Joe

“Georgia. Human rights groups launched investigations into Russia’s reports of pitiless atrocities. It was fake news, but it took time to prove its falsity, and while the fact-checkers tried to disprove one story, the Kremlin put out two more. Russia proved that it could use television and the internet as weapons, launching barrages of disinformation and demonization—aiming, as one analyst put it, to “dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion. Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

“On October 20, 2011, the rebels overran Qaddafi’s last stronghold, found him hiding in a drainpipe, sodomized him with a bayonet, and killed him, capturing his last moments on video. Putin watched that tape over and over again, probably thinking that this was what happened when America wanted to change a regime—Milošević dead in a prison cell, Saddam with a noose around his neck, Qaddafi on the wrong end of a spear.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020