Quotes and Links

A week in review

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance sat down with popular podcaster Joe Rogan on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 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.”

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• “They’re not only looking the other way when he says fascist things like round people up and put them in camps and mass deportation and round up all of his enemies and arrest them. They just shrug their shoulders and say, there’s nothing wrong with it. So the Republicans who are still on Team Trump are apparently fascist enablers.” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid

• “Republicans keep saying Kamala Harris speaks in ‘word salad’ because she speaks in an intellectual, nuanced manner. They are so used to hearing first grade level vocabulary that anything more educated than that is confusing for them.” — Democratic Party strategist Ally Sammarco

• “Donald Trump, you never see him around strong, intelligent women, ever.” — Mark Cuban, during a Thursday appearance on The View

• “I think Joe Rogan is afraid to interview Kamala Harris because that would require a great deal of research and preparation that he is not equipped to do.” — Inside Edition’s Lisa Guerrero

• “If kids are hungry in school, what that does to the brain and learning, you’re not going to learn to read. So if you’re talking about learning to read and closing gaps then you better take away the barriers for that. If that’s tampons, then that’s tampons, right?” — Gwen Walz, wife of Tim Walz, appearing on Katie Couric’s podcast

• “These are deplorable people. Anyone in 2024 that is willing to vote for Donald Trump is deplorable, and it’s a morally indefensible position.” — Marc Lamont Hill, a CUNY professor and Kamala Harris surrogate

• “I was the US intelligence officer in charge of analysis of election threats in 2020. There was never any reason to think the Hunter Biden laptop was illegitimate. To this day I have no idea what basis FBI had in telling companies this. As far as I can tell they just made it up.” — Christopher Porter

• “Can’t get over Biden making this gaffe in a low-pressure Zoom call for Voto Latino. It’s like bowling with bumpers, but somehow throwing a gutter ball that also sets the room on fire.” — Semafor’s David Weigel

• “The main issue is that, like, I mean, yeah, it could be that The Washington Post is endorsing candidates — or it could be that there are millions of voters who believe lying politicians who tell them lies, no one knowing that they are. I mean, that could be the problem, too.” — CNN’s Abby Phillip, on what’s causing trust in the mainstream media to decline

• “I think the progressive idea tendency to treat men as potential predators who are guilty until proven innocent (by supporting progressive causes) is empirically false, culturally corrosive, and politically stupid.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “It’s always worth recognizing that the opposite of ‘DEI’ is not ‘segregation:’ it’s quite literally just race blind merit hiring - you take the names off the resumes and pick the best people. That is WHAT leftists are scared of.” — Kentucky State professor Wilfred Reilly

• “The entire modern Democrat party grew up in an era where there was consensus. They grew up in a high social trust era. A lot of them are trying to reimpose that social trust from the top, not recognizing that social trust came organically from the way American society worked. If you have people trying to reimpose it from the top, it degrades the very thing you’re trying to create.” — J.D. Vance

• “Vance Derangement Syndrome stems from JDs ability to speak in the language of the PMC [Professional Managerial Class] but utterly reject and dismantle their worldview calmly and thoroughly. This is piercing and demoralizing to the liberal mind because with Trump they can rationalize him away by thinking he’s just a simpleton.” — Podcaster Saagar Enjeti

• “Trump has personal faults. His opposition has institutional faults, which are much more serious and difficult to remedy.” — The Spectator’s Daniel McCarthy

• “About 90% if not more of you red hat followers need to be honest with yourselves and acknowledge that WHITEHOOD you all own or were raised to own because of your SICK family history. YOU ARE A RACIST and if your a person of color you need to stop hating yourself and find your roots because you are lost and your assimilation is showing and you are embarrassing the rest of us who have educated ourselves on the REAL AMERICANS HISTORY WITH ALL ITS BLOODSHED AND SLAUGHTER FOR BLACK AND BROWN PEOPLE!!“ — City Council President Jasmine Flores (D) of Erie, PA

• “So the problem is…can anyone guess? I can’t QWHITE see it.” — The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill, on only 36% of white men supporting Kamala Harris

• “The stakes literally are life and death for every woman in America. It’s not hyperbole, it’s not an exaggeration.” — MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace

• “I’ve resisted calling Trump and MAGA fascist, mainly because I’ve understood fascism and Nazism as almost incomprehensibly evil. But the reality is MAGA is today, who the Nazi were before they seized power. There is no better historical comparison to MAGA than the Nazi of the early 1930s.” — Alexander Vindman

• “The sheer and utter panic unleashed by WaPo’s failure to endorse Kamala is actually pre-emptive mourning. If Democrats thought she was winning, they wouldn’t be enraged. They’d ignore it. They need someone to blame already, and the election hasn’t been held yet.” — Ben Shapiro

• “Democratic Party went all the way to the Supreme Court to say it’s OK if colleges discriminate against South Asians and Arabs and suddenly they’re shocked they don’t have these groups locked up.” — Zaid Jilani

• “I’m not going to cancel my subscription to the Post because I’m still hoping to find out what the paper thinks of Trump. The lack of an endorsement in this election has been a setback in that quest, but, if I keep my subscription and keep reading closely, I may still find out.” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

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

• Atavist Magazine: “Half a century ago, an American commando vanished in the jungles of Laos. In 2008, he reappeared in Vietnam, reportedly alive and well. But nothing was what it seemed.”

• A New Yorker story about a young unknown scientist who may have found fossil remains dating from the day when an asteroid hit the earth and eventually wiped 99 percent of life from the planet.

• “The Democrats’ Insanity Defense,” from Tablet.

• The Atlantic: “Murder by Craigslist”

• UnHerd: “Covid was liberalism’s endgame”

• An Esquire story about how two American astronauts aboard the International Space Station suddenly found themselves stranded with no ride home after the Columbia shuttle exploded in 2003.

• “The Inside Story Of How The Kamala Harris Campaign Manipulates Reddit (And Breaks The Rules) To Control The Platform,” from The Federalist.