Quotes and Links

A week in review

Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast had another banger this week while speaking on MSNBC, Monday, August 12, 2024.

Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of various 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.”

---

• “Food is one of the most universally beloved things on planet Earth. Aligning a presidential campaign with it is smart for all the obvious reasons, but for the Harris-Walz ticket, it’s also a signal. The rhetorical challenge of progressivism is that it is by nature abstract: It imagines a world that does not yet exist, rather than advocating to return to some previous version of the one we know. I find it telling that Walz keeps using the word joy when he talks about the campaign and about his running mate. It’s an uncomplicated message, one that’s even more concrete than Barack Obama’s hope: Hope is the future, but joy is the present. It’s cold milk on a hot day; a perfectly cracked egg; a steaming casserole dish full of God knows what, enjoyed at a crowded table. In foregrounding food, Harris and Walz are making theirs the candidacy of terrestrial pleasure and straightforward abundance. It’s simple, really.” — The Atlantic’s Ellen Cushing

• “We cannot be reminded often enough that while in the Soviet Union they had state-run media, in our country we have a media-run state.” — N.S. Lyons

• “The Media’s Double Standard Favors Trump, Not Harris” — New York magazine headline

• “Fun to watch the shift in the press from ‘Biden was the greatest president in a century,’ when he was the nominee, to ‘Harris had nothing to do with all that,’ now that he’s not.” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

• “The way in which we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy.” — Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates, in an interview with Chicago radio news station WVON 1690

• “In Project 2025, folks like [Stephen] Miller, Vance, and Trump want to nationalize their long-term goal of putting a stop to what they call ‘anti-white racism,’ which is just another way of saying ‘we’re sick of America being held accountable for actual racism.’” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid

• “Unusually small eyes as if begrudging vision itself; resisting what the eyes ‘see’ in preference to what the brain dictates. Ideal eyes for one who would punish others zealously and feel little empathy for those whom he would hurt. Eyes of distrust but more importantly, eyes to be distrusted.” — Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, describing JD Vance’s eyes

• “Yeah, I think it’s a really good campaign, and people really like her, she’s gotten to be a really gifted, Obama-level orator.” — Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast

• “I am getting more and more convinced than ever that we could actually be seeing essentially the mirror image of 2016, where Trump is the incumbent who’s not in office, just like Hillary was the incumbent who was not in office, and Harris is something new, we haven’t tried that. Trump was, oh, we hadn’t tried that. And that, right now, I think is probably her best asset.” — MSNBC’s Chuck Todd

• “I continue to argue that we should calculate the total man-hours spent stuck in traffic behind one of these protests, and then the protesters should serve one hour in jail for every hour they wasted of someone else’s time.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle, regarding the “pro-Palestine” protestors who blocked the West L.A. 405 freeway on Tuesday, the busiest freeway in the country.

• “Whiteness is a construct. It was an idea made up by Europeans as they were determining in the earliest years of America who was going to have access to our political system, our social system, our economic resources.” — 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones, during an interview on MSNBC

• “My son was struggling — then he fell for Trump’s toxic brand of ‘masculinity’. I’m heartbroken.” — Guardian headline

• “I’ve not been very political before. They try to paint me as a far-right guy which is absurd because I like to make electric vehicles. I supported Obama. I stood in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand. Historically I was a moderate Democrat. But now I feel like we’re at a critical juncture for the country. For the people out there in the moderate camp, I think you should support Donald Trump for president.” — Elon Musk, in his interview with Donald Trump. The interview received 73 million views, and there were 4 million subsequent posts about the conversation, generating a total of 998 million views. Musk offered to do an interview with Kamala Harris as well; her campaign declined.

• “I think that Elon Musk will let Donald Trump speak all the falsehoods and misinformation he wants. I mean, he’s not a journalist.” — Axios’s Sarah Fischer, during an appearance on CNN. Following the Musk/Trump interview, CNN aired a deceptively edited clip to give the impression that the two were downplaying the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when in reality they were talking about how radiation declines over time.

• “Racism Is Why Trump Is So Popular” — Intercept headline

• “VP Harris’s Democratic Party would be unrecognizable to my father and uncle and I cannot reconcile it with my values. The Democratic Party of RFK and JFK was the party of civil liberties and free speech. VP Harris‘s is the party of censorship, lockdowns, and medical coercion. Kennedy Democrats were anti-war. Kamala‘s is riddled with neocon warmongers. The RFK/JFK dems were allies of Main Street, cops, firefighters, and working people. VP Harris’s is the Party of Big Tech, Big Pharma and Wall Street. My dad and uncle’s party was the champion of voting rights and fair elections. VP Harris’s is the party of lawfare, disenfranchisement, and the coronation of its candidates by corporate donors and party elites.” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• “It’s really about the misogyny and the racism that drives the thing, and we got to recognize that. It’s not about any policy prescription. And the reason I suspect that most of these people describe themselves as pro-Israel is because the Jews are whiter than the Palestinians, which I think drives a lot of what they are.” — James Carville, on why more Republicans support Israel than Democrats.

• “I got infected about two weeks ago. It was my third infection, and I had been vaccinated and boosted a total of six times.” — Anthony Fauci, during an interview with MedPage Today in which he urged “at-risk people” to continue wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19

• “Joy, hope, connection — these are powerful feelings — especially in the face of fear and misery. It was a mistake to discount the joy Trump fans felt in 2016 and it’s a mistake to discount what Harris supporters are feeling now — emotions play a crucial role in voters’ decisions.” — Brian Stelter

• “The paramount objective for Kamala Harris is to win this election. If a press conference helps her win, she should do it. If not, she shouldn’t do it. It’s just that simple. She has no ‘moral obligation’ to talk to the press. Tone it down folks.” — Stanford political science professor Michael McFaul

• “If you notice, Democrats haven’t been pontificating as much about ‘democracy’ lately after they launched a donor putsch to install a new nominee who got zero primary votes, won’t reveal policy positions, and is hiding from the press.” — Michael Tracey

• “If we could convince Kamala Harris that illegal aliens are actually journalists trying to ask her questions she’d build that border wall in five seconds.” — JD Vance

• “Imagine a candidate so terrible that her campaign has to edit the headlines of leftist propaganda outlets to make them seem even more biased.” — The Blaze’s Auron MacIntyre, regarding the bombshell Axios story about the Harris campaign editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads so as to make it appear as if The Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, and other major publishers are on her side. The campaign is now facing a potential lawsuit.

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

• “The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It),” from Presser magazine.

• AFAR: “Why Some People Are Paying to Be Left on a Desert Island—Alone”

• A Tablet profile of Palmer Lucky, an American entrepreneur and founder of Oculus VR, “perhaps the wildest misfit tech diva of his generation, with a torrid ambition and engineering prowess rivaled only by Elon Musk.”

• “The Californication of Texas,” from UnHerd.

• An N.S. Lyons piece on “The Machiavellian cause of Britain’s disorder.”

• The Wall Street Journal: “A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage”

• Another WSJ story about how “Tech Bros Are Betting They Can Help Win a War With China.”

• “How to Start a Professional Sports Team, Win Games, and Save the Town,” from The Ringer.