Bob Garfield > Quotes

“[A TV commercial] crossed my desk in 1986. It came with a press release boasting about an enormous production budget employed in service of what it termed a communications “breakthrough”. The secret of this particular breakthrough was the science of semiotics — i.e., conveying meaning via powerful symbols imbued with significance far beyond their literal interpretation. It’s the sort of thing that Jean Baudrillard and Noam Chomsky write about. Umberto Eco. Dudes like that. Dudes who have no responsibility for marketshare.

Whoa,” I said to myself as I eagerly tore the videocassette out of its jacket. “This is gonna suck.”
― Bob Garfield

“So, in early 2019, when the avowedly arch-conservative TV station chain Sinclair Broadcast Group obliged its stations to run a "documentary" on vaccines, claiming to reveal previously hushed-up information on "one of the biggest medical controversies of our time," it knew it was pandering to the paranoia of the members. Among mainstream media, it is a business bias toward controversy and the principal sin of laziness, this direct assault on truth is an anomaly. In social media, it is a business model.”
― Bob Garfield, American Manifesto: Saving Democracy from Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves

“What passes for patriotism is now largely measured by the flag pins in our lapels and the mouthing of pride and faith in our soldiers, sailors, and aviators. Having long since lost track of the precepts of American democracy, we've devolved into a cult of military, with its own blind faith and liturgy...”
― Bob Garfield, American Manifesto: Saving Democracy From Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves

“It enumerates six planks, six varied spheres of activity--one economic, one regultory, one militant, one educational, one inspirational, one sweet Kumbaya--for putting our fractured Humpty Dumpty of a society back together again.

And so we must. And so we shall.”
― Bob Garfield, American Manifesto: Saving Democracy From Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves

“If I were God, or the sultan, or just the chief justice, this prescription for change would look very different from what I propose here. Citizens United would be overturned. Voting rights protections would be restored. Partisan gerrymandering would be legislated and litigated into oblivion. The Electoral College might be dissolved. But to paraphrase former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you don't wage de-devolution with the power you wish for; you wage it with the power you have. As a matter of both political reality and human mortality, the Supreme Court is out of reach for a generation. To protect democracy, we must otherwise intervene. This manifesto, therefore, is a platform for change built of six wholly unrelated planks--economic, regulatory, militant, educational, inspirational, harmonious--to counter the forces of ruinous fragmentation. . . .”
― Bob Garfield

“. . . The 2018 Democracy Project, . . . . asked fourteen hundred adults about the importance of democracy as our form of government. Among respondents aged twenty-nine or younger, only 30 percent said "absolutely important." Overall, only 60 percent of those polled expressed absolute adamancy. When asked if America is in "real danger of becoming a nondemocratic, authoritarian country," overall, 50 percent said yes.
Half of us are in fear of democracy's collapse? How in the world did we get there?
Well, I have a detailed answer to that question, and then I further presume to prescribe a solution--a solution that has little to do with the actions of government, quite a bit to do with the imperatives of the marketplace, and most of all to do with you, the citizen. So yes, "American Manifesto" is a call to action but it requires maybe a more challenging commitment: to be prepared to discard, or at least reconsider, aspects of your own personal orthodoxy, your assumptions, your affinities, and maybe even one or two articles of faith. Because the time for narrow interests, and the time for delicacy, has passed. This is an emergency. It's time for all the king's horses and all the king's men to get fucking busy. Please note also: I am not inciting a revolution. I am outlining a de-devolution.”
― Bob Garfield

“Please note that the Gallup-documented changes in trust did not flow from the verifiable truth or falsity of the content. In the bubble, facts are no match for belief. There is no Democrat Party child-sex ring being operated out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, and never was. There is no fleet of UN black helicopters poised to invade the capitals of the world and steal their sovereignty, and never was. There was no U.S. military operation under the Obama administration to overthrow Texas and jail patriots in a vacant Walmart (I’m pretty sure we already have Texas, don’t we?). There was no George W. Bush administration plot to blow up the Twin Towers on 9/11 as a false-flag operation. There was no fake moon landing. Baby Barack Obama was born in a Honolulu, Hawaii, hospital, just as the birth certificate and contemporaneous newspaper announcements said. And at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, having already shot his own mother to death, Adam Lanza murdered twenty children and six adults. It was not a hoax. No matter what that asshole Alex Jones or his addled followers believe, the victims’ grieving parents were not “crisis actors” in a plot to undermine the Second Amendment. It was a fucking massacre conducted with a fucking assault rifle such as the fucking NRA has fought for decades to be readily available.”
― Bob Garfield, American Manifesto: Saving Democracy from Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves

“Our current predicament cannot be wholly blamed on a suffocating media sector. It cannot be wholly blamed on filter bubbles, trapping citizens in the prison of their own worldviews. It cannot be wholly blamed on Russian sabotage of our presidential election. Hard not to notice, though, that all three of those disabling conditions can be laid at the feet of Facebook.”
― Bob Garfield, American Manifesto: Saving Democracy From Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves

“Has the press piled on Donald Trump? Of course it has. But no matter what Sean Hannity tells you, this is not the smoking gun of anti-Republican bias. It is simply an eyewitness account of historic depravity.”
― Bob Garfield, American Manifesto: Saving Democracy From Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves

“Subscribe to your local newspaper. Donate to your public radio and TV stations. If you read 'The New York Times' or 'The Washington Post' or 'The Guardian' or the 'Chicago Tribune' online, subscribe to them. In point of fact, journalistic information is not free. It is dear--in every way. If you complain about fake news but don't pay for real news, you are part of the problem.”
― Bob Garfield

“Well, we are certainly experiencing a heyday for irrational discourse and 'alternate facts.' Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Devin Nunes, Ann Coulter, Dinexh D'Souza, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Rush Limbaugh, and the entire Republican congressional caucus inhabit a world in which down is up, up is down, and science is fake news. It is hard for some people to have faith in American institutions when they are being told every day that climate change is a hoax, that Obama is a Kenyan, that the United States government brought down the Twin Towers, that the grieving parents of murdered Sandy Hook kindergartners are "crisis actors," and that Hillary Clinton is splitting time cooking up uranium deals with the Russians and running a child-sex ring out of a pizzeria. Not to mention every word that tumbles from Donald Trump's lying mouth.”
― Bob Garfield, American Manifesto: Saving Democracy From Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves