Charles Mathewes
banner
ctmathewes.bsky.social
Charles Mathewes
@ctmathewes.bsky.social

I teach religion & ethics @ UVa
I'm mostly here to find books & articles I don't yet know about
Sometimes also interested in opinions, but not as often as many of you seem to believe

Philosophy 35%
Political science 31%
Kristi Noem, while governor of South Dakota, supplemented her roughly $130,000 salary by secretly accepting $80,000 donated to a political nonprofit she was affiliated with, records show.

She never disclosed this income on federal ethics forms.

(Published June 2025)
Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations
A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirem...
www.propublica.org
The Norwegian Nobel Prize committee has been forced to make a statement, declaring that the prize cannot be transferred.
It's hard even to comprehend how stupid this has become
Continue to think that saying “abolish ICE” without explaining how you’ll enforce the law is a trap, but boosting this
"YouGov has ICE at 39% favorable, 52% unfavorable...But this top line really understates the intensity of public backlash to ICE and its tactics. In February 2025, just 19% of Americans held a strongly unfavorable view of ICE. Today, 40% do."

open.substack.com/pub/gelliott...
Support for abolishing ICE hits a a new high
Americans have turned sharply against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and say it too often resorts to violence
open.substack.com
"YouGov has ICE at 39% favorable, 52% unfavorable...But this top line really understates the intensity of public backlash to ICE and its tactics. In February 2025, just 19% of Americans held a strongly unfavorable view of ICE. Today, 40% do."

open.substack.com/pub/gelliott...
Support for abolishing ICE hits a a new high
Americans have turned sharply against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and say it too often resorts to violence
open.substack.com
There’s a non-zero possibility that this sort of epistemic closure is a big piece of the male crisis in America.

This is a good thing to acknowledge
Yoel Roth, @yoyoel.com, former head of trust and safety at Twitter, points out that In Covid’s Wake misleadingly quotes an essay of his (ch. 4, fn 65). He is right. My error (not my co-author's). I have apologized to him, and do so now, again.
Yoel Roth, @yoyoel.com, former head of trust and safety at Twitter, points out that In Covid’s Wake misleadingly quotes an essay of his (ch. 4, fn 65). He is right. My error (not my co-author's). I have apologized to him, and do so now, again.
The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.
An ICE agent shot and killed a person in Minneapolis on Wednesday, federal authorities said. The shooting in a residential neighborhood comes days after the Trump administration ramped up the agency’s presence in the city. Follow live updates. nyti.ms/4qgGgYU
In the video in the post, you can see that the officer can clearly get out of the way of the vehicle, at first doesn't, pulls his firearm and continues to shoot as the driver has already driven past him. bsky.app/profile/bnon...
NEW: Second video shows ICE shooting in Minneapolis. A woman, a U.S. citizen, was killed
NEW: Second video shows ICE shooting in Minneapolis. A woman, a U.S. citizen, was killed
"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato."

surreal times

dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...
Texas A&M Bans Plato - Daily Nous
Drop the race and gender material from your course and the Plato readings, or teach a different course. You have a day to decide. That's a paraphrase of what Martin Peterson, professor of philosophy a...
dailynous.com

Early Roman Kings is great
"Hmm, I wonder what Dylan's single most-played song of the last 12 years is…"

FFS
"Hmm, I wonder what Dylan's single most-played song of the last 12 years is…"

FFS
My favorite evidence that congestion pricing in New York has reshaped peoples’ behavior: we can see a surge of people trying to enter the zone before the price kicks up at 5 a.m., and after it decreases at 9 p.m.

Boom
Dan Bongino has departed FBI, per statement
Dan Bongino has departed FBI, per statement

First tragedy, then farce, then fan fiction by a schizophrenic with ADHD
Time to reup the real National Security Strategy:
a man and woman are sitting next to each other in a church .
ALT: a man and woman are sitting next to each other in a church .
media.tenor.com
This aged well
There are some horrible analogies flying around today. A reminder: the US kidnapping of Maduro in no way justifies, vindicates, or lifts responsibility from the Ru govt or the Ru people. Their war against Ukraine continues to be an unprovoked act of aggression with war crimes and genocidal intent.

Always happy to help out a fellow teacher
Some thoughts on what Trump has done in Venezuela and what it might mean for US national security. Caveat: not a Latin America scholar so this is focused on US policy. Clearly huge consequences for Venezuela that others can address.

First, despite the buildup, I didn't think Trump would do it.

1/

(Which is a bit weird for liberalism to be naive about, if you think about its origins.)

A v useful little piece that serves as a helpful reminder of one thing that Carl Schmitt said that wasn't really Nazi or Nazi-adjacent, namely, that liberalism (here in a constitutionalist guise) may be at times naive about the seductions of power. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/sometimes-...?
Sometimes Constitutional Law is Naive
A few thoughts about unitary executive theory in the Age of Trump.
danieldrezner.substack.com
I’m being informed that they will not because it was never rooted in Trump’s actions but in currying favor???? Learn something new every day!

Is it for undergrads? I found the book "Objective Troy" very illuminating in putting a narrative frame around questions of executive power of extrajudicial killing.

Well, today will be very interesting.