September 5, 2025

Now, on to the news…

For years, Chicago has led the nation in overturning wrongful convictions. In some of these cases, the Cook County state’s attorney recommended that courts award “Certificates of Innocence” to former inmates based solely on policing irregularities. The resulting settlements have strained Chicago’s budget at a time when the city can hardly afford to pay.

According to Paul Vallas, these suits have yielded a windfall for law firms and advanced the goals of progressive criminal-justice reformers. “Whether because of their worldview or their wallets,” he argues, activists “don’t care that their policies divert hundreds of millions of dollars from public needs and let violent criminals become millionaires upon release.” 

Read more here.

According to Jeffery C. Mays at the New York Times, Zohran Mamdani is not really a socialist. He claims, in fact, that “[t]he closest Mr. Mamdani gets to socialism is in his belief in treating people more equitably.”

Mamdani’s record suggests otherwise. As Ken Girardin recounts, the self-described “democratic socialist” mayoral candidate has backed a “social housing” proposal, called for “democratic control” of gas and electric utilities, and proposed the creation of city-run grocery stores. A review of Mamdani’s statements, Girardin writes, “fails to reveal any sort of limiting principle with respect to private property.”

Jon Hartley is a Ph.D. candidate and a graduate worker at Stanford University. In June, he received an email from the local affiliate of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, calling on university administrators to fire him and other graduate workers who had declined to pay union dues.

His case is representative of a broader pattern. At universities across the country, student workers are often unable to opt out of paying dues to highly ideological unions, which use members’ money to bankroll progressive activism. “Forcing Ph.D. students into ideological unions undermines academic freedom, burdens the poorest students, and turns research training into a battleground for national politics,” he writes.

Read the rest of his story here.

“Americans should ask themselves some simple questions: Should we ‘celebrate’ schizophrenia? Is bipolar disorder or OCD a ‘lifestyle choice?’ How is it that we have allowed the left to elevate mental illnesses to the status of a human right, even when it requires the destruction of objective reality to accommodate them?”

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ata777, commenting on Christopher F. Rufo’s “Transgenderism Ends in Nihilism”

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