Quotes and Links

A week in review

Progressive Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said the federal government needs to provide significant assistance to his city to help with the border crisis.

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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• “These immigrants that come over here, they’ve been raping people, they’ve been breaking into homes. They’re like savages as well. They don’t speak the language and they look at us like we were crazy.” — Illinois NAACP President Teresa Haley

• “I honestly can’t think of anything more likely to cause an actual race war than reparations. Imagine being an Appalachian or Spanish guy, and seeing your identical-circumstances Black buddy, from the old team, get $5,000,000 for nothing. Does that relationship survive? Multiply by 20,000,000.” — American political scientist Wilfred Reilly

• “Totally agree with you on the mitigation advice, but I very much judge anyone who participates in the social murder of disabled people just because it’s ‘the holidays.’ Many of us who are high risk are missing our FOURTH Christmas because other selfish people can’t be bothered to mask and take basic precautions that allow us to safely participate in public life. They don’t feel enough shame and judgement imo, instead infection has been fully normalized.” — Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz

• “We have reached a critical point in this mission that absent real, significant intervention immediately, our local economies are not designed and built to respond to this type of crisis.” — Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who has been begging Biden for help with the migrant crisis while maintaining that Chicago remains a sanctuary city. But instead of asking for federal policy changes, Johnson asks for money.

• “The wisdom of the CO Supreme Court’s decision hinges on its political consequences, not its legal merits.” — New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz

• “We all have different reasons for favoring an outcome to the President Gay episode — to me it seems vitally important that the first university president to use the term ‘my truth’ in earnest be removed quickly.” — Wesley Yang

• “Since Jesus is from Bethlehem, he’s technically a Palestinian. Remember that the next time you hear a death toll from the Palestinian territories. If Jesus returns to the place of his birth, could he survive the night? Or would he be just another Palestinian casualty?” — Democratic presidential candidate Cenk Uygur

• “Cenk Uygur is a 1970s NYC cab driver with access to TikTok.” — Tablet’s Noam Blum

• “There was an eroticism with something so big and so old holding my back.” — Sonja Semyonova, an “ecosexual” who has fallen in love with an oak tree

• “Gaza is precisely what the Western left says it hates: a racist, sexist, homophobic, militaristic, anti-Democratic, kleptocratic, dogmatically religious police state of science fictional inequity and oppression. And they love it more than anything in the world.” — Commentary’s Abe Greenwald

• “In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper.” — Author Michael Crichton

• “As biological anthropologists we condemn the historical role of our discipline in producing binaries of sex, gender, and sexuality and are committed to work that enacts a more livable world.” — Statement from the American Association of Biological Anthropologists

• “Idk who need to read this but everything bad is white peoples fault. Everything you hate about this world…you can damn near always trace it back to white people. Idk how them mfs don’t be more embarrassed tbh.” — Democratic activist Kashmir Thompson

• “Let’s not forget the White House giving Tesla the cold shoulder, excluding us from the EV summit and crediting GM with ‘leading the electric car revolution’ in the same quarter that they delivered 26 electric cars (not a typo) and Tesla delivered 300 thousand.” — Elon Musk

• “The last five years will be remembered as one of the most successful disinformation and brainwashing efforts in modern history.” — Public’s Michael Shellenberger, on how Democrats went from 40% to 70% support for government censorship between 2018 and 2023

• “There is 1 or 2 percent of black people in America who have a better life (since slavery).” — John Mellencamp

• “Identifying as ‘queer’ is a way for woke straight people to pretend they’re a minority.” — YouTuber Marcus Dib

• “Beware the gatekeepers of misinformation who pretend that it is somehow in everybody’s best interest if accurate information is kept quiet—and who disdain other reporters for breaking ranks.” — Reason’s Robby Soave, on NBC “disinformation reporter” Ben Collins calling the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal a right-wing grifter operation that shouldn’t be covered

• “I am anti-illegal immigrant. Send them all back across the Rio Grande. To see another group come over here, it’s disgraceful, it’s un-American. What about the black children? The black workers? They compete with us! I am strictly advocating for black people. Call ICE on them. Trump, come in here and clean this mess up.” — Chicago legend George Blakemore

• “The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States. For the freedom and future of all life on this planet depends on that.” — University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie

• “The Serial Killer Has Second Thoughts: The Confessions of Thomas Quick,” from GQ.

• “How an Adoption Broker Cashed In on Prospective Parents’ Dreams,” from the New Yorker.

• A New York Times piece on how Hamas weaponized sexual violence on Oct. 7.

• “The Southern Poverty Law Center’s New Enemy: Americans Who Accept Biology,” from Quillette.

• “The Murders Down the Hall,” from New York magazine.

• A Discover magazine story about how time works in our universe.

• “What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane,” from the Atlantic.