The Social World

Category: Law

  • Let ‘Iryna’s Law’ be her legacy

    We’ve seen it again and again – Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Christina Yuna Lee, Michelle Go, Jocelyn Nungaray, Kristal Bayron-Nieves and now Iryna Zurutska – all young women brutally murdered by repeat offenders who never should have been on the street in the first place.

    Mental health failures. Bail reform. Parole abuse. Open borders. Progressive DAs. Every layer of this system protects offenders and creates more victims. To most Americans, that seems unthinkable.

    To those of us who live it, it’s another day in a system that treats criminals better than victims.

    That’s why the passage of Iryna’s Law in North Carolina matters. Named after a young Ukrainian refugee – Iryna Zarutska – brutally murdered by a repeat violent offender who never should have been free, it is both a step forward and a tragic reminder of how far we’ve fallen.

    Even the first few paragraphs of this bill – written and named after a victim – are centered on the rights of the defendant. Not because the drafters didn’t care, but because our entire justice system is built backwards. It’s a framework designed to protect the innocent, but in practice it shields the guilty – while victims and their families are left to pick up the pieces.

    Still, this law is progress.

    And it’s proof that when victims and survivors refuse to be silenced, change can happen.

    Parts of Iryna’s Law mirror the very reforms we’ve championed for years through the Victims Rights Reform Council’s Victims Rights Reform Agenda – born out of tear-filled conversations with survivors across America who all asked the same question: Why was their loved one’s killer free to begin with?

    Here’s what Iryna’s Law does:

    Pretrial Release and Bail Reform: Certain violent offenders can now only be released by a judge, not a magistrate. Judges must review criminal histories and risk assessments, and in many cases, there’s now a presumption against release for repeat violent offenders or drug traffickers. If someone reoffends while on bail, they can be held up to 48 hours for judicial review.

    Mental Health and Involuntary Commitment: Dangerous individuals deemed mentally unstable must remain in custody until both a physician and a judge authorize release – with safety plans, medication and housing secured first.

    Death Penalty Procedures: Streamlines postconviction death penalty reviews so hearings happen within two years, and ensures execution methods remain constitutional and enforceable.

    Prohibits Political “Task Forces” that undermine public safety under the guise of “equity.”

    Expands Victims’ Rights: Extends supervision for violent juvenile offenders and guarantees victims are notified before probation or post-release is terminated.

    Invests in Accountability: Adds prosecutors and staff in overburdened judicial districts so violent offenders aren’t slipped through the cracks.

    Seems like common sense to me. Because predators are everywhere. On Long Island, Shawn Reid, a man under indictment for allegedly raping three little girls, is living freely in an unsecured residential group home in the suburbs – not behind bars. This isn’t just egregious; it’s dangerous. We are not only putting evil people back into our communities, where our children play unsuspecting of the danger.

    We need real accountability. That means ending the immunity that protects parole boards, judges and politicians who make the reckless decisions that destroy lives. It means enforcing the laws we already have – and passing the ones that should have been in place long ago.

    Unfortunately evil will always exist. We will not always be able to stop bad people from hurting good people. But when our laws are weak, our leaders cowardly, and our system paralyzed by ideology, evil wins. And innocent people dying in preventable tragedies is unacceptable.

    Iryna’s Law should not just be a North Carolina victory – it should be a national model. Every state must adopt and enforce similar protections. Every courtroom should prioritize victims’ safety over criminals’ comfort. And every policymaker who dares to look the other way must be held accountable.

    At least now, with this law, we have a chance to do what’s right, to restore justice, and to prevent the next tragedy that everyone will pretend was “unforeseeable.” Enough is enough. It’s time to make America safe again – for the innocent, for the victims and for every family who lives every day with an empty chair at the table.

  • Life in Chicago with ICE and the National Guard

    Life in Chicago with ICE and the National Guard

    Every day, Chicagoans outside the immediate areas where federal forces are deploying pick up fragments of what feels like an unfolding drama.

    Here’s a representative example: on the app NextDoor, the Chicago subreddit and in neighborhood Facebook groups, we watch cell-phone footage from Logan Square of smoke spreading through an intersection as a federal vehicle pulls away. Eventually, local outlets verify that a masked federal agent dropped canisters outside the Rico Fresh supermarket near Funston Elementary. It appears the air was filled with a chemical irritant, causing people to panic, and the vehicle departed. NBC Chicago asked Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security for explanations and, as of publication, had not received a detailed public rationale. Another cluster of videos captures tense scenes outside the ICE processing center in Broadview, a suburb just west of Chicago. In September, a federal agent positioned above the facility fired a projectile that struck Pastor David Black in the head.

    I witnessed an arrest last Saturday afternoon – a man purchasing a hot dog was picked up by CBP. A Greek-American friend, with olive skin and a mess of dark, curly hair, claims in a groupchat that he was asked to show his passport while walking downtown – sparse on details, high on alarm. Another friend, an undocumented immigrant from Ukraine, shares with me that she’s scared of being seized. Each day, a new story and mixed context for residents who may not understand what’s actually happening. 

    The Trump administration has deployed about 500 National Guard troops in the Chicago area for an initial period of 60 days – around 300 from Illinois and 200 from Texas. Federal officials say the mission is to protect personnel and property at federal sites, especially those used by ICE. On social media, there are reports that Chicagoans are preventing federal officials from doing their job through civil disobedience, which, some conservatives say, is justification for the Trump administration to step up operations.

    Illinois and the City of Chicago have sued, arguing the orders are unlawful and implicate the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the use oIf the military in civilian law enforcement. Filed October 6, the complaint challenges both the federalization of the Illinois Guard and the importation of Texas Guard forces. A judge in Chicago is set to rule on whether to block the deployment while the case proceeds.

    Northern Command has publicly declared the troops are there to protect federal workers and property, not to perform general urban policing – though the chatter online tells a different story. There’s a general sense that Chicago is a “war zone” and that the presence of the National Guard is “overdue.” The White House itself has described the deployment as a “protection mission,” while DHS refers to the broader ICE enforcement escalation as Operation Midway Blitz.

    Reporters have yet to work out a complete, detailed after-action account explaining why gas was deployed in Logan Square at that moment. Federal officials have not produced a cohesive public explanation tying together the scattered incidents across the city. And so residents and observers have basic questions that remain unanswered: who ordered the canisters in Logan Square? What does it mean, practically, that one of our alderwomen was briefly handcuffed? Was she arrested or just threatened? Eventually there are fractions of answers, but not all emerge in time to affect public understanding.

    What many Chicagoans are experiencing is uncertainty, amplified by a lack of clear news sources. Local journalists are doing the work: verifying incidents, seeking official responses, documenting what happens on the ground. But that reporting doesn’t reach most people in its original form. Instead, it gets broken apart and redistributed through social platforms, stripped of context, arriving as fragments rather than as coherent stories. 

    From social media, people assemble different stories. Some accept the administration’s framing – that the Guard is there to keep federal workers safe in a city that allegedly refuses to do so. Others see the footage as evidence that federal power is expanding into everyday life  –  understood as authoritarian overreach. Both sides point to authentic images and cite official statements, but few can point to a single, verified timeline that links them all.

    The Guard deployment is real, active and officially limited to protecting federal personnel and property. ICE enforcement in the region has intensified under a named operation, producing repeated confrontations with residents and protesters. And the public does not yet have a stable, integrated account that links these episodes into a common operational plan. This is, in large part, a distribution problem. The pieces are authentic. The whole picture remains incomplete.

  • The Democrat who fantasized about killing a Republican

    The Democrat who fantasized about killing a Republican

    When it was revealed that Jay Jones, Virginia’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, joked in text messages about shooting a Republican lawmaker, Democrats didn’t rush to condemn him. They scolded the comments, sure. But they didn’t demand he drop out. That hesitation tells you everything about the new Democratic mindset: they don’t see this as hypocrisy. They see it as adaptation.

    For years, Democrats have insisted that Donald Trump changed American politics – that he shattered the old civility and made rage fashionable. Now they’re quietly admitting that rage works. They’re not abandoning their moral high ground; they’re repaving it with something harder and sharper. In their eyes, the game changed – and if the only way to win is to play by Trump’s rules, so be it.

    Trump has said and done outrageous things, no honest conservative would deny it. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Democrats have grown addicted to the very aggression they once claimed to despise. They just market it differently. Republicans call it “fighting back.” Democrats call it “meeting the moment.” Either way, the temperature keeps rising – and both sides pretend they’re only reacting.

    Jones’s texts weren’t vague or flippant. He name-dropped a Republican House speaker, fantasized about shooting him, and even joked about desecrating Republican graves. Then came the apology tour: “I’m embarrassed, ashamed and sorry.” But the Democratic Party’s response has been careful – too careful. Condemnation without consequence.

    That’s not cowardice. It’s calculation. Democrats know the old etiquette of politics – the days of “when they go low, we go high” – died sometime around 2016. They believe their voters want fighters, not philosophers. So, as one strategist put it off the record, “you don’t disarm yourself while the other side is armed to the teeth.” In other words, the rhetoric might be ugly, but so is the world Trump built – and Democrats think they’re just learning to survive in it.

    It’s a seductive logic: that moral restraint is weakness, that power justifies posture. But it’s also the same logic that Democrats once accused Republicans of using. The Jones story doesn’t just expose one man’s lapse; it exposes a cultural conversion. The party of “norms and decency” has decided those luxuries can wait until after the next election.

    The most revealing part of this scandal isn’t what Jones said – it’s what Democrats didn’t say afterward. No leading Democrat has publicly called for him to step down. No one wants to be the first to demand accountability in an election season. Instead, they offer the usual script: “We reject violence in all forms.” Then they pivot to whataboutism – Trump’s language, MAGA threats, January 6 – as if pointing to the other side’s sins somehow cleanses their own.

    But moral credibility doesn’t work that way. You can’t condemn the fire while holding a lighter behind your back. The Jones controversy shows how both parties have lost the ability to be embarrassed by themselves. It’s not that Democrats no longer see rhetoric as dangerous – it’s that they’ve convinced themselves it’s necessary. In this new order, politics isn’t about persuasion anymore. It’s about dominance.

    Here’s where conservatives have to be careful. It’s tempting to gloat – to treat every Democratic scandal as proof of hypocrisy. But that’s not enough. The goal shouldn’t be to meet Democratic aggression with equal fury. The goal should be to model the discipline they’ve abandoned.

    If Democrats are determined to sound like the revolution, conservatives must sound like civilization. Strength isn’t shouting louder; it’s refusing to let outrage define your argument. Conservatives win not by matching the moral chaos, but by outlasting it – by showing voters that reason and restraint are still forms of power.

    We’re told this is just politics as usual, but it’s really a culture war over tone – over how far a person can go to prove they “care.” The louder and angrier the rhetoric, the more “authentic” it sounds to the base. But that kind of politics is self-consuming. It rewards fury, not vision. It mistakes destruction for passion.

    Jay Jones may survive his scandal. But Democrats won’t survive the culture that excuses it. Once you start believing you must become what you hate to beat what you hate, you’ve already lost something more important than an election – you’ve lost the moral language that made your cause worth fighting for.

    So let’s be clear: the danger isn’t that Trump made Democrats meaner. The danger is that Democrats now think meanness is a virtue. And if that’s the new rulebook of American politics, we should all be terrified at who’s keeping score.

  • James Comey’s ‘knight in shining armor’ complex

    James Comey’s ‘knight in shining armor’ complex

    Former FBI director James Comey is in the news again for all the wrong reasons. He’s been indicted for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation, which he denies. Comey’s arraignment is scheduled for October 8. Having covered every FBI director since 9/11, I’m reminded of Comey’s difficult relationship with the facts. In May, he was interviewed by the Secret Service after he posted a photo on Instagram that spelled out “86 47” in seashells. According to Merriam-Webster, eighty-six is slang for “to throw out,” “to get rid of” or “to refuse service to.” The dictionary says it originated in the 1930s, but these days to get “86’d” is widely interpreted as a threat of harm. Of course, President Trump is the 47th Commander in Chief.

    Comey, a published author, former prosecutor, and former chief law enforcement officer, claimed ignorance of the violent connotations and immediately took down the post. He should know, better than most, that in law enforcement circles, this could be seen as “consciousness of guilt” behavior. On the other hand, we have Comey to thank for one of the more inventive memes on X… photos of sandy beaches with seashells spelling out “INDICTED.” Each FBI director brings their own style to the job. Comey stood out for his carefully crafted public persona. His predecessor, Robert Mueller, was pegged as a straight arrow and seemed to embrace media interviews like a bad cold. Christopher Wray, who followed Comey, was also media averse – except when it came to friendly outlets such as 60 Minutes.

    I observed that Comey worked very hard to come across as transparent, folksy, a man of the people. I can’t recall how many “brown bag” lunches Comey hosted for journalists at FBI headquarters, but one stands out, because Comey’s ego was on full display. At that time, Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department and the Clinton campaign were insisting that the probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured personal server for government business was “a security inquiry.” It was astonishing how many seasoned beat reporters parroted this ridiculous characterization. 

    As we sat around the FBI conference table, I put my Clinton email question to director Comey who inadvertently confirmed that the probe into Clinton’s unsecured personal server used for State Department business was, in fact, a criminal investigation. “That’s the bureau’s business. That’s what we do. That’s probably all I can say about it. I’m not going to comment, other than to say there are no special set of rules for anybody that the FBI investigates,” he said, bristling at the suggestion thathe might be playing political favorites. Yet his insistence that there was no double standard in the Clinton case has not aged well. In 2018, the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, faulted Comey’s insubordination and poor judgment in the Clinton email probe.He stopped short of accusing him of political bias.

    In August, I was among the first to report on the declassified FBI investigation codenamed “Arctic Haze.” This revealed Comey’s wide-ranging media strategy to shape the narrative about high profile cases such as the FBI’s Clinton email probe and the Trump-Russia Collusion case. Comey also used his media leak strategy to protect his reputation after he was roundly criticized in both probes for exceeding his authority. Comey even had the FBI hire his Columbia Law School friend as a “Special Government Employee” (the same status as Elon Musk) to act as a de facto PR media rep for Comey and his agenda. As one former FBI official told me over coffee, Comey has a kind of “knight in shining armor” complex and thinks “he is the only one who can save the republic!”

    I never expected Comey and President Trump would get along. There simply wasn’t enough oxygen in the room for the both of them. The declassified records suggest the indictment is connected to a 2017 New York Times report, a rather glowing and favorable revisionist history about the tough choices Comey faced in the Clinton email probe. As I read the Arctic Haze records, highlighter in hand, I felt nauseated. The New York Times was given an “investigator-level briefing” on the Clinton case over three days in March and April 2017. This is not standard practice for reporters or the FBI. The fawning coverage of Comey that followed the “investigator-level briefings” feels problematic, to say the least.

    It’s a big deal to bring a criminal case against a former FBI director. We could be witnessing a terrible act of political revenge, or long overdue accountability for James Comey. There is no question the Comey indictment is thin. The declassified records conclude there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute him for leaks. Based on my reporting from the courts, it’s worth considering that it may be a holding charge and that a superseding indictment will follow adding more counts. Whatever the outcome, you have to conclude that if James Comey had not been FBI director in 2016 and 2017, the country could be in a very different place. And less divided.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The end of the race hustle

    The end of the race hustle

    Decarlos Brown Jr. should never have been on the streets. The man suspected of murdering 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August had been arrested 14 times in almost as many years, charged with armed robbery, shoplifting and property damage. According to his sister, he is a schizophrenic who suffers from paranoid delusions. But he was free to roam in part because of the race hustle.

    Want to fire an employee? Good luck if that employee is black; such a dismissal would be presumptively racist

    For decades, pointing out that any action, public or private, had a black target or fell disproportionately on black people was sufficient to discredit that action, regardless of whether it was couched in terms of race or had a racist intent.

    Want to fire an employee? Good luck if that employee is black; such a dismissal would be presumptively racist. Tempted to criticize a government official for alleged incompetence or unethical conduct? If that official is black, think twice, since blackness is used as a shield. Try to jail a serial violent offender, such as Brown Jr., who happens to be African-American? That would contribute to racial inequity.

    The idea that racial disparities in arrest and incarceration rates reflect discrimination and not disparities in criminal offending has been a staple of Democratic policymaking for years. The “systemic criminal justice bias” conceit has led district attorneys across the US to stop prosecuting and stop seeking jail terms for a host of crimes, simply because penalizing those crimes would have a disparate impact on black criminals.

    North Carolina has embraced the disparate impact idea. In 2020, after the George Floyd race riots, then-governor Roy Cooper established the “Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice,” which pushed to eliminate racial disparities in charging decisions. It demanded racial-equity training for district attourneys, judges and parole officers and sought to educate prosecutors about “unconscious bias.” The Office of Equity and Inclusion in Mecklenburg County (where Charlotte is located) is dedicated to reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system and has hired equity and inclusion consultants to help.

    If white toddlers were gunned down at the rate black toddlers are, there would be a revolution

    Charlotte’s police chief, Johnny Jennings, believes law enforcement is “based on racism.” In 2020, he announced an intention to “slow down” on discretionary arrests. It was overdetermined, then, that Zarutska’s future murderer would not be locked up. The system was no longer set up to hold him or anyone else who committed similar crimes.

    Today, the race card is being furiously played against several of Donald Trump’s initiatives. On August 11, Trump declared a “liberation day” in Washington, DC: “I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capitol from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back… we’re not going to let it happen anymore. We’re not going to lose our cities over this.” The President ordered a limited deployment of the National Guard to the Capitol and gave the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration oversight authority over the DC police force.

    Democratic politicians, interest groups and the media immediately accused Trump of an illegal power-grab and insisted that there was no crime problem in Washington because crime there had dropped since the previous year. But it was still at a level that should be unacceptable in a civilized society. The DC homicide rate after that modest crime decline is 21 times that of London, for example, and almost 60 times that of Switzerland, a condition that might well be considered a national emergency. Those DC murders, as in other American cities, regularly include child victims, such as three-year-old Honesty Cheadle, who was caught in a drive-by shooting after a Fourth of July cookout this year, and Ty’ah Settles, also three, who was felled by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting in May 2024.

    Trump mused about taking his focus on crime to other cities, especially after the positive results from the federal deployment in DC started rolling in. He has mentioned Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Oakland and New York City as possible targets. The race hustle, already in play, leapt to the fore. Washington, DC, and the five other candidate cities all have black mayors, it was pointed out ominously. Some have large black populations. So Trump was motivated by racial animus and his crime initiative could not possibly be legitimate.

    Trump had said nothing about race. It did not matter. On August 12, the Associated Press declared: “Trump’s DC rhetoric echoes a history of racist narratives about urban crime.” The AP invoked a favorite Democratic trope: that whenever a Republican official speaks about law and order, he is exploiting a nonexistent problem to win over racist white voters. The organization also said the deployment of the National Guard echoed “uncomfortable historical chapters when politicians used language to paint historically or predominantly black cities and neighborhoods with racist narratives to shape public opinion and justify aggressive police action.” The AP did not ask whether crime levels ever justify a promise to restore law and order; it assumed that they never do.

    Amnesty International USA echoed the AP line. The federal initiative was the “latest expression of a longstanding racist narrative: that black and brown communities represent danger, disorder, and lawlessness and that only force can restore control. This problematic and untrue framing has deep historical roots in white supremacy and racist myth-making and its resurrection underlines how ‘public safety’ has often been weaponized against communities of color.”

    Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, told NBC News that Trump was “playing the worst game of racially divisive politics, and that’s all it is.” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott complained that Trump was “spouting these racist-based, right-wing propaganda talking points about cities and black-led cities,” reported Politico. Trump had obeyed America’s etiquette on crime and had stayed silent about its demographic distribution. Yet since his opponents have introduced the subject of race, it is worth looking at the numbers that are ordinarily kept far offstage.

    In Washington, DC, from 2019 to the end of 2020, black people made up nearly 97 percent of homicide suspects, according to the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. White people accounted for 0.8 percent of homicide suspects. Black people are 46 percent of the DC population, white people 38 percent. The black homicide commission rate is roughly 99 times higher than the equivalent for white people. In Los Angeles in 2022, black people were more than 21 times as likely to be suspected of a violent crime as their white counterparts. They were nearly 37 times as likely to be the suspect in a robbery. Black New Yorkers were 46 times as likely to commit a shooting as white ones in 2023.

    Even if a Democrat were to retake the White House, the racial juggernaut may be too difficult to reassemble

    Data on the race of crime suspects is becoming harder and harder to obtain; at best, most departments provide only victim race data. But victim race is a decent proxy for suspect race, since, as the left likes to say (without understanding the implication), most crime is intraracial. (The predominance of intraracial crime does not mean that interracial crime is not also racially disproportionate. The Zarutska killing was typical. A black person is roughly 35 times as likely to commit an act of violence against a white person as the other way around, according to the National Academy of Sciences.)

    From 2000 to 2019, nationally, black men between the ages of 15 and 24 died of homicide at a rate of 75 per 100,000, according to a study in JAMA Network Open. The white male homicide victimization rate in that age group was a little over four per 100,000, making the black homicide victimization rate 18 times greater.

    A CDC study found that black people between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at nearly 25 times the rate of white people in that age cohort from 2020 to 2021. A JAMA Network Open research letter published in March 2023 found that black juveniles were shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles in LA, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia in the post-George Floyd era.

    Who is shooting and killing these black victims? Overwhelmingly, black perpetrators. Disparities in criminal victimization rates mirror disparities in criminal offending rates. That symmetry explains why Black Lives Matter activists are silent about the dozens of black people killed in homicides every day – more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, though black people only make up 13 percent of the population. If the activists were to draw attention to the victims of that daily bloodshed, they would risk drawing attention to the perpetrators as well.

    If white toddlers were gunned down at the rate that black toddlers are, there would be a revolution. But young black victims such as Honesty Cheadle are ignored by the national media and activists: her suspected killer was also black. No one – outside her family – says her name.

    Racial disparities in criminal victimization mean that the police cannot go where people are most being terrorized by street crime without being disproportionately in black neighborhoods. The bodies do not lie.  You can have data-driven law enforcement targeting crime or you can avoid disparate impact. You cannot have both.

    So when Trump vows to tackle the urban crime problem, he will necessarily be directing federal attention to cities with significant black populations. That does not mean that he is targeting them because of their demographics or leadership.

    Trump’s plans, announced in September, to send more federal resources to Memphis and New Orleans elicited the usual response. “Memphis, like most of the cities singled out for perceived leadership failings, is led by a black mayor and has other prominent black leaders in city government,” observed the New York Times. “The head of the police department is also black.” New Orleans Council member Lesli Harris said: “Sending troops into black and brown cities is not a solution.”

    The race card is also being played with regards to Trump’s effort to fire Lisa Cook, who is described in headlines as the first black female governor on the Federal Reserve Board. The Guardian wrote: “The first Black woman to sit on Fed board faces another obstacle in a long line she has faced and written about.” NBC News added: “Cook weathered racist attacks as a child and became a pioneer as a black woman economist. Her latest fight is to keep her position on the board of governors at the Federal Reserve.” And Democracy Now! carried the headline: “First Black Fed Governor, Lisa Cook, Sues Trump over His Attempt to Fire Her.”

    Trump’s indifference to being called a racist may be having a wider effect

    Cook illustrates the asymmetry of the race card. Once someone is elevated to a position for race reasons, that person is protected from removal for non-race reasons. It was Cook’s identity as a black woman and her advocacy of black victimology that recommended her to Joe Biden in the first place, not any grounding in monetary economics or other policy areas in the Fed’s purview. Cook’s most circulated quote is her claim in a 2019 New York Times opinion piece that “if economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to black women.” In 2020, she called for the editor of the Journal of Political Economy to be fired for criticizing the “defund the police” movement. Her research on racial disparities has had replication problems and she has never provided full access to her data.

    Yet her race helped her into a position on the Fed’s board. In 2022, then-Democratic senator Sherrod Brown claimed that Republicans should be “ashamed” to vote against her because “it’s been 109 years and seven people on the Federal Reserve at one time, and not one African-American woman ever.” Brown did not ask what the pool of competitively qualified female black economists has been over the last 109 years. The answer? Likely nonexistent. In 2022, there were 12 economics PhDs awarded to black women in the US. This constituted 0.8 percent of all economics PhDs awarded that year. But we are to believe that suitable female black economists have been regularly denied a seat on the Fed’s board due to racism.

    The race defense is also active against Trump’s large-scale cuts to the federal bureaucracy. According to a front-page article in the New York Times, those cuts “disproportionately affect black employees – and black women in particular. Black women make up 12 percent of the federal workforce, nearly double their share of the labor force overall.” A Chicago Tribune columnist echoed the charge: “Trump and his MAGA supporters are happily targeting people of color, especially African-American women.”

    Worse, according to the Times, “agencies where minorities and women were the majority of the workforce, such as the Department of Education and USAID, were targeted for the largest workforce reductions or complete elimination.” Never mind that those agencies were the most bloated, least effective and most politicized parts of the federal bureaucracy. Race ideology means that when an organization becomes disproportionately black, it becomes untouchable.

    Never mind, too, that in light of the academic skills gap, such overrepresentation of minority women raises the possibility of a serious sacrifice of merit in favor of preferences. The average math score for a black pupil sitting the SAT in 2024 was 440 on an 800 point scale. The average math score for an Asian pupil was 629. Black pupils’ average total score on a scale of 1,600 was 907 last year, compared with the average of 1,024 for all test-takers (with 1,228 for Asian pupils and 1,083 for white pupils). The SATs measure language capacity and reasoning skills, still useful in government work, however debased such work has become.

    The Times highlighted the higher-ranking black female managers whom Trump has removed, “often disparaging them as incompetent, corrupt or DEI hires.”  But maybe they were at least some of those things. They were certainly committed to diversity ideology, whether believing in “white privilege” or “bringing an equity lens to [their] work” and that ideology is now being extirpated from the executive branch. Plenty of white male bureaucrats have been fired as well, but they do not have an identity defense available to them.

    The race hustle has been one of the dominant forces in American society for decades. But is it finally losing its power? It has had zero effect on Trump. He continues to promise further federal deployments to high-crime cities. A few hours after Trump again criticized Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s failure to control crime in Chicago, the city’s gang members obligingly proved the President’s point with a drive-by rampage in Bronzeville (on Chicago’s South Side). Seven people were shot. That late August outburst was part of the usual violence that accompanies holiday weekends in urban America – in this case, Labor Day weekend. Bronzeville saw another mass shooting with five victims on Labor Day itself. All in all, nine people were killed and 52 wounded in Chicago’s South and West Sides over the three-day weekend.

    Notwithstanding Mayor Scott’s earlier charges of racism, Trump has re-upped his threat to order federal resources to Baltimore. “We have an obligation to protect this country, and that includes Baltimore,” he said on September 2. Scott, ever-hopeful, played the race card again. “It seems they want chaos,” he said during a news conference. “It seems that they want certain images and certain types of people, especially people that look like me, to be easily depicted as violent or ‘born criminals,’ so to speak.”

    Actually, Trump wants peace. He regards any murder as one too many. And he is going after crime where its toll is the most lethal.  He cannot help the fact that 85 percent of Baltimore’s homicide victims from 2005 to 2017 were black men, while just 4 percent were white, reflecting an equal if not greater disparity in their assailants. (Baltimore’s population has historically been about 60 percent black and 30 percent white.)

    Trump has not backed down from his efforts to remove federal bureaucrats and to extirpate federal agencies which he believes impede his agenda, regardless of the racial incidence of those cuts. Cook’s blackness did not scare him.

    Trump’s indifference to being called a racist may be having a wider effect. Americans have played along for decades with the race hustle, terrified to be accused of bias or of insensitivity to the premier victim group.  Now a collective fatigue may be setting in.

    This latest round of racial critique seems to be falling flat and to be out of sync with the times. Maybe not everywhere and maybe not even now. But in four years, after the public has watched a President who is patently and shockingly indifferent to identity-based blackmail, arguments from skin color may be met with an eye roll.

    Even if a Democrat were to retake the White House, the racial juggernaut may be too difficult to reassemble. Perhaps the universities, with their entrenched diversity infrastructure which is, at present, furiously camouflaging itself, will hold out. But everywhere else, the spell will be broken. If so, it will be one of Trump’s most transformative accomplishments.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Crime and no punishment in London

    Crime and no punishment in London

    Those of us trapped in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s London are now obedient, resigned. We expect a car journey of under a mile to take 40 minutes. We don’t hope for anything more. On a recent Sunday, around five o’clock, my son and I stuck fast in Dalston Lane, but as we settled down to wait in a mist of carbon monoxide, there was a commotion up ahead. Down the wrong side of the road, horn blaring, lights flashing, came a Mercedes G-wagon, matte black with that handy snorkel up the side, the favorite ride of north London’s gangsters. It was interesting how calm everyone was about it, how unsurprised. A souped-up tank of a car coming at us head-on, and no one shouted or beeped. Each car in the line ahead pulled seamlessly to one side, like the teeth in a well-functioning zipper. They don’t shift like this for ambulances or police cars any more.

    There are cameras everywhere; the eyes of the state in the sky. Not for the gangs, though

    We all know who drives the G-wagons. There are two rival drug gangs in north London, the Tottenham Turks, aka the Tottenham Boys, and their rivals, the Hackney Turks, aka the Bombacilars. In May last year, the Tottenham Boys attempted a hit on the Bombers and a nine-year-old girl was caught in the crossfire, shot in the head as she ate ice cream just a short walk from my house. And the Tottenham Boys got away with it. Only the getaway driver, a non-Turkish stooge called Javon Riley, was ever arrested, found guilty this summer of grievous bodily harm and three counts of attempted murder. The Sun newspaper did a big feature on the gangs: “Inside the Turkish drug lords’ medieval London turf war, with shootouts and soundproof torture cells, leaving cops terrified.” When Riley was asked by the police to provide the names of gang members, and of the hitman whose bullet hit that nine-year-old, he refused. He feared for his family. The Turks are too ruthless and too effective.

    The G-wagon blared past, faded away, and we law-abiding cars crawled our way to Kingsland Road, where we were careful not to speed up. If, in the euphoria of a clear-road moment, you drive just 4mph over the 20mph limit, you’ve had it. That’s a £100 fine and three points on your license. Then there are fines for pausing in the wrong place, for turning into one of the increasing number of restricted zones, for doing a U-turn. There are cameras every-where; the eyes of the state in the sky. Not for the Turks, though. They do as they please. As I drove, I imagined all the charges piling up in the marbled hall of some gated mansion in the Edmonton area, all the court summons swept up, thrown away. It’s not two-tier justice or two-tier policing, it’s gaslighting.

    Just to enrage myself, I like to play a sort of memory game, where I pair a nasty crime that’s gone entirely uninvestigated with another minor infraction that’s been diligently, exhaustively policed. The speeding and opioid-dealing of the Turks vs minor parking misdemeanors; the virtual violence of “hateful” tweets vs the real violence on real streets.

    My favorite recent Twitter case revolves around a journalist, Greg Hadfield, who last year tried to warn the Labour party that one of its own former MPs was posting pictures of penises on his X account. Hadfield posted a screenshot of one of the tweets with a comment suggesting that Labour should have a word. As a result, Hadfield was charged himself, for passing the picture on. His crime was to “send by a public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message or matter,” and he has just found out that he’s lost his appeal to have the case dropped and must go to trial. The CPS made a “not unreasonable” decision to prosecute, said senior district judge Paul Goldspring. Not unreasonable! All Greg did, as far as I know, was try to prevent indecency and obscenity. I’d pair his crime in my mind with all the offensive, indecent, obscene and menacing matters that I see as I pass police-free Finsbury Park tube station on an average evening – for instance, a few weeks ago, a group of young men that looked like proper trouble: black clothes, black masks, circling like jackals. The Nextdoor app confirmed it: “If you have teenage children around Finsbury Park station, please tell them to be vigilant as there are around 30 youths masked up, robbing and violently attacking local kids.”

    “Hope the police are aware,” read one comment. “They are about as useful as a chocolate teapot,” read the next. “Why not report someone’s hurt feelings and they’ll soon show up?”

    Round the corner, the usual mental case was standing and shouting with his trousers down, groin at eye level for a nine-year-old in a car. Violent attacks on passing children and public nudity – that’s menacing and indecent, Judge Goldspring. If the police just walked up and down past Finsbury Park tube all day, they’d be earning their keep.

    I try to shield my son from the absence of policing. I want him to believe that there’s a robust and vigilant army of officers between him and criminal chaos. “Just youngsters having fun!” I say to him blithely as I lock the car doors in the Finsbury underpass. “They wear masks because they’re paranoid about germs… and that man? Well, darling, some people do just forget to put their trousers on.”

    On the main street that runs perpendicular to mine, there’s been a spate of burglaries, a youngish man smashing in through basement windows. We know it’s the same man every time because there’s footage of him in action on the Ring doorbell cameras. One neighbor offered the video to the police, but was told they couldn’t use it, that actual footage of the crime being committed wasn’t good enough evidence. See? Gaslighting.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Canada’s assisted suicide laws are out of control

    Canada’s assisted suicide laws are out of control

    Death, somehow, seems like the wrong word. So Canada’s euthanasia doctors have adopted other terms for what they offer: each lethal injection is called a “provision.” Stefanie Green, a Vancouver Island doctor who used to work in maternity services, prefers “delivery.”

    Canada has sleepwalked into a moral maze with no exit, where euthanasia becomes a solution for social problems

    Since Canada’s parliament introduced euthanasia in 2016, a new vocabulary has arisen. Those with a terminal illness, whose death is “reasonably foreseeable” are “Track 1”; those who have no such diagnosis but qualify through “grievous and irremediable” conditions are “Track 2.” And assisted suicide has become, not merely “assisted dying,” but “Medical Assistance in Dying,” which some patients understandably believe means palliative care as opposed to lethal injection – and which is universally referred to with a jarring and faintly macabre acronym. If you want to die, you “ask for MAID.”

    With such a large-scale outbreak of euphemism, you might speculate that people are trying to avoid thinking about some major injustice or terrible atrocity. And so they are. Canada has sleepwalked into a moral maze with no exit, in which euthanasia becomes a solution for its social problems. The homeless, the depressed, the poor, the chronically ill, those let down by the system or stuck on long waiting lists: all are at risk of finding themselves on Track 1 or Track 2.

    Overall, one in 20 Canadian deaths comes at the hands of MAID, with a total of 60,000 between 2016 and 2023. The horror stories, at first shocking, have become almost routine. Roger Foley, a disabled man, was told by hospital staff that his care would cost $1,500 a day and did he want to discuss MAID? Sathya Dhara Kovac, who couldn’t afford home-care services wrote, before the assisted death she chose as a result, that “ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system.” Rosina Kamis, who told the assessing doctors that her suffering was physical but confessed to her two dozen YouTube subscribers that her real motive was loneliness (“I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering.”)

    Then there’s the woman whose only condition was a hip fracture and was dismayed at what her last decade might look like. The depressed man whose qualifying medical condition was a hearing problem and whose family claim he was effectively “put to death” under pressure from medical staff. The anonymized “Ms. B,” who had a chronic illness but whose request for MAID was motivated by housing problems. The many patients who have had doctors or nurses, entirely out of the blue, ask them if they have considered making an early exit.

    Such stories make clear that MAID can be a substitute for care. Carla Qualtrough, a former disabilities minister in Canada’s Liberal party, remarked bluntly that in parts of the country “it’s easier to access MAID than it is to get a wheelchair.” Or, more generally, to die than to go on living.

    Last November, when the British parliament first debated its own assisted suicide bill, the Substacker Rose Lyddon published a remarkably candid polemic against the proposal. Relating her long history of mental illness, she wrote: “When you’re deep in it, it’s very hard to argue against suicidal logic. The pros seem to vastly outnumber the cons. Living through each day is unbearably painful and you can see the pain and material damage you inflict on those who care for you. You’re a drain on state resources, the NHS has nothing to offer and considers you a nuisance who’d probably be better off dead, you lack the skills even to get dressed or feed yourself let alone change anything about your state of life. Loss of income and housing happens easily and it feels like nothing can stop the decline. It’s very difficult to feel hope or to attribute any value to your continued existence, which seems a net negative on every level. The only defence against going through with suicide is its not being on the table to start with.”

    An assisted suicide law, Lyddon wrote, would shatter the taboo which puts suicide out of the question. “Enshrining a right to suicide in law will initiate a cultural shift that can never be undone.”

    That single, decisive shift is still playing out in Canada. Almost half of those killed cite feeling like a burden as a reason for choosing MAID. An estimated 40 percent qualified for disability services. In one small-scale study, two-thirds of Track 2 applicants surveyed turned out to have a mental illness. The program has been denounced by the UN’s disability rights committee and described as “social murder” by Sonu Gaind, a professor of psychiatry at Toronto University. “Canada,” proclaims a headline in the Atlantic, that house journal of self-consciously reasonable liberals, “is killing itself.”

    Once, it was possible to claim that a few troubling cases had been exaggerated into a trend by sensationalist newspapers. That notion was exploded by the journalist Alexander Raikin, who obtained recordings of MAID doctors conducting seminars among themselves. Repeatedly, the doctors discussed the regular cases of (as one put it) “people who would opt to die, because the social supports are so poor.” Chillingly, Raikin found that the doctors were unable to muster any real disquiet over their own role in the process.

    Advocates for “assistance in dying” tend to operate on two settings. They present themselves as moral crusaders for “autonomy” and a “right to choose” which has been outrageously denied to those in serious suffering. But when pressed on the unintended consequences of this new “right,” they switch quickly from passionate advocacy to stonewalling (“That will never happen”) and handwaving (“That’s what the safeguards are for”).

    So in 2015, when Canada’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of assisted suicide, the judgment dismissed concerns: assisted dying was for “limited and exceptional circumstances,” and there was no evidence from abroad of “a disproportionate impact…on socially vulnerable groups.”

    In response, Canada’s parliament passed a law limited to those facing a “reasonably foreseeable” death; but in 2019, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the law would have to expand to cover grave but non-terminal illness. “People would be evolving as a society,” Trudeau explained, in another example of the mutant language which has provided the voiceover to Canada’s death march; but nobody should fear being pressurised into MAID “because you’re not getting the supports and cares [sic] that you actually need.” Of course not.

    The emptiness of these assurances should come as no surprise. Advocates for euthanasia and assisted suicide always proclaim the importance of safeguards and strict criteria, but they can rarely outline a coherent case for why the righteous cause of “autonomy” should suddenly be cordoned off – why, say, those who are suffering but have no terminal diagnosis should have their requests refused. There will always be hard cases just beyond the cordon: the expansion of the law became near-inevitable after a legal challenge in Quebec, where a paralysed man asked for the right to die.

    Such is the forward momentum of assisted suicide and euthanasia laws. After a few years, the politicians who insisted on “safeguards” have begun to forget why they were ever so squeamish. Isn’t this a legal right? Didn’t we all agree that denying people the freedom to choose is regressive?

    Likewise, the requirements for strict monitoring come, in a short space of time, to seem pointlessly burdensome. A Freedom of Information request by the BC Catholic newspaper uncovered 2,833 paperwork errors in British Columbia in a single year – more than the total number of assisted deaths in the province.

    After a few years the politicians who insisted on ‘safeguards’ have begun to forget why they were ever so squeamish

    These errors are not merely procedural. Christopher Lyon, a Canadian academic, discovered in 2021 that his father – who had a long history of suicidality – was scheduled for an assisted death in two days’ time. He had been classed as terminally ill on the grounds that he had an elevated white blood cell count which (in Lyon’s words) “might be an infection that, if untreated, might become lethal, despite being a common side effect of his arthritis medication.”

    Lyon pressed for a psychiatric assessment, which was granted but came back “full of errors”: it claimed, for instance, that there was no evidence of his father being depressed, although antidepressants were listed among his medications. After his father went through with the assisted death – “the worst day of my life” – Lyon pressed for an investigation. But the local health authorities blocked it.

    The system, in short, has an institutional bias toward MAID. Doctors “are expected to facilitate access to death,” according to a joint statement from five senior academics and palliative care specialists, even if they know that the applicant hasn’t been offered “reasonable options” that might help to alleviate their suffering. Those who point to the abuse and neglect of safeguards are “dismissed as being “anti-MAID’” or accused of blocking patients’ autonomy.

    Even now, Canada finds itself traveling toward new horizons. In 2027, the government plans to introduce MAID for those whose suffering is purely psychological. A parliamentary committee has also called for under-18s to be granted eligibility. And, as the Atlantic reports, everyday Canadian life increasingly incorporates this new culture of death. There’s an app to help you design rituals around your demise. There’s a podcast, Disrupting Death, where the hosts discuss “subjects such as normalizing the MAID process for children facing the death of an adult in their life – a pajama party at a funeral home; painting a coffin in a schoolyard.”

    Most notorious was the glossy advertising campaign by the fashion chain La Maison Simons, featuring a woman, Jennyfer Hatch, reveling in her last days and her impending MAID appointment. “Last breaths are sacred,” Hatch intoned over images of her enjoying a final bittersweet party with friends on the beach. “When I imagine my final days, I see music. I see the ocean. I see cheesecake.”

    Only later did it emerge that Hatch, too, had turned to euthanasia because she was struggling to find treatment for her chronic illness. “If I’m not able to access healthcare,” she had told an interviewer, “am I then able to access death care?” The ad, it turned out, was a euphemism too.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Do cities need the National Guard?

    Do cities need the National Guard?

    “They are the ones who are making it a war zone,” Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois bloviated on CNN recently, as Jake Tapper listened, displaying his best Resting Serious Journalist Face. “They need to get out of Chicago. If they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst, which is what the President said they were going to do, they need to get the heck out.”  

    ICE has overreached its authority, according to Pritzker, arresting innocent children and zip-tying grandparents in the middle of the night, asking people for their citizenship papers on the street. And yet here comes the National Guard, as ordered by Donald Trump, an “invasion” of trained soldiers from Texas. “Every American needs to stand up and stop this madness,” Governor McCheese tweeted.  

    Yet what are the feds supposed to do? Last month ICE launched “Operation Midway Blitz,” last seen deployed by the Chicago Bears in the 1980s. Unsurprisingly in Chicago, which has a contemporary left wing that makes Red Emma Goldman look like a Bircher, the operation soon led to daily protests outside the ICE processing center in the Chicago suburb of Broadview. This Saturday brought a scarily violent scene during an ICE patrol on Chicago’s South Side, when, according to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents “were attacked and rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars.” Agents shot (non-fatally) a woman who was allegedly brandishing a semi-automatic weapon. There’s some dispute about what role the Chicago Police Department played in all this, but a dispatch call does go, “per the chief of patrol, all units clear out from there, we’re not sending anybody out to that location.” The CPD doesn’t seem to want to get involved. Hence, the National Guard.  

    Meanwhile, in the People’s Republic of Oregon, federal judge Karin Immergut, who Trump appointed, said that Trump’s ordering of the California National Guard to deal with ICE protesters in Portland is illegal, and local officials “are likely to succeed on their claim that the President exceeded his constitutional authority and violated the Tenth Amendment.” California Governor called Trump’s order “a breathtaking abuse of the law and power.” Well, it’s no Covid-era lunch at the French Laundry, but Cockburn can understand Newsom’s concern.  

    Trump, who seeks peace abroad daily but war at home hourly, seems unfazed. In front of a thropping Marine One yesterday, he said, “Portland is burning to the ground! You have agitators, insurrectionists, all you  have to do is look at the television, turn on your television, read the newspaper. It’s burning to the ground. The Governor, the Mayor, the politicians are petrified for their lives. That judge oughta be ashamed of herself.”  

    Trump advisor Stephen Miller has emerged from his crypt to make the case in non-goombah language. The President, Miller says, isn’t trying to deploy the National Guard to rampage through the streets of Chicago and Portland, terrifying ordinary citizens and shaking down neighborhood bars (in Chicago) and feminist yarn stores (in Portland). They’re going to protect federal agents who are trying to enforce immigration laws.  

    “This large-scale political violence is domestic terrorism,” Miller tweeted. “And it is the absolute moral and constitutional duty of the federal government to stop this terrorism, defend the lives and safety of federal officers, and protect the American citizen and nation by ensuring the full and unrestricted enforcement of federal immigration law in all fifty states.” 

    Cockburn, who lives in Washington, DC, has personally enjoyed the side benefit of having the National Guard around. He feels quite secure watching them walk past while he’s at his favorite Asian foot spa, or enjoying oysters at the Occidental. If only Portland and Chicago would willingly open their city gates to the Guard, and let ICE do its job relatively unimpeded. Things would calm down very quickly. Let the Guard cook, and then they, too, can enjoy the true feeling of liberty.  

  • To mark George Floyd or Charlie Kirk?

    To mark George Floyd or Charlie Kirk?

    October 14 will mark the birthday of two very different American martyrs.

    On that day in 1973, George Floyd was born. And, as everyone knows only too well, he died in 2020 after being placed under arrest by a Minneapolis police officer.

    Twenty years later Charlie Kirk was born on the same October day. The nation is still coming to terms with his assassination while speaking to students on the Utah Valley University campus two weeks ago.

    Floyd’s death was the result of a tragic mistake; officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, but on the basis that he killed Floyd unintentionally. Kirk was struck down by an assassin with an explicitly political motive.

    Floyd was unknown to the world until his death, while the 31-year-old Kirk had founded and built one of the most powerful organizations in the country, not to mention been the confidant of a president.

    Both deaths were not just tragedies, they had profound political and social aftershocks that have shaped the national psyche.

    And as the anniversary of their birth approaches, how that day is marked by their respective followers will reveal how close to boiling point America really is.

    The House and Senate have passed a resolution deeming October 14 of this year a National Day of Remembrance for Kirk, an inoffensive measure aimed merely at encouraging the country “to observe this day with appropriate programs, activities, prayers, and ceremonies that promote civic engagement and the principles of faith, liberty, and democracy that Charlie Kirk championed.”

    Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi was among the 22 Democrats to walk out of the House chamber during the vote.

    That act marked a stark contrast from June 2020, when Pelosi and her colleagues – dressed up in performative Kente cloth stoles – knelt for eight minutes and 46 seconds – the time Floyd was pinned under a cop’s knee for – in the Capitol Building’s Emancipation Hall to honor Floyd.

    “We’re here to observe that pain,” declared Pelosi. “We’re here to respect the actions of the American people to speak out against that.”

    There was, of course, much pain to observe. Floyd’s death kicked off a summer of divisive disorder that yielded pain, destruction, and still more death.

    In the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul alone, more than 1,500 businesses were damaged and well over $500 million in property destruction was wrought in violent riots in the days after his killing. Five years later, businesses are still struggling.

    “Even the guy that, you know, helped George Floyd, helped the guy get convicted for the murder. He had a black Chinese spot. He had to move out because he couldn’t afford it, you know. He wasn’t generating any income,” one resident noted.

    By the fall of 2020, the Insurance Information Institute was projecting that across only 20 states, $1 to $2 billion in paid insurance claims were forthcoming.

    The losses were more than pecuniary. It was reported that 17 people had died “in incidents stemming from the unrest following Floyd’s May 25 death.” Among those killed was David Dorn, a 77-year-old, retired black police officer who was shot and killed after responding to a break-in at his friend’s pawn shop in St. Louis.

    Contrast this carnage with the reaction to Kirk’s planned murder on the basis of his widely-held beliefs – a murder that was openly celebrated by the far-left, and lied about in the mainstream press.

    Where are the riots? Where’s the violence and recriminations? What about the vandalism and economic ruin? Has there even been a discernible amount of bitterness?

    Certainly not from Erika Kirk, the widow of the fallen and heir to his organization.

    “That man, that young man, I forgive him,” declared Kirk before a roaring stadium at her husband’s memorial last Sunday. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and is what Charlie would do.”

    “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know, from the Gospel, is love and always love,” she added.

    Good people lamented the deaths of both George Floyd and Charlie Kirk, and bad actors tried to take advantage of both tragedies.

    But how October 14 is marked will show whether the left has learned lessons from its last self-righteous moral panic – and likely demonstrate that the country is not yet done excusing the indefensible, both then and now.

  • Why have Democrats mainstreamed a terrorist?

    Why have Democrats mainstreamed a terrorist?

    On September 26, the Chicago Teachers Union, representing all of the teachers in America’s second largest city, posted on X upon the death of “Assata Shakur” AKA Joanne Chesimard, that “The life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.”

    That would be one way to describe Shakur.

    Another way to describe her would be as a woman convicted of the murder of New Jersey police officer Werner Foerster, a former FBI most wanted terrorist who was broken out of jail by armed comrades and eventually escaped to Communist Cuba, where she lived under the protection of the totalitarian Communist Castro regime for the remainder of her life.

    And Foerster’s murder was far from the only serious crime Shakur was charged with or accused of involvement in. In another instance, she was identified by John Powis (a politically progressive priest) as part of a group of people who robbed his church and threatened to “blow his head off” if he did not cough up $1,800 that had been earmarked for the poor from church funds.

    That one of America’s largest teachers’ unions, fattened by millions of taxpayer dollars, would choose Shakur as a figure to lionize reveals much about the modern left. While the union celebrates radicalism, the most recent test scores for Chicago Public Schools show fewer than one in three students can read at grade level. Fewer than one in five can do math at grade level. Chicago does this while spending almost $20,000 per student, almost two thirds more per student than is spent in my “affluent” school district in Montana. As is so often the case with the left, radicalism goes hand-in-hand with the collapse of basic governance and competence.

    There is no meaningful political differences on these questions between Democrat unions, political activists, the media and academia and many Democrat politicians. All heads of the same leftist hydra. The AP described Shakur as a “black liberation activist” on X – as if this was why she was punished rather than for her crimes. The Washington Post praised her “near mythical status” while USA Today noted her as a “potent political symbol, representing for some a valiant soldier in the war against an oppressive and racist police state.” At least three Democratic Congresswomen, none of them marginal figures, went online to praise her after her death.

    Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley also honored Shakur both online and on X. Pressley, whose district is just 20 percent African American, represents most of Cambridge, Massachusetts, including Harvard University, the pinnacle of the elite left-wing establishment. She could make her statement fully confident in her warm reception in the hallowed halls of academia. After all, Angela Davis, an African-American radical whose guns were used by the brother of her then boyfriend to kill a judge and several others in a courthouse (landing her on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list), was eventually fully rehabilitated by the establishment, serving for decades as a distinguished professor at UC Santa Cruz and receiving an honorary degree from Cambridge University this year, all while declining to repudiate her radical past.

    Other politicians praising Shakur included Congresswoman Yvette Clarke (head of the Congressional Black Caucus) and Summer Lee, who represents Pittsburgh in Congress. Clarke Tweeted that “If there is a single truth in the world it is that Assata died a free woman. May she rest in power and paradise for all eternity.” Clarke had no thoughts at all, of course, as to the victims of her terror campaign.

    Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America announced “Rest in Power, Assata Shakur. The American state brutally oppressed Assata and her Black Panther Party Comrades,” praising the “solidarity” and “loyalty” of the totalitarian Cuban regime that kept her from justice. Zohran Mamdani, the likely next mayor of New York City, is a DSA member who declined to condemn the stance when pressed by the New York Post.

    What we see with the Chicago teachers is the normalization of radicalism on the American left, where there is increasingly no real and meaningful gap between the establishment and the extremists. All political movements have dangerous fringe figures, but the Democrat media, academia and political establishments have embraced some of their worst and most violent ones.

    There were a few honorable exceptions, of course, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called the celebration of Shakur “shameful and depraved.” But Murphy a 68-year-old white male former investment banker, does not likely represent the future of the Democratic Party. The people celebrating Shakur do.

    And that should frighten us all.