Joel

“One you start gazing into the abyss of the far right, pretty soon it turns its gaze right back on you. And its gaze is a fearsome thing, a twisted thing, one full of boredom and anger that have calcified into hatred.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Americans have a tendency to believe that authoritarianism will arise here in a swirl of drama, obvious malefactors emerging from the ether to work their evil; even more, we have a sense that our democracy, the most powerful in the world, is immune to becoming a dictatorship, and this form of American exceptionalism has a tendency to blind us to what is directly before our eyes.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America