Sick Burns - 5/8/2026

It was a busy week over here at Burns Notice HQ. Here's my recap of the week and a few other cool things exclusively for paid subscribers!

Friday Thought:

Chief Justice John Roberts, fresh off completing his decades long venture to destroy the Voting Rights Act, took to the media to scold people who rightly observe that he is plainly a political actor.

Lawrence Hurley (@lawrencehurley.bsky.social)

Roberts: “I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides. I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”

Bluesky SocialLawrence Hurley

But the Roberts court has consistently made plainly partisan decisions over the course of its lifetime. There have been very few cases in which the decision of the court couldn't be projected in advance by looking at which side represented the best interests of conservatives and the Republican party.

The gerrymandering and voting cases in particular really paint the picture. Last year, the court ruled that changing an election rule the December before an election was too close to the election and would interfere with the free and fair nature of elections.

That decision favored Republicans.

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But here we are in early May, with primary election campaigns already underway, and the Supreme Court essentially overturns the Voting Rights Act, allowing historically confederate states to redraw district boundaries to eliminate Black majority districts. Not only did they make this ruling, but they also decided that it could be implemented right away.

Red states are now rushing to postpone elections and redraw maps to give Republicans even more House seats across the south, months after the court's previous "December changes would interfere with the elections" rule.

That decision too favored Republicans.

The court has repeatedly gone to ever more ridiculous lengths in court rulings to find a path to victory for increasingly absurd conservative decisions. Chief in my mind as a trans person was the plainly ridiculous argument that red state laws barring trans youth from accessing gender affirming care didn't discriminate against trans people, but against those with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, making the laws legal.

I don't care how you feel about youth gender affirming care, but that is tortured logic taken to an absolute extreme.

It is blatantly obvious that the court is political and that the justices are partisan actors. The law doesn't really matter in the Roberts court. The only check on conservative extremism seems to be Roberts' concern for the legacy of his court. But that has been a poor mitigation to the great undoing of this nation's legal framework by this extremist court.

I'd at least respect Roberts if he stopped lying to us about how he himself is not a partisan political actor. Instead he chooses to piss on all of us and claim it's raining.

My Work This Week:

On Monday I wrote here on the newsletter about Richard Dawkins developing AI psychosis and deciding his favorite AI chatbot was not only human but also a woman. This came as a surprise to me, a trans woman. Dawkins has spent the better part of the last decade with a near obsession with trans women and how he believes we could never be women.

A funny development after I published this piece is Dawkins writing a second piece describing how he set up a second AI chatbot to talk with the first one about how great he is.

Truly pathetic stuff.

Take a read:

Richard Dawkins’ AI is Neither Conscious Nor a Woman

The exhausting atheist and evolutionary biologist is kind of brainless It’s been an ongoing joke on trans BlueSky for awhile now that AI is someday going to get full human rights before trans people do. It’s a funny joke, but I don’t really think that will happen. After all, one

Burns NoticeKatelyn Burns

I also wrote a quick piece looking back on the Isabel Fall cancellation years ago after Will Stancil compared himself to her after getting harassed on Bluesky. That comparison really pissed me off. I'm not going to deny that there is a trans mean girls clique of leftists who seek people out for dogpiling, I've been there target several times before. But when Stancil demands that trans people criticizing him get banned from the platform, he has all the power and privilege to facilitate that.

Several trans women have been banned off the platform for crossing Stancil this week. Maybe they deserved it, maybe they didn't. But we must also acknowledge that Stancil himself is a significant vector for harassment. I've been on the receiving end of that more than once. (Stancil has accused me of lying about this long ago)

Everyone kind of sucks in this situation but Stancil is not some uwu smol bean here. Anyways, I don't want to make a big deal about all of this, so here is the piece:

Lessons from a Cancellation

When cis people invoke Isabel Fall, they do not understand the complex trans dynamics at play This piece is not about Will Stancil. Though he is what prompted me to write this. To give you a short recap, Will Stancil has been the subject of intense online criticism for years

Burns NoticeKatelyn Burns

Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced an investigation into Smith College, an all women's college in Western Massachusetts (located in the town I live in) over its admissions policy allowing trans women to attend the school. I got a chance to write about the investigation, how Smith's trans inclusion policy has built a queer safe haven in Northampton, MA, and why it's so important that trans women be able to attend a place like Smith for MS Now.

Opinion | Why the Trump administration is going after trans students at Smith College

Katelyn Burns: Government action against Smith, including threats to federal funding, could affect the standing of trans students at other women’s colleges.

MS NOWKatelyn Burns

Lastly in my very busy week, was another excellent episode of Cancel Me, Daddy. This week we interviewed Ben Collins, the CEO of The Onion, about their acquisition of InfoWars and why it took a parody company to take on the Alex Jones conspiracy theory empire!

There have been other interviews with Ben that break down the mechanics and motivations for the acquisition, but only Cancel Me, Daddy were able to have a real discussion between journalists about how the media system failed to contain a guy like Jones.

Other things I found interesting this week:

I'm going to keep this one short this week since it was a relatively busy week for my work. But this piece about online clipping culture and how it is eroding reality for people online was deeply fascinating.

Your feed is overrun with clips — this is the cutthroat community of “clippers” behind it

In the age of clips, what’s the value of the full-length work?

The VergeMia Sato

This interview with Obama really pissed me off. It feels out of touch for me. I don't think the Democrats' problem is "sounding too academic," I think the issue is that their policy platform is not really what working class voters want. You can't be the party of the working class and continue to support the Clinton era project of American Neoliberalism.

Republicans have realized that Neoliberalism is dead, but Democrats keep trying to compromise on the margins and still win elections without presenting any real change.

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)

Obama: “What I’m more interested in for Democrats is, do you know how to just talk to regular people like we’re not in a college seminar? Can you talk in plain English to folks? And not have a bunch of gobbledygook around it. Just talk like normal people talk. ‘The rent is too high.’”

Bluesky SocialAaron Rupar

That's all for this week folks! Tell me in the comments what were your favorite things this week?

Quote of the Week:

"We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead." -Winston Churchill on V-E Day