Quotes and Links

A week in review

Kamala Harris is pictured in studio at ABC during the recording of The View in New York on October 8, 2024. | Getty Images

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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• “It never ceases to be weird that when journalism organizations whose job is to do journalism discover that they have lots of employees who don’t want to do journalism their reaction is to stop doing journalism instead of to fire the employees who don’t want to do journalism.” — Charles Cooke, regarding CBS bringing in a “DEI strategist and trauma trainer” because some staff members were upset that anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed Ta-Nehisi Coates over his pro-Palestinian framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict

• “One advantage of being a leftist is that, being on the ‘moral’ side, you never question your own motives.” — AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant

• “Harris is riding a dream economy into the election. It may be too late for voters to notice.” — Politico headline on Thursday

• “Inflation rate hit 2.4% in September, topping expectations; jobless claims highest since August 2023” — CNBC headline on Thursday

• “There ought to be a price to pay when you don’t tell the truth.” — CNN’s Chris Wallace, commenting on the Fox News defamation suit during an MSNBC interview

• “The Kamala Harris media blitz is not for regular voters. It’s to convince the rich Democrats who already love her that she’s winning. That’s why there’s so much word salad and why her campaign is based on made up problems: The Democrats’ wealthy base doesn’t have real problems.” — Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon

• “The idea of a political movement that rejects expertise and prioritizes personal choice in an epidemic is deeply troubling to public health experts, who worry that public health powers will be curtailed if Mr. Trump wins in November.” — NYT’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg

• “Let’s be clear. Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939.” — NY Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who says the decision has “the potential to incite widespread violence”

• “It required literal, physical bravery to do this.” — The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, regarding Liz Cheney endorsing Kamala Harris

• “That is the full Liz [Cheney]. She gets that this is not the time to publicly question what Harris might or might not do about abortion or energy or the national debt. It is a moment to accept and embrace a simple fact: Harris is not just our best hope to vanquish Trump. She’s our only hope.” — The Bulwark’s Jill Lawrence

• “Send Dick and Liz Cheney to Dearborn and Detroit to campaign for Kamala.” — Glenn Greenwald (the Dearborn area has the proportionally largest Muslim population)

• “If there’s a single swing voter who can be brought over from Trump to Kamala by *the Cheney family,* they need to be identified so psychiatrists can study them in a lab.” — Leighton Woodhouse

• “It’s what frustrates me, there are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president. We can line all those guys up and shoot them.” — University of Kansas professor Phil Lowcock

• “There is not a thing that comes to mind, and I have been a part of most of the decisions that have had an impact.” — Kamala Harris, when asked by The View’s Sunny Hostin if she would have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years

• “It would have been illuminating to hear Walz explain his view, expressed in his annual proclamations honoring George Floyd, that policing suffers from ‘systemic racism.’ In Minneapolis, of the 309 blacks shot in 2021, only one—or 0.32 percent of all black shooting victims—was shot by a police officer, and that shooting victim had fired first.” — City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald

• “It’s time to cancel all the contracts and reassess his immigration status and hopefully deport him the hell out of the country. And if we can’t do that by conventional means, President Biden, you have presidential immunity, get Elon Musk the F out of our country, and do it now.” — Keith Olbermann

• “Gender identity is an unfalsifiable idea, a socio-political construct, a quasi-religious belief. At bottom, it is defined by little more than a person’s subjective feelings, or (more accurately) their claim to feel those feelings. We are told we must believe in the existence of those feelings and that those feelings constitute a new form of fact, even though in literally no other sphere of human life is it held that a person’s self-perception must be accepted unquestioningly as true or real.” — J.K. Rowling

• “The so-called ‘fiscally responsible stewards’ are making the same argument when our people wanted to be liberated and emancipated in this country. The argument was you can’t free black people because it would be too expensive. They said it would be fiscally irresponsible to liberate black people.” — Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

• “Donald Trump has had a very sinister philosophy, wanting to be a dictator, absolutely dividing people up based on who they are, based on factors about them that have to do with their race or gender, etc. And when he uses language like this, I don’t think that it’s a freudian slip, I think that the danger of a Donald Trump is that he would absolutely try to exterminate an entire group of people because he thinks that their genes are somehow different than his and faulty.” — Democratic strategist Aisha Mills, speaking on CNN

• “Republicans make up stories about things the Biden administration handles competently, like disaster relief, because they can’t govern and can’t imagine that anyone else can.” — John Harwood

• “Van Gogh is turning in his grave at the harsh Just Stop Oil sentence. I know, because I spoke to him” — Headline of an op-ed in The Guardian written by Nadya Tolokonnikova

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

• “In deep-blue Philly, working class voters are shifting toward Republicans,” from The Philadelphia Inquirer.

• GQ: “The Miraculous Resurrection of Notre-Dame”

• A New York magazine piece on how prosecutor Jack Smith has “turned the well-established, thoroughly uncontroversial rules of criminal procedure on their head” in order to “chip away at Trump’s electoral prospects.”

• Another New York piece on the life and times of two professional muggers in 1970’s lower Manhattan.

• “Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah,” from The Washington Post.

• Rolling Stone: “Russian Mercenaries Hunt the African Warlord America Couldn’t Catch”

• “The man who stole a hotel: How Timothy Durkin took control of Sooke Harbour House,” from Capital Daily.