Quotes and Links

A week in review

In a desperate attempt to appear hip and appeal to young voters, Kamala Harris instead made everyone cringe with a cameo at the BET Awards. | BET

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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• “My kid just said: ‘It’s sad to watch a pack of lies beat a good person just because the good person can’t speak.’ I literally just gave him a hug and said that ‘debates don’t matter.’” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “If you have friends and family members who support Trump—if it comes down to it, you may literally have to kill them before they kill you. This is where this is headed. This is a fifty-alarm fucking fire.” — Matt Croyle, a Pennsylvania state constable.

• “The First Amendment Is Out of Control” — New York Times headline

• “My favorite example of our propaganda press is that we had a supermodel for First Lady and their unbridled hatred kept her off any and all magazine covers.” — The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway. Jill Biden is on the July cover of Vogue wearing a $5,000 dress. She now has as many Vogue covers in four years as Michelle Obama had in eight.

• “Spitballing here, but I don’t think the current crisis re: Biden’s cognitive state would have been possible if media folk had not spent the past 8 years rallying en masse around the idea that basic journalistic curiosity is a right-wing talking point.” — The Free Press’s Kat Rosenfield

• “There are also multiple kinds of disabilities, especially where gaming is concerned. There are long-term disabilities, there are situational disabilities, there are temporary disabilities. It counts as a disability where a video game like Elden Ring is concerned if you have a kid. If you have a two year old, and you’re trying to play Elden Ring, you can’t pause. That is a situational disability that you have.” — Video game designer Alanah Pearce

• “The pussy hat should replace the old-school press fedora.” — Matt Taibbi

• “The far-right justices occupying the Supreme Court have never been an unhoused single mother living out of their car while working a full-time job.” — Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO)

• “HISTORICALLY THE JOB HAS AGED PRESIDENTS” — MSNBC chyron

• “There are realistically only two choices for who can take Biden’s place, if you understand the psychology of the modern left: Kamala Harris & Michelle Obama. Democrats knew full well that Biden may not make it to the end of his first term when they nominated him in 2020, yet they *still* picked a wildly unpopular, egregiously unqualified VP for exactly one reason: she was a ‘woman of color.’ If identity politics was their rationale back then, it’s their albatross now: they simply *can’t* pass over Kamala, or else that would admit they were wrong to prioritize identity politics over merit (which they obviously can’t do), so doubling down is their only option.” — Vivek Ramaswamy

• “I remain thoroughly unconvinced that Kamala Harris is an electorally superior option for Dems than a partially sentient Joe Biden.” — Michael Tracey

• “Biden’s poor performance in the debate was not a surprise. It also didn’t rattle me as it has others, because the outcome of this election has been clear to me for months: While I don’t plan to vote for him, Donald Trump is going to win. And I’m OK with that.” — Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME)

• “A few years ago, Yale held the embarrassing distinction of employing more than one bureaucrat for every undergraduate. The development attracted criticism from within the university and in the national press. Yale didn’t learn its lesson, doubling down on bureaucracy over education. In the last year alone, the university added nearly three times as many bureaucrats as undergraduates and twice as many bureaucrats as educators.” — National Review’s Lauren Noble

• “Supreme Court Gives Joe Biden The Legal OK To Assassinate Donald Trump” — Huffington Post headline

• “Joe, you’re a reasonable man. You don’t want to do this, but here’s the reality: this is a fucking war. This is a war now, and we are fighting for our fucking country. And these assholes are gonna take it away. They’re going to take it away. Fuck you Clarence Uncle Thomas. Fuck you. Joe, you now have the right to take that bitch Trump out. Take him out Joe. If he was Hitler, and this was 1940, you’d take him out. Well, he is Hitler. And this is 1940.” — LGTBQ activist and actress Lea DeLaria

• “I 👏identify👏as👏a👏reclining👏sofa👏stop👏misfurnituring 👏me👏you👏bloody 👏bigot👏” — J.K. Rowling

• “Yeah girl, I’m out here in these streets, and let me tell you, you’re right Taraji, there is so much at stake in this moment. The majority of us believe in freedom and equality, but these extremists, as they say, they not like us.” — Kamala Harris, in a BET Awards cameo.

• “Ya’ll just tell me who the nominee is gonna be. Let me know when you guys are finished fighting amongst yourself [sic], who I gotta vote for in November to keep Hitler out the White House. That’s all I wanna know: who I gotta vote for to keep Hitler out the White House.” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid

• “I have not heard a single person express anything negative. All they’re saying to us is keep Joe Biden moving forward.” — Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), during an interview on MSNBC.

• “If the SCOTUS rules in favor of absolute presidential immunity, Joe Biden should lock up all SCOTUS justices, call off the election, and exile Donald Trump until the MAGA psychosis passes.” — Harvard/Yale psychologist Bandy X. Lee, who briefed Congress on Trump’s mental state in 2018 and was often featured on CNN during his administration.

• “White males tend to publicly freak out when things don’t go just so. Women cope. Nonwhite don’t have the luxury of melting down.” — The Washington Post’s Jen Rubin

• “What did Trump do during his four years to end the Russia-Ukraine war? Nothing. Trump is full of shit.” — Alexander Vindman

• “I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep.” — New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

• “Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection,” from ProPublica.

• New York Magazine: “The Life and Untimely Death of a Boeing Whistleblower”

• An Atlantic story about how “Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”

• Another Atlantic piece about “The Puzzle That Will Outlast the World.”

• “A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world,” from The Guardian.

• A New York Times Magazine story on how a growing body of research suggests that trees can communicate and cooperate in the wild.

• Texas Monthly: “The Man Who Walked Backward”