Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution Tucker Carlson | DOC

Tucker Carlson

An incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

Q
Maybe there was a mutiny overnight. Maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. You’re not sure. But it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
You can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
As waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. You look on in horror, helpless and desperate. You have nowhere to go. You’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
Plato imagined this scene in The Republic. He never mentions what happened to the ship. It would be nice to know.
Q
What was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
Facts threaten their fantasies.
Q
Donald Trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. He never hid that. Voters knew it. They just concluded that the options were worse—and not just Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, but the Bush family and their donors and the entire Republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and Hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
Q
Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created. Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. He didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. You couldn’t really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
Q
Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.
In retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: Ignore voters for long enough and you get Donald Trump. Yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. Instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, America’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. Beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
Trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
Trump won because Russian agents “hacked” the election.
Trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
Trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
None of these explanations withstand scrutiny. They’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
Q
In 1970, the year after I was born, well over 60 percent of American adults ranked as middle class. That year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. By 2015, America’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more Latin American. Middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. Fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. A majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
Q
Forty years ago, Democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. Now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
Q
Democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: You don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
Republican donors want lower wages.
Q
But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? … Nobody knows.
Q
The cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
Q
From Iraq to Libya to Syria to Yemen, America has embarked on repeated military adventures in the Middle East. None of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
Thousands of Americans have died fighting abroad. The wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged America’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. Enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in America. Yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
Q
One of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight Islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for Islamic extremism.
Q
Democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. In a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the Bastille; they can vote. Once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. Wise leaders understand this. They’re self-reflective and self-critical. When they lose elections, they think about why.
Q
Maybe America’s most effective government agency is the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes. Any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the NTSB combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. Its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. The NTSB is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
If our political and intellectual elites ran the NTSB, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming Vladimir Putin. They’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. If you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
Q
By redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
Q
The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.
Q
Listed in one place, Boot’s many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“I’ll invade you!!!”) Republicans in Washington didn’t find any of it amusing. They were impressed. …
Everything changed when Trump won the Republican nomination. Trump had never heard of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He had no idea Max Boot was a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Trump was running against more armed conflicts. He had no interest in invading Pakistan. Boot hated him.
As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the Russian government would react badly to the provocation. Those who disagreed Boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for Putin and the mullahs in Iran.
As Boot’s posture on Russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by the Washington Post as a columnist. The paper’s announcement cited Boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
Q
 In speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
Q
By sending aid and weapons to the Afghan resistance, Reagan helped weaken the Russian position in Afghanistan, and ultimately the Soviet Union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm Muslim extremists waging a holy war in Southwest Asia. Both Osama bin Laden and Taliban founder Mohammed Omar got their first taste of warfare in the Afghan mujahideen… America had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
Q
By the end of Clinton’s second term, the United States was bombing Iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
America has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
Q
They viewed Gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. That’s all the justification they needed to take him out. So they did. 
Q
On Election Day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of U.S. politics, American troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. The Pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. Barack Obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
Q
Liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. Want to save children? Bomb their country. ...
How often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? Do children on the ground really like them? Who knows? Follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in American media.
Q
The signature characteristic of America’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. No matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
Q
Political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. In Washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
To the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
Q
Washingtonians hate change.
More than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
Q
Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq War was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
Q
A large and growing proportion of Americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
A 2017 Cato Institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified Democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
Q
In order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, Google fired James Damore. For the crime of sharing his alternative views...
Damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
Q
An open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
Q
Even Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. Waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. She lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in Hancock Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. How did Waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? I asked once. She didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
Q
When the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. The entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. After a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists.

241

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q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. rhode island. Thus the egyptians 241 developed their elaborate embalming practices, in which the corpse was artificially desiccated and wrapped to be placed in its coffin. Some immensely exciting events are waiting to happen at the metropolitan opera. an incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. Akbar tanjun g, an ex-chairman of indonesian legislative assembly, is the first chairman of persatuan batak pesisir batak pesisir association. an incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. I could see this as being useful 241 in a repayment plan for a consumer. Killing sessions is the only way to work 241 around ora errors. Sharing sat in fourth for much of the juvenile fillies turf race but dominated down the stretch to overtake daahyeh an incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. and win the second-to-last event of the day.

I want to use a few of an incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. these for an "ancient cultures" collection, i think the code is mostly compatible with ck2 3. Carolyn, i am so, silent screaming mad at my children's grandparents. The republican incumbent 241 governor, frank merriam, defeated him, but sinclair still won over, votes 44 percent. Upon arriving, an incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. the group was attacked by strange-looking birds. I think the amp should be real honestly, there are a lot of good reviews on amazon and i spoke with an alpine rep and he said those amps arent really fake, its just that those people get a hold of them some how and they sell them when they aren't supposed to, and a lot of the prices on amazons from different sellers were similar, anyway ill post back once i receive the amp and show you guys whats comes in the box, if it comes in a brand new box with a birth sheet it should be fine. The new carrying amount of the an incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. intangible asset is its former carrying amount, less the impairment loss. As to the reciprocal cross, florio reports a case of a lipard, occurring in italy. 241 remit of the government in the field of family policy article. The development of 241 knowledge, intellectual qualities, professional and transferable skills, will equip participants for middle management and senior appointments throughout the life science supply chain at home and abroad. Brace treatment group outperformed the conservative group an incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. in all outcomes. We're near a point now where the amount of data being offered to customers of pay monthly with a handset or any sort of sim only mobile deal is often so high it might as an incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. well be unlimited. I am an incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...

q
maybe there was a mutiny overnight. maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. you’re not sure. but it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. …
you can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ...
as waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. you look on in horror, helpless and desperate. you have nowhere to go. you’re trapped on a ship of fools. …
plato imagined this scene in the republic. he never mentions what happened to the ship. it would be nice to know.
q
what was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ...
facts threaten their fantasies.
q
donald trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. he never hid that. voters knew it. they just concluded that the options were worse—and not just hillary clinton and the democratic party, but the bush family and their donors and the entire republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ...
q
trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters america’s leaders created. trump didn’t invade iraq or bail out wall street. he didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. you couldn’t really know what trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
q
happy countries don’t elect donald trump president. desperate ones do.
in retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: ignore voters for long enough and you get donald trump. yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, america’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:
trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters.
trump won because russian agents “hacked” the election.
trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along.
none of these explanations withstand scrutiny. they’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. 
q
in 1970, the year after i was born, well over 60 percent of american adults ranked as middle class. that year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. by 2015, america’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more latin american. middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. a majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income.
q
forty years ago, democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change.
q
democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: you don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them.
republican donors want lower wages.
q
but is diversity our strength? the less we have in common, the stronger we are? … nobody knows.
q
the cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think.
q
from iraq to libya to syria to yemen, america has embarked on repeated military adventures in the middle east. none of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. …
thousands of americans have died fighting abroad. the wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged america’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in america. yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago.
q
one of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for islamic extremism.
q
democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. in a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the bastille; they can vote. once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. wise leaders understand this. they’re self-reflective and self-critical. when they lose elections, they think about why.
q
maybe america’s most effective government agency is the national transportation safety board, which investigates plane crashes. any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the ntsb combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. the ntsb is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier.
if our political and intellectual elites ran the ntsb, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming vladimir putin. they’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. if you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure.
q
by redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. 
q
the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. it happened to the ottomans. max boot is living proof that it’s happening in america.
q
listed in one place, boot’s many calls for u.s.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“i’ll invade you!!!”) republicans in washington didn’t find any of it amusing. they were impressed. …
everything changed when trump won the republican nomination. trump had never heard of the international institute for strategic studies. he had no idea max boot was a leading authority on armed conflict. trump was running against more armed conflicts. he had no interest in invading pakistan. boot hated him.
as trump found himself accused of improper ties to vladimir putin, boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with russia. boot demanded larger weapons shipments to ukraine. he called for effectively expelling russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. the stakes were high, but with signature aplomb boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the russian government would react badly to the provocation. those who disagreed boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for putin and the mullahs in iran.
as boot’s posture on russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the washington foreign policy establishment rose. in 2018, he was hired by the washington post as a columnist. the paper’s announcement cited boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”
q
 in speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is.
q
by sending aid and weapons to the afghan resistance, reagan helped weaken the russian position in afghanistan, and ultimately the soviet union itself.
... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm muslim extremists waging a holy war in southwest asia. both osama bin laden and taliban founder mohammed omar got their first taste of warfare in the afghan mujahideen… america had played a leading role in training its own enemies …
q
by the end of clinton’s second term, the united states was bombing iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year…
america has remained in a state of almost permanent war.
q
they viewed gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. that’s all the justification they needed to take him out. so they did. 
q
on election day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of u.s. politics, american troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. the pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. barack obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
q
liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. want to save children? bomb their country. ...
how often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? do children on the ground really like them? who knows? follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in american media.
q
the signature characteristic of america’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. no matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it.
q
political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. in washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed.
to the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is.
q
washingtonians hate change.
more than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. 
q
republican voters had a different reaction. they understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. they themselves had come to understand that the iraq war was a mistake. they appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
q
a large and growing proportion of americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech...
a 2017 cato institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
q
in order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, google fired james damore. for the crime of sharing his alternative views...
damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
q
an open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber.
q
even representative maxine waters of los angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. she lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in hancock park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in los angeles. how did waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? i asked once. she didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
q
when the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. the entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. after a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists. super excited because i just had a peice of chocolate!! Bhuj mandir website lists acharya 241 rakeshprasadji as head of vadtal gadi - 13.