I never watched Fear Factor. I’m no fan of UFC fighting. And I truly despise podcasts, preferring to read to get information. This is my way of saying that the only thing I know about Joe Rogan is what I read and one funny but politically wrong song. On the other hand, I’m familiar with Justin Peters because he stepped onto my turf.

We are living in the dumbest period of modern American history, where our centering institutions have destabilized, our governing social norms seem unenforceable, and our fast-food restaurants routinely insult one another on Twitter. Into this breach have stepped myriad articulate charlatans, aggro-provocateurs, and other confident dullards who seek to capitalize on the end of authority by using the internet to proclaim their own truths. Their goal is to convince the world’s least-informed people that they are actually the most-informed people, and they are very good at their jobs.

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But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ You know?

–Joni Mitchell, Miles of Aisles

Did you know that some cops commit crimes? What about the limits of Artificial Intelligence, constrained by garbage in, garbage out, providing algorithms that are either grounded in racism by proxy or manipulated to prove the belief that, since there can be no such thing as a disparity between races, the results are faked to align with fantasies?

Did you know that cops, of all colors and genders, are more afraid of young black guys than anyone else, and so respond too quickly to fear and kill them? Did you know that prosecutors understand their fear and don’t prosecute them? Continue reading →

As Erik Wemple satirically noted, the great experiment is how long cable news can talk about a report it doesn’t have? Lionel Richie had the answer. Since the day after the 2016 election, well-intended people have been pounding away. At every twit. Every policy, appointment, act and utterance. I warned some friends, smart and passionate people, who took that path that they would not only fail to achieve their goal, but would undermine their cause by doing so.

One lie is a tragedy. One million is a statistic.

Call it burnout. Outrage fatigue. It’s not that Trump’s every act wasn’t worthy of criticism, huge or trivial, significant or merely the sort of twist that could only matter if your hatred was so deep that you were blind to the fact that no one outside of your echo chamber cared. Yet, there they were, pounding away. Daily. Hourly. Pounding, pounding, pounding. Only the most passionate bothered to listen anymore. It was obvious this would happen. Continue reading →

Whoever drafted the EO for the president did his best to make it viable.

It is the policy of the Federal Government to:

(a) encourage institutions to foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse debate, including through compliance with the First Amendment for public institutions and compliance with stated institutional policies regarding freedom of speech for private institutions;

To the extent there’s any point to this, it’s to direct the Department of Education to get off its butt and do something. It’s not as if the First Amendment wasn’t there before for all to see. And the reaction from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, was a grimace and a shrug. Continue reading →

The saga of Mississippi death row inmate Curtis Flowers, whose case was just argued before the Supreme Court following his sixth trial for the murder of four people at a furniture store in 1996, struck even Justice Sam Alito as too much to endure, calling it “troubling,” and Justice Brett Kavanaugh was as clear as possible in asking Mississippi Assistant Attorney General Jason Davis:

“Can you say, as you sit here today [that] you have confidence in how this all transpired in this case?”

Flowers has spent 22 years in custody up to now, after his first through third trial convictions were reversed, his fourth and fifth trials hung, and his sixth resulted in the current conviction. The issue is Batson, the use of peremptory strikes by District Attorney Doug Evans to remove as many black people from the jury as he could. Continue reading →

Life with a criminal record has its undeniable hardships. Some would argue that if a person commits a crime, then they’ve brought it on themselves and deserve nothing more than the life they’ve created. While the argument has some simplistic appeal, it ignores the fact that the impact has exploded, from credit ratings to housing, from SORA to mugshots on the internet, to preclusion from education and licensure. How could anyone trust a barber with a record?

Then there’s the liability potential, as causes of action have been created by myriad laws holding people accountable for the acts of others, in the workplace and at the apartment complexes. Responses to the sad tears of the moment’s victims made complete sense to some, but created a purgatory where not only could a past crime, for which the debt had been paid in full, remain as a permanent taint, but a hard fact that not even the most empathetic of souls could overlook.

In law, there is a mechanism called “expungement,” the legal elimination of a criminal record as if it never happened. Can this end the taint, give those who made a mistake, or copped a plea even though they didn’t commit the crime, the chance to enjoy a productive, law-abiding life? Continue reading →

While Tamara Lanier of Norwich, Connecticut, sent a letter to then-Harvard president, Drew Faust, in 2011, explaining how she comes to the claim of lineage, the content of the letter remains unknown. She calls him her great-great-great-grandfather. She calls him “Papa Renty.” She claims to know his story. It’s possible she does, though it’s unlikely.

Renty, along with his daughter Delia, were slaves in South Carolina. They were the subjects of nude photographs by a Harvard biologist, Louis Agassiz, who was engaged in “research” to prove the inferiority of the race.

At the center of the case is a series of 1850 daguerreotypes, an early type of photo, taken of two South Carolina slaves identified as Renty and his daughter, Delia. Both were posed shirtless and photographed from several angles. The images are believed to be the earliest known photos of American slaves. Continue reading →

The opinion in Nielson v. Preap would naturally be dreaded, given that Justice Sam Alito wrote for the majority. It does remarkably little to the law, essentially holding that “when released” under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(c)(1) means at any time after a non-citizen is released from criminal incarceration. The upshot is that once seized as deportable under a few subsections of law that cover essentially everything short of a speeding ticket, the person can be held without opportunity for bond in, essentially, perpetuity.

The opinion is beyond tedious, which may explain why this ‘splainer seems nearly unrecognizable to anyone who actually read the decision. Trigger warning: if you read this from the syllabus, you will hate yourself for not listening to my warning. Continue reading →

Nebraska Senior District Judge Richard Kopf took Adam Cohen to task for his review of a book about the enigmatic Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts. What purported to be a book review devolved into a polemic:

Given the court’s current composition, anyone who does not want the law to lurch to the right in civil rights, gay rights, abortion and other areas has to hope Roberts will hold it close to its current course — either based on actual beliefs, or to protect the Supreme Court as an institution. Roberts could become the court’s new moderate center. But Obama’s insight about Roberts’s deep-seated bias against the weak, which rings powerfully true, suggests that may not be the way to bet.

Or as Judge Kopf expressed it more succinctly, “Simple enough. Roberts hates the less fortunate and that is what animates his jurisprudence.” The appeal in Cohen’s review is directed in two directions, similarly but not exactly the same. First, it’s about the law lurching to the right. Second, it’s about “deep-seated bias against the weak.” In his prefatory phrase about the court’s “current composition,” he appears to be dogwhistling about the conservative majority that has become a constant in progressive descriptions of the how courts and judges work, as being labeled conservative is tantamount to being inherently evil in the world of wokeness. Continue reading →

When the results of Stuyvesant High School’s entrance exams broke, the numbers were staggering. Not merely bad as a stand-alone number, but worse than last year, despite the “push” to improve the number of black students offered admission. And before some fool says it, the school is not too white, as Asians, unsurprisingly, make up the majority of students. The end result: only seven black kids, out of 895 freshman slots, were offered admission to Stuyvesant.

These numbers come despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vow to diversify the specialized high schools, which have long been seen as a ticket for low-income and immigrant students to enter the nation’s best colleges and embark on successful careers.

You can vow anything, much to the applause of those who wish unicorns could prance on rainbows, but there were only two ways to make it happen. Reduce the entrance standards, which had the obvious result of reducing the competency level of students attending the school, and thus reducing the value of the Stuyvesant’s education, as students unprepared for its rigors would fail to perform at its current level. Continue reading →