Quotes and Links

A week in review

King of podcasts Joe Rogan returned to his stand-up comedy roots with a live comedy special from his new home state of Texas. | The Wrap

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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• “Here is an older white man, a coach, a soldier, who is very hard to dismiss as some kind of effete coastal elite, who is telling older folks and white people ‘You do not need to be afraid of the future. There is joy in the future, there is joy in having your boss be a black woman.’” — MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas

• “The ideology espoused by Harris is technically labeled ‘California,’ which academics define as ‘extreme performative endorsement of the latest thing.’” — Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri

• “JD Vance just said ‘They even tried to kill him’ about Trump. This is a deeply irresponsible lie and if he had one iota of integrity left he would stop.” — The Bulwark’s Tim Miller

• “Every time David Hogg tweets, the Asian kid whose Harvard spot he took inexplicably starts weeping.” — Kentucky State professor Wilfred Reilly

• “There is no normality left in the Republican Party. They’re driving the normals out.” — The Lincoln Project’s George Conway, during an appearance on MSNBC

• “Gotta be honest, keep it real: This is not the pick that I expected [Kamala Harris] would make. It did come down to the final three as we understand it, and I thought she would go astronaut [Mark Kelly]. Keepin’ it real. He to me would have been the safest, most conventionally safe pick. White, super white, you know, mayonnaise-sandwich-on-Wonder-Bread white.” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid

• “Everyone 6 months or older should get the updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccine and flu vaccine including pregnant moms.” — CDC Director Mandy Cohen

• “It’s gonna be the first woman president and that’s incredibly exciting. And you know, she’s Indian, she’s black, she’s everything. You can be more than one thing, that’s incredible. You know, I’m Jewish and Irish. I wish I was black. Every white Jewish guy wishes he was black.” — Actor Ben Stiller, during the “Comics for Kamala” fundraising event on Monday

• “Tim Walz is my dad; Kamala’s my fun aunt who lives next door. They just found out I’m being bullied by the shittiest kid in my class, JD. When they try to talk to his dad, Don, it becomes clear he’s the real problem. They go back to their car; Kamala pulls out her cop badge, Tim grabs his old baseball bat. They walk back to Don’s porch. As Tim reaches for the doorbell they look at each other and smile. This is going to be fun.” — Climate activist and policy analyst Aaron Regunberg, in a now deleted tweet

• “The Walz pick is the first decision Harris has made as nominee. He is an ‘equity and inclusion’ fanatic, a BLM supporter, a man who justified riots and let his cities burn, a lockdown enthusiast, and a believer in medical experiments on gay, autistic and trans kids, without parental consent if necessary. If you want to accelerate the far left’s cultural revolution, you have the ticket of your dreams. This is not a pitch to the center.” — Andrew Sullivan

• “We lost a lot of people during COVID and most of them are still alive.” — Joe Rogan

• “An authoritarianism scholar explains how Mussolini used assassination attempts on his life to gain power — and how Donald Trump could do the same” — Politico headline

• “JD, girl, you in danger.” — Rachel Vindman, wife of Alexander Vindman

• “Well, here is Tim Walz, who enlisted when he was 17 years old, he served in the National Guard for 24 years. And I’m not aware of any military service that JD Vance has ever served. So, let’s just make the comparison there.” — Minnesota Senator and top Biden surrogate Tina Smith, during an appearance on CNN

• “So it’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025 to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified, and then we need bodyguards for everybody, and civil war conditions, all because the nine [SCOTUS] justices—not all of them, but these justices who have not many cases to look at every year, not that much work to do, a huge staff, great protection, simply do not want to do their job and interpret what the great 14th amendment means.” — Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), flat-out declaring that Congress will stop Trump from taking office even if duly elected. His comments were made during a discussion about voter rights with law professor Richard L. Hasen and civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Iffil at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington D.C.

• “The democratic world must stand up for the rule of law in Venezuela and oppose Maduro’s assault on the electoral process and free speech. The right-wing attack on democratic institutions anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.” — Also Jamie Raskin, who apparently thinks Maduro, a self-proclaimed Marxist, is “right-wing”

• “They make an interesting tag team because of course Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and the few that got caught, Kamala Harris helped bail them out of jail.” — J.D. Vance

• “Such a consequential President of the United States. A Mount Rushmore kind of President of the United States…You’ve got Teddy Roosevelt up there. And he’s wonderful, I don’t say take him down. But you can add Biden.” — Nancy Pelosi, during an appearance on the CBS Sunday Morning Show

• “Since #TamponTim is trending I’ll point out that in high school, any boy who casually was like ‘Oh you got ur period? I stashed a pad from the bathroom in my backpack in case one of my friends needed it’ — that boy would be king stud. That boy would be drowning in prom invites.” — Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse, who writes about “gender and society”

• “We had chaos with the way [Trump] handled covid because he asked people to drink bleach. And [Kamala Harris] and President Biden had to pull everybody out of that and put us in a position that we’re in. Now we have a very clear contrast between the past and the future about whether you want to go dark, which is everything Donald Trump does, or whether or not you want to have a future that is full of hope, optimism—and joy, I think, is a great word. Because you can see this in Tim Walz, and you can see this in the Vice President, and I think you would agree with me that her presentations over the past 20 days have been nothing but spectacular.” — Mitch Landrieu, co-chair of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, during an interview with MSNBC

• “Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor — and, more relevantly, a Black woman in the unrelenting spotlight of national politics — wears broad-shouldered suits, pearls and heels, sometimes crisp Chucks. She marshals an arched brow, a studied hand flip, carefully curated sentences. Her wave is controlled, her eyes always fixed on a distant point, her movements smooth.” — NYT’s Rebecca Davis O’Brien

• “In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make. Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.” — Tim Walz, during a Tuesday campaign rally in Philadelphia. Walz’s administration set up a covid snitch line for people to report their neighbors for failing to abide by pandemic social distancing rules.

• “If you care about your paycheck, you go with Trump.” — CNBC’s Jim Cramer

• “Women voters are looking at this election as a life or death choice. The binary choice is democracy or Trump, and for women, it’s our lives or Trump.” — CNN’s Tara Setmayer

• “The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving,” from ESPN.

• UnHerd: “How the NYT undermined mask evidence”

• A Maclean’s piece on the inside story of the 2018 Thai cave rescue

• “The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning for Progressives,” from The Atlantic.

• Tablet: “The New Yorker’s Fact Crisis”

• “The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code,” from Bloomberg.

• A 5280 story about a 28-year-old man from Colorado Springs who survived nearly a month alone in the southern Utah desert on little more than plant roots and river water.

• Wired: “The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack Ever”