It happened because an entire Potemkin village of originalist academics, originalist law-review articles, originalist theories—chiefly funded by very contemporary oligarchs—was built up to present it as a reversion to the way things always were, as opposed to a revanchist attack on modernity itself; an attack on the common law itself and an assault on the idea of a pluralist, expansive vision of liberty. Originalism is a modern-day lie about history that presents itself as historical… As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has pointed out on more than one occasion, the use of history itself to erase history is now a central part of the originalist project.
— “How Originalism Ate the Law,” Slate.com
A Skeptic’s View of the President’s Actions
In January, I tried to track Trump’s executive actions, but a handy website beat me to it. But with a new authoritarian at the helm, banal summaries don’t cut it. So now I’ve set up a ChatGPT task to do the heavy lifting: provide a brief analysis of each week’s presidential orders from a radical left perspective. No blind trust, no propaganda—just a bullshit detector for the modern age.