Quotes and Links

A week in review

Vice President Kamala Harris attends a news conference with Polish President Andrzejn Duda, December 13, 2023. | Reuters

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.

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• “Let me state as clearly as I can: My father was not involved in my business.” — What the New York Times claims Hunter Biden said during a presser on Capitol Hill. What he actually said was, “Let me state as clearly as I can: My father was not financially involved in my business.”

• “I keep trying to wrap my head around how it is legal to teach inaccurate information and force students to answer against their beliefs or receive negative scores.” — The anonymous parent of a Seattle high schooler who was marked incorrect on a history quiz when he stated that only women can get pregnant

• “The university has sacrificed its academic integrity to retain a president who minimized genocidal rhetoric against Jews, oversaw a racist admissions system, ensnared herself in multiple bullying scandals, and plagiarized a large number of her academic papers—all because she is the corporeal representation and ideological enforcer of the DEI regime.” — Christopher Rufo, regarding Harvard president Claudine Gay

• “Claudine Gay could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot somebody, and she wouldn’t lose the New York Times.” — Venture capitalist Mike Solana.

• “Harvard’s plagiarism system is the same as its free-speech system: an entirely malleable tool that can be used or discarded at will depending on the status of the person whose behavior is being examined.” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

• “Once the narrative that the U.S. was actually one of the good guys in WWI/WWII, last great lie, finally crumbles, the world can finally start to move forward with genuine solutions because it’ll mean they’ve finally diagnosed the real problem.” — Podcaster and Democratic activist Niko House

• “We all watched the television coverage of just yesterday. That’s on top of everything else that we know and don’t know yet based on what we’ve just been able to see, and because we’ve seen it or not doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.” — Kamala Harris, during a news conference with Polish President Andrzejn Duda

• “Trump is an accelerant for a ruling class that can feel itself dying.” — Podcaster Auron MacIntyre

• “Anyone who’s worked as a journalist at the NYT knows that journalists there are absolutely allowed to loudly espouse political opinions, you just have to espouse the *right* political opinions. Right wing opinions are fine, left wing opinions are not.” — Washington Post “online culture” reporter Taylor Lorenz

• “There is a mental health crisis around the world, I think that one of the main reasons for that is that young people look at the fact that we are not yet solving the climate crisis.” — Al Gore

• “I’ll take Joe Biden at 100 over any of these guys at whatever age they’re at, because he’s delivering.” — Minnesota governor Tim Walz

• “Rather than acknowledge the empirical fact that elite academia has shifted hard-left & lost touch with most of the country, its progeny have convinced themselves of a conspiracy theory wherein public backlash against Harvard is a cultivated message from the political right.” — Economic and political historian Phil Magness

• “If I think a government agency is breaking the law and there are demands on [X], I would be prepared to go to prison personally if I think they are the ones breaking the law.” — Elon Musk

• “Biden’s got a good story to tell about the economy. It is objectively true that our country is better off economically than we were certainly three years ago.” — CNN’s John Avlon

• “I think white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate.” — Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper (who is black)

• “I cannot in good conscience vote to further criminalize Black and brown young people in our city.” — Philadelphia City Council member Kendra Brooks, who voted against a bill banning the use of ski masks in parks, schools, public transit or other city-owned buildings to help law enforcement solve crimes. Brooks did not explain why this would criminalize “Black and brown young people.”

• “The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.” — Former New York Times editor James Bennet, who was ousted for running the Tom Cotton op-ed back in the summer of 2020

• “[Trump] could invoke powers we’ve never heard a president of the United States invoke, potentially to shut down companies, or turn off the internet, or deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil.” — MSNBC’s Miles Taylor

• “When the New York Times lost its way,” from the Economist.

• A New Statesman story on “How one detective took on an international network of romance fraudsters.”

• “Why This Math Professor Objects to Diversity Statements,” from the Atlantic.

• An article by Martin Gurri on why America won’t descend into an authoritarian state if Trump is elected again.

• A New Yorker piece on Lina Khan, a “liberal star” who took over the FTC and has “broken the agency.”

• “Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures,” from Esquire.

• A Truly Adventurous piece on businessman Steve Carroll, who went from the life of a high-flying executive to robbing banks.

• “The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer,” from the New York Times Magazine.