Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “Trump has those kind of voters. They are dedicated to him personally. They care more about him being happy than them being happy. They care more about him having what he wants than what they want. They will give their healthcare, they will let their daughters be destroyed, they will let their families be destroyed. There’s nothing he can’t do. He can drown them in Texas. He can take away their FEMA. He can do anything he wants to.” — Joy Reid

• “I would say the state of our democracy.” — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, when asked what keeps her up at night

• “What I find puzzling and interesting about NPR is the same thing, in miniature, that I find puzzling about liberalism in many contexts: the utter inability to impose limits on itself, even when the failure to do so is obviously self-destructive. If NPR had even pursued its ideological agenda merely to the 80% level, rather than essentially to a 100% level, it wouldn’t be in the position it is now. But they just couldn’t help themselves. It’s like a dictator who rigs the election at 100-0, rather than the far more plausible 75-25 or some such.” — Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule

• “There seems to be no real penalty for saying something that’s demonstrably false. It’s just ‘okay.’ No, it’s not. We have a trust deficit where because people don’t know if they can be sure somebody is telling the truth, why should I trust that person? So, we stopped trusting each other most of the time, and that’s dangerous also for our future.” — Former NIH Director Francis Collins

• “Most people voted the wrong way because they were uneducated.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “The reality is that we are going to continue to face emergencies, especially since as we just got done with the big, ugly bill, they are clawing back those things that would have hopefully started to cool this planet down, because they don’t believe in science. The least that they could do is believe in helping American people. Unfortunately, we continue to see Republicans decide that they want to bury their constituents instead of actually doing everything that they can to make sure that they live amazing and full lives.”— Also Jasmine Crockett

• “In free-speech societies there’s nothing that ‘must be said.’ As soon as an idea becomes mandatory (e.g. ‘diversity statements’), it’s wrong.” — Matt Taibbi

• “I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots. I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works.” — JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon

• “It might be hyperbolic for you as a white man. It’s certainly not hyperbolic for me as a Latino.” — CNN’s Ana Navarro, in response to conservative journalist Brad Polumbo saying it’s hyperbolic to call Trump’s second term a “reign of terror”

• “This is literally superpower suicide.” — Susan Rice, regarding 1,300 State Department employees being laid off

• “Looking at State Department documents, it appears the department went from 57,340 total employees in 2007 to 72,895 in 2015 to 80,214 in 2024. So it grew by nearly 23,000 employees before the ‘devastating’ cut of 1,300.” — Washington Examiner’s Byron York

• “For those of us there, it was such a horror, because you saw an emerging America. I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave. Not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you could — you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people. They were coming for us. If [Trump] didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us.” — CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane, speaking about the Butler rally

• “AC is quantifiably bad, but I think it’s also philosophically problematic. Cooling offers comfort, making the unbearable bearable, at least for now. That happens at a community level (no one is really disputing we should keep the very old, the very young and the vulnerable cool), but also individually. When you can buy a personal bubble of coolness and not truly feel the heat, the screaming urgency to tackle the collective issue of a world on fire can recede slightly.” — The Guardian’s Emma Beddington

• “People who feel bad for JD Vance’s kids as family gets booed at Disneyland. I get it, but better those kids know now what their father is about. Other kids are watching their parents get shipped off to gulags.” — Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones

• “I don’t want to hear anything ever in this country again about not being able to house people, no affordable housing. Because they put this thing up in eight days.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin, regarding Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” which is just a makeshift detention space featuring tents and trailers surrounded by razor wire

• “Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

• “The biggest scandal of the last 5 years isn’t that corporate media united to lie to the public about Biden’s cognitive decline, though that is a gigantic scandal. It’s that unelected people exploited it to run the country in secret in Biden’s name.” — Glenn Greenwald

• “For Trump, ‘evil’ is no longer a word reserved for terrorists or immigrants but for domestic political opponents and journalists. And in casting his adversaries as evil, he is seeding the ground for threats of prosecution, imprisonment and deportation.” — NYT’s Peter Baker

• “Republicans, they do not want us to succeed. And they were willing to bring the country down. I would say, we want President Trump to be successful. He’s not going to be, because he’s an idiot.” — Tim Walz

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The Atlantic: “The $30 Million Lottery Scam”

• The Atlantic: “Inside the Carjacking Crisis”

• Esquire: “Gone”

• Reuters: “The Body Trade”

• The New Atlantis: “Reality Is Just a Game Now”

• Bloomberg: “American Mid: Hampton Inn’s Good-Enough Formula for World Domination”

• Atavist: “Conversation With a Hit Man”

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• “Colorado grandfather detained by ICE while walking his dog.” — CBS News headline about an illegal immigrant with a rap sheet that includes over two dozen arrests for theft, assault and battery, damaging property, and shoplifting

• “Trump’s political magnetism, if you will, with his base is about being rich.” — MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace

• “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones

• “Fuck ICE and everyone who supports them. These thugs are America’s gestapo, our modern national shame, and must be stopped at every opportunity.” — Democratic Senator Megan Hunt

• “Doctors’ groups sue Kennedy over Covid shot changes for kids, pregnant people” — Politico headline1

• “The useful political lesson of the Mamdani-Columbia story is that racial self-identification can be more complicated than a lot of (White) people appreciate.” — Washington Post’s Philip Bump

• “In South Africa, where Zohran lived for a time while his father taught there, many Indian South Africans on the left identified as Black - a habit borne of the struggle against apartheid as a way to disavow the hierarchy of race it imposed. This discomfited Black Americans I met, it smacked of stolen valor. But it was instead a refusal of superior opportunities - education, housing, employment - offered to that racial group - Indians - deemed to be superior to Blacks. It was an act of solidarity.” — NYT’s Lydia Polgreen

• “Violence doesn’t come from Democrats, just to be clear. I mean, obviously anyone can be a criminal, but it is MAGA. It is specifically the MAGA faction.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “I think the nice part about being on the court is you have the opportunity, whether you’re in the majority or in the dissent, to express your opinions. I just feel that I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people, in my opinions, how I feel about the issues. And that’s what I try to do.” — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

• “The Trump regime is engaging in ethnic cleansing. We need to say it aloud.” — George Takei

• “I wanna see a few dead ICE agents Los Angeles! Don’t let me down.” — San Antonio City Council candidate Matthew Gauna

• “I tried to interview Joe Biden for my book on the 2024 election. I called his cell phone, and he agreed but cut it short as he boarded an Amtrak train. His aides then changed his number.” — NYT White House correspondent Tyler Pager

• “The Trump administration just dropped 8 immigrants — who they were previously holding in a shipping container in Djibouti — into war torn South Sudan. Cruel. Inhumane. There aren’t words to describe how disgusting this is.” — Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, regarding a group of illegal immigrants that includes multiple murderers and child sex offenders

• “May all visitors, children, non-MAGA voters and pets bet safe and dry. Kerr County (TX) MAGA voted to gut FEMA. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for. Bless their hearts.” — Houston pediatrician Dr. Christina Propst

• “I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for.” — Former CIA Director John Brennan

• “As marriage among people of child-bearing age has declined, the most common number of children born to an American woman aged twenty-five to forty-four is now zero (that is, more women have no children than have any other number).” — First Things’ Darel. E. Paul

• “I think it’s insane, honestly, to just assume we’re going to have normal elections next year. I don’t assume that.” — Joy Reid

• “The thing to understand is that district court judges have to follow the law and Supreme Court Justices get to just make up the law.” — MSNBC’s Chris Hayes

• “I’m going to be very honest and clear. I am fully preparing myself to die under this new American regime. That’s not to say that it’s the end of the world. It isn’t. But I am almost 50 years old. It will take so long to do anything with this mess that this is the new normal for *me*.” — UNC professor Tressie McMillan Cottom

• “Here’s the thing, they’re not going after criminals, they’re going after anybody that is brown, that looks like me, that can’t pass as what they say is the typical American.” — Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez

• “The secret to the Jake Tapper character is acting all shocked and surprised when he digs up a skeleton that he himself helped bury five or six years earlier.” — Walter Kirn

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• Texas Monthly: “The Informer”

• The Atlantic: “That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.”

• USA Today: “A jailbreak, a massive manhunt and a push to fix New Orleans’ broken lockup”

• Rolling Stone: “My Best Friend’s Murder Was a Tabloid Circus. Now, I’m Looking for the Truth.”

• Outside: “Dead Weight”

• The New Yorker: “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?”

• The New Yorker: “Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers?”

• Vanity Fair: “The Man in the Latex Suit”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “Very excited to potentially spend the rest of my life in a white supremacist garrison state.” — NYT’s Jamelle Bouie

• “When you tell a woman she must pretend a man is a woman, you’re asserting the right to control her speech and perception of reality, while also trivialising and devaluing her female-specific experience. You’re asking her to agree that ‘woman’ is a concept men can embody at will.” —J.K. Rowling

• “How was Joe Biden forced out of a presidential race for a disastrous debate and for looking frail and for confusing names, but this man, one of the most ignorant men to ever be elected to any office, allowed to continue on as president and treated as a normal, serious leader??” — Mehdi Hasan

• “If ‘death to the IDF’ is antisemitic, then ‘destroy ISIS’ is Islamophobic.” — The Guardian’s Ash Sarkar

• “The astounding ambit of Trump’s first months has made it possible to imagine a future that looks eerily like the past. An America where the Constitution still stands, but Black people and other marginalized groups receive virtually no protection from the federal government, and the actions of that government instead encourage discrimination. An America where Black people may nearly disappear, first from textbooks, curriculum and museums, and then from predominantly white institutions and entire professions, such as law, medicine and science, where they are already severely underrepresented.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones

• “The border is just one example of many ways in which this administration doesn’t care about the law anymore.” — Democratic Senator Chris Murphy

• “I’m a married polyamorous mom. The MAGA singles could learn from me.” — Washington Post headline

• “One of the defining features of totalitarianism was how its leaders made war on experts, like the Soviet bureaucrats who boosted Lysenkoism. Dictatorial regimes *hate* experts, because experts reach conclusions based on evidence, not political expediency.” — Tom Nichols

• “But this aggressive move to deport any brown or black person that this regime can get their hands on in order to meet Stephen Miller’s 3000-brown-person-a-day quota, they have a literal quota that ICE is required to meet, which is the reason why they are stopping and frisking brown—particularly brown people, but brown and black people anywhere they can get them.” — Joy Reid

• “‘Marginalized identities’ function as warrants to abandon any epistemic standards in progressive spaces. It’s how we saw medicine corrupted to the point where major medical associations all colluded in the lie that chemically castrating and dismembering confused teenagers was ‘medically necessary’ and ‘lifesaving care.’” — Wesley Yang

• “The word ‘socialism’ has been weaponized as Anti-American.” — Former Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman

• “What about any pregnant person who’s a non-citizen in any state anywhere?” — ABC’s Devin Dwyer

• “The racist attacks against Zohran Mamdani since his primary victory are nothing short of disgraceful. The Islamophobia from sitting members of Congress and administration officials is an insult to millions of Muslim Americans and will get someone killed.” — Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who apparently thinks Islam is a race

• “In this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse, where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good.” — The Guardian’s Eve Ensler

• “Our country needs to be sanctioned. We are the bad guys on the world stage. We are a menace to not only free people everywhere, but we are a menace to peaceful people everywhere at this point.” — Elie Mystal

• “Republicans have hijacked the free speech issue, but the only free speech conservatives actually believe in is the ‘freedom’ to shout racist and sexist crap online. That argument works on certain types of men—men who think using slurs makes them ‘edgy’ and counterculture. Men who get uncomfortable when they don’t know the right thing to say. Men who don’t know how to talk to women.” — Also Elie Mystal

• “You see, [Republicans] say they’re pro-life because they want the baby to be born, go to school and get shot in the school. Die in the school, die on the streets.” — Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost

• “Let us say the perspective of the straight white man is being dampened in the world of literary fiction. Should we care?” — NYT’s Marc Tracy

• “The current leader who best epitomizes the spirit of the Declaration of Independence is Volodymyr Zelenskyy.” — Bill Kristol

• “Sometimes you just gotta spike a story because there’s nothing there!

  That’s what editors are for!” — MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, regarding the NYT story about Zohran Mamdani identifying as “African American” on his college applications

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The New Yorker: “Hiroshima”

• Texas Monthly: “It Was Already One of Texas’s Strangest Cold Cases. Then a Secretive Figure Appeared.”

• The Atlantic: “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine”

• The Atlantic: “Columbia’s Last Flight”

• 1843: “‘Downton Abbey’ but with NDAs: how to be a butler to the super-rich”

• The Washington Post: “The Great Egg Heist”

• The New York Times: “Inside the Roosevelt, a Migrant Shelter No More, Echoes of a Crisis”

• The New York Times Magazine: “Democrats Denied This City Had a Gang Problem. The Truth Is Complicated.”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “If Trump, Vance, Miller, Homan, Noem, and McLaughlin had been around in 1939, they would have cackled gleefully and exchanged high-fives as the SS St. Louis and its 900 Jews were turned away from the Florida coast.” — Bill Kristol

• “Socialism is the suicide pact of mediocrity.” — Naval Ravikant

• “One of the hardest things to empathize with: genuinely ignorant westerners enjoying a quality of life the overwhelming majority of human beings of any place or time would give anything to experience glamorizing backwards politics and ideologies that would devour them if given half the chance.” — The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams

• “In the wake of last November’s election, many Democrats blamed low turnout for Kamala Harris’s defeat. It wasn’t entirely without reason, as turnout dropped in Democratic areas, but many months later it is clear the blame was misplaced. Newly available data, based on authoritative voter turnout records, suggests that if anything, President Trump would have done even better if everyone had voted.” — NYT’s Nate Cohn

• “Not for nothing, but I wanna know where all the cholos are at in Los Angeles. 18th Street Florence, where’s the leadership at? Because you guys are all about territory and this is 18th Street and this is Florence, you guys tag everything up claiming hood, and now that your hood is being invaded by the biggest gang there is, there ain’t a peep out of you. It’s everyone else who’s not about the gang life who’s out there protesting and speaking up. We’re out there fighting our turf, protecting our turf, protecting our people, and like where you at?” — Cynthia Gonzalez, vice mayor of Cudahy (a city in southeast LA County), calling on gang members to defend their territory from ICE1

• “Democrats wishing to lose the ‘26 midterms should promote a 33 year-old socialist devoid of executive experience for mayor of America’s largest city and impeach a president who ended a tyrannical regime’s nuclear threat while achieving a cease fire days later.” — Former Democratic congressman Dean Phillips

• “The reason why heart disease and cancer and obesity and diabetes are bigger in the black community is because of the stress we carry from having to deal with being called the N-word directly or indirectly every day.” — Ex-Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman

• “Like, you guys use this terminology. What is that? How do I communicate that to the public? What is the difference between supply and demand? I’m being serious y’all.” — Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, speaking to Jerome Powell

• “Racist fuck. Go back to 1930’s Germany.” — Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan, in a comment directed toward White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller

• “In the briefing, Hegseth referred to B-2 pilots as ‘our boys on those bombers,’ yet both men and women have trained to fly them.” — NYT’s John Ismay

• “Should We Hide Immigrants in Our Attics?” — Bulwark headline

• “I remember, Dana, one point being in Tehran years ago and they’re chanting ‘death to America’ all around me, even as I say, ‘oh, I’m an American, reporting for CNN.’ And they were happy to speak to me, so — so those two sort of jarring realities of the chant and yet, the — the friendliness have existed together.” — CNN’s Erin Burnett

• “In the case of Jasmine Crockett, a rational party facing actual fascism would say, who are our most effective voices? Who do the people listen to? Who do the people trust? Who do the people want to hear from? If it’s Jasmine Crockett, we don’t care who’s in line. She’s about to be the leader. We’re going to put her as the head of whatever this committee is, make her the head of oversight and put her on TV every day.” — Joy Reid

• “Much of the more than $35 billion [USAID] managed last year went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to communities in need overseas.” — A sentence snuck into a NYT article written by Christopher Flavelle, Nicholas Nehamas, and Julie Tate

• “I wonder how many people realize that America is now literally at war *solely* because Trump hates black people.” — Seth Abramson

• “We were talking about the trans issue before and The New York Times really has come over on that to the, sort of the sensible, liberal, not crazy woke position. I think this is a great first step toward getting the Democrats back to sanity, and a second good step would be we gotta do something about The View. I really believe that.” — Bill Maher

• “The ICE agents need to wear N95 masks and watch progressives not know how to handle it.” — Erick Erickson

• “A friendly reminder that people who like socialism are the same people who liked group projects in school.” — Carol Roth

• “I have serious questions about whether we even set back the Iranian nuclear program in any meaningful way, and whether now it’s going to go underground, where we’re in a much more dangerous environment with a covert nuclear weapons program.” — Democratic Rep. Eugene Vindman

• “Asking questions is literally our job. Demanding facts and answers — instead of just taking a president’s word for it.” — Jake Tapper

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• Vanity Fair: “Stealing Mona Lisa”

• The New York Times: “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way”

• Atavist: “The Trials of White Boy Rick”

• The New Yorker: “The Scheme That Broke the Texas Lottery”

• Esquire: “A Crushing Wave of Snow”

• Wired: “When a Houseplant Obsession Becomes a Nightmare”

• New York: “Crime of the Centuries”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “It was clear from the beginning which parts of the job Hegseth most enjoyed: working out, posting about working out, and discussing the imminent removal of trans servicemembers.” — New York’s Kerry Howley

• “Donald Trump is America’s Hitler.” — Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell

• “[Trump] can’t get the numbers he needs to sake his fans’ thirst for brown pain, without going to the states where most Latinos live.” — Joy Reid

• “Maybe if the right ever acknowledged right-wing political violence there would be less right-wing political violence.” — The Washington Post’s Philip Bump

• “Obvious point: Most of the undocumented immigrants who are being rounded up are better Americans, in the ways that matter, than Donald J. Trump.” — Bill Kristol

• “Look at Trump’s Truth Social post. Consider his call with Newsom. He is incoherent, insane. Failure of corporate press to say that every day as he is taking us down the road to a police state is the gravest journalistic malpractice in American history. They will never redeem themselves.” — Jen Rubin

• “Instead of protecting and defending the country, Trump has unleashed the military to terrorize Americans and march for his birthday. Congrats, Republicans. This is what you’ve enabled.” — Wajahat Ali

• “I’m just sort of surprised by the number of people who were at the front of the parade watching, cheering, and then would come and ask to take a selfie. This is a very different, this is a very different mood here. People seem to be going out of their way to say that they’re here to celebrate the Army’s 250th birthday.” — MSNBC’s Ali Velshi

• “To have democracy, a beacon of hope for the world to now be turned into one of the, you know, one of the worst countries where the military are in our streets without any regard for people’s constitutional rights, while our president’s spending millions of dollars prompting himself up like a failed dictator with a military parade, it is really shocking and it should be a wake-up call for all Americans to say this is not the country we were born and this is not the country we believe in.” — Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar

• “During the pandemic, we witnessed the birth of a new religion of contrarianism and conspiracy thinking—the first sacrament of which is to ‘do your own research.’ The problem is that very few people are qualified to do this research. And the result is a society driven by strongly-held, unfounded opinions on everything from vaccine safety to the war in Ukraine.” — Sam Harris

• “People have to just start thinking bigger in this country, and they have to look at what we’re up against. I’ve been sort of trying to shout this from the rooftops or wherever anybody will listen to me, the end of a bar in Kansas City, whatever: the president of the United States is a danger to this country. Full stop.” — Jim Acosta

• “No place on the planet has ever in history been better for white progressive women with bullshit college degrees than America in 2025, and there’s no place in time they hate more.” — Margot Cleveland

• “The humanities couldn’t compete with the Economics Department in promising Wall Street jobs, but they could claim to be ‘useful’ in other concrete ways post-graduation: namely, by giving you the ‘tools’ to be a Good Person with Correct Opinions. The ROI is moral social capital.” — Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper

• “Not if you’re black.” — The View’s Whoopi Goldberg, in response to Alyssa Farah saying “it’s very different to live in the United States in 2025 than it is to live in Iran in 2025”

• “To achieve his desired results, Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, used one of the oldest legal tricks in the white man’s book. He reanimated the should-be-dead idea that treating people ‘the same’ is the same as treating people ‘equally.’” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal, regarding United States v. Skrmetti and the Supreme Court upholding (6-3) a Tennessee law banning “gender affirming care” to minors

• “But, given that we are beset by a bigoted and discriminatory Supreme Court, the way forward, the only way forward, is to take out our frustrations on the elected officials who pass and support these bigoted laws.” — Also Elie Mystal

• “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” — Chase Strangio, the transgender ACLU attorney who argued before the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti

• “I honestly don’t care anymore if this country destroys itself and burns down to the ground. The current form of the United States is incompatible with democracy or human rights. It no longer has any legitimacy to govern and I’ll dance on its grave. Let something better rise from the ashes.” — Alejandro Caraballo, American civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic

• "We’ve got a mental health crisis in this country because everyone, no matter how you affiliate yourself, should be against Trump, period.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “MAGA celebrates the tools of mass shooters and assassins - assault rifles, machine guns, silencers and high capacity magazines. MAGA doesn’t treat firearms with respect - it celebrates their killing power.” — Democratic Senator Chris Murphy

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The New York Times: “They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.”

• Outside: “Snowbound”

• GQ: “Tent City, U.S.A.”

• Atavist: “Blood Cries Out”

• Rolling Stone: “The Death of a CrossFit Athlete”

• The New Yorker: “What’s Happening to Reading?”

• Harper’s: “Rotten Ice”

• The New York Times Magazine: “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “The blood of the Boulder Terror Attack is on Trump’s hands. It’s his fault because the Trump’s ‘illegal alien’ stunts aren’t about preventing crime - it’s about satiating MAGA sadism.” — Keith Olbermann

• “Trump orders investigation of Joe Biden’s alleged ‘cognitive decline’ and use of autopen” — USA Today headline

• “If your dog barks on a daily basis it should be taken away from you permanently.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “There are mass murderers in the world—Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don’t have anyone on the list from America. And I don’t think it’s the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away [USAID] and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of, probably by the end of this, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, that’s Elon Musk’s legacy.” — NYT’s David Brooks

• “[Musk] failed not because his ambitions were too grand, but because they were so pathetically small.” — The Washington Post’s Mat Bai

• “If Joe Biden was like mentally deficient in some way and he was still able to keep this sucker on the tracks, then give me a mentally deficient Joe Biden any given day over Donald Trump.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “So, why not muddy the waters if we can hopefully keep a strong black woman down?” — Also Jasmine Crockett, regarding scrutiny of the Biden administration’s $2B green energy grant to a fledgling Stacey Abrams nonprofit

• “I understand that many people on the left think that associating Trump with conservative views is a shortcut to delegitimizing everything about conservatism, but Trump is no conservative; the MAGA movement is Big Government, Nanny Statism for white people.” — The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols

• “This is a gangster state. And I just hope people begin to understand this is not basically a legitimate government that is sometimes doing corrupt things, this is an essentially corrupt enterprise. It’s like watching the Sopranos. Every day they get up and they try to figure out how to plunder and pillage the people.” — Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin

• “You can see that I’m mentally incompetent, I can’t walk, and I can beat the hell out of both of ‘em.” — Joe Biden, in reference to CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, authors of Original Sin

• “I know the [NYPD’s] feelings on the gang database and how they feel it can be improved. Again, I’m just always gonna stand on the side of things cannot be fixed when it already comes with a broken system. A broken clock can be right twice a day, and things like that just have to go because it stems from racism.” — New York City Councilwoman Althea Steven

• “The rise of anti-Semitism in the last decade can be correlated with the rise of Donald Trump.” — CNN’s Maria Cardona

• “The Trump administration’s framing of Black history as ‘D.E.I.’ and ‘D.E.I.’ as harming white Americans - recasts its attack on Black history as protecting white Americans. As administering justice. Which is the justification of nearly every Klan and racist mob attack in history.” — Ibram X. Kendi

• “A very odd part of the Biden legacy: Elevating black women as the first to be VP and WH press secretary, then making it known to everybody that they were disasters.” — Semafor’s David Weigel

• “You know what I think? I think it’s a waste of money. Maybe these guys should spend their money on teaching men to not be such sexists.” — The View’s Joy Behar, regarding the Democrats spending $20 million to study American men

• “Asking straight white people to acknowledge that they’ve had every advantage this world has to offer is not something we are allowed to do in this country. Instead, we live in a world where every time a white person doesn’t get something they think they’re entitled to, we’re supposed to assume they’ve been treated unfairly.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “Radical Supreme Court rules 9-0 that anti-discrimination laws make discrimination illegal even if progressives dislike the people being discriminated against.” — Charles Cooke

• “Who is actually making the decisions? Who is actually running the country? Everybody wants to say Joe Biden wasn’t running the country. I know for a fact he not only read his presidential daily briefing, he was engaged in the meeting. He asked questions and he gave directives.” — MSNBC’s Symone Sanders

• “The Colorado Civil Rights Commission will be having a heated debate about whether throwing Molotov cocktails at Jews rises to the level of declining to bake a cake.” — National Review’s Dominic Pino

• “American Jews Are Paying for the War in Gaza” — NYT headline1

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• GQ: “The Longest Night”

• The New Yorker: “Atchafalaya”

• ProPublica: “The Tech Recruitment Ruse That Has Avoided Trump’s Crackdown on Immigration”

• The Atlantic: “That Day at Hiroshima”

• Vanity Fair: “A Case So Cold It Was Blue”

• The American Scholar: “The Last Island of the Savages”

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• “More counties with a majority of Black voters shifted toward the Republicans in each of the last three elections (58) than the total number of counties nationwide that trended toward Democrats (57). Democrats increased their share of the vote in all three elections in only two majority-Black counties in the entire country, Rockdale and Douglas, both outside Atlanta in Georgia, a hotly contested battleground state.” — NYT’s Shane Goldmacher

• “Of the 67 counties in America with a majority Hispanic population, 66 voted more Republican in 2024 than in 2012. Even more arresting is that the average swing toward the G.O.P. in those 66 Hispanic-majority counties was 23 percentage points — a political earthquake with which both parties are still coming to terms.” — Also Shane Goldmacher

• “The press has decided to spend a couple months on what I’d call ‘circular self-rehabilitation through self-criticism.’ It’s a modified log-rolling technique with fake confession & interrogation elements which will end w/ a Declaration of Purification & a round of self-applause.” — Walker Kirn

• “Texans, flee the nanny state and come up north to enjoy the land of the free.” — Tim Walz

• “There is an extraordinary ‘reproducibility crisis’ in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate. Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption. The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea. And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country. Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform. Or, they could yell ‘fascism’ at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.” — JD Vance

• “If Trump doesn’t comply, we’re in second amendment territory.” — Michael Mann, a climate professor and senior administrator at the University of Pennsylvania

• “The U.S. isn’t a nation and never has been, so we can cross that off the list. Immigrants assimilate just fine into our culture, better than in the past, so we’re fine there too. Free movement is consistent with ordered liberty, closed borders inconsistent with it.” — Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh

• “You know why I’m not a progressive anymore? Because I spent years hearing misgendering a nonbinary person was violence, but somehow the assassination of two civilians by Free Palestine is mostly a problem because of the optics.” — Brianna Wu

• “You would be hard pressed to find someone in the Trump administration that is actually qualified.” — Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

• “Tumulty took an incident where I felt ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity. She either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was Black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid.” — MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart, regarding his resignation from The Washington Post editorial board after another editor in the section, Karen Tumulty, said it was hyperbolic to call Georgia’s voting laws “Jim Crow 2.0”

• “The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.” — The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer

• “It is time for Republicans to start calling [Trump] out and start questioning his mental acuity and whether or not he is equipped to serve mentally.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “I believe that ICE, an agency that was just formed in 2003 during the Patriot Act era, is a rogue agency that should not exist.” — AOC

• “How To Deal With Your MAGA Relatives Without Ruining Relationships, According To Cult Experts” — Huffington Post headline

• “I went on a left-leaning podcast that shall remain nameless. And we were talking about my kids because I think they were both people without kids. And they asked me about my son and I said he was, you know, he’s a football player and he wants to be a policeman. And their joke was about my 15 year old son, ‘Oh, how does he feel about minorities?’ Like the idea that he wants to be a policeman, therefore he’s racist, my son. And like, you know, that was the big laugh. And then I got dragged in the comments and all that stuff and I thought to myself, this is why you fuckers are losing elections.” — Jake Tapper

• “Women’s reproductive health is about our life. It’s about this whole complicated reproductive system, that the least of what it does is produce life.” — Michelle Obama

• “Kamala Harris did connect with people culturally. There was the ‘Brat Summer!’ There were all these people putting up coconut memes!” — Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna

• “I do worry, frankly, about what’s happening right now in the world. I do worry that it is important that we remember history. It’s important that we remember the 1930s. It’s important that we remember that history has taught us that isolation does not equal insulation. It is important that we understand and remember history, which taught us the interdependence and interconnection between nations. History that has taught us the importance of relationships of trust, of the importance of friendships, integrity, honesty.” — Kamala Harris

• “How is this different from when Putin grabs a journalist or some rogue group in the Middle East grabs an American, and we’re sitting here fighting to try to get them back. Our own government snatched him up and put him in harm’s way, and now refuses to do what it must to get him back home.” — MSNBC’s Michael Steele, regarding the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who, in addition to being an illegal immigrant with a track record of domestic violence, was very probably a member of MS-13

• “A lot of Americans agree with Trump: higher ed needs a kick in the rear end. Those with high confidence in higher ed has collapsed: 57% in 2015 to 36% now. 68% (!) say higher ed is on the wrong track. Also, a plurality of Americans & the GOP agree: colleges have a liberal bias.” — CNN data guru Harry Enten

• “‘You don’t have enough respect for the sanctity of 9/11’ is such a ridiculously out of touch and frankly boomer ass take in 2025. 9/11 has been a punchline for over a decade, ppl are having 9/11 themed parties and there are 9/11 parody t shirts and memes all over.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “Pete [Buttigieg] saying he would have ‘opened the schools sooner’ in 2020 aka killing MORE vulnerable ppl faster, sacrificing teachers and educators (and kids!) lives to force them back into unventilated buildings w no protections. Disgusting how Dems have fully embraced far right eugenics.” — Also Taylor Lorenz

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The New York Times: “How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape”

• Vanity Fair: “Murder at Sutton Place”

• Outside: “Open Your Mouth and You’re Dead”

• The New Yorker: “Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?”

• The Cut: “‘It’s, Like, This Little Cult of Being Skinny’: In Liv Schmidt’s subscriber-only group, members encourage one another to eat as little as possible.”

• New York: “13,000 Pounds at 118 Miles Per Hour”

• The Atlantic: “Unraveling the Secrets of the Inca Empire”

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• “All of the Zoomers that work for me are bisexual, and all of them have long covid. I’ll believe long covid is real when someone who is not bisexual has it.” — Sean McElwee, a Democratic policy advisor and data scientist

• “And then they rigged the election. And then I said, ‘You know what I’ll do? I’ll run again, and I’ll shove it up their ass.’ And that’s what I did.” — Donald Trump

• “Brutal new data for Democrats on the demographic shifts in the 2024 election. They lost ground — or failed to improve — with every cohort and sub-cohort. With the exception of a 1-point gain among married white women.” — NBC News senior political reporter Sahil Kapur, regarding The Cook Political Report’s “Comprehensive New Data Analysis Into Why Harris Lost in 2024”

• “There are people who knew [about Biden] and said nothing, and that is a crime against this Republic. And I think the Democrats are going to pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up.” — CNN’s Van Jones

• “Thing that this election has proven, that this administration has proven, painfully in some ways, is that black people cannot save this country from white folks. We can’t do it alone.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “The only way for Dems to fight this is to draw up a list right now of GOP lawmakers they plan to prosecute if they get back into office in 2028.” — Mehdi Hasan

• “Why Does It Matter Whether Covid Came Out of a Lab?” — NYT headline1

• “How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden’s Infirmity?” — Another NYT headline

• “Yes, the media’s Biden coverage was flawed. But its reporting on Trump was far worse” — Guardian headline

• “Hopefully he rots in hell and rests in piss.” — Taylor Lorenz, in response to news about Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis

• “If ur not masking rn during an ongoing pandemic you believe this eugenic ideology btw, whether you want to admit it or not. If ur not masking you’re ok with infecting and killing/disabling those around u by spewing Covid all over, so mask tf up and don’t talk abt eugenics if ur contributing to it.” — Also Taylor Lorenz

• “I think if the election were held next Tuesday, or tomorrow, we would win back the House.” — Hillary Clinton

• “Well, first of all, don’t be a handmaiden to the patriarchy, which kind of eliminates every woman on the other side of the aisle, except for very few.” — Also Hillary Clinton, when asked what advice she’d give the first female president of the United States

• “Essentially, they’re mad at me for proving that democracy can deliver.” — Stacey Abrams, regarding the outrage over her climate change nonprofit receiving $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers despite not accomplishing anything

• “Extremely easy test to see if someone is dishonest or stupid: see if they think James Comey did something dangerous or threatening when he posted a photo of seashells.” — The Washington Post’s Philip Bump

• “It was pretty likely Biden was going to die if he won a second term, which is something no one wanted to talk about publicly because the Democratic Party is full of children who think bringing up sad things in life is rude and icky.” — Matthew Stoller

• “Why attack universities? Why attack journalism? Because ignorance works for power. First, make the truth-seekers live in fear. Power can rewrite history with grotesque false narratives. They can make criminals heroes and heroes criminals. Power can change the definition of the words we use to describe reality. ‘Diversity’ is now described as ‘illegal.’ ‘Equity’ is to be shunned. ‘Inclusion’ is a dirty word.” — Scott Pelley, principal correspondent for 60 Minutes, in a commencement address at Wake Forest University

• “Alex and I are here to say the conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media to begin with, all of us, for how this was covered or not covered sufficiently 100 percent.” — Jake Tapper

• “The only way out is to face the truth. The president was not fine, was not even within shouting distance of fine — and until we examine our own failure to report that fact, neither are we.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “Democrats always think everything is a messaging problem, which is a low-key way of saying you’re correct and infallible. In reality, Dems have massive cultural and policy problems they cannot fix by just by finding a new messenger.” — Mark Hemingway, regarding Democratic mega-donors debating plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on a range of influencer plans to “find the liberal Joe Rogan”

• “One of the lines in ‘Original Sin’: ‘Five people were running the country, and Biden was at best a senior member of the board.’ For a good example, see the attempted student-loan theft. People around Biden used his infirmity to try to steal money to pay off their loans. Corruption.” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The Atlantic: “An Autopsy Report on Biden’s In-Office Decline”

• The Atlantic: “On 9/11, Luck Meant Everything”

• Wired: “3 Teens Almost Got Away With Murder. Then Police Found Their Google Searches”

• New York: “How One Woman Lost $75,000 to an MLM”

• Texas Monthly: “Still Life”

• Vanity Fair: “How a Ragtag Gang of Retirees Pulled Off the Biggest Jewel Heist in British History”

• The New Yorker: “Looking for Life on a Flat Earth”

• Outside: “The Killer in the Pool”

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• “Gender-affirming care is a common thing that is done in society. For example, men that chew gum to help strengthen their jawline, that take low-T enhancements and testosterone, that do Rogaine or anything like that. That is something we would consider gender-affirming care.” — Democratic Rep. Ann Johnson

• “Can I Wear a Sheath Dress Without Looking Like a MAGA Woman?” — NYT headline

• “It is this fear that the people within the party, within the primary system, will have about voting for a woman because every time we’ve voted for a woman we’ve lost so far. And I think that’s a natural fear because we just want to win. So, there’s a lot of people that are like, ‘You know what, let’s go find the safest white boy we can find.’” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “Anybody who did they research voted the right way. The people that had the information, they voted the right way. These are facts. The more educated voters and the voters that went to the legacy media, frankly, they voted the right way.” — Also Jasmine Crockett

• “Bluesky honestly feels like a miracle where you take the most annoying people in the world and stick them in a broken elevator together.” — Nate Silver

• “I’ll tell ya a story. A friend of mine who’s a businessman, very, very, very top guy. Most of you would have heard of him. Highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug.” — Donald Trump

• “The President, in my view, has not hidden his racism behind a bushel. In fact, you know in his policies, whether it’s removing government workers or in this case admitting white South Africans while denying refugee status to asylum seekers from other countries, principally Central and South American and black nations to come into this country. And so, I think that this policy, while it’s not surprising in this action, really speaks to the underlying message in this administration that disrespects and shows disdains for people of color while embracing these Afrikaners.” — MSNBC’s Donna Edwards, regarding the 49 white South Africans granted refugee status by the Trump administration

• “The richest, most privileged people on the planet are drawn to any cause that makes them if not the oppressed at least proximate enough to slake the thirst of their oppression envy in a milieu that recognizes oppression as the only form of virtue.” — Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon

• “I feel like all of Montana is in the man-o-sphere.” — MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace

• “Men should not play sports against women. If anybody thinks that, I think they’re stupid.” — NBA on TNT co-host Charles Barkley

• “Team Biden would be better off taking the L and waiting a few years until the halo of nostalgia effects the partial reputational rehabilitation enjoyed by Nixon and George W. Bush.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “The directive underscores how Mr. Trump’s crusade to stamp out D.E.I. — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — is now focused not just on targeting programs and policies that may assist historically marginalized groups, but also on the very law created to protect them.” — NYT’s Erica Green, regarding Trump signing the “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” executive order

• “At a pace of one new building permit every two weeks, Los Angeles County will issue 26 rebuild permits per year, and have Pacific Palisades and Altadena rebuilt within 461 years. Mark your calendars for the final ribbon-cutting ceremonies for the spring of the year 2486.” — National Review’s Jim Geraghty

• “I believe there’s no guarantee that we are gonna have a free and fair election in 2026. I think [Trump is] trying to rig our democracy, to destroy dissent, to cripple the political opposition, so that even if his approval ratings are in the 30s in the fall of next year, there isn’t the ability for his opposition to muster a real campaign.” — Democratic Senator Chris Murphy

• “The regime is arresting mayors and judges for opposing their gross mass detention policies. That’s defcon one for democracy.” — Joy Reid

• “Earlier this semester, an NYU professor told me how he had Al-proofed his assignments, only to have the students complain that the work was too hard. When he told them those were standard assignments, just worded so current Al would fail to answer them, they said he was interfering with their ‘learning styles.’ A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due. Another said, about work on a problem set, ‘You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?’ And another, when asked about their largely Al-written work, replied, ‘Everyone is doing it.’” — Clay Shirky, the Vice Provost of Educational Technologies of New York University

• “Says something about the priorities of university admins that they mobilized to rapidly enact sweeping institutional changes during the COVID crisis (because it threatened The Money) but not AI, the gravest danger to higher ed in modern history, which merely threatens learning.” — The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper

• “We’re here to say that there’s no more waiting, no more watering down, no more putting justice on layaway. Black folks are owed more than thoughts and prayers. We’re owed repair, we’re owed restitution, and we’re owed justice.” — Democratic Rep. Summer Lee, speaking Thursday as part of a coalition of Democratic lawmakers and advocates that reintroduced a resolution to offer reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans and people of African descent

• “Watching Jake Tapper pompously prance around as if he uncovered a grand WH deceit to hide Biden’s cognitive decline would be like Nancy Pelosi writing a book denouncing members of Congress who profit off the stock market while in office.” — Glenn Greenwald

• “This man was head of the whole FBI and fancied himself Law itself just as Fauci thought he was Science. And y’all wonder why voters think sanctioned elites are personality-disordered trash and don’t accept their credentials anymore. It’s bc they’re personality-disordered trash.” — Mary Katharine Ham, regarding former FBI Director James Comey posting a vacation photo of shells arranged on a beach to spell out “8647,” which is widely understood to mean “kill Trump”

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• Vanity Fair: “Anatomy of a Miracle”

• GQ: “Hunting the Elusive Rhino-Horn Cartel of Thailand”

• The New York Times: “The Unabomber’s Brother Turned Him In. Then Spent 27 Years Trying to Win Him Back.”

• Atavist: “All That Glitters”

• Rolling Stone: “‘It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl”

• The New Yorker: “How a Frenchman Stole Two Billion Dollars Worth of Art”

• The New Yorker: “The Reckoning”

• Esquire: “The String Theory”

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• “In 2020, data from Britain’s Ministry of Justice found that an astounding 59 percent of transwomen prisoners were sex offenders—compared with 3 percent of women and 17 percent of men.” — Commentary’s Hannah Meyers

• “Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Protein? Blame MAGA.” — Vanity Fair headline

• “If I get shot, if I get murdered by an undocumented immigrant, please tell my children I did not care that they were undocumented.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “I understand that AOC may be more progressive than a lot of people. I also understand that she’s one of the most articulate, exciting people in the Democratic field.” — MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough

• “People say to me all the time, ‘James, why don’t we just do like the Republicans do? Just stand up and lie?’ Because our fucking people wouldn’t stand for it!” — James Carville

• “The majority of people used to be against civil rights. Were they right? No, they weren’t.” — The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill, on 80% of Americans being opposed to biological males competing in women’s sports

• “I wasn’t surprised, not because I didn’t think she was qualified. She is. I was surprised because it went the sexist route. This is a woman, she’s this, she did, I’ve never seen quite a successful and consistent campaign undercutting the notion that a woman couldn’t run the country, and a woman of mixed race.” — Joe Biden, when asked on The View why Kamala Harris lost, and if he was surprised

• “Think about how contrary this is to the example of Jesus. You look at this MAGA Christian Right and it is Will to Power. It is cruelty. It is dominance. Look how they applaud as Trump is cruel to immigrants.” — NYT’s David French

• “Sure would be cool to [have] a non-senile president and a functional national security staff right now.” — NYT’s Jamelle Bouie, responding to the news that India launched a military operation against Pakistan

• “Every time you say my name, you’re reminding the world that you’re terrified of smart, bold black women telling the truth and holding you accountable.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “Yes, Biden was old, but that’s a lot different than an allegation of mental decline that kept him from being able to do the job, which there is no evidence of.” — Former Chief Pentagon spokesperson Chris Meagher

• “[Trump was] claiming investors knew he would win. I think he should stop saying that because you’re going to make somebody investigate how investors would know you would win. I’m just putting that out there.” — The View’s Whoopi Goldberg

• “Think I’m going to be sitting waiting in line at United waiting while 30,000 people are waiting? It’s the only way to get around. No apologies for that.” — Bernie Sanders, when asked by Fox News anchor Bret Baier about spending $221k on private jets during his “Fight the Oligarchy” tour

• “Police Arrest a Man They Say Abused a Corpse on the R Train” — Headline of a NYT article that never once mentions that the “Brooklyn man” is an illegal immigrant

• “I am a great admirer of President Joe Biden, I think he will ultimately go down as one of the most consequential presidents because of all the legislation he was able to pass in his first two years, and the incredible work he did on the international stage in his second two years. As some of the other seminal legislation is actually implemented, Americans are going to benefit from it. You can be sure that Donald Trump will take full credit for it. But it was Joe Biden’s vision and his desire to do the right thing rather than the politically expedient thing, that ultimately I think sacrificed some of his favorability.” — Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, speaking on NBC News

• “Trans people are totally and royally fucked. We’re facing generational oblivion as scotus greenlights eradication of trans people from society. If you want a preview of where we’ll be in two years, look to Russia. Trans people are not safe in the US.” — Alejandro Caraballo, American civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic

• “Buttigieg, who has no clue, you know, he drives to work on his bicycle with his — in all fairness — with his husband on the back, which is a nice, loving relationship. But he didn’t have a clue, this guy didn’t have a clue. And he’s actually a contender for president? Between him and Crockett, you can have that party.” — Donald Trump

• “People like immigrants, who are here not by choice, most of them. They fled fear. They fled where they lived. They fled central America, where they were in danger.” — MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The Cut: “The Watcher”

• SB Nation: “Two Lanes to Accokeek”

• New York: “Manhattan Fold ’Em”

• New York: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”

• Texas Monthly: “The Hunt for the Serial Killer of Laredo”

• Outside: “Trapped”

• The New York Times Magazine: “War Without End”

• Grantland: “The Malice at the Palace”

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• “Harvard just scrapped its office of Diversity Inclusion and Belonging and has renamed it the office of campus and community life. They will move focus from underrepresented minorities to first generation and low income students instead. Resegregation comes to Harvard.” — Alejandro Caraballo, American civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic

• “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.” — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker

• “If you take [diversity] away and try to distill us just down to white folks, we’ll be like Europe, an aging, slowly dying former empire. The Roman Empire didn’t survive because it didn’t have enough strength in its diversity. It suppressed its diversity, and it died. If the U.S. wants to be the Roman Empire, keep voting the way you voting, y’all.” — Joy Reid

• “Once again, socialism is like a nude beach: sounds pretty nice until you see it in person.” — David Burge

• “I’m black, I’m terrified. I’m scared for my trans friends and people who we know and love, our neighbors are disappeared. And that was the goal and [Trump] did it. He did it. He did exactly what he wanted to do because I — you know feel less welcome in my home than I did, you know, last year, and that’s the goal. That was the goal.” — Comedian Amber Ruffin, during an appearance on The View

• “I do think we’re in the middle of an attempted authoritarian overthrow of American democracy, I think everybody who predicted that is right.” — Rachel Maddow

• “Well, if you’re a white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man, you can be as dumb as a rock and be deemed qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense.” — Susan Rice, who also says that “Anybody who fits the mold of somebody who is not a white Christian cisgender male, is by definition in this administration deemed inferior.”

• “That’s what Republicans want to do. They not only want to restore Jim Crow in the south, they want to have Jim Crow spread from one end of this country to the other.” — Chuck Schumer

• “I could code talk to white guys — watching football, fixing their truck, doing that, that I could put them at ease. I was the permission structure to say ‘look you can do this and vote for this.’” — Tim Walz, on why Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate

• “Look, we had the most qualified person who’d run for president in the country’s history at the top of the ticket. That in itself should have got this thing won.” — Also Tim Walz

• “A lot of Americans across the country that I run into, are questioning whether Donald Trump is actually fit at this point, to be able to carry out the duties of president and the commander in chief.” — Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

• “You know, first they came for the Latinos outside of the Home Depots, trying to get work so that they could feed their families. And I didn’t say anything about it because I’m not a Latino at the Home Depot. Then they came for the Hispanic-looking folks wearing hats backward with tattoos and they deported them to El Salvador. And I didn’t say anything about that because I don’t wear my hair [sic] backward and I don’t have any tattoos and I don’t look like a Latino.” — Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson

• “As an immunocompromised person, I don’t have the privilege of buying into far-right fascist denialism and eugenics. I’m one of those weak people you’re probably totally fine killing, because you probably haven’t worn a mask.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “Circling back: Should the incumbent party still pack the Supreme Court and abolish the filibuster and federally rewrite all the voting rules, or are those particular imperatives on hiatus?” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

• “The reason that they can sit there and take this vote and not even blink is because so many of them sit in privilege. When I look across the aisle, I think we have one person who may have a little bit of melanin.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, regarding the House GOP and the SAVE Act

• “One of the lessons I’ve learned is you have to read all the fine print. And you have to follow the threads of stories. Because if not, you’re going to be focused on talking about Greenland while [Trump] is trying to get the personal data of Americans, put them on the Cloud, sell it to China, go to the homes of undocumented immigrants who’re paying taxes, whatever it may be.” — Jen Psaki, during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”

• “It’s a real slippery slope. Trump does this to Harvard, and what’s president Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gonna do to a conservative school?” — CNN’s Jake Tapper

• “Was talking to a professor friend who said that they’ve referred 2 percent of their students for honor violations this year. Before AI, over more than a decade of teaching, they referred two. And the 2 percent are just the students who are too stupid to ask the AI to sound like a college student rather than a mid-career marketing executive. There are probably many more he hasn’t caught.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “California, I’m sorry to say this, a beautiful state, has become Exhibit A in progressive misgovernance.” — NYT’s Bret Stephens

• “Fox News has 15 of the 16 highest-rated cable news shows in April ratings. CNN doesn’t have a single show in the Top 25.” — Tom Bevan, President of RealClearPolitics

• “The impression of a ‘constitutional crisis’ is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration, but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch - limits the courts respected during the Biden administration.” — Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule

• “By aggregating votes across ballots and failing to distinguish between gender categories in a meaningful way, the DNC’s process violated its own Charter and Bylaws, undermining both fairness and gender diversity.” — Kalyn Free, a Native American attorney and Democratic party activist who lost a vice chair spot to David Hogg and is seeking to annul his election

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The New York Times Magazine: “They Stole a Quarter-Billion in Crypto and Got Caught Within a Month”

• GQ: “The Longest Night”

• The New Yorker: “The Trenchcoat Robbers”

• The New Yorker: “'Unsinkable”

• Tablet: “The Price”

• Atavist: “The Balloon That Fell From the Sky”

• The New York Times: “Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash”

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• “Every time I see those cars, I see Elon Musk saluting the country as a Nazi. I made a mistake because I’m basically living in terror every day that the country is turning into Nazi Germany. I’m truly terrified because Elon was unelected and they’re deporting migrants without a trial.” — Natasha Cohen, a Brooklyn therapist who left a brick scrawled with a swastika and the word “Nazi” on a parked Tesla

• “I knew after reading Project 2025 that if Trump got in, it was time for me and my non-binary child to leave the country.” — Rosie O'Donnell, during an interview with CNN

• “The reason the south has languished for generations is that the white leadership cares more about preserving a white male hierarchy than making their society better. We’re now seeing that on a national scale. The Trump administration is turning the US into deep south style autocracy.” — Alejandro Caraballo, American civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic

• “Trump gutted civil rights enforcement in education at the same time he’s promoting HBCUs. The intent is clear, resegregation. They want to ensure elite institutions such as Harvard are only attended by white men.” — Also Alejandro Caraballo

• “I can’t even begin to tell you just how disastrous a traditionalist Catholic pope being elected would be. It would be gasoline on a conflagration of fascism sweeping the globe.” — And also Alejandro Caraballo

• “Gotta say, I struggle on some days to reconcile the fact that millions of Americans actually WANT to live in a country with viruses spreading freely, thousand of people getting kicked out of their jobs, billionaires feasting on the government and people being snatched off the street by secret police. The fact that this and Trump are so many Americans’ heart’s desire makes me question whether this country can ever be saved from its own cynicism and hatefulness.” — Joy Reid

• “The parent can choose to put their kid elsewhere. You don’t have to send your kid to public school. I’m struggling to see how it burdens a parent’s religious exercise if the school teaches something that the parent disagrees with. You have a choice. You can homeschool them.” — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, regarding a major case concerning whether school systems should be required to allow parents to opt their kids out of classes because of religious objections to LGTBQ+ material

• “We go out there as Democrats all the time and say ‘Democracy is the most important thing. We have to defend democracy.’ We fail to acknowledge that for this generation democracy is what put us through school shooting drills and school shootings, it’s what’s put us through the climate crisis and so much more.” — DNC Vice Chair David Hogg, during an interview with CBS News

• “I think the message coming from the Democratic Party is a good message. The problem we’ve got is that we have to depend upon the media to deliver it. We have The Washington Post, for instance, caving to this wanna-be dictator, and we’ve got other media entities that seem to rather push the narrative that will bring eyes to their newspaper or to their television sets and not really give a fair hearing or reporting to what we’re doing.” — Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, speaking on MSNBC

• “If Jesus were alive today and in the United States, this administration would have already taken him and removed him from this country without due process, claimed he was a member of the MS-13 gang as a way to try to justify not giving him due process.” — Hope Walz, daughter of Tim Walz

• “I am a serious lawmaker, but if you try me, you will find out. I’m truly a black woman!” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, speaking at a National Action Network conference in D.C.

• “Black people in America lived under autocracy for most of our history. Black people in the Deep South in many places live under a version of autocracy today.” — Author and progressive policy advocate Heather McGhee, during an appearance on Comedy Central’s The Weekly Show podcast

• “The Trump Administration is going after Harvard for the same reason that Vladimir Putin went after universities in Russia, that Xi Jinping went after universities in China, that Viktor Orban went after universities in Hungary — authoritarians don’t want alternative sources of information, of moral judgment, of alternative ideas.” — NYT’s Nicholas Kristof, speaking on CNN

• “This narrative that school closures were an immense, irreparable harm to kids is unsupported by data. But that’s besides the point. It was really a right-wing ploy to get parents back to work and undermine teachers unions and public education more broadly.” — The Intercept’s Walker Bragman

• “Before I describe the details of Russia’s recent online influence campaigns, I would like to call upon you to stand firm against another autocracy: The United States of America.” — Nina Jankowicz, former head of Biden’s infamous Disinformation Governance Board, testifying before the European Parliament

• “Larry’s piece is not equating Trump with Hitler. It is about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.” — NYT Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy, regarding a guest essay by comedian Larry David titled “My Dinner With Adolf,” which was penned after Bill Maher met with Trump at the White House

• “The fact of the matter is that if Donald Trump had gone on that debate stage and, you know, shit his pants and had a heart attack, Republicans would still be there saying, ‘Yeah, he’s our guy.’ That meltdown that we had publicly is a discipline problem.” — Alex Soros, who says that Biden was “assassinated” by the “pundit class” following his disastrous debate performance

• “21 Years Later, Deported Back to a ‘Home’ He Barely Knew” — Headline of a NYT article about an illegal immigrant convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to 15 years in prison, and who was given a final order of removal in 2008 but was released onto the streets of New York thanks to Biden’s open border policies

• “Joe, we’re here to help. We're worried about you. We're here to gently guide you back into the loving arms of liberal consensus.” — Malcolm Gladwell, in a message to Joe Rogan

• “Trump, Musk, Vance, I’m going to make these easy for you: The only way to increase the white birthrate is to make white people poor again.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• GQ: “The Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die”

• New Yorker: “The Curse of the Buried Treasure”

• Outside: “The Killer in the Pool”

• The Guardian: “‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday”

• New York Magazine: “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York”

• Vanity Fair: “A Vintage Crime”

• Toronto Life: “A Restaurant Ruined My Life”

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• “Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 11.4 percent of American children had been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., a record high. That figure includes 15.5 percent of American adolescents, 21 percent of 14-year-old boys and 23 percent of 17-year-old boys.” — NYT’s Paul Tough

• “Bad News for Man’s Best Friend: Dogs Are Environmental Villains” — Mother Jones headline

• “In a way, Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia.” — The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer

• “Republicans are not going to let up on this, they’re not going to leave it alone, they’re not going to stop this. And we’re going to suffer. It’s very easy to fight back on trans issues. The science is on our side. Every credible medical organization has come out and endorsed gender-affirming care and said that the trans military ban is ridiculous and unnecessary. They’ve said that trans women should be housed in women’s prisons.” — Trans activist Charlotte Clymer, speaking on MSNBC

• “It was a practice; it’s not that they were violent, it was their way of connecting with the celestial bodies.” — María Belén Méndez, an archaeologist quoted in a CBS News story about an ancient altar discovered in Guatemala that was used for child sacrifices

• “You know it’s very white, this movie. You don’t see a lot of different ethnicities; we don’t talk about gender, none of that, and I feel like that really doesn’t represent our world today. So I would like to see movies that are inspired by ‘The Breakfast Club’ but take it in a different direction.” — Molly Ringwald

• “Mr. Biden allowed many migrants to enter the country temporarily as a way to incentivize them to avoid crossing the border illegally. Those people became eligible to work in the United States, receive Social Security numbers and in some cases receive federal benefits.” — From a NYT article written by Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard (yes, five writers)

• “I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him, and honestly? I voted for Clinton and Obama but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will. Me? I feel it’s emblematic of why the Democrats are so unpopular these days.” — Bill Maher, on meeting with Donald Trump at the White House

• “While America’s roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism. From Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to Jan. 6th, there is simply no equivalent on the left.” — CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan

• “Here’s this man who, who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart. He’s a person that seems like a morally good man, which is hard to find.” — Taylor Lorenz, in an interview with CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan

• “There is truly no reason to entertain natalism on the left. If we run out of people in the US, we can simply allow more immigration. Natalism is a Tech Right obsession, like ‘race science’ and eugenics.” — Comedian Kate Willett

• “Such an alpha-but maybe he has just never been that close to a trophy before.” — Alex Soros, son of George Soros, regarding JD Vance accidentally dropping the College Football Playoff National Championship trophy

• “A term of high praise on the dissident right is ‘based,’ short for ‘based in reality.’ But never has an administration been more divorced from reality, and more determined to shove insulting ideological fictions down our throats, than Trump’s.” — NYT’s Michelle Goldberg

• “Regretful Trump voters? More of a media creation than anything else. Just 2% of 2024 Trump voters say they’d vote for a different candidate now. (Numbers for Harris are similar). Appears to be fewer Trump regretters than in 2017 or 2021. GOP continues to lead Dems on party ID.” — CNN data analyst Harry Enten

• “I was in the fetal position. I just wanted to put on sweat pants, eat ice cream and watch hockey.” — Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, describing how he felt in the days after Donald Trump’s reelection as president

• “The Trump administration’s worldview in a nutshell: If you’re white, you’re all right. If you’re brown, get out of town.” — Stephen King

• “Supporters of FWS [For Women Scotland] — including notorious transphobe ‘Harry Potter’ author J.K. Rowling — hailed the ruling as a victory.” — MSNBC’s Clarissa-Jan Lim, regarding the UK Supreme Court ruling that transgender women are not legally defined as “women” under equality law

• “I hope they can see the unity that we modeled and replicate that and understand that we weren’t just taking up space, we were making space for the future. And for me, like Gayle [King] said, this wasn’t a ride, it wasn’t a destination, it was a journey, and it was a supernatural one, and my journey has always been about love and belonging. I think that we have all felt that sometimes we weren’t worthy or we didn’t belong in certain ways, no matter all the accolades, no matter all the studying, no matter anything, and I think today we all said it, like, we belong here. This is where we belong, and we feel very sure of that.” — Katy Perry, when asked on Good Morning America how the all-female crew that Jeff Bezos sent up to space for 11 minutes on a remotely piloted vessel can “affect change”

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The Cut: “Addicted to OnlyFans”

• Toronto Life: “We Bought a Crack House”

• Vanity Fair: “The Riddle of Everest”

• The Washington Post: “The nurse in the NYC subway”

• The Washington Post: “Guns. Knives. Bats. Hammers. Hatchets. Spears.”

• Esquire: “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word”

• GQ: “The Truck Stop Killer”

• The Wall Street Journal: “How a Secretive Gambler Called ‘The Joker’ Took Down the Texas Lottery”

• The New York Times: “In a Snow Paradise, They Live in This Parking Lot”

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• “We believe in merit as Democrats.” — Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

• “Coming into the country illegally is a civil offense. It’s not a criminal offense.” — CNN’s Abby Phillip1

• “Americans are going to think of Joe Biden the way post 1918 Viennese thought of Franz Josef: ‘maybe he was a little confused in his final days, but at least we could then have real cream in our coffee.’” — David Frum

• “So I had to go around the country and educate people about what immigrants do for this country, or the fact that we are a country of immigrants. The fact is ain’t none of y’all trying to go and farm right now. OK, so I’m lying? You’re not! You’re not! We done picking cotton!” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, speaking at a historically black church over the weekend

• “The fact that everything around us is burning to the ground and some people still have no clue that they voted for the arsonist or are complicit in the arson is absolutely mind boggling. People are ok with it so long as the black woman isn’t their President.” — Also Jasmine Crockett

• “But to date, almost all of the 140-plus lawsuits against Trump administration policies have been filed in federal circuits where Democratic appointees predominate. And while the government has won rounds in many of its court fights, most of the judges issuing early restraining orders and injunctions against administration initiatives were appointed by Democrats.” — WSJ’s Jess Bravin

• “This is what kicking the shit out of fascism looks like!” — Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, speaking at the “Hands Off” rally in Washington, D.C.

• “I am undocumented, unafraid, queer, and unashamed.” — Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, speaking at the same rally

• “How do you think [Elon Musk] got to where he’s at? I have people who come up to me and say ‘Maxwell, why would they be stealing? Elon Musk is already the richest person in the world, he has enough money.’ The question is how do you think he became the richest person in the world?” — Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost

• “If you pretend that your differences with friends and coworkers and family are about ‘politics’ when in fact they’re about right versus wrong and fascism versus the rule of law, you’re doing your country a grave disservice.” — George Conway

• “Do you know what’s going to happen? Do you know how this ends? Do you know what the country is going to feel toward collaborators with this regime? After Paris was liberated, they didn’t take very kindly to the collaborators. No, it was not a very pretty sight in the streets of Paris. I’m not saying that these people should be placed in pajamas and have their head shaved, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and spit on. I’m not saying that, but I’m saying that that did happen. And I’m saying that these people betrayed the French nation in the same way that I think that these law firms and these giant corporate conglomerates are betraying the United States. What their comeuppance is, I can only guess.” — James Carville

• “I’m not on the Left.” — CNN’s Jake Tapper

• “I bet you there are a lot of people that voted for Trump that wish that Kamala Harris is in the White House.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin

• “The reason Democrats don’t want voter ID is because they make it much more difficult for elderly people, people who don’t travel. Poor people don’t have cars, don’t have driver’s licenses. It’s sort of a vestige, I think, of post-slavery laws where black people had to prove their right to vote, and often times they couldn’t vote because they couldn’t pass some crazy test.” — Also Sunny Hostin

• “We are currently living through a president who wants to be a dictator. In America, we do not accept dictators and we do not accept kings. We have a billionaire who has bought a seat next to the president and is using him as a puppet.” — Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar

• “We chose a felon who is more interested in loyalty, who is more interested in retribution, who is more interested in grift than in democracy. And we chose a felon because we didn’t want to elect a black woman. So, to read that, to actually explicate that, is to say we would rather destroy the republic than for that to have happened.” — Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, speaking on MSNBC

• “The entire country as we know it is on the line with these people and they are in a full-on effort to turn the government into a gangster state. And Donald Trump’s doing everything in his power to disable the crime and corruption-fighting capacity of the FBI and the Department of Justice so he can just use it to go after his political adversaries. But meantime, the real corruption is just running amok. These people are not opponents of corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse as they keep saying, they are agents of corruption and instruments of waste and fraud throughout the government.” — Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, during an appearance on MSNBC

• “I think she’s the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle.” — Republican Sen. John Kennedy, regarding AOC

• “We’re living under an openly fascistic government whose express goal is to wrench any remaining agency, sexual or otherwise, from anyone who is not a white man with an upsetting hairline.” — New York magazine’s Rachel Handler

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• Harper’s: “The Last Detail: On Patrol With the Guardian Angels”

• The New York Times Magazine: “The Deserter”

• Daily Beast: “How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions”

• Time: “The Return of the Dire Wolf”

• American Mind: “The Border Crisis is Over”

• Manhattan Institute: “Mental-Health Trends and the ‘Great Awokening’”

• The Washington Post: “Nearly 200 cows disappeared. The case remains cold.”

• The Washington Post: “A beloved skier, an audacious jump and the complex grief left behind”

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• “There are trans Americans right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will.” — Illinois Governor JB Pritzker

• “I applied for one school. I kind of had my heart set on it. I am not going to name the institution, but given recent events I am not going to give my money, go into debt for, or support institutions that do not support students and the right to protest and speak out for their communities. Students deserve to be protected. I am not worried about if I were to be protected or not at said institution; I am, you know, a privileged white woman.” — Hope Walz, daughter of Tim Walz, on why she won’t be attending grad school this fall

• “While it may be an uncomfortable truth for this president and for many people in this country, this country was founded on slavery. It was founded on free labor, it was founded on the backs of black people.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin

• “There is an instinct, an authoritarian instinct, that is true in all authoritarian times in history: Take control of the culture, take control of the arts early on.” — Ben Folds, who resigned as artistic advisor of the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center

• “Look, in seventh grade, if I had known that I could have said the word ‘they’ and got in the girls’ bathroom, I would have done it.” — Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is gearing up for a presidential run

• “No leading officials were fired over the Iraq/W.M.D. debacle. There were no notable resignations when Barack Obama’s Libya intervention turned that country into a war-torn terrorist haven. No heads rolled when the Afghanistan papers revealed official dishonesty, and Biden’s foreign policy team did not quit after the Afghanistan withdrawal became a bloody rout. Given that record, you can argue that Hegseth or Waltz should resign over operational security failures even if those failures didn’t have tragic consequences — but it’s silly to act shocked when they do not.” — NYT’s Ross Douthat

• “The fact that you’re sitting around talking about ‘life was better under Jim Crow,’ like, is this because you don’t understand history? Or literally it’s because you married a White woman and so you think that whitewashed you?” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, regarding Republican Rep. Byron Donalds1

• “When I first became a public defender I had no criminal defense experience. And I walked in and I told my boss Charlie, I said, ‘Listen, you should hire me.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I’m black.’” — Also Jasmine Crockett

• “It’s a great honor and a great responsibility. Somebody has to go first.” — Sandy Stone, the founder of the academic field of transgender studies and a biological male, who was elected into the National Women’s Hall of Fame this week

• “Every law passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act should be presumptively unconstitutional. Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act we were functionally an apartheid country. Not everybody who lived here could vote here. So, why should I give a fuck about some law that some old white man passed in the 1920s?” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal, during an appearance on The View

• “Voter fraud does not exist. We shouldn’t make laws based on protecting us from things that don’t exist. The Republicans are the ones who claim that voter ID is necessary to secure our election because their goal is not to secure elections, because, again, voter fraud doesn’t exist. Their goal is to restrict people from voting.” — Also Elie Mystal

• “To cover up the physical signs of Biden’s aging, a makeup artist met with him in the morning when he traveled. The artist also covered up aging signs before Zoom calls with his aides. Biden consistently made these makeup appointments, but he sometimes canceled the briefings that were to follow. After the debate with Trump, Biden needed fluorescent tape to guide him through a fundraiser at New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D) house and needed a teleprompter to speak to just a small group of people. But he still frequently trailed off during his remarks.” — The Hill’s Jared Gans

• “No matter what we do, we’ve got to take this from Elon Musk. He’s part of an effort to go backwards.” — Democratic Senator Pat Fahy, who introduced a new bill that aims to effectively ban Tesla dealerships in the state of New York

• “If you think you can force your candidate down our throat, we will see you when you get out of jail. I’ve instructed all our security to just remove you and hand you over to the po-po, and I will sign the complaint myself.” — MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, who’s long been a critic of “over-policing,” in reference to protestors at the National Action Network nonprofit’s annual convention

• “A climate of fear and trepidation has descended upon the nation. The people of America are more afraid today for our democracy and for their personal safety than ever in our lifetimes.” — Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson

• “Mr. Taibbi said when he was first searching through the so-called Twitter Files, he didn’t know what he was looking at. Well, he still doesn’t. Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.” — Nina Jankowicz, former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, speaking at Tuesday’s House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing on the Censorship-Industrial Complex

• “Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather” — Headline in The Atlantic

• “We’ve got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.” — Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee

• “The thing about watching a JD Vance speech is that everyone knows he’s a little pig man. Everyone knows he exists to squeal for Trump’s amusement. No one respects him and he clearly doesn’t respect himself.” — NYT’s Jamelle Bouie

• “President Obama absolutely did not think that Joe Biden should continue, according to our sources close to President Obama. And he also didn’t want Kamala Harris to be the replacement for Biden, he didn’t think that she was the best choice for Democrats, and he worked behind the scenes for a long time to try to have a mini-primary or an open convention, or a mini-primary leading to an open convention, did not have faith in her ability to win the election.” — NBC News senior political reporter Jonathan Allen, speaking on MSNBC

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today, 12ft.io, or Wayback Machine.

• The New York Times: “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”

• The New York Times: “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek”

• GQ: “The Eruption Of Instagram Island”

• ProPublica: “Fight the Ship: Death and valor on a warship doomed by its own Navy”

• The New Yorker: “The Voyeur’s Motel”

• New York: “The Bernard Madoff Tapes”

• The Globe and Mail: “After the Fire: Murder, Lies, and a Missing Deer Head”

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• “I would emphasize that many Americans experienced the recent period of liberal power, especially under Covidian conditions, as much more authoritarian and lawless-feeling in its everyday impact — schools closed and masks mandated, ideological double standards for different forms of public gathering and protest, ideological speech codes tacitly or explicitly imposed — than anything they experienced under Trump.” — NYT’s Ross Douthat

• “I want to send a message to somebody. Elon, take your musty millions and musty Moscow rights to the moon. Because if you don’t, we are going to stand up, we are going to speak out, we’re going to march and we are going to do anything we need to do. You must get your musty hands off our money or go to Moscow, you musty moo, moo, moo.” — Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, speaking at a recent protest against federal government expenditure cuts

• “Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).” — Compact’s Jacob Savage

• “So many people have sacrificed and fought and died for democracy. And Trump comes along with his ignorant ass and he don’t even know the Constitution. If he wants to start looking so closely to find those who were born here and their parents were undocumented, maybe he ought to first look at Melania.” — Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, speaking at a Los Angeles protest against DOGE1

• “Trump escalates threats against those who destroy Tesla vehicles” — Washington Post headline

• “First of all, you can’t make Canada the 51st state without going to war with them. Let me explain how that happened, how that worked out the last time we tried to go to war with Canada. They burned the white house to the ground in 1814 and won the war. Canada beat us in the war of 1812. They probably like their chances against us. We’re not going to beat them in a war because we have never been able to do that.” — Joy Reid, during an appearance on Don Lemon’s podcast2

• “[Musk’s] incompetent. He’s a thief. He’s a Nazi. And people don’t trust him.” — Former Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman, during a CNN panel discussion

• “Until the GOP and Trump care more about immigrants, women’s rights, people of color’s history and equality, healthcare for people, gun victims, the poor and hungry, and our Constitution than they do Teslas, then don’t ask me to feel bad about the damage to Teslas around the world.” — Matthew Dowd, chief political analyst for ABC News

• “Five years after covid struck, liberals have reconsidered their mistakes, while conservatives have done the opposite.” — The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait

• “I question why the first time in American history a president has won every swing state and is also best friends and his largest donor was a man who owns and runs the internet. So, I would hope that would be investigated, and that we would see whether or not it was an anomaly or something else that happened on election night in America when Kamala Harris was filling up stadiums with people who supported her and Donald Trump was not able to do that.” — Rosie O’Donnell, who recently relocated to Ireland

• “Tom Homan is like an early 20th century Southern sheriff who’d send a mob to find a black kid who’d allegedly looked the wrong way at a white woman.” — John Harwood

• “Why is it that whenever Republicans decide to boycott a company like Bud Light or Disney, they’re doing it because they’re victims of that company. Yet, when America decides to boycott a company like Tesla ‘cause the CEO is running around telling Americans what they can and can’t live without so that he can have a tax break, then all of a sudden they’re victims again. So they’re victims when they’re being boycotted and they’re victims when they’re boycotting. That’s because Donald Trump has made his fortune and his political career on being a victim. And Republicans have learned the same thing, always be a victim. That’s not a very masculine trait to me.” — Adam Kinzinger

• “There was literally a 10-question survey that you could do with SurveyMonkey for $10,000 that the government was charged almost a billion dollars for.” — Elon Musk, when asked by Bret Baier what DOGE’s most astonishing discovery has been so far

• “Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there. And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot ass mess, honey.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, speaking about Texas Governor Greg Abbott at a Human Rights Campaign dinner

• “I wasn’t thinking about the governor’s condition—I was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable. Literally, the next line I said was that he was a ‘Hot A** Mess,’ referencing his terrible policies. At no point did I mention or allude to his condition.” — Also Jasmine Crockett3

• “I never remember in my lifetime a sitting president trashing a previous president. I’ve never heard that before.” — The View’s Joy Behar

• “They want to bring in Panama. They want to bring in Greenland. They want to bring in Canada, where Elon Musk is a citizen after he left his apartheid South Africa. Why? Because they believe that this new consortium will require a new Constitution that would allow Elon Musk to run for president.” — Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin

• “Join us, the right-wing says, and you can use slurs.” — Intelligencer’s Sarah Jones, in a piece titled “Masculinity Will Not Save Men”

• “The right-wing offers men a purpose of a sort but asks him to derive his meaning from the subjugation of others.” — Also Sarah Jones

• “The number one domestic terror threat in America for several years in a row has been white supremacist terrorism which is often aligned with right-wing radical groups. How many times have Trump, Vance, Musk and GOP spoken about them?” — Daily Beast’s Wajahat Ali

• “We let them define the issue on immigration, we let them define the issue on DEI, and we let them define what woke is. We got ourselves in this mess because we weren’t bold enough to stand up and say, you’re damn right we’re proud of these policies.” — Tim Walz, speaking at a Texas town hall with Beto O’Rourke

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today, 12ft.io, or Wayback Machine.

• Vanity Fair: “Sympathy for the Devil”

• Compact: “The Vanishing White Male Writer”

• The New Yorker: “The Case of the Scattered Dutchman”

• The New Yorker: “Jumpers”

• Rolling Stone: “Bellagio Bandit: How One Man Robbed Vegas’ Biggest Casino and Almost Got Away”

• GQ: “The Unsolved Mystery of the Malibu Creek Murder”

• The New Republic: “The Last Unknown Man”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “Among the American public overall, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating stands at just 29% — a record low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992 and a drop of 20 points since January 2021.” — CNN’s Ariel Edwards-Levy

• “My uncles all fought in World War II so that we would not have a fascist in the White House and this is what we’re getting right now.” — The View’s Joy Behar

• “Retired FBI agents with more than 120 years of combined experience told our investigation the legendary FBI Quantico Training Academy was dubbed the ‘Participation Academy’ because of headquarters’ pressure to ‘push through’ poorly performing candidates to meet DEI objectives.” — Catherine Herridge, former senior investigative correspondent at CBS News

• “When my mother came from Guyana, she realized [America] is not a land of opportunity for people like us.” — Joy Reid, during a conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates held at Xavier University1

• “This election I think for a lot of people was a surprise that shouldn’t have been a surprise. I know it was for me. I think I allowed myself the 107-day delusion that it was possible for this incredible black and Asian woman to win.” — Also Joy Reid

• “Why are old, white men the only ones who are allowed to be felons?” — Actress Ellen Pompeo, during an appearance on The View

• “People love AOC. People love Jasmine Crockett. People love Eric Swalwell. And the like. And I think the Democratic Party should put the people out there who the people want.” — Don Lemon

• “Let’s be honest, there’s a huge faction of the MAGA movement that is really fucking racist…and even if they’re not, you have to overlook a lot of that in order to support Donald Trump, which I think is maybe even more egregious than just saying ‘I’m a racist.’” — Also Don Lemon

• “I don’t think that you can be black and be a rational MAGA person.” — And also Don Lemon

• “If we continue to observe norms, if we continue to engage in business as usual, this democracy could be gone. I don’t think we have a year to save American democracy.” — Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, speaking on MSNBC

• “If that doesn’t seem like a lot, the last time it cracked 40%, you gotta go back to 2012. The last time it actually hit 44% or higher—January 2004.” — NBC News political data expert Steve Kornacki, regarding an NBC poll showing that 44% of Americans say the country is headed in the right direction under Trump, up from just 27% in November

• “There’s nothing conservative about an unelected South African nepo-baby firing people at the VA…Can you imagine if President Barack Obama had brought his unelected African friend to cut — you know what I mean.” — Tim Walz, speaking at an Iowa town hall

• “If you need a little boost during the day, check out Tesla stock.” — Also Tim Walz2

• “We narrowly dodged having this bumbling sitcom dad as vice president. The archetype is the weak father, who indulges the latest ideological fads—‘protect trans kids’—to win the approval of his children. Being the ‘white male ally’ relieves him of the responsibility to lead and provides a simple script to follow. Hence, the barking seal routine and the applause from the audience. He even has to pretend that he doesn’t quite know how the stock market app works on his phone. He can’t convey competence or confidence, which is now associated with the Right and Musk, and, therefore, associated with evil. Walz is what happens when white men adopt DEI not only as a politics, but as a personality.” — Christopher Rufo

• “Wokeness is dying. We might miss it.” — NYT’s Michelle Goldberg

• “Democratic senators should listen to the women. Appropriations leaders Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray have eloquently presented the case that we must have a better choice: a four-week funding extension to keep government open and negotiate a bipartisan agreement. America has experienced a Trump shutdown before - but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse. Democrats must not buy into this false choice. We must fight back for a better way. Listen to the women, For The People.” — Nancy Pelosi, regarding the government funding bill

• “You just gotta keep your eyes open, y’all. Because if they can just come up and take somebody because they’ve made a decision that you’re supposed to be that person, any one of us could find ourselves being deported to some country when we’ve never been there.” — The View’s Whoopi Goldberg

• “From what I understand, Teslas will fall apart if you just leave them alone anyway. Yeah, there’s nothing really anybody really needs to do about it. Just drive them enough. Eventually the things will start to fall apart.” — CNN’s Josh Rogin, during a discussion about Tesla vehicles being vandalized and destroyed

• “The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points].” — David Shor, head data scientist at the Democratic consulting firm Blue Rose Research

• “This is the establishment of Jim Crow 2.0. I said that before we ever had the election, and it’s coming true.” — Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, speaking on MSNBC

• “Fuck this evil bitch! We are in an ongoing pandemic and these policies of forced infection will kill and disable countless NYers, mostly the most vulnerable.” — Taylor Lorenz, in response to New York Governor Kathy Hochul pushing for a partial ban on face coverings

• “What was hiring like in government and in the private sector before the Civil Rights Act, before these executive orders? Because it wasn’t a meritocracy. What it was was an exclusive hold that specifically white men had on America. And so undergirding this is a very dark idea that to be competent is to be a white man and to be a straight, heterosexual white man.” — NYT’s Mara Gay, during an appearance on MSNBC

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today, 12ft.io, or Wayback Machine.

• The New Yorker: “Crush Point”

• The New Yorker: “City of Water”

• Atavist: “The Girl in the Picture”

• The Atlantic: “Columbia’s Last Flight”

• Vanity Fair: “The Body in Room 348”

• The Wall Street Journal: “All-Robot Assault Opens New Chapter in Front-Line Warfare”

• The Guardian: “Seven stowaways and a hijacked oil tanker: the strange case of the Nave Andromeda”

• Los Angeles Times: “Man in the Window”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week (ranging from insightful and informative to delusional and deranged), along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “At this point, my only hope for the US to avoid becoming an ally to Russia is a violent resistance by our military.” — UCLA Law professor Peter Arenella

• “It is not a criminal violation to enter the country illegally. It is not a crime.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, speaking on MSNBC

• “It’s striking but it’s true. Right now, 500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for protection from 140 million Russians who have been unable to overcome 50 million Ukrainians for three years.” — Polish President Donald Tusk

• “Feels weird that we’re setting our clocks forward by an hour in an era when some are trying to turn the clock back a century.” — David Axelrod

• “We’ve arrived at the point where democratic nations like Canada and Poland need nuclear weapons in order to protect themselves from America.” — The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last

• “I do not care what you think of this sports issue that is definitely not affecting you in any way shape or form, the Republican Party’s broad project against trans people is a sin. You are committing a sin by signing on to any of it and you are not loving your brothers and sisters, and Jesus thinks you’re going to hell, which is gratuitously pornographic torture for eternity, so maybe if you Believe, perhaps don’t fucking do this, thx.” — Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng

• “I think that what has happened is there’s another piece to this, which is there is not the same, strong mainstream non-partisan media there was in 2016. It is much, much, much smaller. So, it has fallen on these Democratic senators to narrate what’s happening. Right? Like, to explain what they’ve seen in the last seven weeks.” — MSNBC’s Molly Jong-Fast

• “Ah yes, making sure that our soldiers have the right facial hair is essential to Protecting Americans. It is so obvious that Hegseth got a little stiffy from those Russian propaganda videos on the eve of the Ukraine invasion and now wants to reshape the US military in that specific image.” — NYT’s Jamelle Bouie, regarding Pete Hegseth ordering a force-wide review of physical fitness and grooming standards

• “Hegseth wants an all white and all male military and he is going to look for every bureaucratic trick he can find to get nonwhite and women service members to leave.” — Also Jamelle Bouie

• “These are, you know, the scariest times in my lifetime, that’s all. I think that’s objectively the truth.” — Bernie Sanders, who was born in 1941

• “What does Trump expect? Oh, I believe he expects violence. I believe he expects confrontation. I believe he’s working toward a civil war.” — Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, speaking at Thursday’s conference for the Congressional Black Caucus

• “If you’re ok with sacrificing the lives of tens of millions of disabled ppl bc u don’t want to wear a mask and take public health precautions during an ongoing pandemic amidst total state abandonment, then you are playing a key role in ensuring minority groups are expendable.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “Wear a respirator mask to stop the spread of deadly and disabling disease, which kills LGBTQ ppl and other marginalized groups at higher rates. Stop killing and disabling those around u by spreading infection. Have solidarity, we need to protect and care for each other bc our govt certainly won’t.” — Also Taylor Lorenz

• “Russia has been all-in for him ever since he ran for office the first time, and Donald Trump is all-in for Russia. And it doesn’t matter what it does to our national security, doesn’t matter to him what it does to our standing in the world, doesn’t matter to our European allies. The only thing that matters is Donald Trump gets to pay back his Russian benefactor.” — Adam Schiff, speaking on MSNBC (note that not only has Trump retained all Biden-era sanctions on Russia, he’s now increasing sanctions against the Russian oil, gas, and banking sectors, relative to what Biden imposed)

• “There’s a particular place in hell for academics who use their academic expertise and power to distort and do violence to people in the world.” — Harvard professor Timothy McCarthy, who says that any professor “who is a member of organizations that are critical of ‘gender-affirming’ medical treatments” should face dismissal

• “Trump Republicans hate the Department of Ed for the same reasons they hate education. They view education as a waste of funds since it exposes their fraud and prevents their abuse of American minds through their outlets of disinformation. Trump Republicans want a country of believers, not thinkers.” — Ibram X. Kendi

• “I have a 12-year-old son who, as he learns more about various kinds of dark chapters in American history, can get really down on this country. So I often find myself in the strange position of trying to talk up American greatness because I don’t want him to feel despair about the country that he’s growing up in. It’s occurred to me that every single thing that I have pointed out to him as a sign of American greatness or goodness, whether that be foreign aid, whether that be our support for Ukraine, our success in welcoming immigrants and refugees, or scientific pre-eminence, everything that I thought was best about America, Trump has either destroyed or tried to destroy in less than two months.” — NYT’s Michelle Goldberg

• “Amazon forest felled to build road for climate summit” — BBC headline

• “The Ukrainians are the noble, good guys. In some ways they’re more American than we are, over the last couple years.” — Paul Rieckhoff, president of Righteous Media Inc., during an appearance on MSNBC

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today, 12ft.io, or Wayback Machine.

• GQ: “The Secrets of the World’s Greatest Art Thief”

• The New York Times: “What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero”

• The New York Times: “30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything”

• N.S. Lyons: “Love of a Nation”

• IM-1776: “Lessons From Ukraine”

• Vanity Fair: “Thieves in the Night: A Vast Burglary Ring From Chile Has Been Targeting Wealthy U.S. Households”

• The New Yorker: “The Fourth State of Matter”

• Tampa Bay Times: “Angels and Demons”

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Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week (ranging from insightful and informative to delusional and deranged), along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

Subscribe now

• “America First means America Alone. America First means America Amoral. America First means America Weaker. Abroad, America First means America aligned with dictators. At home, America First means government by plutocrats, crooks, and foreign stooges.” — David Frum

• “A sad cavalcade of self owns and unhinged petulance. It only makes Trump look more presidential and restrained. We’re becoming the metaphorical car alarms that nobody pays attention to—and it may not be the winning message.” — Democratic Senator John Fetterman, regarding how his fellow party members acted during Trump’s joint address

• “Vance’s rise from the Appalachian underclass is somewhat less impressive when you consider what a wretched person it produced.” — John Harwood

• “What happens when irresponsible media personalities hype a conspiracy theory, only to see it unravel before their eyes? We’re finding out right now...” — Russiagate extraordinare Brian Stelter, regarding the “Epstein Files”

• “MAYBE THE WORLD DOES NEED MORE WOMEN LEADERS.” — MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, following the Trump-Vance-Zelensky meeting

• “I know people talk about [Musk] as a genius, but to me, I think he’s probably one of the dumbest, luckiest people to exist on this earth.” — Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar

• “The people who start the wars don’t fight them, the people who spend the taxes don’t pay them, and the people who forgive the criminals don’t live next to them. Of course we’re going to have too many wars, too much spending, and too much crime.” — Naval Ravikant

• “If the US had continued to support Ukraine, we may have been months away from the end of the war. The Russians would not have been able to continue to fight for much longer. They were making almost no progress, taking huge casualties.” — The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum

• “I really wish media commentators would point out that Trump calling Warren Pocahontas is unambiguously racist.” — MSNBC’s Michael A. Cohen

• “The idea of a president standing at that rostrum and throwing a slur at a US senator in the middle because you disagree on policy is absolutely ridiculous.” — Tim Walz

• “This is how progressives see the federal bureaucracy, public schools and more -- as distant check-writing institutions given to the US Left by divine design and must never be touched or questioned by those who are paying the bills.” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

• “So, unfortunately, we have someone that is occupying the White House. And as far as I’m concerned, he is an enemy to the United States.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, during an appearance on MSNBC

• “As it relates to X, [Musk] has never made a profit since he bought X. In fact, the value of X is 75% lower than it has ever been. So, if I am gonna go look for somebody to run a business, I’m gonna look for someone who is going to run one successfully. And before people start screaming and yelling about ‘well, he’s a billionaire,’ yeah, when you know the right people and they’ll just give you money, then you can become a billionaire too.” — Also Jasmine Crockett, speaking during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Hearing (it was reported last month in the WSJ that X is now more profitable under Musk than before he purchased it and has doubled in value)

• “We had an opportunity to have a woman lead this country and I promise you, she would have led us to the promised land. But instead we got somebody that seems like he wants to take to us to hell.” — Also Jasmine Crockett

• “I hope he’s alive for another 95 years and I hope he lives the life he wants to live. I hope he never has to defend the United States Capitol against Donald Trump’s supporters, and if he does, I hope he isn’t one of the six who loses his life to suicide.” — MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, regarding 13-year-old cancer survivor Devarjaye Daniel, whose dream is to become a police officer, and whom Trump made an honorary Secret Service agent during his joint address to Congress

• “For the record — and this is disgusting — the President made a spectacle out of praising a young man who thus far survived pediatric cancer, as if the President had something to do with that.” — Rachel Maddow

• “My question to Elon Musk: What the hell are you doing here in America? Go back to South Africa.” — Democratic Rep. Nydia Velazquez

• “But discussion of Mr. Musk, especially in the United States, often misses something: He is a white South African, part of a demographic that for centuries sat atop a racial hierarchy maintained by violent colonial rule. That history matters. For all the attempts to describe Mr. Musk as a self-made genius or a dispassionate technocrat, he is in fact a distinctly ideological figure, one whose worldview is inseparable from his rearing in apartheid South Africa. More than just an eccentric billionaire, Mr. Musk represents an unresolved question: What happens when settler rule fails but settlers remain? That’s what is playing out in America today.” — NYT’s William Shoki

• “I’m not sure I can think of a single person in public life I’ve ever found less appealing than JD Vance.” — The Bulwark’s Tim Miller

• “When Biden was in we had the envy of the world, the world admired our economy.” — The View’s Joy Behar

• “This maga regime is clearly pushing to resegregate American society in favor of aggrieved conservative, straight white Christian men regardless of, or maybe even because of lower qualifications. It’s like they’re deliberately elevating unqualified men and pushing out more qualified women and POC.” — Joy Reid

• “There are people who are charged with trying to find savings. So yes, it’s an attack on government, but it’s also an attack on this government. What I mean by that is it’s an attack on this government that used to be headed by a black man. It’s an attack on this government that almost elected a black woman to the highest office in the land.” — Columbia University Professor Basil Smikle, speaking about DOGE during an appearance on MSNBC

• “If you look around the world, our biggest economic enemy is China, our biggest geopolitical enemy is Russia. In a matter of three years, without losing a single US soldier, we have decimated their military and their economy. It’s been the greatest return on investment for any military expenditure ever.” — Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today, 12ft.io, or Wayback Machine.

• The Atlantic: “The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything”

• Bloomberg: “The Master Thief”

• GQ: “The Legend of Elden Kidd, America’s Most Dedicated, Most Creative People Smuggler”

• Texas Monthly: “The Positively True Adventures of the Kilgore Rangerette–Kidnapping Mom”

• The New Yorker: “Has an Old Soviet Mystery at Last Been Solved?”

• Esquire: “Everest at the Bottom of the Sea”

• Vanity Fair: “The Pirate Latitudes”

• Truly Adventurous: “Lost on Sullivan’s Island”

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