"The Red Scare took decades to build. At its heart, it had a genuine foreign adversary and real domestic espionage. The Blue Scare isn’t being built with the same care or attention or effort at creating political consensus.

The Trump administration, as it often does, is speed-running the project."

"Leadership is always a choice. You can choose to use a moment like this to deepen our divisions, to pull us apart from one another, to make politics into something yet that much closer to war.

Or you can use a moment like this to reduce those divisions."

"All I can say for me in the work I do is that I want to create a space that takes our disagreements seriously, that takes the stakes of them seriously, the consequences for people seriously, but does so without deepening our divisions irreparably. We are going to have to live here with each other"

"Much of what I would describe as Kirk's worst moments were now just standard fair MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of MAGA Republicanism is the President of the United States...we are going to have to live here with each other believing what we believe. Disagreeing in the ways we disagree."

"I had friends say to me, look, we can oppose political violence without whitewashing this guy. I spent some time thinking about that over the weekend...and my reaction honestly is that it is too little to just say we oppose political violence."

Last week, @rhodesben.bsky.social and I did a Munk Debates against Kevin Roberts and Kellyanne Conway on whether Trump is leading America into a new golden age.

We won. This is from my closing statement.

There’s nothing golden about a movement that bathes in gratuitous cruelty.