Quotes and Links

A week in review

MSNBC’s Joy Reid had a revealing hot mic moment this week, January 29, 2024.

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• “My son spent a year in Iraq. That’s how I lost him.” — Joe Biden, to the parents of a soldier killed in Jordan this week; Biden’s son Beau died of brain cancer five years after returning from Iraq

• “[Kamala Harris] will be the vice president nominee. There was a debate about removing her from the ticket, but sadly they didn’t, she’s not popular, but you can’t remove the first black lady to be vice president from the goddamn presidential ticket. Like, what kind of message are you going to send to, like, African-American voters. People would be like, ‘What the fuck?’ Like, she’s a woman and she’s multiracial.” — Charlie Kraiger, a cybersecurity policy analyst for the White House

• “I’m not interested in supporting (Harvard). These elite schools produce whiny snowflakes.” — Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin, Harvard’s largest donor who has contributed well over $500 million to the university

• “[Taylor Swift’s] fans won’t actually kill four cops. They won’t take American flags and turn them into spears and spear law enforcement officers.” — MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, comparing Swift’s fans to Trump’s

• “The term ‘social justice’ appears 72 times in the course catalog of James Madison University, 59 times for George Mason University, and 53 times for Virginia Commonwealth University—2.6 to 4.5 times as often as the word ‘Constitution.’” — The Heritage Foundation’s Jay P. Greene

• “The economy is stronger than ever. Under Trump, it was a disaster.” — Author Stephen King

• “We’ve held seventeen hearings — seventeen — on the border, and [Alejandro Mayorkas] impeachment’s part of that. We have held zero — I repeat: zero — full committee hearings dedicated to emergency preparedness, cyber threats, infrastructure protection, transportation security, Department of Homeland Security management, or information sharing and intelligence efforts with the global dynamic that we have. We have not lived up to our oversight obligation here on this [Homeland Security] committee because you are all obsessed with the border, because you bend the knee to the orange Jesus.” — Democrat rep. Rob Menendez

• “The Donald Trump and MAGA [border] plan is alligator moats, bombing northern Mexico, shooting migrants in the legs, and electrifying the fence and putting spikes on them.” — Democrat rep. Robert Garcia

• “Leave Trump out of it for a moment. We now have a situation in which a socially unpopular figure can be accused — in the jurisdiction where he is hated the most — of a heinous crime without having any realistic means of defending himself, because the alleged crime dates back for decades and any kind of forensic evidence is long gone.” — New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, on the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit

• “First thing, Rachel, you and I are gonna go shopping. We’re gonna get completely new wardrobes, new shoes, motorcycle.” — E. Jean Carroll, to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, on what she’s going to spend Donald Trump’s money on

• “Starting another f*cking war…” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid, during a hot mic moment as she lamented Joe Biden’s vow to respond after U.S. troops were killed in Jordan this week

• “Who in their right mind would want to run when you have someone of such esteem as our incumbent president?” — Gavin Newsom, during an interview with MSNBC

• “Liberal white women suffer from pathological empathy, which has convinced them that the oppressor (if black or trans or an immigrant) is oppressed. And while it may seem selfless, it’s actually a form [of] narcissism, borne of the toxic self-love culture that consumes them, because it allows them to pose as heroes and saviors.” — Podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, regarding a recent Law & Order episode featuring a woke white woman who was raped by a black guy and refuses to press charges because she’s privileged and doesn’t want the perpetrator to go to jail

• “Ibram X. Kendi is not much different than a doctor who makes up a disease for an otherwise healthy person in order to profit off of it.” — Filmmaker Eli Steele

• “Although the majority of U.S. voters oppose it, 89% of Ivy League graduates are in favor of ‘strict rationing of meat, electricity, and gas to fight climate change.’” — Author Rob Henderson

• “The US government will do what we want, nothing else. They must follow our orders. That is how we safeguard the interest of Somalia.” — Democrat rep. Ilhan Omar

• “Right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next election.” — Hillary Clinton

• “Look, crazy lady. Everyone understands how bad the world would be without journalists, because we haven’t had any for decades. Look at all the hoaxes our so-called media pushed while missing the biggest stories of the century. The fact is, only our treasured journalists could fake a scam involving Russia to undermine the incoming president without consequences. Only our treasured journalists could deny a lab-leaked virus for years and suppress anyone who dared questioned the lying experts. Only our treasured journalists would proudly disseminate the government’s talking points word for word on everything from Hunter’s laptop to border policy to crime stats, looting, and riots. Only our treasured journalists would protect a vegetable who can’t leave his basement or finish his sentence and helps him get elected president with multiple election law changes.” — Greg Gutfield of Fox News, in response to Taylor Lorenz lamenting the dying journalism industry

• “Every time David Hogg tweets, the Asian guy who got bumped over to Brown or Michigan by his Harvard admission cries silently for 15 minutes.” — Kentucky State University professor Wilfred Reilly

• “I’m just interested to know what it means to examine equity in bridge maintenance.” — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

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

• A City Journal piece on “How a Washington public school’s transgender secrecy policies drove an immigrant family out of the country.”

• Another City Journal piece on how “New documents strengthen — perhaps conclusively — the lab-leak hypothesis of Covid-19’s origins.”

• “Poland and the Demon in Democracy,” by N.S. Lyons.

• A Science article on new discoveries concerning the vast scale of brutal human sacrifice among the Aztecs.

• “Fentanyl: The Portrait of a Mass Murderer,” from El Pais.

• “Cracking the Case of London’s Elusive, Acrobatic Rare-Book Thieves,” from Vanity Fair.