Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

Former MSNBC host Joy Reid appeared on The Breakfast Club podcast, Tuesday, June 24, 2025.

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”

1. Last month, UCLA hired Gonzalez as “Director of the Principal Leadership Institute,” describing her as a leader in “educational equity and social justice.”