Quotes and Links

A week in review

It was another banner week for MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who thrice used her platform to explain why Americans should shun their Trump-voting family members at Thanksgiving.

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 reading material I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by simply clicking on the top right and going to “manage subscription.”

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• “There are well over 400 Federal agencies. I was once in a meeting with a new agency that was being formed, but it didn’t have a name yet. The reason it didn’t have a name was that all the good acronyms were taken!” — Elon Musk

• “Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.” — Yale historian Timothy Snyder

• “We have to stop and think about who we choose for government and if, in fact, we are actually choosing our government or if the government is choosing itself.” — Actress Sharon Stone, speaking during a panel discussion at the Torino Film Festival in Italy. Stone said Americans who voted for Trump did so because they’re “arrogant,” “ignorant,” and “don’t travel.”

• “Democrats Warn That Excess Thankfulness May Lead To Conservatism” — Babylon Bee headline

• “Virtually ALL ‘asylum seekers’ are economic migrants who are lying. There are no wars in Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Bukele-era El Sal, Poland, China, Jamaica, etc. Even if there were, the USA is almost never the ‘first safe country’ for someone fleeing those places. Even if it were, almost no ‘undocumented’ migrants enter in proper fashion through ports-of-entry. The left-wing position on this point basically breaks down to: ‘Empathy requires us to believe obvious lies, demon.’” — Kentucky State professor Wilfred Reilly

• “Trump’s Cabinet has only 3 people of color – again” — Politico headline

• “We can’t share Thanksgiving. You voted to deport people who look like me.” — Louie Villalobos, USA Today deputy opinion editor

• “A man convicted of exposure returns to W&OD Trail to rape, police say” — Headline of a Washington Post article that does not mention until the 13th paragraph that the “man” is an illegal alien

• “Your semi-regular reminder that if your concern with trans women is that men might claim to self-ID as trans to gain access to women’s spaces and assault them, then your problem is actually with predatory men and not trans women.” — The Guardian’s Harriet Marsden

• “Clearly Putin has a type. He likes narcissists and egomaniacs that he knows as a case officer can easily pander to manipulate, to do his dirty work. Russia has been using different levers — whether that’s corruption networks, in this case, it’s influencers like Donald Trump, like Elon Musk, to kind of sow discord.” — Alexander Vindman, speaking on MSNBC

• “In the increasingly non-hypothetical world ruled by far-right Trumpists, the blissful servitude of women must be insured by removing their control over their bodies, and ideally, actually, by removing them from the public sphere altogether.” — The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino

• “You right-wingers shouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of your votes? ‘You don’t want to be around me because I voted for fascism. No fair. I am coughing on you with COVID, but you want me to wear a mask for your safety? No fair. My body, my choice.’ Well, here’s an alternative thought — make your own dinner, MAGA. Make your own sandwiches, wipe your own tears, troll amongst yourselves with Elon, and leave us alone.” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid

• “It is not a virtue to exaggerate an infectious disease threat at the start of a pandemic to panic the population into compliance. It’s not a vice to ask for data to understand the true risk. A noble lie is a lie.” — Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the new NIH director

• “Because you can’t lie about a few big subjects and tell the truth about others. Big lies cause adjustments all down the line; they change the prevailing levels and conditions, destabilizing everything. It’s like dropping a new predator into an ecosystem.” — Walter Kirn, on why the mainstream media is dishonest in all aspects

• “Here we are calling Republicans weird, and we’re the party that makes people put pronouns in their email signature.” — Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA)

• “The yearslong effort to vanquish Donald Trump in court was a dismal failure.

  For liberals like me, it may be tempting to attribute the collapse of the various cases against him to convenient explanations of process or personnel. The more uncomfortable truth is that our search for political salvation primarily through the law has backfired.” — Yale law professor Samuel Moyn, writing in The New York Times

• “I do love all these ‘believe all women’ leftists who created trigger warnings and safe spaces for when snowflakes hear someone they don’t like speak, telling a rape survivor to buck up and deal with a man being in an intimate space with her because he declared himself a woman.” — Townhall’s Derek Hunter

• “Elon is a field experiment from the Harvard Sociology Department circa 1972 with the title: ‘What if one person shows up and just tells the truth?’” — American entrepreneur Marc Andreessen

• “Complaining is a choice. And usually a choice antithetical to productivity. There's not much correlation between who complains the most and who has the most objective basis to complain. Mostly it’s a sign of privilege, as much as I hate that term.” — Nate Silver

• “A perfect encapsulation of the solipsism that typifies ‘safetyism.’ We’re literally talking about disaster victims — people in an actually precarious position. But their precarity is subordinated to an entirely psychological apprehension.” — Noah Rothman, on Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noting at a hearing that FEMA workers declined to offer aid to homes with Trump signs because they felt “unsafe”

• “Two weeks after winning the presidency, Donald Trump has yet to hold a press conference.” — Politico’s Irie Sentner

• “Nonetheless, let us hope that the Secret Service is on top of things for Trump, since J. D. Vance, a religious zealot, opportunist, and toxic product of debate-team culture, is even worse. He has got a head start on his sociopathy, slickly telling public whoppers at an even younger age than Trump did. He is more like a figure from Margaret Atwood’s dark imagination; may she not win the Crystal Ball Award, just the Nobel Prize.” — Essayist Lorrie Moore, writing in The New Yorker

• The Washington Post: “An Alleged $500 Million Ponzi Scheme Preyed on Mormons. It Ended with FBI Gunfire.”

• The New Yorker: “The Pain Creating a New Coalition for Trump”

• Vanity Fair: “Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: ‘I Loved Him. He Was My Safety.’”

• Curbed: “The Candy Sellers: The lives and livelihoods of some of the city’s newest migrant children.”

• Entertainment Weekly: “How to Get on Survivor: Behind the Scenes of Casting Season 45”

• Wired: “High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace”

• Vulture: “How the Daily Wire Engineered Its First Box-Office Hit”

• The Wall Street Journal: “The Local Sheriffs Gearing Up to Help Trump Carry Out Mass Deportations”