There is little question that Scott Hayes, a pro-Israel protester and Iraq war veteran, was the victim of a forceful attack by an apparently pro-Palestinian passerby. The video leaves no doubt.

🚨BREAKING🚨

A man wearing a Palestinian pin was shot in the stomach this evening after he charged through traffic and tackled a pro-Israel Iraq war veteran in Newton, Massachusetts.pic.twitter.com/Ix5JEJaJNp

— Kassy Akiva (@KassyAkiva) September 13, 2024

In the course, Hayes fired his lawfully carried gun and shot the attacker. Continue reading →

This campus admissions season was the first under the new rule of SSFA v. Harvard, banning the use of racial preferences in admissions. Predictions of disaster permeated the campus debates. After all, without racial preferences, how would colleges fulfill their self-imposed goals of diversity, equity and inclusion? While some colleges desperately sought ways to circumvent, even ignore, the law, others complied. Did the sky fall?

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

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On trial, I never refer to my client as “the defendant.” He’s Joe Smith, or whatever his name happens to be, because I want the jury to see him as a human being. Whether this makes a real difference to the jury is unclear. It’s one of a thousand things that happen at trial, and there is no metric to figure out whether it helps. The best I can argue is it can’t hurt, and there’s no downside to doing so. So why not?

Pamela Paul argues that the trend to euphemism, to vilifying one word as stigmatizing and replacing it with more words, has a cost. She has a point. Or two. Continue reading →

We’re no more informed about what Kamala Harris’ policies are or what she will do as president. She still makes those smug faces. She repeated her empty mantra of “turning the page” over and over, as if that illuminates anything. But damn, did she bait Trump and he fell for it, devolving into the Trumpiest Trump possible.

Haitians eat dogs because he saw it on TV? World leaders respect him because Viktor Orban said so? People don’t leave his rallies early because he’s not a tedious incoherent bore? Crime is through the roof and the FBI are lying about it? Tariffs are paid by Chi-na? Continue reading →

The first clue should have been a guy driving a McLaren into a football stadium. Then again, if cops outside of the PGA Championship can’t figure out that the guy was Scottie Scheffler, why should Miami-Dade motorcycle cops realize the driver was Tyreek Hill?

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Hating Jews. under the guise of hating the colonialist apartheid genocidal oppressor State of Israel, has become the new fashion accessory of the righteous left. The hard right was caught off guard, finding itself outflanked in its hatred of Jews (who have their own space laser and will not replace them). What to do? Open a new Overton Window!

This week Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star who now hosts one of America’s top podcasts, had an apologist for Adolf Hitler on his show. Darryl Cooper, who runs a history podcast (and newsletter) called “Martyr Made,” considers Winston Churchill, not Hitler, the chief villain of World War II. In a social media post that he’s since deleted, Cooper argued that a Paris occupied by the Nazis was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the city on display during the opening ceremony of the recent Summer Olympics, where a drag queen performance infuriated the right. On his show, Carlson introduced Cooper to listeners as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

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Will the world end in a nuclear Holocaust? Jake Halpern seems to not only consider this a probability, but considers this something to discuss with his kids.

In one conversation, Lucian told me: “Dad, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ there will be nuclear war; it’s a matter of ‘when.’” He had this look in his eyes: a gleam of defiance, as if he were daring me — the resident optimist — to disagree. I was at a loss for words because, truth be told, I had been inching my way toward that same terrifying realization. The only question was whether I was willing to offer him some grand reassurance that we both knew would be a lie.

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The implicit argument as Jennifer and James Crumbley were charged and ultimately convicted of murders committed not by them, but their son, was that the circumstances, the evidence, was so unique that this mom, this dad, deserved to be held accountable for their miscreant son, Ethan. After all, they gave him a gun as a Christmas present and they knew of his propensity for violence. What are the chances that would happen again?

[Colin] Gray rocked back and forth in shackles and prison stripes on Friday morning as the charges against him were read. His son had just been charged with murder for opening fire at Apalachee High School, killing two students and two teachers. Next came the charges against the white-haired Mr. Gray, including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for allowing his son access to the gun even though, prosecutors say, Mr. Gray knew the boy was a threat to himself and others.

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David French makes an emotional appeal to hold TikTok liable for the tragic asphyxiation death of a 10-year-old girl, Nylah Anderson, who took the “so-called blackout challenge.” It is, without a doubt tragic and horrible, as the facts leave no doubt.

In 2021, a 10-year-old girl named Nylah Anderson was viewing videos on TikTok, as millions of people do every day, when the app’s algorithm served up a video of the so-called blackout challenge on its “For You Page.” The page suggests videos for users to watch. The blackout challenge encourages users to record themselves as they engage in self-asphyxiation, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. Nylah saw the challenge, tried it herself and died. She accidentally hanged herself.

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More than a few captive organizations have forsaken integrity in their quest for ideological purity. Think ACLU and ABA. Now, it’s the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors. which reversed it principled position against academic boycotts. Emeritus Northeastern law prof Steven Lubet explains.

There was a time when the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) deserved its self-description as the “most prominent guardian of academic freedom” for faculty and students in the U.S. But not any longer. Continue reading →