Quotes and Links

A week in review.

Bill Maher delivers his nightly monologue, October 21, 2023.

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• “A broad coalition of Americans realizes that if Donald Trump were president right now, the world would be a much, much more dangerous place.” — MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace.

• “The answer to the question of how many sexes exist differs depending on the context.” — Scientific American.

• “Because college life today is a day spa combined with a North Korean reeducation camp; it’s a daycare center with a meal plan, except the toddlers can fire the adults…If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market.” — HBO’s Bill Maher.

• “The myth of a U.S.-Mexico ‘open border.’” — An Axios headline.

• “CBP [Customs and Border Protection] reports Border Patrol arrested 18 people on the FBI’s terror watchlist at the southern border in September, bringing the total for FY’23 to 169, the highest year ever recorded & higher than previous 6 years - combined.” — Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin. A reminder that there have been more than 1.6 million “gotaways“ under Biden. CPB also reported that there were 269,735 migrant encounters at the southern border in September, making it the highest single month ever recorded. For context, during Trump’s last year in office, there were 458,088 total encounters.

• “I asked a group at George Mason and they said it’s because they aren’t really kidnapped. It’s all a lie. They sincerely believe the rapes, murdered children, and death toll are lies.” — Independent journalist Lyndsey Fifield, on the college students who keep ripping down posters of kidnapped Israelis.

• “There are no ‘hostages.’ There are civilian detainees and military prisoners of war.” — Author Ali Abunimah.

• “It’s really like watching a cardiologist urge everyone to smoke more cigarettes.” — Glenn Greenwald, regarding the corporate journalists who cheer and demand various forms of silencing, gag orders, deplatforming, and censorship.

• “HISTORY PROVES JEWS ARE NEVER WANTED ANYWHERE LOL. Because they are invaders and traitors.” — Rajaa Chraibi, a realtor in Los Angeles.

• “You don’t have to vote, don’t worry about voting. The voting, we got plenty of votes.” — Donald Trump.

• “Speakers of truly destructive thoughts convict themselves. Let them.” — County Highway editor Walter Kirn.

• “Last night, I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded. This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them.” — New York magazine writer Eric Levitz.

• “It is also unethical for us to continue to require this when we know it can continue to cause harm and has had no change in how students are performing.” — Oregon Board of Education Chairwoman Guadalupe Martinez Zapata. The state of Oregon will no longer require high school students to prove mastery of reading, writing, or math to graduate, citing “harm to students of color.”

• “Inside the fight to end period poverty.” — An MSNBC chyron.

• “Hitler should have eradicated all of you.” — Sarah Chowdhury, President of the South Asian Bar Association of Chicago. Chowdhury was previously honored by the ACLU of Illinois for her commitment to social justice.

• "What we have to do in this upcoming election is just get past this election and democracy has a chance to live forever. But it also has a chance to die." — Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.

• “My concern was to alert the public [about] disinformation … Frankly I haven’t seen any evidence from any intelligence agency that that was not the case.” — Former CIA Director Leon Panetta, regarding the letter that he and more than 50 other former intelligence officials signed that claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

• “Biden’s approval rating among Democrats has plummeted to a record low of 75% — down a staggering 11 percentage points over just the last month, according to a new Gallup poll.” — Axios.

• “Starting on Day 1, in the middle of the pandemic, we vaccinated a nation — the greatest operational effort ever undertaken in this country. Operational. And we did it with the strategy based on science, not on politics.” — President Joe Biden.

• “Academic freedom absolutely does *not* entail professors giving students better grades for parroting their political point of view.” — Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, on UC Berkeley professor Victoria Huynh offering her students extra credit if they attend a protest against “the settler-colonial occupation of Gaza” or watch a documentary on Palestine and call their local California representative.

• “The Truck Stop Killer,” from GQ.

• Another GQ story on “The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver.”

• “Hard Lessons from Israel’s High-Tech Border Failure,” by N.S. Lyons.

• An Atlantic story on the “pure, predatory sadism” of Hamas.

• “The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” from Wired.

• A New York Times piece about how eBay’s Global Security and Resiliency team ran a rogue campaign to terrorize a blogger couple with insects, pornography, and pizza.

• “A Man, a Dog, a Walk Around the World,” from Afar magazine.

• “The Devastation of Be’eri,” from the New Yorker.

• A New York Times Magazine story on the strange truth behind the sexual-harassment complaints made against a university professor and her wife.