Journalists From The United States

"One would imagine that those who write about Communist theory would trouble to learn something about it."

"In July 2016, Trump tweeted a meme declaring that Hillary Clinton was "the most corrupt candidate ever"—with those words emblazoned over a six-pointed Jewish star superimposed on a pile of money. The meme had previously been popularized on a neo-Nazi website. Shortly before the election, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted Kevin MacDonald, America’s premier white-supremacist academic, who has argued that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western countries, pumping the marginal malcontent into the political mainstream."

"Out of 8 billion people on the planet, there are only 16 million Jews—but far, far more anti-Semites."

"[I]s Trump a philo-Semite or an anti-Semite? The answer is both. The principle that explains his seemingly contradictory outlook toward Jews is simple: Trump believes all the anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews. But he sees those traits as admirable. To Trump, the belief that Jews are foreign interlopers who use their wealth to serve their own clannish interests is not a negative — as it is for traditional anti-Semites — but rather a positive. He wants Jews to be his attorneys and manage his money, so that he, too, can be rich. He wants them in his political corner, so that he, too, can be powerful. He wants to buy politicians, just like he thinks they do. As a man who has always stood solely for his own naked self-interest, Trump does not see the anti-Semitic conception of the self-interested Jew as a complaint, but rather a compliment. He prioritizes his needs ahead of the national interest, and so he sees the idea that Jews might do the same with themselves or with Israel as entirely natural."

"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it—but all that had gone before."

"The New Yorker had an interest in publishing any writer that could turn in a good piece. It read everything submitted. Hemingway, Faulkner, and the others were well established and well paid when The New Yorker came on the scene. The magazine would have been glad to publish them, but it didn’t have the money to pay them off, and for the most part they didn’t submit. They were selling to The Saturday Evening Post and other well-heeled publications, and in general were not inclined to contribute to the small, new, impecunious weekly. Also, some of them, I would guess, did not feel sympathetic to The New Yorker’s frivolity. Ross had no great urge to publish the big names; he was far more interested in turning up new and yet undiscovered talent, the s and the s. We did publish some things by —“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” was one. I believe we published something by Fitzgerald. But Ross didn’t waste much time trying to corral “emerged” writers. He was looking for the ones that were found by turning over a stone."

"... I fuss around with commas, semi-colons, dictionaries, and wordings, and it drives me crazy. I am too virile. I ought to be building subways. I was thinking of going to the with the but that would take a year or two and I can spare, at most, only two months. It probably would be a bore anyhow. All life is a bore if you think at all...."

"I would say so. Now, I don't think that precludes the possibility that as ideas about God have evolved people have moved closer to something that may be the truth about ultimate purpose and ultimate meaning... Very early on, apparently, people started imagining sources of causality, imagining things out there making things happen. And early on there were shamans who had mystical experiences that even today a Buddhist monk would say were valid forms of apprehension of the divine or something. But by and large I think people were making up stories that would help them control the world."

"It is not appropriate for news organizations to tell people who they should vote for. But it is appropriate for them to actively strive to correct misinformation, clear up public misunderstandings of key issues in public policy, and advocate for democracy."

"Trump has made it clear that he would rule as a dictator. His plans include destroying government as we know it, while acting on his desires without guardrails or accountability. He has vowed to use the power of the state to punish political opponents. In short, another Trump presidency would end American democracy as we know it."

"We need to flood the zone with truth."

"It will depend on our rulers whether we shall have an orderly evolution, which I have always preached and propagated, or a violent revolution, which we Socialists have always tried to avoid."

"Like every new phase of civilization, Socialism thus far has received the attention only of the oppressed and the lowly. The opulent and the rich have no reason to wish for a change of the present system. They do not, as a rule, want to hear anything about it. Until of late, outside of the working class, only students of history, of political economy, and a few advanced thinkers have given any attention to the principles of Socialism. Most other persons have only a very vague idea even of its basis."

"It is foolish to expect results from riots and dynamite, from murderous attacks and conspiracies, in a country where we have the ballot, as long as the ballot has not been given a full and fair trial."

"This is the first instance in the history of the world that the oppressed class has virtually the same political basis as the ruling class."

"According to my idea, we shall never reach the millenium. We shall never have any heaven on earth. We shall always have great problems to solve. But we shall have an infinitely higher civilization than we have now."

"Socialism is the next phase of civilization, if civilization is to survive."

"The Socialists expect to keep all that is good or useful in the capitalist system and leave it as a heritage to the next generation. And the Socialists will destroy nothing that they can not replace by something better or more beneficial."

"The working class has nothing to hope from either the Republican party or the Democratic party. It is true that the representatives of these parties may be, and very often are, very cultured and accomplished gentlemen. Most of them are honest. However, they represent the capitalistic system, and the more honest and consistent they are—the more loyal they are to their class."

"I would rather use a hundred years to bring about a new world, a better world, by evolution, with all the blessings of civilization, than bring it about by a bloody revolution, as they have in Russia, by shooting down about 30,000 men and women."

"And even that violent upheaval was only due to the fact that in Russia the autocracy was stupid, ignorant, and corrupt. In Russia the ruling class looked upon government and public trust as nothing but huge sources of profits and plunder. This is also a warning for other countries where the ruling class is ignorant, more or less stupid, and corrupt: where there is constant profiteering, based upon bribery, direct or indirect, by hiring ex-Cabinet members as "attorneys" for big corporations."

"Unless plutocracy can persuade the majority of the people to close up the public schools and make illiterates of the next generation, and unless it can also persuade them to give up the electoral franchise, plutocracy is doomed. So much is clear. And that is the reason why we Socialists can look with such equanimity and complacence into the future. The future belongs to some form of Socialism."

"After we have taken over the United States Steel Corporation, Mr. Gary, if he wants to keep his job, might possibly do so, but we would not pay him $800,000 a year."

"This country is divided into classes as much as any monarchial country. Therefore, the working class—the men and women who work either with their brains or their hands—must have a party of their own to take care of their interests of their own class."

"It is true that interesting historical document, the Declaration of Independence, says that "all men are born free and equal." But that was not so, even at the time when the sentence was written. It is less so now."

"American Magazine declared in 1912 that he was "The sanest and most influential Socialist in this country.""

"Political parties are simply the expression of economic interests."

"Victor Luitpold Berger, the first member of the Socialist party ever to sit in a United States Congress, was a disappointment to those who imagined a man of his views to be a bearded, bomb-tossing anarchist haunting the bourgeois world. His life was a model of respectability. It included such unlikely vocations as punching cattle and high-school teaching. As a member of the Sixty-second Congress, 1911-1913, Berger peered at his colleagues in the House of Representatives from behind thin-rimmed spectacles with a bearing that was courteous and dignified to the point of stodginess. The end for Berger was equally respectable: instead of falling behind the barricades clutching the red flag of the proletariat, he was run over by a Milwaukee streetcar!"

"In Berger's analysis the old Russian order had refused to reform democratically. The result was violent revolution instead of peaceful evolution."

"I came to love, really love, road marching. It's called a suck or a haze at West Point, but I think the cadets aren't being fair to it. There's something wonderful about being in a column of marching people: the gravel popping under soles, the leather flexing in boots, the kind of saddle-top sounds as the ruck (what a backpack gets called in the Army) frames settle. Occasionally someone, out of sheer misery, sighing Oooh, or just blowing out air, which in the general silence is like a whale breaching and then slipping back under the surface. You can watch a leaf float down from a tree or stare at the guy's rifle in front of you. The boiling of life down to its basic questions: Can you do this? Can you hang with the rest of us? Those questions don't get asked much, in the civilian world."

"Applying to West Point is a clerical road march. Fifty thousand high school juniors step off together, filling out the official request-for-information form. From there it's a test of stamina, a battle of attrition. Twelve thousand candidates complete the application. Six thousand make it to the physical aptitude examination stage, a fitness pop quiz- push-ups, pull-ups, standing long jump, three-hundred-yard dash. Service academies are the only institutions in the country that will measure how far you can toss a basketball from a kneeling position. (A little under seventy feet is the minimum.) Four thousand candidates are nominated by their senators or congressmen. The congressional nomination is a round-robin event, ten candidates competing for each slot, elected officials taking a turn as admissions officers, sifting through transcripts, recommendations, and clean-cut photographs. (Especially ambitious parents will snag jobs at a congressman's in-town headquarters, hoping to gain their kids an inside track.) If your parents are career military, you can jump the line and apply directly to the president. If one of them happens to be disabled, deceased, POW or MIA- or a recipient of the Medal of Honor- your file skips all the way to the superintendent's desk at West Point. Then the folks at admissions get down to the elimination round, stacking valedictorians against team captains, yearbook editors against debaters. Two thousand hardy candidates are pronounced qualified for admission, but only about twelve hundred get offered actual West Point places. They receive a plaque in the mail. In many small towns, friends and neighbors stop in for viewings."

"For ten minutes there's nothing. Because this is a way to commemorate loss: with an absence, with stillness, with nothing. A steady sprinkler noise of insects rises off the grass, treetops rustle like the sound of approaching water. A truck bumps down a distant road, dragging a hole through the quiet. The cadets stare out to where they sky ends behind the dark, bulky hills. The drill team fires a twenty-one-gun salute. Seven rifles, three shots apiece, each volley followed by a fluffy spreading echo. Then there's the night with its chilly smells of granite and grass and powder. The first slow notes of a bugle, a mournful taps: up the scale, over the scale, down the scale. Then the cadet bagpipe team begins. Matthew MacSweeney is with them, playing "Amazing Grace," with its frills and edges. Faraway music, crimped by sadness, to escort the week's losses over the Plain. After a moment, the cadets sing the alma mater. The sound is close to breathing, the faintest way four thousand people can sing one song. Then the cadets file out- the snap and click of shoes, a rush of gray and white, faces going visible in the light from doorways- and the night is left alone with itself. A quarter hour later, Josh Rizzo is back in his room, staring at his hand. "I didn't know if I was ready," he says, "until this shit happened. I mean, I came here originally to play baseball. But I know now, I'm here to defend this nation. I have no fears, no qualms about going." He runs his fingers over his ring. "It's weird. When I first got this ring, I thought, 'Look at this cool ring. I can get any job I want.' Now I look at it and I think, 'We are called.' I've got a job to do. I've got to defend my home.""

"The graduates return to barracks for the final uniform change, then spread out across the post for their swearing-in ceremonies. George is sworn in by the rabbi. Captain Parades swears in a bunch of Guppies on the Plain. At a tent by the water, before his parents, Huck is sworn in by Major Vermeesch. His mother and father thank the officer for what he's practiced on their son. It's a long march to bring Vermeesch and Huck to this spot together. Before he leaves, the major hands Huck a gift, a copy of the military novel Once an Eagle. "Next to the Bible," Vermeesch says, "this is probably the best book ever written. Just read it, OK?" A couple months later, when Huck actually starts the novel, a memo on official West Point stationary falls from between the pages. He's not going to read it- he assumes the major stuck it there as a bookmark and then forgot about it. Then he glances at the subject line: it's the official record of their counseling session, from February 2000. There were all the TAC's warnings about "discipline" and "separation" and "questioning your desire to be an Army officer." In the upper right corner, beside the date 6/1/02, Vermeesch has scribbled in, "What a transformation. Continue to make us proud.""

"In the age of the internet there are all too many people who are willing to tell you what to think and not nearly enough trying to report what’s going on."

"There's no question that what we want today would have seemed abhorrent to most people in the 1800s."

"We commonly call this hemisphere the New World, but it is just as old as the Old World, and has a past that is just as fabulous."

"Prep is a school steeped in history, family, friendship, and tradition. Many of the hundred boys in my class had gone to parochial school together. Our parents had gone to Gonzaga, Georgetown Visitation, and the other Catholic schools in the area. Many of our older brothers had also gone to Prep. Many of our older brothers had also gone to Prep. I'll never forget when I was in the eighth grade and had an interview as part of my application. I sat down with my parents in front of a teacher I had never met before. "You're a little taller than your brothers," he said after shaking my hand. "But I bet you're not as good an actor as your brother." This kind of atmosphere led to a sense of being part of a group that knew you better than you knew yourself. There was also the advantage of Prep being an all-boys school. At a critical time in our lives we were allowed to study, make friends, and get to know girls as friends due, paradoxically, to the fact that we were not distracted by girls. At age fifteen it was hard to think of anything else. And had there been girls on campus, Prep would not have been the place it was."

"Well, Paul Steiger, you've had a long career in traditional for-profit journalism. Now you're undertaking this. What's the biggest difference?"

"As the Israeli government warns of a new phase in its fight against Hamas, brand-new polling just into CNN shows how Americans are feeling about this war. The U.S. public broadly feels Israel's military response to the Hamas terrorist attack is fully justified. But the difference by age is quite stark; 81 percent of Americans over the age of 65 feel the response by the Israeli government is fully justified. But just 27 percent of Americans 18 to 34 years old feel that way. The humanitarian crisis is also top of mind for many Americans; 71 percent of Americans feel a lot of sympathy for the people of Israel; 41 percent feel a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian people."

"And we start with a major development in the Israel-Hamas war. Israel's Defense Forces putting it plainly, quote, eliminated Yahya Sinwar... Sinwar best known for inflicting though horrors of October 7, 2023, when he orchestrated Hamas's brutal mass murder of roughly 1,200 people in Israel, including 46 Americans, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Around 100 of 250 hostages taken by Hamas are still believed to be in Gaza, including seven Americans, four of whom are believed to be alive. Sinwar hid from public view for the last year after the attack. U.S. officials believe he hid in tunnels..."

"I’m sure that you think that a policy debate would be better than a personality debate, but if President Biden had gone onstage and spoke about the size of a pro golfer’s penis, I think you would be on this show right now saying you were shocked and appalled, and you would suggest it was evidence of his cognitive decline"

"Language has life because it lives in humanity...Language lives in me because it lives in everyone and everyone lives with it."

"My feminism is the feminism of Puerto Rican writer Clotilde Betances Jaeger, who, in 1929 responded to the racist comment of Carrie Chapman Catt that Latin American women were not helping to build peace, by stating that while peace was a central principle for Latin American and Caribbean women, it was based on freedom from US imperialism."

"The personal and the impersonal coincide because life itself impels them. Killing humanity kills language. Once the language is dead, the human self disappears."

"Every slave of a golden cage feels some hatred towards their master. Wondering the cause of such restlessness, they begin their emancipation."

"I'm Jake Tapper in Washington, where the state of our union is rather terrified that this brutal war between Israel and Hamas is about to get much bigger and much worse, more desperation in the Middle East this morning."

"Not even the ashes of heroes have peace. Being great is synonymous with loneliness."

"This week, the former President, hoping to shift the imagery away from his imminent fingerprinting-and-mugshot session in Georgia, has declared it beneath his dignity to engage in a debate with his rivals in the race for the Republican nomination. Instead, he will subject himself to the feathery inquisition of Tucker Carlson on social media. Yet Trump, the unwise wise guy, will eventually face less kindly examiners. Although he has long enjoyed the sleazy glamour and cynical counsel supplied by mob-adjacent figures like Roy Cohn, his mentor in matters of conscience and the law, Trump has no code and shows no loyalty. Despite his mobster cosplay, in short, he lacks even a gangster’s sense of dignity. Carmine (the Snake) Persico, for all his many sins, would have found Trump unworthy of the |Cosa Nostra. Before the mafia's disintegration, a boss was obliged to help a fallen or legally entangled soldier. And yet Trump won’t even pay the legal bills of [[Rudy Giuliani|[Rudy] Giuliani]], his loyal sidekick. The most lasting image of Giuliani will not be of a valiant public servant inspiring a grieving city but of a cynical mook lying about stolen votes on Trump's behalf while rivulets of hair dye course down his cheek."

"Two decades after the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), parents still routinely find themselves having to sue their local school boards to obtain an appropriate classroom placement for their son or daughter. Furthermore, very little of the money raised by advocacy organizations like Autism Speaks addresses the day-to-day needs of autistic people and their families. By focusing primarily on funding searches for potential causes and risk factors, these organizations reinforce the idea that autism is a historical anomaly-a distinctive problem of modern times that could be solved by a discovery that seems perpetually just around the corner. As the mainstream world had a long argument about vaccines, newly diagnosed adults were engaged in a very different conversation about the difficulties of navigating and surviving in a world not built for them. By sharing the stories of their lives, they discovered that many of the challenges they face daily are not "symptoms" of their autism, but hardships imposed by a society that refuses to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities as it does for people with physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness. A seemingly simple question began to formulate in my mind: After seventy years of research on autism, why do we still seem to know so little about it? To find the answer to that question for this book, I decided to start my reporting at the very beginning, even before Kanner's and Asperger's allegedly independent discoveries of autism in the 1940s. By taking nothing for granted, I learned that the standard time line of autism history-its creation myth, so to speak-is fundamentally flawed in ways that render autistic people in previous generations harder to see. Until these inaccuracies in the time line are corrected, they will continue to hamper our ability to make wise choices about the kinds of research and societal accommodations that would be most beneficial to autistic people and their families. One of the most promising developments since the publication of "The Geek Syndrome" has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions. Though the spectrum model of autism and the concept of neurodiversity are widely believed to be products of our postmodern world, they turn out to be very old ideas, proposed by Hans Asperger in his first public lecture on autism in 1938. The idea of neurodiversity has inspired the creation of a rapidly growing civil rights movement based on the simple idea that the most astute interpreters of autistic behavior are autistic people themselves rather than their parents or doctors. (p 15-6)"

"My conversations at Autreat-some mediated by keyboards or other devices for augmenting communication-taught me more about the day-to-day realities of being autistic than reading a hundred case histories would. They also offered me the chance to be in the neurological minority for the first time in my life, which illuminated some of the challenges that autistic people face in a society not built for them, while disabusing me of pernicious stereotypes such as the idea that autistic people lack humor and creative imagination. After just four days in autismland, the mainstream world seemed like a constant sensory assault. The notion that the cure for the most disabling aspects of autism will never be found in a pill, but in supportive communities, is one that parents have been coming to on their own for generations."