2020 Quotes

Most of us knew in our bones that things with the world weren’t right, long before it became a crisis.

وعدت الصين أنها سترسل مركبة مأهولة بالبشر إلى القمر عام 2020، و هو نفس العام الذى وعد فيه الحزب الوطنى بالانتهاء من مشكلة المجارى فى مصر

In an hour, every person in America will be able to look at a screen and see their First Son and his boyfriend. And, across the Atlantic, almost as many will look up over a beer at a pub or dinner with their family or a quiet night in and see their youngest prince, the most beautiful one, Prince Charming. This is it. October 2, 2020, and the whole world watched, and history remembered.

Don't be serious, be sincere.

She’d worn anxiety like a thick robe for so long that it was hard for her to take it off.

Embedded in their psyche was the story of what had happened to the world, and the boys felt glorious to be on the other side of the madness

That's what love is, when your hindsight is 20/20, and you still wouldn't change a thing.

It is May of 2020, and I do not have a brain well suited for this.

Sometimes life is not about what u want to do but what u ought to do

Law and order during 2020 seemed to slip past most communities until the Vigilante stepped into view and began his own style of justice.

You know how hind-sight is 20/20? Love is when you look back and wouldn't change anything.

Stupid people go to college but"smart people own them"....

I always think about what it means to wear eyeglasses. When you get used to glasses you don't know how far you could really see. I think about all the people before eyeglasses were invented. It must have been weird because everyone was seeing in different ways according to how bad their eyes were. Now, eyeglasses standardize everyone's vision to 20-20. That's an example of everyone becoming more alike. Everyone could be seeing at different levels if it weren't for glasses.

In relationship there are always two types of person: one weaker and the other stronger one. It's never easier to live being as weaker one!

Ignorance does not make you fireproof when the world is burning.

لا تقل لي “ماضينا” معاً ، و”مستقبلنا” … ها أنا أنساك … وحبيبي اسمه “الآن” . “البارحة” و “الغد” كلمتان أطلقت عليهما الرصاص ، ولن أهاجر الى الماضي لأعيش بك ، فالهجرة الى الماضي كمحاولة الاقامة في قارة الاتلنطيد التي ابتلعها البحر منذ دهور … والهجرة الى المستقبل موعد غرامي فوق سهول القمر في “بحر الهدوء” عام 2020! الآن ، او ابداً … وها أنا أنساك …

We talk so much of  light, please let me speak on behalf of  the good dark. Let us talk more of how dark the beginning of a day is. —Maggie Smith, from “How Dark the Beginning,” Poetry (February 2020)

P.S. This book was written in a pre-COVID world. The 2020 of Minnie and Quinn’s world now exists only in some parallel universe. Whatever the year ahead might bring for us all, let’s keep reading. Books free us from isolation. Stories unite us. We’ve all had to play in one-player mode for a while—but we’re all still in this game together.

Me, it’s the heart: that’s the part lacking. I used to want one: a dainty cushion of red silk dangling from a blood ribbon, fit for sticking pins in. But I’ve changed my mind. Hearts hurt. — Margaret Atwood, from “The Tin Woodwoman Gets a Massage ,” Dearly: New Poems (Ecco, 2020)

It's understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? How can anyone be expected to care about the questions of worlds above when the questions of the world you're stuck on — the most vital criteria of home and health and safety — remain unanswered?

Also I didn't have 20/20 vision which you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

Opioids are now on pace to kill as many Americans in a decade as HIV/AIDS has since it began, with leveling-off projections tenuously predicted in a nebulous, far-off future: sometime after 2020.

There are two ways of spreading light to be candle,or the mirror that reflects it.

They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.” She took the seat opposite. “Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.” Picking

The missed call and call back drama between men and women deserves its own user mannual.

The kind of hope I have doesn’t begin and end with demanding everything go back to the way it was when it can’t, it can’t ever, that’s not how time works.

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that.

losers, even if they do not have a brain,have a heart.

What if I fall oh but my darling what if you fly

This is it. October 2, 2020, and the whole world watched, and history remembered.

I find it astonishing that in 2020, a smile or a hug has become an act of revolution.

In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.

This is a civilization searching for its humanity,' Gary Michael Tartakov, an American scholar of caste, said of this country [during the pandemic of 2020]. 'It dehumanized others to build its civilization. Now it needs to find its own.

...whatever we do whatever way we move forward there will be damage carried from all previous rows and columns in this mathematical computation we make, all the multi-configured additions and subtractions in language America, in all bases, particularly I'm thinking about at the moment 1492, 1776, 1861, 1867, 1980, 2016, 2020.

You can’t pretend this [Covid] isn’t happening,” Maisie said. I couldn’t, and I don’t. Nor do I pretend that all of us being together doesn’t fill me with joy. I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.

A conservative is a libertarian who has been mugged.

How can God give girls so much power ? How can they turn productive,busy and ambitious men into a wilting mass of uselessness. Page 204

The library in 2020 will be ruled by geeks. In my happy vision for the future, libraries are ruled by benign geek librarian overlords and the world is full of awesome.

The world’s demographic structure passed the point of no return twenty to forty years ago. The 2020s are the decade when it all breaks apart.

DECEMBER 2020

Love may be blind but jealousy has 20-20 vision.

Each new year is another chance to get love right.

You don't think about how unnerving silence is until it's everywhere.

When you get rid of the estate tax,” he (Warren Buffet) said, “you’re basically handing over command of the country’s resources to people who didn’t earn it. It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.

We were, each of us… at a crossroads of public and private dynamics which had brought us to this frame-worthy moment. I thought of the different currents and crosscurrents of history which had formed, merged, broken apart, and reformed to create the opportunity for us to give something essential to each other’s lives.

We read, we wrote, we prayed, we cried, we listened,we screamed, we spoke out, we marched, we helped others in need. But how much do we change for good? It’s sake and forever? For those of us who survived, when and how we see the benefits of what we went through during those turbulent times is relative. But if we work individually to make justified changes for more value driven and righteous tomorrow, the redlight year that 2020 was will one day in the rear view mirror of life inevitably turn green. And perhaps be seen as one of our finest hours.

You create the results in life that you believe you deserve. —DR. PHIL MCGRAW

Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I'm looking at a book, I'm reading a book, I'm trying to get started.

I want to see you not through the machine,' said Kuno. 'I want to speak to you not through the wearisome machine.

Here's to celebrating light where we find it. And making light where we don't.

if we work individually to make the justified changes for a more value-driven and righteous tomorrow, the red-light year that 2020 was will one day, in the rearview mirror of life, inevitably turn green, and perhaps be seen as one of our finest hours.

There is a great new work before us, which is to replace with true knowledge the ignorance that has destroyed human minds. We will construct unity in a world [which] has been brutally torn apart by false divisions of race, religion, gender, nationality, and age. We will heal with unconditional love those souls whose hearts have been disfigured by hatred and loneliness.

Ana tuvo una revelación: su vientre gestaba generaciones; gestaba futuro.

That's what human relationships are about – selective sharing and hiding of information to the point of crazy confusion.

Love is blind but jealousy has 20-20 vision,

Oh, offensive jokes…when, if ever, will your time come around again?

Era extrañamente agradable saber que su destino solo dependía de sí misma y de nadie más

sometimes life isn't about what you do,but what you ought to do

Like other aspiring autocrats, Donald Trump cannot succeed alone. He depends upon enablers and collaborators. Every American should understand what his enablers in Congress and in the leadership of the Republican Party were willing to do to help Trump seize power in the months after he lost the 2020 presidential election—and what they continue to do to this day.

It conjured up an image of fate, not blind at all but equipped with sentient 20/20 vision and intent on grinding helpless mortals between the great millstones of the universe to make some unknown bread.

It had been more than a year since the Joker’s conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you.

Hind sight is 20/20.

Understand that no matter the intensity of pain, no matter how unpleasant the situation may be, there is divine purpose within all things.

The eyes of love have 20/20 vision when focused on another, and become entirely blind when focused on ourselves.

I stopped using twitter because it's like a bunch of mental patients throwing shit at each other.

If I'm an archangel, you can hide under my wing until the sun comes up

Le enseño una sonrisa pequeña que escondía emociones muy grandes

New Year is a new morning and a new morning is a new opportunity and a new opportunity is a new path and finally a new path is a new richness!

New year is the glittering light to brighten the dream-lined pathway of future

They worried that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud. And they had good reason to worry. A 2005 bipartisan commission co-chaired by none other than Jimmy Carter found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in American elections. Why should 2020 be any different? They worried that universal mail-in balloting would make ballots harder to track, as some states bombarded addresses with ballots for previous residents who had moved out but hadn’t been struck from the voter rolls. What would happen to all the excess ballots?

He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn’t take orders. Also I didn’t have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot. But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

The truth was, I had never felt sad about being gay. It was just another part of who I was, no different than my size seven feet or 20/20 vision. The part I hated was the hiding; the pretending to be someone I wasn't; the steady, tormenting harassment that came in the form of Bible scripture and church sermons, the constant fear that if people found out, they would hate me, ridicule me, possibly even hurt me. That stuff sucked.

This is the year 2020. We use the idea of 2020 to represent clear vision forward. We also use the idea of 2020 to talk about clear vision backward; 2020 hindsight. So the idea is that we're smack in the middle of the idea of the past and the future. And 2020 represents our opportunity to really see clearly what we've chosen in the past and really apply that clearly to what we prefer in the future.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the United States would have to spend $3.6 trillion more than currently budgeted just to bring our infrastructure up to acceptable levels by 2020.95 China and India are spending almost 10 percent of GDP on infrastructure; Europe, around 5 percent.96 Even Mexico spends just over 3 percent.97 The United States has not broken 3 percent once since the mid-1970s.98

America is a country in which the storm is essential to clear the way for the calm. Because Americans, obsessed with the present and future, have difficulty remembering the past, they will all believe that there has never been a time as uncivil and tense as this one.

What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true. They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.

Perhaps the simplest way of describing the situation would be to say that, two and a half thousand years ago in the West, we were given a gift — and in our childishness we threw away the instructions for how to use it. We felt we knew what we were playing with. And, as a result, western civilization may soon be nothing but an experiment that failed.

Contrary to what many people have been expecting, the growth of the human population from roughly 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020 has not been accompanied by a lowering of living standards but by an explosion in material abundance. If you approach this volume with an open mind, you will be astounded by the progress that humanity has made, especially over the last 200 years or so. The book will affirm the moral and practical value of every additional human being, leave you appreciative of the abundance that you are enjoying today, and even hopeful about the future fate of humanity

A 389-page audit released in 2020 found that money overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) and intended for the state’s poorest families was used to hire an evangelical worship singer who performed at rallies and church concerts; to purchase a Nissan Armada, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ford F-250 for the head of a local nonprofit and two of her family members; and even to pay the former NFL quarterback Brett Favre $1.1 million for speeches he never gave.

First, you’re going to have to stop using food for anything other than nutrition. You cannot continue to use food to celebrate, or as a companion, or for entertainment, or comfort. You cannot medicate yourself, your mood, or pain with food.

And if you, the reader, hadn’t picked this book, the narrative would be different still. When I think of the trajectory created by these converging choices, I hallucinate a constellation of coincidences floating in front of my eyes. I’m a speck of dust, you’re a speck of dust; we float around in space until we meet by chance and pull each other closer. And then we swirl together, growing hotter and hotter, until we combine into a single sun. Summer 2020. From that tranquil, single sun. Yun Ko-eun © Lee Sang-min

A soldier’s duty…” Taylor intoned the last word in a voice of granite, “is to do an honest day’s work in dishonest times… and to make the best out of the worst fucking mess imaginable. It means… believing in your heart that some things are more important than your personal devils… or even your personal beliefs. It means the willingness to give up… everything.” Taylor sat back in his chair, never breaking eye contact. “And sometimes it just means lacing up your boots one more time when the whole world’s going to shit.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Dumb people like Trump think they're super smart, because they are so spectacularly stupid, they don't even know how much stuff they don't know. They are so dumb, they don't even know that other people know a lot more about a topic than they do.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20–20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination—“unstuckness,” in other words—are completely outside its domain.

He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn't take orders. Also I didn't have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot.

Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes. Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. The reason, says Professor Keltner, is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless.

I wanted to be perfect,” he said over dinner. “I…need to be perfect.” It’s such a burden to place on yourself. Say you are perfect—who’s going to recognize it? Few things are like the Olympics, where judges hold up score cards. How does one paint perfectly? Or lawyer perfectly? The key is to fill the space between your skill level and perfection with charm. That said, you can’t do it consciously. Charm can’t be constructed that way.

I'm not some possession." I pushed at his chest once more. "No, you're not." His mouth returned to mine. "You are my wife." I continued to struggle with the mass of him. He pulled his head back. "You're the only woman I've loved since I lost my mother and sister." His eyes intent on mine. Torn by my anger and his admission, I stopped protesting. His mouth moved against my neck and his body pressed into mine. "I have loved you for so long.

If everything didn't happen the way it happened this year, then think about it, everything would just be the same. And there's something very wrong with that thought. It wasn't supposed to remain the same, going on and on in an endless hum drum motion, repeating all the old rhythms, living in all the old lies, playing back all the same voices in the mind. It needed to end. Something needed to be over. Something new needs to take its place.

I stand in the corners - the darkest pits of the room and sometimes I stand in the center feeling the stale cold envelop me just watching everyone disappear, I know they label it hiatus, but hiatus is just like death. It could be a long time before I could ever say hello again - and sometimes I never got to say goodbye. I'm just now realizing how long this empire called goodreads has survived, I'm always here seeing new faces, new people, new ways of thinking. But my main question is - How could they leave all this behind? A deep sorrow that sounds like a ringing silence delves into my ears when I realize time has gone by fast and here I am finding direct mails from 2020, or 2019, 2018, 2017, even further. I'm scared - alone and out of touch. I remember a couple from my early years....They both disappeared. Ken got shot again. Alastor up and left. I remember forenthico and bree fighting over a valentine's day present he presented to match with her. Abbigail is gone. I haven't heard from Elizabeth in a long while. Nezuko is silent. Alice, Tsukishima, Fizzii, Giran, Moonkitty, Sylvia, River, Star. If you see this I'm still waiting.

The rest of us, on the ·other hand-we members of the protected classes-have grown increasingly· dependent on our welfare programs. In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low income families ($53 billion). Most families who enjoy those subsidies have six-figure incomes and are white. Poor families lucky enough to live in government-owned apartments of often have to deal with mold and even lead paint, while rich families are claiming the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes. The lifetime limit for cash welfare to poor parents is five years, but families claiming the mortgage interest deduction may do so for the length of the mortgage, typically thirty years. A fifteen-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way. If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America's welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France's. But that's true only if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line. If you put aside these tax breaks and judge the United States solely by the share of its GDP allocated to programs directed at low-income citizens, then our investment in poverty reduction is much smaller than that of other rich nations. The American welfare state is lopsided.

Back then, she had to worry about the government tapping her phone. It still probably does, but all the other stuff's been outsourced. Now, instead of just a COINTELPRO operation, she’s got to worry about that and some dude stalking her relatives from his mother’s basement, and kids bombarding her with death threats because it makes them feel like part of the (terrorist) gang, and a troll farm in Russia using the Center as the next cause célèbre to whip up Nazis. All the people who really are a threat to the country; somehow they’ve been convinced to do its dirty work, more or less for free. She would admire it if it weren’t so damn horrific.

The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20–20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly—hindsight being 20–20 and all—we often aren’t open to knowing more. “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” The cat’s hindsight, in other words, distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master.

I was built to protect those who cannot protect themselves." -Zane Julien "A Ninja never admits defeat. A Ninja always picks himself up when he's down." -Kai Smith "Some of us may look a little different, but like our team; some things never change." -Cole Brookstone "It's important to be yourself." -Jay Walker "We're friends. Good Friends. But, that's all we're ever gonna be . . ." -Nya Smith "We are not so different . . Are we? We are . . . Compatible?" -Pixel "The best way to defeat your enemy, is to make them your friend." -Sensei Wu "The only way to defeat an Oni is with another Oni. You need me." -Garmadon

Like our other needs, meaning is an inherent expectation. Its denial has dire consequences. Far from a purely psychological need, our hormonees and nervous systems clock its presence or absence. As a medical study in 2020 found, the "presence [of] and search for meaning in life are important for health and well-being." Simply put, the more meaningful you find your life, the better your measures of mental and physical health are likely to be. It is itself a sign of the times that we even need such studies to confirm what our experience of life teaches. When do you feel happier, more fulfilled, more viscerally at ease: when you extend yourself to help and connect with others, or when you are focused on burnishing the importance of your little egoic self? We all know the answer, and yet somehow what we know doesn't always carry the day. Corporations are ingenious at exploiting people's needs without actually meeting them. Naomi Klein, in her book No Logo, made vividly clear how big business began in the 1980s to home in on people's natural desire to belong to something larger than themselves. Brand-aware companies such as Nike, Lululemon, and the Body Shop are marketing much more than products: they sell meaning, identification, and an almost religious sense of belonging through association with their brand. "That pressuposes a kind of emptiness and yearning in people," I suggested when I interviewed the prolific author and activist. "Yes," Klein replied. "They tap into a longing and a need for belonging, and they do it by exploiting the insight that just selling running shoes isn't enough. We humans want to be part of a transcendent project.

My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

the world is being built up by greedy people wanting higher towers and then there’s a war or a hurricane or a tsunami or a virus or a financial collapse happening to put things in balance. this has happened all through history and the humankind survives and moves on. this is not an exception: this is a rule. and you are not granted to stay here, that is not your right. you were handed a gift of walking here for a little while, breathing the air, feeling things, but did you say thank you? ever? or just took for granted, carried life like a burden and now you’re being angry because suddenly things outside of your control are threatening your peace? why do you let your peace depend on things outside of your control in the first place?

Not being able to see this, culture-based explanations for economic development have usually been little more than ex post facto justifications based on a 20/20 hindsight vision. So, in the early days of capitalism, when most economically successful countries happened to be Protestant Christian, many people argued that Protestantism was uniquely suited to economic development. When Catholic France, Italy, Austria and southern Germany developed rapidly, particularly after the Second World War, Christianity, rather than Protestantism, became the magic culture. Until Japan became rich, many people thought East Asia had not developed because of Confucianism. But when Japan succeeded, this thesis was revised to say that Japan was developing so fast because its unique form of Confucianism emphasized co-operation over individual edification, which the Chinese and Korean versions allegedly valued more highly. And then Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea also started doing well, so this judgement about the different varieties of Confucianism was forgotten. Indeed, Confucianism as a whole suddenly became the best culture for development because it emphasized hard work, saving, education and submission to authority. Today, when we see Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia, Buddhist Thailand and even Hindu India doing well economically, we can soon expect to encounter new theories that will trumpet how uniquely all these cultures are suited for economic development (and how their authors have known about it all along).

We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.

The assumption that femininity is always structured by and performed for a male gaze fails to take seriously queer feminine desire. The radical feminist critiques of femininity also disregarded the fact that not all who are (seen as) feminine are women. Crucially, what is viewed as appropriately feminine is not only defined in relation to maleness or masculinity, but through numerous intersections of power including race, sexuality, ability, and social class. In other words, white, heterosexual, binary gender-conforming, able-bodied, and upper- or middle-class femininity is privileged in relation to other varieties. Any social system may contain multiple femininities that differ in status, and which relate to each other as well as to masculinity. As highlighted by “effeminate” gay men, trans women, femmes, drag queens, and “bad girls,” it is possible to be perceived as excessively, insufficiently, or wrongly feminine without for that sake being seen as masculine. Finally, the view of femininity as a restrictive yet disposable mask presupposes that emancipation entails departure into neutral (or masculine) modes of being. This is a tenuous assumption, as the construction of selfhood is entangled with gender, and conceptions of androgyny and gender neutrality similarly hinge on culturally specific ideas of masculinity and femininity.