Category: Verbatim

It’s Still Amateur Hour at the Pentagon

Buck Banks

“This is so dumb that I have a hard time believing it is true. We don’t want a bunch of Pravda newspapers only touting the Government’s official position. A free press makes our country better. This sounds like more amateur hour.”

— Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), on X in response to the Pentagon’s decision to prevent reporters from accessing military or defense information that has sparked condemnation across the aisle and backlash from media organizations that argue the move hampers press freedom, the Washington Post reports.

Charlie Kirk, In His Own Words

Buck Banks

“Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Vanity Fair

What’s Happening Now

Buck Banks

“If you were writing a hackneyed novel or film about an authoritarian America, it would go exactly like this: a figure close to the regime is assassinated, a massive shrill and sanctimonious hue and cry rises over the martyred dead, hysteria is whipped up about terrorism and public disorder, leaders in the regime and movement promise vengeance, private citizens are mobbed and lose their jobs for expressing anti-regime sentiments at the encouragement of regime officials and regime-aligned demagogues, and, then, the power of the state is brought to bear against public figures who oppose and criticize the regime. … This is exactly what’s happening now.”

— John Ganz

Letterman Speaks Out About Corporate Oppression of Speech

Buck Banks

“This is misery. We see where this is all going, correct? It’s managed media. And it’s no good. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. And you can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office. That’s just not how this works.”

— David Letterman, quoted by Variety.

Trump Using Kirk’s Death to Stifle Opposition

Buck Banks

“President Trump has begun a major escalation in his long-running efforts to stifle political opposition in the United States, using the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to make the baseless argument that Democratic organizations and protesters are part of a violent conspiracy against conservative values and the American way of life.”

— New York Times

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The Snowflakes Are Winning

Buck Banks

“I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching, because according to our president there’s only two genders… and I don’t want to promote something that is against our president’s laws as well as against my religious beliefs.”

— A Texas A&M student, quoted by KBTX, objecting to LGBTQ content in a university course in a viral video that led to the removals of a dean and department head and the firing of a professor.

A Rationale for a Shutdown

Buck Banks

“I want to be very clear about what I am saying here. Donald Trump is corrupting the government — he is using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the Mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under Mafia rule, get the trash picked up or buy construction materials. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the Mafia’s power and wealth. … This is what Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop.”

— Ezra Klein gives Democrats the rationale for allowing a government shutdown.