Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid had arguably her most insane rant ever on Tuesday, January 14, 2025.

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.”

---

• “Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc. aren’t failing to realize that the thermostatic pendulum of American politics could swing back to Democrats who could be harsher when they regain power, the tech billionaires are betting that there won’t be another free and fair election now that coup plotters retook power.” — University of Illinois professor Nicholas Grossman

• “The fact that merely letting people talk to each other feels like a dangerous concession to the right tells you just how much power progressives had amassed.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “First, the media cannot be relied on to tell the [Biden administration’s] success story. Rs have a reliable propaganda machine in right-wing media; Democrats enjoy no such luxury.” — Jen Rubin

• “Though there is one thing the billionaire right is, they are consistent. They want California, America’s biggest state economy. Because if they can take California and retrofit it with their ugly right-wing policies, the way they’ve ruined Florida and Texas and every other red state, where poverty rates are high and education is warped and non-white immigrants, pregnant women, and LGBTQ folks live in fear, then the fight for permanent control of America is basically over. They can drive out the brown people and the black and Asian people or just sink them into the same apartheid they’ve created in Texas.” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid

• “If you perform at the Trump inauguration or at any related events you are endorsing him. Full stop. And it’s no more defensible than if you performed for Putin or Orban or in the 1930s for the German chancellor. You can dress it up all you want but that’s what it is.” — Also Joy Reid

• “Pete Hegseth is the least qualified nominee I think we’ve ever seen for secretary of defense, but he meets the demographic characteristics for the right now to call him DEI. Because it seems to me that what they’re saying is the military has too many women, it has too many black people, it has too many brown people, it has too many gay people, and that the only quality people who exist, who are qualified to do anything, even if they have no background, are white, straight, Christian men.” — Also Joy Reid

• “He’s a TV host. That’s his main qualification.” — The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, regarding Pete Hegseth

• “Trump’s nomination of Hegseth is best understood as part of a decapitation strike against the republic. A Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States.” — Yale historian Timothy Snyder

• “Our military is more diverse than it has ever been, but, more importantly, it is more lethal than it has ever been. This is not a coincidence.” — Democrat Senator Jack Reed

• “Unlike the current administration, politics should play no part in military matters. We are not Republicans or Democrats—we are American warriors. Our standards will be high, and they will be equal (not equitable, that is a very different word).” — Pete Hegseth, during his confirmation hearing

• “When anybody, some dude on the internet, is received with as much credibility as somebody who has to hold themselves to the highest standards of journalistic ethics, fact-checking and professionalism, that is a huge threat to the entire possibility of making policy in a democracy.” — U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, speaking with studentd at the University of Michigan

• “Biden inherited a mess. He leaves the U.S. in far better shape, at home and abroad.” — The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson

• “It’s unreasonable that the House refuses to make any accommodations for people who are pregnant and welcoming a new child.” — Democrat Rep. Brittany Pettersen

• “Republicans have told the politically-damaging tale for 4 years: a chaotic surge of illegal immigration occurred because Joe Biden opened our border. Some Democrats now echo it. But it wasn’t true.” — John Harwood

• “Let’s get something in mind about the border. When I became president, the numbers came way down.” — Joe Biden

• “I would have beaten Trump and could have beaten Trump. And I think Kamala could have beaten Trump and would have beaten Trump.” — Also Joe Biden

• “I think the American people are safer and the country is better off than we were four years ago.” — U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan

• “Cutting fact checkers from social platforms is like disbanding your fire department.” — Alan Duke, a former CNN journalist who co-founded the fact-checking outlet Lead Stories

• “Zuck will be personally lynching queers from lampposts by the end of the year at this rate.” — Harvard Law instructor Alejandra Caraballo, regarding Mark Zuckerberg rolling back Meta’s DEI programs

• “David Hogg represents exactly the kind of bold, dynamic, and courageous leadership our party needs right now. He has a unique ability to connect with the American people and to speak to the strengths of our party. I couldn’t be happier to support him for DNC Vice Chair.” — Tim Walz

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

• The Atlantic: “They Stole Yogi Berra’s World Series Rings. Then They Did Something Really Crazy.”

• Esquire: “Animals: The Horrific True Story of the Zanesville Zoo Massacre”

• The New Yorker: “Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?”

• The New Yorker: “The Really Big One”

• Wired: “The Hibernator’s Guide to the Galaxy”

• The Wall Street Journal: “The Bomb Is Back as the Risk of Nuclear War Enters a New Age”

• Rolling Stone: “Confessions of a Journalist Turned Weed Smuggler”