My most liberal idpol radlib take is that I think it's pretty bad that
right wing forces are actively intervening on behalf of the Klan with the full weight of the state legal apparatus
Jamal is too nice to say "utter hypocrisy," but that's what this is.
Today's #SCOTUS treats *all* coercive relief against the executive branch as imposing irreparable harm on the government. For that proposition, they cite a 2014 opinion by ... Chief Justice Roberts.
Its absence here is deafening.
There’s so much to say about the remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor & Adam Liptak—and I’ll say a lot of it in Monday’s newsletter.
But the most striking thing about all of it is the role & behavior of Chief Justice Roberts. “Calling balls and strikes” this ain’t:
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...
calls for “viewpoint diversity” are little more than demands for a quota system for political conservatives who otherwise could not hack it www.aaup.org/academe/issu...
this goes for so much of the right wing ecosystem. the same guys who scream “DEI hire” would sink to the ocean if they weren’t kept afloat by their far right sugar daddies
1. Horrifying ruling out of the 4th Circuit.
An all-Republican 4th Circuit panel has just ruled that states can compel trans adults to "appreciate their sex" by enacting care bans.
It even directly says that trans adult care bans are legal in the ruling.
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A lot of institutions looks mighty foolish and boy is the damage already done. Have principles.
“we‘ve been working to gut the Fourteenth Amendment for generations. we are so proud”
If the current moment has taught us anything, it is about the uselessness of libertarianism.
The image sums it up perfectly. The Gadsden flag was all out during the Obama era. How often do you see it now? Most of the principled libertarians were happy to trad their principles for Trumpism.
I feel like I'm losing my goddamnned mind.
This op-ed was written by Kathrine Mangu-Ward. Katherine is editor-in-chief of Reason magazine.
Reason fired @shikhadalmia.bsky.social for being too anti-Trump.
“Libertarians are like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”
It is mostly a philosophy for people who like to scold others, but cannot be bothered building a damn thing.
Donald Trump is a racist.
it reveals pretty plainly that "merit-based hiring" means "you belong to the correct class and hold the right set of identities"
So, I've spent most of my professional life on what Bluesky would surely consider "the right," and I think what's going on here is that so much of the action there is top-down and ultimately donor-driven that some of these folks genuinely can't wrap their heads around...
I think this is a tactic, and I do not like it. I’ve experienced it with Adrian Vermeule, and this is that. He‘ll be nice to you and engage so long as you’re suitably deferential. If you don’t defer, he’ll engage in the most childish shit imaginable until you remember your place.
A wild thing about stays is that, yes, this is usually how it works. No explanation need be given for rendering ineffectual a district judge's extensively reasoned opinion finding that absent an injunction, lawless things will likely happen.
The second question: Was UATX a hard-right project from the start? Based on my reporting, I don’t think it was. I was struck by the sincerity of the commitment to free speech and open inquiry from so many of the people with whom I spoke. A few were Trump supporters, but many more were best identified as anti-woke moderates or liberals. The university’s saga has a strong sense of historical contingency — that it could have gone quite differently had some high-leverage moments gone otherwise. A notable example is the episode surrounding Dan’s alleged violation and expulsion, which several former staffers and faculty suggested was exploited by the Straussians as evidence of dysfunction in their successful second coup attempt.
Politico:
"We've got the world's most credulous reporter here to tell you that a university sponsored by billionaires whose anti-trans faculty are at the cutting edge of 18th-century race science wasn't a hard-right project."
Jesus Christ.
When Richard Epstein can explain how he underestimated the number of American covid deaths by 1.2 million people, I'll listen to him about legal history.
There's a rising faction of the legal academy that stays quiet when their MAGAdemic colleagues produce fraudulent psuedo-scholarship in service to the cruelest aspects of Trump's agenda ... then leap in to police the discourse when their progressive colleagues criticize those MAGAdemics too bluntly.
Weird how The Free Press was able to publish all of these without comment from the Washigton University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.
The extreme attack on transgender youth we are witnessing from a governmental stage was enabled by The Atlantic and The New York Times.
Congratulations, those of you who decided to platform fringe voices and create a climate of fear and hate out of ignorance because those voices insisted a non-problem was a problem. They're now on an HHS stage trying to ruin children's lives. You will live with the harm you have done forever.
1/ A few thoughts about @williambaude.bsky.social’s comment in yesterday’s NYT chat that, “It’s amazing how many of our problems today could be solved by a Congress that was willing and able to legislate in response to national problems.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/o...
Harry Enten is same guy who gave us "Soaring Eagle" and "Steady Eddie" (just a couple of weeks ago!) to describe Trump's approval ratings. What a performing clown
🚨WOW. A unanimous per curiam (meaning no named author) panel of the 7th Circuit, made up of a Bush appointee, an Obama appointee, and a Trump appointee, decline to step in and block a lower court order barring the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago!
New study finds Democrats represent public opinion better than Republicans: "the quality of statehouse democracy, here meaning the dynamic relationship between opinion and policy, is substantially weakened by Republican Party control of state government."
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....
ICE is doing a hell of a lot of harm in the Chicago area *right now.* I don’t mean to trivialize the national guard stuff, it absolutely is an irresponsible escalation, but the guard-centric convo around this really does understate what’s going on without any guardsmen.
1/ So many thoughts about this whole, pathetic episode. But two stand out.
www.texastribune.org/2025/09/19/t...
