Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett speaks at the Human Rights Campaign’s 2025 Los Angeles Dinner on March 22. | Christopher Polk/Variety

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 longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “I would emphasize that many Americans experienced the recent period of liberal power, especially under Covidian conditions, as much more authoritarian and lawless-feeling in its everyday impact — schools closed and masks mandated, ideological double standards for different forms of public gathering and protest, ideological speech codes tacitly or explicitly imposed — than anything they experienced under Trump.” — NYT’s Ross Douthat

• “I want to send a message to somebody. Elon, take your musty millions and musty Moscow rights to the moon. Because if you don’t, we are going to stand up, we are going to speak out, we’re going to march and we are going to do anything we need to do. You must get your musty hands off our money or go to Moscow, you musty moo, moo, moo.” — Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, speaking at a recent protest against federal government expenditure cuts

• “Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).” — Compact’s Jacob Savage

• “So many people have sacrificed and fought and died for democracy. And Trump comes along with his ignorant ass and he don’t even know the Constitution. If he wants to start looking so closely to find those who were born here and their parents were undocumented, maybe he ought to first look at Melania.” — Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, speaking at a Los Angeles protest against DOGE¹

• “Trump escalates threats against those who destroy Tesla vehicles” — Washington Post headline

• “First of all, you can’t make Canada the 51st state without going to war with them. Let me explain how that happened, how that worked out the last time we tried to go to war with Canada. They burned the white house to the ground in 1814 and won the war. Canada beat us in the war of 1812. They probably like their chances against us. We’re not going to beat them in a war because we have never been able to do that.” — Joy Reid, during an appearance on Don Lemon’s podcast²

• “[Musk’s] incompetent. He’s a thief. He’s a Nazi. And people don’t trust him.” — Former Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman, during a CNN panel discussion

• “Until the GOP and Trump care more about immigrants, women’s rights, people of color’s history and equality, healthcare for people, gun victims, the poor and hungry, and our Constitution than they do Teslas, then don’t ask me to feel bad about the damage to Teslas around the world.” — Matthew Dowd, chief political analyst for ABC News

• “Five years after covid struck, liberals have reconsidered their mistakes, while conservatives have done the opposite.” — The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait

• “I question why the first time in American history a president has won every swing state and is also best friends and his largest donor was a man who owns and runs the internet. So, I would hope that would be investigated, and that we would see whether or not it was an anomaly or something else that happened on election night in America when Kamala Harris was filling up stadiums with people who supported her and Donald Trump was not able to do that.” — Rosie O’Donnell, who recently relocated to Ireland

• “Tom Homan is like an early 20th century Southern sheriff who’d send a mob to find a black kid who’d allegedly looked the wrong way at a white woman.” — John Harwood

• “Why is it that whenever Republicans decide to boycott a company like Bud Light or Disney, they’re doing it because they’re victims of that company. Yet, when America decides to boycott a company like Tesla ‘cause the CEO is running around telling Americans what they can and can’t live without so that he can have a tax break, then all of a sudden they’re victims again. So they’re victims when they’re being boycotted and they’re victims when they’re boycotting. That’s because Donald Trump has made his fortune and his political career on being a victim. And Republicans have learned the same thing, always be a victim. That’s not a very masculine trait to me.” — Adam Kinzinger

• “There was literally a 10-question survey that you could do with SurveyMonkey for $10,000 that the government was charged almost a billion dollars for.” — Elon Musk, when asked by Bret Baier what DOGE’s most astonishing discovery has been so far

• “Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there. And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot ass mess, honey.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, speaking about Texas Governor Greg Abbott at a Human Rights Campaign dinner

• “I wasn’t thinking about the governor’s condition—I was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable. Literally, the next line I said was that he was a ‘Hot A** Mess,’ referencing his terrible policies. At no point did I mention or allude to his condition.” — Also Jasmine Crockett³

• “I never remember in my lifetime a sitting president trashing a previous president. I’ve never heard that before.” — The View’s Joy Behar

• “They want to bring in Panama. They want to bring in Greenland. They want to bring in Canada, where Elon Musk is a citizen after he left his apartheid South Africa. Why? Because they believe that this new consortium will require a new Constitution that would allow Elon Musk to run for president.” — Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin

• “Join us, the right-wing says, and you can use slurs.” — Intelligencer’s Sarah Jones, in a piece titled “Masculinity Will Not Save Men”

• “The right-wing offers men a purpose of a sort but asks him to derive his meaning from the subjugation of others.” — Also Sarah Jones

• “The number one domestic terror threat in America for several years in a row has been white supremacist terrorism which is often aligned with right-wing radical groups. How many times have Trump, Vance, Musk and GOP spoken about them?” — Daily Beast’s Wajahat Ali

• “We let them define the issue on immigration, we let them define the issue on DEI, and we let them define what woke is. We got ourselves in this mess because we weren’t bold enough to stand up and say, you’re damn right we’re proud of these policies.” — Tim Walz, speaking at a Texas town hall with Beto O’Rourke

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

• Vanity Fair: “Sympathy for the Devil”

• Compact: “The Vanishing White Male Writer”

• The New Yorker: “The Case of the Scattered Dutchman”

• The New Yorker: “Jumpers”

• Rolling Stone: “Bellagio Bandit: How One Man Robbed Vegas’ Biggest Casino and Almost Got Away”

• GQ: “The Unsolved Mystery of the Malibu Creek Murder”

• The New Republic: “The Last Unknown Man”

1. New York Post: “Melania Trump was born in 1970 in Slovenia, then a part of Yugoslavia. She relocated to New York City on her own in 1996, initially on a travel visa before receiving a H1-B visa that allowed her to legally work as a model. The future first lady became a US citizen in 2006 after marrying Donald Trump and is the first naturalized American to serve in that role.”

2. Canadian troops didn’t burn down the White House. Canada was opposed to America in the War of 1812 as part of the British Empire at the time, but it was British troops and leadership who set fire to the White House and other federal buildings in 1814. Moreover, the British did not win the war. It resulted in a stalemate. And the idea that the modern Canadian military poses any kind of threat to the American military is hysterical, to put it mildly.

3. The Washington Free Beacon found that Crockett “‘liked’ Facebook comments referring to wheelchair-bound Texas governor Greg Abbott as ‘hot wheels’ in 2021.” And “hot wheels” has long been a derogatory slang term used to refer to paraplegics.