Category: crime and punishment

What about Lindsay Clancy?

September 8, 2026 • 9:15 am

By now most of you know about the Lindsay Clancy case, but I’ll briefly reiterate it. Clancy, then 32 years old, says she was afflicted with postpartum psychosis after the birth of her youngest child, and in 2023 strangled her three children, eight months old, three years old, and five years old. Then, attempting suicide, she jumped out of a window, managing to paralyze herself from the waist down.

Clancy was tried on three counts of murder and other charges.  After a six-week trial, the jury could not agree on a verdict. Apparently 11 jurors voted to find Clancy “not guilty,” which could still lead to years of her confinement in a mental hospital if she was “not criminally resp0nsible” (see below). The prosecution is now deciding whether to re-try her, but her defense attorney has asked Donald Trump to give her a pardon.

The article below from Northeastern Global News (click headline to read) clarifies what an “insanity defense” constitutes in Massachusetts (note that Clancy did not please “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but simply “not guilty.”

An excerpt:

Once the defense raises the issue of the accused’s mental state at the time of the crime, prosecutors bear the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible, said Daniel Medwed, a university distinguished professor of law.

“In Massachusetts, we don’t typically use the term ‘insanity defense,’” Medwed said, citing the stigma that attaches to the word “insanity.” Instead, it’s referred to as “lack of criminal responsibility.”

. . .Once the defense raises the issue of the accused’s mental state at the time of the crime, prosecutors bear the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible, said Daniel Medwed, a university distinguished professor of law.

“In Massachusetts, we don’t typically use the term ‘insanity defense,’” Medwed said, citing the stigma that attaches to the word “insanity.” Instead, it’s referred to as “lack of criminal responsibility.”

But what constitues “criminal responsibility”?  Psychiatrist Sally Satel answers that in a Free Press article:

Massachusetts uses the McHoul standard for insanity. It allows for a determination of “not criminally responsible” if a person with a mental disorder or defect (which every expert agreed Clancy had) lacks either the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or the capacity to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. If the defendant presents evidence to support her lack of responsibility, the prosecutors bear the burden to prove her responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. Some thought the prosecutors did not carry this burden; others thought they did.

My response to this as a hard determinist is that no criminal has the ability to change their mind about whether their conduct be right or wrong, regardless of whether they had a diagnosis of being mentally ill. As I’ve said before, since I don’t believe in retributive punishment, if Clancy did the killings, and is thus physically responsible—which she admitted she was—then there are three reasons to either put her in jail or hospitalize her:

  1. To deter other people from committing the same act. This is not unthinkable because an Illinois woman, who described herself as being “very invested” in the Clancy case, killed her young son and then unsuccessfully tried to kill herself.  It’s possible that if Clancy gets off, it could promote similar “copycat” acts.
  2. To sequester a dangerous person from society.  I’m not sure how dangerous Clancy is. Both her age and her physical condition militate against her having further children, but one could argue, I suppose, that she could harm other people’s children, or constitute a danger in other ways.
  3. To cure her of her illness. This is manifestly possible, I’m told, but we don’t know how long it will take. However long it takes, that’s how long Clancy should be confined. But the moment that several reputable and objective therapists pronounce her as cured, that’s the moment she should walk free.

At any rate, I’ll take a nonscientific poll here, but regardless of whether or how you answer, I’d appreciate any comments below on what you think could happen to Clancy, even if you didn’t listen to six weeks of evidence. Or tell us your thoughts on this very difficult case.

What verdict would you have rendered if you were on the jury judging Lindsay Clancy?
Results

On guilt by association

February 16, 2026 • 10:15 am

UPDATE:  Sastra notes in a comment below that there’s a related piece by Joe Nocera at the Free Press, “The ‘Epstein Fallout’ is Spiraling out of Control.”

The issue of Jeffrey Epstein has brought up a question that still puzzles me. Granted, the man was a horrible pedophile and sex trafficker  (he was convicted of it at least once) who probably deserved years and years in prison after his second arrest, but took his own life to forestall that fate.  Granted, Epstein sought out a fair number of intellectuals and individuals, associated with some, flew a subset of them around—sometimes to his private island where bad stuff occurred—and gave other intellectuals money for their research.  Granted, some of those who palled around with Epstein should have known better than to associate with a convicted pedophile, take his money, or visit his island. Others were involved in rather pathetic interactions with Epstein, like Larry Summers, who asked Epstein for romantic advice. That’s not a crime, but it doesn’t look so good.

Now it seems that almost every academic of note not only had some connection with Epstein, but also has been denigrated and demonized for it.  You can be tarred even if you’re several people removed from Epstein: even I get emails and comments on the website (which are trashed) demanding to know why I am friends with people who had some tangential connection with Epstein (viz., Steve Pinker, Richard Dawkins, etc.).

You can look yourself up on the Epstein files at this site, and of course I did, though I never met or had anything to do with the man. I was amazed to see that my name appears ten times! But every mention has to do with my literary agent, John Brockman, who was one of the people cultivated by Epstein (Brockman is the agent for nearly all popular-science writers.)

Below is one example: an email from Brockman to many of his authors calling our attention to an article about him that appeared in the Guardian. I have no idea why this email is in the Epstein files. Email addresses have been redacted.

What puzzles me is that people whose connection with Epstein was tangential or minimal are nevertheless demonized, sometimes with great glee (P. Z. Myers is a great proponent of such glee, expounded in his frequent “Two Minutes of Hate” posts).  I really can’t explain it, except that if you already dislike somebody (perhaps because they’re more famous than you), finding that they’re in the Epstein files gives you even more of an excuse to dislike them, and to flaunt your dislike.

I mentioned Steve Pinker, whose connection with Epstein appears limited to flying on his plane to a conference (not to the island!), being at two conferences where Epstein was in attendance (with Epstein more or less forcing himself to get photographed with Steve and even to sit down at Pinker’s table for a bit), and , finally, for helping Alan Dershowitz when Dersh defended Epstein in his first trial. In that case the “help” was free, and rendered because Pinker knew Dershowitz and wanted to help him out with the proper linguistic analysis of a statute. (See Inside Higher Ed for some tarring.) As you’ll see below, Steve has apologized for that help.  But I really don’t think that such an apology is necessary, as even a rich person deserves a good defense.  Remember that I was on O. J. Simpson’s defense team (refusing a fee), because I thought that even Simpson deserved a decent defense and because, at the time, the FBI was using “match probabilities” for DNA in a manner I considered prejudicial. (Match probability was my area of expertise.)  I make no apologies for that, and was appalled when Simpson was found “not guilty.”

At any rate, Pinker has publicly explained his connection with Epstein on Andrew Sullivan’s site (here and here), and I’ll reproduce Steve’s mea culpa below. Greg Mayer put the entire explanation/apology together for me:

You asked “What was Steven Pinker thinking?” with the implication that I was a willing associate of Epstein. I know the question was rhetorical, but let me answer it.

I disliked Epstein from the moment I met him, judging him to be a sleaze and an impostor. I never sought his company, never solicited or accepted funding from him, was never invited to his mansion or island, and would not have accepted. But as we know, Epstein was an obsessive collector of celebrities, including academic celebrities, and he was tight with an astonishing number of my close colleagues, making it difficult to escape associations with him. These included my Harvard colleague and co-teacher Alan Dershowitz; my PhD advisor, department chair, and dean Stephen Kosslyn; my Harvard colleagues Lawrence Summers, Lisa Randall, and Martin Nowak; my former MIT colleague Noam Chomsky; my literary agent John Brockman; and the Director of the ASU Origins Project, Lawrence Krauss. I am astonished that these smart people took Epstein seriously. On the two occasions when I was forced into his company, I found him to be a deeply unserious and attention-deficit-disordered smart-ass.

Nowak, Brockman, and Krauss were prolific impresarios of academic conferences covertly funded by Epstein, and he would often show up unannounced. At one Harvard conference someone snapped a photo with me and Epstein in the frame; it has plagued me ever since. On another, Krauss begged me to allow Epstein to join my meal table for a chat, and the resulting photo has also been endlessly circulated to smear me. In a forthcoming article in a major online magazine, Krauss publicly apologizes for forcing me into that situation. Epstein was also a donor to other Harvard projects, not all of them public.

It’s also important to keep in mind the timeline. I did join a group of TED speakers and attendees (including Brockman, his wife and agency president Katinka Matson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett) whom Brockman had invited to fly on Epstein’s plane to the conference in Monterey, California. This was in 2002, many years before any of Epstein’s crimes came to light. Nothing suspicious took place on the flight.

My other association with Epstein came when Dershowitz asked my advice, as a psycholinguist, on the natural interpretation of the wording of a statute which, it turned out, Epstein had been accused of violating. Alan and I were colleagues who had just co-taught a course, and he often asked me for advice on the linguistic interpretation of laws and constitutional amendments. Dershowitz is, of course, famous for legally defending odious defendants such as O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson on the Sixth Amendment principle that even the most despised defendants have a right to vigorous legal representation. I was not a paid expert witness but was doing a colleague a favor. Still, I deeply regret this, because while Dershowitz is willing to apply his professional efforts to push this principle to the limit, I am not. (Note, too, that in 2007 the full extent of Epstein’s crimes were not known.)

Epstein was a sociopath and, we now know, a heinous criminal. He also was a maniacal collector of famous people who knew how to slosh around enough money to gain entrée into prestigious circles. Perhaps I was too polite to run away on occasions when I should have, but it was almost impossible for me to escape being associated with his far-flung social web.

This is about as straightforward as you can get, and I can’t see that Steve did anything wrong—not even helping Dershowitz clarify wording of a statue for Epstein’s first trial. Steve says he “deeply regrets this,” and I believe him, but I don’t think he has much to regret.  Expert witnesses help all kinds of people, rich and poor (as I did, though I mostly helped indigent defendants for public defenders). Ensuring that the law is administered correctly is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, one could make the case that I was far worse than Pinker, as I helped O. J. Simpson, who was later exculpated for a double murder but, in my view, was almost certainly guilty.  I knew there was a substantial chance that Simpson did it, but I wanted to be sure that the prosecution used its DNA data properly, just as Steve gave his best linguistic interpretation of a statute. Remember, the prosecution’s job is not to convict, but to present evidence that is supposed to show the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is not supposed to involve twisting the facts, though it does far too often, which is why poor people, assigned overworked public defenders, don’t get the same justice as rich ones.

The big question today is: why are people in almost a moral panic about Epstein? As I said, he was almost surely guilty of odious crimes (I allow him a benefit of the doubt, as does the law, though his associate Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty, and there is other eyewitness testimony.) And yes, perhaps some people, like Prince Andrew, were complicit in Epstein’s crimes. But others were guilty only of associating with him, some more than others and some, like Pinker, hardly at all. Why the demonization of Pinbker? And why should I also be tarred because I’m friends with Steve?

None of this, of course, is meant to exculpate Epstein, nor to minimize the pain and misery that his victims suffered and suffer now. I simply want to discuss a question about a moral panic and its apparent excess.

Greg Mayer brought all this to my attention, and I called him to ask his explanation for the moral panic affecting some people who didn’t deserve it. Besides my own view that people love to see the mighty fall, Greg had three other reasons:

a.) People tend, in moral crises, to believe ridiculous and palpably false things about those considered guilty. An example is the McMartin preschool trial, in which people were arrested for child molestation despite the most ridiculous and unbelievable accusations, including Satanic rituals and flying witches (see here for some of them). It turns out that nobody was found guilty and the allegations were not substantiated. Much of the childrens’ testimony seems to have been due to prompting by therapists. To Greg, who teaches pseudoscience and related matters at U. Wisconsin-Parkside, this is an extreme example of what can happen to a “believe the victim” mentality even when there’s no good evidence.

b.) People believe what they want to believe, and will believe ludicrous or disproven claims if they buttress what they would like to be true. Greg used the example of “facilitated communication“, in which “facilitators” supposedly helped nonverbal people “talk” by holding their hands near a keyboard. We now know that this process has been entirely discredited. Like using a ouija board, the facilitators were actually guiding people’s hands to specific keys.  This relates to Epstein in a way similar to my own thesis: people want to believe that some people they already dislike are guilty, and so rush to associate those people with Epstein, despite the lack of evidence that some of the “accused” had anything to do with Epstein’s crimes.

c.) Greg also said that since the 1980s, as inequalities among Americans began to grow, those who had thinner slices of the pie became eager to blame the rich and elite for their troubles. We see this resentment in many places, including politics.  And Epstein, of course, gravitated to the rich and elite, as he apparently thought that some of their panache would rub off on him.  This is why, Greg says, there are so many articles about the “Epstein elite” being published these days.

At any rate, Pinker’s apologia prompted me to think about all this, and after reading it I really cannot find him guilty of any missteps—even the help he gave Dershowitz. I know I’ll get pushback from people who dislike Pinker, or think that the acccused should not be given help by experts, especially when the crimes involved are dire.  But I stand by my claim: I don’t think Pinker did anything wrong. And that is probably true of quite a few people who are being tarred via guilt by association.

Minnesota authorities investigate Nick Shirley’s allegations of fraud in healthcare and daycare, report plenty of kids (!). Meanwhile, the fraud goes on, with some of the money possibly going to terrorists.

December 30, 2025 • 10:30 am

By now you’ve probably seen the 42-minute video (below) filmed by a young YouTuber, Nick Shirley, who describes himself as “politically independent” but has also been described as “conservative”.  Well, his politics don’t matter at all if what he filmed turns out to be true.  Shirley, accompanied by another investigator named David, went to visit a spate of Somali-run healthcare and daycare centers in Minnesota, all of which get big bucks from the government, to see if there was any sign of either healthcare or daycare going on. They posted the video on X, and as of this morning it’s been seen by 125 million people. If you haven’t watched it, do so.

As I said, Shirley and David found no evidence of any “business” going on in any of these places. There were no children, and when Shirley tried to register his nonexistent son “Joey” for daycare centers, either nobody answered the door or nobody wanted to take his business. Eventually the businesspeople in these malls called the cops, and Shirley and David were expelled.  In most cases the pair had estimates of how much government money went into these businesses.

Is this fraud real? It’s hard to believe otherwise given the videos, as well as other facts, in addition to the history of social-services fraud (most pepetrated by Somali immigrants or their families) that began several years ago.  For one thing, the “centers” are ostensibly aimed at the Somali community but, as Luana pointed out to me, the vast majority of Somali families, including those who have been in America more than ten years, are on some form of welfare. As she pointed out (the figures are below): “Notice that 89% of the Somali households with children are on welfare.  That means the mother does not work, so they need no daycare.” Note, though, that the data don’t say anything about homes with or without children, but I think it’s a fair assumption that most of the homes getting welfare do contain children.

Here are some data divided up in the graph below into “native households”, “Somali immigrant households”, and “Somali Immigrant households that have been in America for more than ten years.”:

According to the NY Post, all these scams (and note that the majority but not 100% of them were run by Somalis) may have defrauded the American government (and that means you and me) by 9 billion dollars:

A staggering $9 billion may have been stolen in Minnesota’s sprawling social-services scam orchestrated mainly by members of its Somali community — a figure nearly equivalent to the entire economy of Somalia.

The enormous new estimate is a nearly nine-fold increase from the swiped $1 billion previously suspected, according to federal prosecutors.

It also accounts for roughly half of the $18 billion in total federal funds provided to the Minnesota-run services since 2018, the feds said — as Democratic Gov. Tim Walz continues to take heat for his handling of the debacle.

By comparison to the $9 billion figure, Somalia’s entire GDP was under $12 billion last year, according to the World Bank.

“The magnitude cannot be overstated,” First Assistant US Attorney Joe Thompson said Thursday of the tentacles of the fraud. “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s staggering, industrial-scale fraud.

. . .The scheme saw dozens of people — the vast majority from Minnesota’s Somali community — setting up businesses and non-profits that claimed to provide services such as housing, food or healthcare assistance and then billing the federally funded state programs for the non-existent services.

The fraud was so enormous that it went beyond the over-billing tactics typically seen in similar fraud cases and instead saw people setting up entire operations — sometimes coming from out of state — to get in on the goldrush of fraud opportunity, Thompson explained.

Charges for six more people allegedly involved in the scheme were announced Thursday, bringing the total number of defendants up to 92.

Among the latest defendants were two people who engaged in what Thompson called “fraud tourism” by allegedly travelling from Philadelphia to set up a bogus housing aid program after spotting an opportunity to make “easy money” off Minnesota’s programs.

As I wrote this morning:

Minnesota Governor Walz is pushing back, saying that he’s always investigated fraud.  He doesn’t seem to realize the scale of this fraud, though. . .

Walz, as well as the Lieutenant Governor (a white woman who wore a hijab on a visit to a Somali market), seems more concerned with people demonizing part of the Minnesota community, by which they mean Somalis. And yes, one shouldn’t become an anti-Somali bigot since many are not involved in this fraud, but what seems to be happening is that progressives are downplaying this fraud because most of it is perpetrated by immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and also people of color.  The trope of “Islamophobia”—and, of course, votes—seem to be more important than this fraud. Walz himself has blamed the Trump administration for “sensationalizing” this scandal and his state administration asserts that the scale of the fraud is way overstated: actually, they claim, on the order of tens of millions of dollars.

During the coronavirus pandemic, there was widespread fraud in  Minnesota, with an outfit called “Feeding our Future” getting an estimated $250 million to feed kids, nearly all of which went into the pockets of scammers (several were arrested). Various versions of these scams perpetrated by Somalis have, then, been going on for at least four years.

And the criminality doesn’t stop there. Seven of the defendants were tried (and five convicted) in a $125 million food-aid fraud trial in 2024. Last year the AP reported that at least five other people, apparently Somalis, were charged with trying to bribe with a bunch of cash one of the jurors to acquit the defendants:

Five people were charged Wednesday with conspiring to bribe a Minnesota juror with a bag of $120,000 in cash in exchange for the acquittal of defendants in one of the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI announced Wednesday.

Court documents made public reveal an extravagant scheme in which the accused researched the juror’s personal information on social media, surveilled her, tracked her daily habits and bought a GPS device to install on her car. Authorities believe the defendants targeted the woman, known as “Juror 52,” because she was the youngest and they believed her to be the only person of color on the panel.

According to court documents, the group came up with a “blueprint” of arguments for the juror to help persuade other jurors to acquit, injecting the idea that prosecutors were motivated by racial animus: “(w)e are immigrants, they don’t respect us,” the list of proposed arguments read.

The seven people were the first of 70 to stand trial in what federal prosecutors have called one of the nation’s largest COVID-19-related frauds, exploiting rules that were kept lax so that the economy wouldn’t crash during the pandemic. More than $250 million in federal funds was taken in the Minnesota scheme overall, with only about $50 million of it recovered, authorities said.

The food aid came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was administered by the state, which funneled the meal money through nonprofit organizations and other partners. As rules were eased to speed support to the needy, the defendants allegedly produced invoices for meals never served, ran shell companies, laundered money, indulged in passport fraud and accepted kickbacks.

Federal prosecutors said just a fraction of the money the defendants received through the Feeding our Future nonprofit went to feed low-income kids, while the rest was spent on luxury cars, jewelry, travel and property.

The bribe didn’t work because the accused target was removed from the jury. The convicted:

. . . Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff and Hayat Mohamed Nur were found guilty on most of the counts against them. Prosecutors have described Abdiaziz Farah as a ringleader of the seven and faced the most counts; he was convicted on 23 of 24 counts against him.

And the NY Post strongly suggests that a fair amount of money from these scams has gone to Somali terrorist organizations:

Millions of dollars in taxpayer money stolen as part of a series of massive Minnesota welfare fraud schemes may have been funneled to Somalia-based terror group al-Shabab, according to a report.

The radical Islamic terror group, which is a longstanding ally of al Qaeda and considered a threat to US interests, has likely been the beneficiary of money stolen in a spate of scams and sent to Somalia by the criminals defrauding the North Star State, City Journal reported Wednesday, citing federal counterterrorism sources.

. . . “This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of al-Shabab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” a source who worked on a federal investigation into Minnesotans attempting to join overseas terror groups, told the outlet.

David Gaither, a former Republican Minnesota state senator, believes state Democrats and the media have ignored fraud being perpetrated by members of the state’s large and politically influential Somali community, which has made the problem worse.

“The media does not want to put a light on this,” Gaither told City Journal. “And if you’re a politician, it’s a significant disadvantage for you to alienate the Somali community. If you don’t win the Somali community, you can’t win Minneapolis. And if you don’t win Minneapolis, you can’t win the state. End of story.”

The fraudulently obtained welfare funds make their way to al-Shabab through the “untold millions” of dollars in cash remitted by Somalis in Minnesota back to Somalia through an informal network of money handlers, known as “hawalas,” the outlet reported.

“We had sources going into the hawalas to send money,” Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who served on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), explained. “I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well s–t, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits. How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: This is welfare fraud.”

Kerns said he later determined that “significant funds” were being sent from people in the US to al-Shabab networks in Somalia — and though it may not have been intentional, the terror group was getting a share.

“Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits al-Shabab in some way,” a former member of the Minneapolis JTTF said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, al-Shabab is … taking a cut of it.”

Note that the City Journal is a right-wing site, but if you’re going to dismiss these allegations as baseless because of that, then you might as well dismiss any allegations of the NYT or WaPo because they’re “progressive” (the Post less so now).  Coverage of the scandal is of course heavier at right-wing sites, but that is absolutely understandable. Nevertheless, what is not important here is race itself but the collaboration of members of an ethnic group to defraud the government. And if the al-Shabab allegations be true—and I expect we’ll find out sooner or later—it would mean that the American taxpayer is subsidizing terrorism, which is the worst part of this whole mess.

One final note. If you were running one of those bogus organizations investigated by Shirley, what would you do if you saw the torrent of bad publicity? You’d start packing the empty childcare centers with kids, maybe even paying their parents to bring them in. Because you’d know for sure that the investigators were going to come.  And that may well have happened.  What we do know from this site is that state investigators went back to the sites and, of course, found children—during the holiday season, a time when you don’t expect to find kids in daycare. Bolding is mine:

“While we have questions about some of the methods that were used in the video, we do take the concerns that the video raises about fraud very seriously,” said Tikki Brown, commissioner of the new Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families — which is responsible for paying federal Childcare Assistance to daycares that file claims.

Commissioner Brown says inspectors went out Monday to double-check that children, in fact, are present at the daycares highlighted in Shirley’s video. The federal Department of Homeland Security was also checking those businesses in Minneapolis.

State data Shirley used in his video show those daycares receive millions in taxpayer money.

“There have been ongoing investigations with several of those centers. None of those investigations uncovered findings of fraud,” Commissioner Brown said.

She says a state inspector visited each of the daycares featured in Shirley’s video within the last six months and that there were children present.

Brown confirmed that the daycares in Shirley’s video have active licenses with the state and continue receiving payments. 

The exception — one that closed years ago, and the misspelled Quality Learning Center — which Brown says permanently closed last week.

In a strange contradiction, however, KARE 11 cameras this afternoon captured dozens of children being dropped off at that daycare with parents claiming it’s still open, and a manager saying they are legitimate.

The Department of Children, Youth, and Families has a total of 55 open investigations related to the Child Care Assistance Program. 

Now why were there kids at the closed “Quality Learing Center”? Your guess is as good as mine, but I think my guess is pretty good.

Four degrees of sympathy for Charlie Kirk

September 12, 2025 • 9:30 am

Preliminary note: they’ve apparently caught a suspect in Charlie Kirk’s death. A tweet:

I’ve read a bit about reactions to the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and got into at least one heated argument about it with a friend who said that Kirk’s murder was a good thing.  There have been various degrees of reaction to the bloody assassination, ranging from jubilant celebration all the way to canonization and martyrdom.

My own view is that although I differ with Kirk on nearly every issue he espoused, I see him as someone who was simply of opposite political views to mine.  While you can make the case that his views espoused or created violence, I don’t think you can make much of a case. And I am not aware that anything he said violated the First Amendment. In general, he and his Turning Point group generally espoused civil debate, not calls for killing, injury, or destruction.

Several people who applauded Kirk’s murder have brought up two things. First, Kirk was allegedly elated when he heard that Nancy Pelosi’s husband was injured with a hammer bu a trespasser. I remember that attack, but not Kirk’s reaction.  This is what AI said when I asked it what Kirk’s reaction was:

In a 2022 podcast [on”The Charlie Kirk Show”], Charlie Kirk jokingly suggested that an “amazing patriot” should post bail for the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi. Kirk was not supporting the assault but using it to criticize the justice system and progressive bail reform policies, while simultaneously condemning the attack as “awful”. 

  • The attack: In October 2022, an assailant broke into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home, asking “Where is Nancy?” before attacking her husband, Paul, with a hammer.
  • The podcast: On the October 31, 2022, episode of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” Kirk questioned why the assailant was being held without bail, using the incident to critique policies in cities like Chicago and San Francisco.
  • The criticism: Kirk sarcastically contrasted the denial of bail for the Pelosi attacker with his claim that other serious crimes were often treated less severely under “cashless bail” policies in other cities.
  • Condemnation of violence: Despite his sardonic comment, Kirk also stated, “I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful. It’s not right”. 

Further, with reference to point #3 below, there’s what I call the Argument from Roosting Chickens, which says Kirk espoused violence through approving the Second Amendment, and so that violence came home to him.  Here’s the AI answer to my question, “What did Charlie Kirk think of the Second Amendment?”:

Charlie Kirk was a staunch defender of the Second Amendment and strongly opposed gun control. In his view, the right to bear arms was a crucial protection for individuals against a tyrannical government.
Key points of Kirk’s stance
  • Willing to accept gun deaths as a cost of freedom: In an April 2023 event for TPUSA Faith, Kirk controversially stated that it was “worth it” to accept “some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights”.
  • Protection against tyranny: Kirk framed the Second Amendment as a fundamental safeguard to protect Americans’ other rights, implying it was a deterrent against government overreach.
  • More armed citizens for safety: He advocated for more armed Americans, not fewer, as the solution to gun violence. In 2023, he argued that if airplanes and banks have armed security, schools should have armed guards as well.
  • Rejection of “utopian” gun control: Kirk believed it was unrealistic to think a society with an armed citizenry would have zero gun deaths, dismissing such thinking as “nonsense” and “drivel”.
  • Long-standing advocacy for gun rights: He was a consistent advocate for gun rights and had previously spoken on behalf of the National Rifle Association (NRA)

Although his statement about gun deaths were the “cost of freedom”, I took it as meaning that if you think the Second Amendment is now an overall good thing, he thought the benefits it brought, including possible saving of lives, was worth the accidental deaths of innocent people caused by firearms. This is what one of our  readers commented yesterday,

I believe his actual point about the 2nd was that on balance it would save more lives to have guns than it would to ban them.

I believe he was wrong about that, but his point wasn’t “we must save the 2nd Amendment no matter the cost.”

That was my interpretation. Unfortunately, the data show that FAR more innocent people are killed, commit suicide, or are murdered by guns in the hands of civilians than the number of bad guys killed in self-defense.  There is no justification for the use of guns for self-protection as a way of saving innocent lives (in fact, there are more deaths by accidents or suicide than deaths via self-protection). The original intent of the Second Amendment can no longer be justified.

Now one can argue that it’s too late: the guns are out there and we can’t find them. The bad guys have them and we can’t stop criminal gun violence, so we should allow gun ownership by citizens. But I don’t agree that this means we should stop trying to get rid of guns.  So, in general I disagree with Kirk on the Second Amendment. But I don’t think his statement should be seen, as our reader noted, as a callous disregard of innocent people killed as a byproduct of owning guns. I think Kirk really considered the Second Amendment a good thing for America.

But to me these two points are largely irrelevant in how we judge those who reacted to Kirk’s death.  No, he was not a saint, he said some reprehensible things.  But I have heard far worse from my friends about Republicans, for example  I often hear a fervent wish that Trump had died in the two assassination attempts on him.  Some of my liberal friends think the courts’ interpretation of the Second Amendment, now allowing civilian ownership of guns for reasons other than forming a militia, are fine, even though they surely know, like Kirk, that innocent people will die.  Do these friends deserve to be killed for their views? I think not!

But the issue at hand is this: “How should we think of the different reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death?”  I see four classes of reactions, though there are undoubtedly more.  Remember, Kirk never killed anybody, never caused anybody’s death, and did not espouse violence as a way to achieve political aims. Also keep in mind we’re talking about a man shot in the neck and killed horribly in front of his wife and two young children. Should we celebrate Kirk’s death, as many have, or should we say that he deserved what he got because of who he was?

I am talking now about civilians like Kirk, not terrorists or deaths in wartime, so don’t pepper me with questions about “What about Hitler?” “What about bin Laden?”  I am not going to answer questions like that.

And so I’ll divide the reactions into four groups with a few words on each.

1.) “Who was Charlie Kirk? Since I don’t know him, I have no opinion.”  Many people don’t know about him and Turning Point. This is a perfectly acceptable reaction given that you don’t know if he was a civilian giving a political talk or somebody killed while physically assaulting someone else. But inquisitive people will find out who he was, and when they do they should condemn his killing.

2.) “I know who Charlie Kirk was and how he died.  But I don’t care whether he was killed.”  I find this reaction lacking in sympathy, for he had a wife and two kids. It also seems to justify politically-motivated murder, which at the least can spread the view that killing someone for their views along is, well, not to be condemned. (I note that Kirk was speaking on a college campus, which is supposed to be especially tolerant of such speech). Regardless of the circumstances of the assassination, one should at least condemn this kind of murder. Luana adds that because the celebration is largely by people on the Left, simple human decency that condemns the killing of innocents will, in the end, come around to hurt the Left.  I agreed, but in this discussion we should leave out the political consequences for one side or the other and talk about simple morality instead. Bernie Sanders discusses the consequences for democracy below.

3.) “Because Kirk espoused violence, he got what was coming to him. The chickens have come home to roost.” This is false, obtuse, and reprehensible. As you see above, Kirk didn’t go around advocating violence against his opponents. The two remarks above about Pelosi and the Second Amendment, similar in kind but not content to what I often hear from my friends, do not justify killing the speaker. Period. Kirk had a wife and child, many friends and colleagues who cared about him. Those who neglect that, and the fact that these people will be devastated (no, they don’t deserve that devastation), are people with zero sympathy. This view is reprehensible.

4.) “Kirk deserved to die because he was a homophobe/transphobe/horrible right-wing activist/promoter and enabler of Trump/antisemit, etc. etc.”  This is taking the most unsympathetic and immoral view of all, and, sadly, it’s not an uncommon reaction. But Kirk did not “deserve” to die for his political views. We have a First Amendment that insulates people like Kirk—and most of us—from punishment, much less murder.(As for Kirk’s antisemitism, the NY Times reported it inaccurately; Kirk did not espouse antisemitism but deplored it.)

Only the first view above is justifiable.  The death of anyone is a tragedy for their friends, relatives, and loved ones, even if they are horrible people.  But in Kirk’s case, there is nothing I can see to mitigate that tragedy.

I never though I’d finish a post by touting the words of Bernie Sanders, but here he speaks very eloquently, and I agree 100%.  We must condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk as strongly as possible, for justifying politically-based murder  is both immoral and corrosive to the foundation of our free society .

h/t: Luana for discussion

Bill Maher’s latest rule

May 31, 2025 • 11:45 am

Here’s the latest comedy/news stint from Bill Maher’s “Real Time” show, a “New Rule” segment called “Freak-end update”, referring of course to Diddy’s “Freak offs,” his drug-fueled sex orgies often involving prostitutes. Diddy is very likely to be convicted (you’ve seen the tape, right?), and it will be a huge come-down from his status as music king to living in a cell sans sex and drugs.

Maher’s new rule is this: “If you’ve being abused, you gotta leave right away.” He understands why abused women and loath to report it, and will even send affectionate messages to their abusers, but Maher adds that we must understand these dynamics and not let them soften our attitudes towards abuse. He then recounts how laws and attitudes are changing to punish abusers more seriously, and advises abused women to go to the police immediately rather than just telling a few friends or writing about it in a journal.

This is far more serious than most of Maher’s other bits, but he feels strongly about it.  Yet he still manages to eke out a few laughs.

The scandal of English grooming gangs

January 7, 2025 • 11:15 am

UPDATE:  A UK government report from 2020 suggests that there are conflicting data on the ethnicity of the offending “grooming gangs”. Click below to see the study and I quote from page 10 of the Executive Summary (bolding is mine):

17. A number of high-profile cases – including the offending in Rotherham investigated by Professor Alexis Jay,3 the Rochdale group convicted as a result of Operation Span, and convictions in Telford – have mainly involved men of Pakistani ethnicity. Beyond specific high-profile cases, the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending. Research has found that group-based CSE offenders are most commonly White.4 Some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations.5 However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending. This is due to issues such as data quality problems, the way the samples were selected in studies, and the potential for bias and inaccuracies in the way that ethnicity data is collected.6 During our conversations with police forces, we have found that in the operations reflected, offender groups come from diverse backgrounds, with each group being broadly ethnically homogenous. However, there are cases where offenders within groups come from different backgrounds.7

Stay tuned, and if you know of more dispositive data, place it in the comments. If this be true,  then even bringing in the element of race is misguided. But as I say below, it doesn’t matter what color or ethnicity the pedophiles were, for nearly everyone agrees that the whole issue of grooming gangs has been grossly mishandled by the UK authorities, and largely swept under the rug.

UPDATE 2: A reader calls attention to this NYT article claiming that Musk’s tactics in exposing the grooming gangs are dishonest and politically motivated.

 

The Free Press headline below may be exaggerated, but it comes close to the truth.  For it’s about the “grooming gangs” that have plagued England for several decades.  They involve groups of men—most often of Pakistani or Bangladesi ancestry—whose goal is to subjugate and rape young children of both sexes. Some children have been killed.  But because the perps are usually people of color, the government, the police, and the public have largely ignored the issue.  This is a huge scandal involving, once again, a clash of ideologies that came down the wrong way. The warring ideologies are to avoid denigrating immigrants of color versus protecting children against pedophiles.

Yes, some of these gangs have been broken up and the perps sent to prison, but only now, with the prompting of Elon Musk, is it being publicized as the heinous crime it is. (The fact that Musk is widely hated makes it hard for people to accept the situation, but his actions in this case are right.) For the grooming is still going on, and not just in the UK but in other places in Europe.  Unfortunately, calling attention to these gangs is seen not only as racist, but as anti-immigrant, both characterizations being horrible to liberals.

I’m not going to describe these crimes in detail, as they makes me sick, but you need to know about them, and the UK needs to start taking the issue VERY seriously.

First, a piece from the Free Press, which you can access by clicking on the headline.

There’s a thread of incidents tweeted by Elon Musk you can find at the link, and of course everybody is festooning them with community notes because Musk. This first one, for example, happened five years ago, and the perps are in jail. But it tells you the kind of things that can happen. Here are the first two tweets, apparently both from 2013.  But as the article above notes, this is still going on,

A quote from the Free Press piece:

The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.

Although some have said that this is no longer a problem, and the perps are all in jail, that’s simply not true. The first link above goes to a UK government site about the Grooming Gangs Taskforce, and was published in May of last year:

In the last 12 months the crack team of expert investigators and analysts has helped police forces arrest over 550 suspects, identify and protect over 4,000 victims, and build up robust cases to get justice for these appalling crimes.

Established by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in April 2023, the Grooming Gangs Taskforce of specialist officers has worked with all 43 police forces in England and Wales to support child sexual exploitation and grooming investigations.

Led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and supported by the National Crime Agency, the taskforce is a full time, operational police unit funded by the Home Office to improve how the police investigate grooming gangs and identify and protect children from abuse. It is staffed by experienced and qualified officers and data analysts who have long-term, practical on-the-ground experience of undertaking investigations into grooming gangs.

Finally, from Unherd, an article about how the cops are complicit in not going after grooming gangs. It’s written by a former detective :


The answer is pretty much what you would expect: going after grooming gangs that largely comprise people of color is seen as racist, and you know how the British cops are with “hate speech”:

The statistics behind the rape gang scandal — let’s banish the wholly inadequate word “grooming” — are staggering. For over 25 years, networks of men, predominantly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, abused young white girls from Yeovil to London to Glasgow. The victims’ accounts are beyond depravity, unthinkable in a supposedly advanced Western democracy.

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.

The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.

It is incomprehensible to me how the police, government, and general public prefer to brush this issue under the rug: it’s pedophilia, for crying out loud, and the abuse is both horrible and pervasive. But I’ll close with the observation that again we see a clash of two opposing views: one in which people of color should be treated fairly, which is good, and the other in which children should not be sexually abused, completely incontestable.  But when people of color begin mass sexual abuse of children, and those children appear to be mostly white, you can see how it poses a conflict for the woke. Yet it should not be a conflict, for no matter what color the abusers and rapists are, they are violating the law big time and should be taken off the streets. That has happened to some extent, but not nearly to the extent that should be the case.

h/t: Luana

Why the death penalty?

December 24, 2024 • 9:30 am

As I noted yesterday, Biden has commuted the sentences of all but three federal prisoners on death row; they’ll now be serving life behind bars without parole instead. I insisted that this was an excellent decision, as I have never seen the sense of the government killing a prisoner.  Here are the pros and cons of capital punishment as I see them.

Pro:  People feel that somebody who does a bad crime deserves to be killed for it. The idea is that because the criminal made the victims suffer, he, too, should suffer as retribution for what was inflicted on his victims. It’s retribution, Jake!

Cons:  Because of litigation fees and the length of time before execution, as well as execution costs, it actually costs more to execute a prisoner than to keep him in prison until he dies.

If exculpating evidence surfaces, you can retry or free a living prisoner, but not one who’s been executed.

Evidence shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime.

Capital punishment is purely retributive and, in the end, seems selfish as it satisfies the wishes of people to see other people dead.

The state should not be in the business of killing people. That is reserved for one’s opponents in wartime.

Prisoners sentenced to death have no opportunity to be rehabilitated. And surely some of them could be released eventually and become productive citizens, and enjoy the rest of their lives in freedom.

To a determinist, prisoners who commit capital crimes had no choice in the matter, and you don’t execute people for “making the wrong choice” if they didn’t have one.

Anyone who wants retribution should be able to find it in the idea that someone will spend the rest of his life in prison, which is a harsh punishment in itself.

Note that the cons heavily outweigh the pros. And that is surely why the U.S, is the only Western country to have the death penalty (Japan also has it, though it’s not really “Western”).

My question: is there ANY benefit to society in having the death penalty? It seems to hang around because it to afford a ghoulish kind of closure to those who feel strongly about what should happen to someone who commits a horrible crime. One of the most barbaric things I have seen is the crowd of people massed outside a prison on the eve of an execution, baying for blood.