Clinton Famous Quotes

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy 'experience'—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim 'worked' well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York. Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: 'It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.' Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy.

Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria,” Jake Sullivan, foreign policy advisor to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, famously wrote to his boss via email on February 12, 2012. The US public was unaware of this.

It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.

Vice President Gore, Richard Clarke, and Madeleine Albright were “strong support[ers]” of the program, joining in President Clinton’s “intense” interest in it.5 Egypt’s most famous terrorist, Talaat Fouad Qassem, was “seized in Croatia, flown to the USS Adriatic, a navy warship, interrogated, then flown to Egypt for [torture and] execution.”6 Egypt’s secret police, the Gihaz al-Mukhabarat al-Amma, is widely known for its brutal torture regime, “real Macho interrogation . . . enhanced interrogation techniques on steroids” and was used by both Presidents Bush and Clinton.7 Congress attempted to end this program in 1998. The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act slipped in a passage making it the policy of the United States not to “expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.”8 Clinton vetoed the bill in late October,

Karl Marx famously belittled religion as an “opiate for the masses,” a drug that the spread of worldwide socialism would one day make undesirable. Obama’s aside in San Francisco about “bitter” Americans clinging to belief in God out of economic frustration was nothing more than a restatement of Marx’s view of religion. Like Marx, Obama views traditional religion as a temporary opiate for the poor, confused, and jobless—a drug that will dissipate, he hopes, as the federal government assumes more God-like powers, and his new morality of abortion, subsidized contraception, and gay marriage gains adherents. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,” Obama said, warming to his theme in San Francisco. “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Among the first to call and congratulate me on my election victory was President Clinton. “Bibi, I’ve got to hand it to you.” He chuckled. “We did everything we could to bring you down, but you beat us fair and square.” Quintessential Bill, I thought. He wasn’t telling me something I didn’t know, but here was the president of the United States admitting without batting an eyelash to a brazen intervention in another country’s elections. Clinton’s frankness was refreshingly politically incorrect. You could see how the famous Clinton charm carried him through a myriad of minefields. I let it go and said I looked forward to working with him.

The godfather’s name is Saul Alinsky. His most famous students are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hardly anyone recognizes this, but Alinsky and the Alinsky method is the hidden force behind the 2008 economic meltdown. The meltdown was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; it was the main cause of median wealth in the United States in the subsequent three years declining nearly 40 percent. While the meltdown is routinely attributed to Wall Street “greed,” its real cause was government and activist pressure on banks and banking agencies—like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—to change their lending and loan guarantee practices. Yes, the 2008 crash was actually the result of an Alinskyite scam—actually a series of Alinskyite scams, carried out over many years. Basically the Alinskyites were trying to steal money from the banks and, in the process, force the banks to make loans to people that they had no intention of making loans to. The banks acquiesced, and eventually the whole scheme came crashing down. It was toppled not by greed but by the sober reality that when you loan money to millions of people who cannot afford to pay, those people are very likely to default on those loans. That’s how Alinskyites almost destroyed the U.S. economy a few years ago. If Alinsky had never lived, none of this would have happened.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

The invention of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star,” goes the famous quote from Brillat-Savarin.

awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States. My curtain call worked. Until it didn’t. Still speaking in his usual stream-of-consciousness and free-association cadence, the president moved his eyes again, sweeping from left to right, toward me and my protective curtain. This time, I was not so lucky. The small eyes with the white shadows stopped on me. “Jim!” Trump exclaimed. The president called me forward. “He’s more famous than me.” Awesome. My wife Patrice has known me since I was nineteen. In the endless TV coverage of what felt to me like a thousand-yard walk across the Blue Room, back at our home she was watching TV and pointing at the screen: “That’s Jim’s ‘oh shit’ face.” Yes, it was. My inner voice was screaming: “How could he think this is a good idea? Isn’t he supposed to be the master of television? This is a complete disaster. And there is no fricking way I’m going to hug him.” The FBI and its director are not on anyone’s political team. The entire nightmare of the Clinton email investigation had been about protecting the integrity and independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice, about safeguarding the reservoir of trust and credibility. That Trump would appear to publicly thank me on his second day in office was a threat to the reservoir. Near the end of my thousand-yard walk, I extended my right hand to President Trump. This was going to be a handshake, nothing more. The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn’t. I thwarted the hug, but I got something worse in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The whole world “saw” Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn’t get any worse. President Trump made a motion as if to invite me to stand with him and the vice president and Joe Clancy. Backing away, I waved it off with a smile. “I’m not worthy,” my expression tried to say. “I’m not suicidal,” my inner voice said. Defeated and depressed, I retreated back to the far side of the room. The press was excused, and the police chiefs and directors started lining up for pictures with the president. They were very quiet. I made like I was getting in the back of the line and slipped out the side door, through the Green Room, into the hall, and down the stairs. On the way, I heard someone say the score from the Packers-Falcons game. Perfect. It is possible that I was reading too much into the usual Trump theatrics, but the episode left me worried. It was no surprise that President Trump behaved in a manner that was completely different from his predecessors—I couldn’t imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush asking someone to come onstage like a contestant on The Price Is Right. What was distressing was what Trump symbolically seemed to be asking leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to do—to come forward and kiss the great man’s ring. To show their deference and loyalty. It was tremendously important that these leaders not do that—or be seen to even look like they were doing that. Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t care, though I’d spend the next several weeks quite memorably, and disastrously, trying to make this point to him and his staff.

Hillary served as a U.S. senator from New York but did not propose a single important piece of legislation; her record is literally a blank slate. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas admits that she “doesn’t have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name.”2 Despite traveling millions of miles as secretary of state, Hillary negotiated no treaties, secured no agreements, prevented no conflicts—in short, she accomplished nothing. Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”3 She said her mother named her after the famed climber Sir Edmund Hillary, until someone pointed out that Hillary was born in 1947 and her “namesake” only became famous in 1953. On the campaign trail in 2008, Hillary said she had attempted as a young woman to have applied to join the Marines but they wouldn’t take her because she was a woman and wore glasses. In fact, Hillary at this stage of life detested the Marines and would never have wanted to join. She also said a senior professor at Harvard Law School discouraged her from going there by saying, “We don’t need any more women.”4 If this incident actually occurred one might expect Hillary to have identified the professor. Certainly it would be interesting to get his side of the story. But she never has, suggesting it’s another made-up episode.

What are we left with then? We are left with a system where ObamaCare is a rule for, as Leona Helmsley so famously described them, the little people. For everybody who doesn't have power and juice and connections in Washington, for everyone--look for the men and women at home, maybe you have an army of lobbyists working for you. Maybe you have Senators' cell phones on your speed dial. Maybe you can walk the corridors of power. In that case you too get an exemption. But if you are just a hard-working American, if you are just trying to provide for your family, if you are just trying to do an honest day's work, make your community better, raise your kids, set a good example, then the message this President has sent--and sadly the message the Senate has sent--is you don't count. We are going to treat everybody else better than you.   That

In the 1992 presidential debate, third-party candidate Ross Perot famously warned about a 'giant sucking sound' of American jobs going south of the border to low-wage nations once trade protections were dropped. Perot was right, but no one in our government listened to him. Tariffs were ditched, and then Bill Clinton moved into the White House...He continued Reagan's trade policies and committed the United States to so-called free-trade agreements such as GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO, thus removing all the protections that had kept our domestic manufacturing industries safe from foreign corporate predators for two centuries.

The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (). This famous saying is clear in its meaning. The disciples want to obey Jesus and do what is right in the depths of their spirit, but their external flesh lacks the strength (note the “not strong”/“weak” development from v. 40 to v. 41). This and John 6:63 are the only instances of spirit vs. flesh dichotomy in the gospels, but it is developed further in Paul, who uses “spirit” () for the Holy Spirit in Rom 8, thereby contrasting life in the Spirit with life in one’s own strength.

Clinton got out there and created a new narrative on the economy, which took some of the needles out of Obama,” says Republican strategist Mike Murphy. “It was the biggest single number-moving event in the entire campaign. It was devastatingly important to the Obama guys. And he put him back in business.” (It also helped, Murphy adds, that “the Romney campaign was totally incompetent.”) In 2000, Clinton had famously faulted Al Gore for not letting Clinton rally the base in key swing states. It was not a mistake Barack Obama was going to repeat. In addition to his convention speech, Clinton stumped for Obama in swing states like Florida and Ohio. Unlike Gore and his campaign team, “the Obama people, despite whatever hard feelings they had, were pretty dispassionate and not afraid to let him come in and steal the show, if they thought it would be helpful,” says a former Clinton official who worked in the Obama administration. Clinton even starred in a widely seen advertisement for Obama, declaring that “President Obama has a plan to rebuild America from the ground up, investing in innovation, education, and job training. It only works if there is a strong middle class. That’s what happened when I was president.”15

On Instagram, anyone could become famous among strangers. And so the Kremlin’s IRA did too. Nearly half of their accounts achieved more than 10,000 followers, and 12 of them had over 100,000. They used the accounts to sell things. One sold the idea that Hillary Clinton was a bad feminist. Another, @blackstagram_, with 303,663 followers before Facebook took it down in the Russian account purge, touted products from what it said were black-owned businesses, while telling black Americans not to waste their time voting.

The truth of the New Democrats’ purpose was presented by the journalist Joe Klein in his famous 1996 roman à clef about Clinton’s run for the presidency, Primary Colors. Although the novel contains more than a nod to Clinton’s extramarital affairs, Klein seems broadly sympathetic to the man from Arkansas as well as to the DLC project more generally. Toward the equality-oriented politics of the Democratic past he is forthrightly contemptuous. Old people who recall fondly the battles of the Thirties, for example, are objects of a form of ridicule that Klein thinks he doesn’t even need to explain; it is self-evident that people who care about workers are fools. And when an old-school “prairie populist” challenges the Clinton character for the nomination, Klein describes him as possessing “a voice made for crystal radio sets” and “offering Franklin Roosevelt’s jobs program (forestry, road-building) to out-of-work computer jockeys.” Get it? His views are obsolete! “It was like running against a museum.” That was the essential New Democrat idea: The world had changed, but certain Democratic voters expected their politicians to help them cling to a status that globalization had long since revoked. However,

Methamphetamines were sold in patent medicines and nasal decongestants, recommended for heroin addiction, and mass disseminated to troops to improve their performance. The police and prohibitionists hailed the drop in cocaine use as a success, demanded even more severe punishments and cited the large number of addicts in prison as proof that drugs made people commit crimes; after all, only criminals ended up in jail. With cocaine users scarce in the face of an expanding anti-drugs bureaucracy, the authorities moved onto potheads, where their focus remained for decades, which allowed Escobar to get cocaine into America unnoticed. In the following decades, the most famous cocaine abuser was Adolf Hitler.

Hillary Clinton was famous for her intimate friendship with Wall Street bankers. At one point she actually scolded Bernie Sanders for wanting to get tough with the financial industry because such a policy, by itself, would not also end racism and sexism—a new low in self-serving sophistry.

While the Wichita Cons worked hard to build their movement, they would not have succeeded so extravagantly had it not been for the simultaneous suicide of the rival movement, the one that traditionally spoke for working-class people. I am referring, of course, to the Clinton administration’s famous policy of “triangulation,” its grand effort to minimize the differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic issues. Among the nation’s pundit corps “triangulation” has always been considered a stroke of genius, signaling the end of liberalism’s old-fashioned “class warfare” and also of the Democrats’ faith in “big government.” Clinton’s New Democrats, it was thought, had brought the dawn of an era in which all parties agreed on the sanctity of the free market. As political strategy, though, Clinton’s move to accommodate the right was the purest folly. It simply pulled the rug out from under any possible organizing effort on the left. While the Cons were busily polarizing the electorate, the Dems were meekly seeking the center.

Until more women become recognized as competent and reliable leaders, assuming roles of leadership will remain an uphill battle. By all means, draw inspiration from Hillary Rodham Clinton, former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, business executive Carly Fiorina, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, or Carolyn Lamm (President of the American Bar Association), but remember that the majority of effective female leaders are neither rich nor famous. They’re just competent, devoted, and hard-working people, pretty much like you.

Express Empathy When Bill Clinton delivered his now-famous line “I feel your pain” in 1992, he did more than just clinch a victory over George H. W. Bush; he positioned himself as the guide in the American voters’ story. A guide expresses an understanding of the pain and frustration of their hero. In fact, many pundits believe Clinton locked up the election during a town hall debate in which Bush gave a rambling answer to a young woman when she asked what the national debt meant to the average American. Clinton countered Bush’s linear, cerebral answer by asking the woman if she knew anybody who’d lost their job. He asked whether it pained her that she had friends out of work, and when the woman said yes, he went on to explain how the national debt is tied to the well-being of every American, even her and her friends.5 That’s empathy. When we empathize with our customers’ dilemma, we create a bond of trust. People trust those who understand them, and they trust brands that understand them too. Oprah Winfrey, an undeniably successful guide to millions, once explained the three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard, and understood. This is the essence of empathy. Empathetic statements start with words like, “We understand how it feels to . . .” or “Nobody should have to experience . . .” or “Like you, we are frustrated by . . .” or, in the case of one Toyota commercial inviting Toyota owners to engage their local Toyota service center, simply, “We care about your Toyota.” Expressing empathy isn’t difficult. Once we’ve identified our customers’ internal problems, we simply need to let them know we understand and would like to help them find a resolution. Scan your marketing material and make sure you’ve told your customers that you care. Customers won’t know you care until you tell them.

Betsy, listening to this, was reminded of the famous line about President Reagan during the Iran-Contra hearings. What didn’t he know, and when did he know he didn’t know it?

My place is in the mafia and yours is in high society among the rich and famous. The shadows won’t suit you. You’re too bright to hide.

Recognizing these patterns has a number of important implications. First, obviously, accusing people of racism or calling them the “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton famously did, is a terrible idea. It assaults people’s moral sense of themselves and puts their backs up. They immediately stop listening. Conversely, one can see why calling egregious racists “fine people,” and emphasizing there are bad people “on both sides,” as President Trump did, is clearly an effective strategy (however morally reprehensible) to gain popularity, since it makes those who make these remarks feel better about themselves.

Benenson and Margolis reached out to Jon Favreau, the vaunted speechwriter for Barack Obama, to help draft the kind of visionary message that had eluded Hillary in her first campaign for the presidency. Favreau, then thirty-three, had seen a lot in his short life as a political operative. He had helped navigate Obama through the famous “race” speech in Philadelphia in 2008, the first inaugural address ever given by a person of color, and several reports to Congress on the state of the union. By putting words in the mouth of a politician with a unique gift for giving wings to oratory, Favreau had ascended to an elite rung of political speechwriters by the time he arrived at the White House in 2009.

He lost the popular vote due to massive voter fraud. He agreed with Infowars’ Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton might have taken some form of drugs to enhance her debate performance and demanded, “I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. I do.”24 Trump attacked his primary opponent Senator Ted Cruz by linking his father to the JFK assassination. He has said that a pillow was found on the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s face and he might have been murdered. He’s sided with the anti-vaccine conspiracy nuts. Most famously, he laid the groundwork for his campaign for the Republican nomination by promising he could prove President Barack Obama was born in Africa. He’s claimed President Obama wore a ring with an Arabic inscription. He’s said global warming is a “hoax,” that windmills cause cancer.

Clinton administration’s famous policy of “triangulation,” its grand effort to minimize the differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic issues. Among the nation’s pundit corps “triangulation” has always been considered a stroke of genius, signaling the end of liberalism’s old-fashioned “class warfare” and also of the Democrats’ faith in “big government.” Clinton’s New Democrats, it was thought, had brought the dawn of an era in which all parties agreed on the sanctity of the free market. As political strategy, though, Clinton’s move to accommodate the right was the purest folly. It simply pulled the rug out from under any possible organizing effort on the left.

No one could have missed the reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as if in wildlife documentary, when things did not go his [Clinton] way. That famous tendency of the candidate to take a less than forthcoming approach to embarrassing questions that had already been well documented.

In 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness,” inspired by how Fox News was turning politics into an evidence-free zone of seething resentments. And the Republican politicians whom Fox propelled to power had done their part, too. Republican strategist Karl Rove famously dismissed critics who lived in “the reality-based community”—words intended as a slight—saying they failed to grasp that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Clinton would become the paterfamilias of this tribe, with his so-called Third Way between left and right, and his famous declaration, regarded as historic from the moment it was uttered in 1996, that “the era of big government is over.” Clinton’s evolution from embracing Johnson’s big-government activism in the 1960s to declaring the end of big government in the 1990s spoke of a turning in the culture whose effects were palpable in the Georgetown that Cohen discovered in the early 2010s.

the Human Genome Project revealed that the human species cannot be divided into biological races. President Clinton famously announced, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.”75 Collins ended his remarks by saying, “I’m happy that today the only race that we are talking about is the human race.” Venter reported that Celera Genomics had sequenced the genomes of three women and two men who identified as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian, and African American and found that “there’s no way to tell one ethnicity from another.” He bluntly declared, “Race has no genetic or scientific basis.

Listen, I know I’m no Genevieve Lang. But I’m okay with that. Besides, who really wants to be with a boy who only likes them because of the way they look?! Genevieve and her minions have made it abundantly clear both IRL and on their finstas that I have a mustache and that my Supercuts haircut makes me look like a young, more Middle Eastern Hillary Clinton.