Thieves of American empire are gunning for your future.
By Sarah Kendzior | Jan 7, 2026
The theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested is playing Eyes Wide Shut. The movie is a revival. Everything is a revival when nothing gets resolved.
I am driving around Dallas the day after Christmas. The Texas Theatre is near Oswald’s residence, an unassuming home with a sign offering tours. I decline: I came to see the graves of Bonnie and Clyde and the Ewing Building where they shot JR. I can only handle so much crime at once. But Dallas never cared about that.
My phone offers “news”: pseudo-revelations about Jeffrey Epstein that his victims told in the 1990s, back when Stanley Kubrick was making Eyes Wide Shut. The media ignored the victims because the media are friends with the predators. They dismissed them until 2025, when media itself crumbled and US institutions abandoned even the pretense of law. Now the predators are purchasing social media outlets, the last bastions of unfiltered inquiry, like they’re plugging leaks on their yachts.
There is a theory that Kubrick’s tale of satanic elites was inspired by Epstein — or at least, by people like him. I don’t doubt the latter. There are more people like Epstein than anyone wanted to know.
I drive over a white X painted on the road. I realize I’ve passed the book depository where Oswald allegedly shot JFK and am now in the place where he died.
X marks the spot where the modern American downfall began. It happens fast when you’re a Dallas stranger: the grassy knoll is there and gone before you feel the gravity. I wonder about locals who drive here every day and if a presidential corpse marker is something a person can get used to.
I replay the events of 2025 and how, despite my best efforts, my mind adjusted to the horror, even if my heart never could and never will. I’d rather carry this shattered reliquary in my chest than let it beat blithely to unremitting cruelty.
It’s not what I asked for, but it’s what I am, and they’re not taking that away too [ . . . ]
Your questions answered on Dem party failures, GOP crimes, Die Hard, and more!
By Sarah Kendzior | December 4 2024
Steve: I’ve read all of your books and essays. When I pass along some of your essays or when I had our book club read Hiding in Plain Sight, many people say you’re too depressing for them. How do you respond to this?
SK: Fellow Missourian Harry Truman, when accused of giving people hell, said: “I never gave anyone hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.” The same applies to me. Only I never nuked a civilian population.
Our global plight is objectively depressing. But the most depressing thing of all is dishonesty. A problem must be acknowledged in order to be solved. I write because I believe that things can change for the better. The more we know, the greater our ability to create a just world. If truth didn’t matter, elites wouldn’t try so hard to suppress it. So I’ll keep telling the truth, hard as it is to hear, and hard as it is to write.
Kas: I just started rewatching The X-Files (having not watched since it originally aired) and I’m finding the show so comforting. I think because of the 90s throwback vibe and its basic premise that the government is always lying to you. I’m wondering if you have thoughts on The X-Files, especially since you wrote beautifully about Twin Peaks —which I assume has some similar motifs.
SK: I was and remain a big X-Files fan! It debuted when I was 15 and was a formative influence. I wrote about it in my book They Knew, along with its spinoff, The Lone Gunmen, that negated the “no one could have imagined 9/11” canard by having the World Trade Center nearly attacked by a plane in the first episode. I also wrote about it in The Last American Road Trip because of course my first teenage road trip was to Roswell. (Millennium also appears in that book — and you should watch Millennium season two along with Twin Peaks; they are excellent and reflect our era well.)
The X-Files is an exceptional series, especially the Morgan and Wong conspiracy arcs and the Darin Morgan episodes. I relate to Clyde Bruckman and wish I didn’t. I could go on about XF forever; when I was in college, I covered the show for Fangoria and interviewed Kim Manners, among others. (I just discovered someone put that interview online back in 2000; how delightfully mortifying now.) I may write about X-Files for this newsletter. But I feel like I wrote several X-Files books that are, unfortunately, non-fiction. The X-Files wasn’t quite ahead of its time: it reflected a dark continuum and debuted in the decade with the greatest freedom to discuss it. [ . . . ]
The leaves are falling without changing, like Congress.
They’re green like dollars instead of the standard gold. They don’t get the glorious dignity of a good-looking death. These are two-day delivery leaves, plucked from the branch by the invisible hand, shot down in the amazon prime of life.
I’m old enough to remember seasons. The way colorful leaves crunched under my feet: the satisfying sound of the reliable march of time. Autumn leaves scattered like crumpled drafts of a chapter near completion. They were absorbed into the soil, and in a few months’ time, earth’s story would begin anew.
Green leaves on the ground are empty pages. They did not get the chance to dazzle and die. They were shut down, like Congress.
I look at the leaves and resent the stolen season: resent it like my generation’s stolen social security and stolen retirement and litany of impending thefts. Stolen country, stolen time. The taking tree.
I look at the leaves and wonder what could have been. I don’t wonder that about Congress. The answer is nothing. When you decide to be nothing, to do nothing, to change nothing, you become nothing. You take everything and you are nothing.
Congress takes bribes, they take vacations, they take offense — they take everything but the heat. They save that for us, so it can scramble our seasons and kill our trees. The heat makes leaves fall too early and ignites fear for our children’s future: This is as much as you will see, this is as far as you will go.
Geriatric millionaires say these are dark days: yes, it’s because we’ve spent fifty years in your shadow. A tyrant rules America while Congress feigns helplessness, practiced in the art, having closed its eyes at every off-ramp on the highway to oblivion.
Congress refused the exits. The American people paid the toll.
* * *
Congress is shut down; Congress was already shut down. Congress shut down in 2016 after spending decades running on dying batteries until the invisible hand yanked them out for good. The mafia state was made plain; civics drowned in corrupt institutionalism. We were told to keep pretending representative government was real.
My mother told me that when she was three, she would sit in front of a blank TV for hours, unaware that someone had to turn it on for the shows to start. That was Congress’s ideal public: a nation of toddlers hooked to useless screens with no agency of their own.
The American public is older now. They’re at that preteen age where they start asking questions. They’re at a preteen age in a country ruled by acolytes of Jeffrey Epstein —the age when you become aware that you are prey.
Europeans like to say American is young country, and we were until the 21st century, when we each turned one thousand years old.
A government shutdown was always the goal. The premature ending, the stripping for parts, the theft without pretense of duty. The open abandonment of the public good. The apathy at abandonment and the avarice in apathy. The slaying of seasons, the torture of time, the collapse of chronology: when promises turn to premises and premises to pixelated dust. There is honor in real dust: this is not that.
When you are ruled by a technocratic death cult, the concept of leverage changes. A general strike does not pose the same threat to the powerful when their goal is to destroythe national economy. A protest does not have the same impact when officials are devoid of shame. A spectacle does not hold the same power when AI lies are generated with a whisper to a soul-stripping robot. A vote is an illusion when elections lack integrity. Calling your representative is a grim farce when your representative serves transnational oligarchy — and sells it American sovereignty.
The shutdown is a vice grip. Maybe it will end, maybe it is the end game. In 2013 and 2019, I feared it was. But Congress came back, with renewed opportunities to staunch the bleeding, which no officials tried to take.
The powerful want the American people to be shut down, trapped in this time, divorced from the cycles of life. A shutdown precludes possibility and shatters the political imagination. It never lets you move on but moves everything around you with bulldozer ferocity. They want you to watch and wait until that is all you do — until you are again the passive toddler before a dead screen.
I buried a fallen green leaf in the backyard. Not to feed the soil, but as a rite of ceremony. We need new rites when the rites of spring and summer and winter and fall are stolen. We need new rites, we need new rights. In a digital dystopia, commemoration feels like war: a strike against the extinction racket.
I’m a backyard soldier, one thousand years old, laying the stolen future to rest. In Greek, “eulogy” means “good words.” I’ve got nothing left to say, but I said it anyway, and that’s something — that’s something.
* * *
Thank you for reading! I don’t 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, so I appreciate and need 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.
On May 13, 2005, the Uzbek government killed over 700 civilians gathered in the eastern city of Andijon to protest the economic, social, and political conditions of Uzbekistan. Prompted by the imprisonment and subsequent jailbreak of popular local businessmen, the crowd grew to 10,000 people, some drawn by a rumor that their dictator, President Karimov, would address the largest protest in Uzbekistan’s history.
Instead, military forces greeted the demonstrators. According to the Uzbek government, the forces targeted only armed insurgents, 187 of whom were killed. According to nearly all other accounts, the military fired indiscriminately into the crowd, murdering at least 700 people, including children.
At the center of the massacre was a group the Uzbek government called “Akromiya”. According to the Uzbek government, Akromiya armed the militants, Akromiya gave the orders, Akromiya was responsible for the deaths of Uzbek citizens in Andijon. Akromiya was a menace that had to be stamped out at any cost.
There was one problem with this theory: Akromiya — by the accounts of Uzbek and international human rights groups, political organizations, journalists, citizens, and accused Akromiya members themselves — did not exist.
The Uzbek government had invented “Akromiya” in reaction to mounting frustration among the Uzbek public. When protests erupted, Akromiya became the all-purpose label slapped on any Uzbek who dared to dissent. Uzbeks accused of being in “Akromiya” were baffled. “Surely it’s clear that Akromiya is just a myth,” exclaimed Abdulboiz Ibrahimov, a businessman imprisoned for being an Akromiya terrorist.
It was clear, but it did not matter. What mattered was the power to create propaganda and use force. Against this, the average Uzbek citizen was helpless. Over twenty years later, there has never been justice for the slain of Andijon.
But it did not take long for the myth of “Akromiya” to be debunked. I know, because I was the one who debunked it.
That paper got me got banned from Uzbekistan. It angered US think tanks. It helped some Uzbeks get asylum — though as the West turns autocratic, I wonder what good that did them.
“You’re killing your career early,” my PhD advisor wryly noted, a refrain I’d hear for the next twenty years. He wondered if I should have gone easier on Western accomplices of Uzbekistan’s propagandists: the “war on terror” think-tank crowd. I said I’d rather kill my career than do nothing when hundreds of people are killed. If there was to be no recourse for the victims of Andijon, I at least wanted the truth to be told. Maybe the future would be different. Maybe there could be justice then [ . . . ]
