plutocrats

For the next month, I’ll be doing interviews and getting ready for a tour for my new book, The Last American Road Trip. I’m particularly grateful for my readers as this period is grueling, especially given the political crises and that I have a family of four to support. Trying times! Anyway, I’ll be posting more information about the book and the tour as the date approaches. Here are the answers to your questions!

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Lynn D: Wondering what your take is on the Krasnov allegation (that Trump is a Russian operative who uses that name). Normally, I would dismiss it as another wild conspiracy, but the light of what’s happening, it seems worth considering.

SK: Whether this particular allegation is true is irrelevant compared to the broader question of why nothing was done to prevent a known organized crime associate from gaining access to the highest level of political power. Twice.

Trump’s allegiance is to a transnational organized crime network in which the Kremlin is a key node. He has operated in this network for over half a century. His criminal ties are extensively documented in my book Hiding in Plain Sight, which contains hundreds of end notes to others’ work. Trump is a Kremlin asset: his activity benefits Russian officials and oligarchs and puts their interests before those of the US. This does not make him a secret agent or a spy. Trump is primarily a mafia associate, and it is through that lens that his rise should be examined.

Despite a surfeit of documentation, most pundits and politicians have been reluctant to pursue Trump’s Kremlin ties seriously because: 1) they do not want to follow the money trail, which leads to donors to both parties 2) Trump’s network includes US allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia 3) and ties to cases like Epstein/Maxwell that highlight lost US sovereignty and decades-long sadistic plots 4) and exposes many US officials, especially in the FBI, as corrupt accomplices. As a result, the focus has been on trivialities, like bot farms, or on rumors like this one. As I wrote in Hiding in Plain Sight, “No one could see the forest for the treason.”

I’m suspicious that the Krasnov story is bogus and is being spread as an attempt to delegitimize solid research on Trump’s ties to the Kremlin and its oligarchs. There are many concrete examples of Trump’s illicit activity that were meticulously documented but played down by media and never investigated by officials — some of whom turned out to be on the Kremlin oligarch payroll. Nothing about this crisis is new. The most important question is why every administration, most recently Biden’s, enabled it.

Jodie: Timothy Snyder posted on BlueSky that “Something is shifting….people are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.” Do you agree? If so, what do you think happens next and how can we, the average citizen, support whatever is necessary to make lasting change?

SK: We lost our representative government: it was infiltrated by organized crime long ago. The last chance to fix it was surrendered by the Biden administration. We have been living in The Aftermath since 2022: it just took Trump’s reinstallation for many to realize it. If that’s a new way of thinking, view this realization not with fear, but with defiant pride that you’ve already survived two years in The Aftermath. And now you are joined by other good people who’ve shed their delusions. We may have driven past the point of no return, but at least we got a carpool going.

As I said years ago, you can’t vote out the mafia. US officials needed to hold Trump’s criminal network accountable for their crimes and admit to the American public the full extent of institutional failure. Only from a place of complete honesty could they prevent the inevitable reinstallation. Only with urgency could this be accomplished, and it had to be done by 2022. But US officials had no interest in doing that because their loyalty lies elsewhere: to their bank accounts, to criminal cults, to foreign states. There was a narrow window in which this crisis could have been remedied. Biden chose to defenestrate democracy while letting the burglars climb inside.

Trump has never been popular and remains unpopular. Musk is even more loathed. What folks seem to be realizing is that it took a bipartisan effort to enable this disaster, and the aims of its players are transnational. A criminal network is carrying out hostile takeovers of multiple countries. They do not care about public opinion. Perhaps people in Snyder’s orbit have shifted — I’m guessing MSNBC viewers woke up after they mass fired the non-white anchors — but most Americans were already angry and unhappy with the status quo. It didn’t matter which party was in charge.

What citizens can do is know their values and have each other’s backs. You have been betrayed. None of you deserve it. You are all survivors of an abusive state. They will try to split this country into parts for resource extraction and they will encourage you to attack each other to make their job easier. Refuse them. Do not fall for stereotypes about “red” and “blue” states or pretend that an election in a country this corrupt is a representation of the people’s will. Never sacrifice your humanity or that of others. If you find yourself willing to negotiate another’s humanity, that is when they’ve won something real. That is when you’ll have surrendered your soul.

Katie G: I have recently become terrified that he will declare martial law. Do you see this as a likelihood? If so, how long do you think we have? His recent stunt with the military has me very concerned.

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I was going to make a noose, but instead I made a basket.

The basket coils like a snake in wait, white string binding plain brown rope. It is small but taut. When I rest it on its side, it looks like an eye. I put it on my bedside so it can watch over me as I sleep.

The basket is too small to hold anything but my nightmares. But I know it’s working, because I used up all the rope for my noose.

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I wanted to stab someone 8000 times. Instead, I cross-stitched an ancient design.

The design is a Mediterranean dream not my own. A four-square grid of dark blue and light blue: the cross, the star, the carnation, and the scroll, made of tiny x’s.

I like imagining that hundreds of years ago, a Byzantine craftsman stitched the same patterns as me. I do Palestinian embroidery, tatreez, for similar reasons. I want to learn from a past that persists to the present: a strike against genocidaires who insist that Palestinian culture never existed.

I also do tatreez because it’s attractive. Why is it so hard for some to see the beauty? Maybe this is not a question to ask of those who abide the mass murder of children. People who violate universal taboos are not going to understand art or life or love.

It takes me about a month to stab something 8000 times. To X out so much that my stabbing forms intricate shapes and the X’s blend into a restorative whole. From a distance, there is no X in the fabric at all.

I stabbed X so many times that a new and tranquil world took its place.

As I embroidered, Santorini — where I spent my honeymoon decades ago; Santorini, where the inspiration for this textile came — was evacuated due to earthquakes. I remembered riding a donkey by ancient ruins and eating octopus fresh from the sea, and my husband and I wondering when the Iraq War, then three months old, would end. By the time the war of lies was over, we were raising two children in a rotting husk of America, and Greece hated us with reason.

I dream of Mediterranean days. The soft blue thread makes me feel like I could still ride the waves, though I likely never will again.

I wove a cloth of rage, and when it was finished, I held a cloth of memory.

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I wanted to beat someone to death, but instead I got a treadle loom. A loom is an ideal apparatus if you feel like murdering people but also making an appealing placemat.

The center part of a loom is called a beater. You slam it until you push the threads into submission. Before you beat the threads, you pull them through narrow metal slots, like prison bars for string, until they reach the other side. That thread is called “warp” because it takes a warped mind to create this contraption.

I am learning to weave from an 81-year-old woman who generously gave me her old loom and is teaching me how to use it. I asked her how to get the threads through the slots, and she informed me I would use a “slay hook.”

“Yes!” I said, wielding the s-shaped metal like a weapon until she gently told me it was spelled “sley hook”.

“I’m calling it a slay hook anyway,” I said. “Because I want to slay something.”

“Well, this part of the process is very boring,” she said, as I moved 120 strands of thread one by one, “so you might as well.”

I wondered what the spies using surveillance technology to track me thought of my new project. I hoped they were stuck watching my weaving lesson. I hope they groaned when they discovered that after pulling each thread through 120 tiny bars, I had to pull each thread through 120 tiny holes. I hope I bored them to death.

Excessive crafting is a standard Midwestern response to excessive stress. I would be a model Midwestern housewife if I didn’t despise these people with every fiber of my being, and some fibers beyond it.

 

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