Journalists From San Francisco

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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?"

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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""

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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