The New Year Quote by Peter King

King’s line is a piece of blunt political stagecraft: take a messy policy argument (what to do with Guantanamo detainees) and turn it into a culture-war morality play with clear heroes and villains. The intent isn’t to persuade on the legal or security details; it’s to force a binary. “The American people” becomes a single, righteous bloc, while the ACLU and the New York Times are cast as a separate species entirely - not just wrong, but contemptible.

The subtext is as important as the policy. By praising Senate Democrats for opposing transfers, King is signaling that on national security, the “reasonable” position is hardline and restrictive, and that deviation from it is elite decadence. The jab “where they belong” functions like a door slam: it’s not merely disagreement, it’s banishment from the national “we.” This is how rhetoric turns institutions of civil-liberties advocacy and journalism into moral outsiders rather than participants in democratic debate.

“Troglodytes” does double duty. It’s an insult, obviously, but it also flips a familiar accusation: instead of conservatives being backward, he labels liberal institutions as primitive, implying their values are not just misguided but evolutionarily out of date. In the post-9/11 context, when Guantanamo had become a symbol of both fear and legal controversy, that reversal is strategic. It reframes civil-liberties concerns as naive obstructionism and positions toughness as the only form of legitimacy. The line is designed to travel: quotable, polarizing, and loyal-audience affirming.