Quotes and Links

A week in review

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) speaks during a House hearing examining the Census Bureau’s activities ahead of the 2030 census, Thursday, December 5, 2024. | The Hill

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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• “If saving Hunter was politically improper or reputationally risky, it was also done in accordance with the higher and fiercer laws of familial love.” — The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig

• “Multiple MSNBC programs have lost more than half their audience since Election Day when comparing demo viewership to 2024 averages. ‘The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle,’ ‘All In with Chris Hayes,’ ‘Chris Jansing Reports,’ ‘Inside with Jen Psaki,’ ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ and Joy Reid’s ‘ReidOut’ all shed at least 50% of its audience among adults age 25-54 since Trump’s victory.” — Fox News’ Brian Flood

• “I think the greatest gift of my life is to have kids. And to have a transgender child has made me so much more interesting.” — Actress Annette Bening

• “American veterans now receive absurdly generous benefits” — The Economist headline

• “Planning a Covid safe book launch took months and THOUSANDS of my own dollars ensuring testing, outdoor space, far UV lights, and a litany of other precautions. Meanwhile u dumbfucks are out raw dogging the air and spewing ur disease laden breath all over ur elderly neighbors. We are not the same.” — Taylor Lorenz, former Washington Post tech and culture reporter

• “Could Hunter Biden be the Joe Rogan of the left?” — Also Taylor Lorenz

• “On the campaign trail, Musk talked a lot about the need for the U.S. to live ‘honestly’ and ‘within its means.’ But if his social-media platform is any guide, his aims may have less to do with efficiency than ideology. His stated goal in acquiring Twitter matches one of his favorite reasons for supporting Trump: he says he wants to salvage free speech in America.” — Time’s Simon Shuster

• “I don’t think it’s by any accident that both of Trump’s presidential victories have been against women.” — The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill

• “The ‘guys, don’t joke about the CEO of a health insurance company getting assassinated’ people are why Trump won.” — Yale postdoctoral associate David Austin Walsh

• “So, while I’m not rejoicing about the UHC CEO being shot dead in the street, I’m not sad about it, either. People deserve better than the US health insurance industry, and chickens come home to roost.” — Yolanda Wilson, an associate professor in HealthCare Ethics at Saint Louis University who teaches “Feminist Philosophy” and “Law and Morality”

• “Every medical treatment has risk. Even taking Aspirin.” — Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in response to Tennessee Solicitor General Matthew Rice asking “How many minors have to have their bodies irreparably harmed for unproven benefits?”

• “Donald Trump is a Hitlerlian dictator with no limits on his power, yet somehow his choice to lead the DOJ already had to be withdrawn because he couldn’t get confirmed, and his choice to lead the Pentagon is facing some degree of unknown difficulty. Strange Nazism.” — Glenn Greenwald

• “Elon Musk is a very, very aggressive and capable businessperson, very impressive with what he’s accomplished. He says, I could do more in a week than the government can do in, you know, five years, and in some ways he’s right.” — Bernie Sanders

• “Libs were told [Jan. 6] is the only thing that happened in the last 5 years but if you put it in the context of lockdowns, censorship, mandatory vaxx pushes and government-endorsed race riots you’ll find the average person who doesn’t binge MSNBC barely registers it.” — The Blaze’s Auron MacIntyre

• “Progressivism is when you no longer communicate with anybody in your immediate family, but you feel a strong sense that your community has been harmed when somebody modernizes the facade of a building you don’t own.” — Wayne Burkett

• “What is going to happen to these people? What is going to happen to the military when the military opens fire on us?” — Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky, during a CNN panel discussion on illegal immigrant deportations

• “Funny how libs recognize that minorities have lived experiences of race that may not be adequately captured by data or evidence, but class-based lived experience is dismissed as ‘vibes’ if it contradicts the data-fied picture of the economy sanctioned by the professional class.” — Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper

• “We know that when it comes to minority populations, they tend to be undercounted. So get this: [Texas] added 4 million people. They were people of color. Texas got two new seats. So they took those black and brown and Asian bodies, and guess what? Do you think that we got a new black, brown or Asian seat? Somehow, the way that they do their Republican math in the state of Texas, that amounted to two new white seats.” — Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), during a House hearing examining the Census Bureau’s activities ahead of the 2030 census

• “What makes the FBI director different from most other nominees is they’re not just appointed for one term of a president, they’re appointed for enough time to last past two terms of a president, because they’re supposed to be insulated from politics. President Biden scrupulously adhered to that longstanding bipartisan tradition.” — White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking on CNN

• “A Tulsi Gabbard nomination is a pro-war nomination globally. Point blank, period.” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, during an appearance on Joy Reid’s show

• “The transgender issue is so difficult for liberals because it is one where any conservative by virtue of their default hostility to social innovation is going to be completely right about a movement that depends on waging war on reality and repressing those who wish to remain ensconced in reality. But even more than that, the issue is a symptom of having reached the end of the age of Emancipation, where all that remains to be liberated are criminals, paraphiliacs, the mentally ill, children, and those in the grip of delusions that remain delusional despite being socially validated.” — Wesley Yang

• “America’s biggest problem with racism is treating racism like it’s still America’s biggest problem.” — Podcaster Kaizen D. Asiedu

• “Musk has a brain, but doesn’t have a heart.” — Democratic political consultant Chai Komanduri, speaking on MSNBC

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

• The New York Times: “Mexican Cartels Lure Chemistry Students to Make Fentanyl”

• Politico: “The plan to kill Osama bin Laden—from the spycraft to the assault to its bizarre political backdrop—as told by the people in the room.”

• Wired: “A Brutal Murder, a Wearable Witness, and an Unlikely Suspect”

• Time: “How Elon Musk Became a Kingmaker”

• The Verge: “Millions of people are turning to AI for companionship. They are finding the experience surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and profoundly confusing, leaving them to wonder, ‘Is this real? And does that matter?’”

• Esquire: “We see right through the unshowered soul living in a car by the beach, or by the Walmart, or by the side of the road. But he’s there, and he used to be somebody. He still is. A firsthand account of homelessness in America.”

• National Geographic: “Seeking to solve the Arctic’s biggest mystery, they ended up trapped in ice at the top of the world”