“To emphasize how truly backward our society is...let's finish with a little quiz. Let's do it like Jeopardy.In 1990, this government required companies to give a new mother a year's leave at 90% pay.Answer: What was Sweden?This country provided nurseries for most children over eighteen months.Answer: What was Sweden?Nearly half of the children under three in this country were in publicly financed nurseries, and nearly 95% of children three to six were (and are).Answer: What is Denmark?In this country, 95% of children aged three to five are in preschool.Answer: What is France? This country provides care for one quarter of children under three in wholly or partially subsidized nurseries.Answer: What is France?In 1984, this country gave workers twelve weeks of maternity leave with pay.Answer: What is Brazil? (Yes, Brazil!)This country mandated eight weeks of maternity leave WITH PAY.Answer: What is Kenya? (You heard us, Kenya!)This country provided none of these things; instead, to help mothers and small children, its magazines featured profiles of rich celebrity moms who could show women how to do it all.Answer: What was the United States?”

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.”

“You have come to realize that you must leave it (the old country) and enter the new country, where your Beloved dwells. You know that what helped and guided you in the old country no longer works, but what else do you have to go by? You are being asked to trust that you will find what you need in the new country. That requires the death of what has become so precious to you: influence, success, yes, even affection and praise.”

“At the very same time that we witnessed the explosion of white celebrity moms, and the outpouring of advice to a surveillance of middle-class mothers, the welfare mother, trapped in a "cycle of dependency," became ubiquitous in our media landscape, and she came to represent everything wrong with America. She appeared not in the glossy pages of the women's magazines but rather as the subject of news stories about the "crisis" in the American family and the newly declared "war" on welfare mothers. Whatever ailed America--drugs, crime, loss of productivity--was supposedly her fault. She was portrayed as thumbing her nose at intensive mothering. Even worse, she was depicted as bringing her kids into the realm of market values, as putting a price on their heads, by allegedly calculating how much each additional child was worth and then getting pregnant to cash in on them. For middle-class white women in the media, by contrast, their kids were priceless, these media depictions reinforced the divisions between "us" (minivan moms) and "them" (welfare mothers, working-class mothers, teenage mothers), and did so especially along the lines of race. For example, one of the most common sentences used to characterize the welfare mother was, "Tanya, who has_____ children by ______ different men" (you fill in the blanks). Like zoo animals, their lives were reduced to the numbers of successful impregnations by multiple partners. So it's interesting to note that someone like Christie Brinkley, who has exactly the same reproductive MO, was never described this way. Just imagine reading a comparable sentence in Redbook. "Christie B., who has three children by three different men." But she does, you know.”

“That we need help is easy to see every time we walk down the street. The experts confirm what the obscured view in front of us tells us. They estimate that 64% of adults in the United States are obese and that this percentage is growing. Even our children are being affected, as nearly every one in three American children under the age of 18 is overweight.”

“Three or four countries do have state-sponsored hackers. I shouldn’t name these countries by name, but many of them are known to be hostile to the United States in other ways. Some of these same countries sponsor hackers in order to give us a little trouble.”

“Here's the progression. Feminism won; you can have it all; of course you want children; mothers are better at raising children than fathers; of course your children come first; of course you come last; today's children need constant attention, cultivation, and adoration, or they'll become failures and hate you forever; you don't want to fail at that; it's easier for mothers to abandon their work and their dreams than for fathers; you don't want it all anymore (which is good because you can't have it all); who cares about equality, you're too tired; and whoops--here we are in 1954.”