We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
There are people who are trying to advance themselves by wrapping themselves in Reagan. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
Reagan has very significant things to teach us – positive lessons and quite negative lessons. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
Ronald Reagan felt very great regret about the deficits to which he contributed on his watch. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
As I was growing up, you know, I’m a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother’s family had fled the czars of Russia before that. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
I don’t think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don’t think he’s primarily marvelous; he’s complicated. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early ’70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That’s what you’re up against. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
Ronald Reagan’s legacy is deeply misunderstood because there are political actors in America who, for several reasons, have privately held agendas that they want to sell to the American public in the most appealing way possible. They often find the best way to do that is to package their product with the Reagan brand. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
Reaganism as a political movement has enormous resources behind it and it seeks – through stagecraft and through a tremendous level of effort toward propaganda – to present an image of Reagan that is so much larger-than-life that it sort of blinds us all, and keeps us all in a warm, happy, nostalgic state, thinking of a man who can do no wrong. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
The prison industrial complex, to put it in its crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there’s what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It’s hard to shut off because politicians rely upon the steady flow of jobs to their district that the prison system and its related industries promise. Eugene Jarecki Read Quote
