Elijah Dougherty

“Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It suddenly becomes inefficient to say: Elect us or else they will abolish abortion rights; elect us or they will put more migrants in concentration camps; elect us or they will make your lives so much worse. What is the use, once elected, of doing anything of substance when what was necessary, the negation of some other hypothetical outcome, has by definition already been achieved?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The alternative -- that millions of Americans want desperately for people who don't look and live and believe the way they do to suffer without end -- was too unpleasant to consider, too much an indictment of something bigger than one man's campaign. Even years later ... there is great care on the part of many mainstream liberals to focus on the destructive potential of Trump as a singular entity, a freak accident.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me