The Sarah Kendzior Newsletter
November 5, 2023
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.
“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.