Jason Pierceson

“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.

Opinion | Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump

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.

Most people didn’t think much of it when the university dean, Ben Crocker, called a student named Dan into his office on Monday, Sept. 9, the first day of classes. But at 7:44 in the evening, they received an email from three administrators saying that Dan had been removed from campus, “transported to his home out of state,” and barred from further access to the university. The nature of the allegations concerned, at their core, a pair of charged statements Dan allegedly made that would be familiar to any Title IX officer. The first was a general statement implying that UATX girls carried themselves physically in a way that invited sexual assault. The second was a suggestion to a specific female student that she had carried herself in a way that invited sexual assault. Dan had already been the subject of some negative attention on campus because of provocative statements he’d made in a UATX-based Discord “introductions” chat. These included a challenge — “If I catch any of you guys in my stuff, I’ll kill you” — which was a reference to the 1981 movie “Stripes” and likely misunderstood by fellow students. In another exchange, a discussion of transgender issues, Dan expressed reservations about hormone treatment and said that he couldn’t wait “to play devil’s advocate for legalizing pedophilia.” Between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m., Crocker visited the dorms, where he hosted a meeting on the roof to discuss the issue with students. Crocker’s message was that Dan’s conduct had been evaluated to be a “credible threat” — a phrase that would be repeated by the administration many times over the following days. Crocker then faced what one student attendee recalled as a “firing squad” of questions. Some students said that Dan had seemed off, but others saw his hasty removal as an example of the very cancel culture to which UATX was supposed to be the antithesis.

Several students noted a lack of diversity. Consistent with its emphasis on “merit-based admissions,” UATX doesn’t publish demographic data. The students with whom I spoke said their classmates — and the college’s leadership — were overwhelmingly white, disproportionately came from wealthy families and had an overrepresentation of apparent neurodivergence. They found ideological diversity to be particularly lacking. “I didn’t realize exactly how conservative it would be,” one current student told me. “You know, when I hear free speech and open debate and all that jazz, I assumed that there was going to be a more equal amount of political views, and there wasn’t.” Classes weren’t as innovative as most students expected. “Year one was exceptionally boring,” the student said. “They did great books, they just didn’t do it in a great way,” said another student, who lamented the amount of memorization required. “I thought we were going to be intensely debating,” he said. Several students shared course syllabi with me. Most are easy enough to imagine being offered on any campus — with the notable exception of math and science. “The math classes go over algebra you learned in ninth grade,” a student told me. “There was just nothing there.” He described the offering as “schizophrenic” and described a class he’d taken at University of Texas at Austin as “exponentially more important.” Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.

The poor quality of the science offerings had bothered Heying and Pinker. “Others thought I was the token liberal,” Heying told me, “but I came to understand myself as the token scientist.” In an email, Pinker wrote, “They should have hired a widely esteemed scientist and proven program builder to set up their science division.” Another surprising similarity with other colleges stemmed directly from Dan’s expulsion: The students feared cancellation. “At any moment a frivolous Title IX complaint could be filed against you,” a former student told me. “I’ve never felt my speech was so chilled as it was in the classroom at UATX.”

During the many conversations I had reporting this story, two questions came up more than any other. The first: Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss. speaks onstage during an event in New York City, on Nov. 19, 2024. | Noam Galai/Getty Images for The Free Press One person I spoke to, who was present during the early planning stages, told me that Weiss was “very elusive” and almost never present in person. This was ironic since UATX was closely associated with Weiss — a bust of whom now resides in the school library. Weiss, meanwhile, has only risen further during the Trump 2.0 era and is now editor-in-chief of CBS News, where she has been criticized as genuflecting to the Trump administration. A spokesperson for CBS News did not respond to a request for comment from Weiss. One former member of the development team told me that they would routinely ask prospective donors how they got to know UATX. “Eighty percent of the time, the answer was Bari Weiss,” they said. “It was very often referred to as Bari Weiss’ University, or Bari Weiss’ University Project, or Bari Weiss’ University of Austin.” For several people, this was a source of resentment. “I don’t care whether she wants to pretend this is all gone now — she is the reason that this place exists. She was huge, she was held in such high regard, she had such an enormous impact,” the former staffer said. “I want her to be held to account,” she added. “I’m pissed.”

Apropos of nothing, let's check in with how things are going at Bari Weiss's free speech university. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

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.

Opinion | At the Supreme Court, Scenes From a Judicial Backlash

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.

How a secret recording of a gender identity lecture upended Texas A&M Officials have struggled to detail the exact reasons for the A&M professor’s termination, citing a technical issue with her course description. Faculty say the move was politically motivated.

1/ So many thoughts about this whole, pathetic episode. But two stand out.
www.texastribune.org/2025/09/19/t...

Opinion | JD Vance Claims One of Our Worst Traditions as His Own

Vance’s vision of blood-based citizenship isn’t new and isn’t interesting. You either believe that the Declaration of Independence should mean what it says in our political life, or you don’t. He doesn’t. Great stuff from @jamellebouie.net

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

1) Read the blog "Before Bostock and the Continuous Fight for Transgender Rights" by @jpier.bsky.social here: kansaspress.ku.edu/blog/2025/06...

2) Pick up Before Bostock and get 50% off with discount code 24SUMMER25: kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700633142/.

The reasoning in Skrmetti is just repackaged “every race is punished equally, so nothing to see here” logic that Loving v. Virginia emphatically rejected.

You can take the judge out of the Blackstone fellowship, but you can't take the Blackstone fellowship out of the judge.

UNITED STATES, PETITIONER v. JONATHAN SKRMETTI, ATTORNEY GENERAL AND REPORTER FOR TENNESSEE, ET AL. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT [June 18, 2025] JUSTICE BARRETT, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins, concurring. Because the Court concludes that Tennessee’s Senate Bill 1 does not classify on the basis of transgender status, it does not resolve whether transgender status constitutes a suspect class. Ante, at 16–18; see Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U. S. 484, 496 (1974). I write separately to explain why, in my view, it does not.

For anyone still maintaining hope that Justice Barrett wasn't a "real conservative" or whatever, today closes the door on such wishful thinking. She argues today that a minority group's history of suffering societal discrimination is irrelevant to whether they receive constitutional protection.

one thing i think people should ask the court conservatives given this ruling is what, specifically, was wrong with plessy?

Look at how much work the Court's abortion cases do here. The majority cites Dobbs to say that regulating a medical condition/procedure isn't sex discrimination, and another abortion case, Gonzales v. Carhart, to suggest that legislatures deserve discretion when there is scientific uncertainty.

🚨By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court UPHOLDS Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors, concluding that it does NOT discriminate on the basis of sex, is not subject to heightened scrutiny, and survives rational basis review. All three liberals dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...