Every long arrest video exposes the same failure



What do Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and a viral body-camera video from the University of Central Florida have in common? More than most people might think.

Last weekend, I attended an instructor-certification program at Gracie University in Torrance, California. It was my third time completing the training since I began studying Gracie Jiu-Jitsu six years ago. Rener and Ryron Gracie have developed a remarkable system that adapts essential techniques for real-world confrontations while prioritizing everyone’s safety.

The objective of every arrest should be simple: The officer goes home safely, the suspect enters custody alive and without unnecessary injury, and bystanders remain safe.

They also helped develop SafeWrap, a restraint system created after medical professionals asked for a safer way to control violent patients. Hospitals sometimes needed five or six nurses to restrain one belligerent person, exposing staff and patients to serious injury.

That problem came to mind while I watched the UCF video. The encounter has become another argument about pronouns, mental health, and whether the officer used the right words. Those questions may deserve discussion. But the video also reveals a more practical failure: It took officers far too long to place one resisting person in handcuffs.

The officer began with verbal commands. When those failed, he warned that he would use pepper spray. Backup arrived. The student continued resisting. Officers threatened a Taser and eventually deployed it, yet the struggle continued before they finally secured the handcuffs.

Whatever one thinks about the politics surrounding the incident, a prolonged physical struggle endangers everyone involved.

Every additional second increases the chance of serious injury. Officers suffer damaged shoulders, backs, and hands. Suspects can strike their heads, break bones, or experience medical emergencies. Bystanders can become involved. A routine arrest can turn into a tragedy when officers lack a reliable method for establishing control without escalating through increasingly severe force.

This is where Gracie training deserves serious attention.

I am a professor, not a police officer or medical professional. But I have trained in Gracie Combatives and SafeWrap, and the underlying principle is straightforward: Use position, leverage, and technique to control a dangerous person quickly while minimizing injury.

RELATED: ‘Just say the right pronoun!’ How one cop-cam video exemplifies the absurdity of 'hands-off' policing

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Police departments should study Gracie Survival Tactics. The program adapts the same philosophy behind SafeWrap for law enforcement, teaching officers to establish positional control, restrain resisting subjects, and transition safely to handcuffing.

Gracie Jiu-Jitsu teaches a smaller or weaker person to overcome a larger opponent through skill rather than brute force. Applied properly, those techniques help officers manage dangerous encounters involving suspects, bystanders, and fellow officers.

The goal is not to win a fight. It is to end the fight safely and move the suspect into the justice system.

Good control tactics can reduce the need for repeated strikes, prolonged wrestling, and repeated use of intermediate weapons. They also make officers less likely to escalate out of fear or frustration because they have techniques that work under pressure.

Pain compliance often fails when a person is intoxicated, mentally ill, or in extreme emotional distress. Pepper spray does not affect everyone equally. Tasers do not always produce immediate compliance. The UCF student was tased and still resisted.

RELATED: ‘Back the blue’ cannot mean blind obedience

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When those tools fail, officers need a dependable way to control the person. Simply forcing a suspect prone and placing a knee on the back is neither reliable nor always medically safe. A subject can still posture onto his hands and knees, and prolonged pressure can create additional risks.

Safe restraint training offers a better option. Departments around the country have trained with Rener Gracie, and law enforcement professionals have provided favorable testimonials. The Los Angeles Police Department has also discussed the program’s effectiveness here.

America spends enormous sums on police technology while devoting comparatively little time to ensuring that every officer has competent grappling and restraint skills. We would never expect firefighters to rely on better hoses while neglecting rescue training. Policing deserves the same practical standard.

The objective of every arrest should be simple: The officer goes home safely, the suspect enters custody alive and without unnecessary injury, and bystanders remain safe.

Viral arrest videos will always invite political arguments. But anyone who wants fewer injuries, lawsuits, and controversial uses of force should support one practical reform: Train officers to control resisting suspects safely, efficiently, and humanely before the encounter spirals into something worse.

I train at Gracie Glendale in Phoenix and value every trip to Gracie University in Torrance. Medical and law enforcement professionals should consider SafeWrap and Gracie Survival Tactics. Citizens who want policing to be both effective and humane should ask their local departments whether officers receive this kind of training.

America’s newest jail has no walls



Americans are looking for safety in an increasingly chaotic country. Mass immigration, collapsing social trust, and weakening civic bonds have transformed many communities from places where neighbors knew one another into anonymous zones governed by suspicion.

Technology promises an escape from the consequences of those political and cultural failures. Flock Safety cameras appear to offer law and order at the push of a button. In the hands of the ruling class that manufactured the crisis, however, they are more likely to produce tyranny for citizens.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system.

Municipalities are buying Flock’s automated license plate readers. The company did not invent plate cameras, but its artificial intelligence radically expands their reach.

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and record license plates, makes, colors, damage, bumper stickers, and identifiers. A single camera means little. A citywide network collecting thousands of images every day creates something powerful.

The cameras send their information to an AI database in real time. Police and other municipal employees can search for vehicles nearby. They can place cars on “hot lists” and receive alerts whenever those vehicles appear.

The system effectively places a GPS tracker on every moving car. Police ordinarily need a warrant to attach a tracker to your vehicle. Flock can reproduce the same surveillance through a network of cameras, often without probable cause, due process, or meaningful legal restraint.

The benefits are obvious. Perfect information about every vehicle makes suspects easier to find. Police can recover stolen cars, locate fleeing murderers, and respond faster to crimes.

In a high-trust town, every grandmother on the porch once knew which cars belonged and which did not. Flock offers a technological imitation of that lost social awareness.

But imitation carries a price. Grandma knew her neighbors and exercised human judgment. The database knows everyone and answers to government employees.

Flock is not alone in selling technological substitutes for social order. Cities have used gunshot-detection systems. Networks of acoustic sensors identify gunfire and triangulate its location, allowing police to respond faster.

The engineering may be impressive. The governing theory is primitive: If authorities watch and listen to everyone constantly, they can prevent more crimes and solve more cases.

RELATED: We’re winning the fight against Flock — but the surveillance isn’t going away that easily

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A surveillance panopticon may work. People who know they are always being watched behave differently. Americans have resisted that bargain for good reason.

The Fourth Amendment exists because efficient policing is not the highest political good. Government must possess evidence and follow procedures before invading the privacy of citizens. New technology should not erase old constitutional limits.

Britain offers a warning. Closed-circuit television cameras have become ubiquitous across the United Kingdom. Some estimates suggest that the average British resident appears on camera dozens of times each day.

Britain has no written equivalent of the Fourth Amendment, and its political culture places fewer obstacles before constant public surveillance. Yet cameras did not prevent the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal or protect thousands of vulnerable girls from organized abuse.

Officials ignored or concealed the crimes for years because confronting them threatened the ruling class’s multicultural ideology. When public anger finally erupted, the surveillance state proved far more competent at identifying and punishing citizens who protested the cover-up.

That is the anarcho-tyranny trap.

Conservative thinker Samuel Francis used the term to describe a regime that tolerates disorder while imposing suffocating control on peaceful citizens. Authorities fail to punish criminals, then use the chaos created by that failure to justify new powers over everyone else.

Americans have already seen the pattern.

The government possessed enormous amounts of video from the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Businesses burned, neighborhoods were looted, and citizens were assaulted. The system showed little appetite for using every available image to identify and prosecute everyone involved.

After January 6, the same government used surveillance footage, facial recognition, financial records, and digital communications to pursue participants with extraordinary intensity. Officials punished many who entered the Capitol and investigated people who merely stood nearby.

RELATED: Flock Safety CEO: It’s ‘terroristic’ to want to know where we put our spy cameras

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During the pandemic, technology companies yielded to government pressure, censored disfavored speech, and turned over user information. Neither the administrative state nor its corporate partners have earned the benefit of the doubt. They have repeatedly demonstrated that enforcement depends on the target.

I am less hostile to state power than many conservatives. A government that cannot control its borders, remove violent criminals, or maintain public order is not a serious government.

But power must be directed toward the common good. The officials asking for universal surveillance are the same officials who refuse to use ordinary authority against illegal immigration, organized crime, urban disorder, and politically favored mobs.

Giving them a database that tracks every American driver will not correct their priorities. It will magnify them.

Supporters will insist that only criminals need to worry. That argument assumes surveillance will remain limited to serious crime and that government will apply its powers impartially. Recent history destroys both assumptions.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system. A hot list can identify a murder suspect, an immigration protester, a gun owner, a church attendee, or anyone traveling to a disfavored rally.

The danger does not require a secret conspiracy. Bureaucracies naturally expand their missions. Politicians redefine threats. Private vendors seek new contracts. Once the infrastructure exists, every crisis supplies another justification for using it.

America’s disorder has obvious political causes. Elites imported cheap labor, weakened borders, excused criminality, and dissolved the social bonds that once allowed communities to police themselves informally. Citizens now feel like strangers in their own homeland.

Technology cannot repair that betrayal.

The difficult answers remain immigration restriction, deportation, competent policing, equal enforcement, and the restoration of families, neighborhoods, and civic trust. Cameras may assist legitimate police work, but they cannot substitute for political courage.

Flock promises safety without social repair. The bargain is tempting because rebuilding order is difficult.

Americans should refuse it.

Rewarding the people who created the crisis with the power to monitor every movement will not restore a high-trust society. It will lock law-abiding citizens inside an open-air prison while the disorder continues beyond the cameras’ reach.

'Just say the right pronoun!' How one cop-cam video exemplifies the absurdity of 'hands-off' policing



Cop-cam videos are one of my favorite guilty pleasures. Seeing the badly behaved and the thuggish get what’s coming to them is a rare treat in an America that has abandoned personal responsibility and consequences for bad behavior.

But the pleasure turns to frustration too often. In most of these videos, the police waste minutes to an hour repeating their orders to a struggling suspect who has no intention of obeying.

Any parent of a toddler knows that you don’t negotiate with terrorists.

Take the latest viral example: a blue-haired college kid of indeterminate gender demanding that the cop “use my pronouns” before “consenting” to being arrested (yes, they do think they have a choice).

What should have been a simple arrest turns into an eight-minute installment of absurdist theater. It is truly something to behold.

Missed manners

Before we get to that, consider the general cultural context of such videos. Anyone in their 40s or older knows that standards of public behavior in America ain’t what they used to be. Manners are a thing of the past. People walk their carts up the middle of aisles, oblivious to anyone needing to get by. They sail through doors you hold without acknowledgment.

And that's just on foot. Rules of the road? Forget it. Everyone at a four-way stop is either trying to jump the right-of-way line or they’ve forgotten the rule altogether. Or they don’t care.

The other day I ran across an honest-to-God telephone booth preserved as part of a nostalgia display at an amusement park. These were built for a world with manners. People were motivated to build booths for phones because they assumed the caller wanted privacy and that the caller didn’t want to inflict his conversation on passersby. Quaint, no?

Broken windows

We're living through a nationwide experiment in abandoning broken-windows policing. It's just plain old common sense: When authorities let the "little" things slide — graffiti, vandalism, public disorder, petty lawbreaking — they teach people that the rules don't matter. Bigger offenses inevitably follow. New York City learned that lesson the hard way before Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton restored order in the 1990s by cracking down on so-called "quality of life" crimes.

It’s obviously true. But Democrats, leftists, and communists don’t like law and order. What they like is pretending that having rules for civil society is oppression. What they like even more is getting cities to defund their police departments so that criminals have a rules-free playground at everyone else’s expense. They do this by whining that mean, bad, Republican “fascists” like Giuliani were hurting “people of color” and “unhoused people” with these awful rules and laws.

You can see it in this essay on the blog Common Justice. Author “Cade T.,” who styles himself a “community organizer,” says cracking down on law and order is targeting those oppressed brown people again.

“Ultimately, the fear is that crime will become contagious and endemic in the urban environment,” he writes. “Under Giuliani, the NYPD identified neighborhoods in which to crack down on minor crimes. Not only did broken windows policing fail to reduce crime, but it also provided cover for a deliberate targeting of Black and brown communities.”

No respect

This is simply not true. Giuliani's policy resulted in a dramatic decrease in violent crime. It stands to reason. When people see police take a hands-off approach — especially toward groups the political class considers "protected" — they naturally become bolder. We see it every time hundreds of black teens riot through city streets while news anchors timidly describe the violence as nothing more than a “teen takeover.”

A large number of Americans — especially younger ones — neither fear nor respect the police. Why would they? As Forbes reported in 2020, at least 13 major American cities cut police funding or staffing in response to the BLM movement, while many smaller jurisdictions created such a hostile political climate that officers no longer felt confident their own departments would support them for simply doing their jobs. Small cities like Montpelier, Vermont, now struggle to recruit and retain enough officers.

The video below shows what hands-off policing looks like in the 2020s. Even when cops are willing to try to do their job, they’re strangely timid about effecting an arrest in a way I don’t remember police acting when I was a young man.

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Gender special

Our protagonist is a young man I’ll call a “gender special.” He’s obese, his hair is dyed blue, and he simpers as he gesticulates, using a falsely high voice. It’s eight minutes long. If you’re pressed for time, just watch the first two minutes, and then the last two minutes. The whole thing is worth watching, though: The young man screams “JUST SAY SHE” repeatedly at the cops, jumping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin when his true name was spoken.

The encounter takes place on a Florida college campus. The cops were there to deal with a car theft. The blue-haired person begins screaming at the cops; it’s not clear why. The cops tell the shrieking man to lower his voice and stop freaking out or he’s going to be cuffed and taken for a psychiatric hold. So far, so good.

And then all hell breaks loose, and the cops waste almost seven minutes shouting repeated orders at the increasingly aggressive blue-hair. The trouble is, they don’t make good on those threats immediately. The tantrum-thrower escalates; he claims to be “scared”; he screams at the cops to stop harassing him (they’re not); and he pitches a fit at being referred to as “sir.”

He even threatens the cop with “f**king try it” when the cop warns him he’ll be handcuffed.

Tantrum terrorist

Any parent of a toddler knows that you don’t negotiate with terrorists. You give them one warning, and if they keep fussing, you bodily control them and remove them from the scene. Otherwise, the tantrum gets worse.

That’s the mistake the cops made. I watched the video and counted the number of verbal warnings and commands the cops gave before finally making good on the threat to take him down in cuffs: 14.

The blue-hair’s resistance didn’t stop there. Even after he was in custody, cops had to tase him twice before he finally stopped kicking and fighting.

Back the blue

Policing needs to go back to the way it used to be. Before recent years, we never saw cops who were afraid to arrest a disorderly suspect. Why do they keep giving orders repeatedly while their subject escalates? Don’t they see that failing to follow through on promised consequences teaches the suspect and onlookers that people can, in fact, break the law and the cops won’t do anything about it?

Yes. It does teach that lesson. And that’s part of why we now see behavior every day on the street that only used to happen in mental hospitals.

But the police are not the problem. The governments, municipalities, and mayors' offices are the problem. Cops are working in hostile territory. They know their civilian superiors not only do not support them, but are often working to target their own police force for false complaints of racism and brutality that can cost a cop his career.

If we want the boys in blue to have our backs, we have to make sure someone has theirs.

Citizen Vigilante Aims Wildly Popular Punisher Genre At Politically Incorrect Migrant Invaders

If we are used to movies showing us multiculturalism™ as a moral good, Citizen Vigilante dares to say it can also be viewed as a moral failing.

Mark Fuhrman is dead, but his question still hangs over America



Los Angeles Police Department Detective Mark Fuhrman, who died last week at 74, played a central role in the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial. But even now, more than 30 years on, that needs clarification. Simpson, the former NFL star and actor, stood trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In the courtroom, however, the real defendant often seemed to be Fuhrman.

Fuhrman collected key physical evidence, including the bloody glove. So Simpson’s defense team made the detective, not the accused killer, the trial’s main target. Fuhrman had denied using the “N-word,” but the defense proved otherwise and, from that point, argued that he could have planted evidence. On the other side, prosecutor Marcia Clark looked overmatched, and Christopher Darden did little better.

Mark Fuhrman can rest in peace knowing he was right all along.

As a stringer for the Washington Times, I was at the courthouse for the verdict. An airplane circled above towing a banner that read, “If it does not fit you must acquit — bulls**t.” I believed Simpson was guilty, but when the acquittal came down, I felt some relief. This was Los Angeles, where many people believe police do nothing but harass, beat, and kill black people. When that narrative takes hold, the default response is to burn down the city. The gangs were ready. For plenty of others, the verdict was a joke.

Jay Leno joked about Simpson’s new show, “My So-Called Knife,” while others volunteered to help O.J. “find the real killer.” As Fox News later noted, Fuhrman was convicted of perjury, making him the only person connected to the case who was convicted of a crime related to the trial. Yet many of his colleagues still regarded him as a strong detective, and later events helped explain why.

In 1998, Fuhrman published “Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?” The victim, a 15-year-old girl, was beaten to death with a golf club in 1975. Fuhrman showed how Greenwich police had effectively acted as a private security force for the wealthy Skakel family. They were also badly out of their depth on a murder case and botched the investigation, especially the crime scene.

The murder weapon, a 6-iron, came from a set owned by the Skakels. The evidence pointed strongly to someone in the family. Michael Skakel, then 15, had a reputation for violent behavior, giving Martha reason to fear him. In 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years to life for her murder.

But the Skakels are related to the Kennedys, and in 2003 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a lengthy article for the Atlantic arguing that Michael was innocent and his conviction and imprisonment were “a miscarriage of justice.”

RELATED: Former LAPD detective: Political correctness and justice are not compatible

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In 2018, the Connecticut Supreme Court overturned Skakel’s conviction, ruling that his attorney had failed to present alibi evidence effectively. In 2020, a state prosecutor announced that Skakel would not be retried, and the murder charge was dropped.

Skakel then sued the prosecution, and in 2026 he is still denouncing “bold-faced lies.” The Moxley family have never wavered in their belief that Michael Skakel killed Martha, much as the Goldman family never wavered about O.J. Simpson.

In 1997, a jury found Simpson liable in a civil wrongful-death case. In 2007, a federal judge awarded the Goldman family rights to “If I Did It” to help satisfy the $38 million judgment against Simpson. Simpson died in 2024 at 76.

The Moxley case led Fuhrman to ask whether America has “two systems of justice in this country, one for the rich and another for the rest of us.” The same question hovered over the Simpson case.

Mark Fuhrman can rest in peace knowing he was more right than wrong.

The Gray-Haired ‘Free DC’ Crowd Wants To Free The Capital From Law And Order

While Navy Yard sees street brawls and property damage, Capitol Hill activists are protesting the National Guard from the comfort of their seven-figure homes.

Red-state inaction is the soft underbelly of border politics



Fourteen months into Trump’s second term, the verdict is in. No mass deportations. No major immigration reform. And if Democrats return to power, they will rip the doors off the hinges again.

Trump did slow the flow and put a dent in some outdated visa programs. But the results remain too small relative to the scale of what came before him and what may come after him.

One day, red states will need to enact these deterrents. The only question is timing.

That leaves one durable partial solution: Use red-state supermajorities to deter illegal aliens from settling in those states when the next wave comes. States may lack the power to deport illegal aliens outright, but they can make daily life harder. They can deny jobs and benefits, impose criminal penalties, and create a lasting deterrent that survives any one presidency.

Ron DeSantis appears to understand this in Florida. Almost no other Republican governor does.

Idaho offers the clearest example of the problem. On paper, it looks like the kind of state where serious immigration enforcement should be easy. Republicans hold 61-9 and 29-6 majorities in the House and Senate. Conservatives gained ground in the House thanks to the Freedom Caucus. Yet when the time came to pass meaningful reforms, the GOP establishment folded.

The House moved several bills. The Senate is quietly killing them. Gov. Brad Little (R) remains publicly silent, apparently hoping the issue dies in committee while he cruises to re-election under Trump’s preemptive endorsement and keeps his donor class happy.

The bills now stalled in Idaho expose the fraud.

H704 would mandate E-Verify for all public and private employers and give the state attorney general real enforcement power. It passed the House 43-26 despite opposition from 17 Republicans. It now sits dead in the Senate State Affairs Committee under Chairman Jim Guthrie and Senate President Pro Tempore Kelly Anthon.

H700 would make it a misdemeanor knowingly to hire illegal aliens without using E-Verify. That bill is also dead in the Senate, and 22 House Republicans opposed it.

H659 would require all counties and cities to cooperate with ICE through 287(g) agreements. In a state with barely any elected Democrats, one might assume mandatory ICE cooperation would be the easiest of calls. Instead, the bill passed the House 41-27, with 18 lukewarm Republicans joining Democrats in opposition, and now sits dead in the Senate State Affairs Committee.

H660 would require police to inquire about immigration status after a lawful arrest and would mandate a twice-yearly report on crimes committed by illegal aliens. By definition, this involves people already suspected of some other offense. Even so, the bill passed only 40-30 and is now being blocked in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

RELATED: The TSA showdown reveals a brutal truth about our politics

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H764 would create a state analogue to the federal statute that penalizes anyone who knowingly or recklessly conceals, harbors, transports, or materially assists illegal aliens. It includes misdemeanor and felony penalties, license revocations, and forfeiture provisions. In other words, it would build precisely the kind of standing deterrent red states will need when Democrats reopen the border. It has not even advanced out of committee.

S1318 would audit refugee-resettlement contractors in Idaho, including the number of refugees served, their demographic and language data, participation in language programs, housing use, geographic distribution, and relevant public-health statistics. It would also require disclosure if those entities aided illegal aliens. It remains blocked in the Senate State Affairs Committee.

H592 would require the state to track how many illegal aliens receive hospital services and how much that costs taxpayers. It would not deny care. It would merely quantify the burden. A similar law in Florida led to a drop in illegal-alien use of the health care system. Idaho’s bill has not moved.

H656 would do the same basic thing in schools by auditing the number of illegal aliens enrolled. It has gone nowhere.

How does this happen in a state so red? The answer is simple: Many Republican officials remain functionally progressive on immigration.

Little is deeply unpopular with the grassroots, but he neutralized the threat of a primary by securing Trump’s endorsement. Everyone knows he opposes these bills. He simply does not want to say so out loud. Better to let them die quietly in committee than risk angering the base or the business interests that still demand cheap labor.

Call it political Murphy’s law. DeSantis is term-limited in Florida. Brad Little gets a third term.

RELATED: Memo to Trump: Stop negotiating and ramp up deportations

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Even Florida has not gone far enough. It already has E-Verify, but lawmakers failed to remove the 25-employee exception. Similar attempts to strengthen E-Verify have failed in West Virginia, Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, all solidly red states.

A few bright spots remain.

Tennessee may pass some worthwhile bills, though lawmakers gutted legislation to charge illegal aliens tuition. Arizona’s legislature is close to passing SB 1421, which would bar illegal aliens from opening bank accounts, cashing checks, or obtaining loans by prohibiting financial institutions from accepting foreign ID cards or ITINs as sole identification. It would make life in the United States much harder without legal status. The bill passed the Senate and awaits a House vote. Unfortunately, Arizona has a Democrat governor who will likely veto it.

That only raises the harder question: Why is this not already law in the 22 Republican trifecta states?

The same problem appears in commercial trucking. Amid the rash of crashes involving illegal-alien drivers, very few states have acted seriously. Oklahoma alone passed a law requiring proof of citizenship to reciprocate out-of-state commercial driver’s licenses. Florida appears to be the one state seriously enforcing the English-language requirement and checking for illegal aliens at truck stops.

Iowa let a bill die in committee that would have required driver’s license exams to be administered only in English. Indiana passed an English-only testing bill, but still failed to address out-of-state CDLs, even after two illegal aliens killed Indiana residents in separate incidents in less than two weeks in February.

One day, red states will need to enact these deterrents. The only question is timing. Will Republicans build them now, during the lull, or will they wait until hundreds of thousands of new invaders flood back in under a future President Gavin Newsom?

That choice will tell us whether Republicans ever meant a word they said about immigration.

The next big Supreme Court shift might not be abortion or guns



Qualified immunity, a doctrine the Supreme Court created in 1967, bewilders ordinary citizens who run headlong into it after government officials trample their constitutional rights. In plain English, the doctrine often blocks lawsuits against officials unless a prior court decision “clearly established” that the specific conduct at issue violated the Constitution. That standard leaves many victims without a remedy and lets many constitutional wrongs go unanswered.

That is not right. The Constitution exists to protect individual rights, not to insulate officials who violate them from accountability.

Qualified immunity can turn constitutional protections into paper rights — recognized in theory, unavailable in practice.

Recent years have also supplied fresh reasons to question the doctrine’s scope. Abuses tied to the weaponization of law enforcement and the criminal justice system have come to light with unsettling regularity. Think of Crossfire Hurricane, where senior officials used a discredited dossier — commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and funded through political channels — to pursue surveillance warrants and to monitor an opposing campaign before and after the 2016 election.

Or consider Arctic Frost, the childishly named operation (Arctic Frost is a type of orange, as in “Orange Man Bad”) that targeted hundreds of Americans, including one of the co-authors (Eastman) and relied on sweeping demands for private communications and records in search of a predicate offense in hopes of derailing President Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Episodes like these, and others, zero in on a basic question: When government power crosses constitutional lines, who answers for it?

Qualified immunity often supplies the answer: nobody.

Now the Supreme Court appears to be taking an unusual look at the doctrine — at least if its recent handling of three qualified immunity petitions offers any clue.

What’s different this time

In prior years, the court has frequently disposed of qualified immunity petitions quickly, sometimes through summary action with no explanation. This term looks different. Three cases involving qualified immunity have sat on the court’s docket far longer than the usual pattern would suggest. The justices have repeatedly requested responses and, in several instances, called for lower-court records. The court has also rescheduled cases for conference after conference without issuing a decision.

That process does not prove the court plans to revisit the doctrine. But it does suggest heightened attention.

Case 1: Smith v. Scott

The petition for writ of certiorari in Smith v. Scott was filed nearly a year ago. The case arises from a tragic encounter that began as a call for help. A 65-year-old man contacted police because he believed intruders lurked outside his apartment. Officers arrived, found no intruders, and then attempted to handcuff him. The encounter escalated. Officers restrained him on the ground, and an officer allegedly applied pressure that impeded his breathing until he died.

Both the district court and the Ninth Circuit denied qualified immunity. The officers then asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The respondent (Scott’s estate) initially waived a response, which commonly happens in cert-stage litigation. The court did not let the waiver stand. It called for a response after the case’s first conference last May. After a later conference, the court requested the record. Since then, it has repeatedly relisted the petition — an astounding 13 times — without resolving it.

Case 2: Zorn v. Linton

Zorn v. Linton involves a protest at the Vermont State House. Demonstrators occupied the chamber floor to protest government policy. Most left when the building closed. Shela Linton stayed and refused to leave. Officers removed her using a rear wristlock. She sued, alleging unreasonable force that caused pain, injury, and trauma.

The district court granted qualified immunity. The Second Circuit reversed and denied qualified immunity. The petition reached the Supreme Court in September. Once again, the respondent waived a response, and once again the court requested one. The case then cycled through conference after conference before the court requested the lower-court record on February 27.

This case matters for another reason. Many qualified immunity disputes involve fast-moving encounters where officers make split-second judgments. This one involves an interaction with warnings, time, and repeated opportunities to comply. It tees up an issue courts often sidestep: the obligations citizens assume when they knowingly violate a lawful order and force officers to escalate to removal. Does a protester’s refusal to leave reduce the scope of what counts as “unreasonable” force, so long as officers use measured escalation? Put differently: Were Linton’s rights even violated?

Case 3: Villarreal v. Alaniz

Villarreal v. Alaniz sits at the intersection of qualified immunity and the First Amendment. Police arrested journalist Priscilla Villarreal under a state statute that barred solicitation of nonpublic information. The reporter argued that the arrest violated her First Amendment rights.

The procedural history highlights the doctrine’s power. The district court granted qualified immunity. A Fifth Circuit panel denied it. The full Fifth Circuit later granted it en banc. The Supreme Court vacated and remanded the decision for further consideration. The Fifth Circuit again granted immunity.

Judge Andrew Oldham, in a concurring opinion, made an observation that cuts to the heart of qualified immunity’s justification. Courts often defend the doctrine by pointing to the realities of policing: officers must act quickly, sometimes under threat, with incomplete information. Oldham questioned whether that rationale “makes sense” in a case involving time to find a statute, plan an arrest, consult counsel, and investigate facts. Under those circumstances, why should immunity hinge on whether a prior case matches the fact pattern with near-photographic precision?

The cert petition was filed last July. The Supreme Court requested a response in August. It later requested the record after multiple conferences.

What the Supreme Court might do next

No outsider can know what the justices plan. But these three cases, taken together, give the Supreme Court a menu of options.

The court could reinforce qualified immunity, especially in excessive-force cases, and use the term’s docket to signal more protection for officers facing a rising tide of litigation.

The court could narrow qualified immunity — particularly in cases where officials have time to deliberate, plan, and consult — because the “split-second decision” rationale does not apply.

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The court could also recalibrate the doctrine without overruling it: clarify what counts as “clearly established” law, tighten the inquiry, or distinguish between scenarios that demand rapid judgment and those that involve considered decisions.

In the abstract, “immunity from liability for violating rights” begins to resemble artificial judicial indemnification. Modern society does not grant that kind of blanket protection to most other professions. A surgeon, an engineer, or a corporate executive cannot avoid accountability because no prior case warned that the precise mistake at issue would cause harm. The law often holds them to general standards of care, not hyper-specific precedent.

Qualified immunity operates differently. It can turn constitutional protections into paper rights — recognized in theory, unavailable in practice.

Whatever the court’s destination, the road looks different this term. The extended consideration, repeated relists, and requests for records in multiple cases point to sustained attention. That alone marks a change.

If the court means to revisit qualified immunity, even in part, the consequences will ripple far beyond these three cases. Federal courts hear thousands of civil rights claims each year. The doctrine shapes whether citizens can vindicate constitutional rights at all.

At minimum, one conclusion now seems hard to avoid: The Supreme Court is looking closely. And when the court looks closely, doctrine can move significantly.

Trump’s prison order draws a line that reality should have drawn first



When the news broke that President Trump followed through on his promise to bar taxpayer-funded gender surgeries in federal prisons, the coverage quickly pivoted to one question: How will this affect transgender-identifying inmates?

As a former inmate — I served five years at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla — I kept thinking about the people the headlines keep skipping: the women forced to endure confinement while male inmates encroach on their privacy.

Women in prison deserve the dignity to heal without being sacrificed to an ideology.

After I did my time, I re-entered civil society and founded a nonprofit to help women build sustainable lives after prison. Not long after I got out, women still inside California’s prison system began calling me with alarming reports: Administrators were moving men into women’s prisons.

At first, I couldn’t believe it. No sane person should view placing males in a women’s prison as a “compassionate” policy. It only makes sense if you ignore what prison actually is — or if you want to impose a sinister ideology no matter who gets hurt.

Some of these males claim a female identity because women’s prisons tend to be less violent than men’s prisons. In some cases, they don’t even claim to be women. They claim to be “nonbinary” and gain admission anyway. These men do not always come with minor offenses or nonviolent histories. Some are rapists. Some are child molesters. Some committed brutal, unthinkable crimes.

For years, Bureau of Prisons policies on transgender health care moved forward with little acknowledgment of the harm they impose on incarcerated women. Women like me watched administrators apply sweeping ideological rules to an environment where the stakes involve physical safety, privacy, and survival.

Under the approach that dominated the last several years, officials treated the feelings and demands of men as more important than the safety and dignity of the women forced to live beside them.

Prison has never been, and never will be, a place for “one-size-fits-all” social experiments. Every decision inside a facility affects real human beings in extremely close quarters. Housing assignments, medical decisions, and institutional accommodations cannot follow slogans or pressure campaigns from outside groups. They must prioritize the safety and well-being of the people who live there.

Anyone who has lived inside prison understands how this plays out on the ground. Women cannot leave their cells without permission. They cannot lock their own doors. They cannot choose their cellmates. They shower under supervision, change clothes in shared spaces, and sleep just feet away from strangers. Many entered prison after surviving domestic violence, sexual assault, or trafficking.

Where is the compassion for those women — women trying to rehabilitate while they relive their trauma?

The system has told them, again and again, that their trauma doesn’t matter, their fear doesn’t matter, and their right to privacy doesn’t matter. Instead, officials tell them to prioritize the identity claims of men. Give an inch and the activists will take a mile — especially when you put men with histories of violence against women and children into living arrangements that involve showers, sleeping quarters, and constant proximity.

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Blaze News Illustration

President Trump’s executive order barring taxpayer-funded gender surgeries in federal prisons signals a shift away from treating prisons like laboratories for social experimentation. The order supports women and supports safety.

For incarcerated women, it means they no longer have to watch men receive treatments and accommodations designed to make them “feel like a woman,” while the women themselves lose basic standards of privacy and dignity the moment they enter custody.

Incarcerated people deserve humane treatment. That includes access to medical care, mental health care, and dignity.

But dignity cannot mean denying reality.

If you’ve lived behind the walls, you know what the outside world often forgets: These policies shape the daily lives of thousands of women. Their chance at rehabilitation suffers when officials force them to live in fear, relive trauma, and navigate needless threats of real violence. Women in prison deserve the dignity to heal without being sacrificed to an ideology.

I walked away from California Democrats to keep my sanity



It used to feel good to be a Democrat in California.

Emphasis on used to — and President Trump’s recent State of the Union address illuminated exactly why I left the party.

California is not failing because it cares too much. It is failing because it confuses caring with governing.

In Silicon Valley, voting blue often feels like the default setting.

In many professional circles, especially in technology and venture communities, political alignment is assumed. Fundraisers double as social gatherings.

It feels compassionate, enlightened, on the right side of history.

But that night, the president challenged any member of Congress to stand who believes that the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. Shockingly, Democrats remained seated, providing a stunning visual of the current values of the Democratic Party.

What changed my mind was not the rhetoric. It was the outcomes. California is the glaring example of the failure of liberal policies.

Three areas illustrate the pattern.

Elections: Confidence is a safeguard

California does not require photo identification to vote in person. A voter provides a name and address and signs the roster. More than 30 states require some form of voter ID, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Countries such as Canada, France, and Germany require identification to vote. A 2023 Gallup poll found roughly three-quarters of Americans support requiring photo identification at the polls, including majorities across party lines.

Even if large-scale fraud is difficult to quantify, administrative failures and inconsistent verification practices fuel public doubt. Visible safeguards deter misconduct and preserve confidence in the system.

When California Democrats treat voter ID as ideological heresy, they weaken the legitimacy of the system they claim to defend.

Family: When the state becomes the decision-maker

Under California law, minors ages 12 and older may consent to certain mental health services without parental notification if deemed mature enough by a provider. State law also allows minors to access reproductive health services confidentially. Recent legislation has expanded confidentiality protections in sensitive areas.

The justification is protection, but the effect is state supremacy in decisions that belong to parents.

The Supreme Court has long recognized parental rights as fundamental. Family authority is the first layer of civil society.

When the state positions itself as the confidential decision-maker in significant medical and psychological matters involving minors, it undermines that sovereignty.

It is not compassionate to expand state authority at the expense of parental sovereignty. It is government overreach into the most intimate sphere of civil society. As the co-founders of Moms for Liberty have put it, “We do not co-parent with the government.”

Compassion cannot justify dissolving the family as the primary unit of accountability.

Fiscal reality: Math still applies

California’s budget rests on a narrow and volatile base. The Legislative Analyst’s Office has documented that the top 1% of earners account for close to half of the state’s personal income tax revenue. That revenue is heavily tied to capital gains and is therefore inherently unstable.

Instead of broadening and stabilizing that base, state leadership has repeatedly targeted it. Wealth-based tax proposals focus on the very taxpayers who fund a disproportionate share of state commitments. Capital is mobile. IRS data shows sustained net out-migration of high-income households from California to states such as Texas and Florida over the past decade.

Then comes execution.

California’s high-speed rail project, approved in 2008 at an estimated $33 billion, is now projected to exceed $100 billion and remains incomplete. Florida, by contrast, expanded Brightline passenger rail through a public-private partnership model that attracted private capital and delivered major segments on time.

Between 2019 and 2023, California spent roughly $24 billion on homelessness programs. During that same period, homelessness rose statewide. In 2024, the California state auditor found the state failed to consistently track whether billions in spending produced measurable results.

The pattern is simple.

Spend expansively. Measure loosely. Promise morally. Deliver inconsistently.

The issue is not the stated goals, but the absence of discipline.

In each case, the rhetoric was noble, and the result was dysfunction.

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Photo by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images

This is the governing model Kamala Harris rose within and that Gavin Newsom refined over time. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the system they represent rewards virtue-signaling over measurable performance. It resists basic electoral safeguards despite broad public support. It expands state authority into the family. It builds budgets on volatile revenue while accelerating out-migration. It spends billions without demanding outcome verification.

If that framework scales nationally, the consequences will be dire.

I did not leave the Democratic Party because I stopped caring about vulnerable people. I left because I care about institutional durability. Compassion matters. But governing requires discipline. California is not failing because it cares too much. It is failing because it confuses caring with governing. Compassion without competence becomes institutional rot.

If you are a Democrat in California who feels uneasy but cannot quite articulate why, I understand. I defended the language long after I stopped believing in the results. At some point, loyalty to outcomes must matter more than loyalty to a label. It did for me.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.