UPDATE: Man shot by Fairfax Cops after grabbing their gun, chasing wife with knife is illegal alien who Fairfax DA Steve Descano freed after he suffocated, assaulted, and abducted someone in April 2026. Nehemia Fuentes Banegas He also has 6! “No drivers license charges” and reckless driving.

The real pipeline was never from school suspensions to prison. It was always school disengagement. For too long, schools have replaced punishment with restorative justice and other mental-health-oriented approaches. The theory was to remove the punishment and collapse the pipeline. But a student acting out to escape a math worksheet doesn't care whether he's given a suspension or sent to a restorative circle. Either way, the worksheet is gone, and the student becomes more disengaged. The answer isn't no consequences. It's consequences that change behavior by breaking the connection between misbehavior and its payoff while keeping students engaged in school. @CarolynGorman_ and I explain this in @CityJournal:

Working @ManhattanInst under @reihan has been the most rewarding experience of my life. MI is on a mission. We will continue to engage on policy substance and produce rigorous, nuanced, and historically informed research and commentary. We will oppose socialism locally and nationally, but we're open to good ideas and constructive collaboration. We will work tirelessly to keep America and its great cities—NYC above all—prosperous, safe, and free.

Opponents of @NYCMayor have tried (and failed) to attack him on things like his religion, his affiliations, and his inability to benchpress 135 lb. The @ManhattanInst is trying something different by debating his policies. Whatever you may think of Mayor Mamdani or the Manhattan Institute, a healthy debate of the most consequential issues facing residents is crucial for democratic society. Ideally, it'll take the best parts of everyone's ideas to form policies that truly work for all New Yorkers.

Mehdi Hasan is a believer that American Whites need to pay reparations for slavery. Why doesn't he, as an "American" Shia Muslim, pay reparations to the American victims of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Hezbollah bombings in the 1980s?

When @POTUS authorized the Memphis Safe Task Force, critics expressed skepticism; but the results are in: violent and property crime rates are dropping fast w/ the surge of federal resources. I joined @cabot_phillips on @realDailyWire Live to discuss my reporting on that effort:

This idea that the government can solve crime without policing and incarceration by simply “investing” in more programs is baseless and very, deeply wrong—as is the idea that governments _*cannot*_ provide public safety _*unless*_ we address the so-called “root causes” of crime (which politicians like this falsely assert are socioeconomic in nature). First, serious violence is NOT driven by socioeconomic factors. The research on this is clear. See, e.g., this literature review from Jens Ludwig assessing the effect of transfer programs on serious violence: Second, to whatever extent violence might be driven by socioeconomic factors (it’s not), the history of New York (and that of other cities) illustrates clearly that those factors need not be addressed to control crime. In 1990, NYC experienced 2,262 murders. By 2017, that number had gotten down to 292. I can assure you (as can anyone in the DSA), that during that period, NYC did not eliminate (or even substantially reduce) poverty, income inequality, etc. The homicide rate didn’t spike during the Great Recession (when the unemployment rate doubled), and it’s gone down significantly since 2021 after spiking a year earlier despite the poverty rate going up every year since 2022. (see, e.g., The social science literature is unambiguous in its demonstration of the FACT that policing (and other forms of social control) reduces crime. Here’s a short digest: • Social Control Works- • Hiring police saves lives (especially in black neighborhoods)- • As recently as 2010, year-over-year increases in policing expenditures produced returns of 63% on each additional dollar spent- • Expanding police patrols reduced crime on adjacent city blocks by between 47-73%- • Surging officers to high-crime precincts reduces violence significantly- • Increasing police presence in an area reduces crime in both the area and on adjacent blocks: • Meta analysis showing that policing disorder, specifically, reduces overall crime- • Stepping up patrols reduces shootings- Then there are the empirically demonstrable incapacitation effects of incarceration, which reduce crime by keeping active offenders behind bars… So no, you don’t need to address root causes to control crime; and yes, we should absolutely spend more on traditional crime control measures because they work better than anything else that can be done at scale.

Is ShotSpotter racist? ShotSpotter CEO @ralphaclark responds: "That's a real personal attack for me...I always find it curious that when people look at [it] through a lens of law enforcement showing up as a protector...wouldn't you want to enable that law enforcement agency to have a tool to be able to respond to criminal gunfire? And why would that be racist?" Ralph Clark, CEO of SoundThinking (formerly ShotSpotter), sits down with @Rafa_Mangual to address common attacks and misconceptions about ShotSpotter:

At SoundThinking, we believe the best conversations about public safety are grounded in facts, evidence, and real-world experience. In this @ManhattanInst podcast with Rafael Mangual, our President and CEO, Ralph Clark, addresses the most common questions and misconceptions surrounding ShotSpotter, discussing the data, the challenges facing communities, and the role technology can play in helping law enforcement respond to gun violence more effectively. These conversations matter. Every day, our mission is to help public safety professionals from detection to decision—accelerating response, supporting investigations, and ultimately helping to save lives while serving communities with transparency and accountability. Full podcast:

Amazing that she’s never heard of him, though admittedly Henrich emphasizes ideas unwelcome in today’s academy—that the West’s historical advantage (which itself would be disputed by most leftist professors these days) grew out of the medieval Church’s teaching on marriage and family, which shattered clans and banned cousin marriage, and built a social world based on nuclear families and voluntary associations. The psychology that developed, Henrich maintains, was individualistic, stranger-trusting, rule-following, and patient, and made markets work and innovation explode. Rob’s excellent essay on Henrich’s opus WEIRD (a book that won the 2022 Hayek Prize) explores these themes.