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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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You're still turning a hypothetical into a clear conclusion that it "didn't seem to based meaningfully off of his speech", which is pretty clearly untrue given that he wouldn't have gotten a visit but for his speech.

And maybe that's still a strict scrutiny-passed tots-reasonable thing for police to do. Or at least close enough that everyone involved gets qualified immunity, and the courts never get around to deciding whether it's 'clearly established' one way or the other. But then we have Ken "violence against not just the government doing it and the private people joining the violence but the soft-target think-tank, media, and academic aparatus that empowered it becomes morally and philosophically justified" White, who already has a history of past mental health episodes, past gun advocacy, and who has promoted the belief that he's being personally targeted by the current administration.

No it's not the new standard for true threat, but it is a good showcase of why our currently existing standard is so high. People say edgy things all the time without doing violence.

I'm asking whether it's your standard of evidence. Because I can find a lot of people who were involuntarily committed and then, after release, didn't do anything violent; that's a far more common case than serious judicial review.

My point is that people say edgy things all the time without doing violence, and find either the feds or cops at their door with a fancy piece of paper signed by a judge. Not all the time! But again, Ken White isn't some random preteen being edgy on a Fortnite voice chat; trying to reason from the median case is pretty misleading.

And it's not just that he didn't get that noncon overnight stay with the fancy extra-long jacket sleeves, but that no one seems to be acting like they were even worried about it being a risk.