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• “Trump has those kind of voters. They are dedicated to him personally. They care more about him being happy than them being happy. They care more about him having what he wants than what they want. They will give their healthcare, they will let their daughters be destroyed, they will let their families be destroyed. There’s nothing he can’t do. He can drown them in Texas. He can take away their FEMA. He can do anything he wants to.” — Joy Reid

• “I would say the state of our democracy.” — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, when asked what keeps her up at night

• “What I find puzzling and interesting about NPR is the same thing, in miniature, that I find puzzling about liberalism in many contexts: the utter inability to impose limits on itself, even when the failure to do so is obviously self-destructive. If NPR had even pursued its ideological agenda merely to the 80% level, rather than essentially to a 100% level, it wouldn’t be in the position it is now. But they just couldn’t help themselves. It’s like a dictator who rigs the election at 100-0, rather than the far more plausible 75-25 or some such.” — Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule

• “There seems to be no real penalty for saying something that’s demonstrably false. It’s just ‘okay.’ No, it’s not. We have a trust deficit where because people don’t know if they can be sure somebody is telling the truth, why should I trust that person? So, we stopped trusting each other most of the time, and that’s dangerous also for our future.” — Former NIH Director Francis Collins

• “Most people voted the wrong way because they were uneducated.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “The reality is that we are going to continue to face emergencies, especially since as we just got done with the big, ugly bill, they are clawing back those things that would have hopefully started to cool this planet down, because they don’t believe in science. The least that they could do is believe in helping American people. Unfortunately, we continue to see Republicans decide that they want to bury their constituents instead of actually doing everything that they can to make sure that they live amazing and full lives.”— Also Jasmine Crockett

• “In free-speech societies there’s nothing that ‘must be said.’ As soon as an idea becomes mandatory (e.g. ‘diversity statements’), it’s wrong.” — Matt Taibbi

• “I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots. I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works.” — JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon

• “It might be hyperbolic for you as a white man. It’s certainly not hyperbolic for me as a Latino.” — CNN’s Ana Navarro, in response to conservative journalist Brad Polumbo saying it’s hyperbolic to call Trump’s second term a “reign of terror”

• “This is literally superpower suicide.” — Susan Rice, regarding 1,300 State Department employees being laid off

• “Looking at State Department documents, it appears the department went from 57,340 total employees in 2007 to 72,895 in 2015 to 80,214 in 2024. So it grew by nearly 23,000 employees before the ‘devastating’ cut of 1,300.” — Washington Examiner’s Byron York

• “For those of us there, it was such a horror, because you saw an emerging America. I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave. Not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you could — you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people. They were coming for us. If [Trump] didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us.” — CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane, speaking about the Butler rally

• “AC is quantifiably bad, but I think it’s also philosophically problematic. Cooling offers comfort, making the unbearable bearable, at least for now. That happens at a community level (no one is really disputing we should keep the very old, the very young and the vulnerable cool), but also individually. When you can buy a personal bubble of coolness and not truly feel the heat, the screaming urgency to tackle the collective issue of a world on fire can recede slightly.” — The Guardian’s Emma Beddington

• “People who feel bad for JD Vance’s kids as family gets booed at Disneyland. I get it, but better those kids know now what their father is about. Other kids are watching their parents get shipped off to gulags.” — Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones

• “I don’t want to hear anything ever in this country again about not being able to house people, no affordable housing. Because they put this thing up in eight days.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin, regarding Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” which is just a makeshift detention space featuring tents and trailers surrounded by razor wire

• “Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

• “The biggest scandal of the last 5 years isn’t that corporate media united to lie to the public about Biden’s cognitive decline, though that is a gigantic scandal. It’s that unelected people exploited it to run the country in secret in Biden’s name.” — Glenn Greenwald

• “For Trump, ‘evil’ is no longer a word reserved for terrorists or immigrants but for domestic political opponents and journalists. And in casting his adversaries as evil, he is seeding the ground for threats of prosecution, imprisonment and deportation.” — NYT’s Peter Baker

• “Republicans, they do not want us to succeed. And they were willing to bring the country down. I would say, we want President Trump to be successful. He’s not going to be, because he’s an idiot.” — Tim Walz

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The Atlantic: “The $30 Million Lottery Scam”

• The Atlantic: “Inside the Carjacking Crisis”

• Esquire: “Gone”

• Reuters: “The Body Trade”

• The New Atlantis: “Reality Is Just a Game Now”

• Bloomberg: “American Mid: Hampton Inn’s Good-Enough Formula for World Domination”

• Atavist: “Conversation With a Hit Man”

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• “Colorado grandfather detained by ICE while walking his dog.” — CBS News headline about an illegal immigrant with a rap sheet that includes over two dozen arrests for theft, assault and battery, damaging property, and shoplifting

• “Trump’s political magnetism, if you will, with his base is about being rich.” — MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace

• “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones

• “Fuck ICE and everyone who supports them. These thugs are America’s gestapo, our modern national shame, and must be stopped at every opportunity.” — Democratic Senator Megan Hunt

• “Doctors’ groups sue Kennedy over Covid shot changes for kids, pregnant people” — Politico headline1

• “The useful political lesson of the Mamdani-Columbia story is that racial self-identification can be more complicated than a lot of (White) people appreciate.” — Washington Post’s Philip Bump

• “In South Africa, where Zohran lived for a time while his father taught there, many Indian South Africans on the left identified as Black - a habit borne of the struggle against apartheid as a way to disavow the hierarchy of race it imposed. This discomfited Black Americans I met, it smacked of stolen valor. But it was instead a refusal of superior opportunities - education, housing, employment - offered to that racial group - Indians - deemed to be superior to Blacks. It was an act of solidarity.” — NYT’s Lydia Polgreen

• “Violence doesn’t come from Democrats, just to be clear. I mean, obviously anyone can be a criminal, but it is MAGA. It is specifically the MAGA faction.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “I think the nice part about being on the court is you have the opportunity, whether you’re in the majority or in the dissent, to express your opinions. I just feel that I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people, in my opinions, how I feel about the issues. And that’s what I try to do.” — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

• “The Trump regime is engaging in ethnic cleansing. We need to say it aloud.” — George Takei

• “I wanna see a few dead ICE agents Los Angeles! Don’t let me down.” — San Antonio City Council candidate Matthew Gauna

• “I tried to interview Joe Biden for my book on the 2024 election. I called his cell phone, and he agreed but cut it short as he boarded an Amtrak train. His aides then changed his number.” — NYT White House correspondent Tyler Pager

• “The Trump administration just dropped 8 immigrants — who they were previously holding in a shipping container in Djibouti — into war torn South Sudan. Cruel. Inhumane. There aren’t words to describe how disgusting this is.” — Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, regarding a group of illegal immigrants that includes multiple murderers and child sex offenders

• “May all visitors, children, non-MAGA voters and pets bet safe and dry. Kerr County (TX) MAGA voted to gut FEMA. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for. Bless their hearts.” — Houston pediatrician Dr. Christina Propst

• “I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for.” — Former CIA Director John Brennan

• “As marriage among people of child-bearing age has declined, the most common number of children born to an American woman aged twenty-five to forty-four is now zero (that is, more women have no children than have any other number).” — First Things’ Darel. E. Paul

• “I think it’s insane, honestly, to just assume we’re going to have normal elections next year. I don’t assume that.” — Joy Reid

• “The thing to understand is that district court judges have to follow the law and Supreme Court Justices get to just make up the law.” — MSNBC’s Chris Hayes

• “I’m going to be very honest and clear. I am fully preparing myself to die under this new American regime. That’s not to say that it’s the end of the world. It isn’t. But I am almost 50 years old. It will take so long to do anything with this mess that this is the new normal for *me*.” — UNC professor Tressie McMillan Cottom

• “Here’s the thing, they’re not going after criminals, they’re going after anybody that is brown, that looks like me, that can’t pass as what they say is the typical American.” — Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez

• “The secret to the Jake Tapper character is acting all shocked and surprised when he digs up a skeleton that he himself helped bury five or six years earlier.” — Walter Kirn

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• Texas Monthly: “The Informer”

• The Atlantic: “That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.”

• USA Today: “A jailbreak, a massive manhunt and a push to fix New Orleans’ broken lockup”

• Rolling Stone: “My Best Friend’s Murder Was a Tabloid Circus. Now, I’m Looking for the Truth.”

• Outside: “Dead Weight”

• The New Yorker: “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?”

• The New Yorker: “Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers?”

• Vanity Fair: “The Man in the Latex Suit”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “Very excited to potentially spend the rest of my life in a white supremacist garrison state.” — NYT’s Jamelle Bouie

• “When you tell a woman she must pretend a man is a woman, you’re asserting the right to control her speech and perception of reality, while also trivialising and devaluing her female-specific experience. You’re asking her to agree that ‘woman’ is a concept men can embody at will.” —J.K. Rowling

• “How was Joe Biden forced out of a presidential race for a disastrous debate and for looking frail and for confusing names, but this man, one of the most ignorant men to ever be elected to any office, allowed to continue on as president and treated as a normal, serious leader??” — Mehdi Hasan

• “If ‘death to the IDF’ is antisemitic, then ‘destroy ISIS’ is Islamophobic.” — The Guardian’s Ash Sarkar

• “The astounding ambit of Trump’s first months has made it possible to imagine a future that looks eerily like the past. An America where the Constitution still stands, but Black people and other marginalized groups receive virtually no protection from the federal government, and the actions of that government instead encourage discrimination. An America where Black people may nearly disappear, first from textbooks, curriculum and museums, and then from predominantly white institutions and entire professions, such as law, medicine and science, where they are already severely underrepresented.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones

• “The border is just one example of many ways in which this administration doesn’t care about the law anymore.” — Democratic Senator Chris Murphy

• “I’m a married polyamorous mom. The MAGA singles could learn from me.” — Washington Post headline

• “One of the defining features of totalitarianism was how its leaders made war on experts, like the Soviet bureaucrats who boosted Lysenkoism. Dictatorial regimes *hate* experts, because experts reach conclusions based on evidence, not political expediency.” — Tom Nichols

• “But this aggressive move to deport any brown or black person that this regime can get their hands on in order to meet Stephen Miller’s 3000-brown-person-a-day quota, they have a literal quota that ICE is required to meet, which is the reason why they are stopping and frisking brown—particularly brown people, but brown and black people anywhere they can get them.” — Joy Reid

• “‘Marginalized identities’ function as warrants to abandon any epistemic standards in progressive spaces. It’s how we saw medicine corrupted to the point where major medical associations all colluded in the lie that chemically castrating and dismembering confused teenagers was ‘medically necessary’ and ‘lifesaving care.’” — Wesley Yang

• “The word ‘socialism’ has been weaponized as Anti-American.” — Former Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman

• “What about any pregnant person who’s a non-citizen in any state anywhere?” — ABC’s Devin Dwyer

• “The racist attacks against Zohran Mamdani since his primary victory are nothing short of disgraceful. The Islamophobia from sitting members of Congress and administration officials is an insult to millions of Muslim Americans and will get someone killed.” — Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who apparently thinks Islam is a race

• “In this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse, where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good.” — The Guardian’s Eve Ensler

• “Our country needs to be sanctioned. We are the bad guys on the world stage. We are a menace to not only free people everywhere, but we are a menace to peaceful people everywhere at this point.” — Elie Mystal

• “Republicans have hijacked the free speech issue, but the only free speech conservatives actually believe in is the ‘freedom’ to shout racist and sexist crap online. That argument works on certain types of men—men who think using slurs makes them ‘edgy’ and counterculture. Men who get uncomfortable when they don’t know the right thing to say. Men who don’t know how to talk to women.” — Also Elie Mystal

• “You see, [Republicans] say they’re pro-life because they want the baby to be born, go to school and get shot in the school. Die in the school, die on the streets.” — Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost

• “Let us say the perspective of the straight white man is being dampened in the world of literary fiction. Should we care?” — NYT’s Marc Tracy

• “The current leader who best epitomizes the spirit of the Declaration of Independence is Volodymyr Zelenskyy.” — Bill Kristol

• “Sometimes you just gotta spike a story because there’s nothing there!

  That’s what editors are for!” — MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, regarding the NYT story about Zohran Mamdani identifying as “African American” on his college applications

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The New Yorker: “Hiroshima”

• Texas Monthly: “It Was Already One of Texas’s Strangest Cold Cases. Then a Secretive Figure Appeared.”

• The Atlantic: “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine”

• The Atlantic: “Columbia’s Last Flight”

• 1843: “‘Downton Abbey’ but with NDAs: how to be a butler to the super-rich”

• The Washington Post: “The Great Egg Heist”

• The New York Times: “Inside the Roosevelt, a Migrant Shelter No More, Echoes of a Crisis”

• The New York Times Magazine: “Democrats Denied This City Had a Gang Problem. The Truth Is Complicated.”

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• “If Trump, Vance, Miller, Homan, Noem, and McLaughlin had been around in 1939, they would have cackled gleefully and exchanged high-fives as the SS St. Louis and its 900 Jews were turned away from the Florida coast.” — Bill Kristol

• “Socialism is the suicide pact of mediocrity.” — Naval Ravikant

• “One of the hardest things to empathize with: genuinely ignorant westerners enjoying a quality of life the overwhelming majority of human beings of any place or time would give anything to experience glamorizing backwards politics and ideologies that would devour them if given half the chance.” — The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams

• “In the wake of last November’s election, many Democrats blamed low turnout for Kamala Harris’s defeat. It wasn’t entirely without reason, as turnout dropped in Democratic areas, but many months later it is clear the blame was misplaced. Newly available data, based on authoritative voter turnout records, suggests that if anything, President Trump would have done even better if everyone had voted.” — NYT’s Nate Cohn

• “Not for nothing, but I wanna know where all the cholos are at in Los Angeles. 18th Street Florence, where’s the leadership at? Because you guys are all about territory and this is 18th Street and this is Florence, you guys tag everything up claiming hood, and now that your hood is being invaded by the biggest gang there is, there ain’t a peep out of you. It’s everyone else who’s not about the gang life who’s out there protesting and speaking up. We’re out there fighting our turf, protecting our turf, protecting our people, and like where you at?” — Cynthia Gonzalez, vice mayor of Cudahy (a city in southeast LA County), calling on gang members to defend their territory from ICE1

• “Democrats wishing to lose the ‘26 midterms should promote a 33 year-old socialist devoid of executive experience for mayor of America’s largest city and impeach a president who ended a tyrannical regime’s nuclear threat while achieving a cease fire days later.” — Former Democratic congressman Dean Phillips

• “The reason why heart disease and cancer and obesity and diabetes are bigger in the black community is because of the stress we carry from having to deal with being called the N-word directly or indirectly every day.” — Ex-Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman

• “Like, you guys use this terminology. What is that? How do I communicate that to the public? What is the difference between supply and demand? I’m being serious y’all.” — Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, speaking to Jerome Powell

• “Racist fuck. Go back to 1930’s Germany.” — Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan, in a comment directed toward White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller

• “In the briefing, Hegseth referred to B-2 pilots as ‘our boys on those bombers,’ yet both men and women have trained to fly them.” — NYT’s John Ismay

• “Should We Hide Immigrants in Our Attics?” — Bulwark headline

• “I remember, Dana, one point being in Tehran years ago and they’re chanting ‘death to America’ all around me, even as I say, ‘oh, I’m an American, reporting for CNN.’ And they were happy to speak to me, so — so those two sort of jarring realities of the chant and yet, the — the friendliness have existed together.” — CNN’s Erin Burnett

• “In the case of Jasmine Crockett, a rational party facing actual fascism would say, who are our most effective voices? Who do the people listen to? Who do the people trust? Who do the people want to hear from? If it’s Jasmine Crockett, we don’t care who’s in line. She’s about to be the leader. We’re going to put her as the head of whatever this committee is, make her the head of oversight and put her on TV every day.” — Joy Reid

• “Much of the more than $35 billion [USAID] managed last year went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to communities in need overseas.” — A sentence snuck into a NYT article written by Christopher Flavelle, Nicholas Nehamas, and Julie Tate

• “I wonder how many people realize that America is now literally at war *solely* because Trump hates black people.” — Seth Abramson

• “We were talking about the trans issue before and The New York Times really has come over on that to the, sort of the sensible, liberal, not crazy woke position. I think this is a great first step toward getting the Democrats back to sanity, and a second good step would be we gotta do something about The View. I really believe that.” — Bill Maher

• “The ICE agents need to wear N95 masks and watch progressives not know how to handle it.” — Erick Erickson

• “A friendly reminder that people who like socialism are the same people who liked group projects in school.” — Carol Roth

• “I have serious questions about whether we even set back the Iranian nuclear program in any meaningful way, and whether now it’s going to go underground, where we’re in a much more dangerous environment with a covert nuclear weapons program.” — Democratic Rep. Eugene Vindman

• “Asking questions is literally our job. Demanding facts and answers — instead of just taking a president’s word for it.” — Jake Tapper

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• Vanity Fair: “Stealing Mona Lisa”

• The New York Times: “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way”

• Atavist: “The Trials of White Boy Rick”

• The New Yorker: “The Scheme That Broke the Texas Lottery”

• Esquire: “A Crushing Wave of Snow”

• Wired: “When a Houseplant Obsession Becomes a Nightmare”

• New York: “Crime of the Centuries”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “It was clear from the beginning which parts of the job Hegseth most enjoyed: working out, posting about working out, and discussing the imminent removal of trans servicemembers.” — New York’s Kerry Howley

• “Donald Trump is America’s Hitler.” — Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell

• “[Trump] can’t get the numbers he needs to sake his fans’ thirst for brown pain, without going to the states where most Latinos live.” — Joy Reid

• “Maybe if the right ever acknowledged right-wing political violence there would be less right-wing political violence.” — The Washington Post’s Philip Bump

• “Obvious point: Most of the undocumented immigrants who are being rounded up are better Americans, in the ways that matter, than Donald J. Trump.” — Bill Kristol

• “Look at Trump’s Truth Social post. Consider his call with Newsom. He is incoherent, insane. Failure of corporate press to say that every day as he is taking us down the road to a police state is the gravest journalistic malpractice in American history. They will never redeem themselves.” — Jen Rubin

• “Instead of protecting and defending the country, Trump has unleashed the military to terrorize Americans and march for his birthday. Congrats, Republicans. This is what you’ve enabled.” — Wajahat Ali

• “I’m just sort of surprised by the number of people who were at the front of the parade watching, cheering, and then would come and ask to take a selfie. This is a very different, this is a very different mood here. People seem to be going out of their way to say that they’re here to celebrate the Army’s 250th birthday.” — MSNBC’s Ali Velshi

• “To have democracy, a beacon of hope for the world to now be turned into one of the, you know, one of the worst countries where the military are in our streets without any regard for people’s constitutional rights, while our president’s spending millions of dollars prompting himself up like a failed dictator with a military parade, it is really shocking and it should be a wake-up call for all Americans to say this is not the country we were born and this is not the country we believe in.” — Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar

• “During the pandemic, we witnessed the birth of a new religion of contrarianism and conspiracy thinking—the first sacrament of which is to ‘do your own research.’ The problem is that very few people are qualified to do this research. And the result is a society driven by strongly-held, unfounded opinions on everything from vaccine safety to the war in Ukraine.” — Sam Harris

• “People have to just start thinking bigger in this country, and they have to look at what we’re up against. I’ve been sort of trying to shout this from the rooftops or wherever anybody will listen to me, the end of a bar in Kansas City, whatever: the president of the United States is a danger to this country. Full stop.” — Jim Acosta

• “No place on the planet has ever in history been better for white progressive women with bullshit college degrees than America in 2025, and there’s no place in time they hate more.” — Margot Cleveland

• “The humanities couldn’t compete with the Economics Department in promising Wall Street jobs, but they could claim to be ‘useful’ in other concrete ways post-graduation: namely, by giving you the ‘tools’ to be a Good Person with Correct Opinions. The ROI is moral social capital.” — Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper

• “Not if you’re black.” — The View’s Whoopi Goldberg, in response to Alyssa Farah saying “it’s very different to live in the United States in 2025 than it is to live in Iran in 2025”

• “To achieve his desired results, Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, used one of the oldest legal tricks in the white man’s book. He reanimated the should-be-dead idea that treating people ‘the same’ is the same as treating people ‘equally.’” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal, regarding United States v. Skrmetti and the Supreme Court upholding (6-3) a Tennessee law banning “gender affirming care” to minors

• “But, given that we are beset by a bigoted and discriminatory Supreme Court, the way forward, the only way forward, is to take out our frustrations on the elected officials who pass and support these bigoted laws.” — Also Elie Mystal

• “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” — Chase Strangio, the transgender ACLU attorney who argued before the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti

• “I honestly don’t care anymore if this country destroys itself and burns down to the ground. The current form of the United States is incompatible with democracy or human rights. It no longer has any legitimacy to govern and I’ll dance on its grave. Let something better rise from the ashes.” — Alejandro Caraballo, American civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic

• "We’ve got a mental health crisis in this country because everyone, no matter how you affiliate yourself, should be against Trump, period.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “MAGA celebrates the tools of mass shooters and assassins - assault rifles, machine guns, silencers and high capacity magazines. MAGA doesn’t treat firearms with respect - it celebrates their killing power.” — Democratic Senator Chris Murphy

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The New York Times: “They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.”

• Outside: “Snowbound”

• GQ: “Tent City, U.S.A.”

• Atavist: “Blood Cries Out”

• Rolling Stone: “The Death of a CrossFit Athlete”

• The New Yorker: “What’s Happening to Reading?”

• Harper’s: “Rotten Ice”

• The New York Times Magazine: “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost”

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Over the past week, I’ve enjoyed watching the nation be subjected to the perverse morality of a Left that, because of its near-theological commitment to illegal immigration and the idea that supporting and subsidizing vast cadres of third-worlders should take priority over the rights and prosperity of actual Americans, pushed our former puppet-in-chief to create a de facto open border and is now defending his administration’s cataclysmic handiwork to the last. Enjoyed it, because I’m sick and tired of watching progressives destroy the country, and I get the sense that the public is finally beginning to understand that is exactly what’s happening. Enjoyed it, because JD Vance is a shoo-in for the 2028 presidency.

This is quickly becoming a PR nightmare1 for Team Blue, which is very much on the wrong side of the public when it comes to support for deportations, but which has decided that, in response to 44 illegal aliens being picked up in the allegedly “mass” deportation raids in Los Angeles County — including criminals wanted for second-degree murder, assault with the intent to commit rape, assault with a deadly weapon, sexual battery, grand theft larceny, illegal weapon possession, and drug trafficking — American cities should experience another “summer of love.”

It’s remarkable, really. Neither Democratic politicians, nor the leading figures within California’s state government, nor the mainstream press seem to understand how damning the optics are, and how the “unrest” only reinforces a connection many Americans have already made between left-wing causes and the violence too often carried out in the name of Progress™. They seem to be as equally ignorant of how their reaction to the mayhem — a transparent ploy to paper over undeniable left-wing radicalism by sensationalizing the Trump administration’s deportation efforts — is going to be received by a public that has access to the internet and is now keenly aware of how often Democrats and the media rally together to orchestrate elaborate gaslighting operations.

CNN, which infamously described the George Floyd riots as “mostly peaceful” in 2020, describes the recent rioting in L.A. as “lawful protests” with “some unrest.” Brian Stelter is using his perch to emphasize that “Offline, in real-world Los Angeles, most Angelenos are having a perfectly normal day,”2 and the “protests” are simply “a cry of hope, and a reminder of the human need for community, the need to turn to each other to find something to believe in.” ABC News says it’s “just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn.” Robert Reich, writing in The Guardian, warns that “We are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state.” The Atlantic has published yet another article comparing Trump to Hitler, who was also “a master of manufacturing public-security crises to advance his authoritarian agenda.”3 The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump writes that Trump is sending troops to L.A. because “He couldn’t figure out how to rationalize sending them to Harvard.” According to the NYT editorial board, “Trump Calling Troops Into Los Angeles Is the Real Emergency.” And The New Yorker put out this cartoon yesterday:

Does this look like a “joyful synchronized dance”?

How about this?

Yup, everything is just hunky-dory.

Democratic Rep. Linda Sánchez wants you to know that the riots are “no different than when a team wins a national championship and people get overexcited.”4 Maxine Waters is imploring the public to understand that “There was no violence!“ Gavin Newsom seems to be spending most of his time on X, “posting through it,” as they say, pissed off that Los Angeles is being forced to “respond to protests provoked by chaos from Washington,” which is “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism that threatens the foundation of our republic.”5 Hillary Clinton seconded this line, calling the riots “peaceful demonstrations” and explaining to her 30.5 million followers that “Trump’s goal isn’t to keep Californians safe. His goal is to cause chaos, because chaos is good for Trump.” And then there’s LA Mayor Karen Bass, a veritable paragon of competence, telling CNN that “if you dial back time and go to Friday, if immigration raids had not happened here, we would not have the disorder that went on last night.”

So, in other words, if the federal government hadn’t been trying to enforce federal law, then the idiots who are opposed to the federal government enforcing federal law wouldn’t have started riots to prevent the federal government from enforcing federal law? “If you don’t want mobs burning down American cities, Trump shouldn’t have tried to enforce the law, so this is his fault.”

Spare me. If people are here illegally, then they’re liable to be deported. If you disagree, then you fundamentally disagree with American law. And I have no patience for anyone who argues that some laws aren’t important while other ones are.

The causal sleight-of-hand — insinuating that the whole affair has been contrived by the Trump administration as a pretext for the establishment of a dictatorship — is the actual approved Democratic Party leadership position right now despite how laughable it is to suggest that Trump is the one who “provoked” the riots. The real tinder has been accumulating for months: Democratic politicians’ maximalist rhetoric encouraging Lefties to take more radical stands in opposition to ICE.

Is it any surprise that progressive shock troops are ratcheting up the rhetoric to a boiling point, feeding off the energy of collective grievance?

Leftists are acting like it’s some cosmic mystery as to why ICE was operating in California at all. Perhaps it has something to do with the state leading the country in its contempt for our immigration laws. As the Center for Immigration Studies highlighted, from October 1, 2022, to February 6, 2025, California’s jails and prisons refused to allow ICE agents to take custody of 13,025 illegal immigrant criminals. That number represents more than half of all such refusals nationwide. By comparison, Illinois was a distant second, with 2,946 refusals, and New York, with 873 refusals, was sixth. Jails controlled by the Los Angeles Police Department and by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department released 1,037 illegal-alien criminals over that period.

It’s not just that California’s welfare subsidies for illegals and its sanctuary policies have made it the preferred destination for border-crossing migrants. The state quite literally operates under the premise that ICE enforcement efforts are illegitimate,6 and because they’re illegitimate, radical “resistance” to those efforts is necessary.

The problem is that this deranged belief has become a central tenet of the modern Left’s ideology. It’s not just a California thing anymore.

The twofold takeaway to the events of the past week seems implicit: 1) Democrats are eagerly moving the country toward a prolonged state of civil conflict in which basic peace, public order, and safety are contingent upon Team Blue maintaining power (“Vote Democrat or get the molotov!”); and 2) when Democrats are in power, you can fully expect them to flood the country with illegal immigrants, and when they’re not in power, you can fully expect the Left to use violence in response to every minor Republican attempt to correct their suicidal policies.

Obviously none of this bodes well for the future. I think it’s a mistake to continue dismissing these radicals as mostly harmless, cause-playing morons who simply operate like nihilistic weathervanes bereft of principles twisting in the variable wind, eager to indulge in the frisson of riots. At a certain point, the line between playacting and true belief in this sort of fully immersive “omnicause'“ radicalism fades away after one has spent enough time steeped in it. And it’s now beyond argument that a growing number of progressives are discarding conventional notions of right and wrong in favor of an intersectional worldview that legitimizes terrorism committed out of performative empathy for the “oppressed.” This, combined with an increasingly militant culture of grievance, is normalizing the idea that political violence is an acceptable tool of social change. Mimetic escalation will be forthcoming.

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• “The blood of the Boulder Terror Attack is on Trump’s hands. It’s his fault because the Trump’s ‘illegal alien’ stunts aren’t about preventing crime - it’s about satiating MAGA sadism.” — Keith Olbermann

• “Trump orders investigation of Joe Biden’s alleged ‘cognitive decline’ and use of autopen” — USA Today headline

• “If your dog barks on a daily basis it should be taken away from you permanently.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “There are mass murderers in the world—Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don’t have anyone on the list from America. And I don’t think it’s the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away [USAID] and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of, probably by the end of this, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, that’s Elon Musk’s legacy.” — NYT’s David Brooks

• “[Musk] failed not because his ambitions were too grand, but because they were so pathetically small.” — The Washington Post’s Mat Bai

• “If Joe Biden was like mentally deficient in some way and he was still able to keep this sucker on the tracks, then give me a mentally deficient Joe Biden any given day over Donald Trump.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “So, why not muddy the waters if we can hopefully keep a strong black woman down?” — Also Jasmine Crockett, regarding scrutiny of the Biden administration’s $2B green energy grant to a fledgling Stacey Abrams nonprofit

• “I understand that many people on the left think that associating Trump with conservative views is a shortcut to delegitimizing everything about conservatism, but Trump is no conservative; the MAGA movement is Big Government, Nanny Statism for white people.” — The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols

• “This is a gangster state. And I just hope people begin to understand this is not basically a legitimate government that is sometimes doing corrupt things, this is an essentially corrupt enterprise. It’s like watching the Sopranos. Every day they get up and they try to figure out how to plunder and pillage the people.” — Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin

• “You can see that I’m mentally incompetent, I can’t walk, and I can beat the hell out of both of ‘em.” — Joe Biden, in reference to CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, authors of Original Sin

• “I know the [NYPD’s] feelings on the gang database and how they feel it can be improved. Again, I’m just always gonna stand on the side of things cannot be fixed when it already comes with a broken system. A broken clock can be right twice a day, and things like that just have to go because it stems from racism.” — New York City Councilwoman Althea Steven

• “The rise of anti-Semitism in the last decade can be correlated with the rise of Donald Trump.” — CNN’s Maria Cardona

• “The Trump administration’s framing of Black history as ‘D.E.I.’ and ‘D.E.I.’ as harming white Americans - recasts its attack on Black history as protecting white Americans. As administering justice. Which is the justification of nearly every Klan and racist mob attack in history.” — Ibram X. Kendi

• “A very odd part of the Biden legacy: Elevating black women as the first to be VP and WH press secretary, then making it known to everybody that they were disasters.” — Semafor’s David Weigel

• “You know what I think? I think it’s a waste of money. Maybe these guys should spend their money on teaching men to not be such sexists.” — The View’s Joy Behar, regarding the Democrats spending $20 million to study American men

• “Asking straight white people to acknowledge that they’ve had every advantage this world has to offer is not something we are allowed to do in this country. Instead, we live in a world where every time a white person doesn’t get something they think they’re entitled to, we’re supposed to assume they’ve been treated unfairly.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “Radical Supreme Court rules 9-0 that anti-discrimination laws make discrimination illegal even if progressives dislike the people being discriminated against.” — Charles Cooke

• “Who is actually making the decisions? Who is actually running the country? Everybody wants to say Joe Biden wasn’t running the country. I know for a fact he not only read his presidential daily briefing, he was engaged in the meeting. He asked questions and he gave directives.” — MSNBC’s Symone Sanders

• “The Colorado Civil Rights Commission will be having a heated debate about whether throwing Molotov cocktails at Jews rises to the level of declining to bake a cake.” — National Review’s Dominic Pino

• “American Jews Are Paying for the War in Gaza” — NYT headline1

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• GQ: “The Longest Night”

• The New Yorker: “Atchafalaya”

• ProPublica: “The Tech Recruitment Ruse That Has Avoided Trump’s Crackdown on Immigration”

• The Atlantic: “That Day at Hiroshima”

• Vanity Fair: “A Case So Cold It Was Blue”

• The American Scholar: “The Last Island of the Savages”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “More counties with a majority of Black voters shifted toward the Republicans in each of the last three elections (58) than the total number of counties nationwide that trended toward Democrats (57). Democrats increased their share of the vote in all three elections in only two majority-Black counties in the entire country, Rockdale and Douglas, both outside Atlanta in Georgia, a hotly contested battleground state.” — NYT’s Shane Goldmacher

• “Of the 67 counties in America with a majority Hispanic population, 66 voted more Republican in 2024 than in 2012. Even more arresting is that the average swing toward the G.O.P. in those 66 Hispanic-majority counties was 23 percentage points — a political earthquake with which both parties are still coming to terms.” — Also Shane Goldmacher

• “The press has decided to spend a couple months on what I’d call ‘circular self-rehabilitation through self-criticism.’ It’s a modified log-rolling technique with fake confession & interrogation elements which will end w/ a Declaration of Purification & a round of self-applause.” — Walker Kirn

• “Texans, flee the nanny state and come up north to enjoy the land of the free.” — Tim Walz

• “There is an extraordinary ‘reproducibility crisis’ in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate. Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption. The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea. And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country. Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform. Or, they could yell ‘fascism’ at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.” — JD Vance

• “If Trump doesn’t comply, we’re in second amendment territory.” — Michael Mann, a climate professor and senior administrator at the University of Pennsylvania

• “The U.S. isn’t a nation and never has been, so we can cross that off the list. Immigrants assimilate just fine into our culture, better than in the past, so we’re fine there too. Free movement is consistent with ordered liberty, closed borders inconsistent with it.” — Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh

• “You know why I’m not a progressive anymore? Because I spent years hearing misgendering a nonbinary person was violence, but somehow the assassination of two civilians by Free Palestine is mostly a problem because of the optics.” — Brianna Wu

• “You would be hard pressed to find someone in the Trump administration that is actually qualified.” — Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

• “Tumulty took an incident where I felt ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity. She either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was Black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid.” — MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart, regarding his resignation from The Washington Post editorial board after another editor in the section, Karen Tumulty, said it was hyperbolic to call Georgia’s voting laws “Jim Crow 2.0”

• “The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.” — The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer

• “It is time for Republicans to start calling [Trump] out and start questioning his mental acuity and whether or not he is equipped to serve mentally.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “I believe that ICE, an agency that was just formed in 2003 during the Patriot Act era, is a rogue agency that should not exist.” — AOC

• “How To Deal With Your MAGA Relatives Without Ruining Relationships, According To Cult Experts” — Huffington Post headline

• “I went on a left-leaning podcast that shall remain nameless. And we were talking about my kids because I think they were both people without kids. And they asked me about my son and I said he was, you know, he’s a football player and he wants to be a policeman. And their joke was about my 15 year old son, ‘Oh, how does he feel about minorities?’ Like the idea that he wants to be a policeman, therefore he’s racist, my son. And like, you know, that was the big laugh. And then I got dragged in the comments and all that stuff and I thought to myself, this is why you fuckers are losing elections.” — Jake Tapper

• “Women’s reproductive health is about our life. It’s about this whole complicated reproductive system, that the least of what it does is produce life.” — Michelle Obama

• “Kamala Harris did connect with people culturally. There was the ‘Brat Summer!’ There were all these people putting up coconut memes!” — Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna

• “I do worry, frankly, about what’s happening right now in the world. I do worry that it is important that we remember history. It’s important that we remember the 1930s. It’s important that we remember that history has taught us that isolation does not equal insulation. It is important that we understand and remember history, which taught us the interdependence and interconnection between nations. History that has taught us the importance of relationships of trust, of the importance of friendships, integrity, honesty.” — Kamala Harris

• “How is this different from when Putin grabs a journalist or some rogue group in the Middle East grabs an American, and we’re sitting here fighting to try to get them back. Our own government snatched him up and put him in harm’s way, and now refuses to do what it must to get him back home.” — MSNBC’s Michael Steele, regarding the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who, in addition to being an illegal immigrant with a track record of domestic violence, was very probably a member of MS-13

• “A lot of Americans agree with Trump: higher ed needs a kick in the rear end. Those with high confidence in higher ed has collapsed: 57% in 2015 to 36% now. 68% (!) say higher ed is on the wrong track. Also, a plurality of Americans & the GOP agree: colleges have a liberal bias.” — CNN data guru Harry Enten

• “‘You don’t have enough respect for the sanctity of 9/11’ is such a ridiculously out of touch and frankly boomer ass take in 2025. 9/11 has been a punchline for over a decade, ppl are having 9/11 themed parties and there are 9/11 parody t shirts and memes all over.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “Pete [Buttigieg] saying he would have ‘opened the schools sooner’ in 2020 aka killing MORE vulnerable ppl faster, sacrificing teachers and educators (and kids!) lives to force them back into unventilated buildings w no protections. Disgusting how Dems have fully embraced far right eugenics.” — Also Taylor Lorenz

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The New York Times: “How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape”

• Vanity Fair: “Murder at Sutton Place”

• Outside: “Open Your Mouth and You’re Dead”

• The New Yorker: “Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?”

• The Cut: “‘It’s, Like, This Little Cult of Being Skinny’: In Liv Schmidt’s subscriber-only group, members encourage one another to eat as little as possible.”

• New York: “13,000 Pounds at 118 Miles Per Hour”

• The Atlantic: “Unraveling the Secrets of the Inca Empire”

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• “All of the Zoomers that work for me are bisexual, and all of them have long covid. I’ll believe long covid is real when someone who is not bisexual has it.” — Sean McElwee, a Democratic policy advisor and data scientist

• “And then they rigged the election. And then I said, ‘You know what I’ll do? I’ll run again, and I’ll shove it up their ass.’ And that’s what I did.” — Donald Trump

• “Brutal new data for Democrats on the demographic shifts in the 2024 election. They lost ground — or failed to improve — with every cohort and sub-cohort. With the exception of a 1-point gain among married white women.” — NBC News senior political reporter Sahil Kapur, regarding The Cook Political Report’s “Comprehensive New Data Analysis Into Why Harris Lost in 2024”

• “There are people who knew [about Biden] and said nothing, and that is a crime against this Republic. And I think the Democrats are going to pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up.” — CNN’s Van Jones

• “Thing that this election has proven, that this administration has proven, painfully in some ways, is that black people cannot save this country from white folks. We can’t do it alone.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “The only way for Dems to fight this is to draw up a list right now of GOP lawmakers they plan to prosecute if they get back into office in 2028.” — Mehdi Hasan

• “Why Does It Matter Whether Covid Came Out of a Lab?” — NYT headline1

• “How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden’s Infirmity?” — Another NYT headline

• “Yes, the media’s Biden coverage was flawed. But its reporting on Trump was far worse” — Guardian headline

• “Hopefully he rots in hell and rests in piss.” — Taylor Lorenz, in response to news about Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis

• “If ur not masking rn during an ongoing pandemic you believe this eugenic ideology btw, whether you want to admit it or not. If ur not masking you’re ok with infecting and killing/disabling those around u by spewing Covid all over, so mask tf up and don’t talk abt eugenics if ur contributing to it.” — Also Taylor Lorenz

• “I think if the election were held next Tuesday, or tomorrow, we would win back the House.” — Hillary Clinton

• “Well, first of all, don’t be a handmaiden to the patriarchy, which kind of eliminates every woman on the other side of the aisle, except for very few.” — Also Hillary Clinton, when asked what advice she’d give the first female president of the United States

• “Essentially, they’re mad at me for proving that democracy can deliver.” — Stacey Abrams, regarding the outrage over her climate change nonprofit receiving $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers despite not accomplishing anything

• “Extremely easy test to see if someone is dishonest or stupid: see if they think James Comey did something dangerous or threatening when he posted a photo of seashells.” — The Washington Post’s Philip Bump

• “It was pretty likely Biden was going to die if he won a second term, which is something no one wanted to talk about publicly because the Democratic Party is full of children who think bringing up sad things in life is rude and icky.” — Matthew Stoller

• “Why attack universities? Why attack journalism? Because ignorance works for power. First, make the truth-seekers live in fear. Power can rewrite history with grotesque false narratives. They can make criminals heroes and heroes criminals. Power can change the definition of the words we use to describe reality. ‘Diversity’ is now described as ‘illegal.’ ‘Equity’ is to be shunned. ‘Inclusion’ is a dirty word.” — Scott Pelley, principal correspondent for 60 Minutes, in a commencement address at Wake Forest University

• “Alex and I are here to say the conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media to begin with, all of us, for how this was covered or not covered sufficiently 100 percent.” — Jake Tapper

• “The only way out is to face the truth. The president was not fine, was not even within shouting distance of fine — and until we examine our own failure to report that fact, neither are we.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “Democrats always think everything is a messaging problem, which is a low-key way of saying you’re correct and infallible. In reality, Dems have massive cultural and policy problems they cannot fix by just by finding a new messenger.” — Mark Hemingway, regarding Democratic mega-donors debating plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on a range of influencer plans to “find the liberal Joe Rogan”

• “One of the lines in ‘Original Sin’: ‘Five people were running the country, and Biden was at best a senior member of the board.’ For a good example, see the attempted student-loan theft. People around Biden used his infirmity to try to steal money to pay off their loans. Corruption.” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The Atlantic: “An Autopsy Report on Biden’s In-Office Decline”

• The Atlantic: “On 9/11, Luck Meant Everything”

• Wired: “3 Teens Almost Got Away With Murder. Then Police Found Their Google Searches”

• New York: “How One Woman Lost $75,000 to an MLM”

• Texas Monthly: “Still Life”

• Vanity Fair: “How a Ragtag Gang of Retirees Pulled Off the Biggest Jewel Heist in British History”

• The New Yorker: “Looking for Life on a Flat Earth”

• Outside: “The Killer in the Pool”

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The big story this week was Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, with various reputable doctors pointing out how unlikely it is that the cancer was discovered last week—all but confirming that yes, our now former president was indeed being used as a stalking horse to get Kamala Harris her first term without the inconvenience of having to win an election.

But over on Bluesky, the progressive forward operating base that has long since become a self-congratulatory reality denial echo chamber, the big story has been…ICE.

Note well, however, that this sort of unhinged rhetoric is hardly unique to the Blue asylum. Just the other day, speaking at the University of Minnesota Law School graduation, Tim Walz referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.” Various other Democratic politicians, talking heads, and resistance “journalists” are doing their part to whip up a psychotic level of animus for ICE, encouraging Americans to undermine deportation operations by analogizing such efforts to antebellum resistors of the Federal Slave Act. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel made this point explicitly following the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan. It compared Dugan’s decision to help an illegal immigrant (facing three charges of domestic battery) escape arrest to the abolitionist crowd that saved an escaped slave living in Racine, Wisconsin, from federal marshals seeking to return him to bondage.

As if fugitive slaves or their forebears came here of their own volition to get better jobs than the ones they had in their native lands. Illegally entering the United States to earn more money in better conditions than back home obviously bears no relation to the transatlantic slave trade or chattel slavery. But the comparison speaks of the worldview that informs progressive support for open-border policies: slaves had a moral right to be free, so illegal aliens have a moral right to be in the United States. We have no business excluding unfortunates. Don’t you know about the Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty, you xenophobic bigot?

The modern Left is essentially built on the premise that Westerners and Americans (read: white people) must always prioritize non-Westerners and non-Americans. This telescopic, cost-free concern for the downtrodden, especially racial minorities, is intrinsic to performative antiracism, a bizarro noblesse oblige used to signal identitarian enlightenment. Just as casual anti-white racism is a core part of the radical chic jargon fashion sense of contemporary Democrats, so too is the need to sacralize minorities.

Unbounded kindness toward the marginalized necessitates hostility toward their supposed oppressors—and because excess of zeal in progressive lala land is widely seen as a badge of merit and token of sincerity, hostility often gives way to extremism.

Never mind that an overwhelming majority of the voting public wants a secure border and supports mass deportations. Never mind that the annual cost of the crisis ushered in by the Biden administration is $150.7 billion and will easily exceed $1 trillion in our lifetime,1 or that illegal immigrants have accounted for nearly 60% of the increase in sheltered homelessness over the past two years, or that the influx of illegals during a period of intense economic stagnation has crushed wages for native-born workers, particularly in industries like construction and agriculture.

The people with “All Are Welcome” yard signs have no qualms about imposing onto others the consequences of their pious virtue signaling. Over and over and over again we’ve seen how our noble betters support absurd policies with all sorts of major negative externalities, only changing their minds when they personally pay a price. Progressives in general think “I’m totally fine, it doesn’t bother me” is a genius, irrefutable heuristic that signals their moral superiority and capacity for tolerance when what it’s really indicative of is terminal narcissism, self-involvement, and an incapacity to consider the needs of others. It’s easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded you are when it costs you nothing.

The Left’s near-theological commitment to illegal immigration and open borders isn’t going to wane any time soon.

This is a moral issue that’s central to who they are and what they believe in, and their stance is entirely predicated on a pathetic desire for hollow, confected drama that allows them to cultivate a sense of sophisticated preeminence and exclusivity by play-acting as righteous heroes standing against tyranny, all in compensation for the utter lack of meaning and purpose in their ordinary lives.

But these media mind-whipped morons and their over-the-top displays of effrontery and indignation at the very suggestion that we enforce our immigration laws puts them on the wrong side of the public. The idea that it’s inherently xenophobic to have anything but an open border is ridiculous. America is the least xenophobic nation on the planet. Every year since the millennium, between 703,000, and 1.2 million immigrants have been granted legal permanent residence here. No other country comes close to welcoming this many legal immigrants annually. The United States now has roughly 50 million immigrants, or foreign-born residents (legal and illegal). The next-highest is Germany at about 15 million. In other words, we’ve welcomed 35 million more people from other countries than any other country on Earth.

The bottom line is that the American public didn’t sign on for a policy that would welcome and care for anybody and everybody, regardless of circumstance and without background checks. We have limited resources, and we have the right — and obligation — to prioritize our own people and preserve the dignity of our own citizenship.

It’s time we start doing so.

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• “Gender-affirming care is a common thing that is done in society. For example, men that chew gum to help strengthen their jawline, that take low-T enhancements and testosterone, that do Rogaine or anything like that. That is something we would consider gender-affirming care.” — Democratic Rep. Ann Johnson

• “Can I Wear a Sheath Dress Without Looking Like a MAGA Woman?” — NYT headline

• “It is this fear that the people within the party, within the primary system, will have about voting for a woman because every time we’ve voted for a woman we’ve lost so far. And I think that’s a natural fear because we just want to win. So, there’s a lot of people that are like, ‘You know what, let’s go find the safest white boy we can find.’” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “Anybody who did they research voted the right way. The people that had the information, they voted the right way. These are facts. The more educated voters and the voters that went to the legacy media, frankly, they voted the right way.” — Also Jasmine Crockett

• “Bluesky honestly feels like a miracle where you take the most annoying people in the world and stick them in a broken elevator together.” — Nate Silver

• “I’ll tell ya a story. A friend of mine who’s a businessman, very, very, very top guy. Most of you would have heard of him. Highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug.” — Donald Trump

• “The President, in my view, has not hidden his racism behind a bushel. In fact, you know in his policies, whether it’s removing government workers or in this case admitting white South Africans while denying refugee status to asylum seekers from other countries, principally Central and South American and black nations to come into this country. And so, I think that this policy, while it’s not surprising in this action, really speaks to the underlying message in this administration that disrespects and shows disdains for people of color while embracing these Afrikaners.” — MSNBC’s Donna Edwards, regarding the 49 white South Africans granted refugee status by the Trump administration

• “The richest, most privileged people on the planet are drawn to any cause that makes them if not the oppressed at least proximate enough to slake the thirst of their oppression envy in a milieu that recognizes oppression as the only form of virtue.” — Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon

• “I feel like all of Montana is in the man-o-sphere.” — MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace

• “Men should not play sports against women. If anybody thinks that, I think they’re stupid.” — NBA on TNT co-host Charles Barkley

• “Team Biden would be better off taking the L and waiting a few years until the halo of nostalgia effects the partial reputational rehabilitation enjoyed by Nixon and George W. Bush.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “The directive underscores how Mr. Trump’s crusade to stamp out D.E.I. — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — is now focused not just on targeting programs and policies that may assist historically marginalized groups, but also on the very law created to protect them.” — NYT’s Erica Green, regarding Trump signing the “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” executive order

• “At a pace of one new building permit every two weeks, Los Angeles County will issue 26 rebuild permits per year, and have Pacific Palisades and Altadena rebuilt within 461 years. Mark your calendars for the final ribbon-cutting ceremonies for the spring of the year 2486.” — National Review’s Jim Geraghty

• “I believe there’s no guarantee that we are gonna have a free and fair election in 2026. I think [Trump is] trying to rig our democracy, to destroy dissent, to cripple the political opposition, so that even if his approval ratings are in the 30s in the fall of next year, there isn’t the ability for his opposition to muster a real campaign.” — Democratic Senator Chris Murphy

• “The regime is arresting mayors and judges for opposing their gross mass detention policies. That’s defcon one for democracy.” — Joy Reid

• “Earlier this semester, an NYU professor told me how he had Al-proofed his assignments, only to have the students complain that the work was too hard. When he told them those were standard assignments, just worded so current Al would fail to answer them, they said he was interfering with their ‘learning styles.’ A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due. Another said, about work on a problem set, ‘You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?’ And another, when asked about their largely Al-written work, replied, ‘Everyone is doing it.’” — Clay Shirky, the Vice Provost of Educational Technologies of New York University

• “Says something about the priorities of university admins that they mobilized to rapidly enact sweeping institutional changes during the COVID crisis (because it threatened The Money) but not AI, the gravest danger to higher ed in modern history, which merely threatens learning.” — The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper

• “We’re here to say that there’s no more waiting, no more watering down, no more putting justice on layaway. Black folks are owed more than thoughts and prayers. We’re owed repair, we’re owed restitution, and we’re owed justice.” — Democratic Rep. Summer Lee, speaking Thursday as part of a coalition of Democratic lawmakers and advocates that reintroduced a resolution to offer reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans and people of African descent

• “Watching Jake Tapper pompously prance around as if he uncovered a grand WH deceit to hide Biden’s cognitive decline would be like Nancy Pelosi writing a book denouncing members of Congress who profit off the stock market while in office.” — Glenn Greenwald

• “This man was head of the whole FBI and fancied himself Law itself just as Fauci thought he was Science. And y’all wonder why voters think sanctioned elites are personality-disordered trash and don’t accept their credentials anymore. It’s bc they’re personality-disordered trash.” — Mary Katharine Ham, regarding former FBI Director James Comey posting a vacation photo of shells arranged on a beach to spell out “8647,” which is widely understood to mean “kill Trump”

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• Vanity Fair: “Anatomy of a Miracle”

• GQ: “Hunting the Elusive Rhino-Horn Cartel of Thailand”

• The New York Times: “The Unabomber’s Brother Turned Him In. Then Spent 27 Years Trying to Win Him Back.”

• Atavist: “All That Glitters”

• Rolling Stone: “‘It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl”

• The New Yorker: “How a Frenchman Stole Two Billion Dollars Worth of Art”

• The New Yorker: “The Reckoning”

• Esquire: “The String Theory”

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Excerpts and bits from Original Sin, an anecdote-filled journalistic tome written by Jake Tapper (CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios) on “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” are making the rounds as the two authors conduct a promotional tour before its May 20th release. Some of the more noteworthy examples I’ve come across include:

• One senior aide, who quit the White House because they did not think Biden should run, admitted to the authors that “we attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.”

• Biden struggled to remember the names of top aides.1

• Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, a top fund-raiser for Democratic Presidential candidates since the early eighties, attempted to help “fix” Biden by providing better lighting and trying to find a microphone that would amplify the president’s voice when he would break into whispers. Katzenberg even “recruited his friend Steven Spielberg, who helped coach Biden for the State of the Union and his debates, even assisting with routine campaign videos.”

• When Biden proved incapable of delivering a two-minute video address without stumbling, aides filmed him with two cameras so the edit would be less obvious.2

• Biden had to be repeatedly reminded that the movie star he was speaking with at a June 2024 fundraiser was his longtime friend George Clooney.3 Other high-dollar attendees described the president as “slow and almost catatonic,” so much so that it was “terrifying.”

• The White House physician told Biden aides that the president would likely require a wheelchair during his second term.

More jaw-dropping nuggets can be found in this long piece published yesterday in the New Yorker by Tapper and Thompson.

I’ve written about the Biden potemkin presidency before. I hope you’ll forgive me for harping. But some things bear repeating, and it’s important to understand the enormity of what transpired. We’re talking about arguably the biggest scandal the presidency has ever seen,4 a scandal that runs to the core of what the presidency is supposed to be, and which risks the entire premise of executive government—that the commander in chief and not some shadowy, deceptive cabal is the sole elected decision-maker. The bottom line is Joe Biden spent pretty much his entire term in a state of such advanced senescence that he was borderline non compos mentis and periodically incapacitated.

Far from being an actual presidency, the previous administration was little more than a fraud perpetrated on the American people by scheming Svengalis who sent us careening from one international and domestic disaster to another while working overtime to frame the shameful dotage of our babbling Lear as a right-wing conspiracy. One is left reeling with anger at the near-criminal irresponsibility of all those involved, who, as far as we can tell, never paused to contemplate potential consequences for the country (and the world) because they were blithely focused on using America’s policy trough to promote Progress™ by slopping favors onto activist groups.

And the media was absolutely complicit in this Weekend at Bernie’s charade. I’m with Charles Cooke: “Don’t overthink it. They knew about Biden, just as we knew about Biden, and a supermajority of Americans knew about Biden. They lied about it, because they didn’t want Trump to win. That’s the story, the rest is noise.”

Mainstream presstitutes mortgaged their credibility because they believed a journalistic omertà would protect them. That belief resided on the presumption that their fellow journalists were all playing for the same team, a team comprised of partisans and ideologues with the same political goals as the party in power.

And therein lies the crux of the matter. The scandal isn’t that Democratic politicians feigned ignorance or just straight up lied to the public about their nominee’s cognitive decline because they wanted to win an election. (Disgusting, sure, but hardly surprising when you think about it.) The real scandal is that virtually the entire national press aided in that effort with the same goal. Even if you prefer the excuse being pushed by people like Tapper — that they were “duped” by White House lies, that the president and his political party colluded to suppress the ability of the sacred Fourth Estate to relay what might be conservatively termed a “matter of public interest” to voters — it’s still a massive scandal because the press promoted those lies without any skepticism at all, which everyone knows wouldn’t have happened if this had been a Republican administration.

But what a delicious dilemma to observe these hacks grapple with: either admit you knew about the sitting president’s decline all along and actively participated in the cover-up, or admit that you as a “journalist” were somehow completely blind to what we peasants knew beyond any shadow of a doubt.5

Which is it? Egregiously partisan-motivated benevolent incuriosity about Biden’s morbidly obvious decline, or appalling incompetence beyond all rational description? Either way, you’ve proven that your entire industry is functionally worthless and its credibility crisis is richly deserved.

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• “In 2020, data from Britain’s Ministry of Justice found that an astounding 59 percent of transwomen prisoners were sex offenders—compared with 3 percent of women and 17 percent of men.” — Commentary’s Hannah Meyers

• “Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Protein? Blame MAGA.” — Vanity Fair headline

• “If I get shot, if I get murdered by an undocumented immigrant, please tell my children I did not care that they were undocumented.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “I understand that AOC may be more progressive than a lot of people. I also understand that she’s one of the most articulate, exciting people in the Democratic field.” — MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough

• “People say to me all the time, ‘James, why don’t we just do like the Republicans do? Just stand up and lie?’ Because our fucking people wouldn’t stand for it!” — James Carville

• “The majority of people used to be against civil rights. Were they right? No, they weren’t.” — The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill, on 80% of Americans being opposed to biological males competing in women’s sports

• “I wasn’t surprised, not because I didn’t think she was qualified. She is. I was surprised because it went the sexist route. This is a woman, she’s this, she did, I’ve never seen quite a successful and consistent campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t run the country, and a woman of mixed race.” — Joe Biden, when asked on The View why Kamala Harris lost, and if he was surprised

• “Think about how contrary this is to the example of Jesus. You look at this MAGA Christian Right and it is Will to Power. It is cruelty. It is dominance. Look how they applaud as Trump is cruel to immigrants.” — NYT’s David French

• “Sure would be cool to [have] a non-senile president and a functional national security staff right now.” — NYT’s Jamelle Bouie, responding to the news that India launched a military operation against Pakistan

• “Every time you say my name, you’re reminding the world that you’re terrified of smart, bold black women telling the truth and holding you accountable.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “Yes, Biden was old, but that’s a lot different than an allegation of mental decline that kept him from being able to do the job, which there is no evidence of.” — Former Chief Pentagon spokesperson Chris Meagher

• “[Trump was] claiming investors knew he would win. I think he should stop saying that because you’re going to make somebody investigate how investors would know you would win. I’m just putting that out there.” — The View’s Whoopi Goldberg

• “Think I’m going to be sitting waiting in line at United waiting while 30,000 people are waiting? It’s the only way to get around. No apologies for that.” — Bernie Sanders, when asked by Fox News anchor Bret Baier about spending $221k on private jets during his “Fight the Oligarchy” tour

• “Police Arrest a Man They Say Abused a Corpse on the R Train” — Headline of a NYT article that never once mentions that the “Brooklyn man” is an illegal immigrant

• “I am a great admirer of President Joe Biden, I think he will ultimately go down as one of the most consequential presidents because of all the legislation he was able to pass in his first two years, and the incredible work he did on the international stage in his second two years. As some of the other seminal legislation is actually implemented, Americans are going to benefit from it. You can be sure that Donald Trump will take full credit for it. But it was Joe Biden’s vision and his desire to do the right thing rather than the politically expedient thing, that ultimately I think sacrificed some of his favorability.” — Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, speaking on NBC News

• “Trans people are totally and royally fucked. We’re facing generational oblivion as scotus greenlights eradication of trans people from society. If you want a preview of where we’ll be in two years, look to Russia. Trans people are not safe in the US.” — Alejandro Caraballo, American civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic

• “Buttigieg, who has no clue, you know, he drives to work on his bicycle with his — in all fairness — with his husband on the back, which is a nice, loving relationship. But he didn’t have a clue, this guy didn’t have a clue. And he’s actually a contender for president? Between him and Crockett, you can have that party.” — Donald Trump

• “People like immigrants, who are here not by choice, most of them. They fled fear. They fled where they lived. They fled central America, where they were in danger.” — MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The Cut: “The Watcher”

• SB Nation: “Two Lanes to Accokeek”

• New York: “Manhattan Fold ’Em”

• New York: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”

• Texas Monthly: “The Hunt for the Serial Killer of Laredo”

• Outside: “Trapped”

• The New York Times Magazine: “War Without End”

• Grantland: “The Malice at the Palace”

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• “Harvard just scrapped its office of Diversity Inclusion and Belonging and has renamed it the office of campus and community life. They will move focus from underrepresented minorities to first generation and low income students instead. Resegregation comes to Harvard.” — Alejandro Caraballo, American civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic

• “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.” — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker

• “If you take [diversity] away and try to distill us just down to white folks, we’ll be like Europe, an aging, slowly dying former empire. The Roman Empire didn’t survive because it didn’t have enough strength in its diversity. It suppressed its diversity, and it died. If the U.S. wants to be the Roman Empire, keep voting the way you voting, y’all.” — Joy Reid

• “Once again, socialism is like a nude beach: sounds pretty nice until you see it in person.” — David Burge

• “I’m black, I’m terrified. I’m scared for my trans friends and people who we know and love, our neighbors are disappeared. And that was the goal and [Trump] did it. He did it. He did exactly what he wanted to do because I — you know feel less welcome in my home than I did, you know, last year, and that’s the goal. That was the goal.” — Comedian Amber Ruffin, during an appearance on The View

• “I do think we’re in the middle of an attempted authoritarian overthrow of American democracy, I think everybody who predicted that is right.” — Rachel Maddow

• “Well, if you’re a white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man, you can be as dumb as a rock and be deemed qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense.” — Susan Rice, who also says that “Anybody who fits the mold of somebody who is not a white Christian cisgender male, is by definition in this administration deemed inferior.”

• “That’s what Republicans want to do. They not only want to restore Jim Crow in the south, they want to have Jim Crow spread from one end of this country to the other.” — Chuck Schumer

• “I could code talk to white guys — watching football, fixing their truck, doing that, that I could put them at ease. I was the permission structure to say ‘look you can do this and vote for this.’” — Tim Walz, on why Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate

• “Look, we had the most qualified person who’d run for president in the country’s history at the top of the ticket. That in itself should have got this thing won.” — Also Tim Walz

• “A lot of Americans across the country that I run into, are questioning whether Donald Trump is actually fit at this point, to be able to carry out the duties of president and the commander in chief.” — Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

• “You know, first they came for the Latinos outside of the Home Depots, trying to get work so that they could feed their families. And I didn’t say anything about it because I’m not a Latino at the Home Depot. Then they came for the Hispanic-looking folks wearing hats backward with tattoos and they deported them to El Salvador. And I didn’t say anything about that because I don’t wear my hair [sic] backward and I don’t have any tattoos and I don’t look like a Latino.” — Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson

• “As an immunocompromised person, I don’t have the privilege of buying into far-right fascist denialism and eugenics. I’m one of those weak people you’re probably totally fine killing, because you probably haven’t worn a mask.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “Circling back: Should the incumbent party still pack the Supreme Court and abolish the filibuster and federally rewrite all the voting rules, or are those particular imperatives on hiatus?” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

• “The reason that they can sit there and take this vote and not even blink is because so many of them sit in privilege. When I look across the aisle, I think we have one person who may have a little bit of melanin.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, regarding the House GOP and the SAVE Act

• “One of the lessons I’ve learned is you have to read all the fine print. And you have to follow the threads of stories. Because if not, you’re going to be focused on talking about Greenland while [Trump] is trying to get the personal data of Americans, put them on the Cloud, sell it to China, go to the homes of undocumented immigrants who’re paying taxes, whatever it may be.” — Jen Psaki, during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”

• “It’s a real slippery slope. Trump does this to Harvard, and what’s president Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gonna do to a conservative school?” — CNN’s Jake Tapper

• “Was talking to a professor friend who said that they’ve referred 2 percent of their students for honor violations this year. Before AI, over more than a decade of teaching, they referred two. And the 2 percent are just the students who are too stupid to ask the AI to sound like a college student rather than a mid-career marketing executive. There are probably many more he hasn’t caught.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “California, I’m sorry to say this, a beautiful state, has become Exhibit A in progressive misgovernance.” — NYT’s Bret Stephens

• “Fox News has 15 of the 16 highest-rated cable news shows in April ratings. CNN doesn’t have a single show in the Top 25.” — Tom Bevan, President of RealClearPolitics

• “The impression of a ‘constitutional crisis’ is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration, but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch - limits the courts respected during the Biden administration.” — Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule

• “By aggregating votes across ballots and failing to distinguish between gender categories in a meaningful way, the DNC’s process violated its own Charter and Bylaws, undermining both fairness and gender diversity.” — Kalyn Free, a Native American attorney and Democratic party activist who lost a vice chair spot to David Hogg and is seeking to annul his election

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The New York Times Magazine: “They Stole a Quarter-Billion in Crypto and Got Caught Within a Month”

• GQ: “The Longest Night”

• The New Yorker: “The Trenchcoat Robbers”

• The New Yorker: “'Unsinkable”

• Tablet: “The Price”

• Atavist: “The Balloon That Fell From the Sky”

• The New York Times: “Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash”

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• “Every time I see those cars, I see Elon Musk saluting the country as a Nazi. I made a mistake because I’m basically living in terror every day that the country is turning into Nazi Germany. I’m truly terrified because Elon was unelected and they’re deporting migrants without a trial.” — Natasha Cohen, a Brooklyn therapist who left a brick scrawled with a swastika and the word “Nazi” on a parked Tesla

• “I knew after reading Project 2025 that if Trump got in, it was time for me and my non-binary child to leave the country.” — Rosie O'Donnell, during an interview with CNN

• “The reason the south has languished for generations is that the white leadership cares more about preserving a white male hierarchy than making their society better. We’re now seeing that on a national scale. The Trump administration is turning the US into deep south style autocracy.” — Alejandro Caraballo, American civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic

• “Trump gutted civil rights enforcement in education at the same time he’s promoting HBCUs. The intent is clear, resegregation. They want to ensure elite institutions such as Harvard are only attended by white men.” — Also Alejandro Caraballo

• “I can’t even begin to tell you just how disastrous a traditionalist Catholic pope being elected would be. It would be gasoline on a conflagration of fascism sweeping the globe.” — And also Alejandro Caraballo

• “Gotta say, I struggle on some days to reconcile the fact that millions of Americans actually WANT to live in a country with viruses spreading freely, thousand of people getting kicked out of their jobs, billionaires feasting on the government and people being snatched off the street by secret police. The fact that this and Trump are so many Americans’ heart’s desire makes me question whether this country can ever be saved from its own cynicism and hatefulness.” — Joy Reid

• “The parent can choose to put their kid elsewhere. You don’t have to send your kid to public school. I’m struggling to see how it burdens a parent’s religious exercise if the school teaches something that the parent disagrees with. You have a choice. You can homeschool them.” — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, regarding a major case concerning whether school systems should be required to allow parents to opt their kids out of classes because of religious objections to LGTBQ+ material

• “We go out there as Democrats all the time and say ‘Democracy is the most important thing. We have to defend democracy.’ We fail to acknowledge that for this generation democracy is what put us through school shooting drills and school shootings, it’s what’s put us through the climate crisis and so much more.” — DNC Vice Chair David Hogg, during an interview with CBS News

• “I think the message coming from the Democratic Party is a good message. The problem we’ve got is that we have to depend upon the media to deliver it. We have The Washington Post, for instance, caving to this wanna-be dictator, and we’ve got other media entities that seem to rather push the narrative that will bring eyes to their newspaper or to their television sets and not really give a fair hearing or reporting to what we’re doing.” — Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, speaking on MSNBC

• “If Jesus were alive today and in the United States, this administration would have already taken him and removed him from this country without due process, claimed he was a member of the MS-13 gang as a way to try to justify not giving him due process.” — Hope Walz, daughter of Tim Walz

• “I am a serious lawmaker, but if you try me, you will find out. I’m truly a black woman!” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, speaking at a National Action Network conference in D.C.

• “Black people in America lived under autocracy for most of our history. Black people in the Deep South in many places live under a version of autocracy today.” — Author and progressive policy advocate Heather McGhee, during an appearance on Comedy Central’s The Weekly Show podcast

• “The Trump Administration is going after Harvard for the same reason that Vladimir Putin went after universities in Russia, that Xi Jinping went after universities in China, that Viktor Orban went after universities in Hungary — authoritarians don’t want alternative sources of information, of moral judgment, of alternative ideas.” — NYT’s Nicholas Kristof, speaking on CNN

• “This narrative that school closures were an immense, irreparable harm to kids is unsupported by data. But that’s besides the point. It was really a right-wing ploy to get parents back to work and undermine teachers unions and public education more broadly.” — The Intercept’s Walker Bragman

• “Before I describe the details of Russia’s recent online influence campaigns, I would like to call upon you to stand firm against another autocracy: The United States of America.” — Nina Jankowicz, former head of Biden’s infamous Disinformation Governance Board, testifying before the European Parliament

• “Larry’s piece is not equating Trump with Hitler. It is about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.” — NYT Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy, regarding a guest essay by comedian Larry David titled “My Dinner With Adolf,” which was penned after Bill Maher met with Trump at the White House

• “The fact of the matter is that if Donald Trump had gone on that debate stage and, you know, shit his pants and had a heart attack, Republicans would still be there saying, ‘Yeah, he’s our guy.’ That meltdown that we had publicly is a discipline problem.” — Alex Soros, who says that Biden was “assassinated” by the “pundit class” following his disastrous debate performance

• “21 Years Later, Deported Back to a ‘Home’ He Barely Knew” — Headline of a NYT article about an illegal immigrant convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to 15 years in prison, and who was given a final order of removal in 2008 but was released onto the streets of New York thanks to Biden’s open border policies

• “Joe, we’re here to help. We're worried about you. We're here to gently guide you back into the loving arms of liberal consensus.” — Malcolm Gladwell, in a message to Joe Rogan

• “Trump, Musk, Vance, I’m going to make these easy for you: The only way to increase the white birthrate is to make white people poor again.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• GQ: “The Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die”

• New Yorker: “The Curse of the Buried Treasure”

• Outside: “The Killer in the Pool”

• The Guardian: “‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday”

• New York Magazine: “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York”

• Vanity Fair: “A Vintage Crime”

• Toronto Life: “A Restaurant Ruined My Life”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 11.4 percent of American children had been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., a record high. That figure includes 15.5 percent of American adolescents, 21 percent of 14-year-old boys and 23 percent of 17-year-old boys.” — NYT’s Paul Tough

• “Bad News for Man’s Best Friend: Dogs Are Environmental Villains” — Mother Jones headline

• “In a way, Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia.” — The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer

• “Republicans are not going to let up on this, they’re not going to leave it alone, they’re not going to stop this. And we’re going to suffer. It’s very easy to fight back on trans issues. The science is on our side. Every credible medical organization has come out and endorsed gender-affirming care and said that the trans military ban is ridiculous and unnecessary. They’ve said that trans women should be housed in women’s prisons.” — Trans activist Charlotte Clymer, speaking on MSNBC

• “It was a practice; it’s not that they were violent, it was their way of connecting with the celestial bodies.” — María Belén Méndez, an archaeologist quoted in a CBS News story about an ancient altar discovered in Guatemala that was used for child sacrifices

• “You know it’s very white, this movie. You don’t see a lot of different ethnicities; we don’t talk about gender, none of that, and I feel like that really doesn’t represent our world today. So I would like to see movies that are inspired by ‘The Breakfast Club’ but take it in a different direction.” — Molly Ringwald

• “Mr. Biden allowed many migrants to enter the country temporarily as a way to incentivize them to avoid crossing the border illegally. Those people became eligible to work in the United States, receive Social Security numbers and in some cases receive federal benefits.” — From a NYT article written by Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard (yes, five writers)

• “I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him, and honestly? I voted for Clinton and Obama but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will. Me? I feel it’s emblematic of why the Democrats are so unpopular these days.” — Bill Maher, on meeting with Donald Trump at the White House

• “While America’s roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism. From Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to Jan. 6th, there is simply no equivalent on the left.” — CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan

• “Here’s this man who, who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart. He’s a person that seems like a morally good man, which is hard to find.” — Taylor Lorenz, in an interview with CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan

• “There is truly no reason to entertain natalism on the left. If we run out of people in the US, we can simply allow more immigration. Natalism is a Tech Right obsession, like ‘race science’ and eugenics.” — Comedian Kate Willett

• “Such an alpha-but maybe he has just never been that close to a trophy before.” — Alex Soros, son of George Soros, regarding JD Vance accidentally dropping the College Football Playoff National Championship trophy

• “A term of high praise on the dissident right is ‘based,’ short for ‘based in reality.’ But never has an administration been more divorced from reality, and more determined to shove insulting ideological fictions down our throats, than Trump’s.” — NYT’s Michelle Goldberg

• “Regretful Trump voters? More of a media creation than anything else. Just 2% of 2024 Trump voters say they’d vote for a different candidate now. (Numbers for Harris are similar). Appears to be fewer Trump regretters than in 2017 or 2021. GOP continues to lead Dems on party ID.” — CNN data analyst Harry Enten

• “I was in the fetal position. I just wanted to put on sweat pants, eat ice cream and watch hockey.” — Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, describing how he felt in the days after Donald Trump’s reelection as president

• “The Trump administration’s worldview in a nutshell: If you’re white, you’re all right. If you’re brown, get out of town.” — Stephen King

• “Supporters of FWS [For Women Scotland] — including notorious transphobe ‘Harry Potter’ author J.K. Rowling — hailed the ruling as a victory.” — MSNBC’s Clarissa-Jan Lim, regarding the UK Supreme Court ruling that transgender women are not legally defined as “women” under equality law

• “I hope they can see the unity that we modeled and replicate that and understand that we weren’t just taking up space, we were making space for the future. And for me, like Gayle [King] said, this wasn’t a ride, it wasn’t a destination, it was a journey, and it was a supernatural one, and my journey has always been about love and belonging. I think that we have all felt that sometimes we weren’t worthy or we didn’t belong in certain ways, no matter all the accolades, no matter all the studying, no matter anything, and I think today we all said it, like, we belong here. This is where we belong, and we feel very sure of that.” — Katy Perry, when asked on Good Morning America how the all-female crew that Jeff Bezos sent up to space for 11 minutes on a remotely piloted vessel can “affect change”

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The Cut: “Addicted to OnlyFans”

• Toronto Life: “We Bought a Crack House”

• Vanity Fair: “The Riddle of Everest”

• The Washington Post: “The nurse in the NYC subway”

• The Washington Post: “Guns. Knives. Bats. Hammers. Hatchets. Spears.”

• Esquire: “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word”

• GQ: “The Truck Stop Killer”

• The Wall Street Journal: “How a Secretive Gambler Called ‘The Joker’ Took Down the Texas Lottery”

• The New York Times: “In a Snow Paradise, They Live in This Parking Lot”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “We believe in merit as Democrats.” — Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

• “Coming into the country illegally is a civil offense. It’s not a criminal offense.” — CNN’s Abby Phillip1

• “Americans are going to think of Joe Biden the way post 1918 Viennese thought of Franz Josef: ‘maybe he was a little confused in his final days, but at least we could then have real cream in our coffee.’” — David Frum

• “So I had to go around the country and educate people about what immigrants do for this country, or the fact that we are a country of immigrants. The fact is ain’t none of y’all trying to go and farm right now. OK, so I’m lying? You’re not! You’re not! We done picking cotton!” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, speaking at a historically black church over the weekend

• “The fact that everything around us is burning to the ground and some people still have no clue that they voted for the arsonist or are complicit in the arson is absolutely mind boggling. People are ok with it so long as the black woman isn’t their President.” — Also Jasmine Crockett

• “But to date, almost all of the 140-plus lawsuits against Trump administration policies have been filed in federal circuits where Democratic appointees predominate. And while the government has won rounds in many of its court fights, most of the judges issuing early restraining orders and injunctions against administration initiatives were appointed by Democrats.” — WSJ’s Jess Bravin

• “This is what kicking the shit out of fascism looks like!” — Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, speaking at the “Hands Off” rally in Washington, D.C.

• “I am undocumented, unafraid, queer, and unashamed.” — Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, speaking at the same rally

• “How do you think [Elon Musk] got to where he’s at? I have people who come up to me and say ‘Maxwell, why would they be stealing? Elon Musk is already the richest person in the world, he has enough money.’ The question is how do you think he became the richest person in the world?” — Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost

• “If you pretend that your differences with friends and coworkers and family are about ‘politics’ when in fact they’re about right versus wrong and fascism versus the rule of law, you’re doing your country a grave disservice.” — George Conway

• “Do you know what’s going to happen? Do you know how this ends? Do you know what the country is going to feel toward collaborators with this regime? After Paris was liberated, they didn’t take very kindly to the collaborators. No, it was not a very pretty sight in the streets of Paris. I’m not saying that these people should be placed in pajamas and have their head shaved, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and spit on. I’m not saying that, but I’m saying that that did happen. And I’m saying that these people betrayed the French nation in the same way that I think that these law firms and these giant corporate conglomerates are betraying the United States. What their comeuppance is, I can only guess.” — James Carville

• “I’m not on the Left.” — CNN’s Jake Tapper

• “I bet you there are a lot of people that voted for Trump that wish that Kamala Harris is in the White House.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin

• “The reason Democrats don’t want voter ID is because they make it much more difficult for elderly people, people who don’t travel. Poor people don’t have cars, don’t have driver’s licenses. It’s sort of a vestige, I think, of post-slavery laws where black people had to prove their right to vote, and often times they couldn’t vote because they couldn’t pass some crazy test.” — Also Sunny Hostin

• “We are currently living through a president who wants to be a dictator. In America, we do not accept dictators and we do not accept kings. We have a billionaire who has bought a seat next to the president and is using him as a puppet.” — Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar

• “We chose a felon who is more interested in loyalty, who is more interested in retribution, who is more interested in grift than in democracy. And we chose a felon because we didn’t want to elect a black woman. So, to read that, to actually explicate that, is to say we would rather destroy the republic than for that to have happened.” — Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, speaking on MSNBC

• “The entire country as we know it is on the line with these people and they are in a full-on effort to turn the government into a gangster state. And Donald Trump’s doing everything in his power to disable the crime and corruption-fighting capacity of the FBI and the Department of Justice so he can just use it to go after his political adversaries. But meantime, the real corruption is just running amok. These people are not opponents of corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse as they keep saying, they are agents of corruption and instruments of waste and fraud throughout the government.” — Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, during an appearance on MSNBC

• “I think she’s the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle.” — Republican Sen. John Kennedy, regarding AOC

• “We’re living under an openly fascistic government whose express goal is to wrench any remaining agency, sexual or otherwise, from anyone who is not a white man with an upsetting hairline.” — New York magazine’s Rachel Handler

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• Harper’s: “The Last Detail: On Patrol With the Guardian Angels”

• The New York Times Magazine: “The Deserter”

• Daily Beast: “How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions”

• Time: “The Return of the Dire Wolf”

• American Mind: “The Border Crisis is Over”

• Manhattan Institute: “Mental-Health Trends and the ‘Great Awokening’”

• The Washington Post: “Nearly 200 cows disappeared. The case remains cold.”

• The Washington Post: “A beloved skier, an audacious jump and the complex grief left behind”

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Last night, the UK’s Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro Series Event 2 in Wigan, UK had its final match.

Normally this wouldn’t have grabbed headlines, but this year’s event was different in that there were no women in the final. The match was played between two trans men.1

Thursday, The Washington Post published a feature story lamenting how “transgender rights, particularly for young people, have become a political target for conservative leaders,” which has forced “trans girls” (biological males) to compete with boys (biological males)—a grave injustice, if ever there was.

CBS News followed up a day later with this:

And as I highlighted in Friday’s Quotes of the Week post, a man was recently inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

I have repeatedly railed against this contemptible insanity, and I will continue to do so. It is dangerous, toxic nonsense that has made considerable inroads into mainstream culture thanks to a highly sympathetic media environment and a degree of mainstream coverage wholly disproportionate to the actual number of trans people. This is due in large part to 1) transgenderism being not just a movement driven by individuals with gender dysphoria, but a distinct political and social community of activists who preach gender ideology; and 2) advocacy required by all those who subscribe to the progressive faith and worship at the Church of Woke, congregants of which are all too happy to oblige. Now that the major civil rights victories of the late twentieth century are pretty much secured, agitators must look to new areas to initiate change, because Progressivism is all about the blind desire to uproot whatever currently exists.2

But no one has a civil right to force others to share their subjective identity beliefs, and no one has a civil right to identify into biological categories warranting differential access to protected spaces to which they do not belong. Allowing anyone to identify into a demographic category on the basis of inner feelings knowable only by self-report is a laughably untenable project.

The problem is that, today, more so than ever before, there is no degree of insanity that the administrative state — which is predominantly comprised of progressive clerics seeking to put their fundamentalist view of how the world should be into practice via the logics and compliance architectures of neoliberal governance, gradually expanding their influence so as to establish the dominant ethos of western high culture and institutions — won’t treat as a “civil right.”

At a policy level, it’s indecent to lie and deny biological reality. It’s an affront to reason. And it’s a civilizational threat if you obliterate one of the most fundamental verities of human existence and replace it with a requirement that we capitulate to the disordered thinking of a small percentage of the population. In an individual encounter with a trans person, indulging in their preferred fiction doesn’t seriously threaten the social order. But when the lie is enforced by the state or institutions, or is promulgated by the scientific community, civilization comes to reside on a foundation of sand.

Activists have gone to great lengths to present their success in forcing society’s acquiescence to gender ideology as stemming from a wholesale shift in public opinion, but in reality this is just another instance of a tyrannical minority coercing others into abiding by lunacy. There’s a reason these messianic morons prefer to have social changes enforced from the top down, rather than having to go through the effort of winning people over to their ideas: those ideas can’t stand on their own and collapse under minimal scrutiny.3 Transgenderism in practice is the submission by one party to the libido dominandi of another. It forces a subjective and manipulable view of one person’s self to become a defining reality for everyone else. It’s a demand for the validation of others. But in an actual democracy, the minority — and, a fortiori, the individual — cannot force the majority to conform to individual predilections.

And it’s not a stretch to say the transgender movement is basically left-wing misogyny on steroids. The root idea — that “trans women are women,” a marvel of pretzel logic used in response to any criticism of gender ideology and any objections to biological males inserting themselves into female spaces and sports — reduces womanhood from a biological, social, relational phenomenon to some sort of garish costume that “men who feel like women” can pull on as they please. This is nothing less than an assault on women’s sex-based rights, the specificity of their experiences, and their desire for safety, privacy, and dignity.

The new norms and mores that the movement insists the rest of society follows have long since passed the absurd. We’ve reached the point where neither surgery nor a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is required for someone to be a trans woman. The entire sex category has been opened to any male who says he’s female. This isn’t about “inclusivity,” it’s forced participation in an alternative reality dependent on positive public regard and the redefinition of what it means for someone to be a woman—a total rewriting of societal rules and the legitimation of a regressive set of beliefs requiring the active, conscious, and affirming disposition of every member of society, who must identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim.

If any man can claim to be a woman and just like that we must treat him as one, “woman” becomes a meaningless word and women’s rights cease to exist. You have to be willfully obtuse not to understand that treating gender as simply a matter of self-identification sets up a direct conflict between sex-based protections for females and rights based upon gender identity, instantiating ideas that are harmful to women’s equality.

Trans women are not women. They haven’t had to live their entire lives as females, with all the safety concerns, biological trappings, and societal and cultural expectations that involves. Womanhood is not a choice. And a society that places the feelings of trans people — 0.6% of the population — over the safety and liberty of women, who have historically been forced to fight tooth and nail for equality, is a society in terminal decline.

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

Subscribe now

• “There are trans Americans right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will.” — Illinois Governor JB Pritzker

• “I applied for one school. I kind of had my heart set on it. I am not going to name the institution, but given recent events I am not going to give my money, go into debt for, or support institutions that do not support students and the right to protest and speak out for their communities. Students deserve to be protected. I am not worried about if I were to be protected or not at said institution; I am, you know, a privileged white woman.” — Hope Walz, daughter of Tim Walz, on why she won’t be attending grad school this fall

• “While it may be an uncomfortable truth for this president and for many people in this country, this country was founded on slavery. It was founded on free labor, it was founded on the backs of black people.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin

• “There is an instinct, an authoritarian instinct, that is true in all authoritarian times in history: Take control of the culture, take control of the arts early on.” — Ben Folds, who resigned as artistic advisor of the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center

• “Look, in seventh grade, if I had known that I could have said the word ‘they’ and got in the girls’ bathroom, I would have done it.” — Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is gearing up for a presidential run

• “No leading officials were fired over the Iraq/W.M.D. debacle. There were no notable resignations when Barack Obama’s Libya intervention turned that country into a war-torn terrorist haven. No heads rolled when the Afghanistan papers revealed official dishonesty, and Biden’s foreign policy team did not quit after the Afghanistan withdrawal became a bloody rout. Given that record, you can argue that Hegseth or Waltz should resign over operational security failures even if those failures didn’t have tragic consequences — but it’s silly to act shocked when they do not.” — NYT’s Ross Douthat

• “The fact that you’re sitting around talking about ‘life was better under Jim Crow,’ like, is this because you don’t understand history? Or literally it’s because you married a White woman and so you think that whitewashed you?” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, regarding Republican Rep. Byron Donalds1

• “When I first became a public defender I had no criminal defense experience. And I walked in and I told my boss Charlie, I said, ‘Listen, you should hire me.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I’m black.’” — Also Jasmine Crockett

• “It’s a great honor and a great responsibility. Somebody has to go first.” — Sandy Stone, the founder of the academic field of transgender studies and a biological male, who was elected into the National Women’s Hall of Fame this week

• “Every law passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act should be presumptively unconstitutional. Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act we were functionally an apartheid country. Not everybody who lived here could vote here. So, why should I give a fuck about some law that some old white man passed in the 1920s?” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal, during an appearance on The View

• “Voter fraud does not exist. We shouldn’t make laws based on protecting us from things that don’t exist. The Republicans are the ones who claim that voter ID is necessary to secure our election because their goal is not to secure elections, because, again, voter fraud doesn’t exist. Their goal is to restrict people from voting.” — Also Elie Mystal

• “To cover up the physical signs of Biden’s aging, a makeup artist met with him in the morning when he traveled. The artist also covered up aging signs before Zoom calls with his aides. Biden consistently made these makeup appointments, but he sometimes canceled the briefings that were to follow. After the debate with Trump, Biden needed fluorescent tape to guide him through a fundraiser at New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D) house and needed a teleprompter to speak to just a small group of people. But he still frequently trailed off during his remarks.” — The Hill’s Jared Gans

• “No matter what we do, we’ve got to take this from Elon Musk. He’s part of an effort to go backwards.” — Democratic Senator Pat Fahy, who introduced a new bill that aims to effectively ban Tesla dealerships in the state of New York

• “If you think you can force your candidate down our throat, we will see you when you get out of jail. I’ve instructed all our security to just remove you and hand you over to the po-po, and I will sign the complaint myself.” — MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, who’s long been a critic of “over-policing,” in reference to protestors at the National Action Network nonprofit’s annual convention

• “A climate of fear and trepidation has descended upon the nation. The people of America are more afraid today for our democracy and for their personal safety than ever in our lifetimes.” — Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson

• “Mr. Taibbi said when he was first searching through the so-called Twitter Files, he didn’t know what he was looking at. Well, he still doesn’t. Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.” — Nina Jankowicz, former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, speaking at Tuesday’s House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing on the Censorship-Industrial Complex

• “Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather” — Headline in The Atlantic

• “We’ve got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.” — Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee

• “The thing about watching a JD Vance speech is that everyone knows he’s a little pig man. Everyone knows he exists to squeal for Trump’s amusement. No one respects him and he clearly doesn’t respect himself.” — NYT’s Jamelle Bouie

• “President Obama absolutely did not think that Joe Biden should continue, according to our sources close to President Obama. And he also didn’t want Kamala Harris to be the replacement for Biden, he didn’t think that she was the best choice for Democrats, and he worked behind the scenes for a long time to try to have a mini-primary or an open convention, or a mini-primary leading to an open convention, did not have faith in her ability to win the election.” — NBC News senior political reporter Jonathan Allen, speaking on MSNBC

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today, 12ft.io, or Wayback Machine.

• The New York Times: “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”

• The New York Times: “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek”

• GQ: “The Eruption Of Instagram Island”

• ProPublica: “Fight the Ship: Death and valor on a warship doomed by its own Navy”

• The New Yorker: “The Voyeur’s Motel”

• New York: “The Bernard Madoff Tapes”

• The Globe and Mail: “After the Fire: Murder, Lies, and a Missing Deer Head”

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