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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“In the 2000s, Epstein had taken Bill Clinton for rides on his plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.” Epstein’s criminal partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, was a guest at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010—meaning that both 2016 presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, had at the least an acquaintance with Epstein, though Clinton was never accused of abuse by an Epstein victim.”
― 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

“It is very bad in America to be right too early. It is considered a sin in journalism to tell the public what you have learned in real time, both because you are going against the tide of profit motive, but mostly because it destroys plausible deniability for the corrupt and powerful.”
― 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

“The goal of conspirators today is not only to protect themselves but to vilify the search for truth, and force you to destroy your reputation if you pursue it publicly.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“The real American exceptionalism is the shrinking of a protected class into an infinitesimal slice of the population, who lecture and swindle the rest of us from their gilded retreats.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“The world is a white Bronco and the highway never ends.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“The pandemic left us with only one national pastime: politics. And that meant we were held together by a web of lies.”
― 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.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Cults traffic in clichés. Their repetitive proclamations are not ideas in their own right but symbols of belonging, designators of loyalty and exclusion.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“We may not revolt as one, but we are revolted as one, e pluribus nauseam.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“When the powerful want you to forget a conspiracy, what they want you to forget most are the victims. The conspirators will try to demoralize you and demonize you. The conspiracy may frustrate and exhaust you. But the injustice the victims endure is straightforward. The victims are why the crime matters. To be human is to care about other people. To seek justice is to honor another’s humanity. To destroy elite criminal impunity is to gain equality. The purpose of deciphering a malicious conspiracy is to protect the victims and keep it from happening again.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“The things that mean something to you are incidental to them. Life, love, family, freedom, compassion, imagination, individuality—these are not understood in the same way. They are only possessions to steal from you to exert greater control. That is how mafias operate, and you live in a mafia state in a mafia world headed for the mother of all mergers. In a global autocracy, fear and foreboding transcend borders, hovering over the world like a black cloud. The cry of “what is happening?” is as raw in the United Kingdom and Hungary and Turkey and any other country lurching into authoritarian kleptocracy as it is in the United States.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent