Quotes and Links

A week in review

MSNBC political analyst Molly Jong-Fast argued that Sen. JD Vance's recently unearthed comments criticizing "childless" Democrats reveals his "racist" vision for America.

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• “In 2012, Obama lost the white working-class vote by 20 points, a bounce back performance after the Democrats’ catastrophic performance with this demographic in the 2010 election. Gaining back some of Democrats’ lost white working-class support was a widely-ignored key to his re-election, particularly his success in Midwest/Rustbelt states. But famously Clinton in 2016 did much less well, losing these voters by 27 points (and the election in the process because of these voters’ defection in three key Rustbelt states). Then in 2020, Biden lost this demographic nationally by a slightly lower 26 points, which included slight improvements in those key Rustbelt states—an underrated factor in his victory. But today in the Times poll, Harris is losing these voters by a whopping 38 points.” — The Liberal Patriot’s Ruy Teixeira

• “Kamala Harris Would Be A DEI President — And That’s A Good Thing For America” — Huffington Post headline

• “I think to question someone’s racial identity, especially him…the bar has fallen so low.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin, regarding Trump pointing out that in the past, Kamala Harris has campaigned as an Indian-American. Two years ago Sunny Hostin questioned Nikki Haley”s racial identity, calling her a “chameleon” and accusing her of not “leaning” into her Indian heritage.

• “I surely believe that he went with the intention of showing himself and his hardest core right-wing supporters that he is fully ready to put black people in their place, particularly black women.” — NYT’s Mara Gay, on Trump attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention.

• “One of the bizarre elements of progressive rhetoric right now is this combination of beliefs: We have to defeat Donald Trump at all costs; this country is filled with racism and sexism; we have a moral duty to nominate a Black woman for the presidency.” — Freddie deBoer

• “How will we tell?” — National Review’s Charles Cooke, on CNN permanently ending its opinion section.

• “So, what’s interesting is this is this natalism that comes from an authoritarian playbook, right? That there needs to be more ‘white children,’ right? That’s the idea. You know, this is about ‘Great Replacement Theory,’ racism. This is what this is. So don’t misunderstand it for [Vance] wanting more children.” — MSNBC’s Molly Jong-Fast. Never mind that JD Vance is the father of three biracial children with his Indian-American wife.

• “Molly grew up with rich white parents, surrounded by whites, chose a white husband and has white kids. JD Vance did the opposite with his family. But liberals believe that the *least relevant metric* of a person’s character is how they live their life. The only test is voting Dem and putting BLM hashtags in your bio. That means you’re an enlightened liberal, basically black by license, and thus own the racism accusation and are immune from racism.” — Glenn Greenwald

• “Where Harris’s mother held a doctorate, Vance’s had a drug habit; side by side, their respective upbringings highlight how hollow accusations of ‘white privilege’ can ring, and go a long way toward explaining the media’s need to find other ways to make Vance seem unsympathetic.” — Compact’s Batya Ungar-Sargon

• “Middling professional class women employed in the teaching and helping professions are the shock troops of the Great Awokening. It was a mistake to refer to them collectively by a puerile shorthand that isn’t even accurate — these women are as often married mothers as they are single childless cat moms. But then it was a throwaway line in a podcast. Vance was referring to the class of neurotic scolds, most of them female, who were the driving force behind lockdowns but then pivoted to say ‘racism is the pandemic’ to give license to people to riot in the streets after the death of George Floyd, while you couldn’t go to church, children languished online, suffering permanent development delays, and grandma died alone. There is justified resentment against people who talk like this. This resentment is rooted in the collective power they have over people’s lives and the destructive and deranged manner in which they wielded it. The impulse to slap back at them with puerile epithets should be resisted, since it recasts this class as pitiable and oppressed rather than oppressive.” — Wesley Yang

• “Conservative white men like Vance are the hated pariahs of the emerging regime while nonbinary proselytizers in schools and medical clinics helping children to overcome their Eurocentric cisheteronormative upbringings are the new standard bearers who define normalcy.” — Also Wesley Yang

• “Vice President Harris’s laugh has a beat and a bit of B-flat. Donald Trump has criticized it, but Democrats say it’s good to have a candidate who laughs instead of one who never does.” — Washington Post headline

• “It’s been taboo for women to speak too loud, to laugh too loud, to laugh too much. It’s predictable that, when Kamala laughs, she’s asserting her power and her refusal to be silent or play by these old rules about proper femininity.” — Kathleen Karlyn, Director of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Oregon

• “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development. At least Biden pretended to be a moderate. Now they have to choose between Trump and the most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times — between Trump and a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders. Even the pretense of a benign alternative has been eliminated.” — Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen

• “The ‘How does this affect you personally?!’ bit stopped working when you guys decided to turn June in to [sic] a corporate-sponsored gay Ramadhan and charge people with felonies for smudging the sacred flag you painted on the ground.” — The Blaze’s Auron MacIntyre, in response to The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki commenting that “trans people” have become “one of the GOP’s two or three biggest issues” despite “only affecting a very small percentage of the population.”

• “Like, Andy Beshear is a red state governor with this big white family that—he looks like a Republican, like that’s what [Kamala Harris] wants here.” — NYT’s Annie Karnie, during a CNN panel discussion on potential Kamala Harris running mates.

• “‘So uniquely her’: where did Kamala Harris’s self-help speaking style come from?” — Guardian headline

• “Black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd of them, with the majority unarmed. And that’s exactly what happened with Sonya Massey.” — Kimberlé Crenshaw, leading critical race theory scholar and Columbia law school professor. Per The Washington Post’s database, 84 of the 9,929 fatal police shootings over the past nine years have involved black women, which is less than 1%. Crenshaw’s claim is almost 40 times higher.

• “I think one of our collective worries was that, in our schools, if our kids were going, they would start dying. We did not know [covid] was respiratory in nature, we didn’t know that it would be people on the other end of the age spectrum who would be most vulnerable.” — Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, during an interview on CNN. All of this information was known within the first month of the pandemic.

• “The bad news is that a majority of white women vote for Republicans, because too many of us believe, subconsciously, that it is in our best interest to use our privilege and our support systems of white supremacy and the patriarchy to benefit us.” — Gun control activist and Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, during the “White Women for Kamala” zoom call she organized that raised over $11 million.

• “We live in a country where a regular guy working a 9-5 will face more professional consequences for sharing an offensive joke online than the unelected bureaucrats tasked with protecting our president will face for almost getting the leading candidate killed.” — The Blaze’s Logal Hall

• “As the attorney general of the great state of New York, I and my other colleagues, all democratic attorney generals, have endorsed Kamala Harris for president of these United States. And I think an attorney general obviously knows, is in the best position, to know what a former attorney general is capable of. And Kamala Harris clearly is capable, and is the most qualified individual to run for president—in fact, more qualified than the last four presidents.” — Letitia James, endorsing Kamala Harris on MSNBC.

• “They hate Trump because he champions the people they hate, they hate Vance because he is the people they hate.” — Podcaster Darryl Cooper

• “You know, at this point the Republican ticket is sort of like a walking billboard for men who don’t go to therapy.” — Vox executive Liz Plank, during an appearance on CNN.

• “Sure, I want Kamala to win. But I don’t think it’s the job of writers to engage in self-debasing propaganda for a candidate. It’s not our job to be on a ‘team.’ This mad rush to re-imagine Kamala as the second coming of Obama is bizarre.” — The Washington Post’s Shadi Hamid

• “Kamala Harris is a cook — and she knows her L.A. restaurants. Will it help her win?” — Los Angeles Times headline

• Reuters: “We Bought Everything Needed to Make $3 Million Worth of Fentanyl. All It Took Was $3,600 and a Web Browser.”

• “A Pattern of Lavish Spending at a Leading L.G.B.T.Q. Nonprofit,” from The New York Times.

• “Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps,” also from The New York Times.

• A Tablet piece on “How Barack Obama ended normalcy in American politics.”

• The Wall Street Journal: “America’s New Political War Pits Young Men Against Young Women”

• A City Journal piece on how progressives have notched another victory in their war on American institutions by “Girling the Boy Scouts.”

• The New Yorker: “My Mother, the Gambler”