#gringo nonsens

[eloiduarte]

Every time I see Sarah Kendzior's stuff online I am reminded of that embarrassing article she wrote once about how Steve Bannon was extremely dangerous because he compared himself to Lenin, which signaled his authoritarian goals. Anticommunist brainrot is so powerful that it can make you take a completely bullshit, self-aggrandising comparison from a third-rate racist conman completely at face value.

Now, this was years ago, and her more recent writings do a great job at calling out both heads of the tyrannical hydra that is the US political system. But there also bereft of a compelling vision for the future besides "autocracy isn't inevitable" and "no mafia state". No single person has all the answers, but I find it hard to believe her disdain for anticapitalist ideologies isn't related her lack of political imagination. This ultimately harms her work, which ends up reading like comfy gringo doomerism.

It also doesn't help that she's become very full of herself in her role as the Gringo Cassandra. Almost every article she writes contains some variant of "I saw this coming years ago and they all dismissed my warnings". Like there weren't plenty of people who were also correct before her. No, she has to be the only one who the downfall of the american empire coming. Otherwise she wouldn't be any special.

Why write this rant now? I guess my autistic ass got tired of people parroting how great and visionary she is when her political goals are actually very milquetoast. She may want the US to be free from its dying decrepit oligarchy, which is all well and good. But she also wants it to continue lording over the world, lest those pesky central asian autocrats get any ideas.

She doesn't seem to want an actually better world, but an optimized version of the current one.