Azriel

“Prostitution was a miserable job, and all the more miserable when the location was next to a godforsaken military outpost in a hostile foreign country. The Japanese military did some appalling things during the war, but it did not programmatically and forcibly conscript—or dragoon, if you will—either Korean or Japanese women into providing sex. Some of the comfort women had been sold into this prostitution by abusive parents. Some had been defrauded by dishonest private recruiters. But many—probably most—were desperately poor women who deliberately chose to sell sex for the money. They worked in a wretched job, but they were not “sex slaves.” They were not “gang-raped.” They were not conscripted into the job at bayonet-point. Instead, they chose prostitution as (in their minds) the least bad option available to them. We deceive ourselves and insult impoverished women if we deny that they could have made such a decision for themselves.”
― J. Mark Ramseyer

“It took a long time—at least a year, if not more—for me to start questioning that narrative. But by the time Trump started ticking off items on democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s economic wish list—get rid of NAFTA, enforce the border, start a trade war with China, impose tariffs—it was impossible not to see what was going on. Americans living in industrial communities that had been devastated by NAFTA and globalization—those most likely to have lost friends and family members, men in the prime of their lives, to overdose deaths—had seen in Trump a tribune: a man as reviled by the elites as they were, a man who talked about jobs endlessly, who hated NAFTA and NATO as much as they did. The same voters who were endlessly asked by leftist elites why they bucked their economic interests by voting Republican had in fact voted in their economic interests—and the Left called them racist for it. I called them racist for it.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“Slowly, I started to understand that this was the signature move of the progressive movement: mistaking its economic privilege for virtue and then forcing the working class to pay for it”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“My parents, like so many others in the darker nation, shared the family stories of achievement but omitted the details of racial slights and discrimination, as if the telling were subject to what the historian Jonathan Holloway describes as a “psychologically enduring editor’s pencil.” So for me, writing this book has been a journey of discovery,”
― Stephen L. Carter, Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster