Free Republic

“We called 911 for almost everything except snitching” reads the first line of an Atlantic article, “How I Became a Police Abolitionist,” by social justice activist and lawyer Derecka Purnell. Her deeply personal essay, first published July 6 in the Ideas section, tells of her childhood in a polluted neighborhood surrounded by violence and beset by fear, using one particularly disturbing memory of a police officer shooting their cousin, just a “boy,” in the arm for skipping the basketball sign-in sheet in front of Purnell and her sister, who had been playing basketball but were forced to hide “in...

The Federalist reached out to Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, bringing the investigation, the author's claim, and his editor's silence to his attention. Goldberg has yet to respond. Four days after the facts of a powerful, moving, and deeply personal defund-the-police story in The Atlantic began to unravel in the face of a Federalist investigation, the magazine remains silent. The investigation encompassed newspaper archives, police department records, questions to The Atlantic, the police union, and the office of the mayor, and found the city has no apparent recollection of the serious incident alleged in the magazine — and the...

It is a man-bites-dog story when I support or applaud something that former President Barack Obama says or does. You may recall President Obama started a mentoring organization called My Brother’s Keeper. This initiative attempts to provide a responsible, positive message for young African-American men, a demographic plagued by poor lifestyle choices like dropping out of school, having multiple kids out of wedlock with different women, drug and alcohol abuse, gang involvement, and criminal and obnoxious behavior. These urban pathologies have been triggered by what I believe is our most urgent social crisis in the black community—absent fathers.Recent empirical data shows...