I'm a little confused by this.
I learned about the First Amendment in first grade. Actually, I learned all ten amendments in the Bill of Rights in elementary school, and then again... and again... and again until I graduated in 1992. Granted, that was just a few years after we crawled out of the ocean and walked on two legs, but I'm assuming schools still at least mention it.
So when I hear that a police chief is "reviewing First Amendment training" because an officer allegedly thought "someone got offended" was grounds for a citation or arrest, I have questions.
Mainly: Why does this require reviewing?
This feels less like a training issue and more like discovering your airline pilot needs a refresher on the whole "up is the sky, down is the ground" concept.
I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a cop. I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But "people are allowed to say things that offend other people" seems like it should rank somewhere between "don't pet bears" and "fire is hot" in the list of concepts public officials have mastered before they're issued a badge.
If you're hiring officers who sincerely believe "someone got offended" is probable cause, your problem isn't that they missed a four-hour PowerPoint. The brains behind your hiring process has wandered off into the woods and hasn't been seen in several days.
Nick Shirley uncovers an adult day care in Flushing, Queens with 7,000 phantom members.
Nick: “This public document says you have 7,899 members.”
Employee: “No, we don’t have 7,000 members.”
Nick: “So you’re overbilling then? You’re getting paid $1,600 per patient — that’s how you got $12.9 million in 2024.”
Employee: “Please leave.”
American taxpayer dollars at work.
The situation is so much more desperate than you probably realize.
University professors are saying they're now unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. Their students are simply incapable of reading more than a few pages.
Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures.
There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them.
If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. This is civilizational.
Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings:
Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them.
Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history. We must continue to form new minds in this same model if we're going to keep it.