38 Quotes by Kurt Andersen

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Acknowledging actual, specific conspiracies makes sense. But reflexive conspiracism can become a bad habit and a misguided way of making sense of current events.

The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.

The federal minimum wage is frozen for the entire decade, longer than ever, which translates to an effective pay cut of one-third for America’s lowest-paid workers.

Before the Internet, crackpots were mostly isolated and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the Web, just like actual news. Now all the fantasies look real.

Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism – hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

People’s incomes over a certain level aren’t taxed to pay for Social Security at all.

We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.