They knew - Book Club Ch 7 America is Purple - like a Bruise
The Great Recession birthed an unequal recovery. Big coastal cities like New York and San Francisco thrived and became unaffordable, driving out native residents through gentrification. Meanwhile, small towns, lower-class suburbs, and run-down Midwestern cities like Detroit and St. Louis—which had enjoyed a brief comeback in the late 1990s and 2000s—nearly collapsed. The Midwest’s assets were bought up by American plutocrats as well as foreign oligarchs—like Ihor Kolomoyskyy, a dual citizen of Ukraine and Israel who became the largest real estate holder in Cleveland in the recession’s aftermath. Officials either ignored or encouraged the takeover.
In Obama’s first two years in office, both the Democrats and the Republicans bailed out Wall Street while doing little to remedy the hardship of Americans outside their donor base. In 2010, the Supreme Court upheld Citizens United, deeming corporations to be people and removing constraints on campaign financing. That ruling was a decisive moment in the movement to end America, and it was followed three years later by the Supreme Court’s partial repeal of the Voting Rights Act. Those two Supreme Court decisions stripped away what was left of American representative democracy, allowing the puppet masters to emerge from behind the curtain and flaunt their strings.
Laws are both more formidable and more fragile than propaganda. Laws overrule the best intentions and codify the worst. Ordinary people can combat bigotry and stereotypes, and reject the contrived animosity that prejudice breeds. But once legal rights are lost, they are very difficult to recover, particularly when a key mechanism to protect them—voting—is harmed. The judiciary acts as the cage bars of autocracies. How it wields its power sets the stage for the future, overriding other avenues of liberation.
In the United States, the new state voter suppression laws made possible by the partial repeal of the Voter Rights Act codify the tyranny of the minority into the law of the land. Republican legislatures can lock down a “red state” identity by preventing people from voting while flooding the state with dark-money propaganda as local news sources disappear. They can redraw its districts through gerrymandering so that their permanent rule is all but guaranteed. When confronted with citizen dissent, they can simply decide that certain people’s votes do not count, as Missouri did after residents state-wide—including most Republicans—voted in progressive ballot initiatives that included the protection of labor unions, an increased minimum wage, and the Clean Missouri Act, which would ban dark money in politics. The will of the majority was clear, but the Missouri GOP representatives ignored it and disregarded the measures. As Missourians struggled to defend their fading democracy, coastal pundits crowed that Missouri—once known as the bellwether state for its propensity to fluctuate between parties and reliably back the winner of the presidential election—was a “deep red state” that got the terrible policies it deserved. They went on to say the same about Texas, Georgia, and other states whose legislatures ignored the stated will of the people or created new laws to prevent or disregard their votes. The idea of a “deep red state” was a lie, part of a litany of lies. But repetition is necessary for the political elite to attain its goal. Hostile operatives want their prophecies of monolithic political cultures to prove self-fulfilling, because that will make the partitioning easier. If you keep telling people that their states—states with fluctuating populations and complex histories and vacillating political preferences—have been immutable entities since time immemorial, perhaps they will come to believe it. Perhaps they will look to the distant past—in particular, the Civil War—to justify the crises of the present, like the crisis of a government apathetic to their despair. Perhaps, in desperation, they will seek to revive what they have been told is their “true” political culture: the “good old days” that were only good for a select population. When that fails, perhaps they will see differences as irreconcilable, and back secession plans peddled by elitist plotters who would never leave their gated citadels to live in the regions they seek to dominate and destroy. These tactics are not limited to conservatives; they work on anyone. Maybe liberals will view themselves as above countrymen they have now reduced to clichés, envisioning themselves as residents of a future “blue paradise” removed from the backwards “red states”—even though the “blue states” are just further fodder for an oligarch takeover.
Wherever you live, you must remember you are no longer a human being in this scenario. You are a pawn to push, an asset to mine, and an imposition should you grasp the plan. At every step of the way, you are seen as disposable.
Should the red state–blue state divide reveal itself as a fallacy, operatives will reach deeper into the darkest moments of the American past for inspiration. They rewrite losers as winners, sinners as saints, and treason as triumph. This is why the GOP is working to redefine accurate history as “critical race theory”—an academic term right-wing conspirator Christopher Rufo admitted they chose to repurpose and weaponize into whatever they need it to mean at a given time. “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” Rufo wrote in March 2021. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”19 They need the culture war to distract from the war on national security— a war that all Americans are losing, because the government has decided to forfeit its sovereignty.
In November 2021, the Federal Election Commission ruled that it would become legal for foreigners to fund US referendum campaigns—subversion that was until recently not only reviled but illegal. Another loophole has been created to function as a noose around the neck of American democracy.
If you want to know who owns the United States of America, follow the money—it is in offshore accounts—and monitor who pays the people rewriting the laws and marketing these policies as normal. These donors give to both parties, often in record amounts. Billionaire Len Blavatnik, for example, a USSR-born partner of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, gave millions to the Republicans until House Democrats announced in 2019 that they were investigating Trump, at which point he gave the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee the largest donation in its history. Under pressure, the DCCC returned part of the funds, but as of 2021, he is again lavishing the Democrats with money, including $50,000 for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi alone. In 2019, Blavatnik was a useful vehicle for foreign interests because his American citizenship meant that his donations were legal; now, the FEC is eliminating the need for such go-betweens.
This crisis is not a matter of Democrats versus Republicans, or “red” versus “blue.” The crisis is a matter of people who seek to protect the United States versus elite operatives who want to destroy it. The latter are stripping down the country and selling it for parts and trying to convince ordinary Americans that it was their own idea.
Kendzior, Sarah. They Knew (pp. 164-168). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
The New Civil War is being fought so that you will forget that the Old Cold War ended as a corporate merger. Kleptocrats and oligarchs, pedophiles and criminals, technocrats and white supremacists: that is who runs what is indeed a New World Order, a phrase that merited the apprehension it provoked. Men of multiple passports, men of copious currencies, criminal elites who tell you their plots outright to test not only the limits of their own might but whether civic obligation still exists. No one powerful intervenes, no matter how blunt and blatant they get.
Kendzior, Sarah. They Knew (p. 169). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
The reality of secession and dissolution is that your countrymen—your friends and family members—are suddenly living in other countries that you may not be able to visit. The reality is a military transformed into mercenaries trading weapons and operating with brutal impunity on what used to be fellow citizens. It is the loss of basic infrastructure and it is privatization by the most corrupt actors in your region: a process already underway in the United States by operatives who know that the privatization of public goods can be accelerated by the shock tactics of partition. It means the most vulnerable people in the country—people who are not white or wealthy—will suffer even more under right-wing extremist regimes whom they did not elect and cannot control, while wealthy liberals in “blue enclaves” blame them for their fate. It means the “blue enclaves” will be invaded by the “red territories,” because no oligarch is going to let resources go unexploited. The idea that a liberal paradise will be tolerated in the Partitioned States of America is absurd; the right-wingers who treat small liberal arts colleges as major threats are not going to let actual nations rest in peace. They will raid you and then you will be one of us, only with more stigma and less recourse. There is no paradise in partition: all that will happen is that the things you hate most about America will multiply. This is true no matter who you are or what your political predilections may be.
Kendzior, Sarah. They Knew (pp. 170-171). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
When a country collapses under the weight of its own corruption, as the USSR and Yugoslavia did and as the United States seems set to do, it is common for people to say that the people of that country got what they deserved. What they usually mean is that bad actions have consequences, but we, the people, do not deserve what we have now or what may be coming. There is a great difference between what citizens bear due to the cruelty of the powerful and what they deserve as regular people who dream of more.
Kendzior, Sarah. They Knew (p. 171). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
