Legal briefs
Free speech
The U.S. House of Representatives DOGE Subcommittee held a hearing last week on the prospect of cutting off federal funds for National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You can watch the hearing here. This defunding should 100% happen, and can’t happen soon enough. NPR has become essentially a 24-hour Democrat campaign commercial. If you are unconvinced of this, read this piece by a former NPR editor, Uri Berliner, on just how bad it has gotten. NPR not only affirmatively campaigns for Democrats, it censors conservative speech, which I have written about previously here. Not that there is anything wrong with Democrat campaign commercials or in choosing to ignore stories that help conservatives, per se. It’s just wrong to operate this way on the taxpayer dime.
NPR could do whatever they wanted, for the most part, if they were a private enterprise, but they aren’t. The CPB receives half a billion dollars annually from the federal government. Roughly 20% of that goes to NPR. The organization has strayed far from its mission, has reduced itself to catering solely to an increasingly out of touch minority of elites, and it is unfair for the public at-large to support it.
Crime
Safe injection sites are the most absurd outgrowth of the harm-reduction philosophy in the criminal justice system. The idea is that the government will provide a place for drug users to shoot up and provide a measure of cleanliness, safety and access to treatment. In actual practice, safe injection sites are just government run drug houses.
There is a safe injection site in East Harlem New York. An organization called the East Harlem Neighborhood Group recently petitioned the new U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to close the East Harlem site because local NYC lawmakers refuse to do so. The residents wrote to Bondi that, “Every day in the area outside the facility and in the block surrounding the facility drug dealing occurs regularly in broad daylight, while drug addicts can be found nodding off, lying in the street, begging for handouts, and committing petty crime.”
In 2023, the New York U.S. Attorney found that safe injection sites violate the 1986 U.S. Anti-Drug Abuse Act which prohibits individuals or organizations from maintaining a property for the purpose of making, selling, or using a controlled substance. No enforcement action was taken at that time, however. There will soon be a new U.S. Attorney in town, though. Perhaps he or she will enforce the law. You can read more about it here.
More crime
The U.K. has a governing body in their criminal system called The Sentencing Council. The Council provides binding guidance for courts in England and Wales. Recently, the Council issued a report creating a two-tiered sentencing structure discriminating against white men.
The new rules called for a pre-sentence report to be prepared for criminal defendants who belong to certain classes such as women, racial minorities, ethnic minorities, or young people. The pre-sentence report would outline mitigating factors for a judge to find at sentencing that could be used to reduce the sentence. Under the system, white men would not receive a pre-sentence report, thereby being denied the presentation of mitigating factors the report is designed to highlight.
Following tremendous outcry, including the filing this week of emergency legislation in Parliament to stop the new rules, the Sentencing Council agreed to suspend plans for the two-tier system. You can read about it here.
Still more crime
Also in the U.K. this week—Ninja swords! I wrote in this column a few weeks back about the U.K. banning knives. See here. They banned guns some time ago, so Brits now just stab people a lot. They were using machetes and bowie knives mostly, but then they banned those, too. Now, someone killed a young man with a ninja sword, so ninja swords will be outlawed starting August 1. Come this summer, having a ninja sword in private will land you in jail for six months. If you take your ninja sword in public, you could go to jail for four years. Brits will have until August 1 to voluntarily turn in their ninja swords to authorities. After that, they are subject to confiscation. You can read more about the policy here.
Two years ago, my son’s girlfriend got him an awesome ninja sword for Christmas. When he opened the gift, it was the happiest I’d ever seen him. He keeps it proudly displayed in his room, on the ready for would-be intruders. I can guarantee that if anybody came to confiscate his ninja sword, he’d send them away in more pieces than they entered with, and he’s not even a real ninja.
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