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The headline is terrifying: “Mother gives warning after attempted abduction at rest stop.”

And yet the story is anything but. See if you feel the same.

“A woman is giving a stark warning after she says two women and three men attempted to abduct her daughter at a rest stop on Interstate 74 in Indiana,” reported 10TV.com in Columbus, Ohio.

Here’s the mom’s Facebook post:

PSA: so we are driving home from Cincinnati and got off at a rest stop for a quick bathroom break. Just my daughter and I went inside (i didn’t have my phone or purse on me). As we were walking in some lady who appeared to be on something, was trying to talk to my daughter, I held her hand the entire way in and walked swiftly ahead. As the lady was trying to talk to us she was also lighting a cigarette which she immediately extinguished upon us entering building. We went to far end handicap stall and went in together. I heard the lady enter and she was talking to another lady about us heard her say “the little girl”, I told my daughter we weren’t washing hands and I was going to carry her out. As we leave I passed both women and the one that I originally saw had changed clothes and started to leave after us leaving her bag on the floor of the stall she was in. The other lady with her was probably 6′. I then made a dead sprint to the car, threw my daughter in and locked doors. Once we were safely in car I noticed 3 men standing in front of a gold minivan with all the doors open…We called 911 and reported it and I have this terrible feeling that had I not been aware of my surroundings my daughter may have been taken from me. It is a terrifying world we are living in []. I wanted to share to try to remind everyone to be aware of your surroundings, hold on to your children and stay off your phones so you are not distracted!!!

She may have a “terrible feeling” that a kidnapping was about to take place, but stranger danger is so rare that even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children—the folks who put missing kids pictures on the milk cartons and neglected to tell us most of them were run-aways or taken in custody disputes—has asked people to stop using the term. And David Finkelhor, head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, told me he had heard of no children ever abducted from their parents in public for sex trafficking purposes, which seems to be the main fear these days.

A private citizen spreading fear on Facebook (perhaps innocently) is one thing. A media organization uncritically promoting this hysteria is quite another. This is reckless journalism. Nothing happened, and in all likelihood, nothing would have happened.

Vox recently invited Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, to critique Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist whose meteoric rise to fame and unflinching criticism of political correctness has launched a thousand takes, at Reason and elsewhere.

Manne raises some interesting points. Unfortunately, she also commits a glaring error—one that is more obviously wrong than anything she identifies in Peterson’s work. Asked to identify the biggest mistake (“moral, philosophical, or otherwise”) in Peterson’s bestselling book 12 Rules for Life, Manne points to Peterson’s analysis of “mass shootings in general, and school shootings in particular,” which he says are caused by a kind of social angst, or “crisis of being.”

I don’t find Peterson’s explanation particularly convincing, though existential angst is a broad enough diagnosis that I suppose it could be correct in some fairly useless and non-falsifiable sense. But while Peterson might be wrong about what causes mass shootings, Manne is certainly mistaken about who commits them. By blaming this angst, she writes, Peterson “takes on a huge burden of explaining why white women, people of color, nonbinary folks, and so on, almost never act on our existential angst and despair in this way. Because, as you know, the vast majority of school shooters have been white men.”

Yes, most mass killers are white—but white people represent three-quarters of the U.S. population. If anything, mass killers are disproportionately non-white. According to Slate‘s Daniel Engber, who parsed Mother Jones‘s mass shooting database earlier this year, about 56 percent of mass shooters are white:

Judging by those newer numbers, and the most current census estimate that 76.9 percent of Americans are white, the whites-are-overrepresented-among-mass-shooters meme appears even less accurate. Perpetrators that Mother Jones classifies as Asian make up 7.4 percent of the data set, versus an estimated 5.7 percent of the population, while those MoJo identifies as black represent 17.0 percent of the mass shooters in the database versus an estimated 13.3 percent of the population. According to this data set, then, Asians and black Americans are overrepresented among mass shooters by about the same proportion (a bit more than one-fourth) that whites are underrepresented.

That database covers mass shootings in general (and is flawed in that it probably undercounts mass shootings that happened further back in time). It might be more accurate to say that Columbine-style mass shootings specifically committed in schools are disproportionately perpetrated by white people, but there have only been 8 of those kinds of attacks—shootings in which at least four people were shot to death in a school—since 1996. Schools are actually so safe that it’s pretty useless to make statistically sound racial generalizations about the kinds of mass murders committed there.

Manne claimed that “white women, people of color, nonbinary folks, and so on, almost never act on our existential despair this way.” (If she had stopped at women, she would have been on much firmer ground.) But the truth is that all sorts of people—usually men, yes—of all different colors and creeds are capable of horrible things. Whether or not curing our existential dread is the solution, there is no evidence that whiteness itself is the problem, despite what so many pundits would have us believe.

If you want to serve on a criminal jury, the most important rule is this: Say as little as possible, with your words, your body language, and your appearance.

But why would you want to sit on a jury in the first place? Because in a criminal trial, if you can read and reason and resist being swayed by emotion, you will make a better juror than most of your fellow members of the community. A jury is the entity that acts as the voice of the community, and serving as a juror allows you to contribute to that voice.

You may also believe that the law under which the defendant is being prosecuted is an illegitimate use of state power. In that case, acting as a juror gives you the opportunity to exercise the power of jury nullification—finding the defendant “not guilty” regardless of whether the state has proven the accusation beyond a reasonable doubt, writes Mark Bennett.

View this article.

While it may be months or years before the results of Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un are clear, his meeting with the other Kim was an unqualified success. Last week, thanks to the reality TV star Kim Kardashian West’s intercession on her behalf, Alice Marie Johnson, a great-grandmother serving a life sentence for nonviolent drug offenses, walked free from a federal prison in Alabama after spending almost 22 years behind bars.

Critics of our excessively punitive criminal justice system, while pleasantly surprised by Trump’s commutation of Johnson’s sentence, do not hold out much hope that it marks a shift in attitude for a president who was elected on a “law and order” platform modeled after Richard Nixon’s. But Jacob Sullum thinks there may be a way, short of finding a celebrity to adopt every federal prisoner who deserves similar relief, to encourage the president to use his clemency powers for good: by emphasizing how much it would upset Jeff Sessions.

View this article

“Shame on you! Shame on you!” chanted protestors after psychology professor Jordan Peterson said he’d refuse to obey a law that would require everyone to call people by the pronoun they prefer—pronouns like “ze” instead of “he” or “she.”

It wasn’t just radical college kids protesting. Hundreds of Peterson’s academic colleagues signed a petition demanding that the University of Toronto fire him.

The totalitarian left doesn’t just demand that their own point of view be heard, writes John Stossel. They want resisters like Peterson never to be heard.

View this article.

A prison major in Texas has resigned and four guards have been fired as officials investigate claims that guards planted contraband on prisoners. Several other guards have been demoted. The investigation has found the Ramsey Unit in Brazoria County had a quota system in which guards had to write up a certain number of disciplinary actions against prisoners or face disciplinary action themselves.

A primary challenger backed by President Donald Trump successfully unseated incumbent Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) tonight just hours after Trump took to Twitter to attack Sanford for—of all things—the congressman’s marital infidelities.

First-term state Rep. Katie Arrington (R-Dorchester) defeated Sanford, earning more than 51 percent of the vote to Sanford’s 46 percent. She will face Democratic challenger Joe Cunningham in the heavily Republican district this November. Meanwhile, Sanford’s defeat means Congress will lose an advocate for limited government and individual liberty at the end of the current term.

In an interview with Politico last weekend, Sanford suggested that a loss in his re-election bid could cause other Republicans to think twice before speaking out against the Trump administration. Now that he’s lost, his words also serve as a call for his fellow anti-Trump GOPers to keep fighting the good fight.

“I think it’s entirely appropriate to say ‘I agree’ when I agree and ‘I disagree’ when I disagree,” Sanford told Politico‘s Alex Isenstadt. “That’s the American way. That’s what our entire political system is based on, is the fact that we can have dissent.”

Taking down an incumbent is no easy feat in American politics, but this race was really a referendum on the relative strength of the anti-Trump contingent in the Republican Party as it struggles to hold off the #MAGA cult of personality.

Sanford’s dissent to Trump’s takeover of the GOP dates back nearly two years. In July 2016, shortly after wrapping up the Republican nomination and hoping to unify the party before the convention, Trump paid a high profile visit to congressional Republicans on Capitol Hill. Sanford came away from a closed-door meeting less than impressed by Trump’s grasp of the U.S. Constitution.

“I wasn’t particularly impressed,” Sanford told The Washington Post at the time. “It was the normal stream of consciousness that’s long on hyperbole and short on facts. At one point, somebody asked about Article I powers: What will you do to protect them? I think his response was, ‘I want to protect Article I, Article II, Article XII,’ going down the list. There is no Article XII.”

Since then, Sanford has accused Trump of fanning “the flames of intolerance,” criticized Trump’s use of the word “shit-hole” to describe some third world countries, and most recently called the president’s plan to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports “an experiment with stupidity.” He’s also criticized Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) for not taking a hard enough line against the Trump White House.

Trump appears to have taken notice. As voters were heading to the polls Tuesday, the president took a shot at the incumbent congressman.

Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA. He is MIA and nothing but trouble. He is better off in Argentina. I fully endorse Katie Arrington for Congress in SC, a state I love. She is tough on crime and will continue our fight to lower taxes. VOTE Katie!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2018

Yes, that reference to Argentina is the thrice-wedded president (who may have had an affair with a porn star) accusing Sanford of being bad at marriage, apparently without a hint of irony.

It’s true that Sanford’s six-day disappearance during July 2009—when he was supposedly hiking a portion of the Appalachian Trail, but was actually having an extramarital affair with an Argentine woman, María Belén Chapur—changed the course of his political career. An effort was made to impeach Sanford, but South Carolina lawmakers ended up merely issuing a “rebuke” of the governor instead. Sanford finished his term, then got elected to Congress in 2013 (he had previously represented the same district from 1995 through 2001, when he stepped down to honor a promise to serve only three terms).

Prior to La Affaire Argentine, Sanford was regarded as a possible White House contender. In the years after Ron Paul’s 2008 dark horse presidential run, he and then-governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson (along with, of course, Rand Paul) were often identified as the heirs apparent to the libertarian wing of the GOP.

“They’ll say it as if it’s an evil word—like ‘you’re a communist’ or something,” Sanford said in 2009 when he was labeled a “libertarian” by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S,C), whom no one would confuse for a libertarian. “I wear it as a badge of honor, because I do love, believe in, and want to support liberty.”

It is fitting, perhaps, that the Republican Party’s turn towards Trump’s economic nationalism has coincided with Johnson departing the party to become a Libertarian and Sanford being tossed from its ranks.

Will there be a third act for Sanford? One can hope. Whatever you may think of his personal foibles, he’s been a consistently principled voice for liberty and limited government. He opposes bailouts, loves Atlas Shrugged, and disdains political tribalism. And in the age of Trump, a history of adultery is hardly political suicide anymore.

An ill-advised effort by the Department of Justice to stop AT&T from buying out Time Warner for more than $85 billion was rejected by a federal judge today. The merger will move forward. In fact, the judge even warned the Justice Department away from further meddling.

The New York Times reports:

The merger would create a media and telecommunications powerhouse, reshaping the landscape of those industries. The combined company would have a library that includes HBO’s hit “Game of Thrones” and channels like CNN, along with vast distribution reach through wireless and satellite television services across the country.

Media executives increasingly say content creation and distribution must be married to survive against technology companies like Amazon and Netflix. Those companies started making their own programming in just the last several years, but they now spend billions of dollars a year on it, and users can stream their video on apps in homes and on mobile devices, pulling attention from traditional media businesses.

The Times further notes that typically when the Justice Department attempts to use antitrust rules to block a merger, it’s because of a large corporation buying out a competitor. That’s not the case here. AT&T is a service provider buying up a content producer, making a single, stronger company that’s better able to compete. This doesn’t produce less competition in the marketplace.

Last December, Reason Foundation Vice President of Research Julian Morris explained that blocking the merger would actually be what hurts competition:

Consumers are shifting away from the kinds of access and content bundles that so concern the DOJ. And they are doing so because such bundles poorly match their preferences. AT&T recognizes the trend of falling subscription rates for its traditional TV bundles. That’s why it wants to expand into content. It could have done that by licensing legacy content from others, arranging syndication deals for new content, and building its own studio, as Netflix and Amazon have done. It chose instead to merge with Time Warner.

At the heart of the DOJ’s complaint is an assumption that the merged entity would use its market power to raise the price of content currently owned by Time Warner, or threaten to withhold programming, including hit shows such as Game of Thrones and NCAA March Madness. Time Warner could already make such threats, but the DOJ claims it would have greater incentive because it could benefit from some subscribers switching over to AT&T’s networks (DirecTV, U-verse and DirecTV Now).

A merged AT&T-Time Warner could, in principle, refuse to supply content to some distributors in order to drive consumers to purchase its own access and content bundles, but it would not be in the merged company’s financial interest to do so. As Geoff Manne notes in the WSJ:

“More than half of Time Warner’s revenue, $6 billion last year, comes from fees that distributors pay to carry its content. Because fewer than 15% of home-video subscriptions are on networks owned by AT&T … the bulk of that revenue comes from other providers. In other words: Calculated using expected revenue, AT&T is paying $36 billion for the portion of Time Warner’s business that comes from AT&T’s competitors. The theory seems to be that the merged company would simply forgo this revenue in a speculative hope that withholding Time Warner content from distributors would induce masses of viewers to switch to AT&T—and maybe, one day, put competitors out of business. That this strategy would actually work is unfathomable. Game of Thrones is good, but it isn’t that good.”

The merger had also been heavily politicized due to President Donald Trump’s feud with CNN, so we’ll see if the Justice Department attempts to appeal. The head of the antitrust department said he’d have to read the 170-page ruling first.

The Times also notes that the companies have a June 21 deadline to merge and that the judge, Richard J. Leon, of the United States District Court in Washington, flat out told the feds not to try to seek an emergency stay of the decision due to the harms on the defendants who have battling for 18 months to get the merger approved.

Just one day after the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would join a lawsuit challenging the University of Michigan’s anti-harassment policies on grounds they allegedly violate the First Amendment, university officials have decided to revise the policies in question.

“The revised definitions more precisely and accurately reflect the commitment to freedom of expression that has always been expressed in the statement itself,” said E. Royster Harper, vice president of student life, in a statement.

The university prohibits harassment, which it defines as “unwanted negative attention,” and encourages students to report instances of it to the campus’s Bias Response Team. Administrators have pledged, however, to remove language from the code of conduct that claims “the most important indication of bias is your own feelings.”

Federal officials are pleased with this decision.

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions is committed to promoting free speech on college campuses, and the Department is proud to have played a role in the numerous campus free speech victories this year,” said Justice Department Spokesperson Devin O’Malley.

I have reached out to Speech First, the First Amendment defense group that filed the lawsuit, for comment. This post will be updated when I hear back.

One of the more peculiar politics-adjacent stories of last year was November’s brutal attack on Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Paul’s neighbor Rene Boucher was formally charged for the attack in January.

At the time, pundits hostile to Paul quickly victim-blamed for the vicious assault, which gave Paul five broken ribs and lung lacerations. GQ declared him an “asshole neighbor” who is one of those troublesome “Libertarians [who] don’t want to follow the rules that we as a society have agreed upon, because they feel those rules step on their freedoms.” (Apparently, someone accused Paul of “believ[ing] in stronger property rights than exist in America” because he composts and grows pumpkins on his property.) The New Yorker similarly praised attacker (and Democrat!) Boucher as a “near-perfect neighbor” and looked suspiciously on the libertarian-leaning Paul for thinking all that property rights stuff maybe meant he shouldn’t be sent to the hospital by his “near perfect neighbor” for things he did with his lawn.

Politico saw Paul’s inability to come to a Coasean solution, irrespective of property rights, of whatever grievance prompted his neighbor to break his ribs as a sign that “one or both of them is a jerk. I believe that this is an excellent working hypothesis. I’ve seen Senator Paul up close. He is, let us say, pretty high on himself.” USA Today gave the developer of the two men’s housing association space to condemn Paul, without much in the way of actionable specifics, for wanting to control his own property too much.

Now the specifics of what motivated Boucher—unknown, it should be stressed, by all the above pundits and reporters who were sure it was Paul’s fault—are more well-established in the public record as Boucher seeks probation instead of jail time for his crime.

Boucher was very upset, apparently, by piles of brush on Paul’s property, though within sight of Boucher’s. He had been reacting to these offending brush piles by paying to have them hauled to dumpsters, then by setting a yard fire to destroy them (so carelessly that he gave himself second-degree burns), and eventually by attacking Paul.

In addition to the brush piles in his neighbor’s property, Boucher also insists that Paul’s use of a lawnmower the day of the attack blew some leaves onto Boucher’s property—the only activity of Paul’s that sounds even close to a legitimate complaint, though obviously not a “send neighbor to hospital” level of complaint. Sometimes, even a person with libertarian leanings doesn’t deserve to have five of his ribs broken for believing he has some rights to use his own property.