They Knew Quotes

“Elected officials no longer attempt to win you over, they attempt to rewrite laws and district boundaries so that your vote is irrelevant. Their true constituency is the criminal elite.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Your only obligation is to the truth, and it is an unbreakable obligation. Everything else stems from it. You are entitled to truth from government as a basic covenant of citizenship. There is no justice without accountability, and there is no accountability without the truth. Insisting that the corruption we witness be acknowledged is never an empty gesture. The very act of this public demand, this uncompromising insistence on exposure of the criminal elite, can set in motion unpredictable events. Americans can learn from the past that we keep repeating. And possibly, in the end, we can break the future.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Hannah Arendt wrote: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said in 2011. “Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”37 Assange’s”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Trump and much of his cohort, who appear to want the country to collapse. A depopulated, partitioned United States is easier to exploit and control, particularly in a chaotic era of climate change, which they anticipated decades ago. To them, the state is just something to sell. They do not care if the buyers are foreign or domestic. The United States of America is merely a landmass to split into oligarch fiefdoms. It inspires no sentimentality and requires no veneration. Its laws are irrelevant, its rights ephemeral, its population disposable. Its history can be rewritten.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“The absence of authority in the face of obscene criminality prompts delusions, peddled by propagandists and true believers alike, that noble actors are fighting the good fight but Must Keep Silent for Reasons You Will Understand in Time. In order for this delusion to hold, the sound of their silence must drown out the evidence heard with your own ears. They are dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, the cult of the savior state bleats, they are playing 3-D chess, they are reeling in the big fish, they are aiming for the king so they best not miss, they can’t show their cards without ruining their hand, they’re getting all their ducks in a row, the dam is breaking, the storm is here, they’ve got this, be patient, be quiet, relax, trust the plan.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“I was ignoring the American present so I could have hope for the American future. In an emerging autocracy, hope is dangerous, because hope is inextricable from time, and an enduring strategy of autocrats is to run out the clock. That was the botched institutionalist strategy that had led to the events of January 6—a strategy of inertia masquerading as patience, of smugness sold as savoir-faire. You cannot govern on hope and you cannot be governed by hope. Hope is a drug that gets you high on too many tomorrows”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Since Americans spent centuries failing to learn from history, we get to repeat it all at once. The year is 2021 and we are living through simultaneous revivals of the worst of the American past: the Civil War, the Spanish Flu, the white mob violence of the 1919 Red Summer, the extreme wealth disparity of the Gilded Age, the fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s, the Jim Crow era of voter suppression, the riots of the 1960s, the corruption of Watergate, the cover-ups of Iran-Contra. In August 2021, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. One month before the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban retook Afghanistan dressed in US military uniforms abandoned in the hasty retreat from the quagmire war. It’s like America is on its deathbed, watching its life flash before its eyes.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Material acquisition is not the goal of the mafia side of the criminal elite, and debt is not a problem. A lifestyle of total impunity, powered by fraud and threat, is the goal. Raw power is not measured in money but by how little you need it. Money is beneath you when you live above the law.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“There is a kinship, between the climate scientists and the epidemiologists and the scholars of authoritarian states. The people who research worst-case scenarios are stuck breaking bad news while protectors of profit margins and purveyors of institutionalist mythologies market false assurances. The later remain successful not in spite of evidence, but to spite the evidence.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“I felt like I was back in Hawthorne’s Salem, learning the worst lesson of the witch trials: the public will bow to authority, no matter how corrupt, if they believe that authority is curtailing a greater threat—even if the complicity of the authority becomes increasingly explicit. The longing for a legal system to combat an almost otherworldly evil overrides the public’s ability to see the man-made evil right in front of them.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Covid is but a prelude for how states will handle the era of catastrophic climate change. It is a test run of what happens when powerful elites deem the public disposable without even feigning a pretense of concern. It is a dark omen of our lost leverage.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Conspiracy theories can be weaponized not only to torment victims of violence but to spur violence against individuals or entire populations. This is not new. Weaponized rumors have been used to stoke slaughter and genocides for thousands of years, made easier today by the global speed of technology, the breakdown of institutions, and the increasing pressure to see yourself not as a person but as a brand.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“When abuse by authorities is both rampant and downplayed, a culture of distrust will emerge as a consequence.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“They need the culture war to distract from the war on national security— a war that all Americans are losing, because the government has decided to forfeit its sovereignty. In November 2021, the Federal Election Commission ruled that it would become legal for foreigners to fund US referendum campaigns—subversion that was until recently not only reviled but illegal.20 Another loophole has been created to function as a noose around the neck of American democracy.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Bannon’s vision is shared by Russian far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin, who is popular in both Trump’s and Putin’s circles.3 “It is generally important,” Dugin wrote in his 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics, “to introduce geopolitical chaos within the American daily experience by encouraging all manner of separatism, ethnic diversity, social and racial conflict, actively supporting every extremist dissident movement, racist sectarian groups, and destabilizing the political processes within America.”4”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“One of the most common responses to any insinuation that the US government either abetted the 9/11 attacks or looked the other way and let them happen was that the American government would never kill three thousand of its own people in one day. I remember believing that, until covid came around and we hit the 9/11 death toll on a daily basis while the government lied and denied and profited off our pain. All conspiracy theories are debatable, except one: the American government will absolutely leave its citizens to die.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” Rove said. “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 history’s actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”29”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Mulder bemoans that the truth he struggled to find is now openly out there, but it makes no difference. No one in power will do anything beneficial to humanity, and the public is too saturated with both facts and disinformation to care. In a satirical episode mocking both the show and its audience, Mulder meets a mysterious man who informs him that his quest is over: “Your time is past. We’re living in a post-cover-up, post-conspiracy age.” The man’s name, of course, is Dr. They, because They are behind everything, and They get away with it.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“The end result of all of this—the déjà news, the paywalled facts, the free-floating lies, the absence of official accountability—is the erosion of history. It is the loss of collective memory, including the digital collective memory that had come to augment and even supplant citizen consensus since the advent of the internet. In 2021, the United States of America became the first country in world history to memory-hole a coup.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“There is no longer a public domain. Journalism has come to resemble the insular world of academia, where research had long been sequestered from the masses. Unless you have an institutional affiliation, individual academic articles can cost twenty or thirty dollars, sometimes more—a price no one pays, but that was constructed to keep the general public away and maintain an elite grip on publicly funded knowledge. The article fee is a symbolic amount: the price of entry, the cost of exclusion.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“One year after the Capitol attack, the only people punished were the low-level foot soldiers, not elite coordinators like Michael Flynn, L. Lin Wood, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and not Trump himself.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“It is not enough for Trump to commit an illicit act: He needs to know that you know that he got away with it.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“The sheer number of indicted operatives and pedophiles in Trump’s orbit, as well as the endless exposures of other public figures revealed to have been predators or foreign agents all along, illuminated the criminal underground long propping up the shining city on a hill.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“This crisis is not a matter of Democrats versus Republicans, or “red” versus “blue.” The crisis is a matter of people who seek to protect the United States versus elite operatives who want to destroy it. The latter are stripping down the country and selling it for parts and trying to convince ordinary Americans that it was their own idea.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“The first thing to acknowledge is that after four years of Donald Trump as president, the fringes have been pulled to the center, with the result that the center no longer holds. Trump created a template for elite criminal impunity that aspiring successors seek to emulate. None have done so as successfully, but expect them to try for decades to come.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“No one is on Epstein’s side—except some of the most powerful political and corporate actors in America, the people responsible for the policies that shape our lives and the lives of our children. That we are expected to accept this state of affairs as normal is another shared point of disgust.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“With the exception of Ghislaine Maxwell, who went on trial for sex trafficking in late November 2021, none of the accused participants in the Epstein ring have been indicted. The”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“In 2007, US Attorney for South Florida Alex Acosta worked with the FBI, then headed by Robert Mueller, and Epstein’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz (who went on to defend Donald Trump) and Ken Starr (who had previously prosecuted Bill Clinton), in a plea deal to give Epstein a mere eighteen-month sentence for soliciting, molesting, and raping underage girls. Epstein never spent a day of his sentence in prison, and in 2009, he was granted early “release” from his pseudo-confinement. He”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Epstein is a linchpin in a network of high-power corruption and abuse for which there has been almost no accountability. While trafficking children, he partnered with players in multiple industries that are frequently the subject of widespread anxiety over their rising power and diminished sense of responsibility toward the public good: government, technology, media, national security, higher education. He spent decades with Ghislaine Maxwell operating a trafficking operation in which hundreds of children were raped by powerful men from around the world.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent