The Important Message From Trump’s Moves in D.C.

The most important message to come out of President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to D.C.? “The era of defining crime deviancy down is over,” Heather Mac Donald writes. Coined in the 1990s by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “defining deviancy down” is the idea that as society experiences higher levels of antisocial behavior, what was once unacceptable becomes a new norm—leading to even more disorder.

We saw this reflex play out in the mainstream media’s reaction earlier this week. “Virtually every news article followed its report of the National Guard deployment by noting that crime has decreased in D.C. over the last two years,” Mac Donald writes, “as if that fact rebutted the grounds for the federal action.” We are to believe Trump’s moves are just an authoritarian power grab.

Not so. Mac Donald points to several heinous incidents in D.C. that the media has all but ignored. Violent crime might be down, but that doesn’t mean it’s under control.

Read her take here.

Residential treatment facilities occupy a crucial place in the continuum of care for mentally ill children. More intense than outpatient care and less restrictive than psychiatric hospitalization, these facilities provide structured environments for troubled youth to recover and build life skills. But a national movement, led by Paris Hilton, has contributed to the closure of dozens of facilities and the passage of new laws targeting residential treatment.

In a compelling feature from City Journal’s Summer issue, Christina Buttons speaks to some of the providers who have been caught in the crosshairs of the national movement against residential care. “For all its imperfections,” she writes, “residential treatment remains one of the few settings capable of stabilizing youth who can’t be safely served elsewhere.”

Read the rest of her piece here.

After the presidential election last November, Northwestern University president Michael Schill reportedly warned the faculty senate of an impending “crisis” facing America in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory. While Schill’s fears about the Republican president were mistaken, Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe argue, Northwestern may indeed face a “crisis” of its own making.

Rufo and Thorpe list a series of programs and policies at Northwestern that prefer some identity groups to others. They also review a lawsuit, filed last year against Northwestern’s law school, alleging that the school violated federal anti-discrimination law. “The irony is that, for all their talk about Trump’s fascism,” Rufo and Thorpe write, “it’s universities like Northwestern that appear to have turned identity-based hierarchy into official policy.”

Within hours of last month’s 345 Park Avenue shooting, which left Blackstone senior executive Wesley LePatner and three other victims dead, social media posts glorified the killings as part of a growing wave of anti-capitalist political violence. Max Horder and Olivia Rose, senior fellows at the Network Contagion Research Institute, write that these posts illustrate the spread of a left-wing “assassination culture” that rejects electoral politics in favor of violent extremism.

“The consequences for American civic life are ominous. The slow but steady rise in justifications for political violence bodes ill for any democracy,” they write. Read more here.

When Trump moved to dismantle USAID earlier this year, Democratic-aligned groups gave speeches, staged theatrical protests, and blocked building entrances to protest. Now Trump is taking on the universities, another traditionally Democratic constituency. Yet the response so far has been relatively quiet. Why?

Because both the center-Left and far-Left have their own bones to pick with U.S. higher education, writes Gregory Conti. “Many moderates are quietly embarrassed by the universities,” he writes, noting that they blame academia for harboring extreme woke ideology and for standing in the way of the “abundance” agenda and other efforts to win back independents. Meantime, progressives often see universities themselves as part of the system of oppression they wish to upend. “Though the far-Left is utterly dependent on the jobs, subsidies, and bully pulpit that higher education provides, its adherents have adopted a constantly adversarial stance toward their own benefactors,” Conti writes.

“In a cruel irony, the university’s reward for having involved itself so closely with liberal and progressive priorities has been to receive a far more tepid defense than most observers could have imagined eight years ago when Trump first came to office,” he writes. Read the rest of his piece here.

“I don’t know any people who regularly smoke marijuana and perform to their full potential.”

Photo credit: Kayla Bartkowski / Stringer / Getty Images News via Getty Images