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we are heading into dark times,
If you cannot be brave—and it is often hard to be brave—be kind.
And if the answer is no? Don’t do it.
had spent my professional life studying authoritarian regimes with the luxury of being able to leave them. My studies had been voluntary; I could stop at any time. When I went abroad to authoritarian states, I faced certain risks, but I took them knowing I could always return to the relative security of American life. Now the horror had come home.
The knowledge that the political transition is not yet complete, that we are still in the process of protections being stripped, speech being suppressed, and rule of law being annihilated shakes me, because I know how much worse it can get.
We have lost a lot over the last few years, but one of the most disorienting losses is our sense of time. This is a common experience for people living in a democratic country that is transitioning into an autocracy.
When I was a child, my baby boomer relatives would tell me the story of where they were when JFK was shot—the day their illusion of safety ended. That moment was crystalized: the location, the shock, the grief, the demarcation between one era and the next.
We are trapped in a reality TV autocrat’s funhouse
mirror, a blurred continuum of shock and sorrow that exhausts our capacity for clarity of thought.
You feel haunted by the alternative America that could have existed had people told the truth.
that if you aren’t a propagandist or protector of the perpetrators, you are the prey.
You listen to the administration lay out the road map for future horrors—an acceleration of the existential threat of climate change, an entrenchment of autocratic measures—and to pundits proclaiming that these are mere fantasies. Everyone says it can’t happen here, until it does.
Whatever well exists inside us to capture the magnitude of loss—of lives, of expectations, of freedom—is vaster than I knew or wanted to know.
In autocracies this is always the case: history can be erased, history can be rewritten. But our era is different: the present cannot become history unless there is still a future, and a future is no longer guaranteed.
An enduring strategy of autocrats is to simply run out the clock.
it is one thing to write about the plight of another country and voluntarily make oneself vulnerable; it is another to experience the hijacking of your own nation firsthand.
Where common ground exists is in our kleptocratic leaders, in the cruel financiers who prop up our corrupt governments, and in the endless blitz of propaganda that seeks to erode the very concept of truth. Russian scholars have been discussing this phenomenon for decades, but
it now dominates American discourse too.
“alternative facts” had first entered the vernacular: “What they’re trying to do is establish power: they are lying to flaunt power. They are saying to us: ‘We know that you know that this is a lie, and we don’t care, because there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.’”
ceaseless propaganda and spectacle, exacerbated by corrections and retractions, can destroy your sense of reality. Time spirals forward and lurches backward.
Your memories of political events become blurred when you try to reconcile your initial reactions with the revelatory backstories behind them, forcing you to process your countr...
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you have to live your life, which in the United States means struggling to survive in a gutted economy under a brutal regime that either seems to be collaps...
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Our expectations shifted, our standards fell, and our memories of the time before faded.
It is a history of crime and corruption that ran underground for decades only to emerge in ways that are stark and unavoidable, like bedrock jutting out in a fallow field.
Trump’s path to power parallels a decades-long erosion of American stability, integrity, and democracy.
Trump’s rise in the late 1970s coincided with my birth, and as I grew up I watched the consolidation of that corruption not so much shape my future as steal
don’t remember a time when I felt safe in America, but I remember when I thought it was possible I would be, someday. The nostalgia for what never was is a familiar feeling for those born in the opening salvo in the symphony of American decline.
my recourse has been to write things down: to try to find clarity through words and give the madness meaning.
The last three years forced me to not only reevaluate my nation but my place within it. I don’t believe in hope. I believe in facts and history.
To understand the truth you need to understand the history of America—the raw, mean version.
1904 to 2008, Missouri voted for the winning presidential candidate in every year except 1956.
It’s now where to look if you want to know how the country went to hell.
To understand the rise of Trump, you need to understand the history of America. To understand the history of America,...
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Midwesterners were transformed into MAGA-hat-wearing retired manufacturing workers who sit in diners reciting platitudes about their unshaking loyalty to a New York City tycoon.
It is a terrible feeling to be in pain and to be ignored—
It is worse to be given a mask and told i...
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Missouri is a national litmus test for corruption and injustice.
We live under the tyranny of the minority on a state level, which is subject to the tyranny of the minority on a national level, which is subject to the tyranny of the elite on an international level. After
Cassandra was a Greek goddess cursed to see the future but never be believed.
I saw America through Missouri’s eyes, which means I saw hell and I saw it in advance. I have concluded that the surreal quality of Missouri life has prompted people to doubt my assertions even when I am simply listing the facts. The facts no longer add up, the facts make you wish they were fiction, but that is all the more reason we need to hear them.
Me State,” which allegedly came from a congressman named Willard Duncan Vandiver, who, in 1899, displeased with a blowhard politician’s response, proclaimed: “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me!”
Blue Dog Democrats have turned into radical Republicans, but the dissatisfaction and demand for proof from Vandiver’s era remains. Missourians are locked in a battle against their representatives for accountability in government.
The other nickname of Missouri is “the Cave State.” This is my preferred nickname. It’s a motto for the Trump era, where to survive you need to see in the dark.
Questionable advertising aside, there is a sanctity to Missouri caves that’s incomparable to anything else I’ve seen. The caverns are a visual distillation of time—a constancy that keeps me steady when everything else seems to be crashing down. This took millions of years to form, I’d think; this will stay the same no matter what hell we create on earth. They are the underground heart of a dismissed heartland, a monument to beauty and intricacy that reveals itself only to those willing to plunge into the void.
have a map of the Missouri cave system on my wall. When Trump won, I began visiting the caverns and crossing them off, treating each like a reprieve, a reward. I like that their twisted beauty exists in the dark, indifferent to whether it is appreciated. I like that their depth blocks out the internet along with the sun. I like that Missouri has the home-court advantage in knockout fallout shelters.
“the Era of Good Feelings.”
Elijah Lovejoy moved from Maine to St. Louis, Missouri.
Trump Tower, the Plaza, the many, many casinos. Corporate raiders who would later aid the Trump administration—Carl Icahn, Wilbur Ross, Rupert Murdoch—commenced a national shakedown disguised as economic revival. Scams stretched from Atlantic City to Gary, Indiana, to St. Louis and beyond, to international waters where moguls parked their stolen assets.29 Critical regulations were tossed—the fairness doctrine that had protected media; the labor laws that had protected unions. While there were objections, few recognized the long-term agenda to profit off the damage. Trump arrived on the
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2016, shortly after Trump was deemed president of the United States, the German publication Bild published a series of documents showing that Trump had not paid federal taxes since 1977—an allegation that echoed a vague claim Hillary Clinton had made during a debate but never fully explained.
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR), which had been monitoring Donald Trump and his Czech wife, Ivana, since they married in 1977.
