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Sarah Kendzior QUOTES

Sarah Kendzior QUOTES

1 " I think right-wing populists hate the `liberal elite` more than economic elites because they've grabbed all the jobs where you get paid to do something that isn't just for the money - the pursuit of art, or truth, or charity", notes David Graeber, an anthropologist whose ideas helped shape the Occupy movement. "All they can do if they want to do something bigger than themselves and still get paid is join the army. "

― Sarah Kendzior , The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

2 " It is a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming. It is worse when the threat reveals itself to be real, especially when many of those you warned still dismiss it, and you do not know whether their reaction is rooted in apathy or doubt or fear. What is a warning, in the end, if not a confession--a declaration of what you value and what you will fight to protect? To warn of a threat and be dismissed is to have your own worth questioned, along with the worth of all you strive to keep safe. But there is a price to be paid in persuasiveness, too. I used to think that the worst feeling in the world would be to tell a terrible truth and have no one believe it. I have learned it is worse when that truth falls not on deaf ears but on receptive ones. It is one thing to listen, it is another to care--and yet another to act in time. "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

3 " Americans should not fear riots. They should fear apathy. They should fear acquiescence. They should not fear each other. But it is understandable, now, that they do. "

― Sarah Kendzior , The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

4 " In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems must matter -- for they structure the limitations of their lives -- are locked out of the discussion. "

― Sarah Kendzior , The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

5 " In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, privation should not come with the job description, and survival should not be an aspiration. "

― Sarah Kendzior , The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

6 " Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics. "

― Sarah Kendzior , The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

7 " The nightmares I had been fending off had come home in the form of the Trump administration: a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them. "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

8 " When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live. "

― Sarah Kendzior

9 " The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that problem exists. Telling people not to complain is a way of keeping social issues from being addressed. It trivializes the grievances of the vulnerable, making the burdened feel like burdens. Telling people not to complain is an act of power, a way of asserting that one's position is more important than another one's pain. People who say "stop complaining" always have the right to stop listening. But those who complain have often been denied the right to speak. "

― Sarah Kendzior , The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

10 " No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one. The category of “no one” includes the people smeared by Trump in his propaganda: immigrants, black Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, LGBT Americans, disabled Americans, and others long maligned and marginalized—groups for whom legally sanctioned American autocracy was not an unfathomable horror, but a personal backstory. "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

11 " Charity, as a supplement to justice, should be applauded. But charity as a substitute for justice is neither charity nor justice. It is cruelty. "

― Sarah Kendzior , The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

12 " It is easy, when people feel frightened and abandoned, for a demagogue to exploit those feelings of despair for political gain. It is easy for that demagogue to translate fear into fanaticism, to shift extremism into the mainstream and market it under the guise of populism. By the time buyer's remorse hits, a new and more brutal political culture has arisen. A gaslit nation becomes engulfed in flames. "

― Sarah Kendzior , The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

13 " Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear,” scholar of fascism Hannah Arendt wrote after the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.13 "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

14 " I’m a twenty-first-century American woman; I don’t have enough faith to covet anything but freedom. Over the course of my life, every industry I worked in collapsed, and then my city collapsed, and then my government collapsed. "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

15 " Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are. "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

16 " This is called “normalcy bias”: the idea that if a situation is truly dangerous, if massive crimes are being committed in plain sight, someone will intervene and stop them. "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

17 " The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. The foundation of this edifice was formed not when Trump took office, but decades before, through prolonged engagement with criminal or criminal-adjacent actors linked to hostile regimes, in particular, the Kremlin and its oligarch network. "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

18 " Poverty is a sentence for the crime of existing. Poverty is a denial of rights sold as a character flaw. "

― Sarah Kendzior , The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

19 " US history is beset with partisan divides and corruption, but we have never been ruled by a man whose only loyalty beyond himself is to an authoritarian foreign power. "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

20 " There are marriages that never happened, children never born, chances never taken, because the struggle to hang on to what you have is so great that it hurts your heart to hope for more. You can’t afford the literal cost, and you can’t afford the psychic cost. In the postemployment economy, a generation learned to manage its expectations. "

― Sarah Kendzior , Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America