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121 " 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. "
― Matt Taibbi , Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus
122 " 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. "
― Matt Taibbi , Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season
123 " Donald Trump, if elected, would find a way to turn being the president into a moneymaking operation. Sanders "
124 " Accelerated by social media, moral panic has become the last dependably profitable format of modern news reporting. "
― Matt Taibbi , Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another
125 " in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school—the candidate beams. What "
126 " Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife’s edge. We’re a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there’s a dial tone, and your front yard isn’t underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there’s no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating. "
― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
127 " This is part of the reason that the AIG bailout is so troubling: when at least $13 billion worth of taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, some of that money was doubtless going to cover the bets Goldman had made against the stuff the bank itself was selling to old people and cities and states. In other words, Goldman made out on the housing bubble twice: it fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets. "
― Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
128 " 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 "
129 " The key thing, the one thing that almost every current and former federal prosecutor who lived through this period talks about, is that in the early years of the Obama administration, a huge premium was placed on not losing. Breuer and Holder acted like the corporate stewards they were and gravitated toward a bottom-line strategy of prosecution. They became attracted to a cost-benefit-analysis vision of law enforcement, where the key questions weren’t Who did what? and What the hell should we do about it? but Will we win? and How badly will the press screw us if we lose? "
― Matt Taibbi , The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
130 " Lots of people have remarked on the irony of this absurd caricature of a spoiled rich kid connecting so well with working-class America. But Trump does have something very much in common with everybody else. He watches TV. That’s his primary experience with reality, and just like most of his voters, he doesn’t realize that it’s a distorted picture. If "
131 " Looking back now, what I experienced in the wake of the Goldman piece was a lesson in the subtle truth about class politics in this country. Which is this: you can pick on the rich in an ironic, Arrested Development sort of way, you can muss Donald Trump's hair, you can even talk abstractly about class economics using clinical terms like "income disparity." But in our media you're not allowed to just kick the rich in the balls and use class-warfare language. The taboo isn't so much the subject matter, the taboo is the tone. "
132 " 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. "
133 " So long as we remain a bitterly divided two-party state, we’ll never want for TV villains. "
134 " 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. "
135 " For what it’s worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak. "
136 " One political party may be preferable to another. A news channel, though, can’t be a vehicle for a political party and be anything but a bad thing. "
137 " 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. "
138 " Who we hate just depends on what channel we watch. "
139 " ...one of the key psychological characteristics of the Tea Party is its oxymoronic love of authority figures coupled with a narcissistic celebration of its own “revolutionary” defiance. It’s this psychic weakness that allows this segment of the population to be manipulated by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. The advantage is that their willingness to take orders has allowed them to organize effectively (try getting one hundred progressives at a meeting focused on anything). The downside is, they see absolutely nothing weird in launching a revolution based upon the ravings of a guy who’s basically a half-baked PR stooge shoveling propaganda coal for bloodsucking transnational behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. "
140 " Things that are jailable crimes on one end of that spectrum become speeding tickets on the other. We find white people on the jail end and black people on the speeding ticket end, but for the most part … well, for the most part, you know what I mean. That winking understanding we all share about who gets the book thrown at him and who doesn’t, that’s where American racism has gone: unspoken and hidden, but bureaucratized and automated, and therefore more powerful than ever. "