Michiko Kakutani Quotes

I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.

Trump made no effort to rectify his ignorance of domestic and foreign policy... His former chief strategist Stephen Bannon has said the Trump only "reads to reinforce"... [W]ritten versions of the president's daily brief... he reportedly rarely if ever reads. Instead, the president seems to prefer getting his information from Fox News—in particular, the sycophantic morning show Fox and Friends—and from sources like Breitbart News and the National Enquirer. He reportedly spends as much as eight hours a day watching television...

The journalist Anne Applebaum identified an entire group of “neo-Bolsheviks” — including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán — who, like Lenin and Trotsky, started out on the political fringes and rode a wave of populism to prominent positions. In 2017, she wrote that “to an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his ‘illegitimate’ opponents.”
Many of the more successful neo-Bolsheviks, Applebaum points out, have created their own “alternative media” that specializes in disinformation, hatemongering, and the trolling of adversaries. Lying is both reflexive and a matter of conviction: they believe, she writes, “that ordinary morality does not apply to them….In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of ‘the People,’ or as a means of targeting ‘Enemies of the People.’ In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.

Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias — why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there’s a primitive instinct to defend one’s turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence.
Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group’s leader “does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion.”
Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, “the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.” In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. “Terrorists are made, not born,” Sunstein observed, “and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.

Trump, who launched his political career by shamelessly promoting birtherism and who has spoken approvingly of the conspiracy theorist and Alex Jones, presided over an administration that became, in its first year, the very embodiment of anti-Enlightenment principles, reputing the values of rationalism, tolerance, and empiricism in both its policies and its modus operandi—a reflection of the commander-in-chief's erratic, impulsive decision-making style based not on knowledge but upon instinct, whim, and preconceived (and often delusional) notions of how the world operates.

Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications. “Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.

Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities — having accepted run-of-the-mill anti-feminism — are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas. ‘Ironic’ Nazi iconography and hateful epithets are becoming serious expressions of anti-Semitism.

Some absurd details are unnerving rather than merely comical... Trump's proclivity for chaos has not been contained by those around him but has instead infected his entire administration. ...given his disdain for institutional knowledge he frequently ignores the advice of his cabinet members and agencies, when he isn't cutting them out of the loop entirely.

In addition to amplifying polarization, the report concluded, social media tends to undermine trust in institutions and makes it more difficult to have the sorts of fact-based debates and discussions that are essential to democracy.

The assault on truth and reason that reached fever pitch during the first year of the Trump presidency had been incubating for years on the fringe right. Clinton haters... and Tea Party paranoids who claimed that environmentalists wanted to control the temperature of your home and the color of your cars... hooked up, during the 2016 campaign, with Breitbart bloggers and alt-right trolls. And with Trump's winning of the Republican nomination and the presidency, the extremist views of his most radical supporters—their racial and religious intolerance, their detestation of the government, and their embrace of conspiracy thinking and misinformation—went mainstream.

At the same time, Trump continued his personal assault on the English language. Trump’s incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith, and his inflammatory bombast) is both emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on as well as an essential instrument in his liar’s tool kit. His interviews, off-teleprompter speeches, and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations, and innuendos — a bully’s efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarize, and scapegoat. Precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest.

that people in the West had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realized that “in the face of that, you could play with reality” and in the process “further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.

I hold it, therefore, certain,” Jefferson went on, “that to open the doors of truth, and to fortify the habit of testing everything by reason, are the most effectual manacles we can rivet on the hands of our successors to prevent their manacling the people with their own consent.

If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.

More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.