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Matt Taibbi QUOTES

Matt Taibbi QUOTES

21 " The Congressional Record will forever show that [Obamacare] was passed in a romper room of overgrown children seemingly barely old enough to keep from peeing on themselves. "

― Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

22 " 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. "

― Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

23 " The extent to which we hate and fear each other now -- that's not any one person's fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours. "

― Matt Taibbi

24 " The argument is that Black History Month dwells too much on the downside of white America's relationship to its brothers of African heritage, slavery and torture and the like, and ignores the work of all the good white folk through the years who were nice to black people (did you know it was a white teacher who first suggested George Washington Carver study horticulture?). "

― Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

25 " 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. "

― Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

26 " He steps to the lectern and does his Mussolini routine, which he’s perfected over the past months. It’s a nodding wave, a grin, a half-sneer, and a little U.S. Open–style applause back in the direction of the audience, his face the whole time a mask of pure self-satisfaction. “This is unbelievable, unbelievable!” he says, staring out at a crowd of about 4,000 whooping New Englanders with snow hats, fleece and beer guts. There’s a snowstorm outside and cars are flying off the road, but it’s a packed house. "

― Matt Taibbi , Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus

27 " Eric Garner was murdered by history. The motive was the secret sin of a divided society, a country frozen in time for more than fifty years, stopped one crucial step short of reconciliation and determined to stay there. "

― Matt Taibbi , I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

28 " The next little thing about this vote-for-the-lesser-evil trick, of course—and this is no secret to anyone anymore—is that it drives all the “serious” candidates toward what is commonly referred to as the “moderate center,” even if these serious candidates aren’t, in fact, moderate or centrist in any meaningful sense and the so-called center moves further to the right with each election cycle. For nearly two decades now this process has been steadily advancing on the Democratic side, as liberals are trained to accept the idea that the national majority will never accept a true labor party, or any candidate perceived as “soft” on defense. "

― Matt Taibbi

29 " We paid for this instead of a generation of health insurance, or an alternative energy grid, or a brand-new system of roads and highways. With the $13-plus trillion we are estimated to ultimately spend on the bailouts, we could not only have bought and paid off every single sub-prime mortgage in the country (that would only have cost $1.4 trillion), we could have paid off every remaining mortgage of any kind in this country - and still have had enough money left over to buy a new house for every American who does not already have one. "

― Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

30 " Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer. "

― Matt Taibbi , The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

31 " Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight. "

― Matt Taibbi , Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season

32 " To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight - it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil - but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about. "

― Matt Taibbi , The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

33 " Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county. "

― Matt Taibbi , The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

34 " 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. "

― Matt Taibbi , The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

35 " Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed -- humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel. "

― Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

36 " There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

37 " 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. "

― Matt Taibbi , The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

38 " Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate willpower to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions—just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are. "

― Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

39 " More and more often, we all make silent calculations about who is entitled to what rights, and who is not. "

― Matt Taibbi , The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

40 " People aren’t really needed for anything else in the Griftopia, but since Americans require the illusion of self-government, we have elections. To make sure those elections are effectively meaningless as far as Wall Street is concerned, two things end up being true. One is that voters on both sides of the aisle are gradually weaned off that habit of having real expectations for their politicians, consuming the voting process entirely as culture-war entertainment. The other is that millions of tenuously middle-class voters are conned into pushing Wall Street’s own twisted greed ethos as though it were their own. The Tea Party, with its weirdly binary view of society as being split up cleanly into competing groups of producers and parasites—that’s just a cultural echo of the insane greed-is-good belief system on Wall Street that’s provided the foundation/excuse for a generation of brilliantly complex thievery. Those beliefs have trickled down to the ex-middle-class suckers struggling to stay on top of their mortgages and their credit card bills, and the real joke is that these voters listen to CNBC and Fox and they genuinely believe they’re the producers in this binary narrative. They don’t get that somewhere way up above, there’s a group of people who’ve been living the Atlas dream for real—and building a self-dealing financial bureaucracy in their own insane image. "

― Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America