#extremism

Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell. ↗

— Joe Bageant

#christian #extremism #fundamentalism #ignorance #politics

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#delusion #extremism #fanaticism #fanatics #guerrilla-decontextualism

The Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists. ↗

— Porter Goss

#cause #conflict #extremism #extremists #iraq

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they took the land because god had given it to them from time immemorial. In the noisome town of Hebron, where all of life is focused on a supposedly sacred boneyard in a dank local cave, one of the world's less pretty sights is that of supposed yeshivah students toting submachine guns and humbling the Arab inhabitants. When I asked one of these charmers where he got his legal authority to be a squatter, he flung his hand, index finger outstretched, toward the sky. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#belarus #colonialism #god #guns #gush-emunim

Ah well, I suppose that's the problem with trying to make others follow your own beliefs: what starts out as spiritual ardor too often becomes arrogance and bigotry. ↗

— Persia Woolley

#religious-extremism #spirituality #religion

Let's not leave an educational vacuum to be filled by religious extremists who go to families who have no other option and offer meals, housing and some form of education. If we are going to combat extremism then we must educate those very same children. ↗

— Hillary Clinton

#combat #educate #education #educational #extremism

I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. ↗

— David Eagleman

#decade #extremism #first #going #i

I think it's clear to me that what - when I look at the tea party, it's about one-third Democrat, one-third Republican, one-third independents. But 100 percent of them are sure that the agenda that is taking place in Washington, D.C., is about extremism and is about bankrupting this country and every state within this country. ↗

— Jeff Sessions

#agenda #bankrupting #clear #country #democrat

I oppose the spending of trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan, I strongly oppose Islamic extremism but don't believe that sending troops to die in two unwinnable wars makes sense. ↗

— Roger Stone

#believe #die #extremism #i #iraq

Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion. ↗

— Al-Waleed bin Talal

#extremism #fight #governments #israel #logic