I should have seen it coming. In retrospect, it’s obvious. If elected progressive district attorneys can simply choose which duly enacted laws they prefer to prosecute and which they can ignore because, legislative action notwithstanding, they fail to conform to their ideological vision of their jurisdiction, why not a sheriff?

Lomax embraces the unique powers of elected sheriffs, who report directly to voters, unlike police chiefs, who are generally hired and fired at will by city councils. “You pretty much have no authority above you government-wise; you answer to the voters,” Lomax said, adding that despite this freedom he plans to be “a sheriff who enforces the laws.”

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There was a time when the idea of having female cops seemed silly. After all, they weren’t strong enough, tough enough, threatening enough, to deal with all the bad dudes out there. And yet here we are, with women in blue who are just as familiar with the First Rule of Policing as the guys. And yet, Slate posits that we can fix the excesses of police violence with this one cool trick.

“We’re not the ones out there shooting,” says Janeé Harteau, former chief of police of the Minneapolis Police Department. “This is really about gender at its very core.” Continue reading →

Anti-vaxxer RFK Jr.’s feelings were hurt when it was asserted that the audience at a rally in Germany at which he spoke, run by a group called Querdenken, weren’t just “very fine people,” but neo-Nazis. It was fairly widely reported, including the usual suspects like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The rally and his speech were widely covered in the mainstream media, which reported that his rally was heavily attended by neo-Nazis  and that a variety of antisemitic and neo-Nazi factions  had been involved in organizing the event. Kennedy was infuriated by this coverage of the audience to whom he had become connected by speaking at the rally.  His position is that any neo-Nazis were at some other rally on the same day, and that Querdenken is a fine group unsullied by neo-Nazi or anti-Semitic ties. Our expert witness says otherwise.

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The CEO of American Airlines, Doug Parker, said “this type of behavior has to stop.” And he’s not wrong, caveats of what happened and why notwithstanding. The allegation is that a first class passenger on a flight from JFK Airport to Santa Ana punched a flight attendant twice in the face.

Why this happened is unclear. Maybe it was that the flight attendant bumped him (and apologized), or maybe she said “let’s go, Brandon.” Maybe it was something else entirely. Whatever it was, it provides no excuse for his assault, even though punching people with whom you have a difference of opinion has become all the rage. Continue reading →

The problems with the supply chain are big and serious. And petty as well.

There’s the pop culture homage — Marilyn Monroe, Tony Soprano, The Matrix.

Then there are the festive ways to embody the zeitgeist, a socially acceptable method for donning an outfit that says “look at me, I am clever” — a meme costume, an obscure reference or a Netflix phenomenon nobody saw coming (looking at you, “Tiger King” and “Squid Game”). Continue reading →

One of the opportunities that make academic scholarship and expertise rewarding is to be in a position to testify as to the subject you spent your career studying. When a case involving voting rights as a result of a law passed in Florida, signed by Governor DeSantis, needed experts on behalf of those challenging the law, the plaintiffs turned to three professors at University of Florida.

Cool, right? Not as it turned out for either UF or the three profs. Continue reading →

How serious are we about addressing climate change? On the one hand, world leaders, save China and Russia, are meeting in Glasgow to make promises for the future they are unable to keep. On the other hand, a climate scientist was disinvited from speaking at MIT, not because he didn’t have great scholarly value on this matter of grave world importance, but because of his views on diversity and inclusion.

What are those views that have made him such a pariah, so hated, such a threat of harm to marginalized people that he could not possibly be tolerated? University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot explains. Continue reading →

Prefatory note: Someone apparently had a rotten couple of weeks at the National School Board Association. My hacker contact “BlueDragon72” passed along this copy of a draft apology letter the NSBA planned to send to parents. After reading it you’ll see why they changed things.—CLS

Dear Parents:

By now you’ve probably heard about a troubling letter sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland by someone from our offices equating parents attending school board meetings with domestic terrorists. This letter also said “hate crimes” were being perpetrated by parents attending school board meetings. Continue reading →

It’s a slog to read because of its tediously pretentious language, but Dahlia Lithwick’s latest effort at Slate is to argue that giving “racists,” by which she means those people that everybody she knows believes are racists so no reason to belabor the point, a fair trial proves that the legal system exists to protect white supremacy.

Each of these three trials rests on the knife’s edge of an existential, real-time American conversation about race and violence—one that touches on ongoing debates about policing, guns, hate crimes, and vigilantism. But as each of the three cases progress to trial, each also reveals how every legal decision—indeed every twist and turn of legal language itself—rests on ideas about neutrality, due process, and fairness, and how these ideas always seem to buckle when confronted by real questions about race. We are asking the justice system to solve intractable racial justice problems that no other institution—not politics, not the media, and not academia—can resolve. No wonder these choices being made in courtrooms about language and law and competing claims of victimhood are going so poorly.

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When the push for transgender inclusion was about bathrooms, the discussion that ensued was about bathrooms, as if that was the start and end of the issue. Even then, there were other issues at play, locker rooms, showers, dorm and hotel rooms, that didn’t catch the level of interest of bathrooms. That meant people talked about stalls where people did their business, and what was the big deal, really?

The problem was never bathrooms, even if locker rooms, showers and dorms didn’t fit as nicely into the “no biggie” paradigm. Some women raised the issue of privacy, of a safe space for women, and for young girls, to clean and dress without seeing a penis, and without someone with a penis seeing them naked. The “social construct” argument was created in part to overcome the cognitive dissonance of this situation. It was a fight about nothing, about something society invented that didn’t really exist. Continue reading →