Fascism

Soul Stripping

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Against AI, again

By Sarah Kendzior | Aug 7, 2025
 

An AI created a podcast of your paper,” the email said. I blinked and read it again.

The paper was a work I had written in graduate school and uploaded to the website Academia. The subject was digital freedom and social control in authoritarian states.

I uploaded it in 2010 to thwart the paywalls that blocked academic research from the public. I wanted people to grasp the digital dangers of surveillance, censorship, and impersonation. I wanted them to understand that no one was safe from the future.

It did not occur to me that in 2025 a robot would steal my words and make a podcast out of them and try to charge people, including me, $170 to listen.

I don’t know what the podcast says. I ain’t paying no doppelganger ransom.

In 2010, I sought to debunk the widespread belief that the internet was an inherently democratizing force. In that halcyon era, when Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto did not yet prompt bitter laughter, this was a controversial take. It came from researching the internet in authoritarian states, where dictators used it to monitor dissidents and torpedo their rebellions.

* * *

I miss those days, because the people were real: the dissidents, the government, the infiltrators. The latter two were liars — but real liars. They had not yet been replaced with AI. When someone ruined your life, they had to make an effort. There was more “human” and less “inanity” in the “inhumanity”. (Am I doing it right, AI? We’re supposed to shove woods into a virtual woodchipper and mimic coherence, right?)

No one should feel nostalgic for this time. It’s a sign of ours that I do. Now the journals are defunded, the programs where I got my degrees have been cut, and I live in a semi-authoritarian state where podcast-producing robots steal my speech.

My research was on dictatorships of the former Soviet Union: countries where no one trusted anyone. Their political culture is now indistinguishable from that of the US. How can we trust anybody when anybody might be nobody? We no longer tilt at windmills but shoot at the wind. Shoot the breeze, shoot in the futile hope that the robots don’t take the shells and piece them into a funhouse facsimile of conversation.

“In America, bad news breaks you!” Yakov Smirnoff’s voice whispers as I close my laptop. This is a joke I invented for a fake Yakov Smirnoff, a Yakov Smirnoff that only lives in my mind. I give my fake versions of real people privacy. I wish others would extend me the same courtesy.

Like many technologies, AI is designed to kill humans, but in the most soulless way possible, stripping away even our ability to own and express our pain.

In 1938, the poet Bertolt Brecht, living in exile from Nazi Germany, wrote “In the dark times/ Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing/ About the dark times.”

AI steals even that option. When I was discussing the Brecht poem, a commenter wryly noted that AI could write a song about its own thievery. But it can’t. A song written by AI isn’t a song any more than dust is skin.

AI wins not when it becomes more human, but when humans become more like AI: disengaged and devoid of original thought.

What began as a threat to creativity and critical inquiry has moved into tragic terrain. Sacred rites are being outsourced to machines. AI is used to write obituaries and for pundits to profit off murder by pretending to commune with dead children. Chatbots give cold comfort to real grief, exploiting an empathy deficit that has soared since covid appeared.

Meanwhile, AI spits lies, steals jobs, and destroys the natural environment. Tech companies sell it hard so it can be integrated into daily life before buyers realize they have purchased their own replacements. Extinction is being marketed as ease of life.

I used to be frustrated by people’s lack of imagination. Now I’m frustrated by their rejection of it and replacements for it.

Imagination is nothing to take for granted. It is one of the main qualities that fascist regimes attempt to outlaw. But they do not need to outlaw what is surrendered.

AI is soul stripping.

* * *

In 1990, the Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov popularized the term “mankurt” in his novel This Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. A mankurt is a Central Asian zombie who, due to imperial domination and war, has lost touch with his history, his family, and himself. He is a former person with an enslaved mind.

“They can take your land, your wealth, even your life,” wails the agonized mother of a mankurt in the novel, “but who ever thought, who ever dared to attack a man’s memory? Oh God, if you do exist, how did you give such power to people? Isn’t there evil enough on earth without this?”

In interviews, Aitmatov explained that a mankurt did not recognize himself as a human being. The term spread across the USSR as it crumbled and citizens from colonized nations like Kyrgyzstan tried to rediscover their culture, religion, and roots.

The mankurt is the sort of topic I wrote about in my graduate school papers now being vomited up by AI. That is the terror of the post-existence age: I have taken pains to avoid this fate, but it got me anyway.

I have never used ChatGPT. I have never streamed music, used a QR code, or taken an Uber. I leave home without a phone and boycott cashless establishments. I avoid apps, including the Substack app. I am behind the times and determined to stay there.

Historically, this mindset hasn’t worked out well for Polish-Americans with last names beginning with K who live in states beginning with M and write books about conspiracy theories. But don’t worry, I don’t use bombs either.

It is easy for me to live an analog life in Missouri, which tends to be about twenty years behind the rest of the country. But we’re at about 2005 now, the last year the internet was good, and big tech has come to make me its mankurt.

AI articles with fake Sarah Kendziors are all over the internet. In the past month alone, I was fake-quoted about Jeffrey Epstein in an AI publication purporting to be a Haitian newspaper; about Trump being crazy in Dean Blundell’s AI slopstack; and most distressingly, about how Americans should leave the country in an AI-generated rag called Canada Resists. I found out that Trump was in Scotland from an AI article in which Fake Me was asked for comment.

I never said these quotes, nor would I tell people to leave the US. One reason I keep this newsletter unpaywalled is because my views on topics like that are clearly stated and can be used to debunk my AI doppelgangers. My own words are my best weapons — so long as people recognize they are mine.

An irony of my AI ubiquity is that I am sometimes banned from what’s left of mainstream media, thanks to my books about the mafia, the government, and Jeffrey Epstein. But AI doesn’t know. AI cannot tell fact from fiction or the popular from the pariah — or what to do with someone who is both.

I am used to people making up quotes from me and repeating them. It happens out of malice or to distract from what I actually said. For example, when I brought up Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt finances and disturbing proclamations of loyalty to Israel over the US, a brigade of bots appeared to falsely claim that I called her a “Russian agent”, when I stated point blank that she is not. The goal was to make me seem unreliable and discredit my accurate claims.

This fake “Russian agent” quote was repeated on social media thousands of times over six years — even though it could be debunked in seconds. I could not understand why it persisted until people told me chatbots were saying it in 2025. Social media repetition was necessary to make the false claim land.

By contrast, my new fake quotes are slop. They are trite statements that often appear in a list of quotes from other writers — with no source links for any of us. I have yet to discern the point, except to destroy the notion of reporting itself. I suspect that the other quotes are also fabricated, since I am not the only person with an AI doppelganger making the fake news rounds.

I had a nightmare recently that I was not admitted into a building because I am not “AI compliant.” I trust dreams more than reality these days, and I fear this is the American future: social credit scores, digital currency, mandatory tech. I refuse. I am AI disobedient, and I will stay that way.

But I will admit to a pang in my all too human heart. A longing for bygone days when nightmares ended when we woke up — instead of just beginning.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article in the archives remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Guns or Fireworks

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America is not its government and normal does not mean right

By Sarah Kendzior | July 7, 2025
 

t was a nasty, low-down week so I bought myself a 38 Special. I got it from a peddler down by the river. “Look to the sky before you buy,” the peddler warned. “No refunds!”

I was way ahead of him. There are no takebacks on the Fourth of July in 2025, only take-froms. No refunds, only defunds. AI takes jobs and ICE takes people and cruelty takes its toll.

That’s why I got a 38 Special: fifty ride tickets for thirty-eight dollars, to be shared by me and my husband and our two children, for one last round of memories.

We were in St. Charles, Missouri, the town where Lewis and Clark departed for their 1804 expedition. Their westward journey led to the creation of the contiguous United States and the genocide of indigenous tribes and, ultimately, to the Riverfest Fourth of July celebration my family was attending with thousands of people from hundreds of backgrounds, all now called Americans — a designation the Trump administration wants to strip away.

I wondered what Lewis and Clark would think of the festivities. Clark would probably approve. He was governor of the Missouri Territory and as such loved pomp and violence. Clark is not merely buried in St. Louis, but, as his tomb proclaims, “interred under the obelisk.” As for Lewis, he blew his brains out on the Natchez Trace. No one knows why. Maybe he could see America coming.

My carnival ride ticket package was named after the .38 Special revolver cartridge. Gun culture is inescapable in Missouri.

Every Fourth of July, St. Louis plays a guessing game called “Guns or Fireworks.” The goal is to detect whether the explosions we hear are sky sparklers or deadly weapons, both fired in celebration. A St. Louis child can tell the difference by the time they are old enough to talk and horrify adults with their newfound skill set.

“Guns or Fireworks” isn’t normal? the child asks, and I say, Normal’s what you’re used to, and you know nothing else. Then I pack up the car to show them other ways of life.

Normal has been given too wide a berth, one I try to narrow when I discuss history or current events. Normal is often a cover story for wrong. Slavery was normal. Genocide was normal. “White-collar crime”, “collateral damage”, “ethnic cleansing”: normal. Euphemized, euthanized, eulogized.

The concentration camp the Trump administration built in Florida is being marketed as normal. It has a cheeky name and merchandise. Right now, it disgusts many Americans. As concentration camps become more common, they will offend fewer people — and they will be called normal. When this happens, you must remember that normal is not the same as right, no more than law is the same as justice.

* * *

Riverfest was full of fun, unsafe rides. My daughter and I headed for the Ferris wheel. Comforting dad rock blared from the speakers. “You don’t know how it feels,” Tom Petty wailed, and I sang along, “You don’t know how it feels—”

“No, you don’t know how it feels,” a carnie joined in, pointing at me and grinning.

“To be me-e-e-e-e-e-e!” the carnie and I sang in unison, pointing at ourselves, then high-fiving each other. My daughter watched us in fascination and horror.

“Tom fuckin’ Petty!” the carnie exclaimed. I agreed.

He told us to buckle in for a real good ride. I wondered if he always wanted to be a carnie or if it just happened. He looked around my age. Our generation didn’t have dreams: we had circumstances. Boomers bought the ticket and we took the ride, round and round on a rotting wheel. On the rare occasions we hit the top, we treasured the view before the plunge.

I felt happier on the Ferris wheel than I had in a long while. I was sure this was not wasted time. There was a breeze, there was my daughter, and a view of our future plans below. The Scrambler, a decrepit sun-torched spinner which burned me as it thrilled me. The homemade Plinko game run by a charity where we all won free prizes and bought a bottle of hot sauce to compensate. The halal food truck staffed by hijab-wearing women blaring country music. The man in star-spangled suspenders playing the saxophone in a blissed-out groove. The Black BBQ stands, the Thai ice tea shacks, the Germans offering “the best wurst”.

We could see all of America from St. Charles. The scene was unpredictable and wild and generous: the opposite of the money-drenched fascist bill passed one day before.

* * *

The first time my children saw fireworks was in 2016. My youngest was five, and I decided he was old enough to go to Riverfest after dark. I also knew who would win the election, and I was scared this would be the last Fourth of July. Or that Riverfest would become something rigid and xenophobic and cruel, impossible to celebrate even as a contradiction. That fear never waned.

There are missing years: the 2019 flood that canceled the event and led us to a carnival at the Ozzie Smith Sports Complex where Pat Benatar was inexplicably performing; the missing early covid years; the blank summer of 2023, when personal tragedy left me in a stupor, unable to leave home. 2025 feels like that too, but I pushed through. If 2025 has a lesson, it’s to make memories while you can.

On the Fourth of July, if we get lucky, we buy fried Oreos and picnic by the Missouri River. Fried Oreos are my favorite dessert, but I only eat them when they are fleeting, like at a festival. Once I found a restaurant that served them, but it felt wrong. Fried Oreos are the morels of junk food: they must be found in the wild to be enjoyed.

We watched a family of geese play, goslings toddling on the muddy shore. I did not know it, but as we enjoyed our day, floods were killing dozens in Texas, including children. On social media, liberals left vicious comments claiming Texas deserved it: comments like the ones I get when Missouri is hit with natural disasters. Comments similar to the vile appraisal of migrant children, whom Trump supporters want imprisoned; or of Palestinian children, whom fanatical Zionists believe deserve death.

There is something soul-shattering about seeing people enjoy the suffering of a child. You hope that such hateful people are not real, that they are bots or operatives, but they often are not. They are people who believe the worst cruelty is so normal that they can express it without social penalty.

There are also people who will mourn one group of children, but not others: as if every lost child were not a tragedy, as if all parents did not grieve. Part of me cannot believe that the inherent humanity and innocence of children needs to be spelled out, but the depth of callousness necessitates it.

“Unspeakable tragedy,” people used to say, meaning sadness so deep it cannot be expressed. But we must speak of tragedies as tragedies, and of cruelty as cruelty. When we don’t, it becomes “normal” — or even celebrated. Early 20th century postcards depicting Black babies being fed to alligators are circulating on the Trump-era internet.

These are death cult days. What was I celebrating on the Fourth of July? Life, outside of this inhumane version of America. Life, in a version of America as vibrant and real as the sadist nightmare that seeks to suppress it. Life, while we have it.

There was not one immigrant at Riverfest for whom I did not fear deportation or incarceration — and non-immigrants, too. A government does not pass a bill designating a record amount of money for secret police without sweeping intent.

We didn’t use all the tickets in my 38 Special. We gave the rest to a family with small children, who shrieked at their good fortune. My husband and I remembered when our children were small, and people did that for us. We want the chain to continue.

We didn’t return for the fireworks either. Months ago, my daughter, now technically an adult, had purchased a Minion firework at a gas station. She and her brother wanted to watch their childhood favorite explode. I could hear them from my bedroom that night, laughing. I could hear gunshots too.

I took comfort in the sound. Not in my perverse ability to tell the difference between guns and fireworks, but in knowing why the guns were being fired.

For now.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Heat Exhaustion

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A spark of hope in a limbo that feels like hell.

By Sarah Kendzior | June 27, 2025
 

We are at war with Iran, we are not at war with Iran. Federal lands are for sale, the sale of federal lands is prohibited. The tariffs are back, the tariffs are over. Foreign students are banned, foreign students can stay. Trump rebuffs Israel, Trump will defend Israel to the death.

To the death, to our death: the threat of death is the constant. Nothing is real except awful things that don’t stop growing and don’t backtrack. Death is behind the drapes you draw down like a gunfight you already lost. The temperature hits 100 and makes you remember when the world had centuries instead of one endless day.

The heat will not relent. Why should it when nothing else will?

Politics is a jigsaw seesaw with a push and pull that cuts. Every policy is retracted and reinstated so that you can no longer remember relief. What were its ingredients — time, promises? She inhaled a sigh of relief, you think, but all you inhale is heat. You open the front door and stick out your head and breathe like Sylvia Plath.

Slam the door: you have a choice. Slam the door on that cannonball sun.

If you could have one hour, only one hour, in the cool natural air, just one hour when things were not wrong, you could make it through the week. You imagine a lemonade stand run by children selling RELIEF to adults, pouring it into paper cups, and a line of adults so long it bests the record-breaking No King’s Day rally that everyone forgot after the King announced we were at war.

The King has proclaimed we are not at war with Iran anymore because The King Won (shhhh keep telling him that.) But his backers proclaim we are at war with a nice 33-year-old man who wants to do good deeds and has assembled a massive following.

Things don’t tend to work out well for fellows like that, especially against the forces backing The King. You take some comfort that this fellow is not a carpenter.

* * *

The air feels like an oven, but New York produced a spark. New York, of all places, gave America hope with the platform of Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. We are so used to New Yorkers taking — The Trumps, The Cuomos, The Kushners, Carl Icahn, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Mnuchin, Jeffrey Epstein, Eric Adams, Bernard Kerik (RIP!), Wall Street — that it is odd when they offer something good. Affordable housing, cheap childcare, relief.

Rich New Yorkers compared the prospect of these policies to Kristallnacht.

Rich New Yorkers whined about their personal safety while powerbrokers threatened Mamdani with deportation. When they were mocked as coddled losers, they changed the narrative, claiming Mamdani, a Muslim, threatened heartland states like mine, Missouri. But the lead article on the day Mamdani won was about how much rural Missourians are enjoying the new halal menu at the Stuckey’s in Doolittle.

Zohran Mamdani has a buddy named Brad Lander who ran as a sort of co-pilot in New York’s ranked mayoral race. Lander is from St. Louis, which means he has seen affordable housing and free institutions firsthand. He can testify to New Yorkers that they are real.

Lander left St. Louis long before Wesley Bell won the most expensive race in district history with money from hard-right Zionist PACs posing under fake names like “Progressives for Missouri.” AIPAC and other lobbyists did not care about Bell or about St. Louis. Their only goal was to oust Cori Bush, who had condemned Israel’s murderous policies. The “election” was a sad spectacle. I would complain to my representative, but I don’t have representation.

There are so many terrible New Yorkers to primary, but if Lander feels homesick, we’ve got one here too.

Mamdani’s victory was a primary upset win over former governor and unrepentant sex pest Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is part of a legal team representing Benjamin Netanyahu against ICC charges of war crimes. The team was assembled by Alan Dershowitz, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. Rich people who liked Epstein also like Cuomo, a fellow predator and death merchant. They need Cuomo to hold office and keep secrets.

Mamdani, unlike Cuomo, would not perform subservience to Israel, no matter how many times pundits tried. Mamdani has secrets too: like that a city can uplift its own people instead of functioning as a hub for a wealthy criminals tied to foreign states.

Rich New Yorkers are panicking because that was never a secret. It only felt like one because hardly anyone powerful said it out loud.

I’m worried Mamdani will be murdered. I’m worried he’s another faker. I’m worried he will spur a political cult, and that worry has already been vindicated: the shredding of the American monoculture has ensured every politician has a cult. Politics is the only shared pastime, which is why American life feels miserable, because the stakes are so high, and the quality of programming so low.

* * *

The heat wave hit New York. I wondered how it would affect the election. I wondered if Mamdani would win and billionaires would sue the sun. I wouldn’t rule it out.

When heat waves get this bad, the smallest effort drains you. You can feel the whole country wilting, wilting against its collective will. New Yorkers voted anyway.

I’ve said time and time again that you can’t vote out the mafia, and that’s true. But you can try not voting in the mafia. It won’t change everything. But it’s a start.

Today’s mafia is transnational but not ethnic. Its criminals have multiple passports and offshore accounts and no national allegiances. To them, countries are land masses to be stripped and sold for parts. Transnational organized crime knows no geographical bounds — but it has key hubs, and New York City is one of them.

It does not have to be. New York has been that way so long, people accept it, even take pride in it. Elite criminal impunity is New York’s currency. But what if it wasn’t? What if London and Moscow followed suit?

People fear a system crashing down because they don’t understand that it already happened and they’ve been living in wreckage sold to them as privilege. Or they understand just fine, and do not know what to do about it.

The earth is screaming. It has heat exhaustion. I do too, as I write this out, ride this out, waiting for the sun to set. Waiting for the sun to set on plutocrat thieves, waiting for the sun to set me free. Waiting for the day I greet sunrise not with dread at uncertain hours, but relief at the dawn of possibility.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Photo of a sunset I took on a nice day in 2022. What, you think I’m going out in this weather to get another?!