Quotes and Links

A week in review

President Joe Biden speaks to United Auto Workers members at the UAW's Community Action Program legislative conference in Washington, DC, on January 24. | CNN

Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of various notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best reading material I’ve come across.

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• “Like Trump, Hitler was also viewed as a clown, a goon who could be kept in line.” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid

• “Maybe this is an oversimplification, but Ryan Gosling being nominated [for Barbie], but not Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig, perfectly explains to me why we aren’t in the 8th year of Hillary Clinton’s presidency.” — TV writer Bryan Behar

• “I can’t believe the reaction I’m seeing to journalists losing their jobs. A lot of people are celebrating the misfortune of people who wanted nothing more than to report the facts and occasionally destroy anyone opposed to their politics.” — The Babylon Bee’s Frank J. Fleming

• “The ACLU’s recent settlement with the NYPD requires that when a protest ‘temporarily blocks vehicular or pedestrian traffic or otherwise obstructs public streets or sidewalks, the NYPD shall whenever possible accommodate the demonstration.’” — Pirate Wires’ Sanjana Friedman

• “Radio is essentially dead aside from NPR.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “Let me be clear about this—a great majority of our members will NOT vote for President Biden.” — United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain

• “If you took all the illegal aliens that Biden has let into the country and made a state out of them, that state would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined.” — The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles

• “They’re giving the migrants all the things we’ve been asking for since we came here in chains.” — J. Darnell Jones, a Chicago DEI consultant and a Democrat who is suing the Biden administration

• “Supreme Court Rules Texas Must Replace Barbed Wire With Giant Red Carpet” — Headline from The Babylon Bee

• “I honestly don’t understand why it’s controversial to say we need a secure border.” — John Fetterman

• “There is not a scintilla of evidence for the discriminant validity of a ‘Long COVID’ syndrome. It is a mixture of post-viral symptomatology, ME/CFS, & psychosomatic psychopathology. It has become a performative persona among those vulnerable to highly elevated neurotic & anxious affect.” — Evolutionary psychopathologist J.D. Haltigan

• “Three years into the J6 pipe bomb investigation with zero arrests, a dozen unacknowledged facts, and several impossible coincidences, when the FBI says ‘it’s our policy not to comment on ongoing investigations,’ what I hear is ‘it’s our policy not to comment on ongoing coverups.’” — Republican Rep. Thomas Massie

• “I’m supposedly an expert on foreign policy.” — President Joe Biden, during a speech at the UAW’s Community Action Program legislative conference

• “A teen accused of shooting a man in the head was found incompetent to stand trial, then let go. He’s now charged with shooting another man in the head.” — Headline from Minneapolis’s KARE11 News

• “At a baseline level, governments are supposed to ensure basic goods: Clean streets. Competent police. Functional airlines. Secure borders. Our political system isn’t just apathetic about those things. It’s actively opposed to them. It’s a state at war with its own nation.” — National Review’s Nate Hochman

• “Some pandemic mistakes were inevitable, especially when data was scarce. But others betrayed an ideological intransigence. The obvious example was long-term school closures, mostly in blue states, which we now know caused significant delays in learning, especially among the most vulnerable populations with the fewest resources.” — Remarkably, The New York Times

• “F**k these cops! He wouldn’t move! F**k these cops, it’s a lesson to him, and hopefully he doesn’t want to be a cop anymore.” — Pro-Palestine protestor and criminal justice graduate Sahara Dula, who intentionally ran over a police officer in New York City

• “All you need to know about Western civilisation: The people who are the strongest advocates for Western civ are people like me who have experienced the alternative. The people who are the biggest critics of Western civ have never experienced anything else.” — Podcaster Konstantin Kisin

• “Scary. If he’s elected he might start throwing candidates off ballots, pressure tech companies to censor the opposition, and ignore the Supreme Court.” — The Federalist’s David Harsanyi, on Rachel Maddow’s latest rant about how Trump is going to be a dictator

• “My party is completely delusional right now.” — Democrat Rep. Dean Phillips, who told CNN he was amazed by what he heard from Trump supporters lined up for a rally, all of whom were “thoughtful, hospitable, friendly”

• An Atavist story about how “On a Missouri farm, two families worked the land side by side, until a murder shattered their American dream.”

• “The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave,” from The New Yorker.

• A City Journal piece on how “Even as its black students lag disastrously behind, the Los Angeles Unified School District pours more taxpayer dollars into racial and ideological indoctrination.”

• “The Infamous FBI Informant Behind a 20-Fatality Limo Crash,” from New York magazine.

• “The Harvard of the Unwoke,” from The Wall Street Journal.

• An Atlantic story about how “Air Jordan Is Finally Deflating.”

• “Pretext for a Fedsurrection,” from The American Mind.