Quotes from Matt Taibbi

I look around. You'd have to be out of your fucking mind to write, as Marcus did, that Black History Month is a ploy to lever more entitlement money out of Congress, but the ho-hum nonresponse of the white crowd reading this bit of transparent insanity is, to me, even weirder.

America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can't fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.

we live in a country where people believe implicitly in their right to bore the living shit out of absolutely everybody within haranguing distance with tales of their miserable, lonely, and inevitably self-deluding searches for personal fulfillment in the emotional desert that is our crass commercial culture.

So the only time RICO was used to fight mortgage fraud was when the criminal was a black gang member and the victims were banks. (Ironically, nobody thought to wonder how it was possible for a Lincoln Park gang member to buy 222 houses with no money down. Heading into that particular rabbit hole would have led to the larger crime, but nobody did.)

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

Too-big-to-fail, meet small-enough-to-jail.

We still have real jury trials, honest judges, and free elections, all the superficial characteristics of a functional, free democracy. But underneath that surface is a florid and malevolent bureaucracy that mostly (not absolutely, but mostly) keeps the rich and the poor separate through thousands of tiny, scarcely visible inequities.

The man who once famously pronounced "I know words, I have the best words" scorched through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla ("China—money—bad!").

The mainstream media act just like in the classic studies of herd animals; at the exact instant more than half of the herd makes a move to bolt, they all move.

Being in the building with Sarah Palin that night is a transformative and oddly unsettling experience. It's a little like having live cave-level access for the ripping-the-heart-out-with-the-bare-hands scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when we can instead show people idiots drinking donkey semen for money?

Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin's gulags. For what it's worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak. See if this syllogism works, then. Poverty goes up; Crime goes down; Prison population doubles.

Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.

Say as little as possible, hope some of the undecideds like your teeth better than the other guy's—that's usually the way this business works.

These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled America's ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power, and hoovering up enough of what's left of the cash on their blocks to drive around in an Escalade or a 633i for however long they have left.

Chase's was a junkie's banking strategy, shooting speed in the morning and spending all day foraging for the cash to dope down at night, an endless quest to chase the debt dragon.

Accelerated by social media, moral panic has become the last dependably profitable format of modern news reporting.

People aren't pissed just to be pissed. They're mad because a tiny group of crooks on Wall Street built themselves beach houses in the Hamptons through a crude fraud scheme that decimated their retirement funds, caused property values in their neighborhoods to collapse and caused over four million people to be put in foreclosure.

How Giuliani is not Trump's running mate no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate love story since Beavis and Butthead.

intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When

America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on.

lenders to trade their long-term income streams for short-term cash. Say

The human brain just isn't designed to take in a whole world's worth of disturbing news. Most of us have enough trouble with the more mundane problems of finding inner peace and securing happiness for our loved ones.