People From Texas

"It’s my belief that the Church must get past these human-formed groups and sects, because, frankly, all of that has become a hindrance and distraction. The Divine meets us there, at the altar, but, meanwhile, we have been chewing each other up and ripping one another apart — and what are the fruits of this? This isn’t the Holy Spirit, this division.I encourage those in the traditional congregations to remember why they love the liturgy, why and how the reverence points to him. There is such a great opportunity for setting an example of simple, joyful reverence in the extraordinary form. That sense of awe that I experienced should be experienced by all. I understand it may be that for some who attend these traditional Latin Masses; the lack of reverence they have experienced [in the ordinary form] and even possible persecution from those within the Church for their reverence, has caused a reactionary response. But the fruits of discord, division, sectarianism, elitism, even spiritual pride: These cannot be from the liturgy — it is fully human, reactionary. I think this is where the devil seeps in, distracting this community from the focus on Jesus to a focus on the ritual, on legalism and even elitism. It’s a subtle deception."

"Rejecting the title of Co-Redemptrix is not simply a matter of language. It is part of an ongoing effort to strip the faith of its supernatural claims, to make the Church appear harmless to a world that hates the cross. The Blessed Virgin is the most perfect human reflection of divine truth. To diminish her role is to diminish the very reality of grace. When her titles are declared “inappropriate”, it is not she who is diminished, but our understanding of Christ, for every Marian truth protects a Christological truth."

"Msgr. Joseph Strickland, as quoted in Aldo Maria Valli, Monsignor Strickland: “Colpire Maria significa colpire l’Eucaristia. Non restiamo in silenzio!” (November 2025)"

"If the Lord wants to use me as a sort of a David-voice in the face of the Goliath of our sinful culture, you know I'm ready to pull out the slingshot."

"Limit poker is a science, and these kids are scientists. But no-limit is an art. In limit you're shooting at a target. In no-limit the target comes alive and shoots back at you."

"Semeonoff and Kalmikoff soldiers, under the protection of Japanese troops, were roaming the country like wild animals, killing and robbing the people, and these murders could have been stopped any day Japan wished. If questions were asked about these brutal murders, the reply was that the people murdered were Bolsheviks and this explanation, apparently, satisfied the world. Conditions were represented as being horrible in Eastern Siberia, and that life was the cheapest thing there. There were horrible murders committed, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks as the world believes. I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to everyone killed by the Bolsheviks."

"To judge from what he has to say about the past, he is unlikely to lose sleep over presidential abuses of power in the present or future. Indeed, Gaddis admonishes Americans for placing restrictions on their elected rulers. Describing what he clearly sees as the regrettable overreaction to Watergate and Vietnam in the 1970s, he writes: “The United States Congress was passing laws—always blunt instruments—to constrain the use of United States military and intelligence capabilities. It was as if the nation had become its own worst enemy.” Retrospectively frustrated by such constraints, Gaddis admires the boldness and vision of President George W. Bush. A keen supporter of the recent Iraq war, Gaddis in 2004 even published a guide for the use of American policymakers, showing how preemptive and preventive war making has an honorable place in American history and is to be encouraged—where appropriate—as part of an ongoing project of benevolent interventionism. Thus, while it may seem tempting to dismiss John Lewis Gaddis’s history of the cold war as a naively self-congratulatory account that leaves out much of what makes its subject interesting and of continuing relevance, that would be a mistake. Gaddis’s version is perfectly adapted for contemporary America: an anxious country curiously detached from its own past as well as from the rest of the world and hungry for “a fireside fairytale with a happy ending.” The Cold War: A New History is likely to be widely read in the U.S.: both as history and, in the admiring words of a blurb on the dust jacket, for the “lessons” it can teach us in how to “deal with new threats.” That is a depressing thought."

"Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of the world."

"Stalin's postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order."

"The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all of the differences that separated the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, there was now reason for hope that it would never take place."

"Learning about the past liberates the learner from oppressions earlier constructions of the past have imposed upon them."

"No one can be certain where or when the next great earthquake will occur. It is helpful to know, though, that such upheavals take place more frequently in California than in Kansas: that people who live along the San Andreas Fault should configure their houses against seismic shocks, not funnel clouds. Nobody would prudently bet, just yet, on who will play in the 2001 World Series. It seems safe enough to assume, though, that proficiency will determine which teams get there: achieving it, too, is a kind of configuring against contingencies. Not even the most capable war planner can predict where the next war will occur, or what its outcome will be. But is it equally clear that war planning should therefore cease? The point, in all of these instances, is not so much to predict the future as to prepare for it."

"…It’s more complex because the longer I am writing, and living, I am coming to understand that there is a deep truth that we all have these experiences in some way or another. While we might not all be multi-ethnic (or at least not consciously presenting or celebrating it), we all have multiple identities at play. And it’s not just our genetic or familial cultures, but our societies, our social circles, all the complex ways we come to be who we are."

"…I think borders do not protect us, they wall us in. I think White Supremacy can be defeated by people reclaiming their histories and seeing how structural racism once excluded many from Whiteness that it now includes–a testament to its problematic construct. I think cultures, like our personal identities, are fluid, not rigid, and inform each other, and we should celebrate that as well. I believe that when we see this history, we can understand that the people and the forces that are working so damn hard these days to keep us separated from one another are a part of the long arc of history that has been doing so since this country began, and probably well before that…"

"…see theatre that moves you, theatre that challenges you, and theatre that bores you to the point that, as a beautiful human being once told me, instead of focusing on the performance, you begin attempting to levitate in your chair…"

"We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will."

"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—."

"When things go sideways in this unhappy world, nobody cries out in the dead of night: “For the love of God, somebody call the Dutch!”"

"If you’ve ever been to the monkey house in one of those awful downscale zoos, you know what monkeys — these particular monkeys — are like: They jerk off and fling poo all day, generally using the same hand for both, and they don’t do a hell of a lot else, unless there’s McDonald’s. All day: jerk off, fling poo, jerk off, fling poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling.Twitter, basically."

"[A]fter about 300,000 years of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, here we are again: monkeys, albeit monkeys with Wi-Fi. You could try being human beings. You could. You could try a little freedom on for size and see how it fits and feels. You aren’t going to. We both know that."

"Jerk off, fling poo, jerk off, fling poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling.I hate monkeys.This is their story."

"[M]y own view is that Donald Trump is incapable of being a racist in the traditional sense of that word, because racism is derived from a perverted and misapplied sense of loyalty, a sentiment from which President Trump is manifestly immune."

"The idea that Ilhan Omar could — even as a matter of mass-dunderhead rhetoric — be treated as a non-citizen because the president and his admirers do not like her politics (which are quite unlikeable) does violence to the idea of citizenship per se. In that much, it is fundamentally and literally un-American."

"“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” So said Abraham Lincoln in much more difficult times than these. We should resist the urge to treat our presidents as god-emperors, but Lincoln testifies to the fact that presidential words matter. Alas, so does Donald Trump."

"America is not an idea or a collection of documents, but neither is it a closed ethnolinguistic set. It is a nation in which relations among the people and between the individual and the state are defined by the terms of citizenship."

"Facebook, Google, et al. operate in an almost uniformly Left-Democratic culture, and they heard a great deal from both organized and semi-organized efforts from progressives and left-wing organizations whose sole purpose in life is trying to discredit conservative figures and exclude conservatives from public discourse."

"The opposite case has been made, repeatedly, throughout the history of liberalism, liberalism being the philosophy most despised by the Americans who call themselves “liberals.”"

"[M]onkeys in India are a gigantic pain in the ass and a genuine menace, too: Every now and then, they kill somebody, or maim somebody pretty good."

"Sweden’s more liberal policy toward immigrants may be judged in no small part by the Stockholm riots of 2013."

"In reality, economic xenophobia and ordinary xenophobia always end up colliding. The nastier of Europe’s anti-immigrant and ethno-nationalist movements argue that ethnic solidarity is necessary to preserve the welfare state. Among ordinary Swedes, the topic of immigrants’ — non-Nordic people’s — relatively high rates of unemployment and welfare dependency is politically charged."

"Progressives conceive of themselves as a caste apart, a special and specialized group of enlightened men and women whose job it is to organize other people’s lives for them, a necessity because those people are too dumb to do it for themselves."

"In Sweden, diversity is not their strength. Homogeneity is."

"Nobody but nobody is quite so dumb as to believe that all, most, or even very many uses of firearms to prevent acts of criminal violence result in justifiable homicides. Most of them do not result in anybody’s being shot, much less shot dead, because most of them do not involve discharging a firearm. As it turns out, pointing a gun at a would-be assailant is in many cases a very persuasive gesture."

"[T]he broad movement oriented toward advocacy for sexual minorities has become more hysterical and more insistent as the stakes have in general declined. This is characteristic of many similar political movements: We have much cleaner air and water today than we did a generation ago, but the environmental movement is six times as hysterical as it once was. It is a curious thing."

"What we can and should acknowledge is that there is a difference between moral confidence and moral certitude, and that in both moral and political matters there is always a place for prudence and humility, for the facts of the case and the particulars of the time. A conservatism that fails to account for these is no conservatism at all."

"Liars think everybody is lying, cheaters think everybody else is a cheat, and self-serving political hacks who misuse their offices think that that’s just how the game is played, that everybody does it."

"Because they think of themselves as a special enlightened caste, progressives care almost nothing about process. Process is for the little people."

"I am grateful to the men and women of our military for their service, but armies are only expedients, necessary evils. They should be kept out of sight for the same reason I keep the guns out of sight in my home. A military parade does not display greatness—it displays power. And that may be where I most part company with our new nationalists. To my eye, there is more American greatness in a New England town hall than in all of Washington, and more American greatness in an Oregon apple orchard or a Rotary meeting than there is in all the tanks and rockets that ever have been."

"... essentially, NASA was quite colorblind. If you could do the job, that was what mattered."

"“We were not going to understand gender inequality or [other inequalities] unless we understood the interpersonal processes that mediated and enacted institutional structures and larger patterns of inequality.”"

"“No set of questions is more fundamental to sociology than those about inequality—what is it, why is it, how does it come about, and what can we do to change it.”"

"Identify an agrarian problem—greenhouse gas emissions, overuse of antibiotics and dangerous pesticides, genetically modified crops, salmonella, E. coli, waste disposal, excessive use of water—and trace it to its ultimate origin and you will likely find an animal. … Research shows that veganism, which obviates the inherent waste involved in growing the grains used to fatten animals for food in conventional systems, is seven times more energy efficient than eating meat and, if embraced globally, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from conventional agriculture by 94 percent. … But with rare exception, those in the big, lumpy tent have thrown down a red carpet for “ethical butchers” while generally dismissing animal rights advocates as smug ascetics (which they can be) and crazed activists (ditto) who are driven more by sappy sentiment than rock-ribbed reason. It’s an easy move to make. But the problem with this dismissal—and the overall refusal to address the ethics of killing animals for food—is that it potentially anchors the Food Movement’s admirable goals in the shifting sands of an unresolved hypocrisy. Let’s call it the “omnivore’s contradiction.”"

"Nobody wants to cook "Five Spice Stew With a Mother Deer Shot With a High-Powered Rifle While Her Baby Slept Nearby." But what about "Five Spice Venison Stew"? Much more palatable. … But when we tell ourselves that we're humanely harvesting venison out of reverence for the deer -- rather than killing a sentient being to satisfy our palate -- we're not so much connecting with our food as we are manipulating language to avoid knowing what we don't want to know."

"We’ve been bombarded with nauseating narratives about the evils of factory farming for over 40 years. The fact that we have not, as a collective gesture of consumer outrage, monkey wrenched these hellholes into oblivion speaks either to the human tendency to procrastinate or, worse, our pathological indifference."

"The transformations initiated by a healthy vegan diet go well beyond physical health. For those who want it to be, a plant-based diet is also a potent political comment on our broken food system. … we're looking at a diet for which the ultimate beneficiary is the individual. Healthy veganism explicitly serves no corporate or industrial gods. In fact, it counters these interests. … If the prospect of simultaneously giving corporate food executives nightmares while achieving personal dietary empowerment -- not to mention lowering your carbon footprint and minimizing animal suffering -- has any appeal, then veganism is for you."

"The “animal rights movement” … is at once colossally powerful but ultimately hobbled by a weak spot both miniscule and fatal. … That colossal power emanates from hundreds of thousands of everyday activists who justifiably believe that conscientious consumers can, through a wide variety of measures, take gradual steps toward removing animal products from their diet. These true believers do the grunt work of activism: they hand out pamphlets, write books, blog, make documentaries, start campus veg societies, publish vegan recipes, open vegan food carts, work for animal sanctuaries, run veganic farms, and do basically anything they can to encourage consumers to contemplate the face on their plate. I consider myself a member of this noble tribe. The heel of the movement, by contrast, consists of a handful of radicals, mostly academics, who do little more than set an unrealistic benchmark of success … First, it seeks to eliminate all animal exploitation, in every realm of life, immediately, and without compromise or strategic capitulation; and second, it aims to eliminate all forms of oppression … The heel does not want the good, or even the better. It wants perfection."

"In the case of agriculture and drought, there’s a clear and accessible action most citizens can take: reducing or, ideally, eliminating the consumption of animal products. Changing one’s diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual’s food-related water footprint. Going vegetarian, a better option in many respects, reduces that water footprint by almost 60 percent."

"Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It's a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation. … Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change."

"When a cartoonist attempts to be ‘fair and balanced’ and ‘understand all sides,’ they have failed. Too many avoid that altogether and instead become comedians. They take any topic and cast about and ask themselves: “What’s funny in this?” I despise that attitude. Sure, satirical humor is an important element, but not the only element. A good cartoonist need not be funny to be effective. Many of my best cartoons are not funny."

"Aside from the bumbling Carter and Ford, what we mostly got since Kennedy were corrupt Deep State criminals... Then Trump arrived and the Deep State did their best to thwart him. Trump is a populist and a nationalist. He doesn’t want open borders. He defeated Hillary, the Deep State’s choice. Trump is an anathema to the globalist Deep State and they are still trying to take him down. Therefore, they concocted a ludicrous narrative that Russia aided Trump and ‘hacked the election.’ Instead of locking up Hillary, they invented grandiose lies and reverse McCarthyism. They are out to impeach Trump. This could lead to civil war."