Linda Gordon > Quotes

“Brandolini's law, developed in the context of twenty-first social media, is equally applicable to 1920s Klan-speak: 'The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it.”
― Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition

“no people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.... When our dictator turns up you can depend on that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.' Dorothy Thompson qtd in”
― Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition

“In Oklahoma, and perhaps elsewhere too, Klan membership was automatically suspended for any man called for jury duty, so that he could deny it and not be excluded for bias.”
― Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition

“Vigilantes who executed some of the most vicious and ignoble acts of lawless brutality in U.S. history nevertheless considered those very acts to be the work of citizenship and in many cases elicited wide popular approval.”
― Linda Gordon