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“What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-option of elites. Their goal is self-enrichment; the corrosion of the rule of law is the necessary means. As a shrewd local observer explained to me on a visit to Hungary in early 2016, 鈥淭he main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.鈥
No president in history has burned more public money to sustain his personal lifestyle than Donald Trump. Three-quarters of the way through his first year in office, President Trump was on track to spend more on travel in one year of his presidency than Barack Obama in eight鈥攅ven though Trump only rarely ventured west of the Mississippi or across any ocean.”
― Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic
No president in history has burned more public money to sustain his personal lifestyle than Donald Trump. Three-quarters of the way through his first year in office, President Trump was on track to spend more on travel in one year of his presidency than Barack Obama in eight鈥攅ven though Trump only rarely ventured west of the Mississippi or across any ocean.”
― Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

“A cop ascending a staircase in a white neighborhood who was so pre-terrified of the residents that he pulled the trigger at the first sound he heard would be derided as a paranoid lunatic.
Similarly, the idea that a fat white guy selling hot smokes on a street corner was a grave threat would be laughed at as absurd. But a 350-pound black man is plausibly described in the press as someone who scared pedestrians, a threat needing to be defused.
Try to imagine a world where there isn鈥檛 a vast unspoken consensus that black men are inherently scary, and most of these police assaults would play in the media like spontaneous attacks of madness. Instead, they鈥檙e sold as battle scenes from an occupation story, where a quick trigger finger while patrolling the planet of a violent alien race is easy to understand.”
― I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
Similarly, the idea that a fat white guy selling hot smokes on a street corner was a grave threat would be laughed at as absurd. But a 350-pound black man is plausibly described in the press as someone who scared pedestrians, a threat needing to be defused.
Try to imagine a world where there isn鈥檛 a vast unspoken consensus that black men are inherently scary, and most of these police assaults would play in the media like spontaneous attacks of madness. Instead, they鈥檙e sold as battle scenes from an occupation story, where a quick trigger finger while patrolling the planet of a violent alien race is easy to understand.”
― I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

“The civil rights movement, legislation, and milestone court decisions of the 1950s and 鈥60s produced remarkable changes and ended or ramped down centuries of explicit, statutory discrimination. But real integration was not one of the accomplishments.
The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.
Black America always saw the continuing schism. But white America has traditionally been free to ignore and be untroubled by it and to believe it had reached the 鈥減ostracial鈥 stage of its otherwise proud history. That was until cellphones and the Internet came along.”
― I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.
Black America always saw the continuing schism. But white America has traditionally been free to ignore and be untroubled by it and to believe it had reached the 鈥減ostracial鈥 stage of its otherwise proud history. That was until cellphones and the Internet came along.”
― I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

“Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.”
― The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
― The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“The government of the United States seems to have made common cause with the planet鈥檚 thugs, crooks, and dictators against its own ideals鈥攁nd in fact to have imported the spirit of thuggery, crookedness, and dictatorship into the very core of the American state, into the most solemn symbolic oval center of its law and liberty. The man inside that oval center did not act alone. He held his power with the connivance of others. They executed his orders and empowered his whims for crass and cowardly reasons of their own: partisanship, ambition, greed for gain, eagerness for attention, ideological zeal, careerist conformity, or鈥攊n the worst cases鈥攎alicious glee in the wreck of things they could never have built themselves. They claim the symbols of the republic as they subvert its institutions. They pin the flag to their lapels before commencing the day鈥檚 work of lying, obstructing, and corrupting. They speak for America to a world that remembers a different and better America. But that memory is already fading into a question of whether it was not perhaps always an illusion, whether this new regime of deceit and brutishness will not only form the future鈥攂ut whether it also retrospectively discredits the American past”
― Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic
― Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

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