Sarah Kendzior > Quotes

“When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”
― Sarah Kendzior

“The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that problem exists. Telling people not to complain is a way of keeping social issues from being addressed. It trivializes the grievances of the vulnerable, making the burdened feel like burdens. Telling people not to complain is an act of power, a way of asserting that one's position is more important than another one's pain. People who say "stop complaining" always have the right to stop listening. But those who complain have often been denied the right to speak.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems must matter -- for they structure the limitations of their lives -- are locked out of the discussion.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one. The category of “no one” includes the people smeared by Trump in his propaganda: immigrants, black Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, LGBT Americans, disabled Americans, and others long maligned and marginalized—groups for whom legally sanctioned American autocracy was not an unfathomable horror, but a personal backstory.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“It is a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming. It is worse when the threat reveals itself to be real, especially when many of those you warned still dismiss it, and you do not know whether their reaction is rooted in apathy or doubt or fear. What is a warning, in the end, if not a confession--a declaration of what you value and what you will fight to protect? To warn of a threat and be dismissed is to have your own worth questioned, along with the worth of all you strive to keep safe. But there is a price to be paid in persuasiveness, too. I used to think that the worst feeling in the world would be to tell a terrible truth and have no one believe it. I have learned it is worse when that truth falls not on deaf ears but on receptive ones. It is one thing to listen, it is another to care--and yet another to act in time.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“Charity, as a supplement to justice, should be applauded. But charity as a substitute for justice is neither charity nor justice. It is cruelty.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Americans should not fear riots. They should fear apathy. They should fear acquiescence. They should not fear each other. But it is understandable, now, that they do.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“The nightmares I had been fending off had come home in the form of the Trump administration: a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“Poverty is a sentence for the crime of existing. Poverty is a denial of rights sold as a character flaw.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. The foundation of this edifice was formed not when Trump took office, but decades before, through prolonged engagement with criminal or criminal-adjacent actors linked to hostile regimes, in particular, the Kremlin and its oligarch network.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“All social movements are dismissed at some point as complaining. Over time, they are recognized as speaking truth to power.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear,” scholar of fascism Hannah Arendt wrote after the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.13”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“Once an autocrat gets into office, it is very hard to get them out. They will disregard term limits, they will purge the agencies that enforce accountability, they will rewrite the law so that they are no longer breaking it. They will take your money, they will steal your freedom, and if they are clever, they will eliminate any structural protections you had before the majority realizes the extent of the damage.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“This is called “normalcy bias”: the idea that if a situation is truly dangerous, if massive crimes are being committed in plain sight, someone will intervene and stop them.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“It is easy, when people feel frightened and abandoned, for a demagogue to exploit those feelings of despair for political gain. It is easy for that demagogue to translate fear into fanaticism, to shift extremism into the mainstream and market it under the guise of populism. By the time buyer's remorse hits, a new and more brutal political culture has arisen. A gaslit nation becomes engulfed in flames.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Elected officials no longer attempt to win you over, they attempt to rewrite laws and district boundaries so that your vote is irrelevant. Their true constituency is the criminal elite.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“I think right-wing populists hate the `liberal elite` more than economic elites because they've grabbed all the jobs where you get paid to do something that isn't just for the money - the pursuit of art, or truth, or charity", notes David Graeber, an anthropologist whose ideas helped shape the Occupy movement. "All they can do if they want to do something bigger than themselves and still get paid is join the army.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“I’m a twenty-first-century American woman; I don’t have enough faith to covet anything but freedom. Over the course of my life, every industry I worked in collapsed, and then my city collapsed, and then my government collapsed.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“There are marriages that never happened, children never born, chances never taken, because the struggle to hang on to what you have is so great that it hurts your heart to hope for more. You can’t afford the literal cost, and you can’t afford the psychic cost. In the postemployment economy, a generation learned to manage its expectations.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“The new American economy runs on purchased merit, and now we bear the consequences on a national security level.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“There is a difference between expecting autocracy and accepting autocracy. It is necessary to expect it so that you can plan how you will fight.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“College is a purchased loyalty oath to an imagined employer.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“Paranoia is aggression masked as defense. It was paranoia (and hubris, and greed) that caused the run-up to the Iraq War; it is paranoia that leads to thousands of innocent Muslims being profiled in New York; it is paranoia that led to Trayvon Martin being shot to death on the street. In Congress, paranoia is less a style than a sickness, employed less with flourish than with fear. Paranoia is the refusal to recognize others except as filtered through ourselves—and how do Americans see themselves? Afraid, afraid, afraid.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“US history is beset with partisan divides and corruption, but we have never been ruled by a man whose only loyalty beyond himself is to an authoritarian foreign power.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them. Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“But the crisis we face now is new. Its transnational nature and reliance on non–state actors who can use digital media to override borders—Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a prime example”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

“Your only obligation is to the truth, and it is an unbreakable obligation. Everything else stems from it. You are entitled to truth from government as a basic covenant of citizenship. There is no justice without accountability, and there is no accountability without the truth. Insisting that the corruption we witness be acknowledged is never an empty gesture. The very act of this public demand, this uncompromising insistence on exposure of the criminal elite, can set in motion unpredictable events. Americans can learn from the past that we keep repeating. And possibly, in the end, we can break the future.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent