Quotes and Links

A week in review.

President Joe Biden speaks at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, October 14, 2023. | Getty Images

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• “You know, I look at this from a legal perspective, and I think that we all know that Hamas has been designated a terror organization just like many other terror organizations have had this designation, like the Proud Boys here in the United States.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin.

• “Still queer, still here, and now exploring makeup and my gender expression as a queer, Black, unicorn-phoenix.” — Chase Anderson, Assistant Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at UCSF.

• “It’s currently more socially acceptable to say ‘death to the Jews’ than to say ‘men cannot get pregnant.’” — Independent journalist Sarah Beth Burwick.

• “One of the greatest conspiracy theories of all time is that hidden racism pervades our entire society - predicting every single life outcome for Blacks and Hispanics while being so subtle you need a professional Sociologist to see it...and not affecting Asians, Nigerians, or Indians at all.” — Political scientist Wilfred Reilly.

• “LGBT people are much safer in Gaza than Florida or Texas, for instance.” — Democratic activist Alex Severan.

• “What does it tell you when the same people who break into hysterics at ‘microaggressions’ are able to shrug at scenes of horrific violence in the name of ‘decolonization’? That their hysterics aren't genuine, but merely a way to parasitize others’ empathy to achieve power.” — Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright.

• “You can’t watch that movie and not know the ideal is white.” — Antiracist activist and author Robin DiAngelo, on the Disney movie Frozen. DiAngelo said that children as young as three know that “it’s better to be white.”

• “At Men’s Health, we’ve written extensively about how to perform oral sex on a vulva and finger a person with a vulva.” — Zachary Zane, a “sex writer, author, and ethical Boyslut.”

• “When a person can be married in the morning and thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon, something is still fundamentally wrong in this country — and that still exists!” — President Joe Biden.

• “As Hamas supporters are given more expressive leeway than conservatives, a lot of people are finally realizing that censorship was never about suppressing hate speech.” — The Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon.

• “As we say in America, we don’t negotiate with terrorists. Well, if you are Republicans and you’re Kevin McCarthy, you reward them with committee assignments.” — MSNBC’s Wajahat Ali.

• “I recognize that some folks may not feel comfortable being on campus while these events are taking place. For that reason, we will have a liberal leave policy for class today.” — Debbie Brooks, a professor at Penn State, who told her students they didn’t have to come to class because Riley Gaines, a former olympic swimmer and a leading defender of women’s single-sex spaces, was coming to campus.

• “It was exhilarating! It was exciting!” — Cornell Professor Russell Rickford, on the Hamas terrorist attack.

• “‘Man joins sorority by dressing as a women’ [sic] was a comedy movie premise. Now it’s the new civil rights movement.” — Podcaster Auron MacIntyre, regarding the biological, heterosexual male who has forced his way into a University of Wyoming sorority because he’s a “trans woman.” The Washington Post published a new article on this and it’s every bit as ridiculous as you’d expect. I recommend this post I wrote in July.

• “Our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous. We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such views.” — Harvard president Claudine Gay. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression recently named Harvard the worst school for free speech. It scored a 0 out of 100.

• “Will you retract this libel? Delete the tweet? Or at least hedge your assertion? You are discrediting your/my party and making a mockery of truth.” — Alexander Vindman, regarding Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s tweet claiming that Israel bombed a Gaza hospital, which is still up.

• “Like we learned, if science is Dr. Fauci, you’re damn right I’m defying science.” — New York Jets QB Aaron Rodgers, who people are saying is “defying science” with his quick recovery from an achilles tear.

• “But today and yesterday, that was an assault on our democracy as Jim Jordan assaulted our democracy on January 6.” — Nancy Pelosi, on Jim Jordan being put up for House Speaker.

• “Hadas Kalderon, a resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz, in an apartment in Tel Aviv on Thursday. Two of her children have been detained by Hamas.” — A caption from the Washington Post. “Detained” instead of kidnapped. It was later stealth edited and changed to “taken hostage.”

• “If you and your allies spend years building and cheering a censorship regime — under which those who express views you hate are silenced, banned, censored, fired and otherwise de-platformed — then you’ll have no moral credibility when it’s turned against you and your allies.” — Glenn Greenwald, on the NYU Law students complaining that their classmate’s loss of a job offer because of her pro-Hamas statement is “violence.”

• “Memory-Holing the Apocalypse,” by N.S. Lyons.

• “What lies beneath: the secrets of France’s top serial killer expert,” from the Guardian.

• A Sports Illustrated piece on the quest to prolong athletic mortality.

• “The Magic of Post Malone,” from Esquire.

• A Vanity Fair story on “How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards Came Tumbling Down.”

• “The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere,” from the New Yorker.

• The Atlantic: “Hamas’s Hostage-Taking Handbook Says to ‘Kill the Difficult Ones’ and Use Hostages as ‘Human Shields.’”

• “Dinosaur Cowboys Are Hunting for the Next $32 Million T. Rex,” from Bloomberg Businessweek.