Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

Leading Democratic Party Chair candidate Ken Martin speaks at the DNC Candidate Forum, Monday, January 20, 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.”

---

• “I’m the first Black press secretary. The first person of color press secretary. The first openly queer press secretary. The first Haitian American immigrant press secretary. The first press secretary to be all of the above. Being a first meant that my responsibilities were beyond those in the job description, the load heavier.” — Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, in an interview with Vanity Fair

• “Trump is freeing his violent paramilitary wing from prison because he wants his supporters to be unconstrained to commit violence.” — The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait

• “Is it fine to call everyone who voted for this president racist, bigoted fuckwads, or are people still trying to pretend this had something to do with groceries?” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “I will also never forgive the people who denied us 4-8 years of Alpha Wife Guy Doug.” — Also Elie Mystal

• “I do not see many people of color.” — CBS Mornings co-anchor Gayle King, commenting on the crowd at Trump’s inauguration

• “Free-speech restrictions are like poison gas. They seem like a terrific weapon when you’ve got the gas in your hands and you’ve got your particular target in sight. But the wind has a way of shifting, and when it does, it blows the restrictions back on you. That’s why the progressives have their heads up their asses. I know they’re freaked out about the strength of the right wing these days. I know they’re freaked out about Trump. I’m freaked out, too. But when you allow one power the power to decide who gets to speak, you are deciding that all power has that power.” — Ira Glasser, head of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001

• “Today we inaugurate our courage as power hopes to inaugurate our cowardice. Courage is not the absence of danger but the strength to do what’s right in the face of it, as has been said. We can begin amassing the strength to be antiracist in dangerously racist times. We can be courageous today. I’ll be finishing a book for young readers and a book for adults that are coming out this year. Do you today, with courage for us. Courage is the fuel of resistance, the building block of a new world.” — Ibram X. Kendi

• “America voluntarily turned into a near fascist state within a decade. That’s how quickly it happened. The pain will last for years.” — NYT’s Wajahat Ali

• “I was covering Biden at the time, and I remember coming to my editor and saying, ‘Hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop.’ And I was told this came from on high at Politico: Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop. And the only thing Politico wound up writing was that piece that called it disinformation, which charitably could be called misinformation, at the least.” — Former Politico reporter Marc Caputo, during an appearance on Tara Palmeri’s podcast

• “I’m at the Princeton Columbia MBB game, sitting next to one Columbia fan with a National Review hat and in front of another wearing a gold and white Trump 47 hat. I may need bail money later.” — Kevin Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University

• “Donald Trump didn’t care a bit about safer communities when he released those who were convicted of beating the shit out of police officers. So, don’t come to us and talk about security and safer communities!” — Democrat rep. Nydia Velazquez

• “As an Indian American, let me say this with my whole chest: fuck Usha Vance and her aspirational whiteness.” — NYT bestselling author Samira Ahmed

• “People often say, ‘you don’t sound like a Democrat, and you seem to have left the party.’ No, the party left me, and it left working-class people.” — NYC Mayor Eric Adams, in an interview with Tucker Carlson

• “When does he bring back segregated water fountains?” — John Harwood, on Trump ending DEI programs across the federal workforce

• “What DEI is about is giving everyone with merit an opportunity. That’s the fundamental value. It’s an American value.” — National Urban League’s Marc Morial, speaking on CNN

• “The reason the trans issue is so important is because defeating gender self-id protects a fact-based order against a feelings-based order. If we lose reality we open the door to an Orwellian undermining of truth and freedom.” — Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at University of Buckingham

• “As an elected official in Rhode Island, I will do everything in my power to defend and protect our undocumented immigrant communities. ICE is not welcomed in the state.” — Democratic Rep. Enrique Sanchez

• “The number of texts I’m getting about what Melania Trump is wearing is zero.” — CNN’s Jake Tapper

• “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats who share our values, and we will take their money, but we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.” — Leading Democratic Party Chair candidate Ken Martin

• “If the argument is that Dems need to win the attention economy, and be attention-getters, then that means Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate regardless of whether you agree with her politics or not (and I happen to agree with them, conveniently).” — Daily Beast’s Mehdi Hasan

• “This is the eve of an authoritarian, 21st century fascism.” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

• “I think it’s an incredible situation, and the problem I see is the same thing repeating itself from what happened in the Civil War and the aftermath where the working class whites of the South, who had nothing to benefit by maintaining the system — because they got nothing out of it — were convinced because of cultural sort of language and division that the white working class, who should have sided with the North in this and should have sided with more freedom and should have sided with the freed slaves, ended up becoming part of that sort of awful thing, and that led through civil rights.” — MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd, comparing Trump voters to poor white people who sided with slave owners during the Civil War against their own economic interests

• “‘My goodness gracious,’ ‘historically low,’ and ‘historically awful’ is how I would categorize Biden’s final approval ratings. Biden goes out with the lowest approval rating (38%) after a first term on record.” — CNN’s Harry Enten

• “The problem for Dems is that the ‘edgy’ stuff young men like mostly means ‘being obnoxious to women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and fat people.’” — The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki

• “The brazen power grab by the oligarchs to create a techno feudalist state is pushing the US towards revolution. Whenever such a wealthy few seek to exert total control over the masses without democratic accountability, a violent revolution becomes inevitable. Their greed put the US on this path.” — Harvard instructor Alejandra Caraballo

• “The elites have done a good job over the past 50 years, the populists haven’t, and yet no one holds people like Trump (or Musk, as JVL notes) accountable for things they say and predict. Because we expect elites to perform at high levels of competence, and we expect nothing from populism.” — Tom Nichols

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

• The New York Times: “The Terrifying Ride of Copter 17”

• Rolling Stone: “Empire of Blood: How Dana White’s UFC Conquered America”

• Atavist: “The After Dark Bandit”

• The New Yorker: “What Happened When an Extremely Offline Person Tried TikTok”

• Wired: “The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real.”

• Truly Adventurous: “The Last Train Robbery”

• The Los Angeles Times: “Inside the rise of the conservative movie industry behind ‘Reagan,’ ‘Am I Racist?’”

• Vanity Fair: “Infighting. Panic. Blame. A Special Report From Inside the Democratic Party’s Epic Hangover”