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December 12 - December 26, 2020
In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity.
The last four decades have led to the hoarding of resources on a heretofore unimaginable scale by people who have neither baseline respect for human life nor a traditional sense of the future. Their destructive actions have programmed a desperate generation to settle for scraps instead of settling the score.
The opportunity-hoarding elite told us we were imagining the permanence of our plight and sold us survival as an aspiration.
What is a warning, in the end, if not a confession—a declaration of what you value and what you will fight to protect?
American exceptionalism—the widespread belief that America is unique among nations and impervious to autocracy—is the delusion that paved Trump’s path to victory.
For decades, Trump had relied on oligarchs and mobsters from the former USSR for support after Wall Street blacklisted him following his bankruptcies in the 1990s.10
Once an autocrat gets into office, it is very hard to get them out. They will disregard term limits, they will purge the agencies that enforce accountability, they will rewrite the law so that they are no longer breaking it. They will take your money, they will steal your freedom, and if they are clever, they will eliminate any structural protections you had before the majority realizes the extent of the damage.
Trump is part of a complex illicit network including individuals from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more—some of whom do not have loyalty to any particular country.
It is doubtful that this group of roving criminals and kleptocrats are the climate skeptics they purport to be. It is far more likely that they are, as Naomi Klein phrases it, “disaster capitalists” who see opportunity in a dying planet, and who will spare no expense in pursuit of their own preservation.
This book explains how America went from a flawed democracy to a burgeoning autocracy, and how the refusal to render consequences for elite criminality allowed us to get there.
here is what he said about his desired outcome for the United States: “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”
People ask me how I find hope. I answer that I don’t believe in hope, and I don’t believe in hopelessness. I believe in compassion and pragmatism, in doing what is right for its own sake. Hope can be lethal when you are fighting an autocracy because hope is inextricable from time. An enduring strategy of autocrats is to simply run out the clock.
“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.’”
From 1904 to 2008, Missouri voted for the winning presidential candidate in every year except 1956.
It is a terrible feeling to be in pain and to be ignored—as a place, as a person. It is worse to be given a mask and told it’s your face.
You live near a silver arch towering over a river of mud, the waters of which have long hidden bodies along with printing presses.
The similarities between my original and adopted hometowns made me skeptical of the perceived divide between the coasts and the center. The real divide is between a few exorbitant cities and everywhere else, a few exorbitant individuals and everyone else—a fracture that widened into a chasm during my lifetime.
When John Carpenter filmed his 1981 postapocalyptic thriller Escape from New York—a commentary on Manhattan’s shattered state—he chose to do it in St. Louis because he did not need to build a set. St. Louis’s natural end-times look filled in just fine.
When a region loses both cultural representation and economic clout, it becomes easy for politicians to exploit the resentment of its residents, especially when that resentment stems not from envy but grief.
The assumption that a state has a fixed identity gives cover to the gerrymandering, influence peddling, and general corruption of the political process that arose over the past twenty years.
Between 2006 and 2012, the amount of dark money in national campaigns increased from $5.2 million to over $300 million.
I guarantee you that in 2016, you are going to see the return of Richard Nixon. Not just in Missouri, but on a national level. You are going to see a hard move to the right, and a Nixon-style presidential candidate come out, only slicker, more of a demagogue, someone who can work the media, and we will be living in a new kind of hell.
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
Greitens, a former Democrat, decided to run as a Republican—going “full Missourah” and taking on a contrived redneck persona, despite being a Rhodes Scholar living in a mansion.
Whereas once mere publicity about his scandals would have prompted resignation, Greitens proved that hanging on to executive power to dodge or manipulate prosecution remains a viable option in an era of unfettered corruption—a lesson the Trump administration knows well.
“Wait, so you’re telling me that all this stuff was just happening in the world without me in it?!” my daughter exclaimed, amazed and appalled.
Cohn trained him in the strategy he refined under McCarthy and Nixon: counterattack, lie, threaten, sue, and never back down.
Media was a weapon: a well-timed bomb, a scalpel to carve a façade.
To grasp why a Pulitzer Prize–winning paper would cover up that story—an accurate and far more interesting story—in favor of bland falsehoods is key to understanding how Trump operates.
Before Cohn passed, he managed to teach Trump three key skills: how to swindle money, how to get married for maximum benefit, and—though the purpose behind this agenda was never publicly revealed—how to cozy up to America’s enemies, the greatest one at that time being the Soviets. But most of all, he taught Trump how to construct a new American reality out of the wreckage of the American Dream.
Starting in 1980, the incomes of the very rich began growing faster than the entire economy, while the poor and middle class began to fall dramatically behind.
Foreigners ask me why American citizens are not out in the streets protesting around the clock, like people did in Hong Kong and South Korea. The answer is that protest is more of a financial risk than a political one, and financial risks form the backbone of modern American terror.
Trump may have been involved in an unparalleled and inexplicable pact with the US government to remain above the law, one that was likely buffered by criminal actors and hostile foreign states.
The transformation of the media into an industry for elites who may not recognize white-collar corruption as abnormal—or who may be reluctant to upset their family or social circles by revealing a crime—is described in depth over the next few chapters.
Trump covers up crime with scandal. That is his main propaganda tactic, the one few seem to be able to discern.
This is called “normalcy bias”: the idea that if a situation is truly dangerous, if massive crimes are being committed in plain sight, someone will intervene and stop them. “Normalcy bias” is the psychological counterpart to “American exceptionalism.”
“Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.
With no external enemy left to fight, America focused on fighting itself—and exploiting the casualties.
In 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, a 1949 policy that had required broadcast networks to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was—in the FCC’s view—fair and balanced.
Fox TV was formed in 1986, one year before the Fairness Doctrine was repealed, and Fox News launched a decade later in 1996.
Cable news made fame for fame’s sake a valid aspiration, even if you were, for example, the houseguest of a murderer.
Epstein’s life in the underworld of the global elite begins and ends with the family of William Barr, Trump’s attorney general.
The word “prestige” derives from a Latin word meaning “illusion,”
shortly before the end of his life, Maxwell had begun working with the Russian mafia.36
Mogilevich abused Israel’s “right of return” law to obtain Israeli citizenship and then left Israel to expand his criminal trade around the world—a path that would be replicated by USSR-born mobsters and oligarchs for the next thirty years.
What’s perhaps more disturbing, though, is that there was little difference between the coverage given to Trump’s campaign by the National Enquirer, a literal Trump tool from 1999 onward, and The New York Times. The Times made no serious inquiry into finances and asked no hardball questions.
Putin has also spent decades employing Western public relations specialists to soften his image as a ruthless KGB agent who had skillfully navigated oligarch turf wars.
With the economy tanking, media outlets transformed full-time jobs into contract work and entry-level positions into unpaid internships, and changed worker expectations along the way.
Across all fields, management had realized they could stop paying people a living wage and get away with it.
We lost our faith in the electoral system through the contested 2000 presidential race. We lost our sense of safety from foreign threats through the September 11, 2001, attacks. We lost our sense of prosperity through a recession followed by skyrocketing income inequality. We lost what was left of our shame when we went to war in Iraq based on a lie.
