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The Elephant in the Room QUOTES

The Elephant in the Room QUOTES

1 " The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us — that is terrifying. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

2 " I consider it somewhat psychopathic to label someone from afar as a psychopath. We love nothing more than to declare other people insane, especially people we don’t like. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

3 " The alt-right’s small gains in popularity will not be enough to win Trump the election. This is not Germany in the 1930s. All that’s changed is that one of Alex’s fans — one of those grumpy looking middle-aged men sitting in David Icke’s audience — is now the Republican nominee. But if some disaster unfolds — if Hillary’s health declines further, or she grows ever more off-puttingly secretive — and Trump gets elected, he could bring Alex and the others with him. The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us — that is terrifying. THE "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

4 " Glenn Beck did not fall into line. He told his listeners that Trump was a “dictator in the making. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

5 " The world in which Alex is a leading voice — a loose collection of internet conspiracy theorists and nationalists and some racists — suddenly had a name: the “alt-right movement. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

6 " I put a video out,” Alex said, “a message to Trump. And then two days later he lays out the case. It’s like sending up the Bat Signal.” Was this true? It seemed unlikely, but when I got home I discovered that journalists had indeed spotted several occasions where Alex had said something on his show and Trump had said the same thing — right down to the peculiar phrasing — soon after. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

7 " deciding that instant judgment was a more heroic stance than curiosity. When "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

8 " Is Obama satanic?” he asked me. I was grateful for the conversation starter — I consider anything that staves off social awkwardness to be a blessing — but I couldn’t lie. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

9 " Alex was growing in prominence. I noticed him trending on Twitter from time to time, for telling his now millions of fans that U.S. scientists were covertly creating “man-fish hybrids,” that atheists “worship Lucifer,” and that the government puts secret chemicals in juice boxes to turn Americans gay: “After you’re done drinking your little juices you’re ready to put makeup on, wear a short skirt, put together a garden of roses or something.” And "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

10 " the Bush family’s proclivity for mock human sacrifice. What "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

11 " They’ll be brought great distances,” Trump had said. “We’re not dropping them right across. They learned that. President Eisenhower. They’d drop them right across, and they’d come back. Then when they flew them to a long distance, all of a sudden that was the end.” Here, Trump was praising Operation Wetback — a 1954 endeavor in which Mexicans were rounded up and dumped in the wilderness, where they were stranded without food or possessions and 88 of them died in the heat.) These "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

12 " It felt like a vast left-wing conspiracy to pretend to have found Eric André’s performance funny. This was everyday life on social media, each side lurching toward mockery and attack — fanning the flames of the divisive chaos from which Trump, the Twitter candidate, had risen. But "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

13 " Before working with Trump, Manafort had been Yanukovych’s election strategist. There was something quite Trump-ish about his former client, not least his $75 million palace — with its golden chandeliers and Fabergé eggs and personalized cognac bottles (the label had a little photograph of Yanukovych), his shiny grand pianos and sweeping gold-trimmed staircases. And then there was his private ostrich zoo. The palace had been constructed in secret, and had come as a huge surprise to the Ukrainian people, given that Yanukovych spent much of his career apparently earning a civil servant’s salary of $24,000 a year. Most Ukrainians knew of its existence only after Yanukovych was ousted from office in 2014 and fled to Russia. In "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

14 " The communist looked very pleased with himself — for being a communist and for being hit by Alex. It was exasperating. Alex had been within feet of me and I hadn’t known it until he’d hit a communist and was bustled away, and it was too late. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

15 " These depictions of a broken America were also highly selective. When Ted Cruz listed the various ways Americans “have had their lives destroyed” — by terrorists, or police officers cut down in the line of duty, he pointedly excluded stories of innocent black people shot by the police. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

16 " Stone’s beliefs, I later discovered, were just as crazy as Alex’s. He "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

17 " Oh, Ronson’s all right,” Alex told him. “I’m sure he’s planning some form of sophisticated hit piece, but I don’t care. It’s always artfully done so it goes back and forth, you know.” “Why is he wearing a snow jacket in 90-degree heat?” Stone muttered to Alex. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

18 " partners in a lobbying firm with a client list that included a great many murderous dictators. Like "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

19 " After the interview ended, Stone and I were ushered out. Alex had an interview with Ted Nugent to conduct. In the elevator, Stone scrutinized me. “When we try to assess threats,” he said, “the kooks are almost always wearing snowsuits in 90-degree weather. "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room

20 " frightening person pretending to be normal. Things "

― Jon Ronson , The Elephant in the Room