I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom Quotes

“Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“At its worst, the woke cult of transgenders is a cross between voyeurism and morbidity, a fascination with the sexually bizarre, a politically correct version of snuff pornography. It’s at the “intersectionality” of the lassitudinous culture of the Hamptons and the depraved sexual ennui of Hollywood.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“For Du Bois, there was no such thing as an a priori wrong conclusion; there was only a conclusion proven wrong.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“A mathematician I consulted, Dr. Sanjeev Mahajan, had this to say: Crenshaw’s axiom can be rephrased as follows: Two categories of oppression when combined yield an entirely new, irreducible category of oppression. This seems a fair reading of her contention that the discrimination suffered by a Black woman is distinct from the sum of the discrimination that a Black person suffers plus the discrimination that a woman suffers. Let’s then consider a single individual who suffers four categories of oppression: Black (B), Female (F), Paraplegic (P), Lesbian (L). But then, per Crenshaw, we can form entirely new categories such as {BF}, {BP}, and {BL}. Then these categories can be combined to form yet another irreducible category such as {{BF}{BP}} or {{BL}{BP}}. These categories can be further combined to yield entirely new categories of oppression such as {{{BF}{BP}} {{BL}{BP}}}, etc. Now let us, per Crenshaw’s axiom, enumerate all possible irreducible categories of oppression. Given the 4 options, B F P L, there are 15 non-empty subsets, each of which is an irreducible category. Since these 15 categories are irreducible and independent, they can be combined every which way to give us 215-1= 32,767 non-empty subsets of the set of the 15 categories. Each of these 32,767 categories is an irreducible category of oppression. But then again, applying Crenshaw’s axiom, since we now have a set of 32,767 categories of oppression, we can combine them in all possible configurations to get 232767-1 non-empty subsets of a set of 32,767 categories. Repeating this process, ad infinitum, we get infinitely many categories of oppression.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“(The Catholic Church was the first institutional bastion in the U.S. to oppose eugenic sterilization, not just on account of its opposition to birth control, but also because of its theological commitment to the sanctity of all human life regardless of eugenic “fitness.”)”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“Why extol the idea of changing one’s sex while simultaneously denigrating the idea of changing one’s race?”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“Protection,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“When it comes to curbing speech, experience thus confirms the general rule in human affairs: humility is to be preferred over arrogance.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“The right to sterilize was about government interference in the reproductive process; the right to abort is about barring government interference in it. But at bottom the moral stake is arguably the same: the sanctity of human life.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“You cannot tell a man’s intention by looking at his forehead, you must look through it to the inside of his head; and no judge and jury are capable of looking through the skull of a man who has done nothing but talk to see what goes on inside.” And”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“The police have come to represent not just racist brutality but also the chief enforcers of a heartless, corrupt, unjust”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom