“The media” (or “mainstream media”): a meaningless phrase because there are countless very different media, which don’t act in concert.

“Gets it”: a social media phrase that is used to mean “agrees with me”.

Usually, though, people who claim to have been “cancelled” mean “criticised”, “convicted of sexual assault”, “replaced by somebody who isn’t an overt bigot” or simply “ignored”.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (the complete guide on how to write in just 13 pages). He lists other “worn-out and useless” words and phrases that were disappearing in his day: jackboot, Achilles heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno. The same fate later befell words overused in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: “heroes” (a euphemism for victims) and “greatest country on earth” (meaning largest military and GDP).

So you just go through the whole range of policy issues, and there's nothing so essential to the right wing tribe today that it wasn't at some point considered part of the left-wing tribe, and vice versa. Since what the left and right mean are always changing, you can't move towards something that's constantly evolving in its meaning.

Adolf Hitler was a socialist and he's considered extreme right-wing. George W. Bush was the most radical expansion government president in my lifetime, and he's considered right-wing.

There is certainly a tribe that calls itself right-wing, there's no question about that. And there's a tribe that calls itself left-wing, no question about that. But what these tribes stand for is constantly evolving. So why don't we just throw out the terms right-wing and left-wing, and say Republican and Democrat. That would clarify so much, and get rid of the illusion that there's some kind of philosophical core behind what each party believes because that's simply not true.

People say, "well, the one issue is change versus permanence. Liberals and progressives and the left, they like change. And conservatives like to preserve.” It's just simply not true. Who was it that wanted to change the Roe v Wade decision? Who is it that wants to change tax rates to make them lower? Who was it that wanted to change Europe to create a thousand-year German Reich?

a few years back, [social scientist] John Bargh at Yale said, I've got it. I figured out what it is that divides liberals and conservatives. All conservative positions are about fear. If you're afraid, you're a conservative. See, that's why conservatives went to the war in Iraq, they were so scared of terrorists. That's why they created the Department of Homeland Security, they were scared, they were afraid. And they would say, giving up a little bit of our freedom is a small price to pay for security because we're scared. Ha! Got it, says John Bargh, I figured it out. That's what a conservative is. A fraidy cat. Scared.

It's as if we went to the grocery store and they were sitting out in the front with two carts of groceries for us and said, what do you want, Cart A or Cart B? Now, you'd probably pick the cart that had more of the products you like, naturally. We all would. That's how it is when I go into the voting booth. I pick Republicans sometimes, pick Democrats other times. Sometimes I'm just trying to balance power between the two. But what I try not to do is to pick the cart of groceries, and then after the fact delude myself that all of these groceries are related, they all share an essential characteristic, and make up a fairy tale about how they all are essentially, philosophically bound. That's what our ideologues and pundits in America today are doing. They're inventing fairy tales after the fact to try to explain why all these unrelated positions are related when in fact they are not.

So let's say you are strongly in favor of tax cuts. I would seek out the strongest possible argument for tax increases and what those might be. Maybe that will persuade you, maybe it won't, but at the very least you'll open your mind up a little bit more.

What if we had someone who said, I believe in the minimum wage, but in order to make my research more careful, and to find my blind spots, I'm going to bring in somebody to help me design the study to set out the falsification parameters, and so forth, who is against the minimum wage. And then we're going to work together and we're going to establish ahead of time what it will look like and then we're going to conduct the research.

"Questioned about the 2005 'Access Hollywood' tape, he actually defended his comments about grabbing women by their genitals without consent," Cevallos wrote. He said the rich and famous have been able "to get away with" that behavior, unfortunately or fortunately. "What part of that was fortunate, exactly?" Cevallos asked. Both moments "featured prominently" in Kaplan’s closing arguments, and both were evidence "that didn't exist before Trump offered them up on a platter."

Then I imagined if one of those women sued Clooney, took him to trial, and Clooney had to get deposed. During his deposition he reaffirmed that for "millions of years" rich and famous people have been able to grab women by their genitals and "unfortunately or fortunately" that is how it works. I imagined Clooney mistaking the woman accusing him of sexual assault for his ex-wife. I imagined him, during the deposition, being asked if he cheated on his first wife and saying, "I don't know." I imagined if there were two women willing to testify against Clooney in a trial, under oath, that he sexually assaulted them.

He has claimed on social media he and Carroll don't know each other and have never met, despite photographic evidence of the opposite — nevermind the corroborating fact Trump and Carroll were running in the same circles in New York City in the 1990s and 1980s.