David Sypher Jr.

The Washington Post just quietly pulled the plug on its police shooting database, “Fatal Force.” Don’t expect an apology or a reckoning. Don’t even expect an explanation. Because to acknowledge the full impact of that project would be to admit this: that for nearly a decade, the nation’s premier legacy newsroom helped manufacture and perpetuate a toxic narrative – that police officers are hunting black men in the streets with impunity.Let’s be clear, the “Fatal Force” database didn’t just compile data; it crafted a storyline. It presented fatal police shootings in isolation, stripped of context and devoid of nuance. No breakdown of the circumstances. No mention of weapons. No differentiation between justified use of force and actual misconduct.

Barack Obama has reemerged, stepping back into the national conversation with all the gravitas of a tenured Ivy League professor who just remembered the country exists beyond Martha’s Vineyard. In a conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson, the former president offered a dire warning: America is “dangerously close” to slipping into autocracy. He didn’t mention Trump by name – but he didn’t have to. The implication was clear, and so was the posture: the wise elder statesman cautioning the republic from the comfort of his $12 million estate. But here’s the problem: Obama’s sermon rings hollow. Not because his warning about eroding democratic norms lacks merit, but because the messenger has long since traded credibility for cultural applause and Netflix contracts.

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump descended a golden escalator in Trump Tower and into political history. The press corps snickered. The consultant class rolled its eyes. Late-night comedians feasted on the spectacle. Most people thought it was a joke. What they missed – and still miss – is that Trump didn’t invent the anger that powered his campaign. He simply noticed it first. The pundits focused on Trump’s bombast. But voters were focused on something else entirely: someone, finally, was saying out loud what they’d been thinking for years. Take China. In 2015, Trump said, “They’re ripping us off.” It wasn’t elegant. But it was true.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services didn’t dominate the headlines – but it should have. In a unanimous ruling, the Court quietly dismantled a legal fiction that has distorted civil rights law for decades. And in a twist no one saw coming, the opinion was authored by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the progressive icon of the bench. At the heart of Ames was a question few Americans knew they needed to ask: can equality before the law coexist with unequal legal standards? “In 2019, Ames – a straight, white woman – interviewed and was passed over for a newly created management role, which was instead awarded to a lesbian.

If you tuned in to the first New York City Democratic mayoral primary debate hoping for vision, leadership, even a halfway compelling reason to stay in the city – you were sorely disappointed. What we got instead was two hours of political karaoke: forgettable performances, familiar refrains and not a single candidate who looked remotely prepared to lead America’s largest city out of the hole it’s in. The media crowned former governor Andrew Cuomo the winner, but that says more about the sad state of the field than it does about Cuomo’s abilities. He barely had to try. Like a career politician coasting on name recognition and reflexes, he sleepwalked through the evening while eight other candidates took turns lobbing stale criticisms his way. They all missed.

Five years ago, we watched a man die under the knee of a police officer. The footage of George Floyd gasping for breath wasn’t just horrifying – it was galvanizing. For a brief moment, America stood still, and it felt like we all agreed: this was wrong. This shouldn’t have happened. And something needed to change. But instead of coming together, we fell apart. What should’ve been a rare moment of national consensus turned into yet another front in the culture war. The left veered toward revolution, and the right veered toward denial. And somewhere in the wreckage of hashtags, riots, cable news rants, and billion-dollar DEI schemes, the real moral clarity of that moment was lost. Let’s start with the obvious: what happened to George Floyd was a tragedy.

In America, we are told justice is blind. Hennepin County wants her to peek. Last week, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Minnesota’s Hennepin County Attorney’s Office after prosecutors were instructed to consider race and age during plea negotiations. County Attorney Mary Moriarty defended the policy as an effort to address “racial disparities” in the criminal justice system. But good intentions don’t excuse bad policy – and this one sends a dangerous message: that some people are less accountable for their actions because of the color of their skin. As a black conservative, I am fully in favor of thoughtful criminal justice reform.

Michelle Obama says Donald Trump’s immigration policies “keep her up at night.” But if immigration enforcement is a moral crisis, why wasn’t she losing sleep when her own husband deported more immigrants than any president in American history? Instead of helping the Democrats, this kind of out-of-touch moral posturing only highlights the party’s elite detachment from reality – and it’s costing them working-class voters who live with the consequences of the failed policies they are still defending.Michelle Obama may lie awake thinking about immigration enforcement. Many of us stay up worrying about what happens when our neighborhoods, wages and public schools are strained by policies designed to win applause, not provide order.