"Trump is actually the best remaining Republican" (technically false, but true in the sense that the collection of back-benchers who are better than him are not going to be the ones leading the post-Trump party)is a dispiriting thesis, but important in two senses.

We are officially in a constitutional crisis since Texas National Guard has arrived in Illinois: www.theunpopulist.net/p/trumps-lea...

Earlier this year I was given the opportunity to join The UnPopulist as a contributing editor, and I was glad to take it because I knew I was joining a team that understands the danger this moment presents and is committed to opposing it. I couldn't be happier to be a part of this work. Subscribe!

Talked about this as a potential outcome for tomorrow's episode of Discourse Machine. We didn't even get to release the episode before it happened

As ever, deciding to give everyone a Pocket Cursed Object: Brain Liquefier is having extremely predictable bad consequences.

/4 SCOTUS has lost the presumption of regularity -- the mandate of the legal heavens -- through its shadow docket actions, which by invoking SCOTUS' equitable discretionary powers have obliterated the pretext that SCOTUS is merely calling balls and strikes, merely calling lines where they see them.

I am not kidding when I say the simplest (and basically accurate) way to think about the contemporary epistemic environment is as a global 50% debuff to human cognitive function, video-game style.

America First foreign policy: where God forbid you give a tiny pittance of money to a friendly nation fighting a war against one of your chief strategic foes, but where you *can* light that money on fire changing letterhead.

Here I am, back in the states and already hard at work in the podcast mines

Trump’s constant canard is that his mass deportation plans are targeted at dangerous criminals, not ordinary, hardworking people. This was never true—or even *possible* given the scale of his deportation ambitions. @birchsmith.bsky.social

Birch Smith (@birchsmith.bsky.social) on Trump's fundamentally anti-American legacy.

Here's something I've wrestled with in my academic work and public philosophy efforts for a while now: at what point do you announce that you think it's too late? On one hand you do risk dispiriting people, especially if you're wrong and you *could have* stopped system failure....

Our political media is simply not equipped to handle a situation where the voters were unambiguously wrong in a way which morally implicates the electorate.

@birchsmith.bsky.social and I read More Everything Forever by Adam Becker for this episode. One of the best books I've read this year, and a brilliant explainer on why some parts of Silicon Valley are obsessed with Mars and AGI. Part 2 in a week! open.spotify.com/episode/1z7g...

Yeah there's so much stuff going on that I frequently forget this also happened. But when I remember it, I think it's one of the more undervalued signs of just how bad things are.

"Mass deportation" is the excuse and trigger for authoritarianism. As it was always intended to be.

this is obviously trumped-up bullshit on the criminal charges to offer a face-saving excuse, and hopefully it will get smashed in court, but still good news overall

Well I *had* other things to talk about, but then the worst people in the world all started fighting online, so obviously that was the only story for a political epistemology podcast to cover. A couple highlights: Musk has more internet juice than anyone... open.spotify.com/episode/30LV...

"We're at the Long Knives, We're at the Wrong Wives, We're at the combination Long Knives and Wrong Wives"

I'm going to need to do some more thinking to figure out what I expect the actual consequences of this will be. But right now I'm just on schadenfreude overload watch

*Gradually ascending scream of psychological anguish and sheer rage that violates all known physical laws* www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/o...

Calling it now: Trump is going to end up getting fooled by some dumb AI voice impersonation into giving up some wildly sensitive bit of information, because his brain is mush.

As a sort of coda to the last few weeks' discussions of civic virtue, it's deeply frustrating to see the Right falsely claiming the mantle of "the western tradition" while simultaneously declaring war on education and knowledge.

"Where has all the civic virtue gone" is obviously far too complex to fully explain in a thirty-minute podcast but we hit a couple of important points -- it's an outline of a lot of the research questions I hope to write on in the coming decade.

Also for better (objective quality) or worse (proportion of the electorate) the Republic party has largely consolidated the previously split Buffoon Vote (e.g., RFK Jr.) and left the Democratic party with the Policy Wonk Vote (what if we made every election into a special election?).

I'm allergic to Texas, the median voter is apparently allergic to basic civic virtue, etc., etc.

Birch Thought is undefeated (I wish it was defeated) But it really is epistemology all the way down

"Normie Centrist Lib who Fights" isn't, like, *that* hard of an archetype to find in the world but somehow when it comes to elected officials it's the most secret third thing imaginable.

Every day I lose confidence in the `stove touching' theory, because every day I see people inventing new and worse wrong lessons to learn from things.

It's endlessly astonishing how many mush-brained people go from "art can sometimes be beneficial by transgressing certain social norms (list of 3,582 caveats)" to "literally anything that is 'authentically transgressive' is automatically Good For Its Own Sake." No! You are Being Stupid! Grow up!

At a time when there isn't a surplus of good news to go around, this is very, very good news.

Here's a short-term future that seems fairly probable, and that I'm extremely worried about: we end up with a 'lost generation' of people who rely on LLMs in lieu of developing independent thought and skills, those people struggle to find entry-level jobs because they never learn to outperform AI..

We missed our chance to do any funny bits about the new pope but we *do* roast Marc Andreessen a lot, so if you want egg jokes instead of deep-dish Pizzaballa jokes, give it a listen. (There's some epistemology stuff in there too, I guess) open.spotify.com/episode/3aVH...

Oh. Oh no.

Extremely "let them eat cake"-coded

Cyberpunk corpo-states but it's shit like the Protectorate of Raid: Shadow Legends, Riot Republic, and EA Empire (all household goods are purchased via Ultimate Team packs)

"chat, is this bad?"

"scheming viziers trying to bend the ear of the addled King" isn't a good place to be, but it is the place we're at. But there's a potential opportunity in the fact that some viziers clearly prefer a strategy of telling the courts, etc to pound sand directly, while others want to maintain a facade.

They won't stop until they ARE stopped.

This is why the pivot of (parts of) the GOP towards a friendly view of Putin was not a surprise to me. There's a shared anxiety that, far from confidence in the goodness and validity of their way of life, any example of another way of life will be more desirable and undermine their social control

Obviously a lot going wrong here, but as someone who actually works on virtue (ethics and epistemology) it's extra infuriating when someone like Ingrassia, who is too much of an intellectually vicious fool to even understand what the virtues are let alone apply them correctly, runs their mouth

I'm also fascinated by this. For viewpoint diversity, I think the problem comes from omitting a necessary epistemic criteria: intellectually virtuous belief. 'Simple VD' holds that it is good to have diversity of beliefs per se, regardless of why they are held

I've been harshly critical of Roberts, so it's only right that I should say this is a praiseworthy action. And if this leads to a full-blown Constitutional crisis, we the people have to back the Court to the hilt. (Alito and Thomas still suck though, so some laws of nature still hold)

This is good. Additionally, issue polling is a thing you rely on when you are very confident there will be a free and fair election whose results will be respected. It is decreasingly rational (almost by the day) to be very confident in that.

@birchsmith.bsky.social and I recorded this right before Senator Van Hollen met with Abrego Garcia, but it's still relevant. The case is an atrocity, and SCOTUS appears to be ignoring what time it is. open.spotify.com/episode/6xWr...

Since recording, Senator Van Hollen was able to meet with Kilmar. This is excellent news, but I think the rest of what we say in the episode holds up: Trump's pantomime meeting with Bukele is a serious threat to any pretense of Constitutional accountability. open.spotify.com/episode/6xWr...

Wilkinson has well and truly earned my admiration with this opinion. (And what a contrast to John Roberts and friends, who seem largely immune from the uncomfortable intrusion of reality into their pleasant world of abstractions)

Not just Bukele. When people (and institutions and corporations) aren't afraid of retribution, they are incentivized to be quislings.