Tim Wallace > Tim Wallace's Quotes

“Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“What few people grasp—because they are outside the system and have normal lives to lead—is just how huge the machinery of deception is that the Republicans have erected and how long it has been in the making. Fox News is unique in American media history as serving more like the in-house propaganda arm of a strong-man dictator than operating by the accepted norms of professional journalism.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“American history has never seen a party so unified in perpetuating a massive fraud. This isn’t the action of a rogue president like Watergate but a deliberate, calculated decision for a major governing party of the most powerful nation in the history of the world to join hands and deny what they know is true: that Donald Trump is a threat to the country. At”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“To the contrary, Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the government to prevent the constitutional certification of a legitimate election won by Joe Biden.”
― Bob Woodward, Peril

“As he left the White House for the last time, Trump walked over to a group of White House reporters and said, “It was a great honor. The honor of a lifetime.” He’s right. It was the honor of a lifetime. But unlike any of the forty-three presidents who served before him, he repaid that honor by betraying the very democratic system that made it possible for him to be president. We now live in a nation where a large part of the population does not trust our elections. There are many reasons for this, but none greater than Donald Trump and the lies he told about the 2020 election. —”
― Jonathan Karl, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show

“Death and life are not in opposition. So when someone tells you to live every day like it’s your last, kindly tell them to fuck off. They’re wrong. You should live every day like it’s your first. Live it like it’s your last and you’ll just run around like the house is on fire. I don’t want a bucket list. I don’t wanna live like I’m dying. I wanna live like I’m living. And I want there to be more possibilities left when I die, not NONE. Why rush to tick off all of those boxes? You don’t get a fucking gold star from God for that. I know now that I am going to spend the rest of my life incomplete. But life was designed to be incomplete. It’s not a worksheet you fill out. It’s an open platform. You do some things, but you also leave behind infinite possibilities for those in your wake. That’s the freedom.”
― Drew Magary, The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage

“You spend all your life grappling with the idea of finality. When you do, you adapt and embrace your limitations fully, and that makes you freer. That’s how you get your identity back, even if that identity is altered from the person you once were. The man I had been died that night in the karaoke bar. Back down here, this was the only man I could be. I was growing more adept at being him. You can defy your mind when you’re young and have it pay off. That wasn’t the case for me any longer. I had to accept this new mind and learn to live with it.”
― Drew Magary, The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage

“To live on, you have to make the good happen. A different life need not be a worse one. You have to decide if you’re the lucky one or not. Why live on otherwise?”
― Drew Magary, The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage

“will never know what Carter’s early life was like. I don’t even know his real age. I can only speculate on the potential traumas he may have endured as a stray dog or as an unwanted pet. But I don’t regret saving him. Ever. And I’ll always love him, even though there are things about him I can never, ever know. Love means accepting each other’s mysteries.”
― Drew Magary, The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage

“It’s a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers, I say this unequivocally. Ignorant fools. That kind of stupidity should be put in jail.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“The undemocratic intent behind fascist propaganda is key. Fascist states focus on dismantling the rule of law, with the goal of replacing it with the dictates of individual rulers or party bosses. It is standard in fascist politics for harsh criticisms of an independent judiciary to occur in the form of accusations of bias, a kind of corruption, critiques that are then used to replace independent judges with ones who will cynically employ the law as a means to protect the interests of the ruling party. The”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one’s own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality. When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“The far-right American radio host Rush Limbaugh has, on his popular radio show, denounced “the four corners of deceit: government, academia, science and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.”10 Limbaugh, here, provides a perfect example of how fascist politics targets expertise, mocking and devaluing it.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“In a February 2018 interview, Steve Bannon said, “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall….This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”15”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space. A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence. By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard. The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“In 1989, five black teenagers—the “Central Park Five”—were arrested for the gang rape of a white woman jogger in New York City’s Central Park. Newspapers at the time were filled with breathless accounts of “wilding” black lawless teens rampaging and raping white women. At the time, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in several New York City newspapers, describing them as “crazed misfits” and calling for their execution. Subsequently, it emerged not only that the Central Park Five were innocent, but that they were known to be innocent to many of those involved in their prosecution. Years later, all five were completely exonerated and given a cash settlement by the City of New York.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“The misrepresentation of political protests as riots was a factor in the election campaign of Donald Trump, whose campaign had strong echoes of Nixon’s. Nixon, however, campaigned at a time of rising rates of violent crime. Trump’s successful “law and order” campaign took place under the conditions of some of the lowest rates of violent crime in recorded U.S. history. ...”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Forty-two percent of rural residents in the poll agreed with the statement “Immigrants are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care.” Only 16 percent of urban residents agreed with this characterization of immigrants as burdensome. The poll suggests that the politics of rural versus urban is a promising avenue for sowing division for demagogically minded U.S. politicians, particularly around the topic of immigration.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“In fascism, the state is an enemy; it is to be replaced by the nation, which consists of self-sufficient individuals who collectively choose to sacrifice for a common goal of ethnic or religious glorification.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Right-to-work laws were originally advanced in language that mirrored precisely Hitler’s attacks on trade unions in Mein Kampf. Nevertheless, their antiunion agenda, explicitly founded upon a desire to maintain white racial hierarchy and prevent solidarity across races and religions, has largely won the day in the United States today. Such antiunion policies paved the way for a presidential candidate running a white nationalist campaign with open nostalgia for the 1930s to sweep to victory across the once proud labor states of the Midwest.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Instead, in fascist ideology, all institutions, from the family to the business to the state, would run according to the Führer Principle. The father, in fascist ideology, is the leader of the family; the CEO is the leader of the business; the authoritarian leader is the father, or the CEO, of the state. When voters in a democratic society yearn for a CEO as president, they are responding to their own implicit fascist impulses.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“When universities are as expensive as they are in the United States, their generous liberal visions are easy targets for fascist demagoguery. Under conditions of stark economic inequality, when the benefits of liberal education, and the exposure to diverse cultures and norms, are available only to the wealthy few, liberal tolerance can be smoothly represented as elite privilege. Stark economic inequality creates conditions richly conducive to fascist demagoguery. It is fantasy to think that liberal democratic norms can flourish under such conditions.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Since I am an American, I must note that one goal appears to be to use fascist tactics hypocritically, waving the banner of nationalism in front of middle- and working-class white people in order to funnel the state’s spoils into the hands of oligarchs.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Fascist politics lures its audiences with the temptation of freedom from democratic norms while masking the fact that the alternative proposed is not a form of freedom that can sustain a stable nation state and can scarcely guarantee liberty. A state-based ethnic, religious, racial, or national conflict between “us” and “them” can hardly remain stable for long. And yes, even if fascism could sustain a stable state, would it be a good political community, a decent country within which children can be socialized to become empathetic human beings? Children can certainly be taught to hate, but to affirm hatred as a dimension of socialization has unintended consequences. Does anyone really want their children’s sense of identity to be based on a legacy of marginalization of others?”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“They have also evolved to require a molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD. As we will see later, the loss of NAD as we age, and the resulting decline in sirtuin activity, is thought to be a primary reason our bodies develop diseases when we are old but not when we are young.”
― David A. Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

“Trump was correct in his original assessment of so many Republican “leaders.” They have proven to be weak, conniving, and two-faced cowards. They fear Trump as much as they despise him. They fear his (and their own) voters as much as they have contempt for them. It”
― Mark Leibovich, Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission

“Pompeo and his explosive temper. Pompeo would curse and yell even at early-morning staff meetings with his top advisers. He often vented about leaks. Women were a particular target, especially Lisa Kenna, the career diplomat who served as his executive secretary. His tirades at her, described by three senior officials who observed them directly, were blistering. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such sustained abuse in my life,” one senior official said about Pompeo’s treatment of Kenna.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017 - 2021

“It is midnight in Washington,” Schiff began. “The lights are finally going out in the Capitol after a long day in the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump.” Over the course of the next twenty-five minutes, he said it was not enough to let voters decide because if the Senate were to let Trump off, he would be free to use his power to advantage himself with impunity in the election. “He has done it before, he will do it again,” Schiff warned.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017 - 2021

“He has betrayed our national security and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections and he will do so again. You will not change him, you cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all. I do not ask you to convict him because truth or right or decency matters nothing to him, but because we have proven our case and it matters to you. Truth matters to you. Right matters to you. You are decent. He is not who you are.[36]”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017 - 2021

“As for the coronavirus, Trump remained in denial mode. The president repeatedly told the public that the outbreak was “totally under control,” that it would “miraculously” disappear on its own with warmer weather, that it “will go away,” that it was comparable to the ordinary flu, that the number of cases would go “down close to zero,” that a vaccine would be available soon, and that anyone who wanted to be tested could get a test.[21] None of it was true.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017 - 2021