Politics & Power Quote by Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson isn’t describing America so much as staging an ambush: take the country’s cherished self-image, spray it with gasoline, and toss a match. The “used car salesmen” jab is doing triple duty. It’s not merely anti-capitalist snark; it’s a diagnosis of a national performance style: hustle as identity, persuasion as default, sincerity as a sales tactic. The number “two hundred million” (era-specific population math) turns citizens into a single, multiplying archetype, implying the grift isn’t a fringe behavior but the operating system.

Then comes the pivot from commerce to violence: “all the money we need to buy guns.” Thompson links consumer abundance to militarized confidence, suggesting that wealth doesn’t just fund comfort; it lubricates coercion. The line’s most poisonous insight is that the threat isn’t scarcity or desperation, but surplus paired with entitlement. “No qualms” frames brutality as casual, even managerial. Killing becomes problem-solving.

The real target is the phrase “make us uncomfortable.” Not “attack us,” not “endanger us” - discomfort. Thompson is sketching an empire of thin skin, where inconvenience is treated as provocation and anxiety gets upgraded into justification. Written out of the post-Vietnam, late-Cold War mood that fed his gonzo pessimism, the quote plays like a premonition of endless interventions and culture-war paranoia: a nation that markets itself as freedom, but reacts to unease by reaching for the trigger. The brilliance is how quickly the sentence accelerates: from a smirk to an indictment, from a con to a war.