Hey there! Welcome to Wednesday, June 10, 2026. I'm glad you're here. Today is National Iced Tea Day. It's also National Black Cow Day (Nod to Steely Dan!). It's also National Ballpoint Pen Day and National Abolition Day, which commemorates June 10, 1794, when France formally abolished slavery for the first time. That intersects in an interesting way with today's topic. We'll get to that. We have much to discuss, but first, let's go with the usual daily data.
1752: Benjamin Franklin tests the lightning conductor with his kite-flying experiment.
1847: Chicago Tribune begins publishing.
1899: Improved Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks forms in Cincinnati.
1933: John Dillinger robs his first bank, taking $10,600 from the National Bank in New Carlisle, Ohio. That's $24,434 in today's money.
1947: Saab produces its first automobile. A real Saab story.
1977: James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King Jr, and six other inmates escape from the maximum-security Brushy Mountain State Prison in eastern Tennessee.
1985: So much for New Coke: Coca-Cola announces that it's bringing back its 99-year-old formula.
Birthdays Today Include: Hattie McDaniel, first African American actress to win an Oscar; Fredrick Loewe, musical theater composer; Judy Garland, actress; F. Lee Bailey, criminal defense attorney; Mickey Jones, drummer and actor; and Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York.
If today is your day too, you've got a good day for it. Happy Birthday.
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Yesterday, I wrote about California Prop 209 and the left's crusade to carve racial double standards directly into law by neutering that part of the State's Constitution. Gail Herriot's efforts in the matter are well taken and I think vital to the effort of a race-neutral society.
In my column yesterday, I hammered that point repeatedly, and a few commentators called me out for that repetition. To which I say: Good. Someone's paying attention. But they clearly missed something: I repeated myself on purpose. Here's why I kept swinging.
"Equal justice under law." Those words are engraved on the West Pediment of the Supreme Court building — not as decoration, but as the foundational premise of our entire legal system. The phrase runs its lineage through the 14th Amendment all the way back to ancient Greece. That's the principle I kept returning to yesterday. Our whole system of justice stands on that foundation. Or, if you prefer the Democrats' own favorite bumper sticker — the one they deploy whenever it suits them — "Nobody is above the law." Funny how that chant went silent the moment the whistleblowers showed up, isn't it? That silence tells you everything.
Here's where it gets revealing. Wikipedia notes that when workers inscribed that phrase on the Supreme Court building in 1935, journalist Herbert Bayard Swope actually objected to the word "equal" — arguing it made the phrase too narrow. Ummm. Hmmm. "Journalist." Surprised? Right. Didn't think so.
Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes swatted that objection down, correctly insisting on what he called "a strong emphasis upon impartiality." Good man.
This tension around actual equality under the law isn't new. Judge Robert Bork once recounted a story about Justice Holmes and Justice Learned Hand — which Hand himself confirmed. The two had lunch together, and at parting, Hand took a parting shot at Holmes: "Do justice, sir, do justice." Holmes shut him down cold: "That is not my job. It is my job to apply the law."
I had planned on writing a follow-up of sorts to Yesterday's column, the moment that I'd hit "send." Fortuitously, last night's reading dropped something useful in my lap, to that end — an interesting note from Kim Du Toit.
I hadn't heard from Kim in years, not since the Usenet discussion groups — going back thirty years, give or take. For those who don't know him, he's a South African-born American who has been even more active online than I have over the last several years. His blog has been up as long as mine has, at least. Usenet's still hopping, with about 500 terabytes of new stuff daily, but a lot of the old crew, including myself, have fallen away from it since those days. Kim isn't always right; he and I have had our differences back in the day. But he's got a firm handle on this topic, and the piece I'm linking drives that same point home.
Kim quotes a Breitbart story on the Henry Nowak murder case and the reactions within the Labour government. Let's start there.
British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has said that not all ethnic groups should be treated the same by police in the wake of the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who died in police handcuffs after officers refused to believe he had been stabbed by a Sikh man.
To confirm the link to the discussion we had yesterday, Lammy goes on from there:
Lammy, who also serves as the left-wing Labour Party government’s Justice Secretary, said that while the “starting point” should be equality before the law, it is not always appropriate to be treated “the same”, noting the disproportionate arrest rates of certain ethnic minority groups, such as Roma travellers [Gypsies] and black Britons.
Kim nails this nonsense down on all four corners, with a simple analogy: Fish a pond where 80% of the fish are yellow, and guess what you're pulling out of the water? Mostly yellow fish. Yeah, I know… Shocking, right?
The same iron logic applies to arrest and incarceration statistics anywhere in the world, but most pertinently to this discussion, in Western cultures. Large percentages of minorities appear in the criminal justice system for one simple reason: large percentages of those same minorities are the ones who commit the crimes. That's not disproportion — that's proportional precision. The numbers reflect exactly who does what, full stop. They don't reflect some mythical systemic and racist conspiracy.
So when activists like Lammy — or the people standing roadside with handmade signs demanding "Justice for Karmelo" — wave arrest statistics around as proof of racist policing, they aren't exposing a flaw in the system. They're exposing the flaw in their own argument and banking on you not noticing.
Not that it matters to the left. Take Keir Starmer yesterday regarding a different violent criminal as Jeremy Cordite described.
1. Protestors will be met with the full force of the law.
— Shrodingers Borderline Normal (@JeremyCordite) June 9, 2026
2. Beheaders will be met with sympathetic mental health specialists and woke judges who don't care if they do it again. pic.twitter.com/c7ldlylDGW
Clearly, Starmer has learned nothing from Henry Nowak's experience. Indeed, I doubt he has that ability.
Back here in the colonies, Catherine Salgado, in her piece from last night, correctly points out a quote from Sheldon Daniels on X: "Karmelo Anthony isn’t the first, and he won’t be the last young man to throw his life away like this so long as we allow these democrats to keep pushing this divisive victimhood narrative in America."
(I'm unsure why Daniels went with a lowercase D on "democrats," but I suspect it was an inadvertent omission.)
Equal application of the law pretty well prevailed in the Anthony case — though honestly, 35 years strikes me as soft. Under Texas law, Anthony walks up for parole consideration in 17 and a half years. He'll be 36 or 37. That assumes the law holds between now and then, of course. Changes from the state legislature are always possible.
Until today, I've largely held my peace on both the Anthony case and the murder of Henry Nowak. I lean into them both today because both cases illustrate the same thing: some people don't want equal treatment under the law — they want unequal treatment, which is tilted in their direction. That was the whole point of yesterday's piece.
That demand attacks the race-neutral society that Martin Luther King envisioned. More foundationally, it attacks the entire architecture of equality under the law, which was and remains the basis of Western civilization. Remove that equality, and it's not a hard task to figure out what will happen.
The left likes to position this as a moral issue. Sarah Anderson points out that the American people are increasingly rejecting the left's version of morality. I regard this as a move toward equality.
I'll leave you with this: imagine the Anthony trial in a blue state — say, New York. What would that conversation have looked like?
Thought for today: Smear shoe polish on your face to cosplay as a black man ala Al Jolson, and you'll get crucified. But strap on a dress to cosplay as a woman, and suddenly your harshest critics become your loudest cheerleaders.
VIP Members, you know the drill. Hit the heart and let's hear your commentary on today's topic.
Take care today. You've got a whole summer in front of you. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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