2016 Election Quotes

“There is nothing surprising about the European Union. It’s the medieval Catholic Church resurrected as a secular institution. The British are Protestants who couldn’t stand being in a Catholic Union. That’s really why Brexit happened. In the America presidential election, why was Hillary Clinton so hated? It was because she was perceived as a kind of Pope (President) in charge of the Washington D.C. Establishment (the Church). She was an expert, and experts are hated by ordinary Americans. Why did Donald Trump prove so successful? It was because he was an extreme individualistic narcissist, exactly like so many Protestant Americans. Naturally, he himself is a Protestant.”
― Joe Dixon, The Liberty Wars: The Trump Time Bomb

“How did our politics get so poisonous? … You take a little bit of [the poison] so you can hate the other, and it tastes kinda good, and you like how it feels and there’s a gentle high to the condemnation. And you know you’re right? Right? You know you’re right.”
― Stephen Colbert

“Media members and politicians were largely affluent and privileged and out of touch with what was happening on the ground in other parts of the country.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis

“How frustrating must it have been for the most qualified candidate in US history to lose to a man so incompetent, dangerous, and cartoonish that he is living satire. That enough people in the right places preferred an ignorant, racist, misogynist, dangerous imbecile (not to mention an accused rapist) to a woman with decades of political experience is proof of how much further we have to go. Hillary Clinton has endured a lifetime of abuse about her looks (they were even blamed for her husband's infidelities), her 'shrill' personality, her mannishness, her hawkishness, her sensitivity (heaven forbid a person be seen to cry once in a while) and her general 'lack of appeal'. People still seem to be baffled by the idea that a woman could be powerful in her own right rather than have it bestowed on her by the male gaze. I'm not saying she's above critique or that none of it is fair -- I'm saying there's a flavor to it that is purely do to her being a woman that isn't found in critiques of men with similar political leanings.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship