Category Archives: culture

Cashless Bail and Flight Risk

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Illinois has passed its cashless bail law, euphemistically styled the SAFE-T Act (Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act—how cute, how misleading). This is a law that will allow lots of suspects accused of violent crimes to walk without even needing a hearing—an Illinois magistrate can simply release the suspect, functionally, on his own word that he’ll appear in court when called to do so.

Supporters of the law, set to take effect at the beginning of next year, point out it does not prohibit detention and that anyone deemed a flight risk can be detained.

This is as cynical as it is disingenuous.

The degree of flight risk isn’t the only factor that should be used in assessing bail amounts; it isn’t even the most important. What’s central to bail consideration, or should be central, is the nature of the crime alleged and the degree of risk to the people in the local community from having the accused walking free among them.

A man accused of a violent crime needn’t flee in order to commit (further) violent crimes; indeed, most crimes (like politics) are local. And now he has a collection of targets in the local area against whom to commit further violence: witnesses against him, and their families.

Sack Them

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Now the USAF Academy has torn it apart.

A diversity and inclusion training by the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado instructs cadets to use words that “include all genders” and to refrain from saying things like “mom” and “dad.”

And

“Some families are headed by single parents, grandparents, foster parents, two moms, two dads, etc.: consider ‘parent or caregiver’ instead of ‘mom and dad,'” the presentation states. “Use words that include all genders​: ‘Folks’ or ‘Y’all’ instead of ‘guys’; ‘partner’ vs. ‘boyfriend or girlfriend.'”
“Not ‘Colorblind’ or ‘I don’t see color,’ but Color Conscious,” it adds. “We see Color/Patterns AND VALUE people for their uniqueness.”

This is openly racist and sexist spew, it’s unacceptable anywhere in our nation, it’s especially unacceptable in those institutions where we train our military leaders—and it’s deliberately designed to keep our military personnel segregated, in a number of senses of that term, one from another.

This has gone ‘way too far. It’s time to sack SecDef Lloyd Austin, CJCS General Mark Milley, and to reassign all of the Pentagon’s current military staff who are focused on academic “training” and the military Academies’ Command and Staff personnel, to the combatant commands—in theater, not to command headquarters. Send the associated civilians back to the private sector.

It’s time these worthies lived in the destruction they’re seeking to wreak.

Well-Established Constitutional Rights

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In a Wednesday Letter, University of Maryland School of Law Professor Robert Percival wrote in defense of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s move to politicize the Supreme Court—a move which he denies.

But what drew my attention was this statement regarding Roe v Wade and his concept of constitutional rights:

Justice White opposed creating new constitutional rights, but he didn’t think the court should take back rights once they were well-established.

What Percival has chosen to ignore here is the distinction between “well-established” and “long extant.”

The decision of Roe lasted a long time, but the equally long fight against abortion at various stages of pregnancy, in parallel with the equally long fight to reverse Roe, demonstrates that the “constitutional right” was not at all well established.

The Press Censors

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And it tries to whitewash history, pretending what it’s censoring never happened.

The latest example is provided by NBC. That press outlet tweeted this, saying that Hispanic illegal aliens were just trash:

Now, as Molly Hemingway, Federalist Editor-in-Chief, has noted, NBC has cravenly deleted their tweet.

NBC didn’t—doesn’t—have the integrity or moral courage to leave the tweet in the public’s history with a note acknowledging its error. No, the press outlet has chosen instead to cower away, hide its tweet, and try to gaslight us average Americans into believing that the bigoted tweet never occurred at all.

Hemingway is being generous, too. NBC and its allies don’t just look horrific. They are horrific in the depths of their racist bigotry.