Iran

Intermission

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Tired of the Trump Show? Time to change the way you watch

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Nov 2024
 
 

It’s been a long, lonely year with so many people lying. I keep waiting for nightmares, but my dreams have all gone blank.

I’ve been here before. William Gibson described it in 2003:

“We have no future,” he wrote in his novel Pattern Recognition. “Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did…For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile…We have only risk management.”

Nowadays old political science reads like dystopian sci-fi and dystopian sci-fi reads like new political science. Or self-help, if your goal is to be less despondent. A hall of mirrors is a lonesome place when you’re trying to escape yourself.

In 2016, Donald Trump was proclaimed the president of the United States and immediately prepared to rule like an authoritarian kleptocrat. I had warned of that outcome all year long, and people called me paranoid. After the election, a book I had written four years before, The View from Flyover Country, became wildly popular. Articles about me appeared with titles like “A Cassandra in Trumpland”. People took my warnings seriously now, enough to want to kill me.

In 2024, Donald Trump was proclaimed the president of the United States and immediately prepared to rule like an authoritarian kleptocrat. I had warned of that outcome all year long, and people called me paranoid. After the election, a book I had written four years before, Hiding in Plain Sight, became wildly popular. Hundreds of social media posts calling me “Cassandra” appeared. People took my warnings seriously now, enough to want to kill me.

I’m banking that my aspiring assassins are too tired to follow through. Aren’t we all?

It is intermission in the Trump Show. Full-time programming will resume in January. The Trump Show is the only show Americans watch together, but we can never change the channel.

The remote got lost, like truth and the rule of law. The remote is buried in the couch cushions of the American subconscious. You dig under the seat but all you find is dirt and chump change. Your couch is the media economy.

You sit and surrender to the screen, remembering when the damn thing turned off. There can be no competition for the Trump Show. In a spectacle state, there is only one star — and in a mafia state, he can do anything.

Over the last four years, massive shifts in technology and culture made that much easier. Network television — the last gasp of the American pop monoculture — is no more. The partitioning of TV into streaming silos followed the dissolution of the music industry and foreshadowed the downfall of Hollywood. Cheap entertainment, one of the last unifying American pastimes, was sliced and diced away.

Days after the election, Yellowstone, the most popular TV show in America, returned after a two-year hiatus. For one night, Americans united: not to watch Yellowstone, but to bemoan their inability to find it.

Yellowstone was not streaming even if you subscribed to its streamer. It was said to be on TV, but TV no longer has TV in it. When you googled how to watch it, lying robots gave conflicting bad advice. Yellowstone, the tale of an American who refuses to leave his ranch, now resides in no man’s land.

William Gibson called it: the sky is the color of television, tuned to a dead channel — dead because it is owned by oligarchs. The oligarchs kill fictional politicians and purchase real ones. The same oligarchs who program your TV program your president and your sky, where Starlink slithers. You can’t watch television, but you can watch the sky — and the sky watches you back.

It is not a coincidence that plutocrats are attempting to own everything at once: entertainment and politics and information and transportation and nature. Digital technology is the barbed wire binding their corral, inside which Americans are told to graze on less and less.

Shared American entertainment had to be annihilated, because it fuels comradery and imagination. You might bond with a stranger whose politics don’t align with yours, and the overlords cannot have that.

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook had to be drastically restructured. You may have a serendipitous exchange, maybe lend an offer of support, and that can’t happen either.

Journalism, archives, accurate search results — those had to go too. You may want to really do your own research — the much-derided concept that is and always was necessary — but it is trickier than ever before.

* * *

I had a mantra in 2016 when people would ask how I knew so much about Trump’s dark ambitions.

“It’s in the public domain!” I would exclaim.

I was not predicting the future so much as I was rehashing the past. I researched public figures and ventured that they would continue the same corrupt activity they had been carrying out for the past half century.

I assumed that institutions would allow it, because those institutions would have never allowed Trump and his criminal cohort near federal power unless they were already rotted.

This was common sense: conclusions verifiable through public documentation of crimes.

But now that documentation is gone. Print archives, digital-native sites, even the time-stamped Twitter accounts that tracked Trump’s first term: much of it is erased or locked behind prohibitively expensive paywalls.

The oligarchs purchased history — and then they rewrote it.

Free information is still out there. It is on YouTube channels that proclaim the glory of the incoming administration, on TikTok influencer informercials, on partisan podcasts hosted by hired hands. I don’t trust them, for obvious reasons. I don’t trust the Democratic versions either, the ones that intone Trump is a fascist and then ask for your money instead of your refusal, like a cuckoo clock endlessly striking thirteen.

I don’t want to be influenced: I want to be informed.

But it’s hard. As I wrote in my book They Knew, there is no longer a public sphere, but there is a public flat earth.

* * *

Since 2020, we lost the shared experiences of TV, movies, and social media. Unfortunately, we did not lose the shared experience of Donald Trump — with the consequence that there is but one national pastime left, politics. There was one national story, and few told it true. As a result, folks began to tune out.

News outlets like MSNBC and CNN are baffled that their ratings have plummeted since the election. Trump used to run like a gravy train with biscuit wheels, fattening network coffers. Those days are over.

For cable news heads failed to understand something essential about their audience: they actually care about their country.

During the Biden Placeholder Presidency, networks created a Trump legal soap opera that sucked in both the well-meaning and witless. In their narrative, Trump’s imprisonment was always imminent yet mysteriously derailed each time. These plot twists were framed as “luck” instead of “corruption”. The Trump legal soap opera ignored a more compelling backstory — the mafia, Jeffrey Epstein, what it means when the DOJ abides sedition — in favor of false saviors and bullshit legalese.

Some folks really believed it. They thought the pundits were bad guessers, not paid liars. They thought the DOJ worked to protect the people and not to protect its own secrets — which requires that they protect Trump, an operative privy to their corruption. They trusted they were getting real news instead of watching a career criminal run out the clock while networks profited off their fear.

And they wonder why ratings are down.

* * *

I am writing about intermission because I am still getting my bearings. The second Trump administration will proceed much like the first, in the sense that superficial changes will happen very fast while the broader crisis of corruption — a transnational crisis — will quietly deepen and become more dangerous.

Reporters will waste time on appointments that never occur, on threats never carried out, because Trump is the president, and they feel they have to cover whatever he says. Actual threats will be carried out, but because those threats reflect his mafia and espionage roots, they will be ignored. Crimes will be covered up with scandals.

The deadliest situations will be the most difficult to assess — not only because of a paucity of information, but because of new restrictions on free speech.

Americans may move even further from political participation, as often happens in autocratic states. Many have already done so due to the terror and disappointment of the past four years. A pandemic that wouldn’t end, skyrocketing inflation, genocidal wars, unpunished state crimes, unaddressed national trauma, the end of rituals — even something as simple as watching television — that held our country together.

The American psyche is worn from paying so much attention and learning so little truth in return.

Americans are battered by hypocrisy: Trump is a fascist, Dems say, yet they look forward to accommodating him? This is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, the CDC says, yet both the unvaccinated and vaccinated keep getting infected? “Cancel culture” is a scourge, the GOP says, yet the right-wingers bitching about it are the ones restricting speech and violating privacy? The economy is “booming”, Dems say, but everything is less affordable — and bank statements that prove it are dismissed as “vibes”? And now that the GOP is in power, they’re going to rehash that lie too?

It is intermission and the first half of the show sucked. But intermission is a time to take stock of why it sucked and figure out how to handle the rest.

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The End of Days Inn

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What Trump’s team wants to do to America, and how to fight it.

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Nov 2024
 
 

I am in northern Ohio, looking down at the End of Days Inn.

The parking lot cracks like an outstretched palm no fortune teller needs to read because its future is too obvious. The cracks spread to the dead mall next door, a vacant behemoth with CLOSED and THANK YOU written on an old marquee. I wonder about the person who placed those letters there one by one. That final demarcation, the words you write when you cannot say goodbye.

At the condemned Days Inn, the “D” was removed from all signs. As if folks needed a clue that the old days are gone, as if weeds winding to empty windows weren’t enough.

“AY’S INN”, my children read, laughing.

“This is what America looked like when you were one year old, after the economy collapsed,” I said to my daughter, born in 2007.

“And this is what America looked like when you were one year old, when they said we’d recovered,” I said to my son, born in 2011. “But they were lying.”

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Totem and Taboo

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An interview on politics, music, journalism, tech, and our not-so-inevitable doom.

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Oct 21
 

The oldest store on Route 66 in Missouri closed last month. I don’t remember the last time I visited. But I will always remember that it was the last time.

The Totem Pole Trading Post opened in 1933 and moved down the Mother Road until landing in the small city of Rolla. I was in Rolla to see a geology museum rumored to have minerals shaped like a Missouri breakfast — bacon and biscuits — but it was closed. I went to the Trading Post because it had always been there, and would always be there, and found that it was there no more.

*          *          *

The door was unlocked but the lights were off.

“Are you open?” I asked, confused, looking at a sign with a buxom redhead cooing “Y’ALL COME IN NOW” and the cavernous empty space behind her.

An old man sat on a bench, packing items in a box. The Trading Post is a junk store, or in local parlance, an “antique mall.” I am always buying crap — excuse me, treasures — at antique malls. The Trading Post was king of the road.

“We’re closed.”

“Today?”

“Forever,” the owner said. He sounded like he didn’t want to talk about it. “If you’d come earlier, you could have gone to the retirement sale. Now we’re done. Two generations. My father’s store.”

“I used to come here,” I said. “Not looking for anything in particular, just looking for a place to look around.”

The man looked bored. Unlike his wares, I was interchangeable.

“Not much to look at now,” he said, and motioned to the door, where I exited.

I stood behind rusted gas pumps and gazed skyward at billboards advertising moonshine and moccasins. Like other Route 66 landmarks, The Totem Pole Trading Post borrowed Native American iconography as the road tore apart indigenous lands. *

It might have felt like poetic justice that I’d found it shuttered on Indigenous People’s Day. But it didn’t. It felt like wandering into a wound.

The Americana icon had collapsed so gradually, no one noticed. Maybe no one was left to spread the word. Maybe I’d have known if one local newspaper, The Riverfront Times, hadn’t replaced its staff with AI robots and the other, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hadn’t downsized into a shadow of its former self.

Antique malls sell serendipity and safeguard memory. There’s no organization, no order, no internet — just life after death. Bound books and free spirits: a return to the past, where possibility lives now that the future has been stolen.

I wander halls of history, radio waves tuned to a dead station. Sometimes a ghost plants an object before me, so I know what to do next. These secondhand store specters have been far more useful than my PhD in providing guidance.

I’m not joking. In 2021, I was in Prairie Archives, a sprawling used bookstore in Springfield, Illinois, browsing in a low-key panic. I had a book to write and no clue what to say. I was sick to death of Trump, sick to death of death, and needed a change.

“I’m going to cover my eyes,” I told my kids. “You two walk me through the store and put me in front of a shelf. Whatever page of the book I open, that’s what my next book is about.”

They did as they were told, guiding me through the maze of aisles and spinning me around for good measure. Eyes closed, I grabbed a book, opened it, and exclaimed “Oh, fuck!”

It was a Hunter S. Thompson essay collection from the 1980s. The page I landed on was about Donald Trump and Iran-Contra villain Adnan Khashoggi.

I bought it and spent the rest of 2021 writing They Knew, a book about real conspiracies from the 1980s and how they are marketed as “conspiracy theories” so facts are never found and justice is never served.

Missouri has no shortage of junk stores. But I wonder what I would have found at the Trading Post if I’d gotten there in time. Maybe something to tell me what to do, because I sure as hell don’t know when my country is dying the same way. No fanfare, no pinpoint. Slow and steady surrender, bit by bit — murder disguised as death.

Murdering the United States until it is so unrecognizable, even the mementos are gone.

 

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Kamala earns a key endorsement while Trump hides from 60 Minutes and a second debate

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

October 10 2024

Hurricane Milton made landfall yesterday evening as a Category 3 storm just south of Sarasota, Florida. Before the hurricane hit, thirty-eight tornadoes swept across thirteen counties in the state, putting about 1.26 million people under a tornado advisory. With the hurricane came high winds and water, including ten to twenty inches of rain in the Tampa area. And, although it was not the worst-case scenario people feared, eleven people are dead and about three million are without power because of the storm. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been on the ground since before the storm hit. 

In election news, today, The Atlantic endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. This is only the fifth time since its founding in 1857 that The Atlantic has endorsed a presidential candidate. It is the third time it has endorsed Trump’s opponent. It also endorsed Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 when he ran against extremist Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. And in 1860 it endorsed Abraham Lincoln. 

The Atlantic’s endorsement of Harris echoes its earlier endorsement of Lincoln, not only in its thorough dislike of Trump as “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history”—an echo of its 1860 warning that this election “is a turning-point in our history”—but because both endorsements show a new press challenging an older system.

In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky listed the many articles claiming that Harris is avoiding the press, including most recently a social media post from Politico’s Playbook that read: “After avoiding the media for neigh [sic] on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is…still largely avoiding the media.” Berlatsky pointed out that Harris has taken questions from reporters as she campaigns and has sat down with the National Association of Black Journalists, CNN, Spanish language radio station Uforia, and Action News in Pennsylvania, and did a presidential debate with ABC News. Earlier this week, she appeared on 60 Minutes.

With Trump refusing to participate in another presidential debate, Vice President Harris today accepted CNN’s invitation to a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania. In the announcement, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon noted that Trump has confined his recent appearances to conservative media.

Indeed, Trump backed out of a 60 Minutes interview and has appeared only on the shows of loyalists. And yet, Berlatsky points out, he is not receiving similar criticism. Indeed, observers note that Trump has tended to get far more favorable coverage than his mental slips, open embrace of Nazi racism, fantastical lies, and criminal indictments deserve. 

In a piece today, Matt Gertz of the media watchdog Media Matters reports that five major newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post—produced nearly four times as many articles about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016 in the week after then–FBI director James Comey announced new developments in the story than they did about the unsealing of a new filing in Trump’s federal criminal indictment for alleged crimes related to the January 6 insurrection earlier this month. 

“None of the papers ran even half as many Trump indictment stories as they did on Clinton’s server,” Gertz wrote. “Indeed, every paper ran more front-page stories that mentioned Clinton’s server [than] they did total stories that referenced Trump’s indictment.” “The former president continues to benefit from news outlets grading him on a massive curve,” Gertz wrote, “resulting in relatively muted coverage for his nakedly authoritarian, unfathomably racist, and allegedly criminal behavior.”

On Tuesday, October 8, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter of the Columbia Journalism Review outlined Trump’s longstanding attack on the U.S. media as “fake news,” an attack that is ongoing and obvious. (Just today, he threatened CBS and “all other Broadcast Licenses, because they are just as corrupt as CBS—and maybe even WORSE!”)

Bassin and Potter note that in his attacks on the media, Trump is following the pattern of authoritarians like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who attacked media critics with audits, investigations, and harassment until he “drove independent media from the field.” They also note the observation of Timothy Snyder, a scholar of authoritarianism, that power is often freely given to an authoritarian in anticipation of punishment, what Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.” 

And yet, in the past in the U.S., when the media has appeared to become captive to established interests, new media have begun to give a voice to the opposition. In the 1850s, when elite enslavers stopped the circulation of newspapers and books calling for abolition, they prompted an explosion of new media that expressed the sentiments of those opposed to the expansion of human enslavement. Editor Horace Greeley led the way with the New-York Tribune in the 1840s. He was keenly aware of the importance of the new press and, as an early convert to the Republican Party, led his paper to become the anchor of a string of new Republican newspapers across the North—including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times—that spread the party’s ideology. 

The Atlantic Monthly’s endorsement of Lincoln in 1860 was part of that movement, and poet James Russell Lowell, who wrote the endorsement, mocked the idea that the press should avoid causing trouble. “We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers, Presidents’ messages, and congress, for the last dozen years, lest we endanger the safety of the Union…. In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think.”

Harris has nodded to established media, but as Berlatsky points out, there is very little payoff for her in focusing on those venues, since those audiences are generally already quite attuned to politics and are looking for new developments and scandals. In contrast, winning in 2024 means turning out new voters by finding new venues that offer them a political voice. Harris has recognized that media shift by focusing her media appearances on podcasts like Call Her Daddy, radio shows like Howard Stern’s, and television shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The View. 

Campaign staffer Victor Shi noted that, based on averages, Harris’s appearance on Call Her Daddy reached 5 million people, The View, 2.45 million; Howard Stern, 10 million; and Stephen Colbert, 3.2 million—in all, 25 million or more people that traditional media do not reach. (Shi also called attention to the fact that on October 9, the campaign live streamed an Arizona rally by Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz on the World of Warcraft Twitch stream.)  

The Atlantic nodded to the free thought on which the magazine was founded in 1857 when it came out strongly for Harris today. It is endorsing Harris, it said, because she “respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her.”