Hiding in Plain Sight
Sarah Kendzior
I appreciate Sarah Kendzior’s anger at the corruption and criminality of the Trump regime, as well as her perspective both as a Midwesterner (living in St. Louis, Missouri) and an expert on modern forms of autocracy. This broadside follow-up to The View from Flyover Country, however, doesn’t add much but passion and rhetoric to the bill of complaint against Trump, as well as a lot of self-congratulatory pats on the back for calling the 2016 election.
Much of Kendzior’s analysis seems accurate. The Republican mission is to “strip America for its parts” (she repeats this formulation several times), setting up a one-party state oligarchy along the lines of Russia or China. The Trump administration “is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government,” or, when Kendzior is really wound up, “a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them.”
That such an assessment is more true than false is damning enough. But Hiding in Plain Sight is not a work of investigative reportage so much as an opinion piece. “As I write this in mid-2019, white supremacist movements are moving into mainstream Canadian politics while the country wrestles with financial corruption similar to that which weakened the US and UK economies before our respective collapses.” No notes are provided supporting this so I’m not sure what specifically is being referred to. I don’t think Canada is immune to anti-democratic politics, but I didn’t come away from this feeling newly or well informed.
Perhaps Kendzior thinks this is all obvious. Trump’s crimes and lies are, after all, well documented and “in plain sight.” But their public recitation can still serve some purpose. The biggest lies may be countered by a bigger truth.
goodreports.net 