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the increased diversity of America was offset by repressive new voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise nonwhite voters,
Pundits and politicians like to say that “No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one.
If you are brave, stand up for others. If you cannot be brave—and it is often hard to be brave—be kind.
the “stand your ground” law has essentially made it legal to shoot someone to death if you can prove you felt threatened at the time.
If you're white
“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.
You did not need to be a media insider or a political operative to know the dirt on Trump in the 1980s.
Trump covers up crime with scandal. That is his main propaganda tactic, the one few seem to be able to discern.
I started reading newspapers like The New York Times, which told me no two countries would ever go to war so long as both of them had a McDonald’s.1
According to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer, Fox News founder Roger Ailes created the network to ensure Watergate-style accountability would not happen again to a president he supported.3
sympathy was for suckers now. Sympathy was a junk bond emotion. Sympathy was reserved for only the most virtuous victims—and even then, they always implied, it must have been the victim’s fault.
He had left Ivana for Marla Maples, a beauty queen from Georgia, who, according to Trump biographer Wayne Barrett, was selected to enhance Trump’s political viability among southerners in preparation for another presidential run.4 Barrett’s claim in his 1992 Trump biography—which was not rereleased until 2016—is in direct contrast to the “Trump is a political neophyte” myth often spread by a credulous mainstream media.
hung
Hanged
A 2007 New York magazine profile reveals how New York white-collar criminals protect their own through a complex PR and media apparatus.
The Epstein case, the allegations that Trump raped a thirteen-year-old, and the threats toward those who tried to expose them are a shocking story, the sort of high-profile horror that we should expect to dominate cable news shows and inspire books.
In the 1990s, history ended with the specter of the wealthiest men in the world raping teenage girls provided by a mafia-affiliated blackmailer. History ended in a sealed file, history ended in a silent scream, history ended with the last man warning you that if you tell anyone, you’d end too.
In 2018, BuzzFeed revealed that over a fifth of the condos Trump had purchased and sold since the 1980s were financed through secretive, all-cash transactions that enabled buyers to avoid legal scrutiny.59 As BuzzFeed noted, such transactions are not necessarily illegal but they certainly fit the Treasury characteristics for possible money-laundering.
In February 1999, the National Enquirer had been purchased by a new conglomerate which put longtime Trump lackey David Pecker at the helm. Pecker is now known for his “catch and kill” operation to prevent damning stories from reaching the public, a project he conducted with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. He is also known for his threats toward US opponents of Trump, most notably Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who maintained that Pecker had targeted him in an extortion scheme in possible collaboration with the Saudi government after the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.65
What’s perhaps more disturbing, though, is that there was little difference between the coverage given to Trump’s campaign by the National Enquirer, a literal Trump tool from 1999 onward, and The New York Times.
Much of what Americans took for granted was lost within that brief window of time. We lost our faith in the electoral system through the contested 2000 presidential race. We lost our sense of safety from foreign threats through the September 11, 2001, attacks. We lost our sense of prosperity through a recession followed by skyrocketing income inequality. We lost what was left of our shame when we went to war in Iraq based on a lie.
All news was BREAKING all the time, breathless coverage often elucidating nothing. This is one of the longest-lasting artifacts of 9/11.
The initial post-9/11 obedience of the media was forged in grief.
[Rove] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re
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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.
White-collar crime is violent crime: it’s called blood money for a reason.
The Apprentice is a show built on a lie and the willingness of ordinary Americans to buy into that lie—that Trump is a respected businessman running legitimate enterprises. It is the same lie upon which the Trump presidency is based.
Despite this statement, the Treasury did not pursue the legality of Trump’s enterprises when he became the nominee. This is perhaps due to the fact that by the 2016 election, the Treasury had been infiltrated by Russia, an event that occurred in 2015 but was not reported on until December 2018 in an explosive expose in BuzzFeed.
Post-9/11 America inaugurated an era of panic over fabricated catastrophes and false reassurances about real ones.
Older and experienced reporters were replaced by younger and wealthier content producers who could pay to play in the country’s most expensive cities. People who can pay to play are less likely to report on corruption, inequality, or injustice, because they are less likely to recognize it exists.
the term “kleptocracy,” which describes countries where rulers steal their nation’s resources to enhance their personal wealth.
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.
Corruption breeds loyalty out of fear.
In 2018, Ivanka and Jared were blessed by Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, who calls black people “monkeys” and believes that non-Jews exist in Israel solely to be the slaves of Jews.
There are no clear statistics on failed protests for the very reason that failed protests, especially in repressive countries, rarely reach an audience beyond those who participated.
Social media corporations that would grow into powerful surveillance monopolies presented themselves in the early 2010s as fellow underdogs in the broader struggle against the system.
Networked authoritarianism, a term coined by social scientist Rebecca MacKinnon, describes an internet that is just open enough so that it can be exploited by bad actors, who use it to bombard users with propaganda, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks.3 It is the loudest way of silencing the public voice, and is more effective than traditional state censorship,
Instead of fearing the open internet, Kremlin officials embraced it, using social media to smear the opposition and to release a firehose of propaganda intended to overwhelm citizens’ faculty for critical thinking.
took Congress years to identify an intelligence operation that black women pointed out in real time. The systemic racism enabling this willful ignorance put democracy in jeopardy.
Birtherism was never about where Barack Obama came from. It was about where he was allowed to go. Power, for Trump, a wealthy real estate scion, was rooted in birthright, and birthright was inseparable from race.
The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. The foundation of this edifice was formed not when Trump took office, but decades before, through prolonged engagement with criminal or criminal-adjacent actors linked to hostile regimes, in particular, the Kremlin and its oligarch network.
Trump was a Kremlin asset. To say that Trump is an asset is not to say he directly follows Kremlin orders, but that the Kremlin had exploited or compromised him in order to carry out their goals.
A criminal can bury the truth in a conspiracy because no one will believe it except those accustomed to parsing absurdities, who are then mocked as insane.
is not enough for Trump to commit a crime. He needs to let you know that he got away with it.
A heretic these days is a temporary occupation: the sin lies in telling the truth too early.
