Anthony Rispo

05/22/2026

This graph has been circulating on social media and gaining some hype because, visually, it seems to capture what many people already feel: law schools, law professors, and the broader academy have moved sharply left (Bonica et al., 2018; Bonica et al., 2025). But the deeper question is whether this is a true representation of what is happening, or whether the graph is also picking up something more complicated.

Political donations can be useful as a proxy for ideology, but they do not capture everyone, and they may overrepresent the most politically active people. Broader faculty data show a real leftward asymmetry across many fields, but also a large unaffiliated category, which could reflect weaker partisanship, selection effects, career-pipeline sorting, or even a chilling effect where people avoid publicly identifying with either party (Chin et al., 2025; Gross & Fosse, 2012).

So yes, liberals and left-leaning people may be overrepresented in parts of the academy. But that does not necessarily mean every classroom or department is uniformly captured by the Left. And the simple claim that “liberals are just smarter” does not explain the pattern either, since intelligence, GPA, and SAT-related explanations do not fully account for liberal self-selection into graduate school or academic careers (Carl, 2015; Fosse et al., 2014).

Sometimes institutional culture is shaped less by a numerical majority than by the loudest, most punitive, and most organized minority. As someone who started a club at Columbia focused on viewpoint diversity and academic freedom during the height of the Israel/Gaza protests, I maintain the only way through this perceptual warfare is to get louder, be unapologetic, and do the work you think needs to be done. Do not let people bully you into submission.


Sources: Bonica et al., 2018; Bonica et al., 2025; Chin et al., 2025; Carl, 2015; Fosse et al., 2014; Gross & Fosse, 2012.

05/22/2026

05/21/2026

Is AI therapy actually working, or is it revealing something else?

A randomized clinical trial published in April found that a 12-week conversational AI mental health intervention modestly outperformed face-to-face group therapy and a waitlist control on anxiety and reported well-being. Depression improved mainly compared with the control group, while PTSD symptoms did not meaningfully differ. But the more interesting finding was relational: within the AI group, users who perceived the system as warmer and more competent tended to engage with it more, and greater engagement was linked to stronger symptom improvement, especially anxiety reduction.

That does not prove AI is replacing human connection. But it does raise a deeper question: are people experiencing AI as supportive because it is genuinely therapeutic, or because ordinary human connection has become too scarce, too risky, or too difficult to access? Human beings build trust through responsiveness, rupture, and repair. If more of our emotional regulation gets outsourced to devices, especially across generations shaped by screens, we may lose practice in the very skills that help us trust one another. And the cousin of isolation is suspicion.


Source: Shoshani et al. (2026), JAMA Network Open.

05/20/2026

Most people do not support political violence, but the loudest minority is often the most morally intoxicated. The danger is not just extremism on the Left or the Right; it is what happens when ideology gives psychologically aggressive people a righteous excuse.


Sources / further reading:

Nai, A., & Young, E. L. (2024). They choose violence: Dark personality traits drive support for politically motivated violence in five democracies. Personality and Individual Differences.

Gøtzsche-Astrup, O. (2021). Dark Triad, partisanship and violent intentions in the United States. Personality and Individual Differences.

Bartolo, M. G., & Powell, C. (2024). Associations between the Dark Tetrad and political orientation: A systematic review with meta-analysis. Personality and Individual Differences.

U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. (2024). Refusal of Recovery: How Medicare Advantage Insurers Have Denied Patients Access to Post-Acute Care.

Engels, F. (1845). The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Center for Strategic and International Studies. (2025). Left-wing terrorism and political violence in the United States: What the data tells us.

YouGov. (2025). What Americans think about political violence.

Pew Research Center. (2026). What do Americans consider immoral?

Harvard Institute of Politics. (2025). Fall 2025 Youth Poll.

Polarization Research Lab / Dartmouth. (2024). Partisan animosity and support for political violence in America.

Westwood, S. J., Grimmer, J., Tyler, M., & Nall, C. (2022). Current research overstates American support for political violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Landry, A. P., Druckman, J. N., & Willer, R. (2023). Need for chaos and dehumanization are robustly associated with support for partisan violence. Northwestern Institute for Policy Research.

Political Behavior. (2025). Study on elite cues, violent rhetoric, and support for political violence.

05/20/2026

05/12/2026

Do you know of someone in your life/circle for whom this data makes sense?

05/12/2026

🤦🏻‍♂️🙄

My brain hurts …

Virginia Democrats ask U.S. Supreme Court to override a decision by the state's highest court last week that struck down a voter-approved redistricting ballot measure.

05/11/2026

You know some of these faces!
I think Arielle Scarcella and I are the only ones on Fb.

05/08/2026

No, Gavin Newsom, you blithering IDIOT, MAGA has “not rigged the election.”

Your dumb ass party was too late to the game. In 2020, VA literally changed its constitution to be an anti-gerrymandering state.

But Democrats held a referendum to amend the constitution AFTER voting began in this election season, which is exactly why the court ruled against it. To amend the constitution, they needed to engage with the process BEFORE voting started. How is this hard?

And Newsom and others are saying this ruling is “against the will of voters”? More projection, of course, because nothing says acting against the will of the people like violating a constitution, which is quite literally an agreement between the government and the people, ya nitwit.

Not only is the Democratic Party incapable of standing up to its communist faction while also constantly using “fascism” as a signal against Trump and the Republicans, but the party is also incapable of any introspection.

Yes, both parties gerrymander and act in bad faith on these matters, but redistricting is not illegal or in violation of census rules. But VA is unique because it literally made it illegal 👀

Any Democratic leader who has any sense left really needs to rein it in, because they’re not doing themselves a favor by playing stupid or using voters’ emotions as leverage.

This one was a very clear loss, and a self-inflicted one at that. Nothing new.

05/02/2026

I receive messages from people telling me their family members have cut them off over political disagreements. This is especially hard to hear when it comes from older parents who feel like they are losing access to their children, grandchildren, or the ordinary rhythms of family life because of politics. Of course, there may be more happening behind the scenes externally: family drama, old wounds, unresolved conflict, or dynamics I cannot possibly know from a message.

But there is also a second question: when politics becomes the stated reason for cutting someone off, is it really the whole explanation, or is something internal also involved, such as emotional regulation, conflict tolerance, personality style, or the tendency to experience disagreement as danger? The polling data suggest political estrangement is real and painful, but still usually the exception rather than the norm. So unless there are serious conflicts that genuinely require separation, distancing yourself from aging parents solely because of how they voted is excessive. If another person’s politics becomes a cue for your nervous system to treat them as dangerous, it might be a you thing.

05/02/2026

My “No Fluff” Take!


The Constitution limits race-based districting. The Voting Rights Act enforces the Fifteenth Amendment, which says that “the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In the districting context, that means courts may need to pay attention to race when minority voting strength is being diluted. In other words, is the map making minority voters too dispersed to exercise meaningful political power? Are they being concentrated into one district, which is called packing, or fragmented across several districts so they cannot form an effective voting bloc, which is called cracking?

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act basically says that a voting system cannot be arranged so that racial minorities have less political opportunity than other voters. But the caveat is that there needs to be a legally sufficient reason for creating an additional majority-minority district. A second majority-minority district is not automatically unconstitutional. But if race becomes the predominant factor in drawing the lines, the state needs to show that the district was reasonably necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Otherwise, it can become a violation of the Constitution’s equal protection principle.

You cannot gerrymander a district by reaching across the state to borrow voters from disconnected regions just to manufacture another majority-minority district. The minority population has to be sufficiently large and geographically compact enough to form a reasonably configured district. That is the key distinction. The VRA may require attention to race when minority voting power is actually being diluted, but it does not authorize racial proportionality for its own sake.

Racism absolutely motivated districting abuses after Reconstruction and through Jim Crow. But at some point, the legal question has to return to what the rules actually say. Not every racial disparity in district outcomes is, by itself, proof of illegal racism. And if a state rigs its districts to assemble racial voter blocs in order to obtain a preferred representational outcome, it risks violating the Constitution and distorting the very principle the Voting Rights Act was meant to protect: equal political opportunity, not race-based electoral engineering.