☕️ UNIVERSAL DISJUNCTION ☙ Saturday, June 28, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Three blockbuster Supreme Court decisions, including the one that will change the legal landscape for generations; historic tech breakthroughs, purity spiral news, and a week-ending wrap-up.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Turns out my predictions bore fruit, and today we dig into three blockbuster Supreme Court decisions, including the one that will change the legal landscape for generations. Plus, even more in the roundup: historic tech breakthroughs, purity spiral news, and a week-ending wrap-up.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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It brings me terrific pleasure to say, once again: I told you so! We might soon need a new acronym (maybe, ITYS). Do not doubt me, as Rush would always say. All that fretful waiting and wondering whether SCOTUS would do the right thing or keep letting judges savage Trump’s agenda ended yesterday in magnificent triumph. Let us bathe ourselves in liberal tears, starting at the New York Times: “Supreme Court Limits National Injunctions, a Victory for President Trump.”

The stakes are massive. Since Trump signed his very first executive order, judges have been blasting back with their own pseudo-presidential orders promptly countermanding him. Conservative outrage rightly ensued. To calm folks down, I wrote at length about one of the most mind-numbing legal topics in the hornbook: injunctions. I explained how these out-of-control judges were papering over basic essential requirements for the (normally) rarely granted types of orders.

Things got bad fast. There are currently over 40 national injunctions stopping that many Trump policies —a historic record— and nearly all of them were excreted from five blue federal districts (out of 90+). People demanded Trump pack the court, or Congress start impeaching district judges in droves, or Judge Barrett resign in disgrace, or for Hegseth to drop bunker busters on SCOTUS. Something!

Here, courtesy of Bloomberg News, is a small sample of Trump policies currently frozen solid by so-called national injunctions:

Despite all the chaos, I advised (admittedly, it was hard advice to take): be patient, Jedi, it’ll take a minute because the courts work ponderously, but processes exist to put rogue judges in their place.

And yesterday, the Supreme Court dropped its own bunker-buster, in the form of one of the most irascible, testy, and scolding decisions that ever emitted from the Court’s dark bowels, delivered unsweetly in her Mom Voice by none other than one Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

⚖️ The implications are vast; Trump’s entire agenda just received a mid-flight refueling. Bloomberg gets it (even if the Times pretended not to notice):

“Judges entered nationwide preliminary orders halting Trump administration actions in at least four dozen of the 400 lawsuits filed since he took office in January,” Bloomberg coolly observed. At yesterday’s impromptu press conference, President Trump promised that the administration will “promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.”

It’s on like Donkey Kong, as the kids used to say.

The majority’s core holding was crystalline, originalist, and nuclear: the Judiciary Act of 1789 does not authorize district courts to issue nationwide injunctions because such relief lacks any founding-era analogue. Barrett’s opinion was deliberately maximalist — not just reining in the practice, but burying it under two feet of British jurisprudence and one of Justice Story’s discarded wigs.

Congressional Democrats, who ten minutes ago were complaining about Biden-era national injunctions, called yesterday’s holding overthrowing them “deplorable” and “a vile betrayal of our Constitution.” Politico, yesterday:

If it weren’t for double standards, et cetera.

Unhinged BlueSkiers apoplectically tore loose from their last remaining hinges. For example, Yale Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Genetics and Neuroscience, Mike Nitabach, posted this decidedly non-professorial take:

Let history take note: the professional-managerial class’s first instinct after the Court clipped their nationwide-injunction wings was to profanely fantasize about an armed rebellion, re-open the Underground Railroad, and scream into the BlueSky about red-state kidnappings.

⚖️ Alert readers will also recall that, earlier this week, I wrote that I couldn’t shake a sense that we were teetering on the precipice of a new phase, that the pace was about to accelerate. Well, behold.

In yesterday’s order, the Supreme Court ended for all time one of the most abusive (or helpful, depending on your point of view) quasi-legal tools that district judges had in their judicial tool bags: the national injunction. National injunctions involve a finding that a presidential order or a new law is presumptively unconstitutional— and thus to be chucked in the legal freezer, becoming a spent force or dead letter, at least for a couple years, till the case wound and wended its way in slow motion through the court’s docket.

As Justice Barrett observed from the first sentence of her order, nothing in the Constitution or federal statute empowers district courts to override the Executive Branch in this particular way. In concurrence, Justice Thomas pointed out that, even in the same district, one judge’s orders are not binding on any other judge in that district— so how could national injunctions magically bind judges in other districts?

As we celebrate the victorious unleashing of scores of Trump’s pent-up policies, we must also count the cost. National injunctions halted most of Biden’s worst excesses, like covid mandates, student loan forgiveness, and so on. That’s ended, too. At least they got us through the pandemic.

Justice Alito, in his fine concurrence, correctly opined that, if Congress wants courts to have this power, it could go ahead and expand judicial jurisdiction by passing an authorizing law. But it hasn’t (and almost certainly won’t), so judges must work with what they have been given.

Justice Barrett and the 6-3 majority didn’t just throw shade on national injunctions; they put a lead-lined concrete containment dome over the whole practice. It’s finished.

⚖️ Let’s discuss what this decision is and what it isn’t.

It isn’t a ban on injunctions, per se. Activist lawyers can still haul their wife-beating illegal aliens into court and get temporary deportation relief for that criminal. But they can no longer get midnight orders on behalf of all the other illegal aliens around the country who aren’t parties to their lawsuits. One wonders whether it will be worth the effort in most cases.

They can still litigate the merits of their cases, seeking final decisions that a particular executive order or statute is unconstitutional— but they can’t get it frozen nationwide while the case unfolds. Just frozen as to the specifically named parties.

Activists can also still seek to certify class actions. If they can certify a class —and a slew of those types of emergency motions were filed yesterday in the wake of SCOTUS’s decision— then they can still get a national injunction for their certified class, which in many ways is similar to a regular nationwide injunction.

The problem —and the reason why they haven’t tried it so far— is that class certification is much harder and more demanding even than getting a straight injunction.

In other words, certifying a class is more than double the effort. Now, the activist lawyers must both prove entitlement to an injunction and meet strict requirements for class certification. It almost certainly rules out after-hours temporary injunctions, since there’s no class yet at that early stage of the proceedings.

“This is going to make it more challenging, more complicated, potentially more expensive to seek orders that more broadly stop illegal government action,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, correctly said. “It is watering down the power of federal courts to check government misconduct.”

States can still bring cases seeking injunctive relief for their states, limiting the effect to a patchwork legal quilt around the country. We saw that happen often during the pandemic, since conservative judges frequently refused to issue national injunctions. However, many times, if enough states get a stay, the federal government will just put the whole program on hold.

With all these other possible remedies, despite the lunatic ramblings of moronic Yale professors on BlueSky, yesterday’s decision did not bestow imperial powers on the presidency.

⚖️ But maybe the best part of yesterday’s majority decision was that six justices endorsed taking one of their comrades to the woodshed. Justice Barrett, writing for the majority, explained in painful detail that: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a dum-dum.

Maybe Justice Jackson started it. She began her dissent by describing the majority opinion as essentially obsequious and calling the decision “an existential threat to the rule of law.”

Justice Barrett unloaded:

Justice Barrett wasn’t even close to being done:

Justice Jackson provided a vein of rich illogic for Justice Barrett to mine, and Amy didn’t waste the chance:

Having spent over two full pages tearing Justice Jackson a new alimentary canal, Justice Barrett primly summed it up in two sentences, saying she wouldn’t dwell on Jackson’s silly logic:

The gloves are off.

I cannot recall ever seeing anything like it in a Supreme Court majority decision before. Remember — five more justices signed on to Barrett’s opinion, silently but formally endorsing her smackdown of Justice Jackson. Even the two other liberal justices avoided joining or even mentioning Justice Jackson’s dissent. It’s just as ugly as it looks.

I’m running long. I’ll end with this: for readers concerned about Justice Barrett’s bona fides, it might be time to reconsider. There is no other single decision that SCOTUS could have handed President Trump to put jet fuel in his agenda.

Step aside, Wanda, the train is coming through. Fast.

⚖️ Yesterday, in another terrific 6-3 decision, the Court sided with parental rights. ScotusBlog’s story was headlined, “Court allows parents to opt their children out of school lessons involving LGBTQ+ themes.” Book burners!

The Supreme Court held that a group of Maryland parents (Muslim, Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox) may opt-out their elementary-school-aged children from any instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes. The majority agreed with parents that the Montgomery County school board’s refusal to provide them with an opt-out violated their free exercise of religion.

Montgomery County lies in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, and is one of the largest school districts in the country.

Astonishingly, the decision went far beyond gross, pornographic artwork in library books. One book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, describes a little girl’s reaction to her uncle’s same-sex wedding; another book, Pride Puppy, describes a young dog that gets lost during a Pride parade and meets a variety of ‘colorful’ characters. Yet another, Born Ready, is about a character named Penelope who is initially treated as a girl but says, “inside, I’m a boy.”

The majority squared off —not just against inappropriate images— but against LGBT indoctrination itself.

The school board, Justice Alito wrote, “requires teachers to instruct young children using storybooks that explicitly contradict their parents’ religious views, and it encourages the teachers to correct the children and accuse them of being ‘hurtful’ when they express a degree of religious confusion.”

The holding was clear and stark: schools cannot ‘indoctrinate’ kids in socially experimental ideologies inconsistent with parents’ religious beliefs. Period. They must provide notice and opt-outs.

An overwrought Justice Sotomayor complained the majority’s decision will soon lead to banning books on evolution (!) or interfaith marriages — “and history may be next,” she warned darkly. History itself!

A nation slowly regained its sanity.

But that wasn’t all…

⚖️ Justice Thomas wrote for the majority in another major First Amendment case published yesterday. CNN ran the story headlined, “Texas porn age verification law upheld by Supreme Court.”

Smut-peddlers argued that a new Texas law requiring age verification (and therefore, proof of identity) violated their First Amendment right to publish whatever perverted ‘adult’ material they wanted. The ‘adult entertainment industry’s’ lawyers said the law violates access to free speech online because it would “chill” adults’ access to that content.

Apparently, ‘innocent’ smut buyers aren’t eager to identify themselves, for some reason.

During oral arguments, judges rejected the smut-sellers’ argument that content-filtering software was a less restrictive way to protect kids than age verification. Justice Barrett —who has seven children— called the software “far from foolproof.” “Kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phones, computers. Let me just say, from personal experience, that content filtering for all those different devices is difficult to keep up with,” she pointed out.

“And I think that the explosion of addiction to online porn has shown that content filtering isn’t working,” Barrett added.

The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Texas’s age-verification law for porn sites — though this flew right under media’s radar — could be one of the most consequential developments in the battle against porn addiction in decades.

First of all, it’s a stellar legal precedent that says regulating porn is not inherently unconstitutional. Although not even close to a ban, it’s a speed-bump on the porn addiction highway. Having to verify your age with ID shatters anonymity, and that moment of indecisive friction — even just 10–15 seconds — has a profound psychological effect. It breaks the dopamine loop.

For adults, age verification adds just enough mild shame and delay to possibly reduce compulsive use. That’s probably the main reason porn producers opposed it so fiercly. They know it will cut into the bottom line.

Age-verification laws like Texas’s implicitly validate the idea that porn is not neutral, it can be harmful, particularly to developing brains, and society has a legitimate interest in reducing exposure. That opens a new Overton window, moving the conversation from “don’t be a prude” to “what’s our duty to prevent digital self-harm?” In the long run, this could unlock even more regulation.

Until now, porn’s critics have been airily dismissed as moralists or theocrats. But with this ruling and its constitutional legitimacy, the argument has shifted to consent, mental health, and childhood protection, rather than religion.

This Texas age-verification decision isn’t about porn access. It’s about reclaiming the power to shape what kind of digital society we want. By affirming that states can erect even modest guardrails, the Court has cleared a legal and cultural path to push back against one of the most addictive, exploitative, and socially corrosive industries in modern life.

It might be the first meaningful blow against Big Porn since the cardboard-cover era, back when you had to show up and show ID to buy it.

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Along with the legal landscape, the culture is also shifting. On Thursday, an op-ed ran in, of all places, the Washington Post, headlined, “I co-wrote the anonymous HHS report on pediatric gender medicine. The author’s sub-headline explained, “The hostile reaction to our work shows why we needed to do it in the first place.”

Last month, HHS published a comprehensive review of treatments for gender dysphoria in minors that was savagely and immediately criticized, in largest part because the authors were anonymous. Who can blame them? But MIT professor Alex Byrne has decided to come out, and admitted he helped draft the skeptical study.

Think about purity spirals. Alex’s progressive credentials are unassailable. “I have never voted Republican,” he insisted, “and as an academic from Cambridge, Massachusetts, I hold many of the liberal beliefs of my tribe.” My tribe. Including, he firmly swore, transgender rights. But.

“After surveying all the evidence,” Alex wrote, “and applying widely accepted principles of medical ethics, we found that medical transition for minors is not empirically or ethically justified.” In other words, it’s a Frankensteinian monstrosity, not that Alex would use that sort of plain language.

Still, he’s reached his limit. He can’t take it anymore. Explaining his initial anonymity, and why horrific “gender” treatments were allowed to continue so long, Alex admitted it was cancel culture. “The price of speaking out no doubt contributed to the collapse of medical safeguarding in the United States,” the professor explained.

He complained about what we’ve long mocked: the gender team’s use of “euphemistic and often misleading” language. “Gender-affirming top surgery” is really radical body modification. Patients who regret their surgeries are described as having “dynamic desires for gender-affirming medical interventions.” And, of course, Alex noted you can’t just call them “boys” or “girls” anymore; the ‘standard of care’ requires six or more syllables.

This linguistic circus, Alex admitted, catching up to the rest of us, “has the Orwellian effect of making plain truths impossible to state.” He correctly pointed out (as we have, many times) that gender dysphoria is one of the only psychological diagnoses treated with permanent surgery and chemical interventions, even though it has no observable clinical signs. Just the patient’s say-so.

We don’t do that for any other mental illness. “Speaking for myself, the progressive embrace of this regressive practice is one of the great ironies of the modern age,” Alex wrote.

Though he tried hard to hew to progressive orthodoxy, Alex finally confronted another obvious truth the rest of us have long pointed out: modern medicine makes lots of mistakes:

The fact that this op-ed was published at all, in the WaPo no less, and that Alex was willing (or probably forced) to out himself as an author, and that he’s directly confronting cancel culture, is all evidence that the censorship apparatus is failing. The progressive purity spiral is spiraling out of control.

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Don’t miss what might be the most important tech news in decades, or maybe our lifetimes. Because politics, the news was muted, but a major milestone drove down the freeway in Austin yesterday. Reuters ran the remarkable story below the headline, “Tesla completes first fully autonomous Model Y delivery ahead of schedule.”

To put it bluntly, for the first time in human history, a new car delivered itself to its buyer. And it was competing with Austin drivers. No remote operators had to take over, it didn’t get road rage or a ticket. Nor did it stop for a vape. It just drove off the manufacturing floor and headed straight to its new owner with all due haste.

Elon tweeted that its max speed reached 72 mph.

It is, perhaps, a sign of our frenetic times that this wasn’t bigger news. Maybe, amidst the AI revolution, we’ve become so immune to viral outbreaks of breakthrough technology that these kinds of announcements seem bland and inevitable.

But you must admit: now we’re finally getting somewhere.

For just a tiny sliver of implication, imagine what this means for car dealers. All they need now is a showroom. Soon, parking lots packed with car inventories will become archaic relics of the ancient past, like record players or corded telephones, something else for our kids to doubtfully question and dismiss. You mean you had to go pick cars up? By yourself? How did you get there?

Between AI and self-driving abilities, why can’t they give my car a saucy, crime-fighting personality, like KITT from Knight Rider? Where is David Hasselhoff when you need him?

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Folks, what a week.

• A 12-Day Middle East War ceasefire and WWIII aversion, putting the pundits in their places.

• A historic NATO defense spending agreement and a Trump butt-kissing contest.

• A historic Rwanda-Congo peace deal.

• SCOTUS ends nationwide injunctions, greenlights third-country deportations, prunes online porn, authorizes states to defund Planned Parenthood, and pinches LGBT school propaganda.

• A record-high stock market beclowning the experts and media tools.

• History’s first self-driving car delivery.

• More Democrat purity spirals.

• Florida’s swampy new Alligator Alcatraz will be funded by Biden’s immigrant hotel budget.

• Trump ended protected status for half a million housecat-gobbling Haitians who can now be deported.

And honestly, there was more, like new lower-court wins for the Trump Agenda. I can barely keep up. When I speculated on Monday that the pace was accelerating, I was right again. Things are about to get really good.

Have a wonderful Weekend! Coffee & Covid will return on Monday morning to kick off another amazing week with all the essential news and commentary you need. Be blessed.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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