Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy sat down for an interview with MSNBC’s Kristen Welker, Monday, June 30, 2025. | MSNBC

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.”