The Smallest Minority Quotes

“Peons must have conformity. The instinct to seek it is in their souls. It is what makes them peons. It is the essence of peonhood”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Outrage is intoxicating, and like other intoxicants, it makes people stupid.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“In this way, streitbare Demokratie necessitates the abolition of private life. Which is to say, it necessitates the incorporation of everything into the political project: every business,59 every church,60 every voluntary organization,61 every ill-advised tweet by a fourteen-year-old kid who later goes on to win the Heisman trophy,62 every pronoun,63 every word spoken on every college campus and in every coffee shop,64 every prayer65,66—everything. Like any parasite, it is opportunistic, and like any cancer, it spreads.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“But peons must have conformity. The instinct to seek it is in their souls. It is what makes them peons. It is the essence of peonhood.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The difference between Duterte’s death squads and Antifa is only that the American blackshirts engage in relatively petty violence that generally stops short of murder and more spectacular forms of terrorism.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“We are constantly defining danger down. Defining danger down consists mainly in elevating the importance of hypothetical evils over real evils.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Loewenstein argued that fascism was not an ideology but a technique, which it is—one that is independent of any particular policy content and that can be made to serve any political agenda, from Hitler’s psychotic Jew-hatred to Mussolini’s romantic corporatism to Stalin’s “scientific” socialism to Antifa’s self-professed antifascism.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Nor does it matter which symbols the enemies of human freedom choose: freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism or in that of outright Fascism.”9”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The tendency that must be defended against is streitbare Demokratie’s natural decay: What begins as a principle ends up as an enemies list.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“While I would not support importing German- or Austrian-style restrictions on political speech and”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“and ritual poo-flinging37”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“habitual public masturbation”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“It’s like Jeffrey Goldberg and his balls: You’ll miss them when they’re gone.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The electronic mob—the virtual tribe—is for a great many lonely and foundering misfits the nearest substitute.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The intellectual groundwork for the assault on the individual mind already has been done, and its products have been internalized by the fanatical and the mentally deficient and the rage-addicted and those who are intellectually and morally dominated by the rage-addicted.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The communication that happens on social media right now has more in common with dogs barking at one another than it does with actual political discourse—”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Woodrow Wilson’s proud boys did things to meddling newspaper editors that reality-show tough guy Donald Trump wouldn’t dream of”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The problem for mass democracy is that the demos does not think. It cannot. It lacks the requisite apparatus.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The blackshirts and the American Association of Outrage Professionals were as creepily tumescent as Anthony Weiner cruising a Hello Kitty boutique,”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“All-Lesbian World Bowling Champion haircut”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Social media is not a platform for publishing but a means of seeking human connection, not communication”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“We think in language. We signal11 in memes. Language is the instrument of discourse. Memes are the instrument of antidiscourse, i.e., communication designed and deployed to prevent the exchange of information and perspectives rather than to enable it, a weapon of mass intellectual destruction—the moron bomb.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I took the title of this book from Ayn Rand. I took it from her because she doesn’t deserve it.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“if you’re wondering; the confusion between the grammatic concept “gender” and the biological fact of “sex” is the origin of much modern unhappiness, along with the conflation of metaphysical propositions and physical characteristics.)”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“Which is to say, “You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” was first used to justify precisely the thing the First Amendment exists to prohibit: the official censorship of political speech by the state. Schenk was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for distributing a pamphlet containing nothing more controversial or subversive than an exhortation to “Assert Your Rights.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“But, why this restriction? Why on this speech and not that speech?” There is no evidence, really, that these questions can or will be answered according to principle rather than according to politics and status-seeking or that the project will not be dominated by the desire to punish—by retaliation against real and perceived social rivals—rather than by the desire to prevent some real evil.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“As of this writing, I am unable to find a single case of a progressive-leaning speaker being targeted with firebombs on a college campus or a Democrat being fired by a Silicon Valley technology company because of his liberal politics. But we must have our “right-wing authoritarianism.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The Soviet party bosses and the men who ran their gulags and tortured dissidents in their mental wards were committed “antifascists,” too.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The hijacking of scientific prestige is typical of the ochlocracy of our time; some would-be censors propose prohibiting certain kinds of communication because they are “false by consensus.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

“The German philosophical tradition that so deeply informed the outlook of American reformers and intellectuals such as John Dewey and Theodore Roosevelt has in our era split into mutually hostile progressive and nationalist camps that are, in these illiterate times, incapable of understanding the significance of their common intellectual patrimony. But the fact that the lame pudwhackers marching around Portland in black masks and carrying tiki-torches through Charlotte are too bone-deep stupid to appreciate this doesn’t mean that you, dear reader, must choose to be as well.”
― Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics