For most people, avoiding an avoidable confrontation with a police officer was the objective. Just as nobody got a happy feeling when they heard a siren and saw lights flashing  behind them, why put yourself in a position where things could go bad quickly and, well, right or wrong, nobody sought out the opportunity for a tune up by cop.

That hasn’t been the case for some lately.

“In these riots, you see people getting up in officers’ faces, yelling in their ears, doing everything they can to provoke a violent response,” Carroll said. “I’m not saying the officers do that, but there has to be a provision within that statute to allow officers to react to that. Because that does nothing but incite those around that vicinity and it furthers and escalates the riotous behavior.”

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The “Brawl For All” is arguably the worst idea in wrestling history. A Toughman style tournament between WWF wrestlers for bragging rights and a cash prize, the Brawl For All would end two careers, shelve several men with injuries and cost the WWF five million dollars in one night.

Vince Russo, a New Yorker who caught the WWF brass’ attention with his “Jerry Springer” style of television writing, sold the “Brawl For All” as a way of injecting much needed realism into WWF shows. If audiences were tuning in for the moments the show seemed real, why not make the in-ring action real? Continue reading →

Delvin White was a black man. He was also a cop, a school resource officer as cops in schools are euphemistically called. So is he black or blue, because that would seem to dictate what words he is permitted to use without losing his job.

Officer Delvin White was fired for “violations of policy that prohibit discriminatory conduct,” said a news release. He was an eight-year veteran of the department.

A disposition letter released by police about White’s actions said he used the racial slur while on the phone and directly to a person while he was arresting them Nov. 30.

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Questioning why the adults can’t seem to muster the guts to say “no” to the woke might seem like a lost cause. There are no doubt many reasons and influences that go into this morass. Andrew Sullivan has waded into the puddle in an effort to explain why woke is winning.

It’s been a staggering achievement, when you come to think of it. Critical theory was once an esoteric academic pursuit. Now it has become the core, underlying philosophy of the majority of American cultural institutions, universities, media, corporations, liberal churches, NGOs, philanthropies, and, of course, mainstream journalism. This summer felt like a psychic break from old-school liberalism, a moment when a big part of the American elite just decided to junk the principles that have long defined American democratic life, and embrace what Bari Weiss calls “a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.”

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Kavanaugh? Nope, she can’t even step foot in the Supreme Court anymore knowing that “rapist” is on the bench. Kozinski? Not a chance. Cuomo? Ah, yes. Cuomo.

I am a journalist myself, and I am wholly in favor of a sober and serious probe into Cuomo’s alleged conduct. It’s not a terrible thing to allow an independent investigator to gather all the facts and arrive at a formal conclusion before calling for his immediate ouster. To allow a formal fact-finding process to play out is neither a disparagement of his accusers—whose accounts should be taken absolutely seriously—nor a get-out-of-jail-free card for the governor. It is merely an acknowledgment of something that should have been clear from the vitally important beginnings of the #MeToo era: There is a difference between having the media surface and report predation, and having something akin to a formal process investigate and determine what occurred and what should be done about it.

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The Supreme Court heard oral argument in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, a case of extreme importance to both political parties for all the wrong reasons.

Though the Voting Rights Act seeks to protect minority voting rights, as a practical matter litigation under it tends to proceed on partisan lines. When Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked a lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party why his client cared about whether votes cast at the wrong precinct should be counted, he gave a candid answer.

“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said the lawyer, Michael A. Carvin. “Politics is a zero-sum game, and every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us.”

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The token punching bag at the New York Times, Bret Stephens, made an interesting observation in his post-mortem on  the Smith College fiasco:

Why does the embrace of social justice pedagogies seem to have gone hand in hand with deteriorating race relations on campus?

One answer is that if many students are enjoying a diet of courses on critical race theory, and employees are trained on the fine points of microaggressions, they might take to heart what they are taught and notice what they have been trained to see. Continue reading →

It was November 9, 1997.  Vince McMahon, owner of the World Wrestling Federation, was as nervous as he’d ever been in his life. He was about to fuck over his World Champion on live television and shatter the casual fan’s belief in professional wrestling in an event that would be known decades later as “The Montreal Screwjob.”

The 90s were a huge boom period for the wrestling business. Every Monday night, the WWF and WCW competed for fan attention as they went head-to-head with their television shows “Raw” and “Nitro.” Both promotions regularly used underhanded tactics in an attempt to drive their rival out of business, and a favorite of WCW President Eric Bischoff was talent poaching. Continue reading →

Is there a reason why educators in Oregon believe that black students are incapable of learning math? They believe so and have put together this document, A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction, to explain it. If this were about math teachers being racist, a horrible if odd notion as if math teachers would discriminate more or differently than any other teacher, that would be one thing.

But that’s not what it’s about. Columbia prof john McWhorter explains. Continue reading →

Like many people, I was enthralled by Amanda Gorman’s poem read at Biden’s inauguration, and said so at the time. While it didn’t occur to me, why wouldn’t such a wonderful poem be translated into other languages so that people around the world could enjoy and appreciate it? Then again, it didn’t occur to me that this, too, would be turned into a controversy, another racial sinkhole.

A few years back, a white person refusing to translate a poem by a black person would almost certainly have reflected racist dismissal of the black person. But that was then. This is now. Continue reading →