COLD SPRING SHOPS.

The Rittenhouse verdict comes on the heels of the oral argument in an important Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court, addressing the right of people to carry weapons in public. The case, argued on Nov. 3, raises the question whether states can deny people concealed-carry permits without an extraordinary reason for doing so. At oral argument, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority seemed poised to rule that the Constitution protects the right to such permits. It might not be an unlimited right, as some of the court’s conservative justices expressed concern that there should not be a right to carry a weapon in crowded spaces, such as sports stadiums or Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

But beyond that, the justices seemed very willing to proclaim that everyone has a right to carry a weapon in public. Their basic reasoning goes to the heart of the Rittenhouse case. To the court’s conservatives, the world is a place where you always need a weapon because of the ever-present possibility you will be attacked and need to use your gun in self-defense. This is exactly the defense Rittenhouse successfully used in his trial.

The Supreme Court won’t rule on this case until next year, probably in late June. But the writing is on the wall given the questioning earlier this month and reveals just how conservative this set of justices is. There’s never a guarantee, but almost everyone believes that by the middle of next year there will be a constitutional right to carry a weapon in public, maybe with a few exceptions.

What this means in conjunction with the Rittenhouse verdict is very scary for all, but especially for racial-justice protesters everywhere. With a proliferation of concealed-carry permits and a sense among the far right after today’s verdict that they have the freedom to patrol racial-justice protests and act as vigilantes, the court system’s message couldn’t be clearer — anyone who protests against racial injustice risks taking their lives into their own hands.

Mayors and governors should ask themselves how much responsibility did they have for the chaos in . . . well, how many cities was it? Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, New York, St. Louis, . . . Isn’t their first job to protect the rights of their citizens, to work toward answers, to heal. Surely it isn’t to manufacture racial strife – and it had to be manufactured in several cases before this last, egregious one.

A decade ago, during a traffic stop, a Milwaukee police officer jumped inside Brooks’ car, fearing he was about to be run over. The officer had pulled him over for not wearing a seat belt. As Brooks began to drive away while the officer was talking to him, the officer got inside the car and wrestled for control of the steering wheel.

Eventually, the officer was able to stop the car and removed the keys. Brooks ran away from the car, court records say, and he was arrested hiding in a children's playhouse in the same block. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in that case.

Supper club owners through the decades were characters in their own right, including bootleggers and makers of moonshine during Prohibition and gambling scofflaws. [Author Ron] Faiola documents scrapes, a bombing and other rough (and even lethal) stuff.

And there were the one-of-a-kind club owners, like Paul "Frenchy" La Pointe of Frenchy's on the east side. "He was kind of a Runyonesque character," Faiola said.

La Pointe, who operated a speakeasy downtown in Prohibition, hired the likes of Louis Armstrong and Bobby Short to perform at his midcentury supper club; a song, "Frenchy's Boogie," was written for La Pointe, Faiola said. Later, the club served exotic-game dinners.

Studying people who are attracted to minors is clearly protected by academic freedom principles, and is indeed important to figuring out ways to prevent them from acting on these impulses. It seems likely that there are many millions of people like that; whether we want to change their attraction (if that's even possible) or just to get them not to act on that attraction, we need to study them and to study what allows some of them to resist their impulses.

Many adults, after all, resist their sexual impulses; adults who might prefer having multiple sexual partners, or who fantasize about multiple sexual partners, nonetheless remain faithful to their spouses. Many adults who are deeply attracted to someone with whom they know they shouldn't be sexually involved resist such temptations. Many priests or monks or nuns who have normal sexual interests in others resist that attraction because they believe that abstinence from sex is part of their religious calling.

Perhaps this is possible for adults who are attracted to children (I certainly hope it is). Perhaps it's not. But only being open to seriously studying this, including in ways that morally condemn only people who act on their attraction and not those who merely feel the attraction, can help us figure that out.

Mad-positive pedagogy works by addressing and countering the ableism and sanism that is rampant within university practices and systems. For instance, some universities have begun offering Mad Studies, which aims to question what society takes for granted about mental illness.

Trauma-informed pedagogy takes an intersectional approach at recognizing different types of traumas and stresses that range from pandemic-related trauma, historical trauma, individual, community, and other types of general stressors.

Matthew Bauerle, a graduate student, said he was confused about what the project was trying to prove.

“An explicit goal was to get people to say ‘what if it was reversed’ which the student said was the actual case in the USA. I don’t know of any place that explicitly gives out product to white people for free but price gouges minorities,” Bauerle told Campus Reform.

Bauerle also explained why the social experiment was not a good idea, and how it may have broken university guidelines.

“My opinion was that it was a disgusting project that explicitly violates University policy. Because masks are required for most indoor activities, it could be interpreted to be a white only fee for activities," he said. "The fact that this was a class project makes it worse because it was approved by a professor.”

Ronin Hackworth, also a student, told Campus Reform, “There’s a weird fascination with race in universities and MSU is certainly no expectation to that.”

Hackworth added, “With the university the way it is, I’ve learned to just kind of roll my eyes and get on with my day.”

Even if he isn't guilty of murder and his open carrying of a rifle was legal, Rittenhouse's decision to enter a "war zone" was extremely stupid. It does not matter whether he believed he was helping to maintain order. Despite the American mythology of indomitable voluntarism, sometimes it's better just to stay home.

But the same is true of Rittenhouse's alleged victims. Initially characterized as harmless bystanders, it turned out that they included a homeless convicted child abuser who was treated for a suicide attempt on very day he died; a demonstrator with his own record of violent conduct; and a gun enthusiast and self-appointed (though also certified) paramedic loosely affiliated with something called the People's Revolution movement.

To put it bluntly, these are the profiles of people who find trouble without looking very hard.

Previous misdeeds aren't legally relevant, of course, but their biographies suggest Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreuz had more in common with Rittenhouse and each other than you might expect from the contingent circumstances of their encounter. To different degrees, these men share histories of family instability, domestic abuse, and run-ins with the law. From this perspective, the real story here may not be the ideological clash that fascinates commentators. Instead, it's a tragic encounter among lost "boys" (Rosenbaum, the oldest and most disturbed, was 36, Huber and Grosskreuz were in their 20s, and Rittenhouse was just 17) for whom political causes were likely a pretext for seeking excitement, camaraderie, and danger.

Two weeks ago, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) drew much derision and some praise for suggesting there is something very wrong with a society that offers few prospects to the lonely, damaged men our educational, economic, and political institutions seem to generate in large numbers. The tragedy in Kenosha suggests he's right.

A 9-year-old boy suffered a gunshot wound to his leg when a man's rifle was accidentally discharged during a cleaning, according to the Door County Sheriff's Office.

The sheriff's office reported that when a 45-year-old man mishandled his gun while cleaning it, a shot fired and struck the boy Sunday morning in the Town of Nasewaupee. The child was lying on the couch at the time.

The child was airlifted to a Green Bay hospital to be treated for his injuries.

The Wisconsin DNR doesn’t investigate how treestand accidents happen, and hospitals aren’t required to document the injuries and their outcomes. In contrast, the DNR is required to thoroughly investigate, and hospitals document, every shooting incident. Those data tell us that Wisconsin averaged 0.75 gunshot deaths annually during the past decade’s deer seasons.

Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

Education Week’s Stephen Sawchuk observed, “Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism.” Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, two founders of the CRT movement, write in their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, “Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

To put the matter as mildly as possible, it would be strange to think that a system of thought that questions the “very foundations of the liberal order” would be regarded as anything other than an existential threat to an education system built on that very order. It should be obvious that these foundational concepts are key to understanding why reasonable people might have reservations about introducing CRT to the classroom. But CRT’s skepticism of rational thought, liberalism, universal values, and objective knowledge was mentioned in less than 5 percent of CRT news articles. Eliding this is particularly egregious, since the failure to note any intellectual objection leaves readers free to assume that objections to CRT are rooted in racism, not rationality or a defense of Enlightenment views and values. One doesn’t need a study—eyes and ears will suffice—to acknowledge that this is precisely how the debate has played out. CRT is not “just teaching honest history,” it’s a revolutionary doctrine.

To admit that the press, in the main, got just about every key fact in the Rittenhouse case wrong — that he crossed state lines with a gun, that he had the gun illegally, that he had no connection to Kenosha, that he was connected to white supremacist groups — has nothing to do with whether Kyle Rittenhouse should have gone to Kenosha that day. It has nothing to do with where one stands on the question of open carry. (I am opposed). Or whether or not a teenager should be allowed to walk around with a semiautomatic rifle. (I find it baffling that this is legal.)

No teenager should have been walking around the chaos in Kenosha with a semiautomatic rifle that night. Still, doing so does not forfeit your right to self-defense.

Rittenhouse and his violent acts (justified or unjustified) are tragic. But it is a tragedy that could have been avoided. We saw the night of August 25 what can occur when the state fails or refuses to do what it is uniquely charged to do: maintain the rule of law.

It did not help that in many places last summer, cities and police forces indicated or explicitly said they wouldn’t defend people’s property from destruction or burglary during the unrest. And it didn’t help our understanding of what transpired on August 25 that we were told repeatedly by national media outlets that there weren’t riots, and there wasn’t violence in Kenosha that night until Kyle Rittenhouse discharged his weapon. We could all see the blocks of burning buildings with our own eyes.

To acknowledge the facts of what happened that night is not political. It is simply to acknowledge reality. It is to say that facts are still facts and that lies are lies. It is to insist that mob justice is not justice. It is to say that media consensus is not the equivalent of due process.

In any event, some genius decided that telling people to stay home, closing businesses, closing schools, just shutting people in, would interrupt transmission. Kind of funny since a lot of transmission occurs in the home. All I will say is that people can do all the dumb modeling studies they want, look at epidemic curves everywhere and explain how any of those tactics made any difference, especially in the long run.

Our public health experts, most of whom are employed by the government or academic medical centers, have distinguished themselves with their unrelenting poor advice, usually backed with no data or research. And I say this seriously, while some of these people may be bright and productive, you end up in government for a reason and people in both government and academia are highly risk-averse and not very good at logical analysis or sound decision-making. And as Exhibit A, I give you the responses they have crafted and are still crafting to this epidemic. Two years in, no evidence that any of it works–closing things down, testing everyone constantly and tracing contacts, masking, social distancing, plastic barriers every where–none of it has made a bit of difference. But they are still pushing the same insipid, inane measures, because by God, they might work this time. The politicians and the public health experts lack the basic common sense to say “we aren’t going to do anything until we have clear evidence that it will actually lessen spread”.

What would a better approach have been? It would have started with more respect for real data and science and more tailoring of mitigation measures to address the obvious bifurcation of serious disease. We should have focused on protection of the frail elderly, although realistically there was never a lot that could be done, and we forced absolute isolation on an already lonely group. We never should have closed schools or businesses. Mask mandates were and remain a delusion and a fetish. So yes, we should have accepted the inevitable and let people make their own decisions, with as good a data and advice as we could provide, about what activities they would engage in and what protective measures they would adopt. We would be in no different place than we are now, just faster and with less total pain.

CV-19 is taking us where we were always going to go. It is going to run through the population until enough of us have adaptive immunity, potentially aided by vaccines, to keep transmission and serious disease to a very low level. Florida may be there. Even then, it isn’t going away. Can anyone in their right mind actually believe we are going to suppress this virus?

Nolan Gray, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, launched the bracket at the end of October to determine what people think is the best city in America.

And, of course, who didn’t think Milwaukee wouldn’t reign supreme, what with the Bucks, Brewers, Summerfest and all that delicious beer.

Gray started the round of 64 on Oct. 26 and 27. People had 24 hours to vote via Twitter polls. The No. 10 seed Milwaukee narrowly beat out No. 7 seed Austin in the first round, 53% to 47%.

During the round of 32, Milwaukee blew second-seeded Miami out of the water, 59.5% to 40.5%.

The round of 16 was held on Halloween. Once again, Milwaukee dominated. It beat out No. 3 seed San Francisco, 59% to 41%.

Wisconsin competed with its neighbor to the west in the quarterfinal round, with Milwaukee taking down Minneapolis, 54.8% to 45.2%.

In the semifinals, Milwaukee faced border rival Chicago. And while it was a nail-biter, Milwaukee pulled out the win, 51.9% to 48.1%, to move on to the championship game against New York, where it once again reigned supreme.

On Saturday, after proclaiming Milwaukee the winner, Gray reached out to his great expansion of friends living on a Great Lake, tweeting, “So, uh, to my 2,000 new Milwaukeean followers: I’ve never been to your city and now feel an obligation to correct that. Anyone want to show me around?”

What [political consultant Danny] Barefoot found is that while the women agreed with Democrats on policy, they just didn’t connect with them. When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.

The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped.

It was the purest expression of the way Republicans have driven the fight over schools and then capitalized on it. The fear of public schools indoctrinating our children has been a GOP theme for its base voters for decades, but in the wake of Trump’s rise, the party watched in horror as suburban voters recoiled from Republicans into the arms of Democrats. Casting about for an issue that could win some of them back — recall that this is a game of margins, not absolutes — the party landed on schools. Around the country, the conservative media apparatus, unrivaled by Democrats, gave air cover to the schooling issue — handing local activists language to use, a story to tell, and the resources and platform to tell it.

Properly understanding how different voting blocs understand the terms of the debate, however, unlocks the contradiction: The culture war is not a proxy for race, it’s a proxy for class. The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.

Now, for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice, the culture war and issues like critical race theory easily work as dog whistles calling them to the polls. But for many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the Democratic Party. Take, for instance, one of the women in Barefoot’s focus groups. When asked if Democrats share their cultural values, she said, “They fight for the right things and I usually vote for them but they believe some crazy things. Sometimes I feel like if I don’t know the right words for things they think I am a bigot.”

Cultural traditionalists, according to [political strategist Andrew] Levison, also think of government as often wasteful and inefficient and of politicians as corrupt and bought off — but they don’t think government is inherently evil and can be convinced that it can do good things. Meanwhile, they think Democrats are a party that “primarily represents social groups like educated liberals and racial or ethnic minorities while having little interest, understanding, or concern for ordinary white working people like themselves.”

Levison’s distinction between these cultural traditionalists and what he calls the extremists, except for that last part, can plausibly apply to many, many Black and Latino working-class people as well. And even that last part — that Democrats don’t have much interest or concern for ordinary white working people, specifically — is not really a value judgment, it’s a widespread interpretation of Democratic messaging that is not uniquely held by white voters.