Quotes and Links

A week in review.

A Dollar General in Jacksonville turned into the scene of multiple killings over the weekend. | CNN

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• “This will be my 7th. And I’ve had covid three times.” — Former Democratic representative Harold Ford Jr., who says he’ll be getting the newest covid shot. Three more hole punches on his Pfizer card and he’ll get a free coffee.

• “The trial involving the Boston Marathon bombing began less than two years after the events. The trial involving Zacarias Moussaoui for his role in the September 11 attacks was set to begin one year after the attacks.” — Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing Trump’s election interference trial, comparing Jan. 6th to the Boston Marathon bombing and 9/11.

• “It totally makes sense that Trump will be on trial the day before Super Tuesday for ‘crimes’ he allegedly committed in 2020. Totally on the up and up. Don’t be a conspiracy theorist!” — Comedian Dave Smith.

• “When I call the trans movement a cult I mean it in a literal sense. It functions exactly like a cult. It uses all of the same indoctrination techniques. It picks out a vulnerable target, isolates the target from his family, love-bombs with excessive validation and flattery, demands progressively more extreme displays of fidelity to the cause, and viciously ostracizes and attacks anyone who leaves. This is all Cult 101 stuff. Trangenderism is one of the largest and most dangerous cults in world history.” — Podcaster Matt Walsh.

• “Forcing a teacher to out a trans kid to their parents — even if the kid isn’t ready & even if it puts them at risk of harm — is dangerous & frankly, despicable.” — California Senator Scott Wiener. The Constitution, and specifically the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, protects the fundamental right of parents to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children. Q.v. - Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 720 (1997).

• “The myth of children and Covid-19, that children were not harmed, and that school closings were a mistake—those are dangerous myths.” — MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan.

• “The story is always about guns — people are bad — this guy’s a bad guy. If I could take my gun off right now, and I lay it on this counter, nothing will happen. It’ll sit there — but as soon as a wicked person grabs ahold of that handgun and starts shooting people with it — there’s the problem. The problem is the individual.” — Jacksonville, Florida Sheriff T.K. Waters, on the recent shooting in his city.

• “Ron DeSantis scoffed when the NAACP issued a travel advisory this spring warning Black people to use ‘extreme care’ if traveling to Florida. Just three months later, DeSantis is leading his state through the aftermath of a racist attack that left three African Americans dead. Black leaders in Florida — and across the nation — say they’re outraged by his actions and rhetoric ahead of the shooting.” — AP’s Steven Peoples, obliquely accusing Ron DeSantis of being responsible for the Jacksonville shooting. Peoples’s story, the URL to which includes “DeSantis Racist Republican Shooting,” doesn’t include a single example of the “rhetoric” that contributed to the shooting and relies on the characterizations of DeSantis’s political opponents.

• “The implicit assumption that school closure decisions reflected some vaguely rational attempt at cost-beneift [sic] analysis, as opposed to a trolley problem governed by moral and political sentiment, seems extremely wrong.” — Statistician Nate Silver.

• “The key to understanding what happened with the mRNA vaccines is that the ‘safe and effective’ message didn’t change with the evidence of ineffectiveness and harm. It means the messaging was *always* a sales pitch and it deserved the same skepticism as any Pharma ad.” — Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein.

• “It seems certain people take glee in Trump having to show up at a notoriously disgusting jail in Atlanta. Funny how concern for criminal justice reform dissipates the minute it impacts someone you have a political grudge against.” — Independent journalist Michael Tracey.

• “Well all I know is I killed the little f***ing bitch.” — Jonathan Richardson, regarding his 11-month-old daughter, whom he murdered. The ACLU’s Indiana branch filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana on behalf of Richardson, demanding he be allowed to get transgender genital surgery while imprisoned. After nearly 20 years of incarceration, Richardson started taking estrogen and now claims that having a vaginoplasty is life-saving care.

• “Fact Checker: Here’s a guide to some of the stories told by President Biden that cannot be verified or are not plausible.” — The Washington Post’s delicate and deferential language used to describe Biden’s lies. The Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, shoved all of Biden’s story-telling lies into a single article, never called them lies, and didn’t even assign any “Pinnochios.”

• “The President has done more to secure the border, to deal with this issue of immigration than anybody else — he really has.” — Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. This is, of course, insultingly absurd. On Tuesday alone, Border Patrol apprehended more than 7,000 migrants who crossed into the country illegally. Indeed, the Biden administration recently welded open 114 border gates for “monsoon season,” fearing that illegals could get stuck in the rain or in a flash flood. What’s happening is an invasion, and the vast majority of those crossing the border are young men.

• “Take them someplace else or send them back to Venezuela! I don’t care where they go! This is wrong! You got 73% of the people homeless in this city are black people [sic], what have you done for them?” — A Hyde Park, Chicago resident, regarding the migrants being put up in the city’s hotels. Hyde Park was 94.29% for Biden in 2020.

• “As 11th bus of migrants arrives, LA considering criminal charges against Texas.” — Headline from ABC News. The Los Angeles City Council voted to make L.A. a “sanctuary city” this June.

• “One of the most common, defining and pervasive tactics of left-liberal culture is issuing sanctimonious lectures about the virtues of various policies — right up to the minute that those policies start to affect them, or require any personal sacrifice in their lives at all.” — Glenn Greenwald, on Democratic politicians accusing those concerned with immigration levels of being racists, only to demand that immigration to Blue cities and states be stopped the minute it burdens their voters.

• “White people are not entitled to harm you; When interacting with white victims, speak up for yourself or for your coworkers; If a white victim continues to harm you, ask that they be transferred.” — Key Takeaways from a PowerPoint created by “antiracist” consultant Karen Fleshman, who was recently hired by Oakland, California District Attorney Pamela Price to train Alameda County’s Victim Services Division.

• “Before sentencing 61-year-old grandma Connie Meggs to 15 months in prison for her 18 minute nonviolent presence in the Capitol on January 6, Judge Amit Mehta said he ‘continues to struggle’ with what happened that day.” — Independent journalist Julie Kelly. Thursday, an injured Iraq War vet was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for tearing down a fence on Jan. 6, which the judge ruled qualified him for a terrorism sentencing enhancement sought by prosecutors. If these gross examples of political persecution and DOJ weaponization don’t make your blood boil, you don’t have a pulse. And if you’re a Democrat, you should fear the day when the shoe is on the other foot.

• “If I had the opportunity to speak to [Biden], I’d tell him to resign. I’m not backing off from that. The debacle is on his head, and there’s no other way of saying it. There can be no mincing of words.” — Gold Star parent Darin Hoover, whose son, also named Darin, was one of the 13 U.S. servicemen and women killed in the August 26, 2021, Abbey Gate bombing in Afghanistan.

• “Here’s the TRUTH: the climate disaster death rate has *declined* by 98% over the last century, even as carbon emissions have risen. The average person is 50X less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920. Why? Fossil fuels. And 8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones. The right answer to all temperature-related deaths is, again, more abundance of fossil fuels. These are inconvenient truths for the climate cult. The real emergency isn’t climate change, it’s the man-made disaster of climate change policies that threaten U.S. prosperity.” — GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

• “I graded a whole bunch of papers in a row. No two papers had the same answer, and none of them were correct. It was a striking moment of, like, wow — this is significant and deep.” — Temple University math professor Jessica Babcock. The intermediate algebra class quiz she’s referring to included questions like asking students to subtract eight from negative six, underscoring the fact that more and more students are showing up to college mathematically illiterate.

• The Blaze: “Denver to pay $4.7 million to BLM protesters who violated emergency curfew during 2020 riots.”

• “What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane,” from The Atlantic.

• Tereza Coraggio delves into “Churchill’s Atrocities.”

• A piece from City Journal on how Washington, D.C.’s attorney general is putting politics before public safety, harassing the chairman of the Federalist Society while ignoring a wave of violent crime.

• Another City Journal piece, this one by Abigail Shrier, on how new laws are making California a haven for human trafficking.

• An essay from Aeon on whether or not it’s a good thing that more human beings can write and type their every thought than ever before.

• The New York Times: “The Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row.”

• “Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism,” from the Los Angeles Review of Books.