It’s rare to read something that reflects a grasp of a complex problem, rarer still to read it in the New York Times. But NY1 political anchor Errol Louis took the risk and expressed the complications that few will admit because it muddies their simplistic campaign slogans designed to appeal to a constituency with an 8-second attention span and the grasp of an iguana in a snowstorm.

The context is the battle of New York City mayoral candidates. On the one side, there’s former cop Eric Adams. On the other side, there’s Maya Wiley, former SDNY assistant United States attorney and chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board. There’s a fair chance neither will win the Democratic primary, the winner of which will become mayor, now that Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia (who was endorsed by the New York Times and NY Daily News as a decent mechanic, but can’t seem to get any traction) have joined forces to game ranked choice voting, it’s hard to say what will happen. And then there is a laundry list of others, from Scott Stringer to Paperboy Prince. Continue reading →

I would like to think I’m a bigger person than to indulge in schadenfreude, but I have my moments of weakness. One of them is when I hear from a prof who begins his story with his bona fides as a believer in social justice and ends with his being accused of some outrageous offense that’s so unfair. They can’t see me over the telephone, but I find myself involuntarily smiling.

What did you think would happen when you indulged the little shits in their narcissistic belief that they were entitled to seek and destroy anyone who uttered heresy?

At Reason, Robby Soave notes an interesting new campus survey. Continue reading →

After Michael Powell’s scathing NYT article about the American Civil Liberties Union’s abandonment of its mission in favor of social justice, the knives came out. I’ve chronicled it for the past few years here, Much of the defense of the ACLU’s failing was disingenuous, arguing that it hadn’t abandoned its mission, a position that was typical of argumentation in a factless age of strenuous denial of reality coupled with the nodding agreement of the chorus.

But there were some letters to the editor at the Times that weren’t the typical squishy reimaginings and sophist rationalizations. My old pal Ron Kuby, as lefty as they get, called it out. Continue reading →

It wasn’t because Jack Phillips’ cakes were so delicious, although they are apparently in great demand, but because Autumn Scardina wanted to “get him.” And Denver District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones held she did.

The cake in question was ordered for a birthday. The woman who called Masterpiece Cake Shop to ask for it wanted pink on the inside, surrounded by a layer of blue frosting. She explained to the shop employee it was to honor her gender transition.

At that point, the woman at the shop said they likely could not make it. Continue reading →

Prefatory note: Thanks to my hacker contact, “BlueDragon72,” I intercepted this email before it reached its intended destination. I think you’ll find it interesting.—CLS

Dear Sheriff Roy:

Thank you for sending me to Disney World with Nana Wentzel and Deputies Castle and Sims. I know I did a bad thing shoving the baton up that Fed’s backside, but no one disrespects my commanding officer like that. Continue reading →

When they learned one of their “brothers” had been charged, they resigned. En masse. Much like their counterparts in Buffalo and Albuquerque did before them. They had enough.

A group of about 50 police officers who had served voluntarily on a specialized crowd control unit in Portland, Ore., have stepped down from the squad after a year of sometimes violent clashes with protesters, the city’s Police Department said on Thursday. Continue reading →

On the heels of the Eighth Circuit’s rejection of the facile argument that while colleges are concededly biased, it’s not a bias against male students but a bias in favor of “survivors,” the Tenth Circuit has finally found its way over the hump and similarly refused to play the game anymore.

The decision in the case of “John Doe,” as the former student is identified, comes one year after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit dismissed a similar lawsuit from a male student who also claimed DU’s investigatory process was biased against men and toward women. At the time, a three-judge appellate panel decided that a process generally favoring victims who were largely women did not necessarily equate to discrimination against men. Continue reading →

Some states have legalized weed. Not the feds. Some states call themselves sanctuaries for immigrants, despite the feds controlling immigration and deportation. And some states have laws about allowing the possession of guns, even as the feds want to limit and control it. Each of these scenarios has produced widely different reactions, some based on law but most based on preference.

Missouri Governor Mike Parsons signed a bill that takes control of gun rights in his state.

Gov. Mike Parson signed House Bill 85 at Frontier Justice in Lee’s Summit. Continue reading →

Every once in a while, someone writes something that is far more worthy of your time than whatever I was going to write. This is one of those times.

In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it, as Jonathan Swift wrote.

Chimamanda Adichie lets it all out. Forget me. Read her today.

Maybe a decade ago, a guy with a significant following on the twitters complained that there was nobody in the Harry Potter series who “looked like him.” I replied, “So write some books as good as J.K. Rowling and make the characters look like you.”* Lin-Manuel Miranda did just that in his love letter to his neighborhood, Washington Heights.

It was the first movie I’ve seen in a theater in more than a year, and I thought it was great. I know Washington Heights very well, having spent a lot of time up there with clients. The scenery was the real deal, even if they managed to not include a bar, a money-exchange or the Local Motion cab driven by undercover detectives from the 34 Precinct that everybody knew were cops. Where were the guys selling dime bags on the corner? Where were the car stops to  illegally search for clavos? Where were the kids smoking weed? Where was the bodega cat? But then, this was Miranda’s love story. isn’t he allowed to clean the streets up a bit? Continue reading →