The Invaders

Thieves of American empire are gunning for your future.

By Sarah Kendzior | Jan 7, 2026

The theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested is playing Eyes Wide Shut. The movie is a revival. Everything is a revival when nothing gets resolved.

I am driving around Dallas the day after Christmas. The Texas Theatre is near Oswald’s residence, an unassuming home with a sign offering tours. I decline: I came to see the graves of Bonnie and Clyde and the Ewing Building where they shot JR. I can only handle so much crime at once. But Dallas never cared about that.

My phone offers “news”: pseudo-revelations about Jeffrey Epstein that his victims told in the 1990s, back when Stanley Kubrick was making Eyes Wide Shut. The media ignored the victims because the media are friends with the predators. They dismissed them until 2025, when media itself crumbled and US institutions abandoned even the pretense of law. Now the predators are purchasing social media outlets, the last bastions of unfiltered inquiry, like they’re plugging leaks on their yachts.

There is a theory that Kubrick’s tale of satanic elites was inspired by Epstein — or at least, by people like him. I don’t doubt the latter. There are more people like Epstein than anyone wanted to know.

I drive over a white X painted on the road. I realize I’ve passed the book depository where Oswald allegedly shot JFK and am now in the place where he died.

X marks the spot where the modern American downfall began. It happens fast when you’re a Dallas stranger: the grassy knoll is there and gone before you feel the gravity. I wonder about locals who drive here every day and if a presidential corpse marker is something a person can get used to.

I replay the events of 2025 and how, despite my best efforts, my mind adjusted to the horror, even if my heart never could and never will. I’d rather carry this shattered reliquary in my chest than let it beat blithely to unremitting cruelty.

It’s not what I asked for, but it’s what I am, and they’re not taking that away too [ . . . ]

Every year my husband and kids and I drive from St Louis to Dallas for Christmas, and every year we stop in Arkansas or Oklahoma to make it interesting. In 2024, we saw a bootlegger’s lair, a Bigfoot Museum, questionable Viking runes, and the Center of the Universe (which is in Tulsa, of course.) In 2023, we visited Christ of the Ozarks and retraced the Trail of Tears. Both years we stayed at a haunted hotel.

The route between St. Louis and Dallas is one of the most interesting in the world. Buried crimes abet enormous absurdities. We stopped in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where white supremacists were tried for sedition in 1988, to see the World’s Largest Christmas Pickle. We had a Whataburger picnic in Paris, Texas under an Eiffel Tower replica topped with a red cowboy hat, and drove past the unmarked sites of lynchings until we found the highway again.

Our 2025 trip was bookended by caves. I love caves. It is soothing when the outer world matches the dark state of your soul. It makes you search harder for the light.

I have seen every show cave in Arkansas and 18 out of 20 in Missouri. This feat qualifies me for an Explorer’s Club Patch, which I was gently told by a park ranger is meant for small children. I sent for it anyway. In a cave, I feel like a child, awed and protected. There is no cell phone service in a cave. There is only the unbending truth of ancient geology, and the ever-bending bullshit of an Ozarks tale.

Old Spanish Treasure Cave is near Bentonville, where the Walton family built the Walmart fortune. According to legend — in the Ozarks, there is nothing else with which to accord — they were preceded some 300 years by Spanish conquistadors who mistook Arkansas for El Dorado and decided to search for gold.

The conquistadors found gold but were run out of the region by (take your pick) murderous bandits, Osage tribesmen, or a giant bear. They buried their bullion in the cave, drew a vague treasure map, and died before they could return. In the 19^th century, a man in Madrid discovered the map inside an old family Bible. He sailed the high seas to Arkansas to begin the conquest anew, only to die upon arrival — but the legend did not. American miners picked up where the Spanish left off. The bounty is said to be worth over $300 million.

There are dozens of variations on this tale as well as real archeological evidence of Spanish inhabitation. Our guide led my family through layers of rock and history, a maze marked by ancient fossils and plastic conquistador skeletons. The raw beauty of life and the stupid things we do with it.

Stalactites and stalagmites shimmered, but far fewer than in centuries past. Lust for gold led Westerners to destroy whole sections of the cave, demolishing in seconds what took millions of years to form.

“Tourists broke it too,” the guide said, gesturing at a chipped and ragged stretch of ceiling. “In olden days, they’d get a soda straw [a small hollow stalactite] as a souvenir.”

I considered what it must be like to break a stalactite, to shatter a record of time like it meant nothing. Caves are alive. The tips of soda straws have drops of water filled with the minerals that help them grow a millimeter or so per year. They linger like teardrops waiting to fall. When one falls on me, it feels like a tear of joy, a sign that the world perseveres in darkness.

My mind wandered to the modern conquistadors: the oligarchs mining the earth to build data centers for artificial intelligence. Political frontmen want us subservient to both the oligarchs and their technofascist tools. They will sacrifice humanity and destroy the climate to get there. The latter is not new; the former is. The net of disposability has widened to include everyone but them.

Oligarchs are breaking and buying history the way Ozarks tourists snapped off stalactites decades ago. Show caves are lessons in damage done: how man has a choice between respecting the environment and living with it, or destroying it for mementos that thieve joy from everyone else.

When you delete the past, you steal the wonder of discovery. Childlike wonder is key to the show cave. Their modern stewards tend to be conservationists who guard the real treasure — the transcendent geology of the underworld — from robber barons above.

No one knows what happened to the conquistadors. It’s assumed they returned to the heart of Spanish territory, Latin America — perhaps, to what’s now Venezuela. Venezuela, where the US government and its oligarch partners have decided to rape the land the old-fashioned way: for oil.

What goes around comes around — but that’s not really true. What goes around can be destroyed and never seen again. What the oligarchs want most is no one left to tell the story, and no one left to love what once was.

* * *

On the way to Dallas we stopped in Tuskahoma, the Capitol of the Choctaw Nation. The Capitol building, built in 1884, is now a museum of Choctaw history. Exhibits on Choctaw crafts, self-governance, military service as Code Talkers, and oppression by the US government line the walls. “Chahta Sia Hoke – I am Choctaw!,” one wall read, surrounded by photos of Choctaw people over centuries.

In December 2023, my family inadvertently retraced the forced exile of the Choctaw: driving the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, their original territory, and then stopping in the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, where they were forced to live on reservations after walking the Trail of Tears.

I wrote about how the 19^th-century fate of the Choctaw mirrors the 21^st-century fate of the Palestinians — only to learn that Israel had abused the Choctaw, too, and recently. In 2006, lobbyist Jack Abramoff was indicted after stealing $15 million from the Choctaw, whom he described as “monkeys,” to give to Israelis to build a “sniper school” for murdering Palestinians.

Outside the Choctaw Capitol Building is an intricate silver sculpture called The Eternal Heart. It commemorates the bond between the Choctaw and the Irish. In 1847, the impoverished and displaced Choctaw heard about the Great Famine in Ireland, a weapon of British imperialism, and sent the Irish $170 — equivalent to about $5000 today. In 2020, the government of Ireland returned the favor by giving aid to Choctaws at the height of the pandemic.

The generosity of the suffering Choctaw to the suffering Irish is deeply moving — not only in its selflessness, but because it was never forgotten or taken for granted. The Irish remembered. A bond was forged. In that bond lies hope: that if we recognize the shared fragility of the world under the oligarch boot, and give of ourselves even in hardship, we gain strength in solidarity.

Being on the “right side of history” is romanticized. It often means you were wronged and people cared too late. You are acknowledged after the fact, and the fact is oppression, with your survival trumpeted like cheap equanimity. How nice that we’re both on the right side of history, now that the walls we built to contain you are loosed!

The Choctaw not only committed a kind act: they committed a defiant one. They remained human in the face of constant dehumanization. They stayed on the right side of history in real time. The Irish returned the favor and have been among the most outspoken nations about the Gaza genocide and other atrocities.

In the 21^st century, defiance is compassion; compassion is defiance.

* * *

In northern Arkansas lies War Eagle Valley, named for bloody battles between Union-supporting Missourians and Confederate Arkansans. Its most famed monument is War Eagle Mill, where, in 2019, my son found a fossil in a boulder by the waterwheel.

He was eight and excited. We left the fossil alone, both because I can’t carry a boulder, but also because we wanted others to enjoy the serendipity of the find.

I didn’t return to War Eagle Mill until 2025. I searched for that fossil like I was trying to revive 2019 — before covid, before ubiquitous AI, before Trump term two — but couldn’t find it. I was after lost time: for what else is a fossil but found time? I imagined pressing the fossil and discovering it was a magic button that would transport us to the past. I prefer the past to the future because I know it’s there.

War Eagle Cavern lies a few miles from War Eagle Mill. Before it became a show cave in the 1970s, the cavern had been home to the usual Ozarks residents — Native Americans, bandits, bootleggers — and now was inhabited by 75,000 bats.

The guide led us down a rocky forest trail. He said he used to be a goat herder but was now a caretaker of the cave. He apologized for being tired and explained he had two toddlers at home. I looked at my two teenagers, remembering when they were smaller than stalagmites, and felt the deepest envy at his plight.

“Treasure this time with them, it goes by fast,” I said. He looked at me with the uncomprehending eyes of a man who hasn’t slept in three years.

We walked through a wide open-air passage and descended into the dark. I felt my senses heightening and dulling at the same time, a reversal of misfortune. This is why we had come. In a year of constant sorrow, I craved reliable relief.

We navigated a karst dreamworld of twisted tubes and sloping spires, our guide explaining their geology — until he suddenly stopped. He signaled to us to be silent and pointed his flashlight at the ceiling.

A lone gray bat slept upside-down. He was very small.

“This little guy got left behind,” the guide said softly. “Bats clear out of the cave every season. But he’s a juvenile and got confused and separated from his tens of thousands of friends. I keep an eye on him and make sure he’s doing okay.”

One by one we were permitted to walk under the little bat, as quietly as we could, so we would not disturb him.

We were the invaders.

Bats are vulnerable creatures. In the early 2000s, white-nose syndrome arrived in the US, reducing the bat population by millions: up to 90% in some caves. It paralleled the decline of everything in America we used to take for granted.

We shuffled through the cave until my daughter spotted something flickering in the distance and asked what it was.

“Good eye!” the guide exclaimed after inspecting. “That’s a tricolored bat; they’re rare. I didn’t know he was back there hiding. I’ll have to keep my eye on him too.”

My daughter later confessed she was inquiring about the egg sac of a horrifically large spider that lives in the cave and didn’t see the bat at all, but that was okay.

War Eagle Cavern makes a circular route. As we retraced our steps toward the gray bat, our guide looked worried. He thought the bat had stirred and wondered if the next tour group should be allowed to pass. I was touched by his concern. It was the concern of a good father.

Slowly, silently, we walked under the baby bat and bid War Eagle Cavern goodbye.

* * *

Dallas is a tangle of highways laid out like nooses choking the American Dream. Between them lie oil and tech companies scraping scars into the Texas sky. I still like to visit. Dallas is bad in an honest way. The sins and crimes of America are laid plain. That we do not fully understand them is laid plain too.

Days after we returned from Dallas, the US invaded Venezuela. They kidnapped its president. The agenda is oil, but the motive is what it always is: because they can. If no one stops them, they will do it again: to Cuba, to Iran, to Greenland, to outer space.

There are no limits and there are no regards. Taking for the sake of taking, abusing for the sake of abusing. Snatching everyone from a random migrant to the president of a sovereign state. Congress asks to be briefed on the illegal action next time round. Eyes wide shut, bank accounts wide open.

The drive between St. Louis and Dallas is one of the most interesting in the world because so much remains untouched by big business. It is infamously inhospitable. I want it to stay that way. Fossils instead of fossil fuel profiteers. Legends and lore from humans instead of chatbots. I prefer my bullshit homegrown, my lies artisanal.

I prefer people who protect wildlife and document history’s horrors while honoring those who did the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do.

Americans are being pulled into something worse than war. We are being pulled into a global realignment in which our existence is inconvenient. The ruling class doesn’t want to spill my blood: they want to kill my soul and hope that I don’t notice. They want the same for you, whoever you are.

The invaders love an endangered species, and humanity is on the list.

* * *

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