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May 23 - June 1, 2020
People wanted weapons because they felt afraid.
Elijah Lovejoy,
Nowadays, Akin’s words would barely stoke controversy. The news cycle would last a few hours, with pundits “both-sidesing” whether his comment was offensive and debating whether the female body does, indeed “try to shut the whole thing down.”
The Trump voters are no more a monolith than any other group of voters.
One of the reasons the line to see Trump was so long is that Missouri had enough unemployed people to make an overbooked rally, at noon on a weekday, feasible.
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
“You were right two years ago, but this isn’t going to be Nixon. This is American authoritarianism, and they are going to tell us ‘That’s not possible’ until nothing else is.”
live in Missouri, a state plunged into darkness: dark money, dead bodies, disappearing information, and disputed votes.
“Racism is so rampant in Missouri that in 2017, three years after the Ferguson uprising, the NAACP issued a travel warning for the state, telling black people not to come here because they’ll be profiled and threatened.38
Eric Greitens, who campaigned closely with Mike Pence on a ‘family values’ platform, allegedly tied a half-naked and blindfolded woman to a piece of exercise equipment in his basement and took her picture, threatening to release the photos
Corruption is like a weight that you never shed because no one will recognize you are carrying it.
When asked to vote on a specific issue, Missourians chose the most progressive options. But when asked to vote for a politician, over half of Missourians chose Republicans who sought to strike down the very ballot initiatives for which they had voted. There
party ruled by mysterious megadonors, a party that openly disregards the will of its electorate.
Where is there to go? Missouri is a symptom of the American disease, and America a symptom of an international disease.
Cohn had long ago shunned the mantle of decency, viewing it as an obstacle to power.
Cohn trained him in the strategy he refined under McCarthy and Nixon: counterattack, lie, threaten, sue, and never back down.
“This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children” and be thought of as a patriotic, sensible member of the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, regulations curbed the rich from buying politicians and policies like they had in the Gilded Age.
Growth in worker productivity between 1979 and 2017 grew by 70.3 percent while hourly compensation grew by 11.1 percent.28 (Earnings of the top 0.1 percent of Americas grew 343.2 percent by comparison.)
and financial risks form the backbone of modern American terror.
We live in the era of the masses versus the mob: but people do not recognize the mob as the mob.
We are living in Roy Cohn’s America, directed by his apt pupil, with the aid of a crime syndicate that does not recognize law, freedom, or the sanctity of human life.
includes Saudi prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, millennial murderer Kim Jong Un, and, of course, Vladimir Putin.
Trump has only taken a risk when the reward is guaranteed by others.
Ivana had said at the time of her divorce that Trump, angered by a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot conducted by a doctor Ivana recommended, grabbed her, pulled out hair from her own scalp, bellowed, “Your fucking doctor has ruined me!,”
I offered them all the documents and they wouldn’t print it.”
Trump covers up crime with scandal.
This is called “normalcy bias”: the idea that if a situation is truly dangerous, if massive crimes are being committed in plain sight, someone will intervene and stop them.
“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past,”
The biggest worry for my generation, I was told, would be how to cope with the dazzling array of options the forthcoming utopia would present.
This was a fantasy that became accepted as conventional wisdom—first by elites, and then by the masses, who mortgaged their futures on the assurances of those who had already won.
In the 1990s, to guest star in someone else’s tragedy was regarded as a worthy pursuit, amusing and potentially profitable. You could offer yourself up to the cameras, you could be the prize in a new kind of human game show
The word “prestige” derives from a Latin word meaning “illusion,” and Epstein media profiles cloaked themselves in it
Almost universally, they mocked and blamed the underage victims, whom they saw as an obstacle to the luxurious life to which they felt Epstein—and they themselves—were entitled.
He is a public figure, you tell yourself—if he is lying, surely someone will call him out. If he is hurting people, surely someone will stop him.
2000, no one thought that was remarkable, including me. Only in retrospect is it recognizable for what it was: a fluke. A fleeting taste of the American Dream, sweet enough that it still lingers.
“Get your facts straight first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
This is one of the longest-lasting artifacts of 9/11.
I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.”
The ability to discern threats is related to the ability to discern facts, and preserving that ability was a struggle well before Trump took office.
“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear,”
In the Reagan era, Trump’s Republican backers helped devise the dissolution of corporate regulations. In the Bush era, they chipped away at political checks and balances, with the near elimination of accountability as a result. The Republican party provided the structure for an American autocracy enabled by corporate corruption.
The impact of The Apprentice is possibly the most underappreciated aspect of Trump’s presidential rise.
In America, mealy-mouthed officials call our transition into a mafia state “deeply troubling” and do little to curb the damage.
This pageantry is something authoritarians and reality TV producers understand in equal measure, and Trump inhabits the worlds of both.
In many respects, academia operates like a cult.
In academia, much like in journalism, where you came from determined where you could go.
Many dropped out of fields in which they had trained or worked for years
The Trump administration is, in fact, very competent in achieving its main goal: stripping America down for parts and selling those parts to the highest bidders.
Parties bound by blood or marriage are easier to control.
