Politics & Power Quote by Allan Sloan

Sloan isn’t offering civics; he’s offering survival advice dressed up as common sense, the kind that lands because it clashes with the story Americans like to tell themselves about innocence and cooperation. The line turns the Martha Stewart case into a parable about power: not whether she did the original thing (the trade), but what happens once the state is involved and language becomes the real crime scene.

The intent is bluntly practical: stop talking. But the subtext is sharper and more cynical: the government doesn’t need you to be guilty, it needs you to be narratable. Every sentence you volunteer is a possible inconsistency, a possible obstruction hook, a possible charge that’s easier to prove than the underlying misconduct. “Thinking person” is doing a lot of work here, framing silence not as evasive but as rational adult behavior in a system that rewards caution, not candor.

Context matters because the Stewart saga famously pivoted from a messy, hard-to-prove insider trading allegation to a clean, prosecutable story about lying to investigators. Sloan’s formulation captures the late-90s/early-2000s prosecutorial playbook: build leverage through process crimes, then punish the cover-up more than the act. It’s also a media critique in miniature. Stewart’s brand was control and perfection; the spectacle of her talking herself into trouble made a morality play irresistible.

The line stings because it implies a grim asymmetry: ordinary people are taught that cooperation proves innocence, while “thinking” people know the system treats cooperation as raw material.