New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, is looking to expand the state’s involuntary commitment laws to allow hospitals to force more people with mental health problems into treatment.

This comes in response to a series of violent crimes in the New York City subway system.

Hochul said Friday she wants to introduce legislation during the coming legislative session to amend mental health care laws to address the recent surge of violent crimes on the subway.

“Many of these horrific incidents have involved people with serious untreated mental illness, the result of a failure to get treatment to people who are living on the streets and are disconnected from our mental health care system,” the governor said.

HOCHUL’S CHRISTMASTIME BOAST OF SAFER SUBWAY CAME AMID STRING OF ALARMING VIOLENT ATTACKS

“We have a duty to protect the public from random acts of violence, and the only fair and compassionate thing to do is to get our fellow New Yorkers the help they need,” she continued.

Mental health experts say that most people with mental illness are not violent and are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than they are to carry out a violent crime.

The governor did not provide details on what her legislation would change.

“Currently, hospitals are able to commit individuals whose mental illness puts themselves or others at risk of serious harm, and this legislation will expand that definition to ensure more people receive the care they need,” she said.

Hochul also said she would introduce another bill to improve the process in which courts can order people to undergo assisted outpatient treatments for mental illness and make it easier for people to voluntarily sign up for those treatments.

The governor said she is “deeply grateful” to law enforcement who every day “fight to keep our subways safe.” But she said “we can’t fully address this problem without changes to state law.”

“Public safety is my top priority and I will do everything in my power to keep New Yorkers safe,” she said.

State law currently allows police to compel people to be taken to hospitals for evaluation if they appear to be suffering from mental illness and their behavior presents a risk of physical harm to themselves or others. Psychiatrists must then determine if the patients need to be involuntarily hospitalized.

New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman said requiring more people to be placed into involuntary commitment “doesn’t make us safer, it distracts us from addressing the roots of our problems, and it threatens New Yorkers’ rights and liberties.”

Hochul’s statement comes after a series of violent crimes in New York City’s subways, including an incident on New Year’s Eve when a man shoved another man onto subway tracks ahead of an incoming train, on Christmas Eve when a man slashed two people with a knife in Manhattan’s Grand Central subway station and on Dec. 22 when a suspect lit a sleeping woman on fire and burned her to death.

NYC MAN CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTED MURDER AFTER ALLEGEDLY SHOVING COMMUTER IN PATH OF SUBWAY

The medical histories of the suspects in those three incidents were not immediately clear, but New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has said the man accused of the knife attack in Grand Central had a history of mental illness and the father of the suspect who shoved a man onto the tracks told The New York Times that he had become concerned about his son’s mental health in the weeks prior to the incident.

Adams has spent the past few years urging the state Legislature to expand mental health care laws and has previously supported a policy that would allow hospitals to involuntarily commit a person who is unable to meet their own basic needs for food, clothing, shelter or medical care.

“Denying a person life-saving psychiatric care because their mental illness prevents them from recognizing their desperate need for it is an unacceptable abdication of our moral responsibility,” the mayor said in a statement after Hochul’s announcement.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

While the high-stakes fight to lead the House of Representatives is over, Speaker Mike Johnson’s politically perilous year is just beginning.

Winning the speaker’s gavel was no easy feat considering Johnson, R-La., had no Democratic support and could only lose one fellow Republican, thanks to the House GOP’s razor-thin majority.

All House Republicans except for Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., voted for Johnson on Friday afternoon. Two GOP lawmakers who had initially voted for someone other than Johnson, Reps. Keith Self, R-Texas, and Ralph Norman, R-S.C., were eventually persuaded to switch their votes after speaking with Johnson and President-elect Trump.

Johnson will have to navigate a similarly slim margin over the next few months as he helps carry out what President-elect Donald Trump promised would be a very active first 100 days of his new administration.

REPUBLICANS GIVE DETAILS FROM CLOSED-DOOR MEETINGS WITH DOGE’S MUSK, RAMASWAMY

“There’s a lot of expectations and potential pitfalls,” Marc Short, who served as director of legislative affairs during the first Trump administration, told Fox News Digital in an interview late last month. 

Just the first half of 2025 alone is expected to see at least three separate fiscal fights.

Johnson, meanwhile, is set to lose two House Republicans – Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Waltz of Florida. Both members are joining the Trump administration at the end of this month.

It will reduce his House GOP majority to just 217 seats, compared to 215 for Democrats, which means Republicans will need to vote in lock-step to pass any bills on a party-line vote. 

Special elections to replace Waltz and retired Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., are set for April. An election to replace Stefanik has not yet been set.

Meanwhile, Republicans are gunning to pass two massive conservative policy and spending overhauls via a process called “reconciliation,” which lowers the threshold for passage in the Senate from 60 votes to a simple majority for certain budgetary issues.

Both Republicans and Democrats have tried to use reconciliation to pass significant fiscal policy changes that the other side normally opposes, meaning it takes extraordinary levels of intra-party cooperation in both the House and Senate.

“There’s huge expectations on budget reconciliation, and that’s really hard, even when you’ve got wide margins. To think you’re going to do it twice in a year with those margins, I think is an enormously high expectation that seems to be unreasonable,” Short told Fox News Digital.

“And add onto that another funding bill in three months, plus a debt ceiling fight.”

Along with reconciliation bills – which are unlikely to get much, if any, Democratic support – Republicans will also have to grapple with the government funding deadline they just punted to March 14.

DANIEL PENNY TO BE TAPPED FOR CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL BY HOUSE GOP LAWMAKER

House and Senate lawmakers passed a short-term extension of fiscal year (FY) 2024’s government funding levels in December to give negotiators more time to hash out the rest of FY 2025.

Congress will risk plunging the government into a partial shutdown if the House and Senate does not pass another funding extension or set new priorities for the remainder of FY 2025 by then.

The next government funding deadline will come at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

That’s not all Johnson will have to focus on during those months, however.

A bipartisan agreement struck in 2023 suspended the U.S. debt limit through January 2025 – after which the Treasury Department will be forced to take “extraordinary measures” to avoid a national credit default.

The debt limit refers to how much debt the U.S. government can accrue while making expenditures it has already committed to. As of Christmas Eve, the national debt — which measures what the U.S. owes its creditors — fell to $36,161,621,015,445.57, according to the latest numbers published by the Treasury Department. 

Raising the debt limit is also traditionally a fraught political battle, with both Republicans and Democrats seeking any possible leverage to attach their own policy goals to the negotiations.

A recent model produced by the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) projects the Treasury’s “extraordinary measures” will carry the U.S. through mid-June or earlier, giving Congress potentially six months to act.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is taking aim at the controversial H-1B visa program, arguing that it replaces “good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad” — just as the program is at the center of a debate within the Republican Party.

“The main function of the H-1B visa program and other guest worker initiatives is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad,” Sanders wrote on X. “The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”

The self-described democratic socialist has a history of opposing the program, which allows U.S. companies to hire foreign workers for specialty occupations. It is predominantly used by the tech industry, but has faced criticism mainly from the right that it brings in cheap labor from abroad to replace American workers.

TRUMP SAYS HE’S NOT CHANGED HIS MIND ON H-1B VISAS AS DEBATE RAGES WITHIN MAGA COALITION

The program recently became part of an intra-Republican debate when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who have been tapped by Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, argued for the importance of foreign workers for tech companies.

“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Musk said on X.

That reopened a rift between those on the right over the program and whether it is being used to attract the best talent or being used by companies to bring in cheaper labor, primarily from India, who are tied to their job by the visa.

Sanders cited statistics to show that in 2022 and 2023, the top 30 corporations using the program laid off over 85,000 American workers, while hiring over 34,000 H-1B workers, and that 33% of new IT jobs are filled by foreign national guest workers. He also pointed to layoffs at Tesla, one of Musk’s companies.

ERIC SCHMITT BLASTS ‘ABUSE’ OF H-1B VISA PROGRAM, SAYS AMERICANS ‘SHOULDN’T TRAIN THEIR FOREIGN REPLACEMENTS’

“If this program is really supposed to be about importing workers with highly advanced degrees in science and technology, why are H-1B guest workers being employed as dog trainers, massage therapists, cooks, and English teachers?” he said. “Can we really not find English teachers in America?”

Sanders conceded that there may be labor shortages that could be filled by H-1B workers, but he called for substantially increased guest worker fees in order to pay for opportunities for Americans, as well as other reforms, including increased minimum wages and the ability to easily move jobs.

“Bottom line. It should never be cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker,” he said.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MOVES TO CHANGE H-1B GUEST WORKER PROGRAM TO PRIORITIZE HIGHER-WAGE APPLICANTS

Sanders said that the “economic elite and political establishments” promised in the 1990s that a loss of blue-collar jobs due to free trade agreements would be offset by more white-collar IT jobs.

“Well, that turned out to be a Big Lie. Not only have corporations exported millions of blue-collar manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries, they are now importing hundreds of thousands of low-paid guest workers from abroad to fill the white-collar technology jobs that are available,” he said.

Sanders comments come days after President-elect Trump, who had railed against H-1B abuse during the 2016 campaign, said that he has always supported the program. 

“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he told the New York Post.

The House and Senate will meet on Monday in a Joint Session of Congress to certify the results of the 2024 presidential vote.

The Capitol riot and contretemps over certification of the 2020 presidential election converted the quadrennial, often sleepy affair of certifying the Electoral College into a full-blown national security event. Congressional security officials began erecting 10-foot-high fencing around the outer perimeter of the Capitol complex over the past few days. Some of the fences extend beyond the usual “Capitol Square” which includes the Capitol building itself. One such fence was all the way around the outer boundaries of the Russell Senate Park.

One of the great ironies in the American political system is that the person who lost the race for the presidency often presides over their own defeat. In this case, Vice President Harris. Harris remains the Vice President until January 20. That also means she continues as President of the Senate. 

Others have performed this onerous task of certifying their own defeat. Future President Richard Nixon was Vice President when he lost to President John F. Kennedy in 1960. Nixon then certified JFK as the winner in January 1961. Former Vice President Al Gore ceded his election to President George W. Bush after the disputed 2000 election and tumult over which candidate actually won Florida. Gore was then at the Capitol to seal Bush’s victory in January 2001.

TRUMP RECLAIMS INFLUENCE OF GOP AS REPUBLICANS FALL IN LINE BEHIND JOHNSON

Here’s what the 12th Amendment to the Constitution says about Congress signing off on the election results: “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.”

This dictates a Joint Session of Congress. This is where the House and Senate meet together, simultaneously, usually in the House chamber. The Speaker of the House presides alongside the President of the Senate: in this case, Vice President Harris.

But Harris kind of runs the show.

The House and Senate only meet in a Joint Session of Congress to receive the President for State of the Union and to certify the election outcome. And since the House successfully elected a Speaker on Friday afternoon, the House and Senate can convene the Joint Session. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., will co-preside over the session atop the dais in the House chamber.

Things are different compared to this exercise four years ago.

The relatively routine, almost ceremonial, certification of the Electoral College forever changed on January 6, 2021, following the Capitol riot.

JEFFRIES CLAIMS ‘NO ELECTION DENIERS’ AMONG DEMS DESPITE 2016 ‘ILLEGITIMATE’ REMARKS WHEN TRUMP WON

Capitol Police began restricting vehicular traffic on streets around the Capitol complex early Monday morning. Access to the House and Senate Office Buildings are limited to members, staff and visitors who are there are on official business. There will only be a few access points for pedestrians to the Capitol grounds. Official Capitol tours are suspended.

Johnson will call the House to order around 1 p.m. EST on Monday. House Sergeant at Arms Bill McFarland will announce the arrival of Harris and senators as they enter the House chamber. Members of the House Administration Committee and Senate Rules Committee will serve as “tellers” to assist in the tabulation of the electoral votes.

DEMOCRATS HAVE MIXED REACTION TO JOHNSON’S SPEAKER VICTORY: ‘HELL HAS FROZEN OVER’

Harris will declare that the House and Senate are meeting in the Joint Session and announce “that the certificates (of election) are authentic and correct in form.”

Starting with Alabama, it’s likely that one of the tellers will read the following:

“The certificate of the electoral vote of the State of Alabama seems to be regular in form and authentic. It appears therefore that Donald John Trump of the State of Florida received nine votes for President and JD Vance of the State of Ohio received nine votes for Vice President.”

And on we go.

In late 2022, lawmakers made several changes to the 1887 “Electoral Count Act.” Congress initially passed the Electoral Count Act in response to the disputed election of 1876. Multiple states sent competing slates of electors to Washington. Lawmakers determined there was no formality to tabulating the Electoral College results.

Democrat Samuel Tilden prevailed in the popular vote. But President Rutherford B. Hayes won the White House – after a special commission empaneled by Congress presented him with 20 electoral votes in dispute.

The 2022 Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act clarified the role of the Vice President in the Joint Session of Congress. President-elect Trump and other loyalists leaned on then-Vice President Pence to assert himself in the process. Many demanded that he accept alternative slates of electors from the states in question. The updated law states that the Vice President’s role is simply “ministerial.” The new statute says the Vice President lacks the power “to determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper list of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.”

VP HARRIS MOCKED FOR FLUBBING OPENING LINE OF PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE: ‘WHAT AN EMBARASSMENT’

The new law also established an expedited judicial appellate process for litigation regarding electoral votes. Finally, the law altered how lawmakers themselves can contest a state’s slate of electors during the Joint Session.

The old system required one House member and one senator to sign a petition challenging an individual state’s electoral slate. In 2021, Republicans planned to challenge as many as six swing states. They ultimately questioned two.

In 2001, multiple members of the Congressional Black Caucus tried to challenge Florida’s slate of electors. But they had no Senate co-sponsor.

After Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., made her entreaty to question Florida’s electoral votes, Al Gore – again, presiding over his own loss – asked if the California Democrat had a Senate cohort.

Waters replied that she did not and “did not care.”

Gore then responded with a statesmanlike proclamation that salved the political wounds of the rancorous election he had just lost to President W. Bush.

“The chair will advise that rules do care,” pronounced Gore.

His takedown of Waters triggered an outpouring of bipartisan applause in the House chamber.

TRUMP CHEERS JOHNSON WINNING SPEAKER VOTE: ‘AMERICA IS BACK’

A question emerged about Ohio’s slate of electoral votes when Congress began certifying the 2004 election in January 2005. But this time, late Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, and former Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., joined forces to compel the House and Senate to debate and vote separately on Ohio’s electoral slate. But both the House and Senate rejected their petition.

The 2022 law made it tougher to challenge a state’s electoral certificates. Now it requires one-fifth of all House members and one-half of all Senate members to challenge what the states send in.

The outcome of the 2024 election is not in dispute. There’s no expectation of anyone forcing additional Congressional reviews of the Electoral College. And despite additional precautions, Capitol security officials are not anticipating rallies and certainly no violence, unlike 2021.

In 2021 – after the riot and two near fistfights on the House floor – Pence certified the outcome of the electoral vote just before 4 a.m. EST on January 7. This year’s exercise should be wrapped up in about an hour or so. Vice President Harris will announce that Donald Trump won the election “for a term beginning on the 20th day of January 2025.” She will then dissolve the Joint Session.

And two weeks later at noon, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts swears-in Donald John Trump on the West Front of the Capitol for his second term.

A challenge of describing Britain’s grooming gang scandal for an international audience is convincing the reader that it really happened and is not simply the product of a morbid fantasy.

This is not just because the crimes at its heart—those crimes being the rape and torture of young girls—are so appalling. They are, of course, but appalling crimes happen everywhere, becoming no less evil for their pervasiveness. Nor is it not just because the crimes took place on such a vast scale. In Rotherham alone, in South Yorkshire, there might have been 1,500 victims. It is also because the authorities—police officers, social workers and politicians—failed so miserably and wickedly to prevent them.

In Rotherham, and Rochdale, and Telford, and many, many other places, evil men raped vulnerable girls with impunity while the officials looked the other way (and, in some cases, actively helped). How could this have happened?

It is partly because the perpetrators were disproportionately of migrant heritage. A striking number of them were ethnically Pakistani. Most—though not all—of their victims were white girls, which, judging by the vicious comments that have been reported, had a lot to do with anti-white racism. “All white girls are good for is sex,” one rapist reportedly told his victim, “They are just slags.”

Local authorities were uncomfortable about digging into claims of young girls being raped on the grounds of political correctness. In Telford, for example, according to an independent report, authorities feared “complaints of racism”.

Political correctness also dampened broader interest. A 2004 documentary, Edge of the City, was pulled by the broadcaster Channel 4 amid fears that it could “inflame racial tensions”. Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion, Labour MPs, were widely condemned for emphasizing the role of Pakistani men in the gangs. This contributed to what I have called “a conspiracy of murmuring”. The phenomenon was gradually acknowledged—but in the barest possible terms. Instead of being buried, it was simply filed away.

Yet political correctness was not the only contributing factor. Indeed, the basest forms of classism and misogyny seem to have motivated police indifference. The victims, according to one witness in Rotherham, were seen as “undesirables”—teens from care homes or otherwise troubled backgrounds. “Police weren’t arsed with us, really,” said one victim from Rochdale, “They don’t give a fuck when you’re not from a wealthy [home].”

Thus, teenage girls faced consistent victim-blaming, with one of them even being arrested on charges of being “drunk and disorderly” after neighbors had heard her screams, and another being dismissed from a police station right into the arms of rapists. News outlets also demonstrated a bizarre willingness to ignore the true nature of grooming and rape. When Azhar Ali Mehmood, 26, burned Lucy Lowe, 16, to death, the BBC described him as her “boyfriend”.

Beyond all this, there was the grotesque, though by no means uncommon, impulse towards prioritizing the interests of institutions above the interests of people. In one memorably sinister email, a council worker in Oldham announced that they had fobbed off the concerns of a journalist who had been looking into the subject of grooming gangs before announcing, “PS. In case you didn’t know: We’ve also won Best City at Northwest in Bloom again today.” Great.

Slowly, the atrocities began to come to light. It is important to be clear that in an ocean of indifference, there were people who did a lot to make this happen, like the whistleblowers Maggie Oliver and Jayne Senior, the journalists Andrew Norfolk and Charlie Peters, and the victims who had the astonishing courage to speak of what they had experienced.

But the scale of the response simply did not match up to the scale of the atrocities. Some of the rapists are already being released. Disgraced officials found cozy jobs elsewhere. No police officers faced serious consequences. Chillingly, files and laptops containing important evidence were stolen. The state avoided accountability while a cultural establishment that emphasized egalitarian and minoritarian narratives avoided the subject. When posts about the grooming gangs scandal went viral on X this week, there was widespread shock. People outside the UK hadn’t even heard about it—and many people within the UK hadn’t grasped its implications.

It is about time that there was a cultural and institutional reckoning. Of course, it is important to be clear that such crimes could still be happening today. It is important to be clear that such crimes can be, and have been, carried out by white people as well (and not for the sake of political correctness but to stop it happening). 

Yet if Britain’s state and cultural institutions are allowed to forget what happened in Rotherham, and Rochdale, and Telford, and Oxford, and Bristol, and so many other places, there will not be meaningful attempts to tear off the ideological and institutional blinkers that have blinded them to atrocities in the past and could blind them to atrocities in the future.

The post Britain’s Long-Overdue Reckoning With ‘Grooming Gangs’  appeared first on The American Conservative.

For once, everyone in the chess world appeared to agree with the controversial American chess grandmaster Hans Niemann. “The Chess world is officially a joke,” opined chess’s 21-year-old chief trash-talker as the final hours of 2024 melted away into oblivion. “THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE WORLD CHAMPION!” 

A drama-filled week at the World Blitz Chess Championship had officially boiled over just before the strike of midnight in New York City. The Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, who had made uncomfortable headlines earlier in the week when FIDE, the international governing body of competitive chess, fined the Norwegian ace for wearing jeans to its competition, was at the center of the fracas once again. But this time, Carlsen, who has often curried favor with competitors during his decades-long domination of the sport, found few friends. 

Having bested Niemann in the knockout rounds of the Blitz tournament, Carlsen was in a familiar spot—battling Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi for the title of world champion, this time for the speed chess crown. 

In the world of competitive chess, the world champion is he who wins the classical competition, a series of matches that can stretch over days, or, in the fashion of the late American chess great Bobby Fischer, weeks. Blitz is another animal altogether. Matches are played at a blistering pace and the clock is always the player’s worst enemy, as evidenced by the sad howls emitted from the Ukrainian chess grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk when his clock ran to zero in Round 11 at this year’s competition. 

What makes Carlsen arguably the greatest chess player of all time is his ruthless ability to dominate any time constraint, and in New York on New Year’s Eve, things were no different. Losing and down to his last game against Niemann in the quarterfinals, Carlsen brought his best. Up against the wall and with his clock dwindling, Carlsen was magnificent, turning back the young San Franciscan with a series of swashbuckling moves that rivaled any human player in the history of the game. When it was over, Carlsen had won again. The 34-year-old from Tønsberg mugged for the cameras and slammed his king on the table. 

Niemann, whose passionate denials of accusations that he cheated during a stunning upset victory of Carlsen at the Sinquefield Cup in 2022 set the chess world aflame, was simply no match for the Norwegian’s machinelike brilliance.  

Carlsen breezed through the semifinals, defeating Polish grandmaster Jan-Krzysztof Duda in three straight matches, to set up a star-studded final against one of the only men who has challenged Carlsen when the lights shine brightest—Nepomniachtchi or “Nepo” as he is commonly referred to in the world of chess. 

The title match looked to be over as quickly as it began with Carlsen easily capturing the first two matches in a race to three. But Nepo stormed back, capturing the first game with the white pieces and then successfully finding a way to defeat Carlsen while playing from the weaker black position. The back and forth set up a winner-takes-all situation wherein the next man to win a match would be crowned the 2024 World Blitz champion.

And that’s when things got weird. Carlsen and Nepo tied each of the next three matches before a brief pause confused those watching the world over. Magnus paused his clock and the two chess titans began to chat. Carlsen had an idea—end the title match right then and there with a first-of-its-kind draw. Two “champions.”

Before users on social media had the time to fly into a frenzy, the two men were signing off on their co-championship. 

“I thought at that point, we’d already played for a very long time,” Carlsen said after the tie. “I was very happy to end it and I thought at that point it would’ve been very cruel if one gets first and the other gets second and so I thought it would be a reasonable solution.”

As FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich scrambled to make a ruling, Carlsen turned to Nepo and suggested the two “just play short draws until they give up” if the governing body refused to budge. Chess, the cruelest game of all, would for once end in sweet salutations. 

But not all were happy. In fact, much of the chess world spent the next day complaining about the result with some going as far as to suggest Carlsen had participated in match-fixing. 

“Speechless,” wrote the grandmaster Cristian Chirila. The grandmaster Jacob Aagaard, still frustrated by FIDE’s decision to allow Carlsen to play in jeans also weighed in. “We have already decided that Carlsen can rewrite the rules as he pleases.” 

The grandmaster Elli Paehtz similarly criticized Carlsen: “So Carlsen decides on the format, the dress code and the title regulations?” The chess podcast host Daniel Lona questioned why everyone who played in the tournament shouldn’t be crowned champion. “We’re all world champions!!” he wrote next to an upside down smile emoji.

Even the former Soviet world champion Garry Kasparov, who held the crown for 15 straight years between 1985 and 2000, couldn’t help but share his opinion when asked what Soviet champion Anatoly Karpov would think if Kasparov had suggested a brokered tie during their 1984 championship tilt. 

“He’d insist on a rematch,” Kasparov wrote on 𝕏. 

For Carlsen, who had earlier threatened to leave the tournament after he was fined for wearing jeans, the result was a “reasonable” one. In a sport dominated by decorum and tradition, Carlsen and Nepo smashed the rulebooks for a result that will be hotly debated in the years to come. 

As the internet descended into chaos, Carlsen already had his eyes on a much greater prize. 

The indefatigable Norwegian is set to marry his girlfriend, 26-year-old Ella Victoria Malone, this weekend. The two have been inseparable since they were first publicly seen at a chess tournament in Germany last February and Malone was on hand in New York City to witness history this week. In the abridged words of his rival Niemann: “The Chess Can Wait.” For Carlsen. For the rest of the chess world, and for those who enjoy sports of all stripes, the strange and chaotic ending to the 2024 World Blitz championship prompted wider questions about the nature of competition. 

Why do we play if not to win? Americans especially struggle with the concept of a tie. While cricket and soccer are prone to even scores at the end of a match, only 28 NFL regular season games have ended in a tie since a rule change in 1974 added the overtime feature. Once the playoffs begin, there are no more ties. Ever. The games always end with a winner. And speaking of always ending a game with a winner, the NBA has never toyed with ties in its 79-year history. 

College football fans witnessed their first tie since 1995 this season when HBCU schools Florida Memorial and Clark Atlanta were forced off the field numerous times due to lightning strikes before the game was inevitably called off, a fate decided by Mother Nature. The disappointed FMU Coach Bobby Rome chalked it up to an “act of God.”

The NHL, which features seven Canadian teams, abandoned ties in 2005 preferring to end its game with an exciting sudden death format of 3-on-3 hockey that opens the ice and promotes end-to-end action that more often than not results in a decisive winner. If the teams don’t score within a five minute period, they go to a shootout. No ties. 

But not everyone was so disappointed with the 2024 World Blitz Championship tie. The Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man who is hell-bent for leather to capture real cities in the very real country of Ukraine, extended his congratulations to Nepo following the stalemate. It was all a bit odd considering Nepo publicly challenged Putin only days after the invasion of Ukraine began, condemning the war along with 44 other Russian chess personalities.

Such is the bizarre nature of our topsy-turvy world. In the words of ’60s Bronx rockers The Blue Magoos, “One day you’re up and the next day you’re down.” But on that day in New York City, Carlsen and Nepo found a different way forward. They charted territory only they could see. Together, at the top.

The post What Does Two ‘Champions’ Even Mean? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Surely enough has been written already about Luigi Mangione, the ghost gun–toting Manhattan assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back. But arresting pieces of information keep floating to the surface.  The New York Times, for example, reports his April 27 recorded message, “I want to Zen out.” His voice, says the Times, “quiet and contemplative.”  

I’ve written about Luigi’s education, which may have included a prep school course, “Becoming Human,” that introduced him to Eastern philosophy and the Zen concept of “mindfulness.”  Not that anyone has to go to a ritzy Baltimore prep school to encounter Zen Buddhism. Since the 1950s, it has been a fashionable destination for those seeking “alternative paths.”  I still have a copy of Alan Watt’s 1957 The Way of Zen, the first American bestseller in a soon-to-be crowded genre, the capstone of which was surely Robert Pirsig’s contemplative 1974 opus, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. 

As we anthropologists like to put it, Zen has “diffused” across the culture.  A few years ago, one of my neighbors in Vermont, who had come to rest there once the ’60s settled down, gave me a copy of Ellen Langer’s 1989 book, Mindfulness. Langer was the first tenured woman in Harvard’s psychology department and is best known for adding the sheen of scientific respectability to Buddhist-derived contemplative practices.  

Watts, Pirsig, and Langer did their parts in domesticating Zen long before Luigi Mangione was born in 1998.  Does every search for benevolent bliss have a flip side of egocentric rage?  I don’t know, but I would say that Luigi grew up in a culture where self-indulgent anger was the ruling norm of the political left and, more broadly, a common feature of American public life.  My 2006 book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, and my 2021 sequel, Wrath: America Enraged, are about how we became enamored with self-righteous fury, as though it would liberate us and somehow also bring about a better world. (Of course, it makes me furious that neither book sold as well as works by Watts, Pirsig, and Langer, but hey, I too want to Zen out.) 

Young Luigi took his quest for transcendence first to Hawaii and then to the mother-of-all-Zen-mindful peacefulness, Japan. From whence he apparently returned with a plan to extinguish the people who bothered him.  Christopher Rufo has a thoughtful consideration of how this apostle of non-non-violence made his ascent in “Luigi Mangione and Left-Wing Nihilism.” Rufo warns, rightly I think, that Luigi isn’t a singularity.  He is an exemplar of…something.  The adoration for him that has seeped out of social media, and the excuses from some politicians, point to this.  

The historian Richard Slotkin published a book in 1972, Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, that has been a scholarly touchstone for me.  Violence, especially in the form of murder, has been celebrated (albeit often behind the disguise of condemnation) for a very long time in American culture. We are not exceptional. It is perhaps a feature of common humanity, but it has a particularly American flavor when it comes to coolly gunning down one’s supposed adversary. Where would Hollywood be without this fantasy?  For the murder to have its proper catharsis, the killer must have a certain quiet self-control and aloofness from his own act.  Long before we learned the word for it, we wanted our agents of revenge against the injustices of the world to be “Zen.”  Luigi Mangione played that part and has been rewarded with the applause of his kind.

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President-elect Trump successfully rallied House Republicans on Friday to re-elect House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. — overcoming deep intraparty divisions and quieting concerns over Trump’s ability to unify the party following the spectacular collapse of a government spending bill late last month.

That bill, which saw 38 Republican defectors and threatened a partial government shutdown, touched off fears that Trump’s once-ironclad grip on the Republican Party could be waning — concerns that were quickly put to rest Friday evening after Trump managed to secure the majority votes for a House speaker whose party holds just a razor-thin majority in the chamber and who faced vehement opposition from House Freedom Caucus members.

Three Republicans originally voted against Johnson and seven other members remained silent. Republicans’ razor-thin majority allowed Johnson just one GOP defector, and after the first round of voting, it was unclear if, or how, the party could overcome the odds.

MIKE JOHNSON RE-ELECTED HOUSE SPEAKER AS GOP MUTINY THREAT DISSOLVES

In the end, all but one holdout changed their vote, with many crediting Trump directly as a sign of his continued influence in the party. 

At least two of the Republican holdouts who reversed course to back Johnson as speaker said they did so after multiple conversations with Trump.

Trump spoke by phone with both Reps. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., and Keith Self, R-Texas, after they had initially voted for people other than Johnson for speaker.

Self, one of the two holdouts who changed his “no” vote on Johnson to a “yes” vote, told reporters on Friday that he came to the decision after multiple phone conversations with the president-elect.

“This was all about how we make the Trump agenda successful,” Self told reporters of his decision to back Johnson. “We have to be strong as a Republican conference in order to make the Trump agenda as successful as possible. That’s what this was all about.”

Norman also later confirmed to reporters that he spoke with Trump. “He just made his point about how Mike is the only one who could get elected,” Norman said. He added that Trump did not change his vote but rather a “commitment that things are going to change” from Johnson.

Sources told Fox News on Friday that the president-elect was in “constant communication” with House Republicans throughout the process.

The eleven Republican members of the House Freedom Caucus, who had sparred with Johnson over various provisions in the government spending bill late last month, did not mince words. In a letter Friday night, members said their decision to back Johnson was solely due to their support for the president-elect.

The letter, authored by Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said they supported Johnson “because of our steadfast support of President Trump, and to ensure the timely certification of his electors.” 

“We did this despite our sincere reservations regarding the Speaker’s track record over the past 15 months,” the letter said. “Now, Speaker Johnson must prove he will not fail to enact President Trump’s bold agenda.”

Johnson, for his part, thanked Trump directly in a post on X.

“Thank you, President Trump! Today is a new day in America. Congressional Republicans must stay united to quickly deliver President Trump’s America First agenda,” he said. “Let’s get it done.”