Quotes and Links

A week in review

New York governor Kathy Hochul speaks at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, California, Monday, May 6, 2024. | Gothamist

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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• “President Biden is no less blatant than dictators we see like Putin and others in other pseudo-democracies, where they weaponize these public institutions to go after their political opponents.” — Tulsi Gabbard

• “Though certainly not born into it, I have come to be ensconced within a privileged coastal ‘knowledge’ class that, in my opinion, too often sees the rest of the country as either inscrutable or irredeemable.” — The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams

• “We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas.” — University of Florida president Ben Sasse

• “A person I trust told me a story she heard from her priest of several decades. A man in their church had a heart attack and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. It was his third heart attack, and the tragedy was not a great surprise. When the death certificate was presented to the family for approval, it referred to the cause of death as COVID-related. The family asked what this was about, and the doctor told them that if their relative died of a heart attack, then the family owed a substantial amount of money ($22k or so), but, if he died of COVID, then the bill was paid and they owed nothing. Of course, they approved the death certificate. If this happened once, it happened a million times. Every incentive for families, hospitals, the media, and the government was lined up to guarantee vast overcounting of COVID deaths.” — Darryl Cooper, host of the Martyr Made podcast.

• “I find it shocking, honestly. I can’t — I can’t, you know, make sense of that number.” — MSNBC’s Susan Del Percio, regarding a recent PBS/NPR/Marist poll showing that more independents are worried about Biden weakening democracy than Trump.

• “It would be hard to overstate the degree to which many academics at Harvard and beyond feel intense and growing resentment against the DEI enterprise because of features that are perhaps most evident in the demand for DEI statements.” — Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy

• “Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not ‘marginalized,’ while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.” — The Atlantic’s George Packer

• “I wanna know about all of those right wing organizations that [Trump’s] connected with, who are training up in the hills somewhere and targeting, you know, what communities they’re going to attack.” — Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), during an interview with MSNBC.

• “Just a reminder that tuna fish are individuals who didn’t want to die to be your sushi dinner.” — A tweet from PETA

• “A person’s sex is what they were assigned at birth based on biological characteristics of maleness or femaleness as indicated by chromosomes, gonads, hormones and genitals.” — CNN’s Kristen Rogers

• “If I were a professor, I’d give them an F. Why we’re spending like we’re still in the Great Depression is beyond me and they haven’t stopped.” — Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, during CNBC’s Squack Box.

• “This is how you re-elect Trump: keep pandering to the far left, suck up to wealthy college grads, allow millions of fraudulent ‘asylum-seekers’ to enter the country, insist that men are women, discriminate against whites and Asians and men, while constantly appearing as merely reacting to events rather than creating new political realities. Biden is losing this election, deservedly. And if he cannot pull off an almighty pivot — and I suspect at this point, he really can’t — this election really is Trump’s to lose.” — Andrew Sullivan

• “Can you imagine a kid, two years old, saying, ‘Mom, don’t take me across the Rio Grande. It’s against the law.’ Give me a break.” — Joe Biden, during his remarks at the White House’s Cinco de Mayo Reception.

• “No president has had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office—9%.” — Also Joe Biden, in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett. Inflation was actually at 1.4% when Biden took office.

• “Buzzfeed doxxed a high school teenager for wearing a kimono prom dress and went after some dude for a sombrero on Cinco De Mayo but every Urban Outfitters TikTok Becky has decided the Keffiyeh is the hot new thing and suddenly the journos are nowhere to be found.” — The Spectator’s Stephen L. Miller

• “‘Protest Paradigm’ Shows What’s Wrong with Media Coverage of Student Activism” — Headline from Scientific American

• “Right now, we have young black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word computer is.” — New York governor Kathy Hochul, during Monday’s Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.

• “They’re going to recall the time when we impeached the president of the United States for withholding military aid authorized by Congress from Ukraine—$400 million, that was the basis of the impeachment. This is congressionally authorized military aid to our ally and [Biden] is withholding it for political reasons.” — CNN’s Scott Jennings, regarding Biden’s decision to cut off military aid if Israel invades Rafah.

• “Though our name will be new, our mission remains unchanged: we are committed to teaching young people to be prepared for life. This will be a simple but very important evolution as we seek to ensure that everyone feels welcome in Scouting.” — Roger A. Krone, president of what used to be Boy Scouts of America, but which is now called “Scouting America.” The Girl Scouts has not changed its name.

• “The Romantic notion of the child as magical seer reached its horrible apotheosis when actual medical authorities began insisting that a mystical gnosis (that is actually just kids parroting propaganda fed to them by adults) compelled them to sterilize and mutilate children.” — Wesley Yang

• “If the extremism on display in the protests were associated with the right rather than the left, I suspect the media would be covering it with less sympathy. The anodyne descriptions journalists are instead giving, such as ‘pro-Palestinian,’ will only deepen distrust of the news media in the center and on the right.” — The Washington Post’s Ramesh Ponnuru

• Vanity Fair: “Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist.”

• “The teens making friends with AI chatbots,” from The Verge.

• A GQ story about “a ring of thieves who stole millions of dollars’ worth of luxury watches—and the special agent who brought them down.”

• The New York Times: “Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening?”

• “The children who remember their past lives,” from The Washington Post.

• Politico: “The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down With It”

• Another Politico piece that dives into the Biden administration’s outrageous spending.

• “Up in the Air: Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free,” from Rolling Stone.