(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Nonfiction Views: January 31st, 2023: They Knew, by Sarah Kendzior [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-01-31  

If you’re expecting to simply kick back and cackle to yourself over the insane conspiracy ravings of MAGA and QAnon adherents, Sarah Kendzior’s They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent will disappoint. Oh, there’s plenty of that rightwing insanity dissected in the book, to be sure, but Kendzior takes a much deeper dive into the history and practice of conspiracy theories in America, and at some point you're sure to be set to squirming about something you believe no matter where you lie on the political spectrum.

She sets the scene early in the book with an example undercutting the liberal tendency to blame vaccine mistrust primarily on voter partisanship, an oversimplification that ignores the fact that there are nearly as many voters identifying as ‘Independent’ as there are ‘Republican,’ and that the most-vaccinated segment of the population—White Boomers—is also one of the top Trump-supporting segments. Indeed, the whole idea of ‘Red States’ is a misdirection: she calls them “gerrymandered hostage states run by hard-right Republican legislatures that disregard the public will.” So what is going on, if not a purely partisan divide? “[A]n epidemic of disillusionment and distrust so vast it stretches into paralysis.”

What is happening in Missouri is the result of having been lied to so many times about matters of life or death that the desire to die on your own terms outweighs the desire to get tricked into choosing it. What is happening here is the aftermath of predatory big pharma dynasties like the Sacklers swooping into your state and promising you relief in the form of opioids, assuring you they are safe, and leaving your community addicted and decimated while they laugh and profit off your pain and seek permanent immunity in the courts. What is happening here is recognition that if something were indeed wrong with a new and experimental vaccine, there would be no recourse and no justice, because political officials do not care if you die. What is happening here is abandonment as a way of life, from the streets of St. Louis to the hills of the Ozarks, and the knowledge that making a wrong move in a broken healthcare system is a gamble too expensive to take. What is happening here is not only people falling for conspiracies but remembering the times their loved ones had faith in the system and faith made a fool of them, at the cost of their survival.

In short, “of course people will flock to conspiracy theories when nearly every powerful actor is lying, obfuscating, or profiteering off pain.”

To be clear, Kendzior’s primary target is the blatant authoritarian criminality of the Trump regime, whose dangerous election she had predicted as early as the Fall of 2015. In her previous book, 2020’s Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, she called it “a reality show featuring villains from every major political scandal of the past 40 years—Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial collapse—in recurring roles and revivals...a Celebrity Apprentice of federal felons and disgraced operatives dragged out of the shadows and thrust back into the spotlight.”

But her intent with this book is to show the deeper current of mistrust in the American psyche, something which Trump manipulated to dangerous levels. Just because there are crazy conspiracy theories spread by malevolent actors for dangerous ends does not mean there are no conspiracies.

Where I may depart from other scholars and journalists is that I believe an equal danger lies in dismissing what are deemed “conspiracy theories” out of hand, instead of interrogating the power dynamics and motivations behind them and parsing out the grains of truth. The old adage that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” holds up all too well for our time.

In one example, she delves into the story of a secretive man who nevertheless managed to ingratiate himself with the upper echelons of business and politics, who fell under investigation for the sexual trafficking of minors, who entrapped business and government officials by secretly recording them in compromising situations and using it for blackmail, who seemed to have links to foreign intelligence, and who died by a highly suspicious ‘suicide’ before a full reckoning could be reached. Actually, she writes about two such men. One is Jeffrey Epstein. The other is Craig Spence in the 1980s. (Or is it three she writes about: notorious lawyer Roy Cohn was rumored to have a sexual blackmail operation dating back to the 1950s, using a suite at New York City’s Plaza Hotel to record politicians sexually abusing trafficked children.)

Like with Epstein, early news media stories about Craig Spence were fluff pieces, and as intimations of his dark side began to come to light, major media outlets were hesitant to touch them. It was the conservative and Moonie-backed Washington Times that printed numerous investigations which other national media did not follow up on. In 1989, Spence was found dead in the Boston Ritz-Carlton, dressed in a tuxedo, three dollars in his pocket, a newspaper clipping at his side about legislation to protect CIA agents called to testify before Congress, and a message in black marker written on the room’s mirror: “Chief, consider this my resignation, effective immediately. As you always said, you can’t ask others to make a sacrifice if you are not willing to do the same. Life is Duty. God bless America. To the Ritz, please forgive this inconvenience.”

The life and death of Craig Spence was disappeared through a near-uniform media and political blackout. There were no mainstream books, few follow-up articles, and no congressional hearings. Much of the coverage from the time is not easy to find today. The Washington Times’ 1980s articles, for example, are not in its publicly available archives. Spence is a ghost of history, a specter at the edges of a storm. I was a child when Spence carried out his operation, and I was in my thirties when I first heard about it, despite studying government corruption for my entire life.

Will Jeffrey Epstein by similarly disappeared down the memory hole? Despite the story being what would seem irresistible to news media interested in attracting audiences—illicit sex, corruption, spycraft, celebrities, blackmail—the story was largely ignored for too long. It was the Miami Herald that finally published a series of investigations about Epstein in 2018, helped in part by the ‘me too’ movement that made coverage of the sexual behavior of the powerful a bit more acceptable to the media gatekeepers. (In 2015, the website Gawker had published Epstein’s black book; within a year, right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel sued them out of existence.)

In They Knew, we take a tour of other juicy stories that for mysterious reasons the mainstream media was reluctant to pick up. The Keating Five scandal, which ensnared corrupt financier Charles Keating and five senators, including John McCain, who protected him, was at first ignored by the mainstream press; the story was first broken by the trade journal National Thrift News. An Associated Press reporter, Robert Parry, broke the story of what was to become the Iran-Contra scandal, but his editor was an Oliver North associate, who killed the investigation.

We also are taken through a variety of odd deaths. Aside from Epstein and Spence, we hear of Senator John Heinz and former Senator John Tower, who had both investigated Reagan-era government crimes and who both died in separate plane crashes within 48 hours of one another in 1991. Heinz’s widow later married Senator John Kerry, who had earlier led an investigation into drug-running in the Iran-Contra scandal. That report, issued in 1991, was largely buried until a journalist named Gary Webb picked up the trail in the mid-1990s. His investigation into the story ended in 2004 when he was found dead from two gunshot wounds to the head in his apartment, a death labeled a suicide. We are reminded that Robert Maxwell, father of Epstein’s associate in sex trafficking Ghislaine Maxwell, and who reportedly worked with Israeli intelligence and also helped the Russian Mafia set up global operations, died mysteriously by falling off his yacht in 1991. And we hear of Danny Casolaro, an independent journalist who had spent years investigating what he called “The Octopus” The threads of the story encompassed the CIA, the Department of Justice, the FBI, numerous law firms and tech companies. It included PROMIS, a compromised computer software that, once installed, could allow the computers to be hacked. One of the people involved in selling this compromised software to the US Government was...Robert Maxwell. Casolaro’s investigation came to an end in 1991, when he was found in a Sheraton Hotel bathtub with a dozen slashes to his wrists. His death was ruled a suicide.

And we are taken through what Kendzior calls occasional “anomalous eras of American accountability, glimmers of hope that light the way to a better future.” The 1970s was one such period. In 1971, the activist group Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke into FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania and obtained a thousand documents describing what would become known as COINTELPRO: surveillance, infiltration and covert attacks on antiwar activists and civil rights leaders. The news media covered the story. Also in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which published extensive articles based on them revealing how the government manipulated the facts surrounding the Vietnam War.

In 1972, CIA officer Victor Marchetti and State Department official John Marks wrote The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, an expose of what they called government corruption before and during the Vietnam War. It was the first book to be censored by the US government. It was a fight to get the book published, and to narrow down the deletions insisted upon by the CIA. In the end, the book, with restored deletions highlighted in boldface and still-censored sections marked by blank space, was an instant bestseller. Also in 1972 came the Watergate break-in and subsequent reporting in the Washington Post, followed by actual Congressional hearings that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. This wave of revelations about government corruption and secrecy in turn led to the Senate Church Committee, the House Pike Committee, and the White House Rockefeller Commission, investigating abuses by the CIA, FBI, National Intelligence Agency and the IRS. (John Tower, one of the two Senators who died in plane crashes, was on the Church Committee.)

How to distinguish between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies? Liberals certainly hold up their own cabal of evil entities that exert covert control over public policy: the Koch brothers, the Federalist Society, the Council for National Policy and many others. We believe if the evidence showing these links, even as we mock the MAGA delusions about George Soros and stolen elections. In 1988, gay rights activist Larry Kramer wrote to Anthony Fauci: “You are a murderer...Your refusal to hear the screams of AIDS activists early in the crisis resulted in the deaths of thousands of Queers.” Today, it is the QAnon crowd calling Fauci a murderer (and Kramer has publicly forgiven him). Robert Mueller was a US Attorney and FBI Director in a time when Trump, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and others were left to engage in the early phases of their criminal careers with impunity, yet we applauded when years later he was assigned to investigate the crimes of the Trump administration.

The dangerous curse of the Trump years is that “the fringes have been pulled to the center, with the result that the center no longer holds. Trump created a template for elite criminal impunity that aspiring successors seek to emulate.”

Conspiracies are woven into the landscape of American life. They are how Americans reckon with hypocrisy and betrayal, how they feel around the edges of subjects they are not supposed to touch, how they navigate the twilight zone between principles and practice. Conspiracies structure American politics, but they are not called conspiracies when they are wrapped in the flag or stamped with bureaucracy or printed piecemeal in the papers. They are called plans or policies or “just the way things are….” In a country this corrupt, the line between a plan and a plot is blurred to the point where you do not know if your interpretation is rooted in insight or paranoia, but you know it is worth pursuing. What the criminal elite want, above all, is for people to stop analyzing these crises, to accept them as normal and leave them alone. This motive is not based in fear of being found out. Instead, it is an attempt at psychic control and retaining the political culture that allows them to operate with impunity. They want you to abandon moral inquiry even more than they want you to abandon the truth.

THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS

Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo, by Alan Dershowitz. Well, in the spirit of this week’s reviewed book, here’s something to parse: Dershowitz here endeavors to present what he calls incontrovertible evidence that he is entirely innocent of the sexual misconduct accusations against him, while suggesting a roadmap for how such allegations should be handled in a just society.

Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away with It, by Elie Honig. Another book to ponder alongside this week’s review. It explores America’s two-tier justice system, explaining how the rich, the famous, and the powerful— including, most notoriously, Donald Trump—manipulate the legal system to escape justice and get away with vast misdeeds. Honig exposes how the rich and powerful use the system to their own benefit, revealing how notorious figures like Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby successfully eluded justice for decades. He demonstrates how the Trump children dodged a fraud indictment. He makes clear how countless CEOs and titans of Wall Street have been let off the hook, receiving financial penalties without suffering criminal consequences. This doesn’t happen by accident.

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara. Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo—because we are all implicated.

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias, by Kevin Cook. Another book marking the 30th anniversary of Waco, along with last week’s Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage , by Jeff Guinn. Cook gives readers a taste of Koresh’s deadly charisma and takes us behind the scenes at the Branch Davidians’ compound, where “the new Christ” turned his followers into servants and sired seventeen children by a dozen “wives.” In vivid accounts packed with human drama, Cook harnesses never-reported material to reconstruct the FBI’s fifty-one-day siege of the Waco compound in minute-to-minute detail. He sheds new light on the Clinton administration’s approval of a lethal governmental assault in a new, definitive account of the firefight that ended so many lives and triggered the rise of today’s militia movement. Waco drew the battle lines for American extremists—in Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s words, “Waco started this war.” With help from sources as diverse as Branch Davidian survivors and the FBI’s lead negotiator during the siege, Cook draws a straight line from Waco’s ashes to the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol and insurrections yet to come.



gives readers a taste of Koresh’s deadly charisma and takes us behind the scenes at the Branch Davidians’ compound, where “the new Christ” turned his followers into servants and sired seventeen children by a dozen “wives.” In vivid accounts packed with human drama, Cook harnesses never-reported material to reconstruct the FBI’s fifty-one-day siege of the Waco compound in minute-to-minute detail. He sheds new light on the Clinton administration’s approval of a lethal governmental assault in a new, definitive account of the firefight that ended so many lives and triggered the rise of today’s militia movement. Waco drew the battle lines for American extremists—in Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s words, “Waco started this war.” With help from sources as diverse as Branch Davidian survivors and the FBI’s lead negotiator during the siege, Cook draws a straight line from Waco’s ashes to the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol and insurrections yet to come. Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance, by Alvin Hall. Most Americans only know of the guide from the 2018 Green Book movie or the 2020 Lovecraft Country TV show. Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed to the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Along the way, they gathered memories from some of the last living witnesses for whom the Green Book meant survival—remarkable people who not only endured but rose above the hate, building vibrant Black communities against incredible odds.

A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy, by Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon and John Buffalo Mailer. Published on the centenary of Norman Mailer’s birth, a timely and urgent call to preserve our democracy. American democracy was a lifelong project for Norman Mailer. It was his grand theme. Nearly all of his books touched on the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses, the grace (to use his word) and fragility of the American experiment as well as the threats to it—from autocratic leaders and a complacent citizenry, from violent protest and radical conservative assaults on it, from “soft fascism” and the ills of racism and poverty. In the sharp and impassioned language of a political Cassandra and with the eye of a novelist and journalist, he explored the underlying psychological, social, and economic causes of the country’s fragile polity and offered urgent prescriptions for its reinvigoration. A Mysterious Country is a carefully selected collection of Mailer’s most incisive—and sometimes remarkably prophetic—commentary on American democracy and what must be done to safeguard it. The anthology draws on both published and unpublished sources, from Mailer’s great works of narrative nonfiction and novels as well as essays, interviews, letters, speeches, and talk show appearances.

Reckoning: A Memoir, by V (formerly Eve Ensler). The work of a lifetime from the Tony Award-winning, bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues-political, personal, profound, and more than forty years in the making. The book invites you to travel the journey of a writer's and activist's life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, the personal to the political, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose, poetry, dreams, letters, and essays drawn from V's lifelong journals that takes readers from Berlin to Oklahoma to the Congo, from climate disaster, homelessness, and activism to family.

All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/31/2149899/-Nonfiction-Views-January-31st-2023-They-Knew-by-Sarah-Kendzior

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/