Journalists from San Francisco

"Children born with Down Syndrome are not vegetables, nor are their lives demonstrably not worth living."

"[[Grover Norquist|[Grover] Norquist]] is a mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep . . . an embarrassing anomaly, the leering, drunken uncle everyone else wishes would stay home . . . [He] is repulsive, granted, but there aren't nearly enough of him to start a purge trial."

"I thought I'd be ragged for writing a puffy piece. My wife said people are going to think you're hunting for a job in the Bush campaign."

"The wonderful thing is we're allowed to say what we think . . . Your stories can be more true, more honest, more direct. If a person at a press conference says something I think is ludicrous, I get to say it's ludicrous . . . You try not to distort the truth because someone you're profiling you think is on the right side of abortion or trade or any other issue. That would be dishonest."

"I have a lot of trouble writing or doing anything unless the pressure is on . . . If left to my own devices, I'd spend a lot of time playing with my kids and my dogs."

"It's a good thing Al Gore has an unappealing demeanor, or George W. Bush would be in real trouble. Bush delivered a mediocre performance at the first presidential debate in Boston. For the first half an hour he appeared nervous. Several times he seemed to lose his train of thought in mid-sentence. Though he relaxed as the night progressed, his remarks often lacked focus. He left Gore's endless attacks on the "wealthiest one percent of Americans" essentially unchallenged. He offered no defense of his own pro-life views, allowing Gore, a genuine extremist on abortion, to sound like the candidate with the mainstream position. He even let Gore interrupt him, repeatedly. Bush was not impressive. Happily for Republicans, Gore was far worse. If George W. Bush is elected president, it will be to a great extent because millions of undecided voters entered the voting booth, considered the phrase "President Gore," and shuddered."

"Racial solidarity wasn't a working concept in my southern-California hometown. Most people barely had last names, much less ethnic identities. I grew up feeling about as much connection to nineteenth-century slave owners as I did to bus drivers in Helsinki or astronomers in Tirana. We're all capable of getting sunburned. That's it."

"Most of the time you can beat a woman in an argument. But what do you win? Nothing. You get short-term pleasure followed by a lot of pain."

"I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting [the Iraq War]. It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually."

"But the real story here is an 85-year-old grandmother is attempting to start a class action suit, a frivolous lawsuit, against this video game manufacturer. I thought the elderly were immune from embarrassing behavior like starting frivolous class action lawsuits but they’re not, are they?"

"[T]he idea that if you buy some creepy video game for your grandson knowing it’s a creepy video game, it turns out to be even creepier than you thought, then you’re owed thousands by the people who made it? Ah, no!"

"Anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York . . . Canada is a sweet country. It is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head. You know, he’s nice but you don't take him seriously. That's Canada."

"It only eggs them on. Canada is essentially a stalker, stalking the United States, right? Canada has little pictures of us in its bedroom, right?"

"Politics deserves more color. The legislative process needs more people like Don Young. Young, the Republican congressman from Alaska, once used a walrus penis bone as a prop during a congressional hearing. As Mollie Beatty, then the director of the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, spoke about the need to protect endangered species from hunting, Young angrily slapped the eighteen-inch bone against his hand."

"It was Jack Oliver, the deputy finance chairman of the Bush campaign. He was upset—so upset, I couldn't make out his words at first. "You fucked us!" he yelled. "I can't believe you did that. We gave you all this access, and you fucked us in return." Bush hadn't liked the piece at all. In fact, I later heard from someone who was with him at the time, he was wounded by it."

"I had just gotten off the Crossfire set when one of our producers handed me a stack of mail. On the way to the elevator, I glanced at it. On top of the pile was a registered letter from a law firm. It got my attention immediately. I've never had a pleasant letter from a lawyer. This one was worse than most. It was written by an attorney in Indiana named Paul M. Blanton. Blanton wanted to let me know that his client, a woman named Kimberly Carter, was planning to file criminal sex charges against me in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. "Ms. Carter has informed me that she was raped by you," Blanton wrote. "If you should have any questions or concerns about any of the aforementioned, please do not hesitate to contact me." Should I have any questions or concerns? I didn't know where to begin. Rape? Kentucky? Criminal charges? I knew I hadn't raped anyone. I didn't think I'd ever even been to Kentucky."

"Nuts or not, Kimberly Carter had a lot of chutzpah. Six months later, she wrote me again. This time she sent a clock radio with my name on it, along with a note apologizing "for the misunderstanding." A few months after that I got an Easter card from "Your Biggest Fan!" Her next card had five exclamation points, which I took as a sign of escalating mania."

"Carlson: I think they are. On the other hand, you know, the bottom line is the issue of security — who's going to protect the country against, you know, the Muslim lunatics who want to hurt us — is the only thing the Republicans have left. They can't claim that they're, you know, the party of fiscal restraint anymore. They're big spenders, and that's obvious. But that one argument, “Vote for us, we'll protect you,” that still works, because on — you know, let's be totally real. Nancy Pelosi's going to keep you safe while you sleep? I don't think so. She's not."

"Bubba the Love Sponge: So — so, now listen, can the Democrats not — in the nine, or 10, or eight, or however many months there is — can they not regroup or get a strategy going with, "Listen, we need to — the only thing that these Republicans have is to keep you guys safe." Can they not, you know, responsibly come up with some type of game plan where they can make us feel — make people feel safe as well?"

"Carlson: I think if they're — Oh, they could, absolutely. If there were a Democrat to come out in the 2008 election and say, “You know what the problem is? It’s Islamic extremism. It's not terror, it's not some, you know, indefinable threat out there. It's these lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals, and I'm going to kill as many of them as I can if you elect me.” If a Democrat were to say that, he would be elected king, OK?"

"Bubba: Let's get into a couple things. One, this whole Duke issue. I mean, is this not, honest to God, Tucker, in my opinion, and tell me what you think, I think these guys are innocent."

"Carlson: Well, I think they could get railroaded. I mean, you know, look, here's the bottom line. And I said this the other day and there was all this outrage and, “How could you say that,” but I mean, this woman sells sex for a living. OK? I'm not attacking that — I'm merely noting it. She sells sex for a living. If she's accusing other people of nonconsensual sex, it's a little more complicated than if some, you know, housewife claims she was pulled off the street and raped. It's just not the same thing. It's harder to determine what's consensual and what's not. And to act like, you know, these guys absolutely did it because she's this oppressed stripper, pardon me, adult dancer or exotic dancer, whatever the hell they're calling her, is ridiculous. I mean, these kids, maybe they did do something wrong, I don't know. But, I mean, you got to give them the benefit of the doubt."

"Co-Host: Alexa Stewart, we run into her all the time."

"Carlson: She seems like a — she seems awful —"

"Bubba: Cunt."

"Co-Host: Yeah, she is awful."

"Bubba: They're very cunty."

"Carlson: She seems extremely cunty."

"Bubba: I like to hear that word, oh yeah — I stepped over him. She seems what now? Go ahead."

"Carlson: She just does seem a little cunty. I mean you said it; I'm just agreeing with you. I don't use that word because it's offensive —"

"Bubba: Right. I'd love for Tucker Carlson. Tonight on MSNBC a girl that comes across kind of cunty."

"Carlson: Well she does. I mean, I heard — I mean, now I'm a Brent fan, so, I'm just stating my bias right out front here. I heard her on with him and I just wanted to give her the spanking she so desperately needs."

"Carlson: By the way, women hate you when they do you wrong and you put up with it."

"Co-Host: Exactly."

"Carlson: Because they hate weakness. They're like dogs that way. They can smell it on you, and they have contempt for it; they’ll bite you."

"Carlson: I mean, I love women, but they're extremely primitive, they're basic, they're not that hard to understand. And one of the things they hate more than anything is weakness in a man."

"Bubba: Bill Clinton is a real man, and Bill Clinton could give a fuck whether Hillary wins or loses. He's just playing the role right now. He's trying to get some whores. He doesn't give a fuck about that battle-ax. He's trying to keep her busy right now."

"Carlson: But he can laid anytime he wants."

"Bubba: Oh, right."

"Carlson: Why doesn't he divorce her and, you know, take up plural marriage or something with a bunch of teenagers in a foreign country."

"Bubba: He's saying, “Oh, wait, I don't want her to drop out early, because that means she has to get off the campaign trail. Fuck that. I need to keep her going.""

"Carlson: I've seen a lot more of the typical — and I mean this — typical whining from a Black politician about how, "You don't like me because I'm Black." Using racism as a defense, right? I catch you doing something bad, "Well, oh, you're a racist." That is something that I have covered up close and personal my entire adult life for 17 years being around Black politicians saying that exact thing. The Congressional Black Caucus exists to blame the white man for everything, and I'm happy to say that in public because it's true. Everyone knows it's true."

"Carlson: I still can't get over, you know, Obama saying, "They're going to attack me because I'm Black." I mean, that's just ridiculous. I mean, that is so low to say something like that."

"Co-Host: Well, see, Tucker, here's the —"

"Carlson: Everybody knows that Barack Obama would still be in the state Senate in Illinois if he were white."

"Carlson: I don't like the feminist crap. I hate that and that's one of the reasons I despise the Democrats because they're always rolling that crap out. "Well, you don't like him because he's Black. You don't like her because she's a woman." Oh, shut the fuck up."

"Bubba: But go ahead, Spice."

"Co-Host: Hang on, Tuck. So you're telling me that this choice of him choosing Sarah was a better choice than a Romney?"

"Carlson: Yes, definitely."

"Co-Host: I just can't see it."

"Carlson: I feel like a more risky choice, needless to say, but don't think Rom — you get anything out of Romney, I really don't."

"Carlson: Look, everybody is so intimidated by, you know, the Democratic Party and those whackies in the media on this race and gender nonsense. The country's so fucked up on the subject that getting a white man, I mean everyone's embarrassed to be a white man I guess, that's a bad thing."

"Bubba: No, I love being a white man. It kicks ass, my friend. I love it."

"Carlson: I don't have a problem with it. I don't really think of the world in those terms but, you know, white men, you know, they've contributed some, I would say."

"Co-Host: Well, quite a lot."

"Bubba: Tucker's high on pills."

"Carlson: Well, I mean creating civilization and stuff, I think they've done a pretty — I don't know, whatever! I just don't like to think of the world in those terms but —"

"Bubba: How many pieces of Nicorette has he had today?"

"Carlson: A lot of people would rather see the world in those terms and a lot of people in politics do, and now the Republicans do even more and I just disapprove."

"Bubba: Fine people of Canada, please understand that Tucker is a very good friend of mine, but I in no way, shape, or form share his views of how he feels about people from Canada. I love Canada. They're great people up there. Tucker feels that you guys are a bunch of assholes."

"Carlson: I totally disagree. If I didn't like Canada, I wouldn’t consider it worth invading. I mean, Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys — that’s why it wasn't worth invading."

"Bubba: Keep burying yourself."

"Carlson: But Canada's a solid place with good-looking women and good fishing. We should invade."

"Carlson: Well, actually, he's not in prison for that. He didn’t — Warren Jeffs didn't marry underaged girls, actually."

"Co-Host: No, he's in prison for facilitation of child rape."

"Carlson: Whatever the hell that means."

"Co-Host: That means that —"

"Carlson: He's in prison because he's weird and unpopular and he has a different lifestyle that other people find creepy."

"Co-Host:: No, he is an accessory to the rape of children. That is a felony and a serious one at that."

"Carlson: What do you mean an accessory? He's like got some weird religious cult where he thinks it's OK to, you know, marry underaged girls, but he didn't do it. Why wouldn't the guy who actually did it, who had sex with an underaged girl, he should be the one who's doing life."

"Carlson: He's not accused of touching anybody; he is accused of facilitating a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a 27-year-old man. That's the accusation. That's what they're calling felony rape. [crosstalk] That's bullshit. I'm sorry. Now this guy may be… a child rapist. I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her. That’s bullshit"

"Carlson: All of a sudden, like we're very skeptical about everything until like some prosecutor comes out and says, "This guy's bad" and the rest of us nod in agreement like a church choir, "Yeah, he's bad." How do we know he’s bad? What do we know exactly? Nothing… I should make the laws round here, and Michael Vick would have been executed, and Warren Jeffs would be out on the street."

"Bubba: The governor of Arizona, right now. That's the problem. We'd all be --"

"Co-Host: Dog killing, bad. Child rape, eh, not so much."

"Bubba: Yeah, dog killing, really bad."

"Carlson: — child rape. I'm not for child rape. I'm just saying, if you mistreat dogs like that, we're going to have to execute you."

"Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal."

"When was the last time you stopped yourself from saying something you believed to be true for fear of being punished or criticized for saying it? If you live in America, it probably hasn’t been long."

"A temporary ban on Muslim immigration? That sounds a little extreme (meaning nobody else has said it recently in public). But is it? Millions of Muslims have moved to Western Europe over the past 50 years, and a sizable number of them still haven’t assimilated. Instead, they remain hostile and sometimes dangerous to the cultures that welcomed them. By any measure, that experiment has failed."

"Let me just stipulate. I am for getting along. I am for colorblindness, I’m for tolerance, 100%. But I also think that if things radically change in your country, it’s okay for you to say, what is this, and maybe I don’t want to live in a country that looks nothing like the country I grew up in. Is that bigoted?"

"Totally bizarre situation—which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all."

"It’s going to confuse the living shit out of our viewers . . . When’s the last time you saw someone defend Iran on Fox News? Right around never?"

"That is not actually what is illegal as far as I understand. What I understand is the removal of an entire portion of the female sex organ without the consent of the child. Now you underwent this as an adult, there is a quantum difference between making a decision to do something like that and having that decision made for you, that cannot be reversed, as a child. That seems to me, probably the worst thing you could do to a child. Would you concede, because there are a lot of women who feel mutilated by this .. this is not, y'know .. this is being lead by women .. that maybe we should let adults make this decision and not impose it on six year olds .. is that fair?"

"Hazleton's population was 2 percent Hispanic. Just 16 years later, Hazleton is majority Hispanic. This is more change than human beings are designed to digest. This pace of change makes societies volatile, really volatile, just as ours has become volatile. That's happening all over the country. No nation, no society has ever changed this much, this fast. Now before you start calling anyone bigoted, consider and be honest: how would you feel if that happened in your neighborhood?"

"This was mid-October 2001. I’d gone to Pakistan for New York magazine to cover the Taliban. I was flying from Islamabad to Peshawar, on the Afghan border, to Dubai. It was right after 9/11, so everyone was paranoid about air travel. I was sitting in first class on a big Airbus, and everyone was chain-smoking Marlboros. There were clouds of cigarette smoke, but no alcohol was allowed. We stop in Peshawar, and all these randoms file in and sit on the floor of the cockpit and smoke cigarettes. It made me nervous. This was not a First World thing to do. So we took off again, and because of the bombings in Afghanistan, we had to fly the long way around, over Iran. It ended up being a four-hour flight. Around two in the morning, we’re starting to descend. All of a sudden, bam, the plane just stops . . . And then the plane starts to drop. The engines rev and the plane turns sideways. It’s clear we’re crashing, no doubt about it. People are screaming. We finally touch down and bounce right off the runway. The right wing snaps off and all these sparks are coming up. Everyone knows we’re going to die . . . You’d think in the face of imminent death you’d be like, This is happening, it’s inevitable, and I’m peaceful about it. I was not peaceful at all. So the plane goes into a sand dune and ends up on its side. I was the first person off. I kicked open the door, the slide came down, I ran into the darkness and immediately got picked up by guards. I was brought to a room, locked in there and then put on a British Airways flight eight hours later."

"You know, the funny thing about that, and one of the reasons I’ve never talked about it, is there’s no winning. Either you lie and say, “I’m so wounded by that.” Or you tell the truth and sound like a sociopath. In my case, the truth is my childhood wasn’t that bad. It was actually pretty fun. I love my dad. Losing my mom was sad, I guess. My parents got divorced because my mom was a nutcase. Boo-hoo, poor me. But my dad got remarried to a wonderful woman, my stepmom, whom I love. I always worried I was suppressing all this rage. I used to say to my girlfriend, now wife, “What am I going to do if she ever reappears?” Then I actually did get the call, and it turned out she was living in remote France, in the Pyrénées mountains, working as a sculptor . . . [My aunt] called me and said, “Your mother’s dying.” That didn’t even make sense to me. “My mother? Who’s my mother?” And she said, “Your mother. You know, my sister.” . . . “She’s dying and she’s going to be gone soon. You’ve got to go visit her.” I thought about it, and I said, “No, I don’t think I do.”"

"It’s obvious we need more scientists and skilled engineers. What we’re getting instead are waves of poor people with a high school education or less. They’re nice people; nobody doubts that. But as an economic matter, this is insane. It’s indefensible, so nobody tries to defend it. It’s indefensible, so no one even tries to defend it.Instead, our leaders demand you shut up and accept it. We’ve got a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, dirtier and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement. Previous leaders of our country committed sins. So, we must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans."

"Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created. Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. He didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. You couldn’t really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that."

"Voters knew from the very beginning exactly who Bill Clinton was. They knew because voters always know. In politics as in life, nothing is really hidden, only ignored. A candidate’s character is transparent . . . Voters understood Clinton's weaknesses. They just didn't care . . . Once he got elected, Clinton seemed to forget he'd won . . . Clinton's new priorities seemed to mirror those of the New York Times editorial page: gun control, global warming, gays in the military. His approval rating tanked. New Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress in the first midterm election. Clinton quickly learned his lesson. He scurried back to the middle and stayed there for the next six years, through scandal and impeachment. Clinton understood that as long as he stayed connected to the board center of American public opinion, voters would overlook his personal shortcomings . . . That's how democracy works . . . Somehow, Bill Clinton's heirs learned nothing from the experience."

"Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime . . . If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that . . . [W]e are told these changes are entirely good . . . We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language."

"But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question."

"The few sincere liberals left, the ones actually fighting corporate power, seem like bewildered relics from an earlier age. For generations, there was no more famous activist on the left than Ralph Nader . . . If life were fair, Nader would be living out his days in a socialist retirement home in Florida, greeting a parade of awestruck liberal pilgrims. Instead, he's mostly reviled by his former admirers. His crime was daring to run for president in 2000. Democrats blamed him for Al Gore's narrow loss to George W. Bush. They never stopped blaming him. "Ralph Nader Still Refuses to Admit He Elected Bush," read a headline in New York magazine sixteen years after the election."

"The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America."

"Even Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. Waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. She lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in Hancock Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. How did Waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? I asked once. She didn’t answer, but did call me a racist."

"I want to say to you — why don’t you go fuck yourself, you tiny brain — and I hope this gets picked up because you’re a moron, I tried to give you a hearing but you were too fucking annoying."

"Why are the people who consider Bill Clinton a hero lecturing me about sexism? How can the party that demands racial quotas denounce other people as racist? After awhile you begin to think that maybe their criticisms aren’t sincere. Maybe their moral puffery is a costume."

"These are the people who write our movies and our sitcoms, They are not shocked by naughty words. They just pretend to be when it’s useful. It’s been very useful lately."

"You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country, it means killing people."

"Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn't grateful, not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever . . . Omar isn't disappointed in America, she's enraged by it. Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism. This is an immoral country, she says. She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people. That should worry you, and not just because Omar is now a sitting member of Congress. Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately. Maybe that's our fault for asking too little of our immigrants. We aren't self-confident enough to make them assimilate, so they never feel fully American. Or maybe the problem is deeper than that, maybe we are importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours. Who knows what the problem is, but there is a problem, and whatever the cause, this cannot continue. It's not sustainable. No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results. So, be grateful for Ilhan Omar, annoying as she is. She's a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately, or else."

"We noted at the beginning of this show that Ilhan Omar is trying to take this show off the air. Shut us up. Silence us. We want to reassure you that’s not going to happen. Why? Because we work at Fox News, and they’ve got our back, and we’re thankful for that."

"If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns, problems this country has, where would white supremacy be on the list? Right up there with Russia probably. It’s actually not a real problem in America. "White supremacy, that's the problem." This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It's a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power."

"How exactly is diversity our strength?"

"For a lot of middle class people, wages are not keeping pace with expenses. Child care, housing, education, health care -- they're all getting more expensive by the year. The student loan bubble is still inflating. It's burdening young people with debts so large, they can't start families. Now, these are economic problems, but they require a political solution. The candidate who makes it easier for 30-year-olds to get married and have kids will win the election and will deserve to win. Remember that. It's truer than any economic theory conceived on any college campus in the last hundred years."

"This may be a lot of things, this moment we're living through, but it is definitely not about black lives, and remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will."

"Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the voice of the street, actually grew up in an idyllic town 45 miles north of New York City. It’s called Yorktown Heights. You never know it from listening to her recent race-baiting but the population of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez' home is over 90 percent white."

"Millions of Americans sincerely love Donald Trump. They love him in spite of everything they've heard. They love him, often, in spite of himself. They're not deluded. They know exactly who Trump is. They love him anyway. They love Donald Trump because no one else loves them. The country they built, the country their ancestors fought for over hundreds of years, has left them to die in unfashionable little towns, mocked and despised by the sneering halfwits with finance degrees -- but no actual skills -- who seem to run everything all of a sudden. Whatever Donald Trump's faults, he is better than the rest of the people in charge. At least he doesn't hate them for their weakness. Donald Trump, in other words, is and has always been a living indictment of the people who run this country. That was true four years ago when he came out of nowhere to win the presidency. And it's every bit as true right now, maybe even more true than it's ever been. It will remain true regardless of whether Donald Trump wins reelection."

"What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong."

"[To Sidney Powell, Trump attorney involved in making false claims about the 2020 presidential election result] You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon [...] You've convinced them that Trump will win. If you don't have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying."

"And now Trump, I learned this morning, is sitting back and letting them lose the senate. He doesn’t care. I care. I’ve got four kids and plan to live here."

"A couple of weeks ago, I was watching [a] video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It's not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I'm becoming something I don't want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?"

"[On Donald Trump] I hate him passionately."

"[W]e are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights [...] I truly can't wait.”"

"That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we've got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it's been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump."

"What can we learn from this? It’s not enough to call it a tragedy. Imagine, for a second, getting the call and learning that was your daughter. The last time you spoke to her, she was heading to Washington for a political rally. Now, she’s dead. You’ll never talk to her again. Seriously, imagine that. If you have children, it will put you in the right frame of mind."

"Joe Biden is the president of the United States, not a high school debate coach. He controls the largest military and law enforcement agencies in the world. He has now declared war, and we have a right to know, specifically and precisely, who exactly he has declared war on. Innocent people could be hurt in this war. They usually are. There could be collateral damage in this war, and the casualties will be Americans."

"Streams of politicians, who just months before had told us that cops were racist by definition, praised Brian Sicknick as a hero. They had finally found a police officer who served their political uses. Just one problem: The story they told was a lie from beginning to end. Officer Sicknick was not beaten to death, with a fire extinguisher or anything else. According to an exhaustive and fascinating new analysis on Revolver News, there's no evidence that Brian Sicknick was hit with a fire extinguisher at any point on Jan 6. The officer's body apparently bore no signs of trauma. In fact, on the night of Jan. 6, long after rioters at the Capitol had been arrested or dispersed, Brian Sicknick texted his brother from his office. According to his brother, Sicknick said he'd been "pepper sprayed twice" but was otherwise "in good shape". Twenty-four hours later, Officer Brian Sicknick was dead."

"Beginning on Memorial Day, BLM and their sponsors in corporate America completely changed this country. They changed this country more in 5 months than it had changed in the previous 50 years. How'd they do that? They used the sad death of a man called George Floyd to upend our society. Months later we learned the story they told us about George Floyd's death was an utter lie. There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop. The autopsy showed that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose. Fentanyl."

"Equality is what allowed Andrew Jackson to rise from a childhood of bitter poverty in the Carolina woods and make it all the way to the White House. Andrew Jackson was tough, smart and energetic. He lived a remarkable life, and America rewarded him for it. That's equality. Equity is the opposite. Equity is what allowed Kamala Harris, the privileged child of two PhDs, to stay privileged and become one of the most powerful people on the planet, despite having achieved nothing impressive or worthwhile over the span of 56 years."

"[T]wo sitting members of the United States Senate announced they oppose the entire foundation of American civil rights law, and then proceed to attack the core principle, the main principle, of our country. Some people on Twitter were shocked by it, but otherwise you’d never really know it happened. But it did happen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii publicly informed the White House that until the Biden administration puts more people they like in powerful jobs, they will refuse to confirm White nominees. ‘I am a no vote on the floor on all non-diversity nominees,’ Duckworth said, out loud, with cameras rolling. ‘I will vote for racial minorities and I will vote for LGBTQ, but anybody else, I’m not voting for.’ .. So here you have two actual U.S. senators announcing in public they will deny jobs to people who have the wrong skin color. That’s not news? Oh yes, it is news, though Mazie Hirono and Tammy Duckworth may not realize it’s news. In their defense, Hirono and Duckworth are well-known as the dimmest politicians in Washington. Neither one could carry a dinner conversation. But not everyone in Congress is stupid or oblivious. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., certainly isn’t. The Senate Majority Leader misses nothing. Chuck Schumer has spent his entire life telling us at high volume that racial discrimination is wrong, which obviously it is. Then, this week, two of his colleagues went on television to demand racial discrimination. What did Chuck Schumer think of that? Schumer didn’t say a word about it. No one in the Democratic Party did."

"Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term "replacement," if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually."

"Magazine journalism is worth remembering. They're mostly gone now, but for a long time magazines played a significant role in the life of the country. If you wanted to understand what the rest of the world was like, you read magazines."

"Only 46 members of the entire U.S. military have died from the coronavirus over the last year and a half. Suicides, by contrast, kill many, many times more"

"Non-white DNA is the quote "source of our strength" ... imagine saying that! This is the language eugenics, it's horrifying. But there's a reason Biden said it. In political terms this policy is called "the great replacement", the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries. They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it's happening, they'll scream at you with maximum hysteria. And here you have Joe Biden confirming his motive on tape with a smile on his face."

"The Ideologues are in control, and that is a huge problem for the rest of us. It’s a problem because ideologues have no interest in the lives of actual human beings. Ideologues care only about their theories, about the bright new future they are building. Humans are just speed bumps on the way to utopia."

"It may be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? [...] Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?"

"You don't want to live in a country in which moral panics breakout regularly. By the way, moral panics diminish the people engage in them and hurt the people who don’t. They're degrading. They're crazy. They're the opposite of what you want. You want to live in a country where wisdom and restraint and rational behavior and decency determine the outcomes not screaming. So for nearly two years, the shouting has not ended. Hysteria is now the official language of public discourse in the United States. That's not good for anyone except those benefiting from it... Who is benefitting? Anyone who lies for a living. The liars have perfect cover."

"Sexualizing children, mutilating their genitals, do you get off on it?"

"In general people's kooky theories don't bother me. You can be a flat earther, a circumcision activist, you can be whatever you want to be. But if you try and take over my power grid on the basis of your ridiculous theories, then we have a right to fight back, no?"

"There is no scientific justification for sexually mutilating kids. They are not doing it for a scientifically defensible reason. They are doing it because they believe in a very specific religious ideology."

"[South Africa is] a country we never talk about because no one wants to admit what’s happened there over the past 29 years."

"Probably not the best time to give up your AR-15."

"On the Destruction of the Kakhovka Dam] No one who's paid to cover these things seem to entertain even the possibility it could have been Ukrainians who did it. No chance of that. Ukraine, as you may have heard, is led by a man called Zelensky. We can say for a dead certain fact that he was not involved. He couldn't have been; Zelensky is too decent for terrorism. Now you see him on television, and it’s true you might form a different impression. Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of [US investment giant] BlackRock. But don't believe your own eyes. Actually, Mr Zelensky is a very good man... of all the people in the world, our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend in the tracksuit is uniquely incapable of blowing up a damn. He's literally a living saint, a man in whom there is no sin."

"Who organised those Black Lives Matter riots three years ago? No one's gotten to the bottom of that. What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it's still classified."

"[On the claims of David Grusch and the supposed cover-up by the US government of recovered UFOs and (alleged) absence of reports from some major media outlets] That's what the former intel officer revealed, and it was clear he was telling the truth [...] In other words, UFOs are actually real, and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. Now, in a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell the story of the millennium. But in our country, it doesn't."

"Of course, Joe Biden is not a wannabe dictator! Just because he's trying to put the other candidate in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he himself committed, doesn't mean he has a totalitarian impulse, c'mon, that's absurd! It takes a lot more than jailing your political rivals to earn the title ‘wannabe dictator’!"

"[Referring to Ben Shapiro, an American conservative commentator] They don’t care about the country at all, [...] but I do … because I'm from here, my family's been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like, I'm shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you mentioned. And I can't imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America, because he doesn't, obviously."

"If you're powerful and wise, you seek to bring stability and order and predictability and peace. That's what a father does in his family. That's what a good CEO does in a company. It's what a good general does."

"The idea that the only things that are real are the things that we can see or measure in a lab, that's insane. That's just dumb."

"There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. Yeah, that's right! Dad comes home. And he's pissed! Dad is pissed! He's not vengeful, he loves his children, disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they are his children, they live in his house. But he's very disappointed in their behaviour, and he's gonna have to let them know. He's gonna have — "Get to your room, right now! And think about what you did!" And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And, no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way."

"What [FOX News] are doing is what they always do, which is just turning up the propaganda hose to full blast and just trying to knock elderly Fox viewers off their feet and make them subject to more wars. .. Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who's calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran. On that list: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now."

"You hope Charlie Kirk's death won't be used by a group we now call bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build. You hope that! You hope a year from now, the turmoil we're seeing in the aftermath of his murder won't be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me...if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that—ever, and there never will be. Because if they can tell you what to say, they're telling you what to think, there is nothing they can't do to you because they don't consider you human. They don't believe you have a soul."

"I was shocked and sickened by the reaction of the ghoulish and really repulsive reaction of the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Charlie's death. Basically made it all about him and all about his country. Immediately trying to take the energy, the sadness, the grief that people felt over Charlie's murder, and redirect it toward support for whatever project he's involved in... I don't think that I've ever seen anything lower than this attempt to hijack Charlie's memory and use it for his own political ends, particularly because what he said was completely untrue."

"Example of someone engaging in very effective rhetoric is of course, Tucker Carlson. Tucker is helping mainstream conservatives change the way they think about politics and causing a massive swath of Trump voters to look deeper into many of the issues that we already talk about. The left is aware of what he's doing, and he's aware of what he's doeing, so it works phenomenally."

"Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally. I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews."

"Tucker Carlson is basically "Daily Stormer: The Show." Other than the language used, he is covering all of our talking points."

"Some people, like me, believe retirement should be partly socialized. Others, such as Tucker Carlson, believe in a purely private system: If you don’t save for your own retirement, your neighbor has no obligation to bail you out. Both arguments have roots in the American spirit: We are at once wonderfully communitarian and intensely individualistic. I felt then – and now – that rather than pretend there is not a major philosophical difference, or that there is one objectively perfect solution, we should debate our policy options vigorously."

"As scholars such as Leo Chavez and Otto Santa Ana have shown, threat narratives of replacement, conquest, invasion, and infestation have circulated for well over a century. What is new is how this racist rhetoric is being promulgated by a particularly influential set of forces that includes a white nationalist president, formidable conservative media ecosystem, and an empowered anti-immigrant and alt-right political contingent, often undergirded by a persistent gun culture." Together, this nativist assemblage has taken up the white nationalist rhetoric of the "great replacement"-a conspiracy theory in which white people are being systematically "replaced" by people of color through mass migration (possibly orchestrated by Jews and other "globalists"). Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham in particular characterize white Americans as being "replaced through immigration to the benefit of Democrats"...Asserting that "foreign citizens will be electing our political leaders" and characterizing Democrats as "the party of foreign voters now," Carlson describes Democrats as engaging in "demographic replacement," using a "flood of illegals" to create "a flood of voters for them." Speaking to Fox's disproportionately white and elderly viewers, Carlson has asserted that he is not "against the immigrants" but rather "for the Americans," because "nobody cares about them. It's like, shut up, you're dying, we're gonna replace you.""

"In recent weeks, Carlson has been pushing a bogus Kremlin claim that Russia had to invade because Ukraine was building bioweapons labs with help from … Hunter Biden. This odious lie might be designed as a "false flag" operation to justify Russia's use of chemical weapons. Yet Carlson, the consummate "useful idiot," continues to peddle this loathsome propaganda under the guise of just asking questions."

"Maybe he should be a little more concerned about the suffering of [Ukrainian] civilians at Russian hands? But on his show Monday night, he didn't mention the Bucha massacre. The Kremlin is, naturally, delighted with Carlson's support and has made quotations from his dishonest program a mainstay on its television shows and social media feeds."

"Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic. Conservatives have lately become expert culture warriors—the whole Tucker Carlson schtick. This schtick demands that you ignore the actual suffering of the world—the transgender kid alone in some suburban high school, the anxiety of a guy who can’t afford health care for his brother, the struggle of a Black man trying to be seen and recognized as a full human being. It’s a cynical game that treats all of life as a play for ratings, a battle for clicks, and this demands constant outrage, white-identity signaling, and the kind of absurd generalizations that Rachel Bovard used to get that room so excited. Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change."

"Mr. Carlson misread, mischaracterized me. He’s a good reporter, he just misunderstood about how serious that was. I take the death penalty very seriously. I take each case seriously. I just felt he misjudged me. I think he misinterpreted my feelings. I know he did."

"He read adult books when he was 6 and 7 years old . . . He read War and Peace when he was a little kid."

"I do a lot of shows. He is, without question, the fairest and most intelligent interviewer I’ve ever experienced on the conservative side."

"God bless Mr. Carlson for focusing on these vital issues."

"Tucker is RIGHT! White Supremacy is a ZioMedia Conspiracy Theory! The term is itself a lie. Millions of White activists are NOT 'supremacists' We seek NOT to oppress or destroy any race! Human Rights for all - EVEN FOR WHITE PEOPLE! Stop antiWhite racism!"

"The times I’ve been on TV I didn’t find him to be an effective advocate of his viewpoint. I don’t think he does a good job. That’s what his problem is."

"If indeed Carlson was fired in part for workplace misogyny, he will fall into a venerable Fox tradition. The network has a history of tolerating the abuse of women until revelations become too inconvenient, at which point even figures who’d seemed irreplaceable, like Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, are tossed overboard. Contempt for women was part of Carlson’s brand at Fox News; his infamous “The End of Men” special urged men to tan their testicles to ostensibly increase testosterone and thereby rescue society from collapse. It would be fitting if contempt for women is what finally derailed him."

"Like Trump, he would find success by catering to people who despised the world that had spurned him. He made revenge into a career."

"He has used his platform to push out prejudice. I think it’s disgusting and I don’t think it deserves a place on a major news network....incredibly irresponsible to even make such a statement while we are still burying people who were gunned down by a white supremacist."

"I would consider Tucker Carlson to be a socialist."

"Carlson is comfortably familiar. He’s one of us, an entertaining companion at lunch, full of gossip and wit and even ideas. At the same time, over the years, he has become radically unfamiliar. There are not many journalists or other people regarded as public intellectuals who are promoters of Trump and Trumpism, and who share the president’s fluency in insult and indignation. It is the composite nature of Carlson’s character—belonging at once to two divergent worlds—that makes him interesting to fellow journalists in a way that, say, Sean Hannity, with a larger audience and more direct influence with Trump, generally is not. Many colleagues once viewed him as an important voice of the intelligentsia. Many now believe he has joined the dumbgentsia. They wonder, as Columbia Journalism Review put it, “What happened to Tucker Carlson?”"

"Christopher Hitchens: [W]e picked each other's favorite writers we had from the other side, to see whether we could, get the cream of left-right political writing. So I must've picked Tucker."

"Interviewer: Why?"

"Hitchens: Do you know, I can't remember what the piece is now, and I hope he isn't watching. It's, although this was pre-9/11 it seems like so long ago to me. I'm, I hope Tucker will forgive if I say I don't remember which piece we picked from him."

"Interviewer: And another book I wanna..."

"Hitchens: But I do remember telling Tucker, I wish he wouldn't give up writing for TV. And I hope he sometimes hears the distant, hollow echo of my voice, "Tucker, don't do that!""

"I've been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson. Has anybody heard of somebody called — has anybody heard of Tucker Carlson? [...] What is it with this guy? All these wonderful Republicans seem somehow intimidated by his — by his perspective. I haven’t watched anything that he’s said"

"He's great at digging up stuff and great at getting people to confide in him and tell him things they later wish they hadn't . . . He's engaging and boyish, and people take a liking to him."

"Tucker Carlson began at The Weekly Standard. Tucker Carlson was a great young reporter. He was one of the most gifted 24-year-olds I’ve seen in the 20 years that I edited the magazine. His copy was sort of perfect at age 24. He had always a little touch of Pat Buchananism, I would say, paleo-conservativism. But that’s very different from what he’s become now. I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I mean, I don’t know if it’s racism exactly — but ethno-nationalism of some kind, let’s call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said earlier, and stirring people’s emotions in a very unhealthy way."

"Tucker's not one to be plagued with dark nights of the soul . . . He seems to bob along and that's part of his appeal, his perpetual chipperness. The guy can handle more workload than anybody I know."

"From his position in the 8 p.m. slot, Carlson has managed to become one of the most influential voices in conservative politics, often by refusing to adhere to Republican conventional wisdom. Only a few weeks before the Iran flare-up, he delivered a monologue in praise of Elizabeth Warren’s “economic patriotism” plan; in January, he launched an intra-conservative war over the virtues of capitalism with a monologue attacking Mitt Romney, private equity, and conservatives who “worship” the market. He is also perhaps the most reviled talking head in the country thanks to his frequent diatribes against diversity, immigration, and multiculturalism."

"Although Carlson flirts with white identity politics, particularly on the topic of immigration, his real ideology isn’t white nationalism or even conservatism, at least in the sense that conservatism has come to be defined in America. More than anything, he espouses the Middle American radicalism that John Judis, writing in 2016, identified as the ideological core of Trumpism. Middle American radicals (MARs) are neither fully liberal nor conservative but a blend of the two, mixing populist economics and a hostility to big business with intense nationalism, right-wing positions on race and immigration, and a desire for strong presidential leadership. Their animating idea is that the broad (and implicitly white) middle of American society — those Carlson referred to, in a podcast interview with Ben Shapiro, as people with “100 IQs making 80 grand a year” — is besieged on two sides, by a corrupt elite above it and a grasping underclass below."

"Tucker and I agree on just about nothing, but he has always been kind to me, and a fun person to fight with. I wish him all the best."

"I think the thing that Tucker gets a knock for — that he doesn’t deserve — is this idea that he’s evolved and changed in some radical new direction. Tucker has always been that guy. He is legitimately that guy. He is not faking it. He comes by his beliefs and his convictions and even his tone of voice quite naturally. He is not putting it on."

"Tucker Carlson lambasted his fellow members of the right this week over their response to an ICE agent fatally shooting a woman in Minneapolis, accusing them of trying to score “political points” and failing to see Renee Good’s death “through a human lens.” “The 37-year-old was an American citizen and reportedly the mother of a kindergarten-aged child. Did we disagree with her views on immigration? Probably. But that shouldn’t matter,” a recent edition of Carlson’s newsletter read. “Her death is a tragedy, regardless of her partisan affiliations, ideological beliefs, or who pulled the trigger. A woman got shot in the face.” The right-wing broadcaster added that numerous conservatives criticized the left’s at-times insensitive response to the recent killing of activist Charlie Kirk, and claimed “violence around the world is desensitizing Americans to violence at home,” pointing to the recent U.S. incursion in Venezuela and American support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. Carlson’s nonpartisan tone surprised some on the left, including former Obama administration official and podcaster Jon Favreau. “Somehow, Tucker Carlson had a far more humane reaction to Good's death than JD Vance,” Favreau wrote on X."

"Tucker Carlson is attempting to stay the course amid an advertiser exodus from his Fox News program because of his racist commentary. Carlson had been a mouthpiece for white supremacy, and since being promoted to a prime-time slot on Fox, he has elevated fringe “alt-right” grievances into mainstream media."

"That man's a beast; who else could fill an entire show each night, asking questions that Google could easily answer?"

"When you look at what Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence — very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that we have to be willing to contend with."

""I couldn't care less about what this talking inferiority complex has to say, but I do feel for the women and survivors in his life who now see they wouldn't be believed or safe with him...Many survivors of assault don't tell family, friends, etc bc of how they see others treated"

"According to Tucker, "dismantling the system of oppression" means "dismantling the entire american economy and system of governement". Now, did he inadvertently make a nuanced point about how systemic oppression is definitionally baked into every level and facet of that very same system? Yeah, yes he did. Am I'm going to give him credit for doing that? FUCK NO, especially not when this is what he said next."

"For Tucker, it seems that Western civilization is somehow both the mighty and essential bedrock upon which all modern human existence is built, and also a delicate house of cards that will collapse if you so much as look at it wrong."

"As tempting as it is to dismiss the controversy that follows Tucker every week as one more artifact of our outrage culture, it's important to remember that what Tucker is saying is fucking outrageous."

"Not gonna lie, it’s kinda fun watching a racist fool like this weeping about my presence in Congress,"

"As much as people are rightly laying responsibility for much of the philosophy and rhetoric that clearly motivated the El Paso killer at the feet of the president, it's important to remember where Trump gets many of his talking points: Fox News. Anyone who has tuned into their evening lineup over the past couple of years knows that the language in the shooter's online screed could have come from the mouths of any number of the network's stars. But the only one who has been spouting the specific ideological mix that motivated the killer is Tucker Carlson."

"Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing "populism" of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)"

"He has no intellectual understanding of the white supremacist movement. He's simply an old-school racist without any need for an underlying philosophy to justify it."

"One of my recent analyses contains more than 140 examples of when Tucker Carlson has relied on white nationalists and anti-Semitic tropes in his programming. One of the most prominent ways this manifests is an obsession with racial demographics, and how they are changing in the United States. Tucker Carlson is obsessed with "cultural preservation." There is an entire international far-right movement that echoes such sentiments. Carlson is also constantly fear-mongering about immigrants and blaming every possible problem on the individual choices of immigrants, as opposed to systemic institutions that perpetuate poverty and racism and which impact all people in the United States."

"Tucker Carlson has built his career over the last decade on the inherent authority which comes with being on television. He can use his platform to mainstream white nationalist or white supremacist talking points and ideas that his audience otherwise would not be privy to. Tucker Carlson has managed to pervert the privilege with comes with being on television into an opportunity to mainstream white nationalism.What Tucker is doing is not abstract. Mainstreaming these talking points puts vulnerable communities under direct threat of physical and material harm. The FBI has documented a rise in hate crimes since Trump's campaign and through to the third year of his presidency. There have been massacres targeting Muslims, black people and Jewish people in churches, mosques and synagogues. There is a real life-and-death consequence from the unfettered white nationalism on Fox News, the No. 1 cable news network in the country."

"With all due respect to my colleague, Tucker Carlson, what grown man wants to look like he was dressed up by his mother?"

"I know somebody else who‘s fascinating. I grew up with him, knowing him as the fifth Beatle. You know him as Tucker Carlson."

"I'm hearing, it’s shocking to me, that his numbers actually are far outpacing anything Megyn Kelly’s ever done over there at 9 o’clock . . . A lot of people were concerned when Megyn Kelly left that the numbers would go down, but they’ve actually gone up."

"The Republican Party has grown more racially and religiously homogeneous and its politics more dependent on manufacturing threats to the status of white Christians. This is why Trump frequently and falsely implies that Americans were afraid to say "Merry Christmas" before he was elected, and why Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham warn Fox News viewers that nonwhite immigrants are stealing America. For both the Republican Party and conservative media, wielding power and influence depends on making white Americans feel threatened by the growing political influence of those who are different from them."

"data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus...That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, "It hasn't been the disaster that we feared"...The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later...Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson's words, "mindless and authoritarian," a "weird kind of arbitrary fascism." To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract. (p 235-6)"

"It definitely is not. Bye-bye Tucker Carlson! #BlackLivesMatter."

"Our acquaintance, the host of Fox News Tucker Carlson, obviously has his own interests⁠—but lately, more and more often, they're in tune with our own."

"I wonder how long it will take before Tucker Carlson is put into prison as a Russian agent."

"Carlson: I do think you’re more fun on your show. Just my opinion."

"Jon Stewart: You know what’s interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show."

"Oprah Winfrey: You caused a media storm by calling Crossfire host Tucker Carlson a dick when you went on his show last year. Do you regret that?"

"Jon Stewart: I regret losing my patience. That's about it. But calling him a dick? Not really. I was calling that guy who was on that show right there a dick—I don't pretend to know Tucker as a person. But I regret going on air as tired as I was and not being more articulate with what I wanted to say."

"Carlson is dangerous because he has a cultlike following who believe his nightly rants. I would love to see the Murdochs put decency above dollars and remove him from the airwaves. But it's important to remember what Carlson is: nothing more than an outrage machine. What he offers is not political commentary. It's Fox-approved nonsense meant to juice ratings — and it works."

"Tucker Carlson was at one time the most watched cable news presenter in the States until he was sacked from Fox News. [...] On 9 February, Carlson, now freelance, interviewed Vladimir Putin in Moscow. What you got was a sometimes surreal but most often extremely boring encounter in which the Russian president lectured the far-right American television personality on abstruse bits of Russian history that set out his junk case that Ukraine belonged to Russia. Putin talked rubbish but Carlson let him get away with it. [...] The interview lasted two hours but Carlson failed to mention the fate of Russia's most famous political prisoner once. Is it possible that Putin banked Carlson's lack of interest in Navalny and steeled him to have him murdered a week later? I believe it is. [...] I struggle with this. I struggle with how someone as fluent as Carlson could be so wittingly ignorant of the succession of people critical of Putin who have ended up dead. I struggle with knowing the torture Navalny suffered in the Russian gulag, that his lawyer was so shocked on seeing her client's face gone grey, but that Carlson, given a two-hour slot with the man responsible for the killings of so many, with the man ultimately responsible for creating Navalny's airless isolation cell, could not be bothered to mention his name. It is as if Tucker Carlson is Moscow's creature."

"It’s true you have better hair than I do, but I get more pussy than you do."

"[The] 'general tenor’ of the show [...] should ... inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not "stating actual facts" about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in "exaggeration" and "nonliteral commentary." ... [G]iven Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer "arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism"’ about the statements he makes."

"Well, I’m employed and Tucker really isn’t anymore"

"Fox News host Tucker Carlson can congratulate himself for the sentiment coming from the White House. Last week, Carlson apparently decided that the discussion on immigration featured an insufficient amount of racism and hate. So he attacked Omar, who arrived in the United States at the age of 12, for having the temerity to point out that this country doesn’t always live up to its own lofty ideals. Folks who go into the news business dream of leaving a mark . . . As for Carlson, he’s making his mark by inspiring racist tweets."

"Tucker Carlson and Michael Brendan Dougherty and a lot of Republicans have something in common with Walter Duranty’s clip file and the underplumbed Russian countryside: They’re all full of s—."

"I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself."

"Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest."

"I love the flesh. I'm a pagan. “Who are they who speak evil of the clay? The very stars are made of clay like mine!”"

"Life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do."

"The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances."

"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog."

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."

"Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well."

"Age is never so old as youth would measure it."

"There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge."

"He lacked the wisdom, and the only way for him to get it was to buy it with his youth; and when wisdom was his, youth would have been spent buying it."

"Fiction pays best of all and when it is of fair quality is more easily sold. A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration. Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible - if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.) Humour is the hardest to write, easiest to sell, and best rewarded... Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it."

"Such is my outlook. I look forward to a time when man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day. And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some Frenchman has said, "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.""

"...men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost."

"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move."

"But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come."

"He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive."

"These women, capable of the most sublime emotions, of the tenderest sympathies, were openmouthed and screaming. They wanted to live, they were helpless, likes rats in a trap, and they screamed."

""The cap'n is Wolf Larsen, or so men call him. I never heard his other name. But you better speak soft with him. He is mad this morning. The mate-" But he did not finish. The cook had glided in."

"My first thought was that a man who had come through a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than I received."

"I only remember one part of the service," he said, "and that is 'And the body shall be cast into the sea'. So cast it in."

"Against the wall, near the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with books. I glanced over them, noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De Quincey. There were scientific works too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall, Proctor, and Darwin."

"It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality. At once he became an enigma."

"Hist, now, between you an' meself and the stanchion there, this Wolf Larsen is a regular devil, an' the Ghost'll be a hell ship like she's always been since he had hold iv her."

"Wolf - tis what he is. He's not blackhearted like some men. 'Tis no heart he has at all. Wolf. just Wolf, tis what he is. D'ye wonder he's well named?"

"Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds of rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. The supply is too large."

"He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss."

"My vision is clear and far. I could almost believe in God. But" - and his voice changed and the light went out of his face - "what is this condition in which I find myself? This joy of living? This exultation of life? This inspiration, I may well call it? It comes when there is nothing wrong with one's digestion, when the stomach is in trim and and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well."

"Concerning his own rages, I am convinced that they are not real, that they are sometimes experiments, but that in the main they are the habits of a pose or attitude he has seen fit to take toward his fellowman."

"The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise."

"He was not immoral, but merely unmoral."

"And through it all, calm and impassive, leaning on his elbow and gazing down, Wolf Larsen seemed lost in a great curiosity. This wild stirring of yeasty life, this terrific revolt and defiance of matter that moved, perplexed and interested him."

"Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods?"

"The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right."

"It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled Ruth. Not only were they new to her, and contrary to her own beliefs, but she always felt in them germs of truth that threatened to unseat or modify her own convictions. Had she been fourteen instead of twenty-four, she might have been changed by them; but she was twenty-four, conservative by nature and upbringing, and already crystallized into the cranny of life where she had been born and formed. It was true, his bizarre judgments troubled her in the moments they were uttered, but she ascribed them to his novelty of type and strangeness of living, and they were soon forgotten. Nevertheless, while she disapproved of them, the strength of their utterance, and the flashing of eyes and earnestness of face that accompanied them, always thrilled her and drew her toward him. She would never have guessed that this man who had come from beyond her horizon, was, in such moments, flashing on beyond her horizon with wider and deeper concepts. Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon until it was identified with hers."

"Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked her and made it clear that more remodelling was necessary. Hers was that common insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their color, creed, and politics are best and right and that other human creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than they. It was the same insularity of mind that made the ancient Jew thank God he was not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary god-substituting to the ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire to shape this man from other crannies of life into the likeness of the men who lived in her particular cranny of life."

"Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write."

"Then one can't make a living out of poetry?" "Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes."

"Let beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty into gold? Anyway, you can’t."

"I am. I was. I am not. I never am."

"There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.... The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken."

"I was five years old the first time I got drunk."

"Men do not knowingly drink for the effect alcohol produces on the body. What they drink for is the brain-effect; and if it must come through the body, so much the worse for the body."

"The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the kick."

"How different was the real Jack London from the mechanical, bell-button socialist of the Kempton-Wace Letters! Here was youth, exuberance, throbbing life. Here was the good comrade, all concern and affection. He exerted himself to make our visit a glorious holiday. We argued about our political differences, of course, but there was in Jack nothing of the rancour I had so often found in the socialists I had debated with. But, then, Jack London was the artist first, the creative spirit to whom freedom is the breath of life. As the artist he did not fail to see the beauties of anarchism, even if he did insist that society would have to pass through socialism before reaching the higher stage of anarchism. In any case it was not Jack London's politics that mattered to me. It was his humanity, his understanding of and his feeling with the complexities of the human heart."

"Two days before he died I read him a story by Jack London -- the book is lying now on the table in his room -- Love of Life. This is a powerful story...Ilyich (Lenin) was carried away by this story. Next day he asked me to read another London story. However, with Jack London the powerful is mixed with the exceedingly weak. The second story was altogether different -- one that preached [a] bourgeois moral: the captain of a ship promises the owner that he will sell the cargo of grain at a good price; he sacrifices his life in order to keep his word. Ilyich laughed and waved his hand."

"London’s undoubted socialism is undermined by the most appalling racism."

""Take me this way: a stray guest, a bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings through a brief moment of your life--a rude and blundering bird, used to large airs and great spaces, unaccustomed to the amenities of confined existence." So he wrote in a letter to me dated Oakland, December 21, 1899, in the twenty-fourth year of his life. A bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings not only through my life but through life itself, and not for a brief moment but for eternity. For who shall say when that of wonder and beauty which was Jack London will pass from the earth? Who that ever knew him can forget him, and how will life ever forget one who was so indissolubly a part of her? He was youth, adventure, romance. He was a poet and a social revolutionist. He had a genius for friendship. He loved greatly and was greatly beloved...He is the outgrowth of the struggle and the suffering of the Old Order, and he is the strength and the virtue of all its terrible and criminal vices. He came out of the Abyss in which millions of his generation and the generation preceding him throughout time have been hopelessly lost. He rose out of the Abyss, and he escaped from the Abyss to become as large as the race and to be identified with the forces that shape the future of mankind...Later, Jack became the most mellow of thinkers, as passionately promulgating his new ideas as he had then assailed them. He now believed in romantic love, he had helped in the agitation for woman suffrage and was jubilant over its success in California. He was now an absolute internationalist and anti-militarist...He had come far --he had come out on the other side of everything he had before adhered to, as all who knew him were convinced that he would...He lived not only in the wide spaces of the earth, under her tropic suns and in her white frozen silences, with her children of happiness and with her miserable ones, but he lived in the thought always of life and death, and in the timeless and boundaryless struggle of international socialism."

"He wrote an essay called "What Life Means to Me" which takes its place with Kropotkin's "Appeal to the Young" and Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," and its closing sentence rings with his faith in the rise of the common man. "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.""

"The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance."

"Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it."

"To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual—and hence social—confidence while undermining that of women."

"The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it."

"For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. […] Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank female torsos in women’s magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman."

"Just as 'beauty' is not related to sex, neither is it related to love. Even having it does not bestow love on a woman, though the beauty myth claims that it must. It is because 'beauty' is so hostile to love that many beautiful women are so cynical about men. […] The beautiful woman is excluded forever from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love her 'for herself alone.' A hellish doubt inheres in the myth that makes impersonal 'beauty' a prerequisite for love: Where does love go when beauty vanishes? And, if a woman cannot be loved 'for herself alone,' for whom is she being loved?"

"What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her 'beauty' his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive."

"A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. […] Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one."

"The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her 'beauty.' Her reproductive value, as the 'aesthetic' value of her face and body today, 'came to be seen as a sacred trust, one that she must constantly guard in the interest of her race.'"

"Health makes good propaganda. “'Proof' that women's activities outside the home are detrimental to the health and welfare of themselves, their families and the country as a whole” lent impetus, writes Ann Oakley, to the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. The ovaries were seen as collective property rather than the woman's own business, as the face and body outline are seen today. Who can argue with health?"

"Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria."

"You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all."

"I was completely dumbfounded but I actually had this vision of . . . of Jesus, and I'm sure it was Jesus. [...] But it wasn't this crazy theological thing; it was just this figure who was the most perfected human being - full of light and full of love. And completely accessible. Any of us could be like that. There was light coming out of him holographically, simply because he was unclouded. But any of us could become that as human beings."

"On a mystical level, it was complete joy and happiness and there were tears running down my face. On a conscious level, when I came out of it I was absolutely horrified because I'm Jewish. This was not the thing I'm supposed to have confront me."

"[Experiencing writers' block, Wolf sought specialist assistance. Being induced in "a light meditative state" (Wolf), she was required to descent downstairs in a relaxation technique.] I opened the door and there he was [...] I wasn't myself in this visual experience [...] I was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to him [Jesus] and feeling feelings I'd never felt in my lifetime, of a 13-year-old boy being with an older male who he really loves and admires and loves to be in the presence of. It was probably the most profound experience of my life. I haven't talked about it publicly [before]."

"Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. […] You are not taught—and it is a disgrace that you aren't—that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see."

"[[w:Alex Cohen|[Alex] Cohen]]: There's never a line in this book that says George W. Bush is just like Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin, but there's enough that after a while there definitely seems to be the air of some comparisons happening. Isn't that a bit extreme to compare our president to these historical figures? Ms Wolf: Well, again, I stick very rigorously to the evidence. You had the Nazis unloaded coffins at night; we saw coffins being unloaded at night. They talked about enhanced interrogation, meaning torture; Karl Rove talked about enhanced interrogation, meaning torture. They said, you know, we've got to invade Czechoslovakia because it's a station ground for terrorists. And we said we've got to invade Iraq, a country we're not at war with, because they are torturing their ethnic minorities, it's a station ground for terrorists and they hate our freedoms. I don't need to draw an analogy. The analogies are there."

"JS [Justine Sharrock]: How is your comparison of Obama to Hitler any different from someone at a Tea Party holding up a placard of Obama with a Hitler mustache? NW: Those signs are offensive. If only the Holocaust was just about imposing health care on my people. Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now. The real fight isn't left or right but between forces of democracy across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny."

"The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right."

"It was amazing to go to Belfast, which does not yet have 5G, and feel the earth, sky, air, human experience, feel the way it did in the 1970s. Calm, still peaceful, natural, restful."

"So what can be done? Well, first of all, I can't believe that I'm saying this - a lifelong former Democrat and the child of hippies - but thank God for the Second Amendment. Because one reason the United States is not, you know, entirely enslaved like Australia or Shanghai or Canada, in many ways – we're relatively freer compared to those countries – is that we have, you know, millions of owners of guns. And I'm a peaceful person, this should not be taken out of context, but it is harder to subjugate an armed population. And this is why our Founders gave us the Second Amendment, for exactly times like these. They knew that it was harder to subjugate an armed population. But, you know, may that be the worst case scenario. I really hope that it doesn't devolve into civil war, which is really what the next thing is in history when you have an occupying force, which is what the WHO will be, you know, by next week."

"It was the doctors in pre-Nazi Germany in the early thirties who were co-opted by the National Socialists and sent to do exactly what we're seeing kind of replaying now. It was the medical organisations in the early thirties who were emboldened to be the arbiters of, you know, "life worthy of life, life unworthy of life"’, um, and to, kind of, medicalise and pathologise dissent or difference. So we're seeing wholesale purchasing of the medical establishment in the United States, in Britain and in countries around the world to do things much more serious."

"She is furthermore a serial espouser of mad conspiracy theories, insisting on their plausibility in the face of overwhelming evidence. In 2014 alone she managed to suggest that the Isis beheading victims were really actors, that the Scottish referendum had been rigged and that US personnel sent to Africa to help contain the ebola outbreak were really there as part of a plot to militarise the continent. Last year she joined the "chemtrail" conspiracists who believe that aircraft condensation trails in the sky are evidence of a secret government attempt at "geoengineering"."

"Wolf’s 1991 Fire with Fire – her call for a realpolitik in which 'sisterhood and capital' might be allies – misfired in Britain, partly because British feminism does retain a visceral if complex connection to political radicalism, to system-changing not tinkering."

"Wolf has tweeted that she overheard an Apple employee (who had attended a "top secret demo") describing vaccine technology that can enable time travel. She has posited that vaccinated people's urine and feces should be separated in our sewage system until their contaminating effect on our drinking water has been studied. She fears that while pro-vaccine propaganda has emphasized the danger the unvaccinated pose to the vaccinated, we have overlooked how toxic the vaccinated might be."

"Wolf’s story is instructive. The Beauty Myth, her 1990 blockbuster about the toll taken on women by the upward ratchet of unreasonable beauty standards, made her famous. In retrospect, the seeds of her intellectual decline were already present in that book, which contained both major statistical errors and a conspiratorial subtext that painted the influence of patriarchy as a deliberate plot. In the ensuing years, her work grew increasingly sloppy and absurd, until her reputation collapsed altogether in 2019 with the publication of Outrages."

"In the decade since Occupy, Wolf has connected the dots between an almost unfathomably large number of disparate bits of fact and fantasy. She has floated unsubstantiated speculations about the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden ("not who he purports to be," hinting that he is an active spy). About US troops sent to build field hospitals in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak (not an attempt to stop the disease's spread, but a plot to bring it to the United States to justify "mass lockdowns" at home). About ISIS beheadings of US and British captives (possibly not real murders, but staged covert ops by the US government starring crisis actors). About the results of the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence, which the "no" vote won by a margin of more than 10 percentage points (potentially fraudulent, she claimed, based on an assortment of testimonies she collected). About the Green New Deal (not the demands of grassroots climate-justice movements, she said, but yet another elite-orchestrated cover for "fascism"). She has even spotted plots and conspiracies in oddly shaped clouds."

"To see Naomi Wolf, that histrionic proponent of the third wave, pop up to demand that the women accusing Julian Assange of sexual assault and rape be named (surely they have already been shamed) is a logical conclusion of this deal. It is a dead end. Much of Wolf's work is privileged narcissism dressed up as struggle. The Beauty Myth did not have an original thought in it, but never mind, it remains the only feminist text read by many. Wolf and many of her contemporaries muddled the personal with the political to such a degree it is embarrassing. Wolf was snapped up by the media as she was beautiful – as though feminists couldn't be. Greer and Steinem were lookers, weren't they? Wolf's argument now about the anonymity of accusers in rape trials arrives on these shores a little after the Lib Dems dropped this peculiar proposal, which was never in their manifesto anyway."

"Wolf actually compared him to Oscar Wilde. The similarity is that they were both in solitary confinement. Practically the same person then? Of course, Wolf has every right to think what she likes about Assange's accusers – and to change her mind as she did about abortion – but what kind of feminism is she now espousing? I find it very difficult to know."

"The labor movement has long been struggling in the U.S., as fewer workers join unions and as high-profile organizing drives, like a June attempt to unionize Volkswagen employees in Tennessee, fall short. But American workers, feeling left behind as the economy grows around them, are joining together to demand a bigger slice of the pie. On Sept. 16, 50,000 workers walked off the job in their first strike since 2007, protesting idled plants and low wages. Nearly 8,000 Marriott workers went on strike in eight cities last year, while 31,000 supermarket employees in the Northeast did the same in early 2019. In the past year, tens of thousands of teachers walked out of their classrooms to demand better pay and funding. In all, nearly half a million workers participated in strikes and work stoppages last year, the most since 1986. The labor disruptions show no sign of abating."

"The recent labor unrest is in part fueled by uneven . While companies are prospering and the stock market hovers near all-time highs, the benefits haven't been felt by many workers, who are often stuck in temporary jobs with no benefits. Paradoxically, the strong economy also emboldens workers. [...] When more jobs are available and unemployment is low, people feel more confident in demanding better pay and benefits. [...] Many nonunion workers also want change. Those in the , many of whom are considered- s and thus not eligible to unionize or receive benefits, have been demanding higher pay and steadier hours."

"Though some protections exist for people struggling financially during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to the stimulus package signed into law on March 27, they largely ignore those who were already on the edge of financial ruin. The CARES Act has paused federal student loan debt payments and payments on federally-backed mortgages, and various cities and states have suspended evictions. But few states have stopped creditors from moving ahead with , repossessions, and attachments (one-time seizures of bank accounts). This means that in many cases, the pandemic will tip people [...] into an economic abyss from which it will be difficult or impossible to recover. Even the one-time $1,200 stimulus payments promised to millions in the U.S. can be garnished by financial institutions in many states."

"Garnishments can occur after a creditor obtains a court judgement against someone who owes them money. Some people are not aware of the court hearings, often because they have not been informed by the creditor and don’t show up to argue their cases. [...] But once a court gives the go-ahead, creditors are free to take a portion of a person's wages from their . A separate order allows them to seize money from an individual's bank account. requires that debtors are left with at least $217.50 a week in take-home pay—for a family of four, that's less than half the federal poverty level. Some states protect more income from creditors, but creditors aren't limited to targeting money. They are free to seize cars, even if a debtor needs a vehicle to get to work to earn the money to pay off their debts."

"About one-third of Americans have debts in collection, according to the . Total reached an all-time high in the last quarter of 2019, at $14.5 trillion, according to the . Unemployment checks are supposed to be protected from creditors, but even they are at risk of seizure once they are deposited into bank accounts. To protect their benefits, debtors must file a court motion, which is challenging in scores of jurisdictions where the coronavirus has closed most courts. People who do succeed in filing motions are being told they must wait weeks and sometimes months for their cases to be heard. In the meantime, the funds remain frozen."

"Garnishments are also coming from the , even though Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced on March 25 that the department would halt collection actions and wage garnishments for 60 days beginning March 30."

"[T]hroughout his adult life Trump sought out—and worked closely with—more than a score of criminals, including Mafia associates, Russian mob associates, violent felons, con artists, swindlers, and most significant of all, the embezzler and mob associate Joseph Weichselbaum, a thrice-convicted felon. ...[W]hen Trump was the big man in Atlantic City, he got his helicopters to bring his high-rollers in and out of town through a company formed by Weichselbaum. ...Spy ...reported that Weichselbaum ...personally piloted the Trumps [in the Ivana, Trump’s personal helicopter]. ...Weichselbaum also had another business: importing drugs from Colombia..."

"By deciding not to implement a rule to reduce the chances of truck drivers and train engineers' falling asleep on the job, Trump's Transportation Department has put at risk the lives of those workers as well as the lives of families traveling on our nations highways and trains. And Trump appointed to the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch, a judge who ruled that a company has the right to fire a worker who chose not to freeze to death on the job."

"Almost two cents of every dollar reported as losses one year by everyone in the United States, were reported by Donald Trump. ...He's a terrible business man. His business model is not to get an enterprise, to nurture it, to grow it, to make it more profitable over time. His business model is the same as a mob bust-out. ...[S]queeze all the cash out... don't pay your vendors, try to cheat as best you can your employees, don't pay the bankers... Trump once said, "I borrowed money knowing I wouldn't pay it back," and then leave the carcass and go on to the next deal. ...Trump's business model is to rip off one person after another who gets involved with him, thinking he will make them wealthy, while he is destroying their wealth."

"No serious coverage of taxes is possible without reading the journal Tax Notes published by , a nonprofit enterprise whose beneficiaries include reporters."

"[T]axes are at the core of our democracy."

"If you have heard about companies using a Bermuda mailbox to escape American taxes or that the IRS audits the poor more than the rich or that Enron paid no taxes or that executives have amassed massive untaxed fortunes or that the retired chief of General Electric had a free corporate jet, then you have already had a taste for some of the more shocking stories that I have come across. ...This is not just about facts, figures and statistics."

"[S]ound bytes of politicians in both parties bear as much connection to the reality of the tax system as my... grandson's belief in Santa."

"[O]ur tax system now levies the poor, the middle class and even the upper middle class to subsidize the rich..."

"In every place where there is no real tax system, such as Honduras or Afghanistan, there is no widespread wealth."

"[T]he majority of Americans are being duped into supplementing the incomes and extravagant lifestyles of the rich and powerful. ...[O]ur current tax system is manipulated for profit by the wealthy and well positioned."

"Democrats and Republicans alike have turned the tax system into a vehicle not just to finance government but to finance social change. For the last three decades, it... has been weighing down the already deep pockets of the super rich while just weighing down everyone else."

"A government that takes 90 cents out of each dollar above a threshold, as... in the Eisenhower years, is deciding to limit the wealth that people can accumulate... Likewise, a government that taxes the poor on their first dollar of wages, as the United States does with the Social Security and Medicare taxes, is deciding to limit or eliminate the ability of those at the bottom... to save... and improve their lot in life."

"Congress lets business owners, investors and landlords play by one set of rules, which are filed with opportunities to hide income, fabricate deductions and reduce taxes. Congress requires wage earners to operate under another, much harsher set of rules in which every dollar of income... is reported to the government, and taxes are withheld... to make sure [they] pay in full."

"Members of Congress routinely vote on tax bills that they have never read, much less understood even on a superficial level. Sanford J. Schlesinger... says that "there hasn't been a member of Congress with a comprehensive understanding of the laws since ...""

"For almost three decades corporate profits have been growing one third faster that corporate taxes."

"Many journalists rely for expert quotes on a dozen well-financed nonprofits that exist in Washington to promote policies that primarily benefit their rich donors."

"The super rich... largely control what the government knows about their incomes. And their friends in Congress have slashed budgets for inspecting the tax returns..."

"Just as there is an underground economy of gardeners and handymen and petty merchants who get paid in cash and pay little or no taxes, there is also an underground economy among the super rich that lets them understate their true income and overstate their tax deductions."

"For... the political donor class, the system is being remade to serve their interests while disguising the changes as benefits for every American."

"[T]he Internal Revenue Service in 2003 released its first public analysis of tax returns filed by the 400 highest income Americans... from 1992 to 2000. ...the federal income tax burden on Americans overall rose by 18 percent, it fell by 16 percent for the top 400, whose incomes soared."

"[I]n 1997... Congress passed what its sponsors promoted as a tax cut for the middle class... Buried in that law were many tax breaks for the rich... notably a sharp reduction... on long term capital gains, the source of two thirds of the incomes of the top 400. ...For years the IRS found big tax evaders by looking into people whose reported income did not seem sufficient to support their lifestyle... But the 1997 law stopped such inquiries. ...Lee Shepherd ...said the law "should be called the mobsters and drug dealers tax relief act of 1997." ...1997 cuts for the rich were not enough ...Under ...President Bush in 2001 ...their income going to taxes would slip further ..."

"After the Sixteenth Amendment... the federal government... enacted a regime to tax incomes, gifts and estates... with the explicit promise that the basic means of sustaining life would not be taxed. The original tax regime applied only to the economic elite, to... "surplus" incomes. ...[I]ncome from capital was taxed more heavily ...in the belief that it was morally offensive to take more from money earned by the sweat of one's brow ..."

"To pay for World War I... [t]he estate tax and the gift tax, which apply to wealth, were expanded and the income tax came to apply to a larger, but still minute, percentage of Americans."

"While only a minority of people was taxed during World War II, the politicians got a taste of the huge revenues... by expanding the tax base. After the war... the income tax was steadily expanded until it applied to most Americans..."

"Inflation, combined with the end of real growth in wages beginning in 1973, created... "bracket creep" that moved people into higher tax brackets even if... real incomes were unchanged."

"[L]ess than a century after its adoption, the tax system is being turned on its head. Since at least 1983 it has become the explicit, but unstated, policy... to let the richest Americans pay a smaller portion of their incomes in taxes and to defer more of their taxes... a stealth tax cut, while collecting more in taxes from... the middle class."

"Throughout his writings Smith warned of the damage done when government interferes in the market by guaranteeing profits or by handing out gifts. This damage can exceed that caused when government taxes unwisely or imposes rules that needlessly obstruct commerce."

"[F]or the past quarter century, policies adopted in the name of Adam Smith... that supposedly strengthen the invisible hand guiding the market, have weighed down our economy while simultaneously stuffing the pockets of those among the rich and powerful who solicited them or... were just standing in the right place at a lucrative time. This is our story, not of one free lunch, but of the many banquets at which billions and billions of your dollars are being served to the richest among us."

"For the bottom 90 percent of Americans... the vast majority, annual income has been on a long, mostly downhill slide for more than three decades. ...Even with three decades of economic expansion, the vast majority has to get by on about $75 less each week than... a generation earlier..."

"Of each dollar people earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5¢... the greatest share of income pie since 1929, just before the collapsed into the Great Depression."

"This growing concentration of income at the top... resembles the distribution of income found in three other major countries: Brasil, Mexico, and Russia. ...They all have growing, and seemingly intractable, poverty at the bottom. ...These four countries are also societies in which adults have the right to vote, but real political power is wielded by a relatively narrow, and rich, segment of the population."

"Rewriting the economic rules... in the past few decades has been done under the banner of "" and its promise that less government means more economic growth. The term itself is a misnomer. No society is free from regulation. Everything has rules..."

"In the past quarter century... new rules... have weakened and even destroyed consumer protections while increasing the power of the already powerful. ...[T]he rules affecting who wins and who loses economically have been quietly and subtly rewritten."

"The rich and their lobbyists have taken firm control of the levers of power in Washington and state capitals while remaking the rules in their own interest. They have also imbued private organizations with the power to make rules that few outside the process understand. These same people... [are] the primary source of campaign donations that put politicians in office and keep them there."

"Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream that one day his four children would be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. ...Today we often value people less by their character than by the contents of their wallet. ...The pursuit of ever more financial zeros... has... produced a moral breakdown... twisting our culture and our values in ways that tear at the fabric of our society."

"[P]residents of companies have gone from apologizing when they had to lay off workers to boasting of the riches... obtained through mass firings. ...[I]nvestors ...owe their wealth ...to buying companies in deals that required destroying lives and careers"

"To the addicted, money is like cocaine: Too much is never enough."

"At the same time that the rules have been rewritten to favor the already rich, new rules have been written that ensure harsh treatment for the poor... Coping with the foul effects of poverty costs us trillions of dollars a year... Poverty wastes minds and spirits, robbing all of us of opportunity. ...It makes us less trusting, less willing to see ourselves as one people..."

"Usury laws that protected consumers against rapacious lenders existed until 1978. Now they are gone because of a Supreme Court decision. ...[O]ur government has set forth onerous new rules that reward those who prey on the poor. ...These lenders, or their fronts, can now charge rates and impose penalties that were illegal, even criminal, a generation ago."

"The result? In the past 25 years, one American family in seven has sought refuge in federal bankruptcy court. Exhaustive research by Elizabeth Warren... and her associates... has proven that the vast majority of people seek refuge... after any two of three events combine: divorce, job loss, or major medical problems."

"The impulse to increase profits can blind men to risk, especially when those at risk are strangers. Society imposes rules on corporate behavior to protect public safety in the face of baser impulses. These rules require enforcement..."

"In Britain only about 18 people a year die at rail crossings. ...Even taking into account that America has five times as many people... the death rate at crossings is four times that of Britain."

"Since the imperfect rules of the marketplace actually reward dangerous risk taking, the only thing that could prevent this lethal gamble is effective government regulation."

"[R]ailroads are by far the most deadly form of commercial transportation in the country. ...Measure deaths by distance traveled... and trains are 52 times more deadly than trucks. Trains kill 130 people per 100 million miles traveled, compared with 2.5 deaths in big-rig truck accidents and 1.9 deaths in plane crashes."

"The government agencies, without nearly enough money to oversee safety... write superficial reports, and when it comes to accidents at rail crossings, they thoroughly investigate only 4 out of 3,000 cases."

"Economists have a term for situations in which someone gets rewards but has little or no incentive to avoid risk: a '. ...Those who occupy the executive suite and gamble millions of dollars on the lives of others are rarely seen as engaged in morally hazardous conduct. Yet reward without risk is a form of moral hazard that blinds us to the consequences of our acts."

"In 2006 the trade deficit with China reached $232 billion. ...more than $60 per month for every man, woman and child in America. ...In 2004 when the trade deficit... was $161 billion, it was... more than the $126 billion of income taxes paid by the bottom 75% of Americans."

"In 2006... China, Japan, Canada, and Mexico—accounted for 60 percent of our worldwide trade deficit of $764 billion."

"A lot of people look at the world as they're born into it and assume, like Dr. Pangloss that it must needs be that this is the way that God intended the world to be. It is nowhere written down that we will have our liberties, that we will have the freedoms that we have come to know."

"There is a never-ending struggle against the need for the state to be strong enough to be functional and to have a civilized society, and at the same time, its desire to crush those who stand in the way."

"Prior to our Constitutional Bill of Rights... the historic problem for the inconvenient individual was predation by the state. If the king doesn't like you, throw him in , [if] the king wants your daughter when she's a virgin and you don't want to hand her over, cut the guy's throat."

"[O]ne of the great geniuses of our Constitution was the recognition that the liberties of the people depended on a certain set of standards. ' being a crucial one, the ability to speak your mind, the ability to follow or not follow religion as you chose... [W]hen we put these in place, we had this flourishing society. It's not perfect. We've got lots of things wrong in our society. Government has problems... but there is no civilization, there is no liberty, without government."

"[T]o the extent that people have said... "I don't care what the government's doing..." politicians fall under the influence of other people... in our age they have fallen heavily under the influence of their [political] donors. ...We have a government that is increasingly estranged from the needs of the people, and focused on the needs of the moneyed people and large corporations."

"I want to do things that are beyond the scope of the daily newspaper, as good as it is and as important as it is... beyond the scope of even a great newspaper like The New York Times."

"One of the criticisms I've... gotten is "You're a reporter, what are you doing writing with a moral tone?" ...[Y]es, this is a book about political culture and morality. I cite , the Bible and as moral authorities in this book. ...Andrew Mellon says that people are more important than capital and people have to be thought of first, not capital... that's not our culture today. All throughout the Bible, the most frequently denounced evil is taking from the poor to give to the rich. The Bible tells us in both books that your society will come to ruin if you do this."

"Balzac said 200 years ago that "behind every great fortune lies a crime," but we know how to create wealth now: the Industrial Revolution created wealth, the and our ability to manipulate cyberspace, and to develop concepts and structures in mathematics, and elsewhere. We can create real wealth. So, per say, being wealthy is now not the result of taking from those with less; and yet this historic problem has come roaring back... under the guise of conservatism."

"Conservatism... means we take the things that we know work and we keep... and maintain them. ...[I]f you want to try something new... you're careful... you're cautious... you're skeptical of it. If it turns out it works we'll try incorporating that, but we have a great skepticism about doing that. Well, that's not what we got. We got radical ideas that no one else in the world is doing. ...[T]hese other countries are having fewer problems, and their middle class is better off, because they didn't do these radical things. They were in fact, conservative. Now the things they did, we might view as liberal, but they were conservative in hanging on to those things."

"[W]hat were we promised in 1980 when Ronald Reagan asked his famous question, "Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?" ...I'm here asking the question, "Are you better off than you were in 1980?" He said we'll have less taxes. ...Taxes [and government spending] as a share of the economy are the same as they were back then. ...[W]hat we've gotten instead is all this government debt."

"[A]ssuming that all the... interest on the federal debt is paid, just from the individual income tax, all the income taxes that you pay from January through the end of April, just go to pay interest on the national debt; and since 86% of federal tax revenues come from labor (and 14% from capital); that means that we explicitly have a policy now to tax labor [in order] to transfer [that revenue] to [privately held] capital."

"So we didn't get less government... that we were promised. Next we were told we should have deregulation. There's no such thing as deregulation. Everything has rules. ...What we got were new regulations... written by and the railroads and the banks, and they eliminated [or reduced] consumer protections. They took away enforcement of the existing laws. They benefited this political donor class, who were pursuing their own self-interest."

"I don't have any problem with people pursuing their own self-interest. It's just [that] there has not been a push-back from the rest of society, as we have seen unions, which helped push back, decline; and other areas where there was push-back, decline. The... churches were involved with this, and we've seen them decline."

"We were promised that... markets would provide solutions. A lot of my book is a defense of markets. The Supreme Court says a market is where independent parties, neither under duress or coercion, and with knowledge of the facts, come to an agreement on a price. That's not what a lot of our new markets do. We now have markets designed to thwart competition... Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market, in which there are lots of sellers, and smart consumers who can compare prices, and this drives prices down... to the lowest level at which businesses can continue to operate. We've replaced that, through government policies, with practices that artificially restrict competition... raise prices... inflate profits; all under the guise of conservatism, and "the markets will solve our problems.""

"Fundamentally I argue in Free Lunch what's happened is, that a narrow segment of our society, large corporations which are immortal and amoral... They're necessary, they're important, they are great producers of wealth, but there's reasons that you want to regulate and control entities that are both amoral; their purpose is to maximize return to capital, which is a perfectly good thing to do, but they have no other obligation... [T]hey are immortal. Unless they mess up in the marketplace they go on forever, unlike you and I... Unless we have rules that govern their conduct, they can do enormous damage to our society; and we have had a massive effort to collect subsidies from the government, to get rid of government employees and replace them with private sector workers who typically cost twice as much. So the federal work force has gone down... but the number of people who are paid by the federal government to work is going up; and the cost per... labor-hour is going up enormously. ...Unlike creating a bureaucracy ...empire-building bureaucrats, now you have a corporation that makes campaign contributions to encourage more of this ...and more contracts and... money flowing their direction."

"So all of the things we were promised, most... haven't happened. There have been some good things. Airfares have fallen... There have been some benefits. It is not black and white, but my focus is on these areas where we now have massive transfers of wealth and income from those with less, to the politically connected few. Billions and billions of dollars being handed up the ladder."

"The ... is... fundamental to the American Revolution and it is taught the wrong way in American schools. ...There's a wonderful book called The Boston Tea Party by Professor [Labaree]... where he... got the British records... and the American records. ...It was a protest against a ...a government tax favor to the politically connected friends of King George who owned this royal monopoly, The East India Company. They mismanaged it because... in a competitive environment managers who can't run the business are gotten rid of, or they go out of business. But in a monopoly you can mismanage for a long time, and the same thing with a and an , where there's a... scintilla of competition among a few firms. ...[T]hey were going to go bankrupt because they had all this tea that they couldn't sell, and they were going to replace a market in Boston... 7 out of 10 cups of tea drunk in November and December of 1773 were Dutch tea, but under this law that was being protested, there would be a monopoly, and only British tea could be drunk. ...[P]eople understood that ...would ...mean higher prices ...less competition ...If we have such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the country got started, then we're going to have fundamentally flawed policies that flow out of these myths."

"[A] lot of what I've been writing about in Free Lunch and... Perfectly Legal and the 13 years of stories I've been doing in The New York Times are about... a growing disconnect between our political and cultural mythology, and how the economy actually works. ...[A]ll societies have to operate from myths. You have to have a shorthand for your culture, but ours is getting disconnected from reality."

"[A] lot of people have looked around after 28 years, from when they were promised all these things by Ronald Reagan... [and] realized that for the bottom 90% of Americans incomes are unchanged... even though the country is more than twice as wealthy in real terms, and productivity per capita is up 70%; for every dollar the economy put out back then, per person, in real terms, it puts our $1.70 today. And they've said, "Where's the beef?" ...[T]hat disconnect is ...opening up an opportunity to get people to see what the government has done that's contrary to their interests, because Adam Smith said "Any policy that benefits the majority of the people must be a good thing for the society.""

"[The] only determinant of your economic life in 18th century France was how well you picked your parents. ...The functional equivalent of what would happen if we repealed the occurred, in that all capital and all land (and this was essentially an agrarian society) were tied up. Either the Church or trusts controlled so much that there was no movement..."

"One of the stories that I tell in Free Lunch when I talk about the hedge fund business in the United States and the hedge fund managers who pay taxes at the same rate as janitors... a 15% tax rate on their incomes... The average hedge fund manager in 2006, remember the hedge fund managers keep telling us that if you raise our taxes the whole economy be negatively affected, said that it was not fair to have them pay more than a 15% rate. Of course, school teachers and reporters pay 25% or 31%. Well-to-do Americans pay 35% and... the top hedge fund manager's average income was only $11 million... a week! But they can't afford the taxes."

"If you go... to the big stadiums where we are subsidizing commercial sports, $2 billion a year taxpayer subsidies to baseball, basketball, football and hockey. All the new facilities have these luxury boxes. Most of them are owned by companies, almost all of them are, which are a tax deductible expense. You want to buy a ticket to a baseball game, you pay with your after-tax dollar. People in the luxury box, this is a business expense because they're entertaining clients, and so you're subsidizing this because they're getting a deduction, and... the subsidy payments that you're making for these new stadiums are being used also to create private walkways, so that the wealthy that go to these boxes don't have to mingle with the likes of you and me, and we're the ones who are putting up the money so that they don't have to be with us!"

"The most widely read literature in Western Civilization is Jane Austen and her stories are about these young women... They're looking at these young men... "Oh, Mr. Darcey has 10,000... Mr. So & so has 5,000," and what they're talking about is... the British finance system in the 1700s and 1800s where wealthy people loaned... large amounts to the crown and were paid interest. ...All the crown had to do then was raise enough taxes from the poor and the middle class, to the extent there was one, to pay the interest. ...[W]hat have we been doing since 1980. Ronald Reagan came in saying he wanted a balanced budget. We last had a balanced budget under Richard Nixon. We have seen budget deficits grow enormously over the years to the point where the federal debt, not adjusted to inflation, was just under $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan came into office, and by the time George Bush leaves, it will be $10 trillion. ...Over $400 billion a year is just going to pay interest on the national debt. That means it's money we don't have for higher education, for infrastructure improvements so we don't have have bridges collapse and kill people in Minnesota when they're commuting home from work. So we don't have pinch points that are costing us billions and billions of dollars because we can't efficiently move goods around the country. We don't have it for all sorts of things that would grease the wheels of commerce and make us wealthier."

"This practice of borrowing is a practice that in the long run will make us less wealthy. The practice of spending money we don't have inherently, in the long run, has to make you less wealthy, unless you're spending it for things that add value to your society. So if you're borrowing to build... the Erie Canal, the Interstate Highway system, to educate young people so that their productive minds will make more value in the future, you're making an investment in the future. That's not what we're doing with our borrowing. We're... simply spending money we don't have today... transferring enormous amounts of money to big corporations and wealthy individuals."

"As taxpayers we gave one of Warren Buffet's companies, in 2006, an interest-free loan of $665 million dollars, and he only has to pay half of it back 28 years from now. ...Imagine ...you bought a house in 1980 at the price in 1980. Up until now [2009] you haven't made any payments on the house, and this year you have to pay half in the... dollars you agreed to back then, no adjustment for inflation. Do you think that alone might make you a wealthy man?"

", which did not pay taxes (I broke that story... about 7 or 8 years ago), owned ... and people paid close to $1 billion in their electric rates to cover its taxes. Money that never got to the government... by tax shelters and [through] other devices. When I wrote a story on this on the front page of The New York Times, the wrote a letter... they didn't say this wasn't true. They just said we're doing what the law allows."

"[T]he rules we've set in our society are redistributing incomes up. Our national myth is that we have this socialism policy that redistributes down. The reality of the data is that we are redistributing up, and... we don't have trickle-down economics... we have Amazon [river] up."

"Except for a handful of people, Peter Gosselin at the Los Angeles Times who's done some big series, and a few other reporters here and there, now and then, why is it that this issue of income redistribution and government taking from the many and giving to the few is not being reported widely. You are not reading about it in many, many, many newspapers around the country. I would think it would be one of the major things."

"When I became a reporter in the 60s in California, one of the very first lessons I learned was, your supposed to be watchdogging the government.... looking out for the taxpayers. If the politicians want to spend more money, why? What's it for? Why am I going to give up more of my sustenance to the government? If the government needs it, let's hear the case for it. ...[N]ow we have city councils in big cities in the United States where no reporter goes for months at a time to the meetings; where the city budget doesn't get covered at all."

"I remember reading a story... in one of the biggest papers in the country about the county budget in the dominant area of marketing for that newspaper... It consisted of the 3 county commissioners... yelling at each other over the budget, and it had a single mention of the budget will be "x" dollars. It didn't tell me how much of my property taxes go up, are they spending more on the sheriff and less on schools or are they going to fix the potholes. None of the substance was there."

"[O]ne of the fundamental changes that's taken place is more and more coverage of controversies instead of issues."

"I have encountered I don't know how many people who have...written to me... about how we have the strongest economy in history. No we don't, and nobody who knows the numbers would say something like that, but you could easily get that impression... from watching just television news, and listening to the president repeatedly tell us what a strong economy we have, when it's just not true."

"Whether you love or hate Ronald Reagan, he was a great leader. He really fundamentally changed America."

"From 1945 to 1980 we had a bipartisan consensus in this country about nurturing and developing the middle class. ...There were plenty of fights back and forth, but both sides of the aisle agreed that government should be building up the majority of the people to create a better, wealthier society. We had the , probably the smartest single thing government's done in modern times. ...We had the built, although it was built at the urging of the Pentagon so that we could move material around if we had to have productivity for a war. We invested in all sorts of things, basic science education, we had 30 year mortgages developed..."

"Mr. Reagan came along and said, "Are you better off? ...Government is the problem," and persuaded people who were faced with problems... We had two oil shocks, '73 and '79, we had long lines at gas stations. There were a few cases where we had shootings of people in line at gas stations. ...We had inflation that was scaring people ..."

"I don't think Mr. Reagan intended what happened. ...Mr. Reagan had a clearly defined set of values, but what we got was not conservative. What we got were radical changes that have... turned out to work to our detriment."

"[W]e live in a society where... presidents and candidates for president of both parties are always saying "God Bless America" and "This is the greatest ever" and they're not talking about the real facts of what's going on."

"Child poverty [has] increased in this country since 1980, even though we have had divorce rates fall. We have hundreds of thousands of young people who don't go to college because they can't afford it. ...[F]rom tax data, the average income of the bottom half of Americans is $15,000 per tax payer. ...It's right out of the IRS tables. Some people say it's unfair to use that because there's income that isn't counted, like Social Security payments, and it's taxpayers not households, but even if you go to households, the cost of going to state college now is about $10,000... If you go to household income, even at the typical median level, $50,000; how somebody making $50,000, with even two children, can afford $10,000 a year for college for kids is amazing. When you and I were kids college was paid for. It was free to us. Society paid for it because they were investing in the future. Now, we're putting road blocks in the way of the most valuable asset we have. We're subsidizing the owners of baseball teams and football teams, which is lots of fun, but it's trivia, and we're doing it, in part, by cutting money for this."

"We're subsidizing Tyco and through the burglar alarm subsidy... while starving our parks and recreation programs; and what do we get in the big cities because we've starved those programs? Youth gangs! There have always been gangs [but] not like we have today... and it's because of government policy."

"The fundamental affect that's taking place... is that government has changed from focusing on nurturing and developing a stable middle class, to these other policies."

"[T]wo income households... Lots and lots of women are out there working at jobs that pay minimum wage or $8 an hour. ...[T]he result of the falling wage structure in this country is that the average family with children does 1,000 hours more paid labor today than it did back in the early '70s. ...That's working essentially half of the year. ...[M]arried women with children have often worked throughout history. A Christmas job, a Saturday job. They had what we used to call pin money, but they were not fundamental bread winners, and there are costs associated with this. We have costs for daycare [etc.]"

"This book is about the many ways that corporations extract from you... extra nickels—which add up to thousands of dollars. Many of the mechanisms require the government's cooperation; some... the result of seemingly disconnected sources; others are hidden in plain site. ...It's in the fine print."

"Consider the changes in income... the first full year after the Great Depression and the Great Recession... The economic rebound was widely shared in 1934, with strong income gains for the vast majority and a slight drop at the top, while in 2010 the opposite took place as the vast majority lost ground and those at the top scored big gains."

"The big banks, car makers, insurers and a host of Canadian, Chinese, European and Japanese companies all get to profit by pocketing the taxes withheld from American workers' paychecks."

"has a marketing deal with , and Verizon has joint marketing deals with , Cox and Time Warner. This is not competition but ization. The losers... are the consumers, who will pay higher prices for lower-quality service."

"One of the sneakier tricks the telephone giants are pulling is to get state caps on prices lifted on the claim that they will not be raising prices, but lowering them. ...California regulators lifted the price caps... Some prices were raised as much as 600 percent..."

"[E]lectric and gas utilities in more than twenty states have... quietly obtained government approval to make customers pay in advance for new or upgraded facilities. It is as if... everyone has loaned them the money at zero percent interest."

"Since the corporate income tax began in 1909, Congress has imposed a penalty tax, currently 15 percent, on excess cash and near-cash... Without such, a corporation could... become a huge tax shelter, withdrawing resources from the economy instead of investing in new plant...equipment... jobs and paying dividends... But President Reagan signed a law that... so long as the money was owned by offshore subsidiaries, American companies could hold unlimited amounts of cash. ...[C]ompanies now siphon profits out of the United States under the guise of... tax deductible expenses..."

"The telecommunications companies wanted to build the most profitable electronic toll road possible. Their aim was, first, to spend as little as possible on technology, which... meant slow Internet service for many... Second... serve areas where lots of customers... would buy a monthly pass... sparsely populated areas were at best incidental to such plans. Third... set prices as high as the market would bear, even if it meant many... could never afford to access this electronic roadway."

"Lost... was the crucial fact that the federal government had established an underlying policy to make... services available to all at reasonable prices."

"The only real risk of competition arose when some local governments favored the idea of building a municipal telephone, cable television and Internet access system that would be faster and cheaper. The industry responded like sharks, determined to do in the opposition and protect their predatory position."

"[L]egislatures have rewritten basic business laws, some whose principles date back thousands of years. Too often the goal has been to thwart competition, artificially inflate prices, hold down wages by decimating unions, reduce worker benefits and... restrict or bar access to the courts by those aggrieved."

"Businesses have gotten policies adopted that have allowed some managers to run corporations as, effectively, criminal enterprises... ... those in control run the fraud."

"[S]tate and local governments alone spend at least $70 billion a year of taxpayer's money to subsidize factories, office buildings [etc.]... $900 per year for a family of four."

"[L]aws in nineteen states... let companies pocket the state income taxes withheld from their workers' paychecks for up to twenty-five years. ...In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created."

"Legislatures passed these laws, presidents and governors signed them and the courts have endorsed them. In many cases they effectively gut state constitutional provisions and laws banning gifts to business."

"[B]usiness has been regulated throughout history. ...[I]n the past four decades, we have forgotten the tried and tested (and therefore profoundly conservative) principles of business developed over thousands of years. ...[O]ur wealth... well being and... freedom are being diminished daily."

"Wyoming Corporate Services... for a fee, will create a company, set up a bank account, appoint officers and directors... provide a lawyer as a corporate director so the company can invoke attorney-client privilege... [and] make any required regulatory filings... without anyone being able to ascertain, without a court order, who is behind any corporation it creates."

"If... immortal, amoral and greed-driven people walked the earth, we would have to rewrite our laws governing property. ...[O]ur new class of immortals could just keep accumulating wealth and power forever. In time they would probably own every... asset on earth worth having. ...[That] immortal being is the modern corporation."

"Unlike individuals, who must take responsibility for their conduct, corporations' legal responsibility... has benefited from limits to that responsibility established by law. The rationale... is that people who... build a business would not take the same risks if failure meant they would lose... their houses, cars... and everything else. ...[T]hey can go about their corporate business, creating enterprises and generating wealth."

"[L]imiting liability... has also obscured a corporation's responsibility to function for the benefit of society. The greater good is an idea that is thousands of years old, but in the recent past corporations have been permitted to lose site of that... notion."

"Workers may toil their entire lives, communities may tax themselves to create infrastructure a corporation needs, and vendors may invest their entire fortune to supply the corporation—but none of these parties, Friedman said, has significant legal rights or moral claims. [T]he idea... was not supported by the development of the law, the regulation of business and the advancement of civilization over thousands of years. But... Friedman's ahistorical thinking has come to dominate..."

"[C]lassical "corporations"... existed not for profit but in service of the state. ...A key tenet ...has changed since ancient times... If a business fails, the chief executive does not have to become a slave to the bank... Corporations... have inverted the Roman equation: ...the state serves them."

"Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas insist that they are "originalists,"... interpreting our Constitution as a document fixed in time. No honest originalist could... have signed on to Citizens United, but intellectually corrupt justices who worship corporatism, disdain the poor and enjoy the perks of power..."

"Citizens United is to the expansion of corporate power what the big bang is to the beginning of existence..."

"America has been transformed from a land of growing economic plenty into a hollow shell."

"In just a third of a century, the widespread liquidity that nourished the economy—reliable streams of cash going to workers and owners alike—has... dried up."

"Everything has rules... The rules that we set really determines who benefits and who bears the burden. ...[W]e have all of these policies ...that largely determine what's happening. ...[I]n America... we live in a society... where coming out of the Great Recession, a third [33%] of all increased income through 2012 went to the top 16,000 households, that's the 1% of the 1% [1 out of 10,000], 95% of that income went to the top 1%, and the bottom 90 per cent's income actually fell... to the level of 1966... [T]hat happened because the government rules, in many ways, from who gets access to quality education, to who gets proper health care, to incarceration policies, are shaping what's happening to our society."

"[I]n 1968... most journalists were blue collar intellectuals. Today the newsrooms of the major news organizations are full of people who grew up in wealthy households. So... their attitude... is "The world seems to be doing just fine. It's quite just." ...because that's their life's experience."

"[W]e've had this tremendous weakening of the news media, so that [many] large federal agencies... have no beat reporters... covering them. We have city councils and school boards all across America that get no coverage... and this is terrific for those people who are getting rich by exploiting the rules of the system for their benefit; and you're not hearing about that."

"[W]e have the highest percentage of children who go to bed hungry of any modern country. You wouldn't know from reading the news or watching TV that America has a hunger problem, that all across America we have communities, in the country, in the suburbs, in the city, where volunteers send home backpacks full of food for families on the weekend, because otherwise these kids would not eat."

"The most important period determining your lifetime health and emotional well being, and therefore you ability to get along, is from conception to about the first 6 months of your life. We pay very little attention to that. We give women in this country 6 weeks of disability, and they may use several other at the end of their pregnancy, so little babies... are not getting enough nurturing. In some of the European countries you are required to take a year off, and it's a violation of the law... to hold a job when you have a small child, because these societies recognize that we have a long-term interest. So just as we're using up our infrastructure by not fixing up roads and bridges and dams and pipelines, we are also stealing from the future by not nurturing and providing proper care for small children. ...[T]here will be a price, and it will be very high."

"There's a big attack going on in this country on public education. One of the Koch brothers... publicly advocated ending public education, because that's socialism. ...[I]n Wisconsin we saw people call kindergarten teachers thugs. Something I would never have imagined when I was young... [I]t's because we've gone through a fundamental change. We've been living under Reaganism now since 1981, and in Reaganism we worship money, and our measure of the country is money."

"The purposes of our country were written down for us in the Preamble of the Constitution, the justice, the general Welfare with a capital "W", common defense, domestic tranquility, liberties... Nothing in the Preamble talks about getting rich. That's a byproduct of these other things. But we have gotten a distorted view of what's happening, and we also... are now at the point where we have 33 years of evidence that Reaganism produces actually exactly what Ronald Reagan said in 1980, if you listen carefully... It's made the rich richer. Now it's doing it at the expense of the 90%."

"We are mining the 90% to benefit the super rich."

"Rather than building the economy for all of us, we are mining the bottom to benefit the top."

"The number one driver of this is campaign finance. The reality is, if you or I got elected to Congress, we would have to spend our time dealing with wealthy people who want favors from the government. There are over 100,000 people in America who's job is to mine the public treasury, or the rules, for their benefit. ...So we've got to change campaign finance... in a way that this Supreme Court, with the radicals on it, can't knock down."

"John Adams... wrote that his fear... of what would destroy America was a business aristocracy would arise. Instead of people being yeomen farmers who owned their own land, or workers who owned their own tools... workers would be mere wage earners, and... not being truly independent, would vote for the policies that benefit the business aristocracy, and we would lose both our liberties and our democracy... a good indicator of what's going on right now."

"Adam Smith, in his lessor known book, ', says that the greatest corruption of our moral sentiments is a tendency to almost worship the rich, and to hold in bad regard people who are poor. ...[O]ur politicians reflect this, even though many of them will tell you... how religious they are. ...[T]hey obviously have not studied their religious texts because, if they did, they would know that (in the case of the Christians, for example) you are supposed to give all that thou hast to the poor. That's a standard I'm not willing to meet, but that's the standard that you are supposed to meet... It's certainly not to be mean and literally deny hungry children food."

"[I]f Reaganism worked, if Bush's tax cuts worked, America today would be swimming in jobs. That's what we were promised. It would lead to all this investment and all these jobs. Instead, it's led to this enormous concentration of wealth among people who could never consume that much wealth, and who now increasingly are putting it into financial products, rather than investing it in ways that will grow the economy. ...[W]e're socking it away ...American corporations, under a rule almost nobody knows about ...are limited in how much cash they can hold, unless they move it overseas. ...[O]nce you move if overseas they can have ...unlimited amounts of cash, and what have we seen happen? ...Corporations have almost 3 times as much cash overseas as they have at home, and they then take that cash and buy US treasuries. So we pay big corporations to not pay their taxes. ...The interest they will earn from the treasury will exceed the value of the tax, and we will collect 40 cents on the dollar or less of the actual tax. ...Literally it has become a profit center ..."

"There is a movement to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment. When the US Supreme Court clerk, who was the former president of a railroad, announced that the corporations are people for purposes of defending their property... That makes sense, because a corporation is property. But Chief Justice Rehnquist, in a dissent in a case called Bellotti vs. ...Bank of Boston, was clearly opposed to the idea of giving political rights to corporations. We are now on the verge, in the Hobby Lobby case, of giving religious rights to corporations. Who's a corporation prey to, Mammon? So we've very much veered off from what was intended."

"When this country was founded, there had only been 7 corporations... in the... old British colonial United States, at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Six of them were what today we would either call a charity or a utility. ...One corporation, created in the colony of New Haven, was set up solely to make profit. It was such a scandal they had to shut it down within a year and it took 10 years to clean up the mess. The Founders disliked and distrusted corporations. But they believed in collective bargaining, and I can prove that because in 1792 Congress passed the first significant labor law and subsidy law. It was to benefit the cod fishing industry. We got a quarter of our foreign earnings from cod and we were deeply in debt from... the Revolutionary War. So it was important we had foreign earnings. ...[T]o address ...harassment by the British Navy the cod fishing industry wanted a subsidy, and Thomas Jefferson ...ordered a study and concluded that those ships that only paid wages to their fishermen should be excluded. But if... the workers were paid partly in the share of the profits... then you got the subsidy, and 5/8 of the subsidy went to the workers and 3/8 to the company. ...[T]hat sounds a lot like collective bargaining."

"Back in 1996 I was the principle reporter at The New York Times on a huge series... that changed the way executive pay was reported. We showed how the head of had gotten a $100 million pay one year and he only paid taxes on about $2 Million... [H]e had built a fortune of just shy of a billion dollars at that point, tax free... [T]here were members of the board of directors of Coke that did not understand how much money they had paid him."

"When you and I were young and a company laid people off, you would see the president, not the CEO... in those days, say "...I'm gonna work for a dollar a year" or "I'm going to take no bonuses until everybody is rehired." Today it's... "Ooh, I fired 10,000 people. I'll get a bigger bonus!""

"We are... seeing... failure to enforce the law. I have written for 15 years about a way that real estate in partnerships cheat. It's easy to spot but you have to do the work... The guy who figured it out was given all sorts of awards by the IRS. No one will do it. The governor of New York, who should be in the forefront... because it costs the state as much as $700 million in a peak year, refuses to do this, and... his administration has... literally lied, claiming repeatedly that they're looking for this, but there's no court case of any kind."

"The Attorney General, Eric Holder testified, in March of 2013, to Congress that he was afraid to prosecute the banks because it would cause economic disruption. ...I've been going after him in Newsweek for that and he has backtracked, but for months, an Inspector General's report shows, he claimed that they had gone after more than a billion dollars and over 500 people involved in mortgage fraud... still... a drop in the bucket. ...In fact, there were less than a hundred cases involving $95 million ...a drop in a drop ...and he kept telling this lie. So we... now have a government that does not go after people who are engaged in criminal frauds because they are considered so powerful, that if they were prosecuted it would damage the economy. My God!"

"George Will had a column in The Washington Post this week in which he said that the proof that the failed after 50 years was people trusted the government under LBJ and now they don't any more. ... [I] would argue... the facts show just the opposite. People don't trust the government anymore because they recognize it does not work in their interest, it works against their interest..."

"We decided in 1980 to go down a different path when we elected Ronald Reagan. We have gotten the results that Mr. Reagan said, if you listen to him carefully in 1980, we would get, which is that those people that are wealth holders would realize the income from that wealth, and they have. Their actual tax rates, for people at the very top, are 60% lower than what they paid in the 1960s. But at the same time, by getting rid of unions... by having these "free trade deals," which are really deals to drive down the cost of labor; we have driven down the wages and the salaries of the vast majority of Americans... We have also weakened these environmental laws... that were pretty good. So we've put in place a whole mechanism in which we favor profit over labor. ...When you look at the data you can see it ...Returns to labor in the Federal Reserve data go [down with time] and returns to capital have been rising, and since 2009 it's like looking at one of those jet fighters going straight up."

"[B]ecause labor returns have gone down there's not enough ... to buy goods and services. ...The next thought should be ...capitalists will change because people have to buy their products. No, if your a global level capitalist, it doesn't matter. As long as there aren't riots in the streets, you can sell your goods in other countries."

"While at my last paper, I won a for exposing so many tax dodges and loopholes that a prominent tax lawyer called me the "de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States.""

"In 1990, I broke the story that, instead of being worth billions, as he'd claimed, Trump actually had a negative and escaped a chaotic collapse into personal bankruptcy only when the government took his side over the banks..."

"I... watched Trump run briefly in 2000 for the nomination of the Reform Party... during that brief campaign Trump declared he would become the first person to run for president and make a profit. ...For the 2016 run, a large share of Trump's campaign money was spent paying himself for the use of his Boeing 757... in addition to his smaller jet, his helicopter, his Trump Tower office space, and other services supplied by Trump businesses."

"Trump doesn't know anything. ...Trump's own words and conduct ...and his comments on many issues ...show how appallingly ignorant he is."

"[H]e does not have a clue about the Constitution's system of checks and balances."

"Trump never faced tough questions as a candidate where he could not walk away or give nonsense answers without repeated follow-up. This is a serious problem for the future of American democracy in the television era, when appearances matter more than reality."

"He appointed as chief executive of his campaign, and, later, White House strategy chief, Steve Bannon, a known anti-Semite who, in his time at Network, published racist articles and bizarre conspiracy theories..."

"For five months, Trump's campaign manager was Paul Manafort, advisor to dictators and near dictators including a pro-Moscow regime in Ukraine that was ousted by a popular uprising."

"The hiring of Manafort and others, specifically , a Russian-born real estate mogul with mob ties whose 2015 emails indicate that he hoped to help secure both a Moscow-based real estate deal and the American presidency for Trump—showed a disturbing pattern of associations with those around Vladimir Putin, head of the in Moscow..."

"Trump applauded Putin throughout the campaign... [which] paralleled the language... of mob soldiers speaking about their bosses."

"Trump has worked hard to make sure few... know about his lifelong entanglements with a major cocaine trafficker [Joseph Weichselbaum].., with American and Russian mobsters and many mob associates, and with various con artists and swindlers."

"[C]rowds of young people... filled the Trump Tower auditorium in June 2015, interrupting with applause forty-three times as Trump announced his campaign with vicious s of Mexicans, Muslims, and the media. ...A day later news broke that the crowd was not ...voluntary ...Many ...were actors paid fifty bucks apiece. ...[S]uch dishonesty continues a pattern that traces back throughout the life and career of Donald Trump."

"A few years after the war ended, [] took on a partner... Willie Tomasello. When cash was short, Tomasello was able to provide Trump with operating capital on short notice. Tomasello also saw to it that there was no trouble from the unions... The New York State Organized Task Force identified Tomasello as an associate of the Genovese and Gambino Mafia families... turned to an organized crime associate as his long time partner... Decades later, Donald Trump would also do business with the heads of the same families, though at a remove, developing numerous business connections with an assortment of criminals, from con artists and a major drug trafficker to the heads of the two largest Mafia families in New York City..."

"Business owners who are prudent about making promises and are known for honoring their word often go through life without a single lawsuit. Trump has been a party in more than 4,000 lawsuits, some of them accusing him of civil fraud..."

"Trump has... been sued thousands of times for refusing to pay employees, vendors and others. Investors have sued him for fraud in a number of different cities. But among Trump’s most highly refined skills is his ability to deflect or shut down investigations. He also uses threats of litigation to deter news organizations from looking behind the curtains of the seemingly all-wise and all-powerful man they often refer to as The Donald."

"Our democracy is in very deep trouble. ...Donald Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom."

"[I]f we're going to fix this, and if we're going to get this manifestly unqualified criminal out of the White House, we have to do some work. We've got to diagnose the real underlying problem."

"Americans have a pretty good idea of the chaos and the palace intrigues in the Trump White House. Journalists are actually doing a much better job of covering what's going on in the White House than I anticipated, partly because, even though Donald Trump is all about loyalty to Donald, there are all sorts of people eager to leak, who are in there not as close allies... and who want to position themselves for the future with journalists."

"But that's not what... effects your lives, your children's lives [etc.]... It is important that we understand what the Trump administration is doing. ...[I]t's not Donald personally doing this. Donald's a lazy guy. He works about 4 hours a day. ...[H]e spends one third of his time at his properties. It's the people he brought in."

"Steve Bannon put it best. Steve Bannon said "I'm a Lennonist" that is, I'm someone who wants to destroy the existing order. Many of these people, although they... wouldn't put in these terms, hate the United States of America. ...They hate the fact that there are people of color... that there are people of a different religion in this country, that there are people who are not interested in worshiping the rich and trying to get rich, and certainly don't want to be taxed to subsidize the rich."

"We have a president of the United States who is not a loyal citizen. ...[L]ook at the email that ... sent to Donald Trump Jr. ...[Y]ou want to read it carefully because the journalists... did not parse the sentences... the fourth sentence in this email makes it clear that there was an ongoing conspiracy. Collusion is not a crime. I don't care about collusion... There was an ongoing conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump administration. It says in the fourth line... "as part of Russia's efforts to help." That's not a "Hi, would you like to get together..?" That's "We're already sleeping together. You want to try something new?""

"Donald Trump has been involved with the Russians back to 1983. He has worked very hard to suppress a lawsuit about a quarter billion dollar tax fraud which he authorized. ...DCReport.org, the nonprofit news service that my friends and I started ...is in court trying to get access to some of the documents in this case that have been sealed, because Trump has been incredibly successful in hiding the record of his conduct."

"So when Trump came to the White House, the people he brought with him, Michael Flynn... Steve Bannon, [etc.] brought with them this team... Team Trump... [I]n the federal agencies, it's not just the incompetent, unqualified, anti-(to their oath of office) cabinet secretaries who matter. It's not just Scott Pruitt, who wants to destroy the EPA and Betsy DeVos whose completely unqualified. It's the people that came with them... political termites... loosed into the structure of our government, and they are damaging our government."

"[T]hey have stopped posting notices of worker deaths. About 4800 people a year die on the job, and some... are just accidents nobody could have predicted. ...But many of them are the result of the fact that... While... most employers try, or do a good job, there are some [that] just don't care. ...[T]ime after time, they have workers who are unnecessarily maimed or killed. The records of those aren't there any more. They're not putting them up. They're fighting giving away the statistical information that we need to understand what they're doing, and the Labor Department's actions in this area are far from unique."

"I asked the federal government under an agency Trump just took control of, the (which has recovered multiples of its budget) for a copy of a receipt... evidence that a huge fine, supposedly paid by one of the banks was actually paid. ...[T]hey said... "You'll have to file a Freedom of Information Act request. This is the kind of administration we have."

"When Donald Trump took the oath of office "to faithfully execute the laws" and to be "loyal to the United States of America", he then got in a motorcade to go to the White House. There's a TV camera... in the truck... that looks square down the middle ...The presidential limousine... stopped... the family got out... they spent two minutes walking around... in front of the Trump International Hotel, whose lease says "no federal employee can be involved in that lease" and... we have jointly an employee named Donald J. Trump. He's our employee. ...[T]he reason he did that was ...[I]f you are an emissary... seeking a favor from Donald Trump, if you're an oil baron, or a coal company, or anybody else who wants a favor from the Trump administration, you got the message."

"That hotel... in Trump organization filings had predicted would lose money in its first year, is making money hand over fist. ...They're taking in at the bar, $68,000 a night. ...If you want something from the Trump administration, what he made clear, is "You will pay me tribute." You'll sign up to join , where he doubled the admission price."

"[T]hese appointees that they put in place... are totally unqualified, and in many cases, enemies of the agencies they represent. Donald Trump's administration is turning America into what the ancient Greeks called a . ...[A] government of the worst people, the most venal, unqualified criminal elements around. The worst people. ...These are people who when they get called to testify, give answers that make it clear, they have no business being the manager of the little town I live in... much less running a cabinet agency."

"This book tells you what has either not been in the news or [has] been in it glancingly, about what they're doing to our government; and that effects your safety, your income, your future."

"Donald Trump came into office and killed the . ...[T]hat partnership had serious flaws. It was written in secret, by corporate lobbyists and by lawyers involved in the trade business. It was so secretive that when my congresswoman, , having seen what I wrote, wanted to read what was in there... she said "Yea, it's all written... in language that doesn't mean anything to me," and Louise has a PhD in microbiology. ...It's written in the language of people in the trade, not to be understood by mere mortals."

"We needed to fix the TPP, but Donald killed it, and did nothing to replace it. ...That creates a vacuum, and into that vacuum stepped president Xi. The RCEP is the led by Beijing. It's 15 countries (not us, just as TPP didn't include China)... plus India. ...[W]hen I was in Australia... I was astonished... They were all saying that Australia is going to have to reorient its trade policies towards Beijing, because there is no American leadership."

"[O]ne of the purposes of the was to contain China. ...China is very expansionist. ...[T]hey're building in the Spratly Islands these artificial islands and saying "You can't fly airplanes over here or run ships through here, especially not military ships." China believes that it's the country of the future, and if you drive on their highways... they put the Autobahn to shame, which puts our Interstates to shame... They are... like the Catholic Church in terms of their thinking, "We're here forever.""

"What is Trump doing? Nothing. Japan signs a trade deal with the European Union last summer in Brussels. Donald Trump is 800 miles to the east in Poland. He's giving a speech where he talks about "Everyone adored me..." (That's because the right-wing government of Poland used police to make sure that only Trump supporters... got in, that protestors were kept blocks away...) So while this important trade deal is going down, where's Donald Trump? ...[Y]ou put Japan together with Europe, and the RCEP, and this is not good for our future. This is very, very bad for our future."

"Donald has a degree on his office [wall] from Penn, an ivy league school in economics []. He was given that degree, and I emphasize the verb "given" because he always said "Mexico is going to pay for the wall." ...[A]ll thinking people went "How are you going to make a sovereign nation pay for a wall they don't want?" "I have a plan!" Do you know what his plan was when he came into office? "I'm going to put a tariff on Mexican goods." It's a guy with an economics degree who doesn't know that a tariff... means we pay for the wall through higher prices? The man doesn't know anything."

"He appoints as his commerce secretary one of leading s in America, Wilbur Ross, whose specialty is seizing a company that's run out of cash, recapitalizing it. You don't pay the bills you owe... (something that Donald Trump never heard of). You borrow new money (something Donald Trump certainly has heard of) then you squeeze the borrowed money out and put it in your own pocket, and you turn the zombie [company] loose until it dies."

"Wilbur Ross goes with Donald Trump to , where Donald Trump praises the Saudis for leading the fight against terrorism. You know who the biggest funders of terrorism in the world are? He attacks ... an ally of the US that allows us to have our most important military base there. ...Wilbur Ross comes back from this trip, he goes on CNBC and he says, "...The Saudi people love us. ...There wasn't a single demonstrator, anywhere..." and Becky Quick ...says "...It's against the law to protest there. They arrest people. They whip them"..."

"The way that the Trump administration is cutting regulations... It's just "Go ahead and pollute. Take the toxic residue from burning coal, and instead of drying it out and putting it in a place where it's unlikely to cause harm, continue to put it into slurries and then toxic ponds next to rivers where we get drinking water." That's not benefiting us. That's simply jacking up the profits of these companies, which by the way, get paid rates under rate regulation, to pay for these costs of cleaning up their mess."

"Let's go to the student loan industry. ...What is the Trump administration doing? "We're going to address the student loan problem." So brings in... executives from the companies that made the student loans. ...This is building a new hen house designed by the fox!"

"Donald Trump is never going to resign... [H]is ego is never going to let him resign. He will not be moved against by the Republicans... They've made their bed with him. They're excusing everything he does."

"I have this vague recollection of Republican leaders talking about their concerns about immorality, especially women and wanting to make sure we can't have access to things like birth control... and talking about family values. So out comes the Wall Street Journal on the playmate of the year who got paid $150 grand to not talk, and now the porn star and, trust me, to quote Donald, "Believe me..." there's more like this out there. Where are the moralists about Donald Trump's behavior? ...His conduct is outrageous."

"Where are the moralists who scream about drugs and say nothing about what I describe... Donald's deep entanglement with a major international cocaine trafficker [Joseph Weichselbaum], and things he did that make no sense whatsoever, unless they were in business together, in which case everything he did makes perfect sense. Where are these people?"

"Where are the ministers? ... ...said ..."Donald denies it." Well, Eliot Spitzer denied it. ...Bill Clinton denied it. ...[Graham] goes... "Donald is a changed man from 10 years ago." ...That's a reasonable question to think... you know, was I different 10 years ago? ...I was. I had less grey hair."

"What matters is that we get a new Congress. Donald Trump ran for president based on the economic policies (just the economics, not the racism) that was in my trilogy on the American economy: Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch and The Fine Print. If you know that uses your tax dollars to build its stores and GE taxes its workers in Ohio to build factories, you know that because of my work; and it's now widespread... even if most people have forgotten I'm the guy brought all that to the fore years ago."

"I said back in 2012, a year when the average income of the bottom 90% of Americans was lower, adjusted for inflation... than in 1967... that if you ran for president on the economics in my books you would win, because it champions the 90%, in fact it champions... the 99.5%; and that's what Donald did, and I know he watched me on television because he talked to other people about it, who told me..."

"Donald Trump said "I'm going to drain the swamp." He comes here and immediately turns it into a federally protected wetland, a paradise for Wall Street."

"He says in 2015, "I have a tax plan here. The best tax experts in America have all been over it." ...I called and said "Where are the experts?" There are no experts. They didn't have anybody. Come April, he's been in office three months. He promised, day one, we're going to have a tax bill. They put out a 100 word tax plan... It was a shopping list for ' clients."

"This is the anti-education presidency."

"People don't know... They... are so fascinated by what's going on in the White House, they're not paying attention to what matters. ...[T]he reason I hope every single one of you reads my book (and if you can't afford to buy the book, it's in the library...) is that people need to know this or we will not get change."

"Citizenship is not something that you can outsource! ...We've got to do the work ourselves, and you've got to know, and you've got to talk to people."

"[O]ne of the problems that all the labor leaders I speak to face, is that a lot of their members believe Donald Trump is helping them. They have no idea the damage he is doing to them, because it's not in the news!"

"Journalism never did a great job of covering government, but 40% of journalism jobs in this country have disappeared since 2000. ...[A]s a result of that the agencies aren't being covered at all. The electricity markets, job safety, diplomacy, all through the government, the military. All of these things are being ravaged by this . ...Spend a couple of evenings reading the book, and then you've got to... tell other people. Have the facts to persuade them to understand what's wrong."

"[T]he Democrats, who have not paid attention to their knitting for 40 years, while the Republicans have been building bench strength, passing laws to suppress votes, coming up with laws to throw out votes after they're cast, as we saw in Michigan. The Democrats have to run candidates who are viable. I was sent a news clip by a friend... a couple of interviews of people who want to run for office as Democrats... they were young and they were earnest and... then they got asked questions... [T]hey immediately fell apart because they didn't know anything. They were just like Donald Trump. ...You've got to find and develop real candidates."

"People have to get registered to vote. People have to be driven to the polls on election day... Go to a district where there might be change. Arrange in advance... Don't call people and ask them to go. Go get them! Take them to the polls. That's the only thing that matters at the end of the day, our votes."

"If we do our jobs as citizens, we become informed, we insist on rational debate about real issues and we then get people to the polls, we can get a different Congress, we can get rid of this presidency and we can have a bright future. There's damage that will last forever, but the longer he's in office, the longer he is a clear and present danger to all the world. So please... read my book, get to the actual damage being done, and tell other people."

"Next time you go to a talk by me, because I'm sure I'll be back with one of my future books. Maybe the one I hope to have out next year, which is a whole new tax system that's simple and... you can't cheat under my system without committing a crime. Bring a young person."

"Viewed properly in the context of their times, the last forty-four presidents all pursued policies that they believed would make for a better America tomorrow."

"The Trump presidency is about Trump. Period. Full stop."

"Trump is desperate for others to fill the void inside himself. He has a sad need for attention and, preferably, public adoration."

"Trump has... lived a life of thumbing his nose at conventions and law enforcement, learning... from his father, Fred, whose business partner was an associate of the Gambino and Genovese crime families. He has long been in deep with mobsters, domestic and foreign, along with corrupt union bosses and assorted swindlers. Trump even spent years deeply entangled with a major international drug trafficker who, like many of the others, enjoyed their mutually lucrative arrangements."

"Instead of a president of specific duties and constitutionally limited authority, Trump and his aides talk as if he is an absolute ruler, or should be, to whom all must bend the knee."

"Trump has himself reduced his life philosophy to a single word—revenge. ...Repeatedly he has said in talks and in books that destroying the lives of people he considers disloyal gives him pleasure. That Trump does not recognize ethical limits on conduct... derives from his fundamental character, narcissism."

"Over many years in paid public appearances and in books bearing his name... Trump rejected the idea of turning the other cheek, saying that those who do are "fools" and "idiots." This philosophy was ignored by the many pastors who endorsed Trump and accepted... that he is a Christian. ...[R]evenge is explicitly rejected by Jesus and runs counter to the whole theme of the New Testament."

"The Golden Rule has no place in the life of Donald Trump."

"Revenge is the philosophy of dictators and mob bosses... used to keep others in line with threats of economic ruin, violence, or worse."

"[T]he Trump presidency is unlike anything that came before, a presidency built on open public contempt for Constitutional principles."

"[H]e brought into the White House a host of people with fringe ideas, some of them Islamophobes... white nationalists... xenophobes, and many... sharing Trump's ignorance of science. ...[M]any ...had no qualifications ...for the posts ...he got the advice and consent of ...senators despite testimony revealing some as ...know-nothings and one ...determined to destroy the agency he now runs."

"Trump has left the vast majority of positions under his control vacant."

"The Trump administration deposited political termites throughout the structure of our government. Their task, in the words of Steve Bannon, is the "deconstruction of the administrative state." ...[H]e means to undo the tax, trade, regulatory, and other means... [T]he end game is... a government that looks first after the best-off... not those most in need of a helping hand in the form of a sound education, clean water, and other basics of a healthy society... These termites operate out of sight... to bully or scare scientists into leaving, remove from public access... public records... necessary to enforce environmental, worker safety, and other laws."

"Few things benefit Trump more than ignorance. ...Unless and until some fact they cannot reconcile slaps them hard in the face, the con's marks will keep seeing the world through the credulous and distorted lens..."

"He has boasted about not paying banks that loaned him billions of dollars. He conned thousands of people desperate to learn... paying up to $35,000 to attend . ...[T]hese professors turned out to be fast-food managers and others with no experience in real estate, the focus of the "university." Because of... law suits Trump paid back $25 million... so the scam would not follow him into the White House."

"Many of those who believe in Trump come from the 90 percent whose economic fortunes have dwindled over that last half century... [P]olicies embraced by both parties ignored their plight or made it worse."

"The Chinese have seized upon Trump's erratic behavior and his cancellation of the to promote their own trade deal, orienting fifteen economies and India away from Washington and toward Beijing."

"Trump used illegal immigrants with sledge hammers (but no hard hats or safety gear) to demolish a... Manhattan department store so he could build . A federal judge... held that Trump engaged in a conspiracy to cheat those men out of their full $4 an hour pay."

"Trump started a faux university named for himself that taught nothing of value and collapsed in scandal."

"Questions of corruption and foreign influence are on the front burner... because of the extensive business holdings of Donald Trump and his actions encouraging foreign powers, lobbyists, and other favor seekers to spend money at his Washington hotel and other properties."

"The domestic emoluments clause... states that beyond his government salary the president may not receive "any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them." Those... words bar payment from the federal government or any of the fifty states... Trump has been profiting from spending at his properties by foreign governments... Also Trump has been profiting from federal, state, and local governments spending money at his properties as part of presidential security details. When Trump stays at [his properties]... these governments... pay full retail prices."

"Lawsuits accusing Trump of violating the Constitution's s have been filed by attorneys general from sixteen states and by 196 senators and representatives,... a bipartisan ethics watchdog organization called ... and a growing list of business owners who compete with Trump hotels and restaurants."

"The s... go to the very nature of... America and whether we are a nation of laws... whether elected office is for public service or it permits profiteering."

"Trump is the first president to pose numerous questions about whether he is receiving income from foreign governments, which the Framers felt was inherently corrupting. He is also the first to present the issue of profiting from spending by federal, state, and local governments with payments that the Framers denied... How these cases are resolved will likely have an enormous influence on whether the American Republic endures..."

"Trump's private and Justice Department lawyers narrowly define emolument. ...[A]nything short of an flat-out bribe is legal ...so long as the transaction is run through one of the ...companies owned by the president."

"During the Constitutional Convention... [d]ictionaries from the era... show that emolument had a broad meaning, including profit, gain, benefit, and advantage. John Mikhail... found that "the majority of Blackstone's usages of 'emolumnent' involve benefits other than government salaries and or perquisites," including profits from business and rents from land."

"and ... as leaders of CREW]... describe Trump's conduct as a "flagrant abuse" of the Constitution for personal profit. ...Painter, the Bush ethics chief... is almost apoplectic at Trump's conduct and the failure of his fellow Republicans to speak up."

"Trump bought the Doral with $104.8 million he borrowed from ... infamous for laundering money for Russian oligarchs. ...When Trump took office, the Doral was under a foreclosure order. Trump, as he often does, refused to pay contractors in full. ...Most contractors just walk away when Trump refuses to pay... because Trump will spend far more to litigate than the amount in dispute to discourage contractors and small business owners he cheats from suing for what they are due."

"[I]n modern language we think of "idiot" as someone who is stupid or a fool. That is not the classical meaning... An idiot is someone who cares only about himself and has no regard for anyone else, and that's terribly important when you think about tyrants. ...[W]e think of tyrants as people who are horrible... oppressors. ...[I]n its classic historic meaning, tyrant was simply someone who ceased power."

"The Founders of this country are in two groups... [W]e live in the second American republic because the first American republic under the Articles of Confederation failed, because it had no power to tax."

"[A] government that can't tax ...is no government at all."

"The reason we created the Constitution was to tax ourselves... It's Article 1, Section [8]... that Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties and imposts [and excises]."

"Governments throughout history have been run by tyrants."

"Whose society lasted 3,300 years? It was the [Egyptian] Pharaohs. ...They figured out through public works how to keep people busy and out of trouble, and every high-born Egyptian was taught... how far you can oppress people before they would strike back. ...[T]hey also learned one other lesson. You've all heard of the ?"

"The is a grant of tax relief. ...[E]ssentially it says... I, Pharaoh so and so... hereby make this grant of tax relief to these priests."

"[W]hat's happened in our society is we have seen this experiment, this crazy idea of self-governance which had very few antecedents, atrophy."

"The Haudenosaunee people, the People of the Longhouse, the ones we call the created a democracy. ...[T]hey had the equivalent of state legislatures. ...[O]nly men ran for office. Only women voted, and women could remove from office men who misbehaved, and they did."

"The other old democracy... was in Athens. ...Aristotle said democracy means "to rule and to be ruled in turns"... because the system... was designed to ensure that nobody would... cease power. ...Different clans had to be together. You couldn't be segregated. ...[E]very month a different group was in charge. ...[I]t worked for 200 years. [Much of] our Constitution is based... on the experience of Ancient Athens, of ."

"All of the Founders of this country... were well steeped in the history of the ancient world. ...[T]hey were very concerned about the rabble... about people being inflamed, and making bad decisions, and ruining this idea they had. ...In many places you weren't allowed to vote if you were just a wage earner. The theory, and this came out of the horrible system of the Dutch in Hudson Valley, where ordinary people would be told by their boss, who to vote for. But if you were a no one could tell you what to do."

"[O]ur Consitution... is designed to be slow and hard to change. It takes six years to get rid of all the scalawags in office today. ...[I]t's designed to be conservative, and it has a very interesting backstop. ...The has a second purpose... to have an ultimate backstop if the people went for a zealot, or a crazy person, to be president of the United States. ...[T]hat [the elector] would vote [his] conscious and say "No, the popular will here is wrong. This person will destroy our democracy.""

"And then we get a man who hasn't done a single day of public service in his life, and he has a rabid following. This is a man whose lawyers... in court two weeks ago said that "Yes... if he were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue no law enforcement agency could investigate. He is immune.""

"There are always people who want a tyrant. Democracy requires work if it's going to work."

"One of the things that changed was [that] the institutions that supported working people have been decimated. ...[T]he Democrats, the party of the working people, played a role in this. They allowed the weakening... of unions. They bought the argument that unions are bad for companies."

"Japan has mandatory unions. ...It's in their Constitution, and who wrote their Constitution? ...The staff of... General Douglas MacArthur, because he knew that if Japan had unions it would democratize the country, it would tend to equalize incomes, and it would help resist the bellicose tendencies of the aristocratic class in Japan. And it's worked brilliantly."

"We're all interdependent. Don't think about exploiting and mining other people because we're all interdependent. ...You say that today and people say, "Oh, you're a socialist!""

"Bill O'Reilly... called me a socialist, and I said "Interestingly, my books champion competitive markets," but I understand people like Bill think that competitive markets are a socialist scheme, because they just want to mine the public and make all the money they can, with no regard for anybody else."

"Those organizations that were focused on the New Testament and the idea that you have an obligation to your fellow man and to provide people with a means to interface with government... That's just shriveled away like unions have. ...[W]hat's risen in their place? Corporate America."

"Corporations are good things. They encourage people to take risk. They're smart vehicles for building wealth, but they also have to be controlled. ...[T]he reason is, they are soulless entities. A corporation has no morals and its purpose is to make money. ...If we have to induce diabetes in millions of children by getting them to drink sugary soft drinks and eat too many french fries and greasy hamburgers, [corporations will] do that."

"We have to... channel... greed so that it becomes useful to our society."

"Our system for identifying and promoting military officers for leadership actually works. In my biography of Donald Trump I cite the Army Field Manual 6, which is the selection of officers for promotion because they have leadership skills. ...[S]omeone ...had reduced this to 6 basic lessons. Do you take responsibility for what you do? Do you credit other people? Are you open to recognizing a mistake and correcting it, etc. ...Donald Trump flunks every one of those measures. ...But, because he doesn't have real leadership skills, he's who he is. He's a con man and a con artist. He's not a business man, he's a cash extractor who gets a hold of a business, takes cash out of it and puts it aside. He's not capable of being a tyrant and taking over the country. ...But we need to worry about what happens when someone comes along who has a really deep philosophy."

"Adolf Hitler had a really deep philosophy. ...It came out of a hundred years of German and Polish and Austrian and Russian and Belarus and Ukrainian philosophy about the "Demon Jews" and the Romanis and the "cripples""

"What about competent managers? ...Vladimir Putin seems to be a reasonably competent manager... the leader of the biggest international gang in the world. These are the criminals who stole the wealth of the old Soviet... and the way that criminal gang leaders work... "This is your territory, that's your territory. Don't bother me. If there's a problem I'll intervene. If necessary I'll have one of you wacked. Because I want to do what I want to do." By the way, that's the way the s operated in Egypt. "I don't want to deal with people's petty problems." So they set up the equivalent of a modern wage and hour court in 1350 BC. You delegate... you set certain boundaries. That's how tyrants operate."

"[T]here are people in this country looking at what's going on... and either for themselves or someone they think they can put in that [tyrannical] position. ...Every politician has people around them who are going to promote them. ...There are people... that realize that Americans have become so disconnected... so amenable to messages like "all taxes are bad."... Tax is the most vile three-letter word in America."

"Trying to get people to understand, as I'm going to try and do in my next book, that we can have a wholly different tax system that will actually make us wealthier... 'The Prosperity Tax'... It's going to be a tough sell because so many people have been brainwashed on this. ...Trying to tell them that we created this country so that we could tax ourselves."

"Think about someone who's like Donald Trump in that he has... charisma... You've got to give it to Donald, he's a great con man. He's got these audiences wrapped around his finger. People who believe literally... He looks up to the sky. He implies that he's God. Did you see any pastors or rabbis or imams saying that's sacrilegious?"

"[Trump] just now has someone on his staff in the White House who basically says the Democrats are demonic. ...[I]t's really quite shocking to see what this person who's... what I call a faux Christian. She's a "God wants me to be rich, so send me money and God will love you" sort of person. These kinds of folks, they're looking to advance their interests because they aren't thinking about the society around them. They're [not] thinking about anything in the New Testament, about your obligation to your fellow citizen. They think "I'm in this for me and how do I get this to work for me" and that's how tyrants work."

"So imagine somebody who has Donald's charisma, but first rate management skills... actually knows how to be an executive and get things done, how to prioritize, how to follow-up, how to select people and hold them accountable, and who doesn't believe you should be able to question what he does."

"That's what I'm worried about... the tyrant next time."

"Johnston's book... dismisses with the hyperbole and makes his argument for the absurdity, department by department, issue by issue, lie by lie. ...[W]hat I most appreciated about Johnston's writing was that while I was already hyper-aware of Trump's ignorance... he takes known news stories... and explains them in detail."

"For his penetrating and enterprising reporting that exposed loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code, which was instrumental in bringing about reforms. ...Born in San Francisco on Dec. 24, 1948, Mr. Johnston studied economics and law at the University of Chicago. He also studied at Michigan State and San Francisco State University in 1972 and 1973 to 1975."

"What they need to do is to look more closely at the fundamentals of American life, sympathetically, not with intent to "commit a message.""

"If Americans don't give up their prejudices because of false notions of religious or racial or national superiority, then, by golly, they're going to have to give them up because the other fellows are getting the guns."

"Jimmy "Mr. Cupid" O'Brien: Come on, step on it, Jefferson! We're an hour late for our deliveries now. Thomas H. Jefferson: Aw, have a heart, Mr. Cupid. Look at that speed meter. Jimmy: What're you worried about? Jefferson: About goin' to my own funeral. [Siren heard.] Mm mm. What'd I tell you? Here come the cops. Jimmy: Now listen! You keep quiet. I'll get out of this. Jefferson: You wouldn't be in it if you would go where the flowers was goin', instead of stoppin' where they ain't."

"Jefferson: But Mr. Cupid: if you go through that book, lookin' all through them Joneses, we're gonna be late. And we gonna get another traffic ticket, and... Jimmy: Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Don't you want to get a boy friend for a nice girl like Susie? Jefferson: Yeah. And I wanna keep a job for a nice boy like Jefferson."

"Jimmy: This is awful! It's terrible! Hey, Jefferson! [Shouting] Hey! Hey. Jefferson: What's the matter? Jimmy: I made a mistake! Jefferson: Which one? Jimmy: Well... according to this, Morgan isn't a G-man! Jefferson: How can you tell? Well, this claims he's a liar. Jefferson: How does that prove he ain't no G-man?"

"Jimmy: Hey, Callahan! Callahan: Hey, Cupid, who sent you down here? Jimmy: Never mind the smart cracks; something important has happened. Callahan: Yeah? Jimmy: Yeah, I... I've decided maybe I was wrong about you. Callahan: So what? Jimmy: Well... so how do you spell your name?, Callahan: My name? C, A, double L, A, H, A, N. Why? Jimmy: Mm hmm. Look... would you mind writin' it for me? Callahan: Writing it? Jimmy: Yeah. Callahan: [Signs.] What's the gag? Jimmy: Well, if this proves you're all right, you're gonna get Susie. Callahan: Hey, are you crazy? Jimmy: No, no! No, I'm a graphologist; now be quiet."

""I don't like the word tolerance. It sounds stuck up". It was a little old lady speaking, very little and quite old. Her name was Kitty, and she was my mother. "There ain't any respect in tolerating," she continued, the blue of her eyes grown darker with indignation. "That's just putting up with them, like with bad plumbing when you can't afford to move..." [...] She did not "tolerate" the Negro or the Asiatic, the Protestant or the Jew, despite their racial or religious difference. Instead, she respected every human being equally, because she thought Thomas Jefferson had meant every word of the Declaration. pp. 1, 3"

"In the spacious mansions of San Francisco's Nob Hill a Chinese cook was a must. The first thing the nouveau riche did as they tried to scramble up the ladder of society was to jingle gold pieces in the ears of a Lee or a Wong to lure him into their newly furnished houses. But the Chinese themselves had a social position only slightly above that of the rodents who sometimes threatened the fine mahogany wainscoting of their employers' houses. They were commonly referred to as "Chinks," with or without accompanying epithet, except by the gentler of tongue, who invariably spoke of a Chinese as "John Chinaman." pp. 5–6"

"Gaiety and God were closely connected in my mother's mind. Going to church on Sunday was not enough. Having fun was necessary, if the worship of God were to be complete. "We should enjoy ourselves, especially on Sunday, to show Him how happy we are on His day. If we can't help having a long face once in a while, then for heaven's sake let's have it on a week day." p. 103"

"Usually no one sees the city of his birth until he leaves and then returns to it with new eyes, but, ridiculously proud of my brand-new press badge, I was discovering San Francisco as though it were a strange city. I began to realize the city's many hills, as if they had been erected only last month. You go up and down those hills by cable car or auto, and a dozen times a day you catch your breath in the suddenness of beautiful vistas—water, ships, wooded hills across the bay . . . and sea gulls, no matter where the neighborhood, never once letting you forget the nearness of the ocean. They really dominated the Embarcadero, that long stretch of San Francisco's beautiful harbor. On one side were brine-encrusted piers, their pilings creaking against the sides of ships with exciting cargoes from all parts of the world. Across the way were shabby marine stores, pawnshops, tattoo parlors, bedraggled flophouses, and seedy bars. The constant calling of the sea gulls often had to compete with the sirens of police cars. pp. 112–113"

"Next week the Independent and Press will bring you a new column published for the first time anywhere [...] It will be titled "Mary McCarthy's Column." Anything more pretentious would offend Mary Eunice McCarthy."