Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

Kamala Harris speaks at the Australian Real Estate Conference, Sunday, May 25, 2025. | The Guardian

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.

---

• “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”