Brian Turner

“as inequality and desperation had deepened between 1980 and 2025, it had required an altogether new level of fact distortion, even more unabashed pandering to privilege, and a more intentional stoking of racial resentment and rage to persuade so many ordinary white voters that it still made sense to give away their own hard-won rights, opportunities, and economic security. Continuing to sell the brutal trickle-down economics of the long Reagan Revolution would now require not just a conservative press but a rage- and race-baiting misinformation media machine. Such was needed to translate the brutal fallout of this dramatic political and economic turn in such a way that any anger it might spawn would be directed not at those who were actually responsible for it but rather at those who suffered it most acutely.”
― Heather Ann Thompson, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage