Trey Isaac

GenX stereotype

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

AI is free speech’s next frontier.

It will shape what people read, write, ask, and know. That means the worst response is letting government panic decide what ideas, questions, or viewpoints AI tools are allowed to produce.

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

New report outlines the deep ideological capture of the Smithsonian in DC.

Politicizing American history to weaponize it in service of leftist activism. Not surprised they did this, but good to see it getting exposed.

https://t.co/2yav7hlsN1

[Kristen Soltis Anderson @KSoltisAnderson]

Been thinking a lot this afternoon about this exchange from @kasie's @TheArenaCNN last month.

I try to stay pretty even-keeled on air, but was pretty aghast at the way the allegations against Graham Platner were being dismissed.

[Trey Isaac @Trip_Isaac]

@CasuallyGreg By a lot.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing.

I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at:

• The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty.

• A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere.

• The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.)

• Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight.

• The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there.

• The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius.

• The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world.

• Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life.

• Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives.

• Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe.

• Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American.

That’s the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it.

What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 🇺🇸

[Trey Isaac @Trip_Isaac]

@TheCinesthetic Risky Business was the ultimate teen boy fantasy. I'm still nostalgic.

[Gerald Posner @geraldposner]

Tim Walz and Minnesota’s Board of Pardons just pardoned Tou Lue Vang — a convicted illegal immigrant who repeatedly raped a 10-year-old girl — specifically to block his deportation.

Democratic friends and colleagues: What is the political strategy here?

Explain to the people of Minnesota why a child rapist stays in your communities instead of being removed to Laos. Is this simply “do the opposite of Trump”?

This isn’t compassion. It’s a deliberate choice with real consequences for public safety.

And why do I believe you will see little of this reported in full and accurately in the legacy press?

[Trey Isaac @Trip_Isaac]

@amnesty 30 years ago I used to donate to amnesty international. I even had a sticker on my car. I'm so embarrassed.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

DSA leaders: We think America is irredeemable, support seizing the means of production, want to abolish police/prisons, and plan to destroy the entire societal structure to redistribute wealth.

Media: Democratic Socialists just want everyone to have healthcare and housing.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

You mean men, men who claim to be women. You are a national broadcaster that consistently obfuscates facts around sex because you’ve taken an ideological position the public overwhelmingly rejects. This isn’t news, it’s propaganda.

[Seth Dillon @SethDillon]

Males can be excluded from female sports. And of course they can. The exclusion is the whole point.

That this had to go all the way to the highest court is embarrassing for humanity. But still, it’s a victory for sanity worth celebrating.

[Trey Isaac @Trip_Isaac]

@NBCNews BREAKING: The Supreme Court upholds that males are not female, up is not down, and reality still matters, delivering another major blow to TQ delusions.

[Trey Isaac @Trip_Isaac]

@nypost Scott enjoyed sowing so much more than reaping.

[Skeptic Research Center Team @SkepResCenter]

One of the most persistent false beliefs in American culture is that the Floyd/BLM riots were incredibly peaceful, causing little damage to life and property.

In fact, the Floyd/BLM riots were the most destructive riots in American history, leading insurance agencies to designate them as a "catastrophe event."

(See first chart below showing that misinformation about the Floyd/BLM riots is positively correlated with trust in journalists.)

(See second chart below showing that misinformation about the Floyd/BLM riots is associated with left-leaning political beleifs.)

[Trey Isaac @Trip_Isaac]

@ErinIshimoticha @Pjlecy @SpaceX The conviction that one's ideology is the motivating force and guiding principle behind a group of other people's work is a weird form of narcissistic projection.

[Trey Isaac @Trip_Isaac]

@grantjbailey Ask boys about their porn habits and girls about their social media habits and you'll be nostalgic for the drunken days of yore when young people actually met in the real world.

[Trey Isaac @Trip_Isaac]

@Martina If most women say trans identifed men are women, should we believe them?

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

Every attempt to shut down campus speech should trigger an independent investigation asking two questions:

1) Did administrators do anything to stop the censorship?

2) Did administrators do anything to encourage, excuse, or facilitate it?

Students are responsible for their own actions. But the deeper scandal is administrative complicity.

In a healthy university, the answer to right-wing demands to fire a professor would be: “No way.” And the answer to left-wing attempts to shut down a speaker would be: “Not on my watch.”

Does that sound fanciful? At this point, probably. Because it has become hard to imagine administrators actually acting this way.

The dirty little secret is that too many of them have enabled this for years. Some are hired into ideological jobs built around policing speech, running BRTs, and managing “harm” rather than protecting open inquiry. Sometimes the damage comes through omission: refusing to punish obvious censorship. Sometimes it comes through commission, as at Stanford Law School several years ago, when administrators actively helped the shutdown along. Here, it looks like a combination of both.

So yes, blame the students. They are adults, not infants or automatons. But look squarely at the administrators who are supposed to defend academic freedom and freedom of speech—and who too often undermine those values instead.

We have long since passed the stage where tolerated—and often facilitated—shutdowns and shoutdowns can be treated as somehow distinct from university policy. If campuses allow, and especially if they facilitate, the systematic silencing of locally unpopular points of view, that should not be treated as some weird tragic coincidence. They have the power to stop it. They don’t.

Worse, they often train students to think like censors and then protect them when they act that way. Until universities prove otherwise, the systematic shutting down of unpopular voices on campus should be understood as formal—or at least semi-formal—university policy.