Charles Fain Lehman
@CharlesFLehman
Senior Fellow @ManhattanInst • Senior Editor @CityJournal • Crime, Drugs, Vice, Cities • Opinions my own
1.8K Following 22.4K Followers
I'm in @TheFP this morning on the ways in which pot is more like cigarettes than like alcohol, and what that augurs for weed's political future.
Bipartisan tax revolt arguably the most important state and local policy story no one is following systematically
By law, Rikers must close in 423 days.
Is NYC ready today? No.
There are 6,497 people detained in the Rikers jail complex.
That's 3,197 more than the city could detain if it closed Rikers.
3,636 are charged with murder or another violent felony.
#CloseRikers#
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No nation on earth, including the United States, understands the role of government to work in the way you do. In the American tradition, regulations of activities like gambling are substantially older than the Republic. The states and cities have and have always had broad authority on matters of health, welfare, safety, and morals (this is called the police power). Today, they exercise that power on matters spanning guns, cars, pollution, and vaccines. That power includes, and has always included, the regulation and prohibition of gambling.
The reason for this is that the division you're drawing is totally meaningless. There are no harmful practices that only harm the person engaging in them. Gambling has all sorts of measurable knock-on social effects — there's a robust literature on the effects of legalizing sports gambling that speaks to this. The public interest is served by limiting these effects, and the most efficient way to limit them often is prohibition.
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No nation on earth, including the United States, understands the role of government to work in the way you do. In the American tradition, regulations of activities like gambling are substantially older than the Republic. The states and cities have and have always had broad authority on matters of health, welfare, safety, and morals (this is called the police power). Today, they exercise that power on matters spanning guns, cars, pollution, and vaccines. That power includes, and has always included, the regulation and prohibition of gambling.
The reason for this is that the division you're drawing is totally meaningless. There are no harmful practices that only harm the person engaging in them. Gambling has all sorts of measurable knock-on social effects — there's a robust literature on the effects of legalizing sports gambling that speaks to this. The public interest is served by limiting these effects, and the most efficient way to limit them often is prohibition.
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We should legalize murder for hire. Currently, people still do it, but there’s a dangerous black market in murderers that could end up hurting customers. Taxation and regulation would make everyone safer!
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By law, Rikers must close in 423 days.
Is NYC ready today? No.
There are 6,497 people detained in the Rikers jail complex.
That's 3,197 more than the city could detain if it closed Rikers.
3,636 are charged with murder or another violent felony.
#CloseRikers#
Show more
America is and remains the greatest country in the history of the world. 🇺🇸
I knew patriotism had declined in the United States. But hadn't realized we're actually below the world average now.
New paper finds that the arrest of Luigi Mangione—and, therefore, the revelation that he had murdered Bryan Thompson—appeared to cause Democrats to increase their support for partisan violence.
The authors exploit a large, two-wave survey that asked about support for political violence and was coincidentally fielded before and after the murder.
They compare responses before and after Thompson's death and Mangione's arrest. The former event led to a slight decrease in support for violence among Democrats. But the latter caused a significant increase in their support for a hypothetical act of partisan violence:
"For instance, comparing 7 days before and after the arrest, Democrats are estimated to agree 9 points more than Republicans that the partisan violent act described in the mock newspaper article 'could be justified' depending on the circumstances, and 7 points more than Republicans that the perpetrator in the mock article 'was likely provoked to react like that'."
I doubt these results hold for just Democrats, to be clear. Rather, I think they suggest that high-profile political violence can, when committed by a charismatic or appealing offender for an allegedly just cause, persuade partisans left or right to be more supportive of political violence at the margins. As the authors write:
"Support for interpartisan violence among Democrats rose only after Mangione’s public identification and arrest, that is, when a legitimizing, moralized narrative about his actions gained traction. This narrative may have activated feelings of moral justification and in-group solidarity, fostering tolerance for violence when perceived as serving a just cause."
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By law, Rikers must close in 424 days.
Is NYC ready today? No.
There are 6,514 people detained in the Rikers jail complex.
That's 3,214 more than the city could detain if it closed Rikers.
3,645 are charged with murder or another violent felony.
#CloseRikers#
Show more
This is one of the rhetorical modes for talking about patriotism when you actually don't like America very much.
What makes America great? Well, what, theoretically, it will be in the future!
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Mamdani: There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it: American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in far away lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here.
And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.
For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.
We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.
The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence-that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all.
It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel— the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too.
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You can literally just ban gambling.
By law, Rikers must close in 424 days.
Is NYC ready today? No.
There are 6,514 people detained in the Rikers jail complex.
That's 3,214 more than the city could detain if it closed Rikers.
3,645 are charged with murder or another violent felony.
#CloseRikers#
Show more
I do think you could get 80%+ support for a constitutional amendment restricting birthright citizenship to children of citizens or permanent residents.
A serious effort to revise or reform birthright citizenship would have begun with legislation, not an Executive Order that contravenes existing law.
I mean, probably not. But the social network that contains both Kassem and Chevalier - overlapping, eg, with CUAD and Mahmoud Khalil - is a group with pretty disturbing views!
People have got to stop covering Mamdani like the British Royals. There's a serious story buried in here: Did Avila Chevalier — a candidate with some alarming views and baggage — get Mamdani's endorsement because she's dating his chief legal counsel.
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Mamdani deserves real credit for staying the course here, against the demands of his allies.
I know y’all hate good news but NYC just set a record for fewest murders in the first half of the year. Amazing.
Pew says 9% of kids are born to illegal or temporary immigrants.
If the 14th amendment says they’re all citizens, that’s what it says. But that’s a pretty crazy policy outcome, imo!
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I don't really have a strong opinion on the meaning of the 14th amendment, but it seems to me hard to come up with a policy justification for jus soli, especially expansive jus soli, in the 21st century.
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Sorry I thought he was a smol bean who just wanted freaking health care
🚨 Hasan Piker just shouted out DSA’s Liberation Caucus, the Maoist caucus that signed the “Free Elias Rodriguez” statement after Rodriguez allegedly murdered two embassy staffers.
The statement framed the killings as building a “popular cradle of resistance.”
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.@christopherrufo is one of the people I know who is thinking the most deeply, publicly and privately, about how today's right can remain effective without also capitulating to its demons. His thoughts here are well worth your time:
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