E-Pluribus | February 3, 2025
The cops are watching you; Britain’s grooming gangs, exposed; banning trans birth certificates
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
C.J. Ciaramella: Los Angeles Sheriff Misused Confidential Database Thousands of Times To Run Concealed Carry Background Checks
Overzealous law enforcement is a perennial threat to individual liberty. At Reason, C.J. Ciaramella offers a typical and troubling example from California, courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):
Two researchers from the EFF discovered through public records requests that California police departments reported 7,275 misuses of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, or CLETS, to the state Department of Justice in 2023. The vast majority of those offenses were committed by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (LASD), which was responsible for 6,789 of the violations.
The LASD committed thousands of abuses by violating a specific rule against using CLETS data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits. According to meeting notes obtained by the EFF, the LASD unit responsible for the searches was retrained, "and no further incidents of misuse have been identified since."
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Police in America now have access to a shocking amount of intrusive surveillance technology, and privacy advocates say there's not enough safeguards or disclosures about how this data is being accessed.
Maggie Oliver: ‘I Risked Everything to Blow the Whistle on Britain’s Grooming Gangs’
Over at The Free Press, former Manchester police constable Maggie Oliver recounts her two-decade effort to expose the UK’s grooming gangs, and—perhaps more importantly—the refusal of her superiors to protect so many young girls who were victimized:
Over the past few weeks, politicians, journalists, and commentators have expressed outrage that gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men have been raping British girls for years—and that many have not been punished. Many in these institutions have had every opportunity to help shut down this abuse over the last two decades, but they’re only speaking out now because it’s safe to jump on the bandwagon.
To those who have finally found a conscience, I ask: Where were you 20, or even 10, years ago?
Because when I tried to tell the world about this scandal, no one wanted to listen.
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Social workers, who knew the victims well, told me the scale of the crimes, and how the gangs operated in Manchester. Almost always, the girls knew their abusers. They were men who worked as taxi drivers and at Asian restaurants, people the girls met around the community. At least one, we suspected, was a police officer.
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By the spring of 2004, we had a list of just under 100 suspects, most of whom were Muslim men of Pakistani ancestry. And that was in Manchester alone.
Through our network, we started to learn this was happening nationwide. We spoke to forces in Liverpool and West Yorkshire, and both reported the same phenomenon: networks of predominantly Muslim men of Pakistani descent who were grooming and raping underage white girls.
I discovered the gangs were in cahoots. Men trafficked girls to other towns where they knew other abusers. But for some reason, the police in these districts had also been slow to respond.
Colin Wright, Ilya Shapiro: Trump Can Ban Transgender Birth Certificates
President Trump was well within his authority to ban transgender birth certificates, argue Colin Wright and Ilya Shapiro in the Wall Street Journal. In fact, they add, the new administration hasn’t gone far enough:
The unstoppable force of left-wing science denial has collided with an immovable object: Donald Trump. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.’ The order affirms that a person’s sex is immutable and intrinsically tied to the type of ‘reproductive cell’—sperm or egg—he or she can or would produce. It also rejects the unscientific notion that subjective ‘gender identity’ can replace biological sex.
We welcome this return to science-based definitions of male and female. It’s essential, however, to highlight some pitfalls to avoid and draw attention to an area where further executive action is needed to protect women’s rights.
Around Twitter (X)
Columbia-trained historian and libertarian gadfly Tom Woods hits back at critics who accused vice president JD Vance of racism last week. The VP’s alleged offense? Declaring that Americans have an obligation to care for their families, neighbors and country before turning their attention to the rest of the world. Excerpts below; Woods’ full post is here.
Chris Rufo says that fighting antisemitism is a fine cause, but it shouldn’t be done on the basis of defending any one ethnoreligious identity:
Finally, Wesley Yang takes a not-so-subtle shot at the Democrats as they struggle through an election-induced identity crisis: