journalists-from-washington-d-c

"[A]ll the evidence suggests that stricter gun laws would fall disproportionately on the same people who have always bear the brunt of tough criminal justice policies."

"[A]s Reasons A. Barton Hinkle pointed out, New York’s notorious stop-and-frisk policies, which left-wing mayor Bill DeBlasio led the charge against, was arguably one of the most effective gun control policies in the country."

"[T]errorism has rattled us, starting with 9/11 but continuing through lesser forms of murder and mayhem ever since—the kind perpetrated by radical Muslims via internet indoctrination (for example, Ft. Hood, Boston Marathon, San Bernardino, Orlando) and the more nativist kind perhaps more so (for example, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Dylann Roof, Stephen Paddock, and, just this past week, Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers). Terrorism does its damage not mainly through body counts but by undermining the social trust that keeps communities engaged, united, and optimistic. The bureaucratized paranoia we have allowed to develop as a consequence hasn’t helped in the least—“If you see something, say something” spoken a hundred million times a day across the country by our now ubiquitous automatonic ghosts. By essentially reminding people of the real prospect of mass murder several times a day, it’s been on balance counterproductive as well as very expensive."

"[S]ocially liberal gun control champions don’t see themselves as pushing policies that would abet racial profiling or worsen the problem of mass incarceration. They see themselves as going after their political enemies—socially conservative white men in red states."

"[F]ear is necessary, for without it we become passive victims of our own bewilderment. We can still work our way out of the mess we’re in, with fear as our fuel. But to do that we must understand and tame our fear, not let it drive us crazy—even despite events like Saturday’s murder of eleven Jewish worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. For many people, naturally enough, the difference can sometimes be a thin line."

"[F]earful societies—and American society obviously isn’t the only example—develop markets for fear abatement. The most effective way for political entrepreneurs to tap into such markets is to focus on what or, better, who to blame for what makes people afraid. The simpler the depiction of fear’s source the better for the would-be political hustler. No matter how varied and interactively complex the real sources of fear and insecurity may be, rattled people are easily manipulated by demagogues offering parsimonious, emotion-driven conflations—say, about “carnage” caused by immigrants."

"[D]emocracy is not in imminent jeopardy but American liberal democracy—predicated on the rule of law, individual rights, and tolerance for dissent—does seem up for grabs in a way it has never been in my lifetime. The willful trashing of U.S. postwar grand strategy takes us anew into a world based not on a U.S.-led Western rules-based order, but on a ragged concert of great powers with zones of influence in which power-based relationships alone define relations between big and small nations. We’ve been there before and we’re still here to tell of it—but earlier epochs of balance-of-power realism did not proceed in a world with nuclear weapons."

"[B]roken families produce more insecure children; kids who feel emotionally betrayed by those who are supposed to love and protect them often grow into insecure adults, replicating insecurity by often failing to form secure loving bonds. Deep-seated insecurity is a host on which fear feeds, and so is the loneliness that is often the result of a love-deprived life. Unfortunately, American family life has been hurting now for some time, especially among lower socio-economic cohorts under growing economic pressure."

"[S]hould we be afraid? Yes. But understand that what we think we fear may not exhaust its real sources."

"[F]ew intelligent observers are under any illusions that this type of symbolic half-measure on gun control would meaningfully cut into America’s gun violence statistics. Meaningfully reducing gun violence in a nation with 300 million guns would probably require the type of confiscatory gun regulations enacted in Australia and some European countries. And the mechanics of enacting such policies could well contradict the vision for police and prison reform that has been gaining momentum on the left and right alike over the past year."

"[W]e have become so beset with ambient fear in recent decades that Donald Trump’s rise to the White House would be inexplicable without it. Too many people, abetted by the media, focus on the man: That’s a mistake. The proper focus needs to be on what has happened to our culture that has allowed a man like that to become President—and what it may lead to next."

"[G]un control advocates seem to be under the impression that governments can pass new felony legislation that will take guns off the streets without requiring more aggressive policing, without putting more people in prison..."

"[S]ince fear is ubiquitous, every civilization has devised ways to manage it. That has typically been accomplished in the context of religious culture. Dangers are easier to cope with for most people when they are seen as something other than completely random and meaningless, when they are integrated into shared narratives that make a certain kind of emotional sense. When traditional religious templates erode, as they have in most Western societies in recent times, the frameworks that control the psycho-social impact of fear erode with them. They have been replaced, in a manner of speaking, with the pseudo-religion of the therapeutic, whose obsession with absolute security has only served to make nearly everyone more anxious, not less."

"Gun control and tough-on-crime politics are two sides of the same coin. If governments are serious about cracking down on illegal guns in a meaningful way, they will need to use all of the same tools that they used to crack down on crime from the 1970s onward—tough criminal penalties (i.e., long prison sentences for offenders) and aggressive policing..."

"The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage."

"The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised."

"We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal."

"You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line."

"The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!"

"The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld."

"To its neocon architects, Iraq was always about empire, hegemony, Pax Americana, global democracy – about getting hold of America’s power to make the Middle East safe for Sharon and themselves glorious and famous."

"I have family roots in the South, in Mississippi. When the Civil War came, Cyrus Baldwin enlisted and did not survive Vicksburg. William Buchanan of Okolona, who would marry Baldwin’s daughter, fought at Atlanta and was captured by General Sherman. William Baldwin Buchanan was the name given to my father and by him to my late brother... As a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I have been to their gatherings. I spoke at the 2001 SCV convention in Lafayette, LA. The Military Order of the Stars and Bars presented me with a battle flag and a wooden canteen like the ones my ancestors carried."

"With each year, America becomes ever more addicted to the narcotic of cheap imports. The price of that addiction is the dismantlement of the mightiest industrial empire the world has ever seen. Piece by piece, job by job, factory by factory, it is being carted off to foreign soil. The yellow brick road that once took tens of millions of poor and working Americans into the middle class lies in ruin. It is not an accident. It is a direct consequence of a deliberate effort to submerge our country in a Global Economy, whence we shall never be truly free again."

"The new hedonism seems unable to give people a reason to go on living. Its earliest fruits appear to be poisonous. Will this new "liberating" culture that our young have so enthusiastically embraced prove the deadliest carcinogen of them all? And if the West is in the grip of a "culture of death," as the pope contends and the statistics seem to show, is Western civilization about to follow Lenin's empire to the same inglorious end?"

"Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now."

"A cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests."

"For it is this cultural revolution that has led to just such a "profound modification in the ideas" of peoples. And those ideas have made Western elites apparently indifferent to the death of their civilization. They do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration."

"While world population had doubled to six billion in forty years, the European peoples had stopped reproducing. Their populations had begun to stagnate and, in many countries, had already begun to fall. Of Europe's forty-seven nations, only one, Muslim Albania, was, by 2000, maintaining a birthrate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely."

"The prognosis is grim. Between 2000 and 2050, world population will grow by more than three billion to over nine billion people, but this 50 percent increase in global population will come entirely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as one hundred million people of European stock vanish from the earth."

"As Western peoples have begun to die, the vacant rooms in the House of the West will not long remain vacant. In America, the places prepared for the forty million unborn lost since Roe v. Wade have been filled by the grateful poor of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As Europeans forgo children, the places prepared for them, too, will be occupied by strangers."

"This struggle to preserve the old creeds, cultures, and countries of the West is the new divide between Left and Right; this struggle will define what it means to be a conservative. This is the cause of the twenty-first century and the agenda of conservatism for the remainder of our lives."

"The West is dying. Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink. Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the fourteenth century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization."

"In the wake of Jean-Marie Le Pen's capture of 17 percent of the vote in the first round of France's presidential election, the French Establishment, too, has shown great tolerance for fascist tactics in resisting any rebirth of the European Right. … Though Le Pen has made radical and foolish statements, there is no evidence he is a Nazi. His hero is not Hitler but Joan of Arc, and he and his National Front have accepted defeat in every election they have lost. No, Le Pen is hated and feared not just for who he is, but for the issues he has raised. ... As it is often the criminal himself who is first to cry, "Thief!" so it is usually those who scream, "Fascist!" loudest who are the quickest to resort to anti-democratic tactics. Today, the greatest threat to the freedom and independence of the nations of Europe comes not from Le Pen and that 17 percent of French men and women who voted for him. It comes from an intolerant European Establishment that will accept no rollback of its powers or privileges, nor any reversal of policies it deems "progressive.""

"As you may have heard in my last campaign, I am called by many names. “” is one of the nicer ones; but it is inexact. I am an economic nationalist. To me, the country comes before the economy; and the economy exists for the people. I believe in free markets, but I do not worship them. In the proper hierarchy of things, it is the market that must be harnessed to work for man – and not the other way around."

"I'm not going to walk away from my views simply because David Duke takes them."

"What was right and true yesterday is wrong and false today. What was immoral and shameful — promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide — has become progressive and praiseworthy. Nietzsche called it the transvaluation of all values; the old virtues become sins, and the old sins become virtues."

"In half a lifetime, many Americans have seen their God dethroned, their heroes defiled, their culture polluted, their values assaulted, their country invaded, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans have held for generations."

"America has taken on the historic roles of the German empire in keeping Russia out of Europe, of the Austrian empire in policing the Balkans, of the British empire in patrolling the oceans and sea lanes and protecting the Persian Gulf, of the Ottoman empire in keeping peace in the Holy Land, of the Japanese empire in defending Korea and containing China — and of the Spanish empire in Latin America."

"Kristol's warning that neoconservatives could go to Kerry was an admission of what many have long recognized. The neoconservatives are not really conservatives at all. They are impostors and opportunists."

"Neoconservatives are the boat people of the McGovern revolution."

"Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common — not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons."

"A civil war is going to break out inside the Republican Party along the old trench lines of the Goldwater-Rockefeller wars of the 1960s, a war for the heart and soul and future of the party."

"Nine days after an attack on the United States, this tiny clique of intellectuals [Neocons] was telling the President of the United States...that if he did not follow their war plans, he would be charged publicly with a "decisive surrender" to terrorism."

"The Bush Doctrine is a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics."

"The Bush National Security Strategy is the imperial edict of a superpower out to exploit its present supremacy to make itself permanent Lord Protector of the universe."

"The Bush Doctrine is democratic imperialism. This will bleed, bankrupt and isolate this republic. This overthrows the wisdom of the Founding Fathers about what America should be all about."

"Listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden's prophecy as to what we were about."

"If Iraq collapses in chaos and civil war, there will be a ferocious fight in this country over who misled us and who may have lied us, into war. Into the dock will go the neoconservatives whose class project this was."

"Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire."

"Under the rubric of conservatism, the Republican party of Bush I and II has been reinventing itself into what conservatives would have once recognized as a Rockefeller party reciting Reaganite rhetoric."