Quotes and Links

A week in review

CNN’s Erin Burnett conducts an interview with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tuesday, April 2, 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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• “A peculiar blend of optimistic enlightened positivism (History is with us!) and anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist rage (History is the story of racist, genocidal injustice!) has somehow brought ‘Death to the Gays’ Islamism, ‘Death to the TERFS’ radical identitarianism, and ‘Jews are Nazis’ antisemitism into a partnership on the addled American campus.” — Tablet’s Walter Russell Mead

• “I’ve lived in New York City all my life. I know what the problem is. And believe me, front and center is what happened the other day. This doesn’t have to do with politics, this has to do with race.” — Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis, regarding members of the New York City Fire Department booing Letitia James and chanting in favor of Trump.

• “To build a new religious edifice, you must first tear down the temples of the old faith.” — Kentucky State professor Wilfred Reilly, on the Biden administration celebrating Easter Sunday as “Transgender Day of Visibility.”

• “When is ‘Trans People Give It A Rest For Five Goddamned Minutes Day’ this year?” — Ann Coulter

• “I get it that we didn’t know exactly what was happening at the beginning of COVID and some mistakes were inevitable, but four years on, I’m tired of hearing, ‘Well, we didn’t know.’ No we didn’t. But some people guessed better than others, and the people who got it wrong don’t seem to want to acknowledge that now.” — Bill Maher

• “A common criticism of Israel is that, in its treatment of the Palestinians, the country has become the thing it once hated. This seems too facile to adequately describe the complexities of a conflict thousands of years old, in which all parties involved have suffered, and struggled, and spilled the blood of others as surely as others have spilled their own. But it could perhaps describe the current state of the arts in America, in this moment of absolute hegemony by the Left in every place where culture is produced — and in which the flag of the progressive cause can be found literally flying over everything from corporate headquarters to the White House.” — Unherd’s Kat Rosenfield

• “Speaking of class analysis: why are all but one the wealthiest 27 congressional districts represented by Democrats? Why is the Republican caucus overwhelmingly centered on poorer areas? This is a relatively new phenomenon, and incidentally not unrelated to what I’ve been covering — ‘anti-disinformation’ work is done exclusively by upper-class, college-educated professionals. There are no ‘working class’ censors.” — Matt Taibbi

• “Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.” — Salma Hamamy, president of University of Michigan’s Palestinian advocacy group. She received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award honoring students “who best exemplify the leadership and extraordinary vision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

• “It’s obvious that Joe will win this election.” — Jill Biden, during an interview on CBS Mornings. The latest Wall Street Journal poll shows Trump leading by 2 to 8 points in each of six battleground states.

• “Elon Musk is not an honest actor. By some measures, he has engaged in criminal behavior, and I think it’s pretty clear that he has to be reigned in and we are going to need much tougher regulatory policies to deal with companies like Twitter and Facebook, that are effectively monopolies now.” — Climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, in an interview with Salon.

• “If the deluded goofball mob on Jan 6 represented the pinnacle of ‘fascism’ in the US, then it’s safe to say that fascism is not an operative threat. Anyone still maniacally obsessing over the words Trump blurts out of his mouth might be mentally ill.” — Michael Tracey

• “To the word. Every single question was scripted, gone over dozens of times by many editors and executives. Absolutely. I was on script and was told not to deviate.” — Former ESPN host Sage Steele, regarding her 2021 interview with Joe Biden.

• “It’s because the policies we are advocating are getting stupider and stupider and no one can say so. It’s because the movement is a panopticon police state, where you cannot say anything out of step with the extreme or you get devoured by cannibals hoping for clout.” — Brianna Wu, director of the progressive PAC “Rebellion,” on why she’s not convinced progressivism is a force for good in American politics anymore.

• “President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy [than Trump], and the reason for that is President Biden is the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech.” — RFK Jr., during an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett.

• “So your daughter got silver in her swimmeet because of a trans woman. Who cares? If you want to buy her your own little gold medal that says ‘best swimmer in the competition who isn’t trans,’ go for it.” — Former Mother Jones editorial director Ben Dreyfuss

• “But in the big scheme of things, the $25 million will probably mean more than the look.” — CNN’s David Axelrod, on Biden’s decision to hold a high-dollar fundraiser in NYC while Trump attended the wake of a slain NYPD officer.

• “Everything you read makes sense if you simply translate ‘experts’ as ‘crazy people.’” — Techno-optimist Marc Andreessen

• “If you squint and look sideways, you might be able to see a more conventional political game at play within the transgender phenomenon – the state trying to gain more control over the human body, Big Pharma trying to make a buck. But I think it’s actually simpler than that: mentally ill misfits inspire compassion in women, particularly childless women looking for an outlet for their maternal instincts. When women view trans people [as] hyper-vulnerable – and trans activists have worked very hard on promoting that view – women are about as likely to call a trans woman ‘a man’ as they are to call a disabled child ‘a retard.’ The whole issue comes to be regarded as a basic test of kindness, and people who fail that test – particularly other women – risk being socially ostracised.” — Louise Perry, host of the Maiden Mother Matriarch Podcast.

• “I just find it exceptionally hard to believe that Epstein’s plane, private island, and everything else in his life constituted a nonstop diabolical cavalcade of exploitation and abuse of naïve and vulnerable young and often underage women, but that whenever Epstein was around Bill Clinton, he suddenly chose to live a life purer than driven snow.” — National Review’s Jim Geraghty

• “The Damage Caused by Trans ‘Inclusion’ In Female Athletics: a Massachusetts Case Study,” from Quillette.

• An Atavist story about “Two scammers, a web of betrayal, and Europe’s fraud of the century.”

• Compact: “How the Clintons Changed America—Twice”

• “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust,” from The Atlantic.

• A Hazlitt piece on Frank Warren and PostSecret.com, a project that began in 2004 as an outlet for strangers to anonymously unburden themselves of quirky thoughts, deep fears, and unspeakable desires in a public space, free of judgement.

• A ProPublica story about the 2017 collision that drowned seven sailors on the guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald.

• The New Yorker: “The Meltdown at a Middle School in a Liberal Town”

• “Now Means Nothing: How Time Works In Our Universe,” from Discover.