In the bootheel of Missouri a bald eagle gazes out at a packed parking lot from a storefront painted like a giant American flag. The eagle is faded and frozen, forever free from flight or fight. “God Bless America”, it says, but this phrase is an afterthought. The real invitation is bold-face and blood-red.
“WELCOME TO BOOMLAND.”
We walk through the doors to our sanctuary.
Boomland is an experience, not a destination. Technically, it is a fireworks emporium, but it is so much more. I like to go to Boomland before the Fourth of July and watch my countrymen load up on Patriot Sticks and explosives with names like “America’s Elite”.
As someone who routinely suppresses an urge to blow up America’s Elite, I have always understood the appeal of Boomland.
Sarah Kendzior
Boomland is a popular stop for anyone driving between St. Louis and New Orleans with an excess of cash and a deficit of discernment. Lately it has branched out beyond fireworks to challenge its Missouri road trip rivals, Ozarkland and the Uranus Fudge Factory, with acres of Americana.
There is nothing one cannot buy, or should buy, at Boomland. As a result, I own many items dedicated primarily to the greatness of Boomland.
I have a Boomland hat and a Boomland magnet and a Boomland keychain and a Boomland mug decorated with a firework-filled sky and an American flag bracketed by IN GOD WE TRUST and UNITED WE STAND. The bottom of the mug has another familiar phrase: MADE IN CHINA.
This article was originally published November 15, 2023
I do not want to talk about Merrick Garland again. It feels like doing homework for a class my country already failed.
But it is necessary to do so. There is a shroud over the USA. It is woven of decades of deceit and impunity, but it is not interminable. There are threads that, when pulled, cause the shroud to unravel and Americans to see the light.
One of those threads is Merrick Garland’s rise to power, and the role of his mentor and lifelong best friend, Jamie Gorelick, in that rise.
I have told this story in pieces over the years. I am now putting the information in one article to make it easier to find. The story touches on so many atrocities that it is impossible for me to cover them all, and I encourage folks to pick up where I left off. The point of describing a crisis is to give people tools to fix it. This shadow network affects everyone, regardless of where you live or for whom you voted.
It is common to hear Garland described as an institutionalist. This is true. He protects a broken and corrupt institution, the Department of Justice. He protects it instead of protecting the United States or its people. He protects it above democracy or freedom or a future. He protects it over justice itself.
The DOJ Industrial Propaganda Complex that emerges when any critique of Garland is made insists that justice is imminent. They bleat that Garland is merely “dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s”.
Which he is, in the word COMPLICIT.
Sarah Kendzior
Merrick Garland is a cog in the Biden Placeholder Presidency. He serves to streamline an aspiring autocracy into an entrenched one. You can read about that process here.
The Biden Placeholder Presidency was designed to exist between two terms of Trump, Mafia Grover Cleveland style. The threat of Trump returning to office to complete his autocratic agenda is severe. But that he is able to do it – that the US is the only country in history to allow a coup to go unpunished and a seditionist to run for president again – is due to Garland, the DOJ, and their accomplices in Congress.
Garland is not unique in his role as a mafia state enabler. He follows a long line of DOJ cover-up operatives marketed as saviors of American democracy: James Comey, Robert Mueller, Bill Barr, Cy Vance, and so on. Over and over, Americans are told that these prosecutors are going to “get Trump” and dismantle his criminal network. Over and over, they serve their real role, which is to run out the clock and allow criminal elites to escape accountability.
Theirs is a time-tested strategy. It is a necessary strategy, since members of the DOJ have worked, or continue to work, for the very transnational criminal networks they claim to fight. Among them are William Sessions and Louis Freeh, FBI heads who went on to serve Semyon Mogilevich and his transnational mafia operation. I explain this complex network in my books Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew.
The FBI and DOJ need to protect Trump, because in doing so, they protect themselves.
Trump knows what crimes the US government carried out because he and officials in his orbit abetted them or witnessed them. These servants of the mafia state would not intervene even when public safety was at grave risk. The longer they waited, the more power Trump accumulated.
As a career criminal with deep ties in business, media, and organized crime as well as access to classified information, Trump now has more leverage over the American government than they do over him.
There are a lot of ways to blackmail a government. Not all of it has to do with individuals and their personal secrets. You could expose horrific prior actions a government did against its own people, for example.
Unspeakable things.
* * *
Trump is a career mafioso trained in the arts of blackmail and bribery by his mentor, Roy Cohn. He and his backers continually threaten physical violence against anyone in their way. But it is not necessary to deploy threats when the ostensible target – the DOJ — is their willing accomplice.
Many fail to understand Garland’s role due to an elaborate propaganda network (the mechanics of which I will break down) and a reluctance to recognize complicity among officials who are often portrayed as feuding. It is easier to attribute disaster to one political party instead of examining networks and recurring figures responsible for a multitude of tragedies over the past twenty-five years.
Jamie Gorelick is one of these figures, a Forrest Gump of 21st century corruption. Like Garland, she is a Democrat who serves GOP objectives, the most notable of which for Garland was working as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s lawyer and getting them the White House clearances that they should have been denied due to conflicts of interest.
As a result of Gorelick’s actions, Kushner gained classified intelligence that he likely shared with or sold to foreign states, including Saudi Arabia, from which he pocketed two billion dollars, and Israel, to which he has been tied since birth due to his family’s long friendship with the Netanyahu family, to the point that Benjamin Netanyahu slept in Jared’s bed when visiting the United States.
Garland has refused to investigate Kushner. A likely reason is that, were he to investigate Kushner – who remains a profound national security threat – he would also be investigating his best friend.
It is one big club, and it is destroying our country.
Crises of institutional integrity are beyond partisanship. They cannot be fixed by elections. They can only begin to be remedied when the rot is revealed. The road to accountability begins with evidence, context, and history.
Reckoning with this horror is difficult, but an informed public is a powerful public. Never forget that state officials are paid to serve you. You deserve more than a plate of platitudes meant to weaken your capacity for critical thought.
You deserve the truth, as unpleasant as it may be.
Monument Valley on the Navajo Nation, photographed March 2023
Merrick Garland gained national prominence when he was blocked from the Supreme Court by Republicans in 2016. The refusal of the GOP to hold hearings gave the Americans the false impression that Garland is a staunch Democrat and defender of liberty.
By the time we reached New Orleans, the sun had set on the shortest day of the year. It was four days before Christmas and the only thing on my wish list was relief. 2021 began with an unpunished coup and was ending with a mutating plague. I wanted to take my children to a place where music still ruled the streets.
We drove south from St. Louis along the Mississippi River, the artery of the American slave trade, and arrived after dark. I had told the kids of wild crowds but I was operating on old impressions. It was quiet now in this city famed for nightlife, the kind of quiet that makes you ask where all the people went. You are not supposed to ask this question because the answers are buried in the earth.
We walked toward a long brick wall surrounding a cemetery. The tops of tombs poked out: the resting places of slaveowners and soldiers and politicians and priests. But nothing really rests in New Orleans. Shadow clouds freed the moon until it lit our path like a spotlight. As we approached the cemetery, a spraypainted message became visible. We stopped and read the writing on the wall.
Sarah Kendzior
“All colonies are burning,” it said in neat cursive script.
It was not a proclamation. It was a promise.
The day before we hit the road in December 2021, I finished writing my book, They Knew. They Knew covers a variety of actual conspiracies over which officials feign ignorance – child trafficking, climate change, covid, cults, coups – but above all, it is a book about elite criminal impunity.
“The 21st century’s most desirable currency is impunity,” I wrote. “Impunity, the sadist’s conception of freedom, mainstreamed and marketed as the new American Dream.”
Victims posing as oppressors, the powerful playacting as the powerless, lies told with the smirk of people who love to get caught because they know they will not be punished. The Trump administration was the culmination of America’s worst tendencies, a consequence of institutions so rotted they needed to be gutted and reborn.
People used to admit this when Trump was still in office. They have stopped now that Biden is president and the rot has only festered. The Biden administration has continued Trump policies while refusing to hold Trump and his backers accountable, to the point that Trump can run for president again like Mafia Grover Cleveland.
I did not know why. There were too many options. Was it the mass killing of Palestinian children whose cries were cut off as the Israeli government plunged Gaza into darkness? The theocrat selected to lead the House after backing the unpunished insurrection? The unending pandemic and its deleted data and official obfuscation? Was it Ukraine, Acapulco, Lewiston? Or was there a new geographical shorthand for tragedy?
Had Henry Kissinger finally died?
Sarah Kendzior
That prospect was enough for me to click on “Satan”. But like the X on black, it marked no spot. No tweet it summoned mentioned the devil. But they did not need to when evil is the default mode. I fell down a wormwood wormhole. I spent hours lost in tales of horror, and exploitation of horror, and excuses for horror. I could not decide what scared me more, the silence or the screams.
The algorithm was riding vibes. Satan was superfluous and Twitter was a dead see scroll.
Twitter has always been a place where people go to bear witness to the disappearing world. Like many, I joined in June 2009 to watch the protests in Iran. I watched until they were interrupted by the death of Michael Jackson, and I thought of all the ways the world could stop. For fourteen years, I watched people rise up and I watched their governments beat them down. I watched followers who felt like friends pass away during a plague. I watched election violence and mass shootings and climate catastrophes. I watched strangers from all over the world comfort each other and give advice on how to survive.
That last part – that is why I stayed. Not for the advice, but for the kindness of the gesture.
