James J. Johnson

“Some on the left still found it comforting to assume that every Trump supporter was a shiftless rube under a demagogue’s spell. The reality I’d seen so far was more unnerving in its complexity. The leaders of the Deplorable movement were deeply wrong on many fundamental questions, both empirical and ethical, but they weren’t guileless or stupid. They were deft propagandists who, having recognized that social media was creating an unprecedented power vacuum, had set out to exploit it.”
― Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

“Music should be censored,” said Moissaye Boguslawski of the Chicago Symphony. “There is censorship for the film and for the stage, yet none for music, for which it is even more needed. I believe much recent criminal endeavor by youths has to a degree been influenced by jazz. Americans probably would not be so highly flattered if they knew they were paying tribute to the music of Africa.”
― Kliph Nesteroff, Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars

“On November 28, 2000, while the Bush and Gore campaigns were still arguing over hanging chads in Florida, Sailer wrote a blog post. Citing exit-poll data, he demonstrated that if Bush had increased his share of the white vote by just 3 percent—if 57 percent of white Americans had voted for him, rather than 54 percent—he would have won in a landslide. Sailer then expanded his hypothetical: what if, in order to win those additional white votes, Bush had embraced a platform so caustic, so openly hostile to racial minorities, that he lost every nonwhite vote? “Incredibly,” Sailer found, “he still would have won.”
― Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to your informed opinion.”
― Paul Guyot, Kill the Dog: The First Book on Screenwriting to Tell You the Truth