The foundational premise underlying campus Title IX sex tribunals’ denial of due process to male students accused of rape is “believe all women.” There is no reason to suspect this premise will change on campus, and it will continue to serve as the justification for precluding the accused students from having a minimal opportunity to defend themselves and challenge accusations against them.

In the mythology of sexual assault “survivors,” women almost never lie. They constructed a litany of excuses for why they can’t remember, tell different, even contradictory, stories or enthusiastically consented at the time, although discovered they were raped a month or year later. But to raise these issues is to violate the basic premise: Believe women.

Except when it comes to being an Israeli woman raped by Hamas. Continue reading →

When an argument for criminalizing conduct begins with the appeal to emotion, “We’re fighting for our children,” it’s almost certainly calling for bad law. But when it comes to “deepfake”** nudes of women, particularly minors, does that change the calculus?

The problem with deepfakes isn’t new, but experts say it’s getting worse as the technology to produce it becomes more available and easier to use. Researchers have been sounding the alarm this year on the explosion of AI-generated child sexual abuse material using depictions of real victims or virtual characters. In June, the FBI warned it was continuing to receive reports from victims, both minors and adults, whose photos or videos were used to create explicit content that was shared online.

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Like so many laws that made sense in one context, the Insurrection Act, as amended, seemed like a good, if not necessary, idea at the time. And like so many laws that gave enormous power to the president, the guardrail was that the American people would never be so foolish as to elect a person to that high office who was so lacking in trust, so antagonistic to the Constitution, democracy and the rule of law, as to abuse that vast power. But that was then and this is now.

I’m talking about the Insurrection Act, a federal law that permits the president to deploy military troops in American communities to effectively act as a domestic police force under his direct command. In theory, there is a need for a well-drafted law that permits the use of federal troops in extreme circumstances to maintain order and protect the rule of law. The Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792 but has since been amended, is not, however, well drafted. And its flaws would give Trump enormous latitude to wield the staggering power of the state against his domestic political enemies.

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Like the president, Senate Majority Leader and New York’s senior Senator Chuck Schumer sees a problem. And like the president, Schumer thinks he can thread the needle and worm his way out of the problem. It isn’t working for Biden, and it won’t work for Schumer. Both fail to grasp the nature of the problem.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned this week in a landmark speech that anti-Israel militancy has fomented antisemitism on the American left since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks against the Jewish state. His remarks highlighted the resilience of the Democratic Party’s non-antisemitic majority. But they also showed why a party steeped in identity politics has a limited capacity to contain antisemitism’s spread.

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There was some small degree of controversy about whether a sitting president could be prosecuted, as the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum that a president could not during the term of office. This wasn’t law, but DoJ opinion, which ordinarily binds the federal government’s exercise of authority. And frankly, who would have ever thought we would need such an opinion, given that we’re talking about the president of the United States here, someone who should be a paragon of integrity, if nothing else. Would there ever be another Richard Milhous Nixon?

This was, upon reflection, the correct decision. So long as a person was president, the person could not be dragged into local courthouses by prosecutors who oppose the person to make it impossible to do the job of president. There is room for debate, but this was the only practical outcome. Continue reading →

Hell froze over Saturday, November 25, 2023 around 11 pm.

It happened at the Rosemont Horizon in Rosemont, Illinois. At the close of WWE’s annual “Survivor Series” Pay Per View, the babyface team of Randy Orton, Cody Rhodes, Jey Uso, Sami Zayn and Seth Rollins were all celebrating after their victory in WarGames, a brutal two-ring steel cage match designed by Cody’s father, “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes.

The copyright notice ran on Peacock’s feed, and most folks like myself got ready to see if we could catch some highlights from college football. Continue reading →

It began with a letter from the Superintendent of the Teaneck school district, André D. Spencer, to the parents and students, characterizing Hamas’ October 7th attack not as terrorism, or even as something bad perpetrated by Hamas, but as “the latest incidents in the cycle of violence in the Middle East.” At the next Board of Education meeting, Jewish parents stood to address this failing. Board Vice President Victoria Fisher was having none of it.

The Board, however, repeatedly cut off commenters who described Hamas’s actions to
underscore why they thought Superintendent Spencer should have issued a stronger statement condemning the attack: Continue reading →

For all the calls to do the untenable, fight Hamas without disproportionately (whatever that means) harming Gazans in the process, no one has yet come up with an actual way to accomplish this. It sounds great in platitudes, but can’t be done on, or below, the street. Is there any other way Israel can eradicate terrorists dedicated to its destruction and thrilled to rape, kidnap and murder its people, to salvage its reputation among the unduly passionate and those who rely on their votes?

Michael L. Gross, a professor of political science at the University of Haifa, offers a way out.

Israel insists that it is doing all it can to protect civilians, given the complex urban environment it is fighting in, the embedding of Hamas in the civilian population and persistent missile strikes. Continue reading →

It’s bad enough that McWhorter has a point when it comes to the way language develops going forward.

It’s a principle in linguistics that things that settle in for good tend to start with young people, and the new “they” is used most by people under 35. (It has a mixed reception among people between 35 and 55 and is often outright dismissed by people past 55, according to a 2019 survey.)

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As the four-day Israel-Hamas ceasefire enters its fifth day, the question remains: What happens when the hostage release comes to an end?

The tenuous truce between Israel and Hamas appeared to hold for a fifth day on Tuesday, an act of continued cooperation that could allow for additional aid to flow into Gaza and the release of more hostages, prisoners and detainees than initially expected.

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