Category: Justice

“Never Again?”: Responding to China’s Uighur Genocide

Mike Coté1 Comment

To the list of all the genocides of the last hundred plus years – Armenia, the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Cambodia, and Rwanda – another entry should be added: the genocide of the Chinese Uighurs.

According to legitimate international researchers and tribunals, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is currently committing cultural and physical genocide against the Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang province. This population, both ethnically and religiously a minority, has been surveilled by the Chinese government, placed into ‘re-education camps,’ and forcibly sterilized. These deeds fall directly under Article II of the United Nations Convention on Genocide: China is both “causing serious bodily or mental harm” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within the Uighur population, “with intent to destroy” it. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government is denying all claims of atrocities. To their credit, many Western governments, including the United States, have properly labeled these abuses as genocide. Now they must act accordingly.

Unlike the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, and more recently in Iraq against the Yazidis, the perpetrator, China, is a nuclear power that cannot be deterred through military intervention. Yet, there are several ways that the United States can impose significant costs on Beijing and make it harder for China to continue committing these crimes against humanity.

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Pandemic Restrictions & Religious Freedom

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Why the Supreme Court got it right in overruling California’s draconian lockdown rules.

The United States has been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic for over a year now. Some states — including my own, New Jersey — have been in varying stages of lockdown or otherwise heavily restricted for many of those past 365 days. California is a perhaps the exemplar of this lockdown approach, having drastically curtailed civil rights for millions of its citizens under the guise of Governor Gavin Newsom’s “emergency powers”. Just a week and a half ago, those restrictions — in California and by proxy elsewhere — were dealt a crushing blow by a majority of the Supreme Court. Much of the coverage of this important decision has been framed negatively, focusing on the religiosity of the petitioners, the fact that the decision was a split one, or decrying the Court’s ‘new direction’ after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Some pundits have even gone as far as claiming that the Court’s decision “Doubles Down On Religious Rights Amid Pandemic,” or that the majority had ulterior motives for its decision, as they are all “ultraconservatives” whose decision “may kill people”. This is all utter nonsense. The Supreme Court absolutely made the right decision in this case when it comes to religious rights under the First Amendment and the government’s power to curtail them in times of crisis.

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Some Thoughts on the Capitol Riot

Mike Coté3 Comments

It’s been almost two weeks since the destructive events of January 6 in our nation’s capital. As things have settled down some and the fog of war has partially lifted, I figured that it is time to share some of my thoughts on the events of that day and the fortnight following it. This post will touch on several different aspects of the riot, the coverage, and the aftermath, including overreactions and exaggerations. I don’t plan on trying to weave these thoughts together in a coherent and smooth narrative, as my opinions on these events don’t easily fit that paradigm; instead, I’ll go through a series of discrete views that hopefully will give you the full breadth of my feelings on this complicated subject.

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On Police Abolition

Mike Coté1 Comment

The conflict over police abolition is essentially a fight over how we view humanity; in the battle between Hobbes and Rousseau, the Englishman wins.

Over the past few weeks of protests and civil unrest following the tragic killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, discussion of police brutality has been widespread and bipartisan. Politicians, journalists, and regular people across the ideological spectrum have come together around the idea that police reform is necessary. This is an excellent development, as any changes to American policing need to be generally popular with all groups to have any chance of being made permanent and accomplishing their goal of improving public safety for us all. Unfortunately, radical (and unpopular) ideas have come to dominate some aspects of this conversation, particularly on the political left. The idee du jour among American progressives is the concept of total police abolition, or in its slightly tamer variant, the defunding of the police. In this article, I am going to group these two somewhat different ideas under the same heading of police abolition for one major reason: those advocates for defunding of the police often see it as a step towards a wholly new model of public safety that does not involve policing at its heart. To me, this seems like a slower version of the more aggressive slogan of ‘abolishing the police’, so it is fair to lump them together when thinking in the abstract.

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