Quotes from Matt Taibbi

Meanwhile the pessimism of Trump's revolution is intentional, impassioned, ascendant. They placed a huge bet on America's worst instincts, and won. And the first order of business will be to wipe out a national idea in which they never believed. Welcome to the end of the dream.

The London-based Reprieve organization found that 1,147 people were killed by drones in efforts to kill just forty-one men.

it's so pathetically easy to set big groups of voters off angrily chasing their own tails in response to media-manufactured nonsense

The public largely misunderstands the "fake news" issue. Newspapers rarely fib outright. Most "lies" are errors of omission or emphasis. There are no Fox stories saying blue states have lower divorce rates, nor are there MSNBC stories exploring the fact that many pro-choice Democrats, particularly religious ones, struggle with a schism between their moral and political beliefs on abortion.

It may not seem funny now, because it's happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.

It was also the content. Trump sold hate, violence, xenophobia, racism, and ignorance, which oddly enough had long been permissible zones of exploration for American television entertainment. And the news media was becoming more and more indistinguishable from entertainment media. Meanwhile

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame.

Jesus," I said into the phone. "I'm an establishment pseudo-hipster." "The funny thing about that," my so-called friend answered, "is that you are." "Fuck you," I said.

Get your liver ready: the second GOP debate is upon us S

The final insult to all of this is that when Trump secured the nomination, media companies looked down at their bottom lines and realized that, via the profits they made during his run—Trump is "good for business," CBS president Les Moonves infamously confessed—they had been made accomplices to the whole affair. —

In fact, the tension between the sheer quantity of horrifying news and your real-world impotence to do much about it is part of our consumer strategy. We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you'll keep tuning in.

The notion of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

Donald Trump, a man whose idea of policy is a big wall, was the Republican front-runner for months, and ceded the lead to a man who wants to fight immigrants with drones. This whole thing is a joke.

As a professional misanthrope, I believe that if you are going to hate a person, you ought to do it properly. You should go and live in his shoes for a while, and see at the end of it how much you hate yourself.

Donald Trump, if elected, would find a way to turn being the president into a moneymaking operation. Sanders

in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school—the candidate beams. What

Even in his books, where he's allegedly trying to string multiple thoughts together, Trump wanders randomly from impulse to impulse, seemingly without rhyme or reason. He doesn't think anything through. (He's brilliantly cast this driving-blind trait as "not being politically correct.") It

Duck Dynasty viewers think they're the experts on hunting, but actually they're the hunted ones, just another dumb demographic to be captured, laughed at and force-fed commercials for Geico and Home Depot by the Smart People in New York and L.A.

So long as we remain a bitterly divided two-party state, we'll never want for TV villains.

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we've developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don't, it's a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what's at the end of it.

For what it's worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.

Bill Clinton's political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free on Wall Street. He showered the projects with cops and bean counters and pulled the cops off the beat in the financial services sector. And in one place he created vast new mountain ranges of paperwork, while in another, paperwork simply vanished.

Who we hate just depends on what channel we watch.

In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party's right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump. Huckabee