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by Jill Lepore


  161.Daly, Covering America, 401–15; Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country (New York: Random House, 2014), 183.

  162.Ken Auletta, “Vox Fox,” TNY, May 26, 2003. Sherman, Loudest Voice, 175. Jane Hall, “Murdoch Will Launch 24-Hour News Channel; Roger Ailes Will Head the New Service,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1996.

  163.Sherman, Loudest Voice, 230.

  164.Markus Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increase Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  165.Leibovich, This Town, 101–7; Sherman, Loudest Voice, 200, 229.

  166.Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter, Politics by Other Means: Politicians, Prosecutors, and the Press from Watergate to Whitewater, revised and updated edition (New York: Norton, 1990, 1999), figure 1.1., 27.

  167.Kenneth Starr, and United States Office of the Independent Counsel. The Starr Report: The Findings of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr on President Clinton and the Lewinsky Affair (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), 49–50. The quotation is attributed to Lewinsky by David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York: Scribner, 2001), 372.

  168.Johnson, Best of Times, 254.

  169.Ibid., 259.

  170.Ibid., 272–73.

  171.Ibid., 232–33, 292; William J. Clinton, interview by Jim Lehrer, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, PBS, January 21, 1998; Patterson, Restless Giant, 390; Today show, interview with Matt Lauer, January 27, 1998.

  172.Sherman, Loudest Voice, 236–38, 245; Brownstein, Second Civil War, 171; A. M. Rosenthal, “Risking the Presidency,” NYT, March 17, 1998; Andrew Sullivan, “Lies That Matter,” TNR, September 14, 21, 1998.

  173.Hemmer, Messengers of the Right, xiii–xiv.

  174.Johnson, The Best of Times, 328–30, 373–74, 397; Steven M. Gillon, The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 249; Katharine Q. Seelye, “The Speaker Steps Down,” NYT, November 7, 1998.

  175.Gloria Steinem, “Why Feminists Support Clinton,” NYT, March 22, 1998; Toni Morrison, “On the First Black President,” TNY, October 5, 1998.

  176.Patterson, Restless Giant, 267; “Letter to Conservatives” from Paul M. Weyrich, February 16, 1999, in Direct Line, http://www.rfcnet.org/archives/weyrich.htm.

  177.Anthony Lewis, “Nearly a Coup,” New York Review of Books, April 13, 2000.

  178.“I decided real estate was a much better business,” he later explained: Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 1987), 77.

  179.Ibid., 77–81; David Dunlap, “Meet Donald Trump,” NYT [Insider], July 30, 2015.

  180.Luis Romano, “Donald Trump, Holding All the Cards,” Washington Post, November 15, 1984.

  181.Trump, The Art of the Deal, 105, 107; Fox Butterfield, “New Hampshire Speech Earns Praise for Trump,” NYT, October 23, 1987.

  182.Patterson, Restless Giant, 357; Lawrence R. Samuel, Rich: The Rise and Fall of American Wealth Culture (New York: American Management Association, 2009), 224–31.

  183.Carl Rowan, “The Uglification of Presidential Politics,” Titusville (PA) Herald, November 3, 1999; Donald Trump, interview by Chris Matthews, Hardball with Chris Matthews, NBC News, August 27, 1998; Adam Nagourney, “President? Why Not?,” NYT, September 25, 1999.

  184.Donald J. Trump with Dave Shiflett, The America We Deserve (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 2000), 261; The Donald 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/199 91104133242/http://thedonald2000.org/; “In to Win? Trump Eyes Candidacy,” Harrisburg (PA) Daily News Record, October 8, 1999; Nagourney, “President? Why Not?”; Chris Matthews, “Gotham Hero,” Corbin Times Tribune, December 1, 1999; Tony Kornheiser, “Look Who’s Running for President,” The Titusville Herald, October 13, 1999.

  185.Trump, The America We Deserve, 271–72; Adam Nagourney, “President? Why Not?”

  186.Maureen Dowd, “Behold the Flirtation of the Trumpster,” Lowell Sun, November 18, 1999; Adam Nagourney, “Trump Proposes Clearing Nation’s Debt at Expense of the Rich,” NYT, November 10, 1999; William Mann, “If Donald Trump Were President,” Syracuse (New York) Post-Standard, November 1, 1999.

  187.Mark Shields, “A Wonderful Holiday,” Daily Herald Chicago, November 24, 1999; The Donald 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20000116042120/http://www.the donald2000.org/.https://web.archive.org/web/20000116042120/http://www.thedon ald2000.org/; Michael Janofsky, “Trump Speaks Out About Just About Everything,” NYT, January 8, 2000.

  188.George W. Bush, Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination, Republican National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 3, 2000; Frum quoted in Kevin M. Kruse, “Compassionate Conservatism: Religion in the Age of George W. Bush,” in Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 230.

  189.Sherman, Loudest Voice, 253, 259–60; Jane Mayer, “Dept. of Close Calls: George W.’s Cousin,” TNY, November 20, 2000.

  190.Jeffrey Toobin, Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election (New York: Random House, 2001), 25; Johnson, Best of Times, 523–24.

  191.Toobin, Too Close to Call, 266–67.

  192.Patterson, Restless Giant, 410–16; Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000) (Stevens dissenting).

  193.“Count the Spoons,” Washington Post, January 24, 2001; Johnson, The Best of Times, 546–47.

  194.George W. Bush, Address in Austin Accepting Election as the 43rd President of the United States, Austin, Texas, December 13, 2000. Linda Greenhouse, “Bush Prevails,” NYT, December 13, 2000.

  Sixteen: AMERICA, DISRUPTED

  1.This account derives chiefly from The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), chs. 1 and 9; and Understanding 9/11: A Television Archive, https://archive.org/details/911. “F93 Attendent CeeCee Lyles Leaves a Message for Her Husband,” YouTube video, 0:45, posted by “911NeverForget,” May 21, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUrxsrTKHN4.

  2.“America Under Attack,” CNN.com, September 11, 2001.

  3.“World Trade Center Toppled in Attack,” NYT, September 11, 2001, and “Terrorists Attack New York and Washington,” NYT, September 11, 2001.

  4.“America Under Attack,” Drudge Report, http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/specialreports/EFG/20010911_0855.htm.

  5.“Terrorism Hits America,” FOX News, September 11, 2001.

  6.George W. Bush, 9/11 Address to the Nation, Washington, DC, September 11, 2001.

  7.Samuel P. Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993. And see Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, 2011).

  8.Bush, 9/11 Address to the Nation.

  9.Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Knopf, 2010), 337.

  10.Susan Sontag, “Tuesday, And After,” TNY, September 24, 2001.

  11.Charles Krauthammer, “Voices of Moral Obtuseness,” Washington Post, September 21, 2001. And for a roundup, see Celeste Bohlen, “Think Tank: In New War on Terrorism, Words Are Weapons, Too,” NYT, September 29, 2001.

  12.Ann Coulter, “This Is War,” National Review (online), September 13, 2001, and in print September 17, 2001.

  13.Jonah Goldberg, “L’Affaire Coulter,” National Review, October 2, 2017.

  14.Quoted in Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 516.

  15.Laurie Goodstein, “After the Attacks,” NYT, September 15, 2001; John F. Harris, “Falwell Apologizes for Remarks,” Washington Post, September 18, 2001.

  16.https://archive.org/details/TheAlexJonesRadioShowOn9-11-2001. And see Alexander Zaitchik
, “Meet Alex Jones,” Rolling Stone, March 2, 2011.

  17.Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump (Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2017).

  18.Infowars, September 11, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20011201080653/http://infowars.com:80/archive_wtc.htm; Jones in his 2005 film, Martial Law 9-11, is quoted in Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind, 108.

  19.Remnick, The Bridge, 362, 370.

  20.Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” Speech, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 18, 2005.

  21.David Remnick, “The President’s Hero,” TNY, June 19, 2017.

  22.Marc Mauer, Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later (Washington DC: The Sentencing Project, 1995).

  23.Kay, Among the Truthers, xvii.

  24.David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), xxiii.

  25.Dinesh D’Souza, The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010), 26–27, 34, 215, 198.

  26.Gregory Krieg, “14 of Trump’s Most Outrageous ‘Birther’ Claims—Half from after 2011,” CNN Politics, September 16, 2016.

  27.David Graham, “The Unrepentent Birtherism of Donald Trump,” Atlantic, September 16, 2016.

  28.Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009), 519–27.

  29.Trump got the Coulter material via Corey Lewandowski, according to Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind, 155–56.

  30.Ann Coulter, ¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (New York: Regnery, 2015), 1–2.

  31.Seema Mehta, “Transcript: Clinton’s Full Remarks as She Called Half of Trump Supporters ‘Deplorables.’” Los Angeles Times, September 10, 2016; Romney: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/18/mitt-romney/romney-says-47-per cent-americans-pay-no-income-tax/.

  32.Jones is quoted in Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind, 109; Tessa Stuart, “How ‘Lock Her Up!’ Became a Mainstream GOP Rallying Cry,” Rolling Stone, July 21, 2016.

  33.Stephanie Condon, “Obama Campaign Launches ‘Truth Team,’” CBS News, February 13, 2012.

  34.Katharine Q. Seelye, “Wilson Calls His Outburst ‘Spontaneous,’” NYT, September 10, 2009; Barney Henderson, David Lawler, and Louise Burke, “Donald Trump Attacks Alleged Russian Dossier as ‘Fake News’ and Slams Buzzfeed and CNN at Press Conference,” Telegraph, January 11, 2017.

  35.“Fact-Checking Trump’s Claim That Thousands in New Jersey Cheered When World Trade Center Tumbled,” PolitiFact, November 21, 2015.

  36.Eric Hananoki and Timothy Johnson, “Donald Trump Praises Leading Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones And His ‘Amazing’ Reputation,” Media Matters for America, December 2, 2015.

  37.Trump called for this ban on December 7, 2016 but after court challenges to his administration’s travel ban, the call was erased from his website. Laurel Raymond, “Trump, Who Campaigned on a Muslim Ban, Says to Stop Calling It a Muslim Ban,” Think-Progress, January 30, 2017, https://thinkprogress.org/trump-who-campaigned-on-a-muslim-ban-says-to-stop-calling-it-a-muslim-ban-630961d0fbcf/.

  38.David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018).

  39.Karen Breslau, “One Nation, Interconnected,” Wired, May 2000, 154.

  40.Broadly, see G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  41.Sam Reisman, “Trump Tells Crowd to ‘Knock the Crap Out’ of Protesters, Offers to Pay Legal Fees,” Mediaite, February 1, 2016. And see Louis Jacobson and Manuela Tobias, “Has Donald Trump Never ‘Promoted or Encouraged Violence’?,” PolitiFact, July 5, 2017.

  42.Isaacson, The Innovators, ch. 7.

  43.Stewart Brand, “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, March 1, 1995, 54.

  44.Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 216–18; Louis Rossetto, “Why Wired?,” Wired, March 1993. On Rossetto’s biography and politics, see Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 209–11; Owen Thomas, “‘The Ultimate Luxury Is Meaning and’ . . . Chocolate?,” Gawker, December 12, 2007. And see Mitchell Kapor, “Where Is the Digital Highway Really Heading?,” Wired, July & August 1993.

  45.Roger Parloff, “Newt Gingrich and His Sleazy Ways: A History Lesson,” Fortune, December 5, 2011; Esther Dyson, “Friend and Foe,” Wired, August 1995; Po Bronson, “George Gilder,” Wired, March 1996; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 208, 215, 222–24.

  46.Esther Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” The Progress & Freedom Foundation, August 22, 1994, http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html.

  47.Guy Lamolinara, “Wired for the Future: President Clinton Signs Telecom Act at LC,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin, February 19, 1996. And see Andy Greenberg, “It’s Been 20 Years Since John Perry Barlow Declared Cyberspace Independence,” Wired, June 3, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-been-20-years-since-this-man-declared-cyberspace-independence/.

  48.John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence.

  49.Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private v. Public Sector Myths (London: Anthem Press, 2013); A. B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 82, 118.

  50.David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus (Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 1995, 1998); Haynes Johnson, The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2001), 25; WorldWideWeb SLAC Home Page, December 24, 1993, https://swap.stanford.edu/19940102000000/http://slacvm.slac.stanford.edu/FIND/slac.html; George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 129–34.

  51.Johnson, Best of Times, 25, 57; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberspace, 214.

  52.Edmund Burke to Chevalier de Rivarol, June 1, 1791, in Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, ed. Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir Richard Bourke, KCB, 4 vols. (London, 1844), 3:211; Gazette of the United States, June 10, 1800.

  53.See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Essays on Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism, ed. Richard V. Clemence (1951; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989). Regarding the origins of innovation studies, see Benoît Godin, “‘Innovation Studies’: The Invention of a Specialty,” Minerva 50 (2012): 397–421, and especially Jan Fagerberg et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), introduction—note, in particular, figure 1.1 (a graph of scholarly articles with the word “innovation” in the title, 1955–2005); and Box 1.2 (on Schumpeter as the theorist of innovation).

  54.Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business (1997; New York: HarperBusiness, 2011). For an earlier usage, see Jean-Marie Dru, Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace (New York: Wiley, 1996).

  55.I discuss the shaky evidence for “disruptive innovation” in “The Disruption Machine,” TNY, June 23, 2014; a bibliography for that article can be found at https://scho lar.harvard.edu/files/jlepore/files/lepore_disruption_bibliography_6_16_14_0.pdf. On heedlessness, see, for example, Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (New York: Little, Brown, 2017).

  56.Franklin, “Apology for Printers.”


  57.Daly, Covering America, ch. 13.

  58.Quoted in Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 2.

  59.Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things, 6, 21. And see Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin Press, 2009).

  60.See, broadly, Hindman, Myth of Digital Democracy; Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Nathan Heller, “The Failure of Facebook Democracy,” TNY, November 18, 2016.

  61.George W. Bush, Address before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, Washington, DC, September 20, 2001; “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” March 2006, http://web.archive.org/web/20060517140100/www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/nss2006.pdf.

  62.Stephen E. Atkins, The 9/11 Encyclopedia: Second Edition (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2011), 741; The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Washington, DC: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 2004), ch. 2.

  63.Daniel Wirls, Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense from Reagan to Obama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 17.

  64.Wirls, Irrational Security, 134–35; Melvin A. Goodman, National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism (San Francisco: City Lights, 2013), 279, 327; Timothy Naftali, “George W. Bush and the ‘War on Terror,’” in Zelizer, The Presidency of George W. Bush, 59–87; George W. Bush, “Remarks at the Embassy of Afghanistan,” Washington, DC, September 10, 2002.

  65.Fredrik Logevall, “Anatomy of an Unnecessary War: The Iraq Invasion,” in Zelizer, The Presidency of George W. Bush, 88–113; Patrick J. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Presidency (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 6, 233.

  66.Pew Research, “The Military-Civilian Gap,” November 23, 2011, http://www.pew so cialtrends.org/2011/11/23/the-military-civilian-gap-fewer-family-connections/; Goodman, National Insecurity, 8–9, 30, 211.

 

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