David Neiwert > Quotes

“Orcas may not be very intelligent humans, but humans are really stupid orcas”
― David Neiwert, Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us

“One of the peculiar realities of conspiracism is that people who believe in conspiracy theories rarely ever believe just one; most conspiracy theories are interconnected by the nature of their afactual grounding, and often this forms a web of theories that lead to radicalization. This is why anti-vaxxers’ conspiracies coalesced so seamlessly with far-right extremist movements in COVID denialism, and moreover why that commingling became a global phenomenon.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“Breitbart began holding forth at length in various venues about the evils of “cultural Marxism.” He appeared on Fox News and told Sean Hannity and his audience: “For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, America dealt with Communism, which was economic Marxism. And what America was susceptible to during that period of time was cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism is political correctness, it’s multiculturalism, and it’s a war on Judeo-Christianity.”
― David Neiwert, Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us

“They all fundamentally dwell in the same alternative universe—a semi-functioning epistemological bubble composed of misinformation and disinformation and fabulist conspiracy theories leavened with a few grossly distorted facts, which I have elsewhere named Alt-America. They occupy varying zones of this universe, meaning that they differ at times on the details and emphasis, but are united in the essential view that the world—its politics, its media, its cultures—are being deviously manipulated by the same cabal that brought down Trump to impose their “New World Order” enslavement on us all.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“Over the course of his political career, Donald Trump perfected a three-step tango with the radical right—a dance in which he’d pull them close in an embrace, spin away while staying connected, and then pull them back to close quarters. Acknowledge, deny, validate. Lather, rinse, repeat….It was a dance that enabled Trump to court and embrace the radical right with a wink and a nod while maintaining a plausible deniability that he supported them. All of them, Trump and extremists alike, were united in their shared reality: the alternative universe of right-wing conspiracism, founded on the essential belief that the world is being secretly controlled by a cabal of elite “globalists” whose agenda is to place the world, America particularly, under their totalitarian control.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“[Michael] German observed how blinkered our national culture—not just within law enforcement, but within the halls of officialdom and in the national media—has become about the real threat posed by white nationalists:
If the government knew that al-Qaeda or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the U.S. over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“That, in fact, is how the American right had come to deal with reality: just throw so much misinformation out there that the public becomes unable to discern fact from fiction—at which point right-wing authoritarians will naturally embrace their lying propaganda. Ex-Trump adviser Stephen Bannon calls it “flooding the zone with shit,” creating so much uncertainty with a barrage of disinformation that many people default to the word of their preferred authority figures.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“The 2020 election was the turning point for America’s epistemological crisis: the moment when the growing divide between people who believed in the old shared reality—based on reported facts and traditional authorities and institutions—and the people who believed in the new, alternative shared reality—the one concocted by Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem based on conspiracy theories, disinformation, wild conjecture, and flat-out falsehoods—became finally irreconcilable.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“Thus Patriot Prayer’s tactics settled into an established strategy that became a national blueprint: organizing right-wing activists primarily from rural and exurban areas to invade liberal urban centers and intimidate them with thuggish behavior. These tactics proved flexible enough to apply across a range of right-wing issues, succeeding in creating a violent Antifa/leftist bogeyman narrative that could translate readily on friendly right-wing media such as Fox News. It began showing up nationally in the context of other scenes of right-wing conflict across the nation.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“Many observers, including historians, compared it to previous periods of societal strife in the United States, including the Civil War and the Civil Rights era. “What’s different about almost all those other events is that now, there’s a partisan divide around the legitimacy of our political system,” Owen Wasow, a Pomona College political scientist, told The New York Times. “The elite endorsement of political violence from factions of the Republican Party is distinct for me from what we saw in the 1960s. Then, you didn’t have—from a president on down—politicians calling citizens to engage in violent resistance.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“A central feature of the spread of far-right politics is the intimidation directed at mainstream liberals and even Republicans who refuse to participate in their incoherent conspiracism: As with all authoritarian movements, aggression directed at anyone who fails to submit to their rule is a foundational component of their real-world behavior. And in the rural areas where their politics already dominate, they often have free rein to threaten their neighbors with impunity.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy