"The message of the consumer society, pumped out over flat screens... is shrill and unrelenting: You are a failure. Pop culture celebrates those who wallow in power, wealth and self-obsession, and perpetuates the lie that if you work hard and are clever, you can become a "success."... The disparity between the glittering world that people watch and the bleak world they inhabit creates a collective schizophrenia. It manifests in diseases of despair, suicides, addictions, mass shootings, hate crimes and depression. We are to blame for our own misfortune.... Noam Chomsky suggests, "If you care about other people, you might try to organize or undermine power. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich; you don't care whether other people's kids can go to school or afford food. In the USA that's called 'libertarian' for some wild reason. I mean it's actually highly authoritarian, but that doctrine is extremely important as a way of atomizing and undermining the public."

“The deep state committed the greatest strategic blunder in American history when it invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. Such fatal military fiascoes, a feature of all late empires, are called acts of “micro-militarism.” Dying empires historically squander the last capital they have, economic, political and military, on futile, intractable and unwinnable conflicts until they collapse. They seek in these acts of micro-militarism to recapture a former dominance and lost stature. Disaster piles on disaster.”

“As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think.”

“Many of those can’t find meaningful work, are often burdened by large sums of and have realized that in this world of serfs and masters they don’t have much of a future. They understand that if these protests are to succeed, they must be led by people of color, those who suffer disproportionally from the inequities and violence meted out by the occupying forces of the. And they also know that social inequality is at the root of the evil we must vanquish.”

“We are not fully human if we live alone. These small acts of compassion-for they can never be organized and institutionalized as can hate-have a power that lives after us. Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies. These acts recognize and affirm the humanity of others, others who may be condemned as agents of Satan. Those who sacrifice for others, especially at great cost, who place compassion and tolerance above ideology and creeds, and who reject absolutes, especially moral absolutes, stand as constant witnesses in our lives to this love, even long after they are gone. In the gospels this is called resurrection.”

“The government officials, along with the courtiers and the press, ... insist that congressional and judicial oversight, the right to privacy, the rule of law, the freedom of the press, the right to express dissent remains inviolate. They use the old words and old phrases, old laws and old constitutional guarantees, to give our corporate totalitarianism a democratic veneer.”

“I'm more optimistic because I see the resistance in the streets... That's where hope lies.... They're mostly young, incredibly courageous, they are out there braving economic misery, arrests, indiscriminate, brutal and often lethal police violence and COVID-19, and they're fighting against injustice and the elites anyway. They're all heroes in my book.”