This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites—it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.” —Sen. Mitt Romney on Friday

Mitt Romney took the stage at the McCain Institute on Friday, sitting down across from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and for an hour the two talked shop. The setting was strange enough: It would be unfathomable to see a Republican president’s secretary of state interviewed by a Democratic senator at a forum named for a Democratic presidential also-ran. Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo weren’t yukking it up with, say, Michael Bennet at the Hillary Clinton Institute during the Trump years.

That setup didn’t put much elevation in the eyebrows, but Romney’s comments about TikTok and Palestine sure did. Twenty minutes into their keynote, the men exchanged some perhaps all-too-candid thoughts about the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza and its rank unpopularity among young Americans, along with the rest of the world, a fact that the American political establishment has otherwise refused to publicly acknowledge.

“Why has the PR been so awful? … Typically the Israelis are good at PR!” Romney put it to Blinken, in a looping question that came out less like inquiry and more like confessional.

“You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion—the impact of images—dominates,” Blinken responded.

Romney was quick to co-sign that hypothesis: “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of........

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