Trevor Burrus

Political philosopher; constitutional lawyer; former editor in chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review; baseball; comics; Sooners FB; guitar; beautiful noises

[Trevor Burrus @TCBurrus]

Making excuses for abhorrent behavior to gain power? Who would do that?!?

The shameless, spineless sycophants in DC have multiplied exponentially since Trump. It is exhausting.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Kellyanne: Is there any number of scandals that would make you stop? Putting on with women that are not your wife? Would it be the lying? Would it be insulting heroes? Is power really worth that to you?

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

Slobodian: Mises insisted on a "first priority" of keeping the colonies under a "muscular superstate" to ensure free trade.

What Mises really said: Europe should use the League of Nations to implement the "final goal" of "complete liberation of the colonies from despotic rule"

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

Monty Python’s @JohnCleese makes a point here that should be obvious, but somehow isn’t.

Learning usually starts with the uncomfortable realization that you weren’t misled by villains or harmed by disagreement. You were just wrong.

[Jerry Z. Muller @jerryzmuller]

Wise observation from the late Gordon S. Wood.
“I don’t think history teaches a lot of little lessons, frankly,” he told C-SPAN. “I think it teaches one big lesson, which is that nothing really ever works out the way the perpetrators intend. I can’t think of any major event in the history of the world that ever turned out the way the participants who launched it expected.”

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

Here are four things every serious anti-communist should understand about Marxism:

First, Marxism is not primarily a set of economic policies. It is a complete philosophical system built on the claim that private property and markets are the root causes of human oppression and alienation. This is why communist regimes did not simply make economic mistakes - they systematically tried to abolish the foundations of voluntary cooperation.

Second, Marxism focuses heavily on social structures and class forces while leaving very little room for individual choice and moral responsibility. Individuals are treated largely as products of their class position rather than as autonomous agents capable of shaping their own lives. This deterministic outlook underpins both Marxism’s repeated predictive failures and its readiness to justify coercive social engineering.

Third, the authoritarianism, terror, and centralised control seen in every communist state were not distortions of Marxism. They were logical consequences of attempting to impose a total transformation of society (and Mark understood that). Once private property and markets are rejected, coercive state power becomes necessary to enforce the new order.

Fourth, Marxism has never died. It has mutated. Much of today’s identity politics, critical theory, and institutional “equity” activism draws directly from Marxist frameworks - simply replacing economic class with race, gender or other identity categories while retaining the same oppressor-versus-oppressed logic.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Rollins on Screwworm: This does trace back to the last administration….

[Trevor Burrus @TCBurrus]

@mattyglesias The real question is whether 1) he is knowingly lying; 2) made a mistake and is unable to acknowledge it; 3) or he’s absolutely beholden to an idêe fixe about free markets and their advocates.

I think it’s 3.

[Peter Laffin @petermlaffin]

“We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth,” Gordon Wood wrote of the 1619 Project. “I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves."

[Sheldon Gilbert @SheldonGilbert]

I first encountered the work of Gordon Wood as an undergrad history major. I thought then that "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" was a tour de force — and its reputation with me has only improved over time.

Over the years, I purchased every single Gordon Wood book. Many years ago, when I was a young husband and new dad, Gordon Wood came to the Mall in Washington DC as part of a book festival. I brought several books for him to sign. I dropped off my wife with our young child (and the pile of books) and then searched for parking.

Dear reader, I had to park very far away. So far, in fact, that Gordon Wood's window for signing books had long since passed. I finally found my wife and young child with Gordon Wood at an empty author's booth. He not only had signed all my books, but he had stayed well past his time to leave and graciously chatted with my wife, who had implored him to wait **just a little longer** so that I could meet him. He was so kind to my wife, our child, and — when I finally showed up — me.

Imagine my delight earlier this year when Gordon Wood agreed to be filmed for The Federalist Society @FedSoc for two days, to talk about America250 and the Founding (in particular, the path from the Declaration to the Constitution) and also to talk about his own life and career as a historian. I was honored to witness my good friends @kurtlash1 and Steve Calabresi interview Gordon Wood.

... and then Gordon Wood stayed long past the agreed upon filming time to talk to me about his life and our shared love of America's Founding.

We lost a brilliant man today. We also lost a good man, a kind man. Too often, that Venn Diagram of brilliance and kindness does not overlap. It did with Gordon Wood. May God receive his soul, and may his memory be a blessing.

[McKay Coppins @mckaycoppins]

Coolest @TheAtlantic cover in a long time:

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

Here's something many people don't know about me -

Before I publicly dissected the long list of problems in the 1619 Project, I contacted the New York Times through their official channels to request a series of corrections to unambiguous factual errors in its content. The editor - Jake Silverstein - brushed me off and refused any correction - a pattern he also exhibited toward other critics from across the spectrum.

Before I publicly broke the story about Kevin Kruse's plagiarism in Reason, I contacted Princeton's academic integrity officer and alerted him to the problems I had found, giving them a chance to respond and address it internally. They ignored my email and later claimed to have lost my email after I went public.

Before I published my findings on Quinn Slobodian's habitual manipulation of source materials to alter its plain meaning through misquotation, I submitted an article to Contemporary European History (the journal where the worst examples appeared), highlighting the problems with the passages and asking for a correction through their official process. They desk-rejected it, brushed me off, and falsely claimed that Slobodian's piece had been thoroughly vetted in peer review. In fact, one of their own referees had flagged the same problems over a year earlier and recommended rejection of the article.

Before I published an expose on Nancy MacLean & Sandy Darity's similar manipulation of W.H. Hutt quotations in their article for History of Economics Review, I (along with 2 coauthors) submitted a response comment to this journal asking for a correction through its official processes. The editor gave us a complete runaround where he imposed an arbitrary length limit requiring us to cut the content, sent the trimmed version to a referee, then rejected the piece because the referee said we didn't sufficiently address the very same things we were forced by the editor to cut. When I then asked the editor to issue a simple corrigendum to the most egregious misquotation (one that transformed Hutt's explicit attack on the racism of white Afrikaners into a defense of Apartheid), he refused and tried to pass it off as a difference of "interpretation."

Before I published an expose of a leading covid masking model in the Wall Street Journal, I sent a comment to the medical journal that published it alerting them to a math error that changed their entire set of results. The journal acknowledged the error was real but refused to publish my piece on the grounds that the "next release" of the model would be updated to reflect it - even as politicians up to and including Joe Biden were trumpeting the erroneous results all over the news.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

Heartbroken to hear about Gordon Wood. If you don’t know what a titan he is, @aei’s video tribute as part of the Kristol Award ceremony from earlier this year will give you a sense. https://t.co/D75ybkNO4p

[Bob Elder @southernphd]

I never met Gordon Wood, but I have a story about him.

In one of my grad school seminars, we read Wood’s Creation of the American Republic. The sheer erudition and evidentiary depth of the book bowled me over.

Back then, before kids and before life accelerated to warp speed, I used to call my mother every Sunday to catch up. Lots of times, we ended up talking about what I was reading that week in my grad seminars or for leisure. Mom had an omnivorous mind, and she was always looking for something else to read. She was a true intellectual—curious about almost everything, always eager to integrate new arguments or ideas into her existing schemas of how the world worked or to have those schemas challenged and changed.

When we talked that particular Sunday, I think I tried to describe to her part of Wood’s argument about the relationship between the state constitutions during the Articles of Confederation era and the federal Constitution. Maybe I was tired, maybe I didn’t completely understand her questions, but the end result of the conversation was that Mom had questions about Wood’s argument that I didn’t answer satisfactorily. I told her that she should probably just read the book, and we said goodbye.

She did eventually read the book, but the next Sunday, Mom started our conversation by saying, “Well, I had a lovely conversation with Gordon Wood this week.” For a split second, I thought she was joking, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. I started to sweat. “How?” I asked. A whole variety of unlikely scenarios in which the foremost historian of the American Revolution and my mother, who lived in Wichita, Kansas, might have met ran through my mind. “Oh, I just looked up his office phone number on Brown’s website and called, and he picked up!” Mom said. I decided I would have to find another profession.

As it ended up, Gordon Wood spent about an hour on the phone with my mother answering her questions about the Constitution. Ever since, I’ve had a soft spot for the man when I imagine him picking up the phone in Providence and finding Becky Elder from Wichita on the other end of the line. His generosity in that moment spoke very well of him.

Rest in peace, professor.

[Rod D. Martin @RodDMartin]

🧵 China’s population collapse is now mathematically irreversible.

There simply aren’t enough women left of childbearing age.

Even if the fertility rate magically returned to replacement level (2.1 children per woman) tomorrow, the country would still lose more than 40% of its population by 2100.

It won't. The real number is 75%. There's nothing like it in history. 🧵

[Trevor Burrus @TCBurrus]

Oh no.

I met him a few times. A wonderful man.

And no one has been more influential on my thinking about the Founding Era.

A rare historian who makes all other historians change course.

RIP.

https://t.co/Mg3RMl4Ph0

[Trevor Burrus @TCBurrus]

The greatest band that not enough people talk about.

The same level as the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin…

[Geronimo @artyshowboy]

Hier soir, The Cure était à Barcelone.
La chair de poule quand les 50k personnes accompagnent la voix intacte de Robert Smith.

Just Like Heaven | The Cure | Juin 2026.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Everyone is talking about how bad the ideas in this Piketty proposal are, and it's true: They're very bad.

But what's also notable is how *out of date* they feel. A one-world government to fight climate change? Seriously? Even Greta Thunberg has moved on to Palestine activism.

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

No matter what your theory about birth rate collapse is, there’s some data point that disproves it. Japan didn’t have the pill when fertility collapsed. There are highly patriarchal countries where fertility is collapsing. It’s collapsing in countries that are still poor. It’s collapsing in places with more generous social support for families. It’s almost like a psychic alien just decided to phase humans out.

[Trevor Burrus @TCBurrus]

@historyrock_

[Trevor Burrus @TCBurrus]

@CuriosityonX Ares, obviously.