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Phil Magness

@PhilWMagness

Apr 25

1. There are very few libertarian/classical liberal hubs in academia.

2. Those that exist are under a barrage of Nancy MacLean-style attacks from the far left.

3. Pecknold has never experienced that, nor has he done anything to move the campus needle rightward in his own career

I speak on this from experience, btw. I was in the trenches fighting the AAUP, the Unkoch mvmt, MacLean etc. for a decade.

Also, I assembled the original version of the faculty ideology chart Pecknold shared above as part of my research on higher ed bias. I published it in my book w Jason Brennan, and in several subsequent journal articles and popular outlets.

Pecknold was AWOL from that fight and a complete nonentity in the scholarly debate around it.

Among my many battles with the academic left over the years:

- I was one of the first to expose statistical malfeasance in Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century," the bible of the Occupy Wall Street movement

- I caught Piketty's co-author Gabriel Zucman red-handed in manipulating tax statistics to advance false claims about the wealthy paying lower tax rates than the poor, and likely cost him a job at Harvard as a result

- I caught Harvard's Naomi Oreskes peddling false data claims political ideology in the national media to downplay the leftwing bias on the faculty

- I demolished Duke professor Nancy MacLean's "Democracy in Chains," the National Book Award-finalist that was the centerpiece of the academic left's crusade to purge free market economics from campus in the late 2010s.

- I was one of the first people to call attention to the failure of Neil Ferguson's Imperial College model during Covid, showing that its predictions about Sweden in the absence of lockdowns were not coming true

- I discovered a basic math error in one of the most heavily cited pro-mask modeling studies during Covid, completely undermining its claims. I published that revelation in the Wall Street Journal

- I discovered and broke the story about the now-infamous FOIA'd "devastating takedown" email order from Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci during Covid

- I dismantled the economic sections of the New York Times's 1619 Project, and broke the story about how the newspaper made ghost-edits to Nikole Hannah Jones's claims on the American Revolution by altering their text on their website

- I caught star left wing Princeton historian Kevin Kruse engaging in plagiarism in his dissertation and several of his other academic works

- I helped to expose Claudine Gay at Harvard for plagiarism, both as one of the only experts who was willing to go on record in the early days of the story after Chris Rufo and Aaron Sibarium simultaneously broke the news, and then by found more examples of it myself in Gay's other academic papers

And those are just a few of the major ones, going back over a decade.

Read 9 tweets

Phil Magness

@PhilWMagness

Apr 24

Time for a history lesson.

In the founding era, a 10 miles square block was seen as sufficiently large space for a capital that could encompass the whole of the federal government's operations. This was done out of a concern that the federal government's presence in any one state would exert undo influence upon that state's own government, and also become unduly influenced by the host state's political establishment. Both problems were very real and tangible issues in the 1780s-90s when the capital was located in Philadelphia, New York, and briefly in a few other locations. The decision to create a new and completely distinct federal district was a direct response to that problem.

Originally, 100 square miles was more than sufficient to contain the operations of the federal government and keep them relatively buffered from the neighboring states. Unfortunately, the federal government eventually outgrew the District. Part of that happened in 1846 when, at the behest of slaveowners, Congress reverted the Arlington side to Virginia (recall that Arlington Cemetery was formerly the site of a large plantation belonging to Robert E. Lee's wife). The measure was controversial at the time. Former president John Quincy Adams, then serving in Congress, thought that the retrocession was blatantly unconstitutional and hoped that it would be challenged at some point in the Supreme Court (a challenge was attempted in the 1870s, but the Court punted on the issue of retrocession and settled the case on technicalities that avoided weighing in on its constitutionality).

Retrocession had immediate consequences for the capital, because it took away a geographic buffer around the city that had thus far insulated it from the politics of the two surrounding states. Abraham Lincoln called attention to this problem during the Civil War because it also made the capital less-defensible from military attack. In 1861 he explicitly asked Congress to repeal the 1846 retrocession and return Arlington to the District. Congress never acted on his request though, as the battle lines of the war soon shifted away from the capital (in 1861-62 when Lincoln's request was pending, they came within a few miles west of the city, with major battles in Manassas, Virginia). Lincoln also hoped to bring Arlington back into the District because he was working on a bill to abolish slavery inside the capital's boundaries and that would have freed the slaves on the Custis-Lee plantation and other neighboring Virginia estates (he signed it in April 1862).

After the Civil War, the federal government continued to grow until it eventually ran out of space in the now-shrunken District. In 1909 President Taft recognized this problem on the horizon, and tried to unretrocede Arlington as expansion space for federal offices and federal parkland. He made it a major goal for his second term after the 1912 election, but lost the race.

The federal government grew rapidly in the following years, particularly during World War I. The War Department outgrew its office buildings and had to erect temporary structures along the present-day national mall, which were still there at the start of World War 2. They had planned to move into a new permanent structure in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood but it was too small upon completion (the State Department now occupies that building).

DC effectively ran out of room sometime in the WW2 period and outgrew its residual boundaries on the former Maryland side. The construction of the Pentagon in 1941 became the solution, as well as a major milestone that set the precedent for "core" federal departments spilling out beyond the boundaries of the district. Congress was concerned about this effect at the time as it placed essential federal functions in the jurisdiction of neighboring states. During the war, they even gave serious consideration to a bill from Sen. Pat McCarran that would have reverted Arlington to the District in conjunction with the War Department's relocation to the Pentagon. Much like Lincoln's efforts during the Civil War, the McCarran bill withered after the end of World War 2 because it was no longer seen as a pressing issue.

But the Pentagon move set the precedent, and in the decades that followed dozens of other departments started to spill over into Virginia and into neighboring Maryland.

We've now reached the point in both states that the federal government's presence exerts a controlling influence on their respective state governments - or precisely the scenario that the founders aimed to avoid in 1789-91 when they created the 10 miles square federal District of Columbia. The DC suburbs are now the tail that wags the dog in Annapolis and Richmond, such that the politics of both states are largely subservient to federal government interests and people living hundreds of miles away from DC are now governed by the political preferences of those living inside the DC beltway.

One other twist of the story:

Prior to the 1960s, most state legislatures followed the design of the US Congress in how they allocated their districts. The state House seats were divided by population according to the census, but state Senate seats were divided by geography to represent different regions of the state (yes, both were susceptible to being gerrymandered, but the idea was to have different political subdivisions in each chamber so that no faction or region gained a controlling monopoly on the state government). We know that this split design was the intention of the founders, because they implemented it and even based the Constitution's House/Senate distinction on older state-level versions of the same system.

In the 1960s though, the Warren Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that invalidated all state constitutions that allocated their senate seats by geography. The new court order required apportionment by population, so state senate seats simply became larger versions of state house seat. Virginia was one of the most heavily affected states, because the populous DC suburbs gained the most in state senate representation. In the decades that followed, that shifted the entire political locus of the state to the DC Beltway. And now it is the tail that wags the dog for the entire state.

Could the situation be addressed today? Partially. Compromises are uncommon in our garbage DC political climate due to bad behavior of both parties. If sanity ever returns though, I'd suggest this "deal" as a way to bring the federal district's purposes closer to the founders intentions while also offering a fair solution to those in the affected regions.

1. Repeal the 1846 Retrocession, which would place Arlington and the core of Alexandria back within the original boundaries of the District. This would not completely solve the problem of federal offices that have spilled over beyond the original 10 miles sq. boundaries and into VA and MD, but it would address the heaviest concentration of them, which is Arlington County.

2. Begin a gradual long term process of moving other core federal offices back into the district where possible. Utilize empty federal office space downtown when it becomes available, and shutter federal offices in the MD and VA suburbs when they become obsolete or in need of renovation.

3. To make the deal more politically palatable, the reconstituted square District should be given a voting member of the House of Representatives, commensurate with its population. This would probably require a constitutional amendment, which would be part of the deal (i.e. supporters of the retrocession agree to the amendment in exchange). But it would solve the disenfranchisement issue, and it could be implemented by simply adding 1-2 new members to the House (which can be done by legislation).

Read 4 tweets

Phil Magness

@PhilWMagness

Apr 21

🧵Yesterday, a Vance-aligned group called the Bull Moose Project posted this viral picture of an old farmhouse on sprawling acreage, purporting to illustrate how once-common rural housing became unaffordable in the United States.

I did some digging into the photo...

It turns out that there are lots of pictures of this house online...because it isn't a historic farmhouse. It's a modern design of a house intended to look like a historic farmhouse.

That website sells architectural plans. The house is one of their model designs. So it isn't even a representative dwelling from an American past that we purportedly lost. The same site says they designed it in...

2008.

Read 8 tweets

Phil Magness

@PhilWMagness

Apr 11

Oh my. Pilkington is mad at me over my article on the Orban government's subsidization of careers for postliberal activists.

What he doesn't mention: he is employed by the Orban government and depends on that same goulash train for income.

Link to the full article:

theargumentmag.com/p/god-orban-an…

Also going to save this for when the American Postliberals (and their Budapest auxiliary) inevitably try to construct a new genealogy for themselves by latching onto older movements that also share the postliberal label by coincidence.

Read 4 tweets

Phil Magness

@PhilWMagness

Feb 12

"The rise in anti-Semitism on the right is attributable to a handful of individuals whom Hazony is too cowardly and embarrassed to condemn. Like a vengeful alcoholic at an intervention, he is lashing out and blaming everyone but himself for the wreckage he helped create" commentary.org/articles/james…

Also note: the picture of Hazony in the banner image is from him speaking at an event cosponsored by MCC, aka Viktor Orban University.

I first encountered Hazony ca. 2018 at a dinner sponsored by ISI where he gave a talk on his book. His lecture was vapid nationalist slop that made multiple egregiously erroneous claims about American history and political philosophy.

I remember sitting there shocked that anyone could find this guy even remotely convincing - not because the message was bad (and it was) but because his arguments betrayed utter incompetence with the subject matter. I was not the only one who thought so either. Most of the others at my table were rolling their eyes at him, and whispering about his mistakes in the speech.

When Q&A opened up, I started to raise my hand to push back on some of his claims. George Gilder, who was sitting right behind me, raised his hand at the same time. They called on Gilder, and he proceeded to make some of the same criticisms of Hazony that were going around my table. Hazony's answer to the challenge amounted to meandering babble and evasion.

I didn't think much else about Hazony after that, until he resurfaced as the leader of this NatCon thing. I was not at all surprised when I read the speaker list, and saw it was an eclectic mix of bigots, cranks, and conspiracy theorists. More surprising though is that Hazony has been pushing the same bigots for the last 6+ years now, all the while feigning "shock" that they spew bigotry whenever it spills into public view...and then turning around the next day and inviting the very same bigots back to his conferences.

Read 4 tweets

Phil Magness

@PhilWMagness

Jan 17

Another scrubbed JD Vance tweet from 2020 where he calls on the government to "make everyone wear masks."

Note that in 2022 Vance reinvented himself as a mask opponent for his senate campaign.

Another one from May 2020:

Vance in March 2020: even if masks don't work, we should wear them anyway as a reminder to avoid touching our faces.

Read 6 tweets

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