Ozarks

My Friend Leatherface

by

 

Remembering a creative conservationist as plutocrats take a chainsaw to Texas.

By Sarah Kendzior | Aug 19, 2025
 

We pulled into Bastrop around noon. This is a bad move: everyone knows you don’t go to a rundown gas station in small-town Texas unless you’re looking for trouble. We were, so we walked right in.

The Gas Station is the only major surviving site from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the 1974 low-budget classic by Austin director Tobe Hooper, who cast local unknowns in leading roles and filmed in rural areas near the city. An exploration of human savagery more artistic than its title implies, the film tells the tale of road-trippers who stumble upon a family of sadistic cannibals. It is visceral, violent, and at times, beautiful.

The final shot — masked killer Leatherface twirling his chainsaw in the haze of the rising sun, unpunished and unexplained — is cinematic poetry. A light so lovely, it makes the darkness feel worse. It is a very American story.

I was in Austin on book tour and I wanted to see The Gas Station. Now I could, thanks to an unexpected break. An NPR host had blown me off for the second time after making me wait for his call like a 1950s schoolgirl. I was annoyed but had hours to kill and knew just the place for killing.

My husband and I set off for Bastrop, letting the capital fade from view. Austin was unrecognizable from my last visit in 2018. Tech oligarchs had built a skyline of skyscrapers that loomed like landing pads for bad ideas. Driverless cars zipped through bitcoin-bathed streets. The conspiracy theorists work for right-wing think tanks and nobody there is slacking. On the outskirts lurks Tesla, where a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk rips through Austin’s famed weirdness and affordability.

I didn’t want to feel scared, so I headed to the site of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

* * *

Today The Gas Station is a barbecue joint that sells horror memorabilia. I had read it had items from the original Chainsaw, but that is no longer the case. They had them once, the owner said, but then the Californians ruined everything.

The Californians ruined everything is a phrase I was hearing a lot in Texas.

The owner explained that an entertainment corporation had forced them to transform their TCM pilgrimage site into a generic chop shop due to an alleged copyright infringement, despite the store’s connection to the original film. He spoke with the aloofness of someone used to greeting the disappointed.

“You can get barbecue,” he said with a shrug, gesturing at the cannibal-themed menu. “Or whatever.”

“I’m sorry this happened,” I said. “This is a national landmark. You should get to revive it. I’ve wanted to come here a long time. I used to write for Fangoria.”

He did a double take. We started talking. You hear about the coldness of Americans, but everyone warms up when you love what they seek to preserve.

I’d spent my book tour road trip getting pleasant surprises: swag from the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame after I asked about neglected outlaw singer Sammi Smith; a print from the daughter of a Cherokee artist after I showed her a photo I’d taken of an obscure painting by her father in a museum years ago, and told her of my search for a copy, which she made for me in her studio. When your interests are strange, no one is a stranger.

The Gas Station owner regaled me and my husband with tales of the venue’s glory. He brought us out back to reveal a prop severed head in which he showed great pride. He mentioned Gunnar Hansen, the University of Texas graduate student who took what he thought would be a quick and amusing gig playing Leatherface, only to have it dominate his life. Hansen passed away at 68 in 2015.

“Leatherface was my phone friend!” I exclaimed.

“Who?”

“Leatherface! I mean, Gunnar,” I said. “When I was in college, I was supposed to interview him about Chainsaw. But we ended up talking about everything. Carl Jung and horror literature and the collective unconscious. Ocean life and ecology. He could recite Moby Dick. He made me want to go to Maine.”

“I proposed to you in Maine,” my husband interjected. “Maybe that should be your top memory of Maine.”

“It is,” I said. “But I was 20 and didn’t know anything. Leatherface gave me life advice.”

I had gotten Gunnar Hansen’s phone number through a friend of a friend from Lubbock. He agreed to speak to me, even though I had nowhere to publish my piece, and ended up using it for a college class in non-fiction writing. A former graduate student in English, Hansen didn’t mind. For one week in 1999, I called him multiple times for “follow-up questions”. That was a front: I wanted to keep talking. He understood things I was only beginning to grasp.

I wondered what I would be like in middle age, and I decided that if I was like Gunnar Hansen, I’d be doing just fine.

* * *

He could have cashed in early, but he didn’t care. When Chainsaw brought him fame, Hansen — the only Melville scholar to have his own action figure with a detachable severed head — quit acting. Inspired by the John McPhee essay “The Survival of the Bark Canoe,” he moved to the Maine woods to live in seclusion. He left university life behind as well. Hansen was wary of academia and Hollywood, describing them as industries where you’re expected to give pat answers to please bad people. He sought creative freedom above all.

“I wanted to write,” he told me. “That’s all I ever really wanted to do. If I was going to struggle and suffer and starve to try and develop my skill, I’d rather do it as a writer than as an actor.”

Over the next two decades, Hansen wrote five books, including poetry and travelogues about ecologically vulnerable regions of the United States. When I spoke to him in 1999, his most recent book, Islands at the Edge of Time, about East Coast barrier islands, had received a glowing review on a new book vendor called Amazon. The title of the review was “Leatherface Goes Island-Hopping.”

Hansen got used to being typecast. It never deterred him from his intellectual pursuits, and he did not view those pursuits as separate from his background in horror. When we spoke after the Columbine shootings, I asked him about media accusations that horror films fuel real-life murder. Hansen sighed. He said he’d been getting this question for decades from people who didn’t like the answer.

“People go after horror films not because they’re violent, but because a lot of times horror films have values that contradict normal values,” he said. “That’s why people are so outraged. When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, it was much more explicit than Chainsaw Massacre. No one raised a complaint about the explicit violence in a film that, to some degree, was aimed at kids. But when Chainsaw came out, Johnny Carson gets on TV and says that he’s offended that it didn’t get an X rating for its violence.

“What’s happening is that we’re going after these films not because of their violence. We see the violence as something we can hang on to. We’re offended by horror movies because we’re middle Americans who don’t want to see things in which the values are not the same. The vision in horror films is often very dark. We want to have a movie that tells us that everything’s okay.

“A horror film does not pretend that death is not horrifying. It does not pretend that violence is not bloody, grotesque, and painful. What’s irresponsible are the films that show violence with no ramifications.”

Hansen saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a rule-breaker: a movie of “impolite horror” that refused to offer clarity or resolution. He saw a similar ambiguity in his favorite book, Moby Dick, which he encouraged me to read once a year.

“There’s the deep unconscious that the sea represents, if you want to be Freudian about it,” the Texas Chainsaw Massacre star explained. “Or, as Jung said, the lake in the valley of the unconscious. At the same time, it’s a tragedy about Ahab. There are so many different things going on but what worked particularly for me was that it was dipping into the idea that there was this mass of unknowability. It’s this huge book that has all these seams in it.

“Sometimes you read something and you feel that everything is polished as smooth as a stone. I never had that feeling with Moby Dick. The book was bigger than the author. It was like he had lost control over it, and that’s what I loved about it.”

When I used a quote from Moby Dick as an epigraph in my book They Knew — a book I structured as a non-fiction horror story to convey the pain of the political moment in a palatable way — I thought of Gunnar Hansen.

* * *

He told me to see the wilderness before it was too late. In 1999, I had barely traveled, and he encouraged me to explore the country, to visit his beloved Maine, to cherish fragile lands. He worried about the future my generation would inherit. When I look back on our chats, we were two people obsessed with death because we loved life.

Gunnar Hansen made me feel normal. It was normal to love Moby Dick and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was normal to abhor violence and watch horror for entertainment, in the hope that somehow the entertainment would convey the grief in the American air, even in that glorious illusion of 1999, the sole year I could be called an optimist.

I never spoke to him after that week. Sometimes you have a brief encounter and it shapes your life without you realizing it. A gentle man famed for playing a serial killer taught me I never had to choose one way to live or to be. I could be of the world, and that was enough.

You’re not a contradiction in terms when you’re the one writing the terms. It’s a lesson I wish younger people — sorted into boxes not only by social pressure, but by panopticon data miners — understood through experiences beyond life as prey.

If the seas shall rise, let the mass of unknowability rise too.

* * *

In 2013, Hansen, who started making horror cameos in the late 1980s but kept his movie persona separate from his writing, published an amusing tell-all called Chain Saw Confidential. Chapter One begins: “Call me Leatherface.”

But his description of Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s ending sounds like a 2025 news report, if 2025 still had news:

“The monster goes unpunished. He is still there, still capable of returning. The normality, the predictability of the world is gone. There is no punishment. There is no relief of suffering. There is no justice. There is no order. Without justice and order, how can we have meaning? It is all nothing. This is the real horror.”

Hansen died of pancreatic cancer before Trump took office, autocracy spread worldwide, and climate catastrophes devastated the lands he loved. He died before a technofascist belief in human disposability became mainstreamed into global politics: an extinction racket that shuns even the pretense of valuing life.

He died before Trump started talking up Hannibal Lecter. Trump ignored fellow cannibal Leatherface: Leatherface is too impolite, too raw in his menace. Gunnar Hansen feared the polished villains. I don’t need to wonder what he would think of the plutocrats who destroy the natural world to build an AI facsimile.

On our last night in Texas, my husband and I drove the same Austin streets that Hansen did a half century ago in an America that had hit its peak without knowing it. Texas Chainsaw Massacre mocked the idea that Americans were free, but the film felt free — ruthlessly, frantically free, like it was gathering a dark truth before the means to share it were foreclosed.

The sequels and remakes that followed heralded the narrowing of vision that led to our current dystopia: movies made by robots to pander to the unimaginative.

Near the Congress Avenue Bridge, a crowd was growing. We joined them as dusk fell. I liked the night because I couldn’t read the QR codes. I liked the night because I could pretend Austin was old Austin, and it was 1999, and the future lay before me instead of behind me.

Then it happened: hundreds of thousands of bats emerged from under the bridge. The bats were resolute in flight, impervious to tech lord transformations. The crowd cheered. Here was nature, unrepentant. Here was a timeless symbol of horror stories engendering our shared humanity. Austin felt good again, alive again.

There’s a crack in the dystopia. That’s how the night gets in.

* * *

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.

Soul Stripping

by

 

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

by

 

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.

I Spent No Kings Day in a Cave

by

 

Walking over the underground before it walks over you.

By Sarah Kendzior | June 29, 2025
 

There is a salamander so rare, you can find it only in the Ozarks. It is born wide-eyed and willing, eager to explore its surroundings: blue streams, green forests.

One day, the salamander wanders into a crack in the earth. This is the most fateful decision it will make. The world darkens, but the salamander keeps going: down, down, down, until no light remains. Over time, its skin begins to mutate. A film grows over its eyelids and fuses them shut.

The salamander is now blind. But it does not know. It will live, and die, in the eternal darkness of a subterranean cave.

I spent No Kings Day in a cave because I wanted to see the salamander. But I also wanted to ensure no film comes to cover my own eyes. A cave 250 feet underground has no cell service and no surveillance. It has no AI or GPS. Lone light shines from lanterns held by humans. They reveal a labyrinthine land of stone, not dead but slow growing. I go to caves to reset my senses. They show me the peace I am missing.

On the drive to the Ozarks, I saw a photo on social media. A protester held a handmade sign with a warning I wrote years ago: “THIS IS A TRANSNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATE MASQUERADING AS A GOVERNMENT.”

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

I’ve seen these words on signs for nearly a decade. In Trump’s first term, they were plastered around St. Louis by activists from the local Indivisible group. Now they’ve been revived. I’m glad people read my words, but I wish they didn’t still resonate. I want my books housed under “History” instead of “Current Events.” I want my warnings to be heeded and an alternate America to emerge: the America we deserve.

That outcome looks less likely each year. Time is the autocrat’s weapon: that’s why DOJ lackeys crowing “Be patient” were integral to mafia state rule. Officials knew what Trump was before they let him in, in part because he wouldn’t stop telling everyone. The remedy lay not only in exposing Trump but stopping the forces behind him. No one in power wanted to do that, for it would reveal institutional complicity.

As I wrote in January, “The most important thing about the election is not that Trump was proclaimed the winner, but that he was allowed to run.”

Despite my own ominous message, I was heartened to see the sign. I am grateful for the protesters: their refusal to abide tyranny and genocide, their insistence that immigrants and migrants be protected, their creativity and defiance. Protesting is honorable. Protests show the magnitude of dissent and shape new alliances.

Protests matter in their own right. But in the 21st century, protests have not brought policy change. Americans have never protested so much yet gained so little leverage. This is not the fault of protesters but of the multifaceted mafia state.

“No Kings” is a misnomer. Trump is not in charge. A birthday with a military parade gives the trappings of a king. But Trump is only the frontman for transnational organized crime. That’s all he ever was or will be.

Trump did not rise to this position alone. US officials have grown a second skin, one that seals their eyes and their deals and their documents. They entered the darkness of the mafia state and did so knowingly. Had they not, Trump could have never run in 2016 or in 2024. Party allegiance indicates whether a US official acts as an abuser (GOP) or an enabler (Democrat). But when they speak, it is often with one voice.

Now that voice is calling for war. This is another reason I descend beneath the earth.

US officials want war with Iran. They want it because Israel wants it and they do what Israel says. Israel has been planning to strike Iran since 2024: a timeline which makes Kamala Harris’s rehabilitation of Iraq warmongers look less like a campaign and more like an audition, and November resemble less an election than a selection.

Trump showed his willingness to abet an Iran War in his first term. The only question for Iran warmongers was whether they would rather have an ambitious bureaucrat like Harris or put up, again, with Trump’s mercurial grift.

The notion of not having an Iran War is dismissed. Israel is the main instigator but not the only one. The military-industrial complex wants war, apocalypse fiends want war, and alphabet agencies have had an Iran grudge since before I was born.

I don’t like comparing US officials to an Ozark blind salamander, because it is insulting to the salamander. But US officials have been obeying and abetting so long that they don’t remember what it’s like to see the world for what it is — or realize that we can see them for what they are, too.

* * *

The cave opening was a third of a mile into the woods. We gathered at the trailhead as the guide detailed our journey. It was rare for Cathedral Cave to be open. So rare that I, a cave connoisseur, had never been inside.

There were about twelve of us: my husband and kids, a few couples, and some folks from India who had never seen a cave. Everyone was excited that their first time would be in Missouri. A man in a Cardinals T-shirt asked me where I lived. When I said “St Louis”, he gave me the eye reserved for city folk.

“I’m from Kimmswick,” he said. A town of 134 people.

“Home of the levee-high pie!” I exclaimed. “I ate that pie, that big huge apple pie. And you have the apple butter festival! And the strawberry festival. We tried to go once, but it was too crowded.”

“The strawberry festival.” The man shuddered. “Don’t get me started. We get out of town for that. Stay and it’s 45 minutes to drive half a mile.”

“You had some hard years with the floods, right? 2019, 2022.” Canceled events, sandbags on riverbeds.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “We need that festival. The apple butter one too.”

“Once,” I said, “We went to Kimmswick without even knowing it was Deer Widow’s Weekend. My husband spent the whole time wandering around like, ‘Why am I the only man in town?!”

Everyone laughed. Later in the cave, the man in the Cards shirt helped a one-armed man make his way down the slippery paths, ensuring he was safe.

“Did everyone get bug spray?” asked our guide, a peppy parks ranger. “The ticks are bad this year. And there’s that new tick, the really bad one. The one that makes you allergic to meat.”

Everyone gasped. Here was a Missouri tragedy.

“Is that real?” asked my son. “All meat? Even hot dogs?!”

“It’s real,” the guide confirmed. “Allergic to all meat. Except fish and chicken, but those don’t count. I know someone who got bit. She’s a vegan now.”

We gasped again. Someone grabbed the spray and began frantically reapplying.

“Now there’s a shame,” said the Cardinals man.

“Poor thing,” a woman murmured.

“OK!” said the guide after a moment of silence for the tragic vegan. “We’re going to hike to the cave. Does everyone have their lanterns?”

We held up our “lanterns,” which were flashlights, but we liked the delusion. Cathedral Cave used to be a show cave when it was owned by Lester Dill, who also owned its neighbor, Onondaga Cave. I wrote about Dill in my book The Last American Road Trip, for he was a quintessential American: the inventor of the bumper sticker and tacky PR stunts, and an environmentalist who spent his final years saving Missouri’s caves and rivers from destruction. Dill led a life of wild contradictions: like his state, like his country.

In the 1930s, Cathedral Cave was a show cave with electricity. When the electricity broke in the 1970s, and thieves stole the copper wire, Dill decided not to fix it, but instead make Cathedral a “wild cave” lit by lantern. Missourians excel at transforming laziness and destruction into entertainment.

At the end of the trail stood a moss-covered concrete cube with a padlocked door. Here our guide showed us photos of the blind salamander, talking him up like a long-lost friend. She noted he had been hard to spot, but we should give a holler if he appeared. She gave the requisite warnings about not touching cave formations and urged us to protect bats vulnerable to white nose syndrome. I have heard these warnings for decades, but I never tire of them, because they mean someone cares.

She unlocked the door. A blast of cool air initiated our descent. We climbed into Cathedral Cave, navigating puddles and switchbacks. The railing was gritty from age but the formations dazzled, indifferent to time. Stalactites glistened with pearls of water: the ceiling lived. The guide noted that caves are impervious to earthquakes and other natural disasters. Stromatolites outlast everything: they are older, she said, than the rings of Saturn. It would take a deliberate act of man to destroy the underworld.

 

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