Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

CNN’s Brian Stelter has become increasingly prone to hyperventilation when discussing Elon Musk’s growing influence among the public.

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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• “California is spending $6.5 billion a year on Medicaid for undocumented immigrants.” — The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

• “If this teenage white student at this private Christian school had instead shot and killed unarmed Black and brown adults MAGA would celebrate her. This is where we are in America. Where we’ve always been, sadly.” — Daily Beast’s Wajahat Ali

• “Fight the president-elect’s attack on independent journalism with a pro-truth stance.” — The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson

• “Congress has the power to block Trump from taking office, but lawmakers must act now” — The Hill headline

• “This is interesting. I don’t expect Democrats to have the cojones to try it, but I see no fault in the reasoning.” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid, regarding the idea that Congress has the power to prevent Trump from taking office

• “Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and happy Kwanza and just plain happy holidays to everyone who opposes fascism, nazism, apartheid, colonialism and imperialism around the world. To everyone else? Have whatever kind of week works for you.” — Also Joy Reid

• “Biden is one of our greatest presidents — smears won’t tarnish his legacy.” — Former DNC Chair Donna Brazile

• “I think it is very cool that the political press was basically uninterested in the fact that Vance is openly adjacent to/pals around with far-right Nazi-sympathetic maniacs.” — NYT’s Jamelle Bouie

• “I was one of the last members of Congress in the gallery on Jan. 6, and as it turns out, we have the security footage that shows it was only 30 seconds from when I was able to evacuate that the insurrectionists were in that hallway hunting for us with zip ties and bear mace and who knows what else. I just felt like, [Trump] tried to kill me once. I’m not available for it again.” — NH Democrat Rep. Annie Kuster, on why she’s retiring from Congress

• “As gender-equality researchers at the U.N., we see growing evidence that women, girls and gender-diverse people are bearing the brunt of climate change. And that raises a question: What if we approached climate from a feminist perspective?” — Scientific American article written by Laura Turquet, Silke Staab, and Brianna Howell

• “There is a strange faction in US intellectual life that believes that urban crime and disorder are just punishments on American society for not adopting socialism.” — David Frum

• “The left is morally driven to hate inequality and finds itself opposing human nature, free markets, and evolution. The right is the ragtag coalition of people that want to be left alone - merchants, nationalists, the religious, libertarians. What unifies the right is the left.” — Naval Ravikant

• “The most insane-making political scandal of my adult life has been watching everyone shrug (including Republicans!) as it became increasingly apparent that a senile president was being managed by a posse of unelected bureaucrats while wars raged overseas. Truly, truly maddening.” — The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper

• “Because the media reports reality and most Republicans have disconnected themselves from reality.” — John Harwood, on why Republican trust in the mainstream media has plummeted

• “Keeping the space station manned is not worth selling our security out to Elon musk. Cutoff space X from federal contracts unless they can Musk. This is a clear and present danger.” — Adam Kinzinger

• “[Musk] is oftentimes relying on random anonymous accounts. These users on X who are trying to present themselves as the new CNN, the new New York Times, but have no research behind them, no backing, no institutional knowledge.” — CNN’s Brian Stelter

• “The thing about Elon’s alleged political power is that it mainly flows from just saying things out loud that are obviously true.” — Marc Andreessen

• “Buying a Tesla, or buying stock in Tesla, is different than buying a share of stock in GM or Daimler-Benz, or even Google and Facebook, because you are buying a share in Elon Musk—a 21st-century master technologist who is uniquely capable of imagining the very biggest things and turning them into physical realities. Musk’s companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars because of Elon Musk’s unique ability to incarnate dreams and make teams of talented people believe them, too. His investors are buying pieces of those dreams, which are magic—components of a self-validating belief system that puts its faith in the power of the individual believer.” — Tablet’s David Samuels

• “All these so-called Democrats, the party of inclusion, the party of diversity, masks off. And it’s even worse because they pretend to occupy the moral high ground. They pretend to be so loving and caring and embracing of diversity but all of a sudden, when I dare to utter any criticisms of the goddess Kamala Harris, I get ostracized. Me, after having raised tens of millions of dollars for the party. My donors are pissed. It’s my responsibility to ask what the hell happened with their money, these are legitimate questions, but no, in the cult, you can’t ask questions. And leaving the Democratic Party or even questioning the Democratic Party is like leaving a cult. It’s terrifying. I don’t want to be a part of this craziness anymore. They’re accelerating my rightward shift.” — Kamala Harris campaign advisor Lindy Li

• “The most devastating effect of cognitive stratification has been the loss of ability for high IQ people to model the inner lives of the average citizen. Elites literally can’t imagine what people who shop at Walmart think, what they value, how they live their lives.” — The Blaze’s Auron MacIntyre

• “The Supreme Court Case Over Trans Youth Could Also Decimate Women’s Equality” — Politico headline

• “Nevertheless, the moral wisdom of Biden’s decision is compelling to me. Biden’s legacy may be tied up in allegations of corruption and the evident cover-up of his waning health, but he has also secured a place in history as a president of certain mercies, all of which speak of the restraint a sovereign owes his people.” — The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig, on Joe Biden commiting the sentences of 37 death row prisoners

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

• Wired: “Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here's What Happened”

• The Wall Street Journal: “A Luxury Giant, a Reclusive Heir and the Case of the Missing $13 Billion”

• The Wall Street Journal: “Behind Closed Doors: The Spy-World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak”

• Harper’s: “The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify’s plot against musicians”

• Vanity Fair: “This Year’s Biggest Documentaries Are a Liberal’s Nightmare”

• Vanity Fair: “Can Anyone Fix California?”

• The New York Times: “The Hotel Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave”

• Nautilus: “Discovering the First Other Earths”