Columnists From The United States

"Actually, none of this is fine. None of it! Trump should be directing all resources at his disposal to punish Russia for the attacks and prevent future ones. But he is not. America’s commander wants to be chummy with the enemy who committed the crime. Trump is more concerned with protecting his presidency and validating his election than he is in protecting this country. This is an incredible, unprecedented moment. America is being betrayed by its own president. America is under attack and its president absolutely refuses to defend it. Simply put, Trump is a traitor and may well be treasonous."

"…it’s not a term I reject. It’s a term that I came slow to using. I had a desire to want something that was more personal and more precise and less freighted and not an umbrella term, but, in a way, all identity terms are umbrella terms. Now I’m incredibly comfortable with the term."

"I think that’s a good way to put it. I told someone recently that I feel like a folk artist among fine artists. And I love it, because the columnists are a sort of orchestra—every one should be hitting a different note. Trying to figure out the thing that makes you stand out can take years to find. Eventually I decided that being the Southern guy, from the small town, from no means, was, in fact, the thing that made my voice different."

"Donald Trump is a bigot, there’s no other way to get around it, anybody who accepts that, supports it. Anybody who supports it is promoting it and that makes you a part of the bigotry itself. You have to decide whether or not you want to be part of the bigotry that is Donald Trump. You have to decide whether you want to be part of the sexism and misogyny that is Donald Trump."

"Put aside whatever suspicions you may have about whether Donald Trump will be directly implicated in the Russia investigation. Trump is right now, before our eyes and those of the world, committing an unbelievable and unforgivable crime against this country. It is his failure to defend."

"…On the one end, the abuse is making these young people LGBT. The science for that is completely flimsy. I completely disagree with that idea. On the other side ... children who will eventually identify as LGBT are more likely to be targets of sexual predators. If you think of it that way, it changes our concept of how we need to nurture and care for children who are different. ..."

"…There is a lot of bi-phobia and bi-erasure that exists in society but I find it to be a tremendous distraction from living your life, so I don't give any energy to that. ... I am who I am. This is a lived experience for me…"

"For this manifestation to be as forceful as it possibly can, we have to work to find solidarity in each other’s stories, as differing as their inciting perspectives may be. The patriarchy sands out the edges of our rightful infuriation, making it harder to see in any light but our own. This blindness is part of what denies us community-forming solidarity and part of what has allowed widespread and harassment to continue for so long. The sinister idea that there is a limit to the total number of accusations of "sexism" that society will bear has made us trend toward the egotistical in our understanding of oppression, but it is happening to all of us, and it is happening all of the time."

"Understanding the total impact of the patriarchy on the female experience is endlessly elusive. ... It is a constant process, perpetually blurred by the ebb and flow of so many epiphanies clouded by self-doubt."

"For many of us, living under the Trump administration has cast everything into sharper relief: It’s as if we’ve all been given fancy polarized sunglasses with which to more clearly see the fault lines of the patriarchy. It’s no longer possible to ignore what was there all along."

"It occurred to me how very tired I sometimes feel as an outspoken feminist. ... Trolls are trying to silence women, and I've installed a fiery declaration within myself to never give in, but it's incredibly hard, and gets harder as my platform as a writer grows. What didn’t occur to me initially is that West has spent years in the trenches fighting this endless, thankless fight, and maybe she needs a goddamn break. I had this revelation again, much more profoundly and emotionally, about my own mother while watching ’s new film, Lady Bird. ... Often, my mother and I clashed when she denied me freedom, but only because she had been harmed by the dangers she knew lay ahead for her daughter. I did so many risky, awful things, and then lied to her about them, because I never felt I could be honest with her. I should have known she wasn’t judging me. I should have known that she had done it all before, that even though she wouldn’t have used the word "feminist" to describe herself at the time, mostly she just didn’t want me to have to be so very tired. ... Walking home from Lady Bird on the kind of night that New York fall fantasies are made of, I resisted the urge to call my mother, because I thought I might cry until the universe ripped apart at the seams. But then I called her anyway. I sobbed as I told her I had no idea how impossibly hard she had been trying."

"I know I will almost certainly forget it all again, but I hope next time, I will be able to recall quickly. For this moment to become a movement, we have to keep trying to remember."

"Amid an extended, international discussion of and female confession, it has occurred to me that sometimes it can be difficult for women to understand one another’s pain. We are often told that experiences of oppression are actually the result of the supposedly overwrought emotional set point of womanhood, a pressure that compels us to keep our stories to ourselves — or, in the worst of cases, to look upon each other’s stories with excessive scrutiny, behavior prescribed by the poison of internalized misogyny."

"A bore is a man who, when you ask how he is, tells you."

"Mayer was definitely a left-winger in politics, even a revolutionary. But his would be a revolution different from the one urged by the typical anti-capitalist agitator, socialist, or communist. His, an anti-materialist one, would indeed put an end to capitalism, but, he told the editors of Christian Century in 1944, it would be a moral one."

"Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma that had not been expelled with the Romans, the dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe."

"National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists."

"It is a sensible military tactic to recognize the enemy before you shoot. The common enemy is the animality in man, and not the men here and there who are behaving like animals at the moment. Neither science nor prayer nor force will save us. What will save us is the reason that enables men, in ancient Israel and modern America, to choose between guns and butter, and to choose well. When we have produced men of reason, we shall have a world of reason, and the Hitlers will disappear. As long as we produce men of force we shall have a world of force, and the Hitlers, whoever wins the wars, will carry the day. Society may make many demands on me, as long as it keeps me out of the cave. It may take my property. It may take my life. But when it puts me back into the cave I must say, politely but firmly, to hell with society. My ancestors were cannibals without benefit of parliaments."

"If the last and the worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. If, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next."

"One day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you lived in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

"Socialism may be all right when men are fit to be socialists. The way may be hard and slow, but until we take it we shall find that the so-called Socialist state degenerates and Fascism as rapidly as the pacifist with warm hearts to generate into militarists with fevered brows. Marxism, like fascism and capitalism is materialism. The love of material goods above all others is as animal as of love of war. The love of justice above material goods must save us in the end it saved we may be."

"Justice alone knows liberty, equality, and fraternity, and justice is a human virtue arising from man's human capacity to reason. We cannot make sense out of justice by looking at the moon or taking dope or building battleships. We can make sense out of justice by using our reason to discover that justice, like wisdom, is better than rubies."

"If I believed that force would ever build a better world, I would be a Marxist revolutionary. But I have no more faith in poor men's animalism than in rich men's. And I want no proletarian revolution until the proletariat has demonstrated devotion to reason which the rich, with larger opportunities to cultivate that virtue, have so universally failed to achieve. I favor the underdog against the upperdog, but I favor something better than a dog above both of them."

"Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed."

"The masses of the people could not be held back from Nazism, so powerful was its appeal, and this same priest, who would not leave his people, went with them to Nazism, too."

"[G]overnment has an abysmal record of abusing the public’s trust, finances, and its own authority. Now some people want it to take on a bigger role?"

"Government doesn’t louse up everything, but it sure louses up a lot of what it promises to deliver."

"[I]f you want to live like a Norwegian, buy a plane ticket."

"[P]rogressives seem to think that conservatives distrust the government because of some esoteric philosophical theory, or because we had some weird dream involving Ayn Rand. In reality, it’s because we’ve been told to trust the government before — and we’ve gotten burned, time and time again."

"Despite our repeated warnings, Qadhafi continued his reckless policy of intimidation, his relentless pursuit of terror. He counted on America to be passive."

"[W]hy are Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway not that far behind us, ranking in the top twelve countries for antidepressant use? Is it just the long winters? Why are their drug-related deaths booming? Isn’t it possible that a generous, far-reaching welfare state depletes people’s sense of drive, purpose, and self-respect, and enables them to explore chemical forms of happiness?"

"I remain a skeptic about Donald Trump. Trump fans look at us skeptics with incredulity that we could possibly object to their man... Yet I see people comparing Trump to Reagan. Donald Trump has been a conservative for about ten minutes."

"There was a time when intellectual meant someone who uses reason and intellect. Today, people who call themselves intellectuals are in a form of mental death spiral: they search for, and find, those index cards that support their world view, and clutch little red books like rosaries in the face of all external evidence. They are ruled by appeals to authority. Their self-image and sense of emotional well-being trumps any and all objective evidence to the contrary."

"It may not be factually true that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the saying has passed into common usage because the image has the ring of truth to it. Time and time again, the good and decent common people have manned the walls of the city, and have been ready to give their lives in its defense, only to discover too late that some silk-robed (expletive) has snuck out of the palace at midnight and thrown open the gates to the barbarians outside.""

"You may think that Andrew Breitbart, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and BigGovernment-dot-com were fighting against an enemy, and the enemy was ACORN, but I do not think that's the case at all. I think the enemy they were fighting against are the media. By not covering the story, not at all ... Breitbart showed that the media is no longer merely biased. They're no longer even ignoring the news. The mainstream media is now in the news suppression business."

"It's always such a pleasure to have Germans enlighten us on the best way to move large groups of sick, downtrodden people by rail. The only motivation I can ascribe to such behavior is that same one that propels young dim boys to tear the wings off flies."

"Civilizations fall because the people inside the Sanctuary throw open the gates."

"And why do soldiers wear uniforms? It certainly is not to protect the soldier. As a matter of fact, a soldier’s uniform is actually a big flashing neon arrow pointing to some kid that says to the enemy, SHOOT ME!"

"Government can take your money at gunpoint; businesses have to persuade you."

"You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that that advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer's head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky."

"Any idiot can build bombs. Our Trinity sits not on some desert sand seared into glass at an abandoned, sad pillar of stones. It's in our heads and our hearts, it's in our genes, this beautiful, gorgeous marriage of money, freedom and ingenuity."

"People are telling you that Tuesday will be the most important election of your lives. That is not true. The most important election of your lives was held on Tuesday, November 7th, 2000. You just didn't know it. Neither did I. What happened on that day led to one man being in the White House these past four years, rather than the other one. Whether he has done enough to keep us safe, even if he should lose on Tuesday, remains to be seen. But the fact remains that George W. Bush was Commander in Chief and President when we needed him the most."

"There is a word for people who are kept safe, fed, clothed, housed and sustained fully by others, and that word is SLAVES."

"There's no way I could be president of the United States, I have no; military experience, I've never run a business, for God's sakes I mean - who could possibly clear that bar? The great thing about President Obama is he's actually left the presidential bar on the floor, anyone can walk over that bar now. If Barack Obama can be President of the United States literally anybody in the planet can be President of the United States."

"It's time to reintroduce Americans to America."

"You're not black, white, yellow or brown. You're an American."

"We are the party of big guns, fast cars, and hot women. If you can't sell freedom to the American people then you're in the wrong line of work."

"Treat your past as a book that you learn from instead of a hammer that you beat yourself up about."

"Nothing penetrates the liberal's sense of moral outrage."

"Bernie Sanders is an aged, dimwitted thief who's never worked a day in his life where he wasn't taking money from people at gunpoint."