It began with a sinus infection. The staff at the urgent care gave me antibiotics to address it, saying nothing about the directive on the label to take a probiotic as well.

Three days later, it began. I won’t go into gruesome detail but let’s just say I very quickly began to wonder how there was anything left to go to the bathroom about. This went on for several days. Another urgent care. This time, they gave me a different prescription. I went to the pharmacist to have it filled. “This is just over-the-counter Imodium,” the pharmacist told me.

I was already taking that, which I had told the staff at the urgent care. So, I had paid $50 and gotten my hopes up for the urgent care to effectively tell me to take a lot of Pepto Bismol.

I called my doctor and scheduled an appointment. Then, a friend told me about his experience with Clostridioides difficile, or C diff. So I called my doctor back and told them I needed to make a decision: go to the ER now or wait until my appointment in the morning.

The first nurse told me something obvious if not particularly helpful: “If you feel bad you can go to the ER.” Thanks, I said, but what I was trying to determine was whether my doctor the next day would even be able to perform the tests needed to identify a case of C diff. She connected me to another nurse who eventually said that, no, my doctor probably wouldn’t be able to conduct the necessary tests to diagnose C diff. So, yes, I should probably go to the ER.

That evening I did, and after a few hours, finally felt like I was talking to someone competent and helpful: the ER doctor on shift at St. Joseph’s Candler in Savannah. But the entire episode — mild by comparison to some healthcare horror stories I’ve heard — was a frustrating reminder of how broken our healthcare system is. Luckily I have a primary care doctor, but if I didn’t I would have had to wait weeks or months to see one. The other option? Urgent cares. We see how well that went.

Yes, I should have know that I had to take probiotics with the antibiotics prescribed by the urgent care. But when I returned almost a week later complaining of stomach pains, diarrhea, the staff there should have sent me to the ER.

Finally, I made the choice that I thought was best for me after a week of serious stomach pain and 20 trips a day to the bathroom: go to the ER. I have insurance, so my bill probably won’t be huge. But the fact that these are the options for most people in this country is a lowdown, cryin’ shame.

***

As I waited to be seen at the ER, I scrolled news on my phone and saw that the Trump administration will kick as many as a million people off Obamacare for allegedly committing healthcare fraud. Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said they had found people who had allegedly committed fraud because they had never made a claim through their insurance plan under the Affordable Care Act.

Is that fraud? It doesn’t sound like it to me. This initiative of Vance’s “anti-fraud task force” will save American taxpayers $2.2 billion, Vance and Oz said on Tuesday. That’s about the same amount that Donald Trump made during the first year of his second term in office.

Vance and Oz also said they’re stopping brokers from selling Obamacare insurance plans. That’s in addition to the millions of Americans who are now paying much higher premiums as a result of Republicans’ halting of Obamacare subsidies. Oh, and then there are the 10 states — most of them dominated by Republican majorities in their legislatures and governors’ offices — that have refused to expand Medicaid, which would offer coverage to low income Americans.

My brief but frustrating experience these past two weeks with the healthcare system was one of a handful my wife and I have had in recent years. And I’m one of the lucky ones: I’m a relatively healthy middle-aged man who doesn’t drink or do drugs, eats a moderately healthy diet and exercises. (Yes, I still smoke, and yes, I know… The big quit is coming; I’m just not quite there yet.)

This experience revived a conversation we’ve had before about finding a concierge doctor. Again, luckily, we can probably afford that and it’s worth it to us to make our lives a little easier. I know more than a few people who have gone down this path, but it’s one that isn’t available to many Americans.

It also seems entirely unnecessary for a country as wealthy and powerful as our own. The fact that those in the upper-middle class and above can essentially opt out of all the frustrating madness of the American healthcare system and have their own, somewhat private doctor simply because they can afford it seems like an indicator of how broken things are, in addition to being one of those dystopian signs of late-stage capitalism.

But that’s where things have been going lately. There are plenty of news stories about the concierge doctor trend. A new private medical plan in Connecticut costs $45,000 a year. That’s a lot of money, but I bet you get great service!

As I was dealing with and trying to self-diagnose my malady this past week, I also tried to keep up with work. That meant reading a lot of news and paying attention to what congressional candidates are saying about a variety of issues. One statement stood out among all the rest.

Responding to news that Vance had told congressional Republicans in a closed-door meeting to simply mention the name of Michigan’s Abdul El Sayed in order to scare voters about far-left candidates, the doctor and candidate for one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats said that he didn’t care what Vance said, and that he was focusing on issues that affect Americans.

Instead, El Sayed said that he would continue talking about “gas, groceries, and how hard it is to see a doctor.”

I nodded my head in vociferous agreement when I heard the remark. Maybe there are Republicans on the trail talking about the many and obvious problems with our healthcare system, but I haven’t seen that as much as GOP candidates fear-mongering about “Communists.”

The reality is that every single American has a version of the story you’ve read here today. Many, many Americans have several such stories. And many Americans have even worse stories about their interactions with the healthcare system. Republicans can say they’re trying to fix all of this, but they’ve never really said exactly how they’ll do it.

Trump is trying to lower prescription drug costs. But Republicans have never formulated any credible plan for insuring more Americans, or for making healthcare less expensive and more equitable for low income Americans and the working class.

I know it’s not as bad here as it is in other parts of the world, but I think we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. The Republican plan for healthcare, based on the experiences in my lifetime, appears to be entirely market-driven.

Republican voters can continue to believe their party is working toward a solution, if they choose. But I know I’m not alone in navigating our healthcare system and thinking, “This is the best we got?”

At a certain point, even conservative Americans might be forced to look around them at all that is broken and reckon with the fact that Republicans have no plan to fix it, that their ideological drive to make government as small as possible is also making it ineffective to the point that it’s actively harming how our society functions.

Under Trump, Republican voters might even have to conclude that their party is actively trying to break things. And they’re breaking things not for the benefit of Americans who need to see a doctor, or afford a decent quality of life, but for the wealthiest people and most powerful forces in our society.

To not conclude this after taking part in virtually any part of the American healthcare system is to purposefully ignore the realities of it. And for God’s sakes, don’t get a sinus infection.

***

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In my first year in what was once called “the newspaper business,” the city editor of the paper gave me my weekend assignment.

I was an intern, and weekend assignments were always pretty bad — some fluff story about a local Boy Scout troop raising money, or a casserole cook-off. It was not the type of stuff a youngish, hungover reporter with a Nelson Algren complex wanted to spend a Saturday writing about. If anyone under the age of 25 is reading this, I know it must make me sound pretty old, but this was only 16 years ago, and this was the way it had been for a long time.

So, on one of those warm-but-crisp Midwest autumn mornings, I drove my grumpy, hungover ass out to Canton, Illinois for a September 11 memorial event at a local church. The editor — who I think would call himself a Reagan Republican but was also a committed truth-telling journalist with Hunter Thompson quotes on his wall — had joked with me about the event, which featured a monster truck and dirt bike jumping.

“Ask the pastor what dirt bikes have to do with 9/11,” he told me. I thought he was joking. Maybe he was not.

At the entrance to the event was a mangled piece of steel from the World Trade Center that, during its demise, had formed into the shape of a cross. People solemnly looked at it as they entered a field near the church.

We billed the event as a “unique” 9/11 memorial. I took the pastor’s words about how the historic attacks that had occurred just nine years earlier were part of the reason that Americans should accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, and folks who picked up their Sunday paper had a nice little story to read.

But the strange and, to me, troublesome blending of church and state — not to mention the religious iconography of what was, again, to me, a horrific tragedy that was nonetheless a historic event that had absolutely nothing to do with God and everything to do with U.S. foreign policy and its impact — was not lost on me. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a terrible, violent shock to Americans. But they did not come completely out of nowhere. And on that day at the church in Canton in 2010, we knew that. By then, we had come to understand why the 9/11 attackers did what they did, as wrong and evil as it was.

Many Americans had also created a Christian-nationalist legend out of the attacks — a story that resulted in otherwise reasonable, perhaps more secular people, supporting or accepting a variety of authoritarian themes that continue to shape our society. Out of fear and anger, many Americans — for a time, myself included — went along with the nationalist fervor that followed 9/11, having little or no idea of its grave repercussions.

It wasn’t my job that day to explore these haughty topics, so I wrote up something that avoided any of that potential controversy and instead described the scene, got some quotes, and framed the event as one community’s way of remembering the fallen. We used to joke in the newsroom that anniversaries of events only really mattered when there was a five or a zero at the end of them. No one cared about the 59th anniversary of D-Day, for instance. But you better make a big splash on the front page when the 60th rolled around.

That muscle memory still resides in me, which is why I’m remembering that day in Canton on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and thinking a bit more about what it means.

***

By now, we know that the surveillance state that came in the wake of the attacks has become a daily part of our lives. The expansion of federal government and executive power has grown to a point that it seems there’s no going back. On September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security didn’t even exist. Now, it’s the largest federal law enforcement agency, with unbelievably sweeping powers to spy on and apprehend citizens and noncitizens alike. Under Trump, the vast powers initially granted to DHS out of our desire to never allow an attack like 9/11 to happen again have reached their inevitable, authoritarian scope.

DHS is now a fully-fascist paramilitary organization that answers only to Trump and Christian nationalist forces in our government. Even under Democratic presidents, its power has expanded well beyond its original intent. Left unchecked, the agency will continue to expand its presence in everyday American lives, further threatening the liberties of even native-born men and women.

But DHS isn’t the only example of the authoritarian shift in American society. That shift was relatively slow at first and threatened primarily those here from Muslim countries, but has expanded to focus on anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of patriotism that has now expanded to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a white, Christian-nationalist vision of American life. Under Trump, this dynamic has only accelerated.

Following 9/11, the nation developed what I call the automatic hero complex. Under this framework, we collectively agreed to grant all first-responders the title and stance of heroes. It didn’t matter whether they were firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center or a paramedic in Peoria. They were heroes. But that designation began to apply more to police than anyone else. With this granting of hero status, we also gave away some of our collective skepticism of the power of police.

American law enforcement has used this permission structure to collect more and more funding from cities and states, and more acquire surveillance and investigative powers. Perhaps most obviously — because we can see it with our own eyes in the gear and dress of the average police officer — American law enforcement has become almost absurdly militarized.

The attacks of September 11 helped to shift the public’s perception of being a cop, which data shows is less fatal than being a roofer, to men and women who are risking their lives on the frontlines of wars against evil in their own communities. In reality, they’re often just writing traffic tickets.

***

The great irony of 9/11 is that what began as a response to a war against us has become our own war against ourselves. Yes, 9/11 has been used as justification for our forever wars across the globe. But twenty-five years on, one of the unavoidable realities of our response to the attacks is that the American right has decided that as much as half the country is fundamentally anti-American for being skeptical or critical of the powers of law enforcement and right-wing government that have grown since that day.

Those who question or criticize the American right’s vision for the nation are effectively viewed as enemy combatants in this war.

At times, our post-9/11 war against ourselves has mostly been a culture war in which Republicans and conservatives decide who is, at heart, an American and who is not. But increasingly under Republican governments, the war is entering the physical realm, turning hotter.

Without a societal shift away from the authoritarianism of the American right — sweeping election wins for moderates, significant policy changes at the national, state and local levels, a rebuke of authoritarian belief systems and behavior at the community level — this war is only going to get hotter, and our decline will accelerate.

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If there is a single statement that sums up what American life can feel like under President Donald Trump’s second term, it may be this: “We control everything.”

That’s what Trump said Wednesday during a speech at the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library. Trump is correct in some ways — it certainly does feel like the president, his authoritarian regime, and its enablers possess vast control over the government, the economy, and the media. But like all fascist movements, this power is brittle. Trump and his people may feel like they control everything because they live in a hyper-curated echo chamber where even the remotest dissent from anyone within their ranks is not allowed, but their movement is broadly unpopular.

That’s because it’s obvious to anyone who is not a committed member of this movement that Trump and his people are no better than the corrupt Washington insiders they were elected to ostensibly replace. The Epstein stuff, the war in Iran, the constant self-dealing, the wasting of taxpayer dollars on frivolous construction projects to feed Trump’s ego — there remains a large swath of conservative American voters who look at all of this and, at minimum, will decide to stay home in November. Some of them may have even had enough of the corruption, waste and incompetence of Trump’s second term to go out and vote for Democrats.

This group of voters will doom Republicans for one very simple reason: it is becoming quite clear that Trump and his people are getting obscenely rich off the backs of everyday Americans. Deluded by the belief that the white rage that fuels their fascistic policies on immigration gives them a free pass to loot the government, Trump, his family, and his administration have developed a massive blind spot that is preventing them from seeing what’s coming.

But it’s coming, and that’s because of very clear and obvious things like this:

What you see here is the result of deep reporting from Reuters, showing that Trump and his family’s crypto ventures are nothing more than a scam that enriches those at the top. In a way, this graph perfectly illustrates American life under Trump because it shows the decline of the many — and the rising prosperity of the few.

Making gobs of cash is as American as apple pie, as they say. But this is something different than your run-of-the-mill, hyper-capitalist cash grab. As president, Trump has enacted policies that have helped the crypto industry gain a foothold in global markets. (He’s also directly helped other industries in which he is heavily invested.) The crypto company run by Trump’s sons, World Liberty Financial, has benefitted from investments from the United Arab Emirates, a regional ally, and the founder of Binance, who Trump pardoned.

These are the exact type of swampy, jet-setting conflicts of interests that fueled Trump’s political rise. Now they’ll help usher in his movement’s downfall.

Still, instead of this being a universally-accepted understanding of the perversion of American values that it is, a solid third of the country sees nothing wrong with the profits Trump, his family, and the world’s richest people have made directly as a result of Trump’s election to his second term.

But a recourse is probably coming — this time in the form of a sweeping rebuke of Republicans in November.

***

Trump, the billionaires who populate his cabinet, the tech industry titans that have cozied up to Trump’s authoritarianism, and anyone and everyone who has access to the president and is cashing in on federal government contracts are the few who have gained massive profits since Trump took office. Americans making less than six figures a year are no better off — at best. There is simply no amount of immigrant fear-mongering that can make up for the fact that the lives of working class Americans look no better now than they did before Trump took office.

Of course, this should have been obvious to them from the very start, but we’ll have to take what we can get. The many millions of white, working class voters who will likely stay home in November will do so because they will have finally learned that Trump doesn’t actually give a solitary fuck about them. Between now and then, Trump will probably only make this dynamic worse.

The golden age is not already here and it is not coming because it never was. It’s here for Trump, his family, and the richest people in the world — but not for me, you, or any of the white working class masses who thought that kicking out immigrants would solve all their problems. By November, if deportation levels keep going the way they are, there will hardly be any undocumented immigrants left to blame.

That’s why, in recent days, you’ve seen Republicans shift to a new scapegoat: “communists” running for office against less left-wing Democrats. Trump has called these “communists” — also known as members of the Democratic Socialists of America, or just plain old Democrats — the “biggest” threat the United States has ever faced. Bigger than World War II, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Trump has said.

This makes the leftists currently winning elections across the country just the latest “biggest threat” of the Trump era. China, Mexican immigrants, immigrants in general, the news media, Democrats in Congress, judges — all have had their turn as the biggest threat facing the nation. After 10 years of proclaiming whatever person or entity Trump was able to focus on for more than 10 consecutive minutes the “biggest threat,” what are Americans to actually believe?

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Even some of Trump’s supporters understand that, at a certain point, you can’t just keep claiming that everyone else is ruining things for the president you elected to make your life better. After 10 years of this, and with Republicans in control of “everything,” even some Trump voters will begin to question why it is that Trump can’t seem to make things better for the white working class. Then, those voters might catch a glimpse of some news that Fox or their algorithms aren’t feeding them. Something like, since taking office in 2024, Trump’s net worth has doubled, from $2.4 billion to $6 billion.

Even some Trump supporters who would otherwise brush this off with, “he’s a businessman” won’t be able to countenance the news of Trump’s obscene profits during his second term.

They elected him to make the country richer, to make them richer, not himself. Recall that, from the beginning, one of Trump’s biggest selling points was that he couldn’t be bought — he was already rich, so he wasn’t in it for the money. Tens of millions of Americans elected him on this very idea. Now, even with the powerful forces of right wing media and Trump-slanted social media algorithms, they won’t be able to avoid the truth that Trump has bilked his voters and everyone else to the tune of godly sums of money.

Some of these Trump supporters will feel lost and confused. And in that moment they’ll have to decide between what are really the only three choices in life: freeze, fight or flee. The ones who freeze simply won’t show up in November. The ones who fight will buy the new line about “communists.” The ones who flee will come to the other side or go farther to the right.

The MAGA movement will end because of its greed, hubris and brittleness. They don’t actually control everything — at least not yet. Trump and Republicans’ constant lies about election fraud are proof of this: they don’t have complete control over elections because that’s not how our founders set it up — but they sure do want that control, and are doing everything they can to try to get it.

That’s another reason they’ll lose in November. Not only will lots of Trump’s people stay home — bored with his nonsense, fed up with the corruption, the lies about Epstein, or the war he started — but many, many millions of Americans who aren’t particularly politically engaged will come out of the woodwork to stop what is the actual biggest threat to American freedom: Trump and Republicans themselves.

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The older I get, the more efficient I seem to be at many things. I know there will be a time in old age when this is not the case, but hopefully by then some of the many things I am required to spend my time on will have passed.

One of those requirements is having to pay a lot of attention to what elected officials say and do. Maybe I’ll always have to spend what I estimate to be a solid 40 percent of my time doing this, which, combined with general news consumption and my own investigations and stories, becomes more like 60 percent of the minutes in a day.

But I have a child now, and a house that needs some work, plus my book is out, plus I’m feeling a bit squishy so I’m at the gym relatively frequently, and I like to play music as often as possible, ideally every day. Family, friends, recovery, paying bills — life gets busy and fast.

So when it comes to paying attention to the many, many things our elected officials say and do, plus the consequences of those actions on people who often don’t have the power to do much about it — like immigrants dying in awful conditions in facilities across the country — I have to be efficient.

Luckily, people like Donald Trump and just about every single person around him makes what they do and how they do it incredibly obvious.

Just days past his latest corrupt gambit — the advertising, marketing, and grift-filled spectacle that was UFC Freedom 250 — Trump is on to his next corrupt project or stunning failure, depending on how it shakes out.

The details of the deal over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and ending our war there are out and they’re not great, at least politically for Trump. He basically just blew hundreds of millions of dollars — and wasted the lives of 13 American service men and women — on a war that didn’t need to happen, and is now preparing to ink a deal that is no better than the one Barack Obama made with Iran a decade ago.

But Trump, who has spent his life incorrectly believing that he is smarter than every single person in the world, blew up Obama’s deal under the guise that it was a cash-laden handout to Iran. Now, Trump is about to give Iran even more money — not to mention the blood and treasure we’ve expended in our war effort. (Dead American soldiers are just the start. Our munitions reserves are incredibly depleted thanks to Trump and Pete Hegseth’s unnecessary and relentless bombing. Plus, soldiers and airmen are now run down after having spent months screaming across the region in service of Trump’s military adventurism, which he has openly said he’s bored with.)

But it’s not just that Trump’s deal with Iran does nothing new, or that it’s cost us much more than the previous one did, it’s that, like everything Trump touches, it’s probably entirely corrupt.

That’s because the deal promises $300 billion in funds to rehabilitate the Iranian infrastructure we destroyed. The exact language of this bullet point in the deal says those funds will come from both the United States and “regional partners.” That’s vastly more than the $1.7 billion promised by the Obama administration as part of the previous Iran nuclear deal. If you don’t think that those in Trump’s orbit and probably Trump’s own Trump Organization will somehow find a way to profit off all those billions of dollars, you haven’t been paying attention.

Every deal Trump has made during his second term in office has financially benefitted himself, his family and their companies, or the slew of business interests still held by members of his cabinet. The Iran nuclear deal, if it holds, will be no different.

The scale of the Trump administration’s corruption is historic. Sunday’s birthday blood match, in previous times, would have been an impeachable offense in and of itself. Trump’s corruption perverts and harms rules, norms and laws like a steamroller every single day. It will continue until someone puts a stop to it. Republicans won’t do this. It will be up to Democrats, hopefully starting in November, to begin a second reconstruction project that ensures no future presidential administration will be able to get away with all that Trump has.

Trump as president exists for a lot of reasons. Among them is the obvious fact that Reconstruction failed following the Civil War. Since then, a shifting coalition of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and hyper-capitalist forces have successfully been able to flourish. The systems under which they’ve done so must end in order for a truly democratic republic to continue. The reforms of the Watergate era were a start, and something similar — albeit much more aggressive — must start taking shape now. If not, the historic corruption of Trump will become the norm, not the exception. At that point, people like me probably won’t even be able to make a living. And all of us who aren’t inside the system of corruption and influence will work in service of it.

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For as long as the internet has been around, there have been people willing to say terrible things online. It used to be that many who expressed racist beliefs and other markers of societal regression did so anonymously, and that’s certainly still the case. But take a scroll through the Facebook feed of just about anything these days — including, most certainly, your local TV news station — and you’ll see members of your own community openly espousing racism and hate.

Many of our friends, neighbors and co-workers no longer feel pressured to keep these beliefs under wraps. They are open with it, and clearly feel there are no consequences. Increasingly, they’re right.

As I’ve gone about talking to people about my book, which has now been published, people have asked me variations of a question: what’s different about America now compared to when I began my career as a newspaper reporter more than a decade ago? If I had to pick a single word to describe a driving factor of the widespread decline the book covers, it would be shamelessness.

Many of our friends, neighbors and co-workers have been emboldened over the last two decades to openly espouse beliefs that many of us grew up believing were in the past. They do not feel shame in displaying their ignorance and racism. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in an era where things like the Civil Rights movement were generally viewed as good things. The people who believed otherwise, I was led to believe, were on the margins of our society. I don’t know if I can say that anymore.

Savannah Mayor Van Johnson does an admirable job combatting the hate and racism that fills the comment sections of his Facebook posts on any given day. Like a lot of us, he might be better off ignoring those comments more often, but I understand why he feels the need to confront them head-on.

His feed — plus that of hundreds of local news outlets across the country — is inundated every single day with people saying things that should result in getting them ousted from polite society. But they’re not doing so anonymously — they’re doing it under their own names, often proudly linking themselves and their racist comments back to their employers.

Maybe some of these folks get a talking-to by their boss at the local car dealership where they work. Maybe some of them even get fired for saying obviously racist shit on the Facebook page of their town’s mayor, where their profile lists them as being employed at businesses whose bottom lines rely on, you know, not being openly racist. But many more of them face no consequences. And why should they? Over the last 10 years, we’ve watched as some of the most powerful and influential people in American life have expressed racist beliefs on a daily basis.

In this type of society, why should anyone be fearful that such comments will have consequences in their own lives? Many of the things that many of us were led to believe would result in dire consequences no longer apparently do so, especially for those at the top, like Donald Trump. Wanton corruption, open racism, abject ignorance — all of these things have led to more success and power for Trump and his vast network of Americans who support these degrading behaviors or are profiting from them.

How do you turn around a society where such behavior is rewarded? That’s the underlying question that will be answered by November’s elections.

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You might have seen that American Doom beat the Justice Department in federal court last week. Trump’s DOJ will now have to officially reveal the names of some of the witnesses in an affidavit that led to an FBI raid on an Atlanta elections office. Doom was the only publication in the country to motion the court to release the names. To support our work, please choose a paid subscription or drop a few dollars into our Coffee Fund.

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I do not think this summer will be as hot as the last one, but what do I know? I’ve been wrong before. For whatever reason, it seems that many Americans have come to accept the daily drumbeat of chaos and corruption that emanates from Washington, as well as the more recent authoritarian machinations being heaped upon us by Trumpian legislatures throughout the country. Well, maybe accept isn’t the right word. Maybe people are just exhausted.

And when I say us, I guess not all of us. Because lots of people are very happy about the abject power grab that has occurred in recent days following the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Republican-led states to effectively rig the map so that only Republicans can win.

Last summer saw fairly widespread protests over the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime as masked agents stormed American streets. The song of the summer this year seems to be a slightly less obvious one of rising authoritarianism: the quiet, plodding work of Republicans who are using the tools of democracy to undo it. There are many ways to create an authoritarian state. One of those ways includes the masked police that sparked outrage and protests last year. Another involves what we’re seeing now: duly-elected officials ensuring that no one else can come to power by using the very levers of government and elections that are supposed to ensure equal representation under the law.

Simultaneously, Republicans are working to, once again, convince millions of Americans that any election that doesn’t result in a Republican victory is fraudulent. (This is the thesis statement of the election denial movement, whether they explicitly state it or not.) All of this — the war in Iran, Trump administration corruption coupled with a complete disregard for the economic concerns of Americans, attacks on voting rights, sowing distrust in elections — feels like the inevitable, if not openly-violent, end state of decades-long period of turmoil that I’ve reported on in one form or another my entire career.

Today at Luke O’Neil’s Hell World, you can read about some of that chaos in an excerpt from my forthcoming book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened – The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. The book will be published in June by the University of Georgia Press and you can pre-order it here. (Use the code 08TERRIBLE to receive 30 percent off.)

Some folks have been asking me why I wrote this book, which also deals with my descent into and recovery from alcoholism, and the short answer is: I had to. Not only did I have to get all this shit off my chest, but I felt I had to put these events down so that other people who were watching the chaos and violence of American life — and who were wondering if it all was really as bad as it can sometimes seem — were not alone. First, you are not alone. Secondly, it certainly all has been very bad. Third, it’s going to get better. The pendulum never stops at the top, as my dad would say.

All of this pressure and pain will go away if Americans stick to the principles of light, love, justice and progress. It can be hard in dark days to remember that those principles can win, but by remembering that they can defeat darkness we get closer to willing the darkness away.

***

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Had a brief flashback last night to 2017, when I woke up to the news of the Vegas massacre, then hopped on a plane to go there and find the unsung hero. At the time, that event seemed unthinkable. What happened the other night in D.C…. well, I don’t know about you but I sort of knew before I knew, if that makes sense. Here are some thoughts on that as well as an excerpt from my forthcoming book that deals with the Vegas massacre.

The book — If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened — just received a starred review at Publishers Weekly, which I’m told is a big deal. You can pre-order it here. Use the discount code “08TERRIBLE,” (that’s a ZERO at the front) to get 30 percent off. If you choose to become a founding member of American Doom, I’ll send a free signed copy of the book.

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We have some exclusive reporting coming on a few fronts, including more on ICE deaths and efforts to interfere in the midterms. So, as always, I ask for your paid support or contributions to our Coffee Fund to help pay for our journalism here.

Driving through the salt marshes lit by the moon we laughed and talked about the gig. The band had played well and the crowd was good. People enjoyed it and tipped us accordingly: each of us made $75 from the tip jar. A successful night. She told me about some of the people who had talked to her about the music, including the bartender at another place on the island I’ve always wanted to play who said he wanted to book us there. Then, she asked, “Do you want to hear the other development?”

Sure, I said, knowing what it was before she even said it: someone had tried to kill him again. Maybe that’s my finely-tuned intuition after having spent the better part of the last two decades reporting on the violence and upheaval of this country. Or, it’s just a reflection of our collective understanding and acceptance of the violence and upheaval of the Trump era.

The first thing I read about the attempted assassination was someone’s post saying they believed it was real, that it was not staged — another grim hallmark of times in which a faked presidential assassination attempt seems even remotely plausible. A quick scan told me everything else I needed to know. They caught the guy, he was nuts, and he had some guns.

The circumstances of this attempt are a bit different than the last two — or three, depending on how willing you are to trust the U.S. intelligence apparatus under Trump — but some of the results will be relatively the same: some in the legacy media put out a story about a changed, reflective and humbled Trump. He’ll surely blow a hole in that narrative in the coming hours and days as he blames half of the country for the actions of a single person before using the attempt on his life to enact further crackdowns on immigrants, or civil liberties, or decides to expand the surveillance state.

Meanwhile, men and women caught up in the ever-growing network of immigration detention centers continue to die at a record pace; alleged drug traffickers and at least some innocent fishermen continue to die in extrajudicial drone killings carried out by our military in international waters; the war in Iran drags on with no clear end or objective as we send more assets to the region, making us vulnerable to attacks elsewhere as our stockpile of munitions is depleted by the endless bombing.

And to add a bit of Trumpian absurdity to the growing catastrophe, Republicans in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life have taken up talking points about the construction of a White House ballroom that is now apparently a matter of national security.

Combined with several other major renovations and construction projects at the White House, Americans would be justified in wondering why the president is spending so much time, money (ours) and effort revamping a building that he is required by law to vacate in less than three years. Many Republicans have already been coalescing around the idea that he is not required to leave office at the end of his second term, or that they should change the rules to allow him to remain in power.

Simmering underneath all of this are efforts to upend what is currently the only threat to Trump’s power — the November midterm elections. Across the country, Republican state legislators have introduced more than 1,000 bills, according to an American Doom review of legislation in several states, that seek to enact some of the anti-democratic measures for voting and elections that Trump and the election denial movement insist must take place. Some of these bills include state-level changes to who is allowed to call themselves a U.S. citizen for the purposes of voting.

Urged on by developments like the latest attempt on Trump’s life, Republicans nationwide continue to operate under the belief that they are both victims targeted by an ascendant and violent left, but are also always the victors. This seemingly contradictory narrative is fleshed out a bit by Jeff Sharlet and a colleague, who described it succinctly as “Victory over victimhood.”

They will ride this narrative into November, when they will try — through legal, quasi-legal, and probably other means — to hold on to the power that allows them to brutalize the people they blame for not being more rich and powerful than they already are.

***

DALLAS, LAS VEGAS — I finished up work one day and punched in a single word into Google Maps: “bar.” Five minutes away was a place — no reviews, no website, no photos, just a neon “OPEN” sign shining and a hand painted ship on the side of the building: Tradewinds - The Original Social Club. I opened the door and took off my sunglasses to adjust from the blinding Texas afternoon sun to the utter darkness inside, where the only light came from the glow of TVs and Christmas lights. “I called earlier. Cool to bring in my dog?” Sure, the bartender said, and in ran Hendrix, a wildhearted Wheaten Terrier mutt who never met a person he didn’t like or a set of woods he didn’t want to disappear into. Before I could introduce myself, Henny was behind the bar, jumping up on the bartender’s leg and getting pets on the head.

Thus began my three-year residency at Tradewinds, the last real neighborhood bar in an area of Dallas that was either becoming trendy or being ignored by developers because it was too Mexican. Tradewinds was right in the middle of those two worlds. Henny and I took our barstools — back then, Henny was still spry enough to jump up on one — and I introduced myself. “I’m Justin, too,” said the bartender, “and that’s Justin down there.” Just three Justins sitting in a dark bar drinking Lone Stars on a warm spring Texas afternoon. I texted Sarah the address and told her to meet me there after work. I was elated. After leaving Chicago and moving to Texas, I figured my days of neighborhood bars were gone. Finding Tradewinds was like finding a piece of home right down the street from our house. She was, shall we say, less than pleased to walk in and find Hendrix and I sitting on a barstool at five o’clock in the afternoon after a few hours of drinking. But she made the best of it, and put up with my affection for Tradewinds and its cast of rough-and-tumble regulars as I acclimated to Texas. She put up with a lot of things I wish she wouldn’t have.

We rented a small home in Oak Cliff, which we filled with art and records and tchotchkes from our lives of travel. Things began to slow down. I bought a lawn mower and a grill and began reporting on immigration. At night I sat outside on our patio and listened to the neighbors blaring Tejano music as I slowly got drunk on Tecates. One bright morning I awoke with my usual sudsy hangover and saw Sarah looking at her phone. Fuck, she said, 50 dead? I opened my own phone to an email from the Washington Post asking if I was available to chase down some addresses in Dallas tied to the shooter who opened fire in Las Vegas overnight. Then came the rush — shower, clothes, laptop, notepad, phone charger, car, highway. By 11 am I had found a few of the homes and talked to some neighbors. Nothing doing. No one really remembered the guy. He was just another nobody. By noon I was on the phone with my editor in New York at the Beast. A call to Sarah — “Gotta go, love you” — then back to our house in Oak Cliff, and then the rush again — suitcase, car, highway, airport, security, airport bar, seat, Bloody Mary. By 10 pm., Sin City for the first time in my life.

My experience with hotels up to that point was that my car was usually sitting just on the other side of a dirty door in a parking lot no more than 15 feet from my bed, so dropping my bags in a room 20 stories off the Vegas strip was nice. It was 11 o’clock local, a little more than 24 hours after a madman had picked off 55 people with a machine gun from his turret in a highrise hotel room at Mandalay Bay. The time meant there probably wouldn’t be much for me to do, not that I thought there was much to do on this story regardless of the time of day or night. From the moment I woke up the day before in Dallas and hit the ground running to try to unravel the mystery of the shooter, Stephen Paddock, I knew it was a fool’s errand. I couldn’t say why; I just knew. The answer would come to me in bits and pieces over the days, months and years that followed.

I took the elevator down to the lobby and emerged to eternal daylight. New York is a city that occasionally sleeps —Vegas never does. I walked outside onto the sidewalk and into the freakshow diaspora that is the strip on any given night. People watched the worst of the other drugged out or drunk people laugh, cry or argue under the false sense of security that they weren’t like that, that they would keep it together. In Las Vegas, no one keeps it together for long. Your time crying in the pit is always just a few more hours away. The sidewalk was filled with these freaks, people from all over the country and the world unchained from their daily selves, laughing or crying and puking their way toward midnight. I walked through them and toward the Mandalay Bay. A TV news van was parked on a street corner just on the public side of yellow crime scene tape. A woman stood in front of it, posing for a photo her boyfriend took. There was no sense in something like the worst mass murder in US history ruining their vacation.

I went to a casino and sat at a bar and drank Jack and Cokes, smoking cigarettes and taking in the scene around me. The incessant chiming of slot machines provided a comforting white noise as an hour or so wore on. I talked to no one and went to bed. The next day I woke up to the sun streaming bright orange desert light across the carpet and got to work. I had heard that Paddock had tried to shoot up another music festival a week before and headed to the hotel that was across the street from where that event was held, where I found a manager and asked whether they’d seen Paddock when he stayed at the hotel and whether anything seemed amiss. The manager didn’t want to talk, and it was hard to tell, as it always is, whether that was because he had been trained not to talk or knew something he’d been told not to tell a reporter. Across town, the police were holding a press conference and argued my way inside. I didn’t have press credentials. For some reason I almost never had them over the years. Maybe I always thought I was faking it. I convinced a cop that I was actually a reporter and snuck in just in front of a group of reporters in line who weren’t allowed in because the room was at capacity, and wound up jammed underneath the TV cameras streaming the press conference out to the world. The reporters in the front row asked dumb questions like, Why did the shooter do this? As if the cops would know then or ever. I thought they should have been asking more obvious questions like, Didn’t anyone see this guy checking into a hotel room with a giant bag full of machine guns? Or, Why the fuck did it take you guys so long to find this guy and take him down? One of the officers leading the press conference talked about law enforcement’s response to the shooting and offhandedly mentioned that it was a security guard at Mandalay Bay who first found Paddock as he carried out his rampage. I wondered who that person was and why he wasn’t getting the attention he deserved for being the hero that finally drew the violent carnage to a close. I went back to my hotel and called the Mandalay Bay and asked to speak to the head of security. Someone there said I would have to speak to the union for security officers. A man told me a guard had been called to the 32nd floor, where Paddock’s room was located, for a hallway door that had been left ajar. When he walked past the room, Paddock saw him through cameras he had set up outside the door to his room and shot him in the leg. The guard alerted police who took a few excruciating minutes to reach the hallway. Meanwhile, Paddock shot out a window and began firing on the crowd below. The security guard was a hero but no one knew it. That was about to change. I told the union official that the security guard deserved credit for his heroic actions and after an hour of cajoling convinced him to let me tell the world his name: Jesus Campos. I wrote up my story in an adrenaline fueled rush so powerful that my hands shook as I typed.

I had my big story and watched it blow up online and on cable news as word spread of Campos’ heroism. Then I got drunk because that’s what I did when a big story went out, because the combination of adrenaline and alcohol was the best feeling in the world to me. I knew when I went to Vegas that I wasn’t going to leave there with the why of Paddock’s massacre, but it felt good to have figured out a little bit of the what the hell actually happened here? Now that the what was out of the way with, there wasn’t much left to do than some victim cleanup. That is, tell a few stories of victims’ families so the world would know what it felt like to lose a loved one in what people like to call senseless violence. I had done this hundreds of times over the years but wasn’t much in the mood for it in Vegas. It depressed me and I didn’t like feeling depressed. I was in this line of work for the adventure and the chase, not the sadness.

Over the years, I had ignored the traditional requirement of objectivity in journalism to advocate for people and causes I thought had gotten a raw deal. I used the concept of objectivity to justify my purposeful lack of emotions for those who had experienced the worst things imaginable. Drinking just made that easier. I drank away that which frightened or disturbed me and dismissed those feelings with forced callousness under the guise of journalistic objectivity or good, old fashioned gallows humor. If a murder victim’s mother broke down in front of me I carefully described the scene in order to not feel the emotions it brought. I relayed the facts of grim realities like the psychological breakdown of a grieving mother to an editor as if I was collecting meaningless bits of construction material to build a house I would soon abandon. In Gary I described the physical dismantling of the murdered women in excruciating detail in order to make them less human to me and more mechanical, soulless structures that were taken apart. In Piketon I wrote about the minor crimes of two young men who had been brutally murdered in some obsessive and heartless quest for a complicated and meaningless truth. As far back as Peoria and throughout my travels I often othered the Black community by reporting on it like it was a foreign warzone instead of a neighborhood across town where my fellow Americans lived. I deluded myself with the internal narrative that I was a righteous truth-seeker. I wasn’t like the politicians on the evening news and the Stephen Paddocks of the world who degraded and destroyed human life through their quest for power and control. I convinced myself that even if I fed on whatever soul had just passed, at least I did so in pursuit of the truth. The reality was, sometimes I was just a parasite.

By that evening I was back on my patio in Texas listening to the neighbors play Tejano music and sipping a beer. I was tired, so I did something I hadn’t done for a very long time: I turned my phone off and just listened. I heard the birds chirping, then a mother screaming over her dead son in Peoria. I heard the Tejano music, then gunshots in Chicago. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the orange film that the sunlight created through my eyelids, then I saw the man bleeding from a gunshot wound to his stomach in the back of a car in Ferguson. I opened my eyes and looked up into the trees, then saw tear-gas canisters with smoke spiraling from them flying through the air in Baltimore. Things began to feel bright, sharp and loud. I knew that it was the beginning of a panic attack. But I couldn’t understand why. How can I have anxiety because of the things I have seen? I didn’t lose my son to murder in Peoria. I wasn’t shot in Ferguson. I wasn’t at a country music festival in Las Vegas where a madman fired on innocent people with a weapon of war. I didn’t experience any of these things myself. I had just learned about all of these events and written about them in intimate and excruciating detail before moving on to the next one. I simply compiled terror and pain for a collection of stories that comprised the body of work that was my career. I was just a normal guy, I thought, whose line of work caused him to have random thoughts like wondering whether the chef’s knife I used to chop cilantro was the size of the blade Tino Bagola used to murder his two cousins on that remote Indian reservation in North Dakota. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the orange film and the Tejano music, then I saw Bagola’s eyes, staring back at me through a haze of dilated pupils and psychotropic drugs from a jail cell in Fargo, where I met him just before he was shipped off to prison for the rest of his life.

Three weeks after returning from Las Vegas, a young man shot up a church in Sutherland Spring, Texas. That day, I had had my phone off for hours. Things were slowing down in my life — a bit. Sarah and I were settling into our new home and I’d was enjoying spending time discovering Texas with her. I turned my phone on and learned of the shooting, then waited for the emails and calls to come in with the assignments. They didn’t. I had to sit this one out. And for the first time in a while, I wanted to.

***

Watching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth give another bombastic press conference that seemed like an act of absurdist theater this morning as the chyron reminded us of the ridiculous name of our war in Iran — Operation Epic Fury — I had one of those moments where I’m reminded just how staggeringly dumb much of modern American life is. It inspired me to start something new here at American Doom, where much of my work lately has been focused on the hard news of holding the Trump administration and its threats to democracy to account — a new section called Dispatches.

Here, you’ll get writing that’s more along the lines of historically correct than the often chaste and detached news voice that’s required by my journalism. Considering my recent investigation into the deaths of detainees in immigration custody, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit some past reporting on immigration and the border.

Below, you’ll find an excerpt from my forthcoming book, If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened. It’s being published by the University of Georgia Press and comes out in early June. I’ve provided some links below to past excerpts as well as this PDF which contains a QR code for a 30 percent discount. Feel free to share this PDF with anyone who you think might be interested in the book. You can also go to UGA Press’ web page for the book and enter the code 08TERRIBLE to get the same discount.

You can also read other excerpts from the book, which focus on my hometown, Peoria, Ill. ,and the unrest in Baltimore following the killing of Freddie Gray.

As always, if you support my journalism and writing, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or drop a few dollars into our Coffee Fund. Those of you who choose a founding membership to American Doom will get a signed copy of Something Terrible.

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EL PASO AND JUAREZ — After hundreds of miles of desert floor, a wind farm emerged. It was gone in a minute, passing by 34,000 feet below my comfortable seat on a packed plane heading over West Texas. It looked like the same wind farm I passed when I drove here a few months before, I thought. There can’t be more than a few of them. There’s not really more than a few of anything along the nine-hour stretch of Interstate 10 from Dallas to El Paso. Nothing but desert wastelands as far as the eye can see. I stopped at a gas station in Odessa, a town of oil workers with their jeans tucked into their boots and bad gas station hot dogs. You have to get gas in Odessa, because that’s the last place there is until El Paso, but that was another trip. That was when I decided to drive from Dallas to El Paso to get a sense of how far it actually is. You can’t really tell that in a plane. The only way to know how far El Paso is from everything is to drive there. Flying is much easier. Plus, you can see the pink and orange tops of the mesas as they rise up from the desert floor just before the sprawling grids of El Paso and Juárez come into focus through the broiling, dusty haze of any given afternoon.

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El Paso is its own world. It gets roped into an amorphous political concept that has no real basis in geography generally known as “the border,” but El Paso is more than just a town with fences on an invisible line guarded by men with guns on one side and children with guns on the other. Juárez is an even more misunderstood place, which is to say a living, breathing thing, because cities are really their own thumping creature manifested by the people who occupy them. Growing up in the Midwest, they would have seemed like they were on the moon. I was in love from the moment I walked on the scalding asphalt of their streets.

I’d come to the border for a new beat of American horror I was working: immigration. The first two years of the Trump administration were filled with shameful stories of desperate migrants caught up in concrete border cells and disgusting and dangerous privately run gulags at the behest of America’s would-be Latin American-style dictator. Asylum seekers were routinely and illegally turned back by border officials following Trump’s new dictates. The administration separated some 3,000 families, locking up parents hundreds and thousands of miles away from their children. Then the White House lied about it, saying they “did not create a policy of family separation.” Border guards dressed up in riot gear and closed the bridges in El Paso so Trump could have a show of force for a migrant caravan that was 1,500 miles away. A seven-year-old girl died after drinking contaminated water that guards at a detention center in New Mexico refused to touch. And that was just a six-month stretch of 2018.

Looking back, it makes sense: Trump’s entire campaign was run on the high octane hate fuel of the threat of immigrants, so it was only natural that the first two years of his administration were focused on the punishment and degradation of those same people. Also, signing executive orders and locking up immigrants en masse was really one of the only things the corrupt and feckless Trump White House could ever hope to accomplish. Filled with amoral climbers and reactionary thugs who were just as dimwitted and reckless as their boss, the White House of the 45th president was not built to tackle complex economic policy or global diplomacy. It was built to lock up perceived enemies and convince Americans who were mentally handicapped by ignorance-driven hate that Trump was a tough guy fighting for them. All you need to know about Trump’s ability to understand the complicated issues for which he was elected to navigate is that he thought building a wall across thousands of miles of desert would stop people from moving from one place to another for the first time in human history. Part of that wall was supposedly being built in El Paso.

Most people have never been to the border, so they don’t really understand how much of not really a thing the border is. I will never understand why people are so afraid and angry about people coming across it. I care as much about people crossing the border from Mexico into the United States as I care about the dozens of cars full of people who will cross from Florida into Georgia over the next five minutes and every next five minutes for the rest of my life — not at all. I’m secure in the belief that nowhere in those cars driving south from Brunswick or north from Jacksonville are people who are going to come to my house and hurt me or take my job or ruin my way of life. I think the same of anyone who crosses the invisible line between Juárez and El Paso, but many people don’t, so that border has become big political business. I needed someone in Juárez who could explain to the world that the border was simply a mental construct, and began asking friends both in the news business and outside of it if they knew anyone who could complete this task. I learned there was a man there who could distill the complexities into something anyone could understand. So I set out to meet him.

I paid a $1 toll to a woman in a booth and walked up a steep sidewalk on a bridge between the two cities and back down onto the street in Juárez. Standing there leaning against a Toyota pickup truck was Julián Cardona. He had spent almost his entire life in Juárez. First, he had worked in the maquiladoras, the cheap labor factories that built cars and appliances mostly for Americans. Then he had learned the art of photography and began documenting the city in all its grim and vibrant complexity for the daily newspaper there, El Diario. Now, in his early 60s, he still worked as a photographer but got most of his income by acting as a fixer for people like me, people who came across the border looking for help in telling stories. Julián and I shook hands and got into his truck. I needed to speak to migrants, I said. We drove farther into Juárez, through the industrial areas that held the maquiladoras and to Casa de Migrantes, the city’s small but busy migrant shelter.

One day in February 2019, Julián and I were driving around Juárez when we learned that the federales had rounded up migrants and were keeping them in a gymnasium. We drove to the gym and walked inside to find hundreds of men, women and children sprawled out on cots and blankets on the floor. In a back room we found a young man in his mid-20s laying on a makeshift bed made of a door resting on two piles of gymnastic floor mats, his legs in styrofoam braces, and his wheelchair resting next to him. His name was Jose and had made his way from his home in Honduras to Juárez and had wound up on the Paso del Norte bridge, trying to get into the United States. There, border guards put him in a cell and provided him the type of humane treatment that could only come from representatives of the greatest country in the world: they told him he was worthless, because he was in a wheelchair he had nothing to contribute to society, much less the United States of America. He told them that he was just asking for help and it was up to them to decide whether they were willing to give it to him. Pedir es fuerza y dar es voluntad, he told them. Asking is strength and giving is will, Julián translated for me. Jose made it, and he ended up in Dallas for a while where Sarah and I visited, bringing supplies from a GoFundMe I’d embedded into a story I’d written about his plight. He made us friendship bracelets from his bed, where he would lay and pet Hendrix. But the GoFundMe eventually ran dry, and his family ran out of money to take care of him. He returned to \Honduras.

Julián and I left the gymnasium and headed toward the bridge back to El Paso. There is a strip of bars there, including the Kentucky Club, where legend has it the margarita was invented. I was obsessed with another drink called chucho, cheap tequila in which roots from a native plant called the chuchupaste soak and give the tequila a harsh, earthy flavor. I drank Tecates and shots of chucho while Julián drank Jack and Cokes and told me how Juárez had changed from his youth. Gone were the days of pimple-faced and boot camp-weary soldiers coming across the border from Fort Bliss in El Paso for a rowdy night on the town. The cartel violence that began its climb toward a zenith of about 1,000 killings each year by the early 2000s. I sat with Julián in bars like Club Quinze, looking at old Playboy centerfolds plastered on the walls and ceiling, thinking about how this was one of those far-flung places on the edge of the world in which I’d always imagined myself having an adventure. But for Julián, this wasn’t a remote foreign outpost. This was home. It was his Peoria, and I was just another curious interloper who was adding “JUAREZ —” to his coveted list of exotic datelines.

Julián taught me a lot of things, but one of the most important was that the concept of remoteness is entirely subjective. Peoria is remote if you’re from Juárez. What Americans tend to think of as normal can be anything but for people who aren’t from here. Juárez wasn’t necessarily a place to be scared of, I learned. Migrants are no different than us, I knew. Julián was no different from me, a curious guy who liked asking questions and telling stories. Those stories inevitably end up being the same in one way or another. Someone always has power or money and is using it to get more, while the few struggle to get their cut.

While I spent most of my time at the border speaking with migrants from Mexico and Central America, Juárez was awash with people from all over the world trying to make it to America, including the Middle East. That was constantly used as a fear-mongering tactic in the first years of the Trump administration — ISIS is coming in the latest migrant caravan! In Dallas one day, I received a message from an Iraqi woman whose husband was in a privately run immigration prison in Laredo, Texas.

Zinah Al Shakarchi grew up in Iraq, but fled after she was shot for doing her job as a food inspector when she turned away a sugar shipment tainted with gasoline. Not long after, she met Safaa and the two quickly fell in love and married. They moved to the United Arab Emirates, but as Shiite Muslims they were hounded out of the majority-Sunni country. Together with their two children, they fled, arriving first in Mexico City, filled out the wrong visa paperwork, and ended up crossing into the U.S. near Hidalgo, Texas out of pure desperation. There, U.S. immigration officials took Zinah and her children away from Safaa, who became distraught and near-suicidal. He stopped eating inside the prison. Zinah and the kids fled to Canada, where she kept in touch with me over text and phone calls. Immigration and the border had become my latest obsession, a new set of traumas to consume in secondary fashion. Zinah and Safaa were just two of many people who had been caught up in the inhumane system I tried to penetrate. As always in America, there were tens of thousands more who were being abused by the systems we were supposed to trust.

Throughout all of this border chaos and terror inflicted on innocent migrants, plus the daily onslaught of controversies and unhinged madness coming from the White House and Trump’s Twitter account, I kept wondering about Las Vegas. I wondered why it seemed to have faded so quickly from memory. It seemed like a pretty big problem that such a bloody massacre could take place and the only thing that came from it was conspiracies about how it was all fake and an attempt by the government to take people’s guns. The dead bodies meant nothing to the people online theorizing about how and why unseen forces had manipulated Paddock to do their globalist bidding. Confronted with an obvious problem — Paddock had what can only be described as a fuckton of firearms and ammunition — the American right and online zoo of gun fetishists and government conspiracy nuts ignored the issue at hand and instead focused their energy on twisting it anyway they needed to avoid the problem at hand. I knew something about that myself, although I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time — the Thing was my big problem I chose to ignore in favor of diving down some rabbit hole of investigative fury. Taking in all this conspiratorial madness as the world continued to turn, quickly leaving Vegas behind, I went back.

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***

LAS VEGAS — The desk was covered in takeout containers, empty packs of cigarettes, and beer bottles. I had been in the room for four days, leaving only to go to the convenience store inside the lobby of Circus Circus to get more beer and cigarettes. It had been a year since the massacre, and I had returned to try to make sense of the senseless. Mostly, I stayed in my room and got drunk at a bar in the casino. I was binging episodes of The Office to try to get my mind off whatever it was that was making me feel like the world was falling all around me, the Thing kicking my ass. I knocked myself out each night with Miller Lites and shots of Jameson at a bar inside the casino before retreating to my room to finally and mercifully try to sleep away the the Thing inside me that wouldn’t let me go. The room gave me anxiety, I gave myself anxiety, the casino floor gave me anxiety, the whole city did. All around me, all I could see was future dead people. Smiling faces turned to blank stares of death on the blood-soaked ground. I kept seeing Stephen Paddock’s dumb, drunk, soulless eyes in the only picture that had ever been found of him, a picture I’d seen a thousand times online. Through the incessant chimes of the slot machines, I heard far-off screams.

After a few drinks at the bar that fifth night I had my fuck it moment. I went back to my room and packed a small bag with a notepad, called a cab, and told the driver to take me to Mandalay Bay. I got out and walked past the bellhops and security guards and into the lobby. Everything there was black and gold. But there was a dimness to it all, like looking at street lights at night with your sunglasses on. There was a dark film over everything, a shadow I couldn’t make sense of. I walked past a bar where a lounge lizard sang Frank Sinatra tunes to mostly empty chairs. Walking past a set of gleaming, golden elevators, I briefly thought about hopping in one and heading up to the floor where Paddock stayed that horrific night a year before. A security guard nearby, either through my own paranoia or because they were actually eyeing me for carrying a messenger bag into a casino late at night, scared me away from that plan. Instead, I walked out onto the massive casino floor and wound up where I always do in casinos, the sports book. I was drawn even more quickly than usual to the sports book at Mandalay Bay. You couldn’t miss it. The TVs climbed what seemed like three stories high off the casino floor. It was an electronic wonder that brought the solace that only a meaningless, early season hockey game or watching a few trips around Santa Anita racetrack can provide. Comforted by the movement of players in countless games across the country and around the world, the sports book in any casino is simply an extension of every family living room I grew up sitting in, where the green glow of some field came through the television. Childhood memories of going with my dad to the off-track betting parlor in Peoria, where cigarette butts and ticket stubs littered the hardwood floor, are never far off as long as there are horses racing endlessly around an oval, beamed to me in whatever casino I’m in from tracks back east where my nana played the ponies in the Poconos.

As I steadied myself under this comforting glow, I looked for a bar. Settling down on a bar stool I ordered a Jack and Coke. I sat there sipping my drink and staring blankly around me, wondering why I had come here. In four days, I had spoken to no one, done no reporting, and come to zero conclusions about why the massacre seemed already forgotten. They should tear this whole place down, I thought. Implode the Mandalay Bay into a pile of rubble. They did it all the time all over Las Vegas for plenty of other reasons. The hotels and casinos that made this town famous the world over are mostly gone, having been replaced by newer and shinier models in an eternal cycle of capitalistic renewal. Why was Mandalay Bay still here? And how could all these people be sitting here, happily drinking and gambling, knowing what happened thirty floors above them? I began to feel sick to my stomach and quickly finished my drink. Like the Motel 6 in Hammond, Indiana where Afrikka Hardy was killed, I had come too close to the epicenter/wellspring of violence for my own good. I felt that I had to see it with my own eyes, even if it made me ill. I had to know what it looked and felt and smelled like, even if it hurt me. I need to know what has happened and how and why so I can understand its role in creating the world in which we all live. I had to go to the heart of everything to try to make sense of all the madness of life. Here I was again, sitting in a crime scene that wasn’t a crime scene anymore. The terror had passed and, just like Tall Bob’s in the South End of Peoria, business had once again resumed.

I limped back to Circus Circus, deciding to walk off this terrible feeling. When I arrived I was ready for a drink. I sat down at the bar and received a text from Zinah: Safaa had been freed. No reason was given. ICE simply let him go from the detention center in Laredo and he was on his way to Canada to rejoin his family. Zinah said it was my reporting that helped to make this happen, and she thanked me. I cried to myself at the bar. Sarah was asleep, two time zones away in Dallas. My editor was down for the night too in New York. Journalism might have helped Safaa but it couldn’t save us from ourselves if we couldn’t even remember let alone do something about an event like the massacre just a year later, I thought to myself. In that moment, that’s all I had. Just me and my thoughts at a bar in a Las Vegas casino writing about some historic event and feeling that none of it mattered.

It did matter. It’s just that voice inside telling me it did not wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop questioning and wondering and asking what it all meant, whether it was worth it, what I was doing, where I was going, what I was going to do, who I would do it with, why I was doing it. God, that why… If there’s ever a word in this world that I’d like to never hear in my head again, it’s why. That why was the stowaway’s favorite word, the one it asked the most and at the worst times.

It was asking it as I sat at the bar and thought of Safaa and what would happen next, as I tried to shut up the voice by making small talk with the bartender. He wanted nothing to do with me. I was too drunk to make sense to anyone but me and the Thing.

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