“The Puritans are conventionally considered more "moderate" than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans were no less mad... They forbade Church of England clergy from setting foot in their new… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“It’s telling that Americans know and celebrate Plymouth but Jamestown hardly at all. The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative new Americans who mattered were the idealists, the hyperreligious people seeking freedom to believe and act out their… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“Since the turn of the century, American fundamentalists had reveled in their sense of persecution by an infidel elite, but in the 1960s the… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise.” — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“But what other place on Earth has been more congenial to believers and promoters of mad dreams and schemes of so many kinds? California… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“The antisharia movement lobbied states to pass statutes and constitutional amendments banning the use of sharia in their courts and legal systems, a fantasy… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
I'm comparing Americans to international peers in terms of GDP, educational system - the sort of benchmarks we used to designate a so-called developed… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
TED was simply wonderful, an intellectual spa, a 21st-century Chataqua, superb and singular. — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press…did not foresee…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“EVEN PAUL GOODMAN, beloved by young leftists in the 1960s, was flabbergasted by his students in 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“Sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine instructed, basically, Don’t be stupid. “Shall we say, then,” he wrote about Genesis, “there was such a sense… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“After more than three decades and many hundreds of studies, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that GMO foods are safe to eat. The National… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“P. T. Barnum was the great early American merchandiser of exciting secular fantasies and half-truths. His extremely successful precircus career derived from and fed… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
I am proud to be American. We wouldn't have our big dreams without this quality, but if we can't agree on the shape of… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“In 1848 the Homeopathic Medical College was founded in Philadelphia, eventually becoming the Drexel University College of Medicine. Homeopathic M.D. degrees were issued by… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
