When the cultural issue was Black Lives Matter, universities could not contain their need to take a stance. After all, who could be against Black Lives Matter, and how could universities not assuage the feelings of their students by validating them at the institutional level.

Gaza, on the other hand, was a problem. To some students, the moral issue was not only as clear, but the need was even greater. After all, this was genocide, and what sort of monstrous institution would not take a stand against genocide? To other students, the call for the destruction of Israel, death of Jews and deprivation of unfettered access to the university by Jewish students was not the obvious moral stance. Continue reading →

My former congressman in New York’s third district, George Santos, copped a plea because what else could he do?

“I accept full responsibility for my actions,” he told the judge as he admitted to participating in a scheme to “artificially inflate” the number of contributions to his campaign to win support from the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Mr. Santos was more voluble. His voice thick with emotion, he said that his plea was an effort to make amends for misrepresentations to supporters and the government, as well as “the lies I told myself over these past years.”

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The dream is that the Democratic National Convention will be a lovefest, a show of unity behind the candidate who will both satisfy those obsessed by identity as well as those young people dreaming of a government that will provide solutions to their fiscal woes without their having any responsibility to suffer any sacrifice to improve their lot. So what if Kamala Harris never won a primary or had her policies tested by the gauntlet of political challenge. She is the annointed candidate. She is female and black. She laughs and smiles while speaking in vapid  and inoffensive platitudes. She is not Trump.

The Democrats have revamped their former Biden convention to be a Kamala affair of joy.

But outside the walls of the convention hall, the schism between the liberal wing of the party and the progressive wing will show its face. The hope is that it will be a peaceful face, one that will further show how the Democrats can disagree while still respecting the concerns of the progressive wing that aren’t pacified by the potential of a black woman candidate. Will it happen that way?

“It has to be safe and peaceful and vibrant and energetic,” said Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former labor organizer who was elected last year on a liberal platform, and who talks frequently about his own history of demonstrating. “We’re ready for this moment.”

In interviews, protest leaders described plans for days of peaceful gatherings that would draw thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of demonstrators to Chicago. Many of the protests will be focused on Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and on what activists see as complicity by President Biden and Ms. Harris in the killing of civilians there. The recent elevation of Ms. Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket has done nothing to quiet that outrage, many of them said.

Mayor Johnson has already intervened on behalf of the anti-Israel protesters

Hatem Abudayyeh, a leader of the protest coalition, applauds Johnson for his help in securing their right to be within “sight and sound” of the convention. His help continued on Friday when Johnson personally intervened to rescind strict conditions the city applied to the coalition’s march, including limitations on sound systems and portable restrooms. Johnson’s negotiations made the group’s emergency motion about their First Amendment rights moot.

“He is a friend and an ally to all of the social justice movements in Chicago and beyond,” Abudayyeh says.

There remains hope that the Dems will have a Palestinian speak at the convention to demonstrate Harris’ empathy with Gazans. But whether vibes will be good enough while the war continues, weapons continue to be sent to Israel and Hamas continues to sacrifice the lives of Palestinians to its cause remains the question.

Mr. Johnson said the city was happy to let demonstrators voice their concerns and insisted that the Chicago Police Department had been trained to facilitate peaceful marches.

Who doesn’t like peaceful marches? The problem is that peaceful marches sometimes turn mostly peaceful. Peaceful marches sometimes stray from their officially designated routes to the streets where they’re not supposed to be. What then?

Chicago police officers have been preparing for the convention for months, even inviting reporters recently to watch them train in riot gear, and the city has outlined a “coordinated multiple arrest policy” on its convention website. Officials listed “throwing things, breaking windows and destroying property” as actions that could lead to arrest, and noted that “obstructing traffic is not protected First Amendment activity.”

As Mike Tyson said, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

A leader of one group, Behind Enemy Lines, said its members disagreed with the goal of merely being “within sight and sound” of the arena in Chicago, arguing that protesters need to be “actively confronting the convention.”

“We think that their whole convention is illegitimate and criminal, and people should treat it that way,” said Michael Boyte, a co-founder of the group, which is critical of the U.S. government and describes itself as anti-imperialist.

From the sound of it, Behind Enemy Lines does not sound as if it’s going to be cooperative.

The point of all this, of course, is to get Kamala Harris to flip on our sole ally in the middle east, end weapons shipments and stop the war in Gaza by whatever means necessary. They are not looking for soothing words or feeling “seen,” but a fundamental change in United States policy from supporting Israel against the terrorists and Iran to supporting Palestinians against Israel. When the peaceful protests on Day 1 fail to accomplish their goal, will the marches be less peaceful on Day 2? Will Kamala Harris try to utter even more soothing words in the hope that she can calm the outrage without acquiescing to their demands?

Will Harris give them something, a partial win such as cutting military aid in half or cutting Israel in half to create a sovereign nation to be called Palestine? Will she capitulate to the pressure outside the walls of the convention?

And if the peaceful protests turn ugly, will Harris call for the protesters to be arrested or for the Chicago police to stand down? Chicago will be a test for Harris. Will she pass?

There are many things that have no really good answer, no answer that will fix all the problems. The one good thing is that everybody knows the rules, even if the rules don’t necessarily serve anybody very well. That was real estate commissions, a deal that often gave agents a windfall based on the selling price of a house that bore no relation to the time, expense, effort or skill of the agent.

A deal that put the cost on the seller to pay the full freight, even when that cost went to pay the agent serving the buyer. It put the buyer’s agent in the awkward conflicted position of trying to get the highest price for the seller since that meant the buyer’s agent made more money. It put the seller’s agent in the easy position of getting the listing, getting some decent pics taken and then sitting back until buyers’ agents brought a deal to their door. Continue reading →

In a fairly sloppy opinion, the Second Circuit upheld the denial of qualified immunity to Nicholas Andrzejewski of the Waterbury, Connecticut police department for having arrested and searched the car of Basel Soukaneh for the “crime” of being in a “high crime area” while in possession of a gun for which he had a facially valid permit.

That conduct, as alleged by Plaintiff-Appellee Basel Soukaneh, is that in the course of a routine traffic stop, Andrzejewski unlawfully and violently handcuffed and detained Soukaneh in the back of a police vehicle for over half an hour and conducted a warrantless search of Soukaneh’s vehicle after Soukaneh presented a facially valid firearms permit and disclosed that he possessed a firearm pursuant to the permit. On appeal, Andrzejewski argues we should reverse the district court’s denial of qualified immunity because the presence of the lawfully owned firearm in the vehicle gave him the requisite probable cause to detain Soukaneh, search the interior of his car, and search his trunk.

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Prefatory Note: There’s going to be quite a bit of swearing for the next few weeks. More than usual—so much that I’m warning you now if crass language offends you’re going to want to skip reading me for about the next month. But if you do, you’re going to miss out, so maybe get a friend who isn’t as sensitive to give you the Reader’s Digest version—CLS

Cruise ships are really fucking big. The one that became my home for a week was no exception. With a crew of about 1000 and three times as many passengers the Good Ship [REDACTED] was essentially a floating version of my small mountain hometown in East Tennessee. Continue reading →

While I agree with Columbia linguistics prof John McWhorter about many things, I remain deeply dubious about one of his primary assertions, that African American Vernacular English is a stand-alone language, a legitimate vernacular with rules similar to Spanish or French, or standard American English for that matter, that could end up in a rule book like White and Strunk’s “The Elements of Style.” Except it hasn’t.

The corollary to that is “code-switching,” where a person otherwise fully capable of speaking standard English will switch to a vernacular when speaking to an audience that either uses the vernacular or will appreciate the speaker’s use of it. When AOC did it, McWhorter explained why it was all good and normal. Continue reading →

Judge Mark Scarsi did not mince words as he opened his ruling issuing a preliminary injunction against UCLA.

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.

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Let there be no mistake, the police failed miserably in addressing the backlog of rape kits. It is a national disgrace. But that wasn’t the problem Madison Campbell sought to fix.

“​​We built our system to basically be as advanced as humanly possible,” says Campbell, who said she studied epidemiology in college before dropping out her senior year to escape an “extremely awful” ex-boyfriend. “Our advice is to go to the hospital to get a full rape kit, but if you’re not comfortable with that, we believe that if you follow our instructions, it’s your next best shot.”

Campbell’s “tech” start-up, Leda Health, makes and markets do-it-yourself rape kits for women who hate the idea of being poked, swabbed and prodded at the hospital on the “worst night of her life.” What’s wrong with that?

In a May cease and desist order, [NY Attorney General Letitia] James demanded that Leda Health, which Campbell started in 2019, pay half a million dollars for “misleading” victims into thinking that its services are “a substitute for professional medical care.” Pennsylvania’s top lawyer, Michelle Henry, also hit Campbell with a similar demand that month—shut down or else.

The Leda rape kits open its instructions with “We think you are brave, and we believe you,” heartwarming words to women who fear they will not be believed or treated with the respect they believe they are due as the victims of rape. Unfortunately, believing isn’t the same as producing rape kits that are either useful in identifying perpetrators or being admitted into evidence in court.

But Campbell says: What other option is there? The government, she says, does a poor job of getting justice for rape victims—only an estimated two percent of sexual assault perpetrators are convicted of felonies nationwide. And to obtain justice, victims usually have to undergo an in-person exam, in which a medical professional swabs, photographs, and prods their genitals. Even if a survivor goes through that “traumatizing” experience, Campbell says, there’s still a chance the evidence could be thrown out by a judge.

“We cannot guarantee the admissibility of our kits because you cannot guarantee the admissibility of any kit,” she told me. “All we want is to be held to the same standard of any other piece of evidence.”

But the crux of Campbell’s defense is that the government is seeking to violate her First Amendment right to free speech.

“I have a First Amendment right for myself and my company to say that the criminal justice system as it currently works does not work for everyone,” Campbell tells me over Zoom.

Her lawyer Alex Little, who represented pop star Kesha in her sexual assault lawsuit against her former producer Dr. Luke, tells me that all the components of a Leda Health kit are “entirely legal,” like tamper-proof tape, a ballpoint pen, and cotton swabs.

“You can go to CVS, and you can get either of those things immediately,” he tells me. “None of those things are illegal.”

The challenges to Leda Health have nothing to do with Campbell’s criticism of the criminal justice system, per se. Criticize all you want. We’ll make more. Nor is the problem that the items contained in her home rape kit are illegal to possess, either individually or in the aggregate. The problem is that she’s selling a product that purports to be a substitute for rape victims who don’t want to go to the hospital and endure the normal SANE procedure.

Users are encouraged to download the Leda Health app so that they can connect over video to a SANE-certified nurse as they collect their evidence. The company employs eight of these professional sexual-assault examiners, all of whom are prepared to later testify in court. A leaflet in the Leda Health kit tells victims “it is always best that you go to a hospital.” But Campbell tells me “the majority” of rape victims don’t want to do that—nearly 70 percent of sexual assaults are never even reported to the police.

“We’re not saying that we have a gold standard here,” she says with a shrug. “We’re just saying that not all survivors want to go to the police or hospital. And I know that because I didn’t want to.”

It’s entirely understandable why a woman who has just been raped wouldn’t want some random person in a hospital poking and swabbing her vagina. But is selling an inadmissible palliative alternative as if it was even a somewhat legitimate rape kit a feminist #MeToo stroke of brilliance or an opportunistic fraud playing on the emotions of the vulnerable? Consider the case of Bunny:

She tells me she hopes that Leda Health might be able to run tests on a condom that she found inside of herself the morning after the attack. She says she knows the kit might not help catch her attacker, because the evidence can’t be put into CODIS, but that “Leda is the only one who really gives a shit.”

“I don’t care if it’s supported in a court of law or whatever,” she says. “It is justice. Someone cared.”

Is it justice, or is it a scam to take advantage of women who prefer comfort and validation over anything that could potentially serve any useful purpose? Is Madison Campbell a feminist icon or the next iteration of Elizabeth Holmes?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.

Everything’s different at the border. CBP and ICE are entrusted with keeping us safe from enemies, both foreign and domestic, at least when it comes to those who have the temerity to present themselves at a port of entry for inspection.

As many folks know, the government gets a special tool at the border. The Fourth Amendment is particularly hamstrung by federal law and regulations when it comes to “routine” searches at the border, meaning that border agents can go through your stuff without a warrant or probable cause. CBP applies this to anywhere within 100 miles of the United State’s external boundaries, and that can affect over 200 million people. For those foolish enough to live in a place like Florida, their entire home state can be a “constitution-free zone.” Continue reading →