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Taxes and Government Fees Make Up 25 Percent of Car Rental Fees

2026-05-18T09:29:28.879-04:00

By J.D. Tuccille - May 18, 2026 at 07:00AM

With gasoline averaging about $4.50 per gallon—over six bucks if you're unlucky enough to live in California—President Donald Trump proposes a gas tax holiday to give American consumers a bit of relief. A reprieve from taxes is always welcome, but the real bite isn't the federal 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24.4 cents on each gallon of diesel fuel. States charge far more, and that's especially true if you rent a car, with gas taxes the least of the problem. In some places, more than half the tab for car rentals comes from taxes and government-mandated fees.

Car Rental Taxes Add 'Hundreds of Dollars to Vacation Expenses'

Travelers make for easy marks, since they rarely vote in the places that soak them for revenue. The taxes and fees add up. Last year, Tennessee's WSMV4 reported that at Nashville International Airport, car renters are hit by "multiple taxes and daily charges that can add hundreds of dollars to vacation expenses."

Taxes and fees come from multiple levels of government, including states, localities, and authorities such as those that run airports. That makes renting a car more expensive than many people expect.

"Rental cars are some of the most heavily taxed transactions in the United States," Adam Hoffer and Jacob Macumber-Rosin wrote recently for the Tax Foundation. As the authors noted in a separate piece last year, the most burdensome state taxes are found in Minnesota, at 22.5 percent. But as they note in the recent piece, high local taxes and fees make Chicago the most expensive city, tax-wise, to rent a car:

Despite Illinois imposing one of the lower tax rates on rental vehicles at 5 percent—ranked 35th in our state rankings—the addition of a 15 percent City of Chicago rental tax, a 6 percent Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA) tax, a 1 percent Cook County Automobile Renting Occupation and Use Tax (ART), and a $0.50 per rental City of Chicago tax, the combined total tax on a Chicago car rental is 27.2 percent, or $68.00 on a $250 5-day rental.

After Chicago, they add, "Seattle, Washington (24.8 percent); Denver, Colorado (23.9 percent); Minneapolis, Minnesota (23.3 percent); and Colorado Springs, Colorado (21.9 percent), tax rental cars most heavily."

The cheapest place to rent a car, tax-wise, is Cincinnati, Ohio, where levies add up to 6.5 percent. Detroit, Michigan, and Columbus, Ohio, come in next at 8 percent.

But local authorities, like those that operate airports, also impose taxes and fees. These can overshadow state and city taxes, making it smart to leave airport property before picking up a car.

Mandated Airport Fees Exceed State and Local Taxes

"In nearly every case we examined, airport fees exceeded the combined taxes charged on a rental contract," add Hoffer and Macumber-Rosin. "The largest total airport fee is charged at Newark Liberty International, at 40.67 percent—over $101 on a $250 car rental."

Those fees are usually justified as funding airport operations. But in 2014, The Wall Street Journal's Heather Haddon reported that "a tax on travelers who rent cars at Newark Liberty International Airport is helping to fund an animal shelter, a park and a jobs program in New Jersey's largest city." She added that "rental car companies, tax groups and travelers associations say the taxes unfairly tap people who don't live in a locality to pay for services that benefit others."

Newark airport's take is the largest in the country, but it doesn't stand alone. The lowest fees, at 11.11 percent, are at St. Louis Lambert International Airport and Orange County, California's John Wayne Airport. Those fees are added on top of state and municipal taxes to deliver a surprise to travelers who haven't yet learned that quoted car rental prices are often just a vague wave in the general direction of the final bill.

A Combined 63.8 Percent Levy on Car Rentals

"The combined total burden from state and local taxes, airport fees, and other fees on car rentals is more than 25 percent of the sample transaction in every major city we examined, and is more than 50 percent in 5 cities," comment Hoffer and Macumber-Rosin.

Newark's combined tax and fee burden on car rentals is 63.8 percent. Denver comes in at 55.44 percent, Chicago at 54.06 percent, and Seattle at 53.32 percent.

The lowest tax and fee combination found in the study is 25.08 percent in Anaheim, California. St. Louis, Missouri, follows at 26.49 percent, with Tucson, Arizona, at 28.29 percent.

Rental companies are aware of the burdens that taxes and fees pile on travelers and how they can come as a rude shock to customers expecting one price and paying another. Hertz, one of the car rental giants, warns on its website that "car rental tax differs from state to state" and that "basing your budget on the base rate alone can be misleading as not all providers include rental taxes and fees in this total." The company urges renters to share their itineraries with the company so "you'll easily see how the total cost is worked out, including any extra fees and car rental taxes."

Hertz doesn't mention its staff's impressive ability to detect expensive damage on returned vehicles that's invisible to the human eye.

And, of course, plenty of people still get slammed by unexpected taxes and fees. The fact is that most renters have little sway with tax-imposing authorities in a place they're just visiting. The most they can do is avoid renting a vehicle in the most avaricious locales in favor of traveling elsewhere.

Travelers Are Easy Marks for High Taxes

Travelers are also considered fair game for lodging taxes, which can make hotel room rates just as much a guessing game as those of rental cars.

"A growing number of US destinations are lifting their hotel tax—often called a bed tax, tourist tax or occupancy tax—adding double-digit percentages and nightly fees to room bills," Hotel Management's Mohamed Dabo reported last November. "Industry research suggests the average lodging levy in the US is now above 15%."

Hoffer and Macumber-Rosin urge that rather than "trying to export the tax burden to nonresidents, municipalities should enact principled, neutral transportation tax policy that is unlikely to discourage visitors, tourists, and other economic activity." But so long as travelers have limited means to punish tax-hungry officials in places they visit, they're unlikely to enjoy anything like a tax holiday. Keep that in mind as you plan your trips.

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This Tiny Toad Blocked a Green Energy Project. A New Federal Rule Will Cut 'Green' Tape.

2026-05-18T07:29:12.357-04:00

By Jeff Luse - May 18, 2026 at 06:00AM

In February, the Interior Department, which manages 20 percent of America's land, unveiled a streamlined process for environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The new rule moves the department's NEPA procedures from the Code of Federal Regulations to an internal handbook, giving the department broader discretion in how it implements NEPA review. It also incorporates the page limits and statutory deadlines for NEPA review enacted by Congress in 2023.

NEPA has been an impediment to most energy and infrastructure projects in the United States. While many organizations have invoked the law to delay fossil fuel production, NEPA has disproportionately blocked clean power projects.

That is what happened in 2021, when the Bureau of Land Management approved a permit for the Ormat Dixie Valley geothermal project in Nevada's Great Basin Desert. The project, which Ormat began exploring in 2007, sought to tap into the area's hot springs to produce enough geothermal energy to power 44,000 homes, offsetting 6.5 million tons of carbon dioxide, Mother Jones reported. But construction stopped in 2022, when local environmentalists filed a NEPA lawsuit. The complaint argued that the project would hurt the population of a rare toad that the federal government had listed as endangered earlier that year. While a federal judge did not grant an injunction, the project has faced other environmental lawsuits and remained in limbo as of March.

The Interior Department hopes to avoid situations like that with its new NEPA rule, but not everyone supports the changes. In December, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club sued the government over the draft version of the rule. Central to the challenge is a provision that removes mandatory public hearings from the NEPA process, which the groups argue is illegal.

Such legal challenges illustrate the perils of reforming the permitting process through executive decree. Even if such efforts can survive judicial review, NEPA reforms that are not backed by binding legislation are likely to change based on whoever occupies the White House.

Congress is considering legislation that would make reforms more durable, including the SPEED Act, which the House approved in December. That bill would expand the list of categorical exclusions—projects that don't require reviews—and tighten the statute of limitations for NEPA lawsuits. Although the SPEED Act is unlikely to pass the Senate because it includes provisions that disfavor offshore wind energy, it has laid the groundwork for bipartisan permitting reform.

Those talks may falter, as they have in recent Congresses, and the Interior Department's rule may be reversed when the next Democrat takes over the White House. In the meantime, we can take solace in the fact that the government is trying to reduce its involvement in everyday life—at least when it comes to permitting.

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Open Thread

2026-05-18T06:29:09.995-04:00

By Eugene Volokh - May 18, 2026 at 03:00AM

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Memories of a Different Planet: Roentgenizdat

2026-05-17T20:29:32.254-04:00

By Eugene Volokh - May 17, 2026 at 04:37PM

From Wikipedia, photo by Dmitry Rozhkov of display "Rock on bones" in Gallery "Vinzavod", Moscow (2008)

My father Vladimir was remarking yesterday about an item from his youth in the USSR: People wanted to hear Western music (such as jazz and rock), but the Soviet authorities wouldn't allow it to be distributed. One could sometimes hear it on foreign shortwave broadcasts, but how to record it? And if one could get a smuggled foreign LP, how to duplicate it? Consumer tape recorders were generally unavailable. People had record players, and some people managed to cobble together recording machines for LPs. But the standard recording medium—vinyl—wasn't available to ordinary consumers.

So people would record instead on used X-rays, such as the ones you can see above. The story made its way into the West some time ago; there's a recent book on the subject, Bone Music: Soviet X-Ray Audio, and an accompanying web site. Here's an excerpt from the site:

The bootleggers' first technical problem, that of obtaining a machine to record with was relatively straightforward. Literature existed explaining audio recording techniques (say in case a righteous citizen wanted to copy the speeches of Comrade Stalin) and various recording machines had been brought back from Germany as trophies after the second world war. These could be adapted or copied, but a further problem existed. The State completely controlled the means of manufacturing records. You couldn't just go and buy the vinyl or shellac or lacquer needed in a store somewhere.

But at some point, some enterprising music lover hit on a genius idea. An alternative source of raw materials was available - used X-ray plates obtained from local hospitals. And that is where this story really begins. For many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing strange vinyl type discs when they were young.

The discs had partial images of skeletons on them and were called 'Bones' or 'Ribs' and they contained wonderful music, music that was forbidden. The practice of copying and recording music onto X-rays really got going in St Petersburg, a port where it was … easier to obtain illicit records from abroad. But it spread, first to Moscow and then to most major conurbations throughout the states of the Soviet Union.

The term "Roentgenizdat" is of course cognate to "samizdat." "Samizdat" was a combination of "self-" ("sam") and the first two syllables of "publishing house" ("izdatel'stvo"). The "sam" was replaced by "Рентген," often anglicized as "Roentgen," which is the root for all things X-ray in Russian (after the discoverer of X-rays, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen).

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Archives: The Best of Brian Doherty

2026-05-17T08:29:06.858-04:00

By Reason Staff - May 17, 2026 at 06:00AM

In March, longtime Senior Editor Brian Doherty died in a hiking accident. He was 57. To celebrate his life, this month's archives are excerpts from his 30 years of work at Reason.

3 years ago
March 2023

"In the post–Donald Trump GOP, support for the Iraq War has largely become anathema. Yet the U.S. has still not fully internalized that war's lessons. The Iraq debacle should have taught the U.S. it can never again scare itself into war based on guesses about how sinister some enemy is or will be. It should have taught Americans the damage that can be done by treating a foreign bogeyman as inherently intolerable—whether it's Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin or the mullahs of Iran, a nation whose feared pursuit of nuclear weapons has vexed Washington for many years."
"The Iraq War at 20"

6 years ago
December 2020

"If you actually care about a functioning civilization, it is never enough to have the state controlled by the 'right side.'…In a more libertarian world, police would not be continually engaged in overly aggressive assaults on citizens, whether those citizens were suspected of crimes or not. We suffer that now because police, as representatives of the state, are not subject to the same discipline that the rest of us are, and because they're charged with enforcing, potentially through violence, all sorts of petty or flagrantly unjust dictates, from traffic laws to drug laws. In a more libertarian world, we also would not see angry, threatening mobs insisting that random fellow citizens join them in public expressions of political piety or setting fire to buildings and breaking windows. However honorable the cause may be, such actions tear at the roots of our prosperity: the ability to possess wealth and space and to use them to offer goods and services for a price, helping others while peacefully bettering ourselves."
"Bourgeois Libertarianism Could Save America"

8 years ago
January 2018

"There are a number of qualities people might seek in a currency—such as relative stability in value—that bitcoin definitely lacks. But if you measure 'better' by an ability to acquire more in goods and services, bitcoin so far has proven far superior to the U.S. dollar and other countries' government-issued 'fiat' currencies. Less than a decade into its life, the digital token has enjoyed what is likely the largest, quickest rise in asset value in the history of the human race."
"In Search of the Elusive Bitcoin Billionaire"

12 years ago
December 2014

"In January 2015, a 30-year-old libertarian named Ross Ulbricht is scheduled to go on trial in federal court in New York for narcotics trafficking, running a 'continuing criminal enterprise' of drug selling (known colloquially as the 'drug kingpin' statute), computer hacking, and money laundering. The jury will be told that he also contracted hitmen to commit murder on his behalf, though he is not being charged with that crime in this trial. Ulbricht….faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. In the course of its war on Silk Road, the FBI has collared a handful of other defendants and shut down all activity at the site's original address. But the crackdown has done little to slow the growth of anonymous, encryption-enabled drug sales on the secret Internet. Silk Road is dead. Long live Silk Road."
"How Buying Drugs Online Became Safe, Easy, and Boring"

14 years ago
November 2012

"The future may be unknowable, but you can always guess. And thanks to prediction markets, your guesses, in conjunction with the guesses of others, can beat predictions made by professional forecasters. Just as money creates incentives in other realms of the economy, putting money or other stakes on guesses encourages better guesses. Hence the development of 'prediction markets,' where people bet money—sometimes real, sometimes fake—on specific future outcomes."
"Money Talks"

16 years ago
October 2010

"McDonald v. Chicago….established that the gun rights recognized in the District of Columbia because of [D.C. v.] Heller must also be respected by states and cities outside the purview of the federal government. The Second Amendment's protection now applies not just to D.C.'s 600,000 residents but to more than 300 million people across the country. The magnitude and reach of this earthquake in American law, which has touched off slow-motion aftershocks throughout the 50 states, are still uncertain. But whatever the future holds, Americans' ability to own guns has, at long last, taken its place among the other individual rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights."
"You've Come A Long Way, Baby"

18 years ago
December 2008

"When reason began in 1968, it was just one of many mimeographed zines then pushing a mostly obscure political and philosophical vision known as libertarianism…..During the intervening decades, the broader civilization has, in fits and starts, heeded much of the message that reason has been pushing since that first mimeographed edition. From the deregulation of airlines to the decriminalization of sodomy, from the fall of communism to the rise of dot-coms, the world is in many ways much freer than it was in 1968. It's easy to get caught up in those many restrictions on liberty that remain—including new ones that have arrived since 9/11—but the big picture reveals a happier story."
"40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets"

26 years ago
October 2000

"Pop music—especially that expansive, vague subcategory known as rock—is universally recognized as the soundtrack of rebellion, whether the authority in question is Daddy taking the T-bird away or the Soviet Union. (The former Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution was so named in part because its participants drew inspiration from those poster children of bourgeois decadence, the Velvet Underground.) While rock hugely, hilariously upset right-wing record burners in the '50s and '60s, it was also officially outlawed in all the great Worker's Republics of the same era—indeed, it was seen as the very apotheosis of capitalist hedonism. (But then if only Richard Nixon, that notable Elvis fan, could go to China, then perhaps only Rage Against the Machine, those millionaire communists, could bring Mao back across the Pacific.) As important, rock and the larger pop music scene are so clearly a function of the wealth, innovation, and leisure time thrown off by capitalism that it should be nothing less than mind-boggling that pop stars themselves mutter incessantly about toppling the very system that pays them so well."
"Rage On"

26 years ago
February 2000

"Certainly, Burning Man has changed from a truly anarchistic event—an anything-goes party of pyrotechnics and drive-by shooting ranges done off the grid, with no official approval sought and none granted—into a limited--liability corporation that charges admission and devotes a huge amount of resources to placating government agencies at all levels…..But the story is more complicated than a simple tale of unfettered liberty clashing with immovable and hidebound forces of government and social conformity. The agencies that sign off on Burning Man's permits have come to see the festival more as an opportunity than as a problem and have thus forged a relatively easygoing relationship with the openly danger- and drug-filled event. And Burning Man's gradual evolution of rules is more properly seen as an extended experiment in community building than as a case study in the suppression of liberty."
"Burning Man Grows Up"

31 years ago
February 1995

"With the self-interest of many industries, a new congressional majority, and the ever-declining power of private-sector unions all converging, it has never been more possible to harness a powerful political alliance for free trade, uniting ideology and interest. While free trade allows changes that can cost jobs in the short run, in the long run allowing capital and labor to move freely where its owners want it to go is the key to generating prosperity for everyone. The United States wisely eliminated trade barriers between states in the union, and we've all prospered for it. It's time to do the quickest, purest, and most effective thing we can to extend these benefits to our trade with the rest of the world. No complex negotiations are needed: End all tariffs and other policies that block the flow of goods immediately, and regardless of what other countries do. For the future of free economies the world over, there is no more important battle."
"No Deals"

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Open Thread

2026-05-17T06:29:39.699-04:00

By Eugene Volokh - May 17, 2026 at 03:00AM

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Stewart Brand on Fixing Stuff, Modern Environmentalism, and the Nuclear Future

2026-05-16T09:29:28.186-04:00

By Nick Gillespie - May 16, 2026 at 07:00AM

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Why Civilization Needs Better Manuals

Stewart Brand has spent decades shaping how we think about technology, the environment, and the future. He first came to prominence in the 1960s as co-creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture bible that helped inspire personal computing, the hacker ethic, and the modern environmentalist movement. Since then, he's launched the Long Now Foundation, championed nuclear power and de-extinction, and pushed us to think in 10,000-year time spans.

In his new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Brand argues that the real work of civilization isn't flashy invention but the long, patient care of complex systems. In March, he spoke with Nick Gillespie about what that means—and whether his vision of planetary stewardship conflicts with libertarian values of individualism, creative destruction, and decentralized power.

Reason: Your new book argues that maintenance is the hidden foundation of everything. What do we miss when we focus on innovation, creative destruction, and disruption and forget about checking that everything is tied down the right way on a daily basis?

Brand: I don't think they're opposed. A lot of innovation comes out of maintenance. People who figure out how to improve a thing are often the ones who are stuck with keeping it going and realizing how difficult that is. "Gee, we could make it easier this way or that way. Or what if we just throw this stupid thing away and get something better?" Which is all part of the process of keeping something going.

We often think of maintenance in terms of preventive maintenance. Repair is such a big hassle when something breaks. It's a trauma to you and to the system that the thing is part of. We spend some of our time doing the very unrewarding thing of changing the oil and brushing your teeth so that your teeth don't fall out and your car doesn't blow up. But really maintenance is the whole complete process of keeping the thing going. For example, right now, I'm writing on the history of agriculture, because if you're an animal, you've got to keep it fed. We are animals and we have to keep ourselves fed. The process of doing that has been one innovation after another.

You write about how interchangeable parts made it easier for people to fix things rather than throw the whole thing away, and how necessity was the mother of invention—living miles away from your neighbor, you had to figure out how to fix things yourself. Do you feel that, as a society, we still have that ethos, or have the machines we use to live and prosper become mysterious to us?

The Model T was designed to be maintained and tailored any old which way. Henry Ford grew up on a farm in the Midwest. He knew that farmers and ranchers were very good at fixing their own stuff, so he counted on that. The Model T stayed the Model T, and millions of them were made and used, and got old, went in the junkyards, and then got completely pillaged in the junkyards for the parts—because 20 years later, a part from a really old Model T would fit in your brand new Model T.

I'm glad you brought up the bit about interchangeable parts, because it's probably the most anti-libertarian, anti–Reason magazine section of the book, in that it was government people who for 40 years in the War Department, the Ordnance Department specifically, spent millions of dollars, which now would be a lot more than that, trying to get manufacturers in the U.S. capable of making interchangeable parts. It turns out you have to get down to about a 50th of a millimeter accuracy in order for that to actually work. They did it. And that's why America wound up taking the lead in the manufacturing part of the Industrial Revolution.

We led the way, a thing called the "American system." It turned out that the way to get really good interchangeable parts was to basically automate the machine tools that made them.

Ford never allowed anybody to use a file on the assembly line, because as soon as you took a part and filed it to fit better, that would suddenly stop the assembly line. With guns, if your gun failed and you're military and you're in the field and you need to fix it, you've got to find a gunsmith, which is not going to be anywhere near the battlefield, and they'll file a part to get it put in there or they'll make it from scratch. Once they're interchangeable, like the AK-47, any piece of any AK-47 will substitute just fine and they're very roughly designed and built.

I see that process in the 19th century as being what led to [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. The researchers I counted on call it military enterprise.

In the book, you write about how the AK-47 was created by the Soviet Union and is the weapon of choice for armies and insurgents around the world because it is relatively simple, easily fixed, and there are lots of parts for it. You compare that to the M16, developed in America, which was rolled out en masse in Vietnam and was terrible for that. It has twice as many parts as the AK-47. It's more subject to corrosion and rust and gunk getting in there. It seems like we're always going between simpler products that might be more limited vs. something more sophisticated. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in between?

I don't think so. I think you wind up being rewarded by going in both directions. AK-47s were cheap and M16s are not cheap. AK-47s operate in the mud. They operate in the sand. They operate in humidity. You can pick one up out of the mud and fire it, and as you fire, the mud flies out. [An] M16 basically has to be surgically cleaned to function. When it functions, it's absolutely fantastic—at 500 meters you can put high-velocity small rounds through a helmet.

There's always a place in not just the market, but a range of situations and mindsets, for things that are cheap, fast, and just barely in control, and things that are exquisitely attuned to perfection if they're in relatively perfect circumstances. Exploring both of those, as a good direction to explore the whole field of design, is always worth doing.

Your work on, among other things, the campaign to have NASA release a photograph of the whole Earth helped inspire the first Earth Day. You helped create the environmentalist mindset. When you say they went too far, that carries a lot of weight.

Greenpeace were anti-technology. Romantics in general are anti-technology. John Henry is always going to get the song. The steam drill never does. But the steam drill is actually a better way to do that kind of work.

The French Revolution—where the idea of interchangeable parts for guns, or muskets then, was actually started—the French Revolution said, "Don't do that, because these nice gunmakers will be out of work." They actually shut down the guy named [Honoré] Blanc who was building interchangeable parts for muskets. France went, in the course of a generation, from having the best muskets in Europe to having the worst muskets in Europe. There was no taking account of "Was this beneficial for the customer?"—in that case, soldiers. And that keeps happening.

The anti-technology romantic is almost always: 1) wrong, and, 2) mistaken in his arguments. The way to critique a new anything—AI now—is to embrace it and experiment with it, make mistakes with it, see if you can break it, red-team it, do all these things to sharpen it. And if in the course of that you decide, "You know what, this is a blind alley and we need to back out of it," the critique from people who have done that is a valid critique.

People are just imagining problems. You can always imagine more problems than you can imagine more ways of things actually going right.

What do you think is the strongest critique of AI as it's being rolled out now? What are the things that we should be testing it on to see if it's something that we're not really going to embrace?

I don't think of that. But I do know a lot of the people who are going to think of that, and I trust them to investigate the ways it could go wrong.

They'd be able to head off some of them. They won't be able to head off all of them. Some of them will go probably pretty calamitous, and then we negotiate. The use of AI in weapons is clearly going to be played out very quickly, because the militaries always grab new technologies and turn them into weapons, and rightfully so from their standpoint. It could be a thing like the use of gas that gets tabooed after a while. The use of nuclear weapons, even tactical ones—that's been tabooed for quite a while.

Everything has to do with a threat. And the massive amount of testing that went on in the '50s and '60s was negotiating with threat. But once you had mutual assured destruction with the second strike capability, that actually put a stop to it. That was, in a way, why it was developed. Some problems turn out to be nonexistent. Some problems turn out to be easy to recognize and solve, and some problems are really hard to solve and it takes a while. We'll go through all of that with AIs.

In the late '60s, there was more political violence than there is now and it was undergirded by people who actually believed that political violence was the answer. The country seemed to be coming apart. There was no consensus about things. We seem to be back in something like that, where there's a lot of polarization, demonization, and political violence. Is the political system robust enough to keep things in check or is it just not working anymore? How do we create a consensual government system where we get most of the benefits with fewer of the harsh costs?

This is actually an interesting time to be alive right now, because all of that is up for proof, up for grabs. There's a lot of grabbing going on. The system was designed to be ungrabbable, but it's been grabbed. How far down that path of having been grabbed does it go before it becomes stuck there? That's what we're in the process of finding out.

There's lots of reasons to find its way back to some kind of balance. It'll be different than before. The systems will be different than before. We may have different political parties with different names, but the basic apparatus in the towns, to a large degree in the states, is pretty intact. We'll find a way to find a new center of balance.

The Whole Earth Catalog's statement of purpose says, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." The first issue came out in 1968. We're coming up on 60 years. Do you think we've gotten pretty good at it?

The big test will be climate. We've certainly gotten better at a whole lot of godlike powers—god with a small g. These are great god things, not the Almighty.

We haven't really attempted anything in terms of maintenance of the planet at planet scale, at planet pace. With climate change, we're dealing with a big, deep, slow process. There's no instant cures, although some are better than others. Geoengineering is one that we'll come to just because the cost of continually rising temperatures and rising oceans will make it seem like this is the low-cost way to buy enough time to really convert all of our energy systems to basically noncombustion. That will be a different planet, a different society, different global civilization, because it's not economic. There's a global economy, but there's no such thing as a planetary economy. The things that matter at planet scale are not measurable in dollars and cents.

The great thing of the advance of science is that we have lots and lots of capabilities of sensing that something is going wrong and what exactly is going wrong in that thing. In terms of maintenance, the ability to do that kind of sensing is crucial. They call it predictive maintenance. Before the thing breaks, you have indications that would like to break, and that's when you try to head it off. Often, you can't. So far, we've not fully succeeded in doing that with climate. We've gone a long way, much farther into solar than I would ever have thought. We were pushing solar 60 years ago in the Whole Earth Catalog in a big way. Among our crowd, we thought, "This is obvious," but it took a while for it to become cheap and easy.

If you're a farmer and you have 100 acres of your farming, you can get a certain amount of food out of it. Even with precision farming, it's going to be just a certain amount. If you let some company put a whole bunch of solar collectors on your 100 acres and you lease it to them, you get 10x to 100x the money and none of the hassle. The cheap, abundant source of energy is increasingly becoming the sun. And there's quite a lot of sunlight. There'll be even more in orbit as these guys are trying to figure out how to start having major data centers in space.

Do you feel like the world is growing up a bit about nuclear energy? You rankled a lot of people in the environmentalist movement when you claimed that nuclear power makes obvious sense if you want to reduce various kinds of emissions and minimize impact on the planet. Do you feel that message is about to be fully accepted around the world?

The opposition got outlived. Basically, they were not able to convince younger and younger generations to buy into what turned out to be a false fear. And then very wealthy young people want to do AI or want to do crypto or whatever; that takes a lot of energy. They look directly at the advantages of nuclear power. They're not looking at it through the history of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Three Mile Island and all that. They're looking at "Can this be made safe?" Yes, totally. "Is it something that can really scale?" Yes. So nuclear scaling up and solar continuing to scale up look like they're both going to happen.

What are you doing to maintain your legacy? How does one go about maintaining their legacy while they're still around to do it?

I tried to write a memoir at one point, and as soon as I wrote a line of it, I hated it. I was just bored with myself. But I didn't have to because some guys came along and wanted to make a film about me and this documentary called We Are As Gods was made, and it's good. John Markoff came along and wanted to write a biography, and he did, and it's good. All of the Whole Earthwork we did over 30-plus years is now online at wholeearth.info. My legacy has gone ahead and somehow established itself. It's not something I'm concerned about. I'm one of the really very lucky people in that respect.

After The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich died, you wrote, "I'll speak up for Paul. He was wrong about discounting the 'demographic transition' in human population, but he co-authored (with Peter Raven) one of the most cited papers in biology, on co-evolution." Given his large role in stressing people about overpopulation and his influence among governments in reducing births, how do you assess his overall contribution to science and society?

Remember, it was Dave Brower at Sierra Club who asked Paul to write that book and to write it not as science but as a polemic. Overpopulation was an environmentalist obsession before Paul lit the fuse on his book. (These were the same self-named "ecologists" who couldn't tell a trophic level from a Tyrannosaurus.)

Peter Raven is a botanist (whose Wikipedia bio says, "Raven is possibly best known for his work 'Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution,' published in the journal Evolution in 1964, which he coauthored with Paul R. Ehrlich"). Paul was a zoologist, a lepidopterist focused on checkerspot butterfly populations. He noticed that supposedly identical butterflies dined on completely different plants in different regions. Over coffee, he and Raven complained to each other that zoologists treated plants as just so much edible plastic, whereas in evolutionary reality, plants pay just as much active attention to animals as animals do to them. Naming that attention "coevolution" was a thunderclap in evolution theory, because it forced biologists to notice that most of evolution is in fact coevolution—living things devote most of their adaptation to dealing with other living things, who are busy adapting right back at them.

It's a profound idea that reframes everything. That's why I named a magazine for it—CoEvolution Quarterly. For me, it far outweighs Paul's exaggerations about human population numbers.

In a sense, I'm attempting something similar with "maintenance." It's not just a persistent nuisance. It's so essential that it's what most living things have to spend most of their time and attention on tending to.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity, as well as augmented by questions answered over email.

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The Anarchists Who Thought Mao Was on Their Side

2026-05-16T08:29:11.760-04:00

By Jesse Walker - May 16, 2026 at 06:00AM

Sixty years ago today, Mao Zedong issued the May 16 Notification, a document frequently seen as the opening shot of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In this period, Mao fought his rivals in China's power structure by declaring them counterrevolutionaries and urging the country to rise up against them. Young radicals known as Red Guards heeded the dictator's call, and soon a mishmash of groups were chaotically clashing. The ensuing years saw violent rebellion, even more violent repression, and intense attacks on allegedly reactionary forms of culture. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed—probably well over a million.

At a time when Americans and Europeans had very little direct contact with China, most Westerners viewed this through a fog. Some of them projected their political ideals onto what was unfolding. This was not merely the familiar pattern where starry-eyed leftists identified with a socialist revolution: This time, some of them thought they were watching an anti-authoritarian leader instigating a revolt against bureaucracy.

Paul Berman once argued that there were three "grand tendencies" in the New Left: the old-school Marxists, the neo-Marxists, and the "inconsistent libertarians." He didn't mean the free market sort of libertarians—though as we'll see, there was some overlap. He meant people who were "anarchist at heart, allergic to bureaucracies, allergic to anything like a Marxist-Leninist centralized organization," yet "kept falling for the Third Worldist fantasies of the modern Marxists, kept wanting to celebrate Ho or some other tropical Communist as a hero of the libertarian cause." The fantasy was particularly intense around China, thanks to the Cultural Revolution (and thanks to Mao's interest in local self-sufficiency, which a distant observer could misconstrue as a more benign sort of decentralization). The idea that something semi-anarchist was happening in China had more adherents at the time than you might expect:

• David Dellinger, an antiwar activist with an anarcho-pacifist background, reported from China in 1967 that "strongly libertarian attitudes" were "noticeable in the Red Guards and (contrary to the assumptions of most Westerners) in Chinese society generally."

• The composer John Cage loved the Spooner-Tucker circle of individualist anarchists—he was constantly giving away copies of a book about them—and his politics mixed their breed of anarchy with the futurism of Buckminster Fuller. For a while he improbably added Mao to the mix, citing the dictator's interest in anarchism as a young man and his admonition to the Red Guards that "it is right to rebel."

• That counterculture bible, the Whole Earth Catalog, had a strong libertarian streak, as did its founder and primary editor, Stewart Brand. Yet one edition included a special section hailing Mao's China as "one of the great social and political experiments of all time"—and Brand himself casually declared, while reviewing Ursula Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed, that the book had "changed his mind politically" by turning him "toward Kropotkin and Mao." The left-anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin, that is.

• The British anarchist Colin Ward offered the same unusual pairing. Writing in 1974 of the decentralized economic development imagined in Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops, Ward cited China as one of three "actual human societies which exemplify the ideas set by Kropotkin in this book"—though he acknowledged that the country was sufficiently centralized that "some great shift in policy might put into reverse the trends which, at a distance, we admire."

• In continental Europe, the German New Left leader (and later vice chancellor) Joschka Fischer sometimes spoke of "anarcho-Mao-spontex," an anti-hierarchical ideological tendency that fused anarchy with, in Berman's words, "an imaginary Mao—a Mao who, unlike the real Mao, was not a totalitarian." This phenomenon took its most bizarre form in Italy, where a partly but not entirely tongue-in-cheek movement styled itself "Mao Dada." (That's Dada the anti-authoritarian art movement, not Dada the benevolent father.) In France, a Mao-spontex party called Gauche Prolétarienne included several prominent intellectuals; Michel Foucault worked with many of its members (including his partner) in forming a militant anti-prison group.

Needless to say, Mao wasn't abolishing prisons back in China. But in France, Gauche Prolétarienne was the most prominent collection of self-proclaimed Maoists around.

• In the free market world, the future gun-rights litigator Stephen Halbrook took to claiming an exotic assortment of leftists for the libertarian cause, describing V.I. Lenin as "one of the great libertarians of our age" and Fidel Castro's network of informants, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, as an anarchistic alternative to "huge central bureaucracy." Halbrook's attempt to fuse libertarianism with Leninism crested with two articles full of praise for Mao, one in Libertarian Analysis and the other in Outlook. The latter appeared under the title "Mao, Economy, and State"—a play on Murray Rothbard's pro-market treatise Man, Economy, and State—alongside a cartoon of the Great Helmsman reading Rothbard.

Some of his articles' assertions were flat-out inaccurate: Halbrook claimed, for example, that "all forms of coercion were taboo" during the Great Leap Forward. Others were cherry-picked: He quoted a 1934 report where Mao wrote, "As regards the private sector of the economy, we shall not hamper it; indeed we shall promote and encourage it," without mentioning the rest of the sentence—"so long as it does not transgress the legal limits set by our government." Halbrook essentially assembled every example he could find of Mao either promoting local self-sufficiency or relaxing economic controls, and he presented them together as a more-or-less consistent ideal of "a free, decentralized economy." Most readers did not find this persuasive.

Still, at least two prominent libertarians felt something compelling in Halbrook's arguments. One was Leonard Liggio, a future president of the Mont Pelerin Society, who had publicly praised Halbrook's take on Lenin and published an article that invoked "Lenin's basic anarchism" and the "anarchistic nature of [China's] cultural revolution." (Liggio would later take a more critical attitude toward that portion of Chinese history.) The other, treading more carefully than Liggio but still dipping his toes into the water, was the Goldwater speechwriter turned anarchist Karl Hess.

Outlook's editors asked Hess to write an introduction to Halbrook's piece, perhaps under the theory that a benediction from a figure widely admired in libertarian circles might help a controversial thesis go down more smoothly. Hess approached the subject from the side: He did not claim that China was free, but he argued that libertarians should pay attention to "the direction of political and social movement within all nation states" and thus should take note if the Chinese were "moving—at least moving—away from command socialism and toward a sort of participatory democracy." Hess mostly left it to Halbrook to offer evidence of that movement, but he listed some changes that he believed were happening in China: turns "toward a militia defense, unarmed police, local direct democracy, cooperative rather than state ownership."

By framing the subject as a shift toward freedom rather than an actual arrival at a free destination, Hess put a degree of distance between himself and the Chinese regime. A few years later, when Reason columnist Edith Efron claimed that Hess "now calls himself a Maoist," he wrote in to call that an "actual libel" and to say that the "only other place beside Miss Efron's article that I have been described as a Maoist, so far as I know, is in the intelligence files of the FBI."

By that time, Hess was not merely distinguishing movement from destination; he was distinguishing the party-state from the hinterlands. Interviewed by Playboy in 1976, he derided Mao as "an elitist, a bureaucrat" and concluded that the country was freest where Mao's power was weakest: It was "far left out in the countryside and still right-wing in Peking." (In the mid-1970s, Hess used left to mean dispersed power and right to mean concentrated authority.) He made a similar claim in his 1975 book Dear America. Each time, he was vague about what precisely was happening in those hinterlands. But in that vagueness, and in that lingering suspicion of the Beijing regime, Hess accomplished something that I don't think any other Mao-curious anti-authoritarians managed to do: He anticipated a transformation that was about to sweep the country.

You see, there really was something anti-authoritarian and decentralist in the Cultural Revolution's effects, though not in the way the anarcho-Mao-spontex crew imagined. The chaos of the period so decimated the party and the state that the authorities were too weak to keep a firm grip on the countryside. By the time Playboy was interviewing Hess, many villages really did enjoy a great deal of de facto autonomy—and used it to divide communal property, evade planners' diktats, expand private landholdings, and trade on a growing black market. Soon millions were engaged in what was essentially a vast, spontaneous civil disobedience campaign. When the post-Mao regime "introduced" market reforms, it was legalizing what people at the grassroots had already started illicitly on their own. In the words of the Chinese-American political scientist Kate Xiao Zhou, "When the government lifted restrictions, it did so only in recognition of the fact that the sea of unorganized farmers had already made them irrelevant."

So when Hess wrote in Dear America that China was "very far to the left out in the countryside while still being much more to the right in the seats of power," he landed on an important truth. He may have landed there accidentally, but he got there all the same.

There was, I should add, one more significant group of people in the late '60s who embraced the anarcho-Mao-spontex notion that true Maoism meant eradicating hierarchies. This was the ultra-left segment of the Red Guards themselves. In the 1968 tract "Whither China?," a teenaged spokesman for the Shengwulian movement argued that the party was a privileged class and that the state should be replaced with a decentralized democracy modeled on the Paris Commune. If you need proof that Maoist orthodoxy and Mao-spontex heresy were very different beasts, you need only note that this essay was officially denounced and its author shipped to a prison camp. (He eventually became a free market economist.) Another contingent of ultra-left ex–Red Guards had to flee to Hong Kong, where they mixed with anarchists and other anti-Mao leftists in a journal called Minus and a group called the 70s Front. No longer anarcho-Mao-spontex, they now were simply anarcho-spontex.

Those leftist critiques of the Maoist state caught an American politician's eye. "The main thrust of the 70s Front is the contention that Red China has become a giant monopolistic corporation," he announced. "The economy is governed by raw political power, rather than by the law of supply and demand. The state corporation has become a religious cult, and criticism of the regime is suppressed." This politician acknowledged that these "new Chinese libertarians" were "not defenders of Western-style private enterprise," but they did, he said, recognize the evils of monopoly and the need for civil liberties.

The politician in question was not one of those New Left veterans who had combed their sideburns, put on suits, and tried to take over the Democratic Party. He was Ronald Reagan, reading a radio script composed by a libertarian Republican who had never seen Mao as anything but a tyrant—a fellow named John McClaughry. If anyone ever wants to start a movement called anarcho-Reagan-spontex, they should check out the moment in that broadcast when the Gipper read directly from a 70s Front manifesto. "We oppose all dictatorships, all governments, all forms of statism, and all authority," he quoted approvingly.

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Open Thread

2026-05-16T04:29:38.182-04:00

By Eugene Volokh - May 16, 2026 at 03:00AM

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Brickbat: Not Fantastic

2026-05-15T06:29:47.010-04:00

By Charles Oliver - May 15, 2026 at 04:00AM

New York lawmakers are considering a bill that would require companies with net income of $5 million or more to reduce or eliminate plastic packaging. Supporters say the bill would help fight pollution, reduce waste, and make large companies pay more of the cost of recycling instead of taxpayers. But grocery stores, packaging companies, and other business groups warn the changes could raise prices on common products like toilet paper, diapers, and paper towels because alternative packaging may cost more and protect products less effectively. Critics also say the bill could lead to damaged goods, supply problems, and higher costs for families. Supporters argue the environmental benefits outweigh those concerns.

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Open Thread

2026-05-15T05:29:38.388-04:00

By Eugene Volokh - May 15, 2026 at 03:00AM

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What Do Bruen, Dobbs, and SFFA Have In Common?

2026-05-15T01:29:26.391-04:00

By Josh Blackman - May 14, 2026 at 11:49PM

Randy Barnett and I are nearing completion of the Fifth Edition of our Constitutional Law casebook. We are still waiting for the last batch of cases from June to finalize a few chapters. Our last edition was published in 2021. Needless to say, a lot has changed, though much of the book remains the same. Still, this experience has reinforced the difference between how students are taught constitutional law, and how practitioners see it on the ground.

In the classroom, we read the landmark decisions that changed the law of the land: Bruen laid down a rigorous test to review gun control laws; Dobbs returned the abortion issue to the states; Students for Fair Admission all-but eliminated affirmative action; and so on. Students who read these decisions from 2022 and 2023 might get the sense that constitutional law changed overnight with respect to guns, abortion, and racial preferences. The reality, however, is far different.

Barely a year after Bruen, Rahimi walked back the "analogue" test. Gun laws have remained virtually unchanged. Blue states have allowed shall-issue carry regimes with many obstructions and burdens. Moreover, the Supreme Court has turned away every single case about the scope of sensitive places and the types of arms covered by the Second Amendment. The two cases argued this term (Hemani and Wolford) present fringe issues that will matter little to gun owners.

Ditto for affirmative action. In the wake of SFFA, the Court turned away Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp. v. The School Committee For the City of Boston (2024). This case cleanly presented a challenge to an affirmative action policy at an elite public school that was evading SFFA. Justices Thomas and Alito would have granted cert . Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were silent. As documented in a new Manhattan Institute report, the rates of racial minorities admitted to elite colleges has remained roughly the same, despite doomsday predictions from Harvard and other groups. Remember Justice Kagan's hypothetical about what would happen if zero black students attended Harvard? To my mind, these numbers suggest that universities developed clever ways to evade SFFA, though the data is not clear. I doubt the Supreme Court will re-enter this fray.

The abortion issues is a bit more complex, but the reality is the same. After Dobbs, doctors began sending mifepristone to red states, and blue states enacted shield laws to immunize these doctors. Dobbs held that abortion would now be an issue for the states to decide, however pro-life states are helpless to stop doctors from flooding their states with abortion pills. Indeed, there are more abortions now in red states than before Dobbs. The shield law issue has not yet reached the Court, but I suspect the Court will stay out of it. And, just this evening, the Court once again copped out on mifepristone.

The court, by an ostensible 7-2 vote, granted a stay of the Fifth Circuit in Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana. There is no explanation at all. I am old enough to remember when the Court's liberals complained that unexplained stays should not be granted. But here, Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dutifully joined the order. As did Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. In 2023, I wrote that Justice Barrett only grants relief on the emergency docket when the Fifth Circuit does something conservative. Well, the trend continues.

Why did the Court grant a stay of the reasoned decision by Judge Duncan? Was it due to a lack of state standing? Did the Court find that Louisiana is not likely to win on the merits? Perhaps the Court found that Danco prevailed on the equities to distribute a product that is illegal? Who knows? The Court said nothing at all.

Of course, this might be a rare case where all three Trump appointees voted in the exact fashion Trump wanted. The President clearly does not want to block the shipment of mifepristone. He has been very clear on this from the outset. There have been no Comstock Act prosecutions. The FDA has refused to revisit the Biden-era REMS. The FDA didn't even file a brief in this case! Trump was hoping that the Supreme Court would bail him out, and they did.

The only Justices willing to say anything about the matter were Justices Thomas and Alito. Thomas made the obvious point: the distribution of mifepristone is illegal. How can Danco and Genbiopro "be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes"? Imagine a gun manufacturer sought an injunction to allow the shipment of their products into a blue state, where it was illegal. Does anyone think the equities would tip in favor of those shipping firearms? Of course not. And really, no need to imagine. I represented Defense Distributed, which was enjoined from putting files on the internet that might be downloaded by someone in a blue states. Do you think the federal judge in Washington was troubled that Defense Distributed lost profits? Come on. Get real.

Justice Alito, as usual, said what needed to be said. Blue states are flouting Dobbs and the Supreme Court will do nothing to stop it.

The Court's unreasoned order granting stays in this case is remarkable. What is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U. S. 215 (2022), which restored the right of each State to decide how to regulate abortions within its borders. Some States responded to Dobbs by making it even easier to obtain an abortion than it was before, and that is their prerogative. Other States, including Louisiana, made abortion illegal except in narrow circumstances. See, e.g., La. Rev. Stat. Ann. §40.1061 et seq. But Louisiana's efforts have been thwarted by certain medical providers, private organizations, and States that abhor laws like Louisiana's and seek to undermine their enforcement.

In the past, Justice Kennedy prevent Louisiana from banning abortions within its borders. Now, the government of New York can impose the same undue burden on state sovereignty. Has anything really changed since Dobbs? Justice Kavanaugh's Dobbs concurrence reached out to decide the issue of whether women could travel from red states to blue states. But he missed the most obvious response: mail order abortions. Why travel when you can get the pills sent through the Postal Service?

As for the equities, Louisiana simply seeks to put Danco in the same position it was before the 2023 REMs. They were profitable under the old regime, and can remain profitable.

I will continue to teach Bruen, SFFA, and Dobbs. But students should know the Justices really didn't mean to enforce any of these rulings.

I think we can soon add Kennedy v. Bremerton to this list. Judge Duncan's opinion for the en banc Fifth Circuit faithfully applied the history and tradition test to the Texas Ten Commandments Law. I think the Chief Justice will write the majority opinion, and hold, "Well, we really didn't mean what we said." As I said above, the casebook changes, but constitutional law remains largely the same.

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Are Democrats Now the Party of Free Markets? Don't Bet on It.

2026-05-14T09:29:33.587-04:00

By Stephanie Slade - May 14, 2026 at 06:00AM

Source: Gallup

Here's a fact about partisanship and public opinion that may surprise you: According to Gallup, Democrats have been warming toward foreign trade since 2008, and they have been more positive about it than Republicans have been since 2012. With all the talk of political realignment in recent years, data points like these have led some to wonder whether Democrats are becoming the major party that better aligns with libertarian commitments to free markets and limited government.

That case could certainly be made. Another recent Gallup poll found that, for the first time in almost 20 years, Democrats are more concerned than Republicans about government overreach. Asked whether the federal government has too much power, about the right amount of power, or too little power, 62 percent of Americans say it has too much. That includes 66 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners, compared to 58 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners.

Republicans are still much more likely than Democrats to think the government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses (81 percent vs. 31 percent), while Democrats are much more likely to think the government should do more to solve our country's problems (62 percent vs. 17 percent). Yet most Americans with a household income of $40,000 or less say government should be doing more, which is relevant because President Donald Trump edged out former Vice President Kamala Harris among lower-income voters in the 2024 election, according to exit polls.

During the last three presidential cycles, Americans without a college degree have shifted toward Trump, while more highly educated Americans have broken decidedly for Democrats. Those trends have caused many observers to posit that the GOP is now the "working-class party."

If working-class voters are more favorable toward government action, it is reasonable to wonder whether that demographic change could lead to an ideological change, with the Republican Party in years to come following Trump by embracing deficit spending, industrial policy, tariffs, and other interventions in the economy. Meanwhile, the rise of "abundance liberals"—left-of-center policy wonks who have belatedly realized that overregulation and interest-group politics are making us all poorer—raises the possibility that the Democratic Party is on the opposite trajectory.

A 2025 podcast conversation between former Daily Show host Jon Stewart and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein exemplified the latter flavor of policy evolution. Klein spent a chunk of the episode walking through the endless maze of sometimes-conflicting, always-onerous mandates attached to federal spending: requirements that subsidized factories use costly green energy sources, jump through hoops to diversify their workforces, provide on-site child care, and so on. When you add complications such as comment periods, challenge periods, and the convoluted stages of the application process, it's no wonder that President Joe Biden's efforts to jump-start infrastructure investment or "reshore" manufacturing found little success.

"And also, by the way, it's going to make it impossible for anyone other than larger corporations to comply," Stewart observed, because "smaller, more agile, more local businesses….would not have the manpower, the financial resources. You are excluding an enormous amount of the American economy in terms of building things by laying on compliance costs that would drive most companies into the ground."

Listening to two prominent progressives highlight the cronyism and inefficiencies of government bureaucracy that libertarians have been shouting about for decades was equal parts refreshing and infuriating. But if you were tempted to hope those realizations would bring them around to genuinely libertarian conclusions, you would be disappointed.

Ultimately, as the second half of the podcast made clear, Klein and his allies support streamlining government because they hope to make it easier for government to do big, ambitious things: nationwide high-speed rail, federal housing projects, Medicare for All. They are not trying to get government out of the way so people can thrive; they want government itself to thrive.

That distinction is the main problem with the hypothesis that Democrats will soon be the party of free markets and limited government. Even the abundance movement—the most libertarian-coded segment of the larger Democratic coalition—wants "a much stronger government," in Klein's words. And the less libertarian elements of the party—think of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who favors government-run grocery stores and free public transit—are busy pulling their party in the opposite of a free market direction.

Sure, a recent Pew Research Center survey found 87 percent of Democrats saying Trump's protectionism would have a mostly negative effect on the country. But a lot of that seems to be negative polarization: Democrats oppose the tariffs because they dislike the guy imposing them, not because they have a principled commitment to free markets and free trade. Biden ran in 2020 as a critic of Trump's reckless first-term tariffs. Once in office, he kept many of them and even expanded some.

Democrats frequently discover a strange new respect for limited-government ideals when they're not in power, but it doesn't last. The moment they're back in the White House, expect progressives to experience sudden-onset amnesia about the lessons they weren't really learning during the Trump years.

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Brickbat: Slow Down

2026-05-14T06:29:26.522-04:00

By Charles Oliver - May 14, 2026 at 04:00AM

The Florida Highway Patrol arrested Zachary Krug, an officer with the Temple Terrace Police Department, on charges of vehicular homicide and reckless driving after a crash that killed a 6-year-old girl. Investigators say when the crash happened, Krug was driving more than 100 mph in a 50 mph zone, and he was not responding to a call or taking any law enforcement action at the time. Authorities say Krug's police SUV collided with a Nissan Pathfinder attempting a U-turn, which carried a mother and her three children. The crash killed Layla Sakowski and seriously injured several others, including her 8-year-old sister. Temple Terrace Police later fired Krug for violating department policies and laws.

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Open Thread

2026-05-14T05:29:33.365-04:00

By Eugene Volokh - May 14, 2026 at 03:00AM

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U.K. Elections Show Populist Uprising Is Far From Over

2026-05-13T10:29:24.891-04:00

By J.D. Tuccille - May 13, 2026 at 07:00AM

If you wondered whether the populist surge of the last decade shows any signs of abating, the answer is a resounding no. In last week's local elections in the United Kingdom, the biggest winner was the insurgent Reform Party, which went from almost no seats on local councils to the largest share and firmly established itself in regional parliaments. The next biggest winner was the upstart Green Party, which gained hundreds of seats. Squeezed out were the two traditionally dominant parties, especially the governing Labour Party. Polls suggest similar results can be expected elsewhere in elections to come.

From Nowhere to a Dominant Election Showing

Prior to the election, the anti-immigration/populist Reform Party held all of two seats in local councils across Britain; it now has 1,454. The environmentalist/socialist Green Party gained 441 seats for a total of 587. Britain's Labour and Conservative parties, which have alternated in power for a century, lost 1,498 and 563 seats, respectively.

In Wales, the nationalist Plaid Cymru party won the most seats in the regional parliament for the first time, with Reform as the second-largest party. The Scottish National Party continues to dominate Scotland's parliament, though with a reduced presence; Labour and Reform tied at 17 seats each for second place, with the Greens close behind at 15 seats.

Reform had no representation in either of the regional parliaments before this election. It's fair to say that the results showed deep dissatisfaction with both major parties. Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose approval is almost 50 points underwater, faces calls from his own party to step down.

You can bet the results were watched across the English Channel in Europe, where establishment politicians have faced—and often lost to—populist insurgencies of their own in recent years. British election results and polling in several countries suggest the voters have plenty more revolt in them.

France and Germany Face Political Insurgencies of Their Own

In France, early polling for the 2027 presidential election puts Jordan Bardella, the candidate of the populist Rassemblement National, in first place at 35 percent. That's comfortably ahead of the second-place candidate, former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, who pulls 20.5 percent.

"The far-right Rassemblement National would comfortably win the first round of a presidential election if it were held tomorrow," reports Zane Lilley of The Connexion.

In Germany, the state-funded Deutsche Welle broadcaster reports that "never before has a German government been this unpopular after only one year in office as that of Chancellor Friedrich Merz." The public broadcaster adds that "for the first time, there is a clear majority in support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—a party of which several regional chapters are classified as right-wing. At 27% nationwide, it has reached a new record high."

Like the U.K.'s Reform, the populist/anti-immigration AfD has done well in local elections, demonstrating strong support beyond its base in the region that was once communist East Germany.

A populist victory in any of these countries wouldn't be novel after years of governance by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Fratelli d'Italia–led coalition, Poland's years under the Law and Justice Party, or after the participation of populist parties in the Netherlands' last coalition government. Populist parties have also won and governed elsewhere—including, notably, Hungary, where Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party governed for 16 years before losing power last month.

But Orban and Fidesz demonstrated that upstart populists can wear out their welcome. After many years in office, Orban and company were the political establishment. They displayed even more authoritarianism and corruption than traditional politicians, so disgusted voters turned them out.

The Many Flavors of Populism

That's not to say that Reform's breakthrough in the U.K. or the rise of the Rassemblement National in France or the AfD in Germany necessarily portend Orban-style thuggery in those countries. Populism is more of a grassroots reaction against local politics-as-usual than a coherent ideology. As Walter Russell Mead noted for The Wall Street Journal in reaction to the British election results, "The new direction in politics seems less firmly aligned with either the left or the right than with antiestablishment and identity-based politics."

That can mean a variety of outcomes depending on just what it is the electorate is reacting against in any given country. The results can be all over the place.

Writing last year for the European Center for Populism Studies, Amedeo Varriale commented that Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia, "despite its (distant) neofascist origins, is now steadily progressing toward liberal conservatism" and away from a "type of socialistic extreme right" that "was still influenced by neofascist anti-capitalism."

Along those lines, Reform leader Nigel Farage once associated himself with the free-market legacy of Margaret Thatcher, but he began remaking his political image several years ago. Reform calls to "cut red tape, cut business taxes, simplify planning, and create a stable, pro-enterprise environment." But it also flirts with nationalizing industries and mostly defines itself as nationalistic and anti-immigration.

France's Rassemblement National also takes a hard line against immigration and crime. On economics, the party's recent platforms propose restricting "unfair" foreign competition, renationalizing highways, subsidizing families and young workers, lowering the retirement age to 60, imposing a wealth tax, and increased funding for public healthcare. The party's positions once led the BBC to ask whether it was best characterized as "far right or hard left."

Likewise, the AfD is anti-immigration and nationalist, as are most populist parties. Its platform leans towards deregulation of business and the labor market and lower taxes, putting it at odds with Germany's penchant for intrusive bureaucracy. That said, its members have an unfortunate habit of embracing identitarianism when they're not playing with outright Nazism.

Whatever its flavor from place to place, the populist revolt of recent years isn't going anywhere. Voters in many countries remain discontented with the status quo and show every sign that they intend to turn out the establishment and put somebody else in power. That generally means emphasizing national concerns and restricting the flow of immigrants. Beyond that, though, results will depend on local culture and just what infuriated voters in each country and led them to reject politics as usual.

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Open Thread

2026-05-13T05:29:13.597-04:00

By Eugene Volokh - May 13, 2026 at 03:00AM

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The Trump Administration Is a Powerful but Unreliable Ally of Second Amendment Advocates

2026-05-13T01:29:46.799-04:00

By Jacob Sullum - May 13, 2026 at 12:01AM

After the Supreme Court clarified the constitutional test for gun control laws in 2022, many longstanding restrictions on the right to arms looked newly vulnerable. Second Amendment groups jumped at the opportunity, filing one lawsuit after another in cases that frequently pitted them against the Biden administration.

Those groups now have a powerful ally in the Trump administration, which has filed several lawsuits aimed at vindicating Americans' gun rights, including two filed last week in Colorado. But even as the Justice Department advertises its commitment to defending the Second Amendment, its position in other gun cases belies that stance.

The Colorado lawsuits involve the state's 15-round magazine limit and Denver's "assault weapon" ban. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, argues that both laws are unconstitutional for the same reason: They ban arms "in common use" for "lawful purposes," which the Supreme Court has said are covered by the Second Amendment, and there is no "historical tradition" that would justify such a policy, as required by the test that the Court prescribed in 2022.

Last December, Dhillon deployed the same argument against the District of Columbia's "assault weapon" ban in another lawsuit filed by the Civil Rights Division's newly established Second Amendment Section. Although federal appeals courts so far have not been receptive to such challenges, at least four Supreme Court justices—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch—seem inclined to agree with Dhillon.

That suggests the Supreme Court may soon weigh in on the constitutionality of "assault weapon" bans, which typically target rifles based on arbitrarily disfavored features such as pistol grips, folding stocks, and flash suppressors. While the outcome of such a case is uncertain, Dhillon's argument seems like a straightforward application of principles the Court has already recognized.

Dhillon is on even firmer ground in her December 16 lawsuit against the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands, which imposes a vague, highly discretionary requirement for publicly carrying handguns that is strikingly similar to the New York law that the Supreme Court overturned in 2022. Her investigation of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which takes as long as 18 months to act on carry permit applications, likewise seems consistent with the Court's concerns about bureaucratic burdens on the right to bear arms.

The legal hook for the Justice Department's involvement in these cases is a federal law that authorizes the attorney general to seek civil remedies for a law enforcement "pattern or practice of conduct" that deprives people of their constitutional or statutory rights. "The Constitution is not a suggestion," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said last week, "and the Second Amendment is not a second-class right."

The Justice Department nevertheless maintains that the Second Amendment does not apply to broad categories of Americans who are barred from owning firearms based on criteria that have little or nothing to do with public safety. The Trump administration has defended the Gun Control Act's ban on firearm possession by "unlawful" drug users, which is at the center of a case that the Supreme Court will soon decide, and that law's disarmament of people with nonviolent felony records, which has generated many petitions that the justices so far have declined to accept.

Both of those controversies pit the Trump administration against the National Rifle Association and other leading gun rights groups. It is not hard to see why, since neither policy is supported by the sort of "historical tradition" that the Supreme Court has said is required to justify gun regulations.

The Justice Department insists that "the Second Amendment is not a second-class right." Yet it argues that cannabis consumers and people convicted of nonviolent felonies are, in effect, second-class citizens.

Unlike the civil liberties guaranteed by other constitutional amendments, the Trump administration says, the right to arms can be revoked for arbitrary reasons. Contrary to Blanche's rhetoric, that sure seems like a second-class right.

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Today in Supreme Court History: May 12, 1790

2026-05-12T09:29:30.389-04:00

By Josh Blackman - May 12, 2026 at 07:00AM

5/12/1790: Justice James Iredell takes the judicial oath.

Justice James Iredell

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Open Thread

2026-05-12T07:29:49.308-04:00

By Eugene Volokh - May 12, 2026 at 03:00AM

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Why the Bipartisan War on Housing Investors Won't Make Housing More Affordable

2026-05-11T09:29:23.218-04:00

By Christian Britschgi - May 11, 2026 at 06:00AM

In March, the U.S. Senate passed a bill full of tweaks to federal grant programs and regulations. Although nearly all of the bill's provisions are aimed at increasing the housing supply, one would undermine that goal.

That provision, inserted at the last minute, bans investors from owning more than 350 single-family rental homes. Investors could still acquire homes built as rentals, but they would have to be sold off within seven years. Because of these restrictions, the Senate bill, which otherwise could be expected to have a modest positive impact on the housing supply, probably would reduce yearly home construction.

Proponents of the large-investor ban argue that it's necessary to preserve owner-occupied homes. "An overwhelming majority of Americans across party lines want to stop private equity from snapping up single-family homes," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) said on the Senate floor after the bill's passage. "This bill does exactly that."

Warren is correct about the popularity of a ban on corporate purchases of single-family homes. A poll from the left-leaning groups Groundwork Collaborative and Data for Progress found 73 percent of likely voters supported such a policy. Politicians on the left and right are increasingly blaming large investors for raising home prices. It was one of the few things that J.D. Vance and Tim Walz could agree on during the 2024 vice presidential debate.

In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to limit home purchases by large institutional investors. He also urged Congress to codify a more sweeping ban.

Despite their bipartisan appeal, such restrictions work against the goals of increasing home construction and making housing more affordable. In recent years, new single-family communities built as rental housing have made up anywhere from 3 percent to 10 percent of new homes. There are currently 160,000 such units in the development pipeline nationwide.

If investors are forced to sell off their build-to-rent communities, they probably will decide not to build them at all. Far from making more homes available to families, the edict would result in fewer homes. The ban would especially hurt people who can't qualify for a mortgage or don't want one.

The claim that large investors are making housing more expensive does not stand up to scrutiny. Large investors own just 0.7 percent of the country's single-family homes. And in recent years, they have been net sellers of those homes.

For all the negative attention they have received, these large investors can't possibly be responsible for a general rise in home prices, given their very small share of the market. A more plausible explanation is regulatory restrictions on new home construction.

The Senate's housing bill does try to address that problem by repealing federal regulations on manufactured housing, exempting new housing from federal environmental reviews, and redistributing grant dollars to communities that actually build new housing. But it combines those wonky yet welcome reforms with populist-inspired meddling that would have the opposite effect.

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Brickbat: No Spilled Tea

2026-05-11T08:29:05.235-04:00

By Charles Oliver - May 11, 2026 at 04:00AM

Brodie Mitchell, a student at Royal Holloway, University of London, is facing possible hate crime charges after saying a pro-Palestinian activist's keffiyeh looked like a "tea towel." The incident happened at a campus event and followed a heated exchange where both students insulted each other. Mitchell, a self-described "non-Jewish Zionist," said the other student first called him a "wannabe Jew" and made reference to him not wearing a kippah. The university suspended Mitchell for nine weeks, and police referred the case to prosecutors.

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Open Thread

2026-05-11T04:29:39.659-04:00

By Eugene Volokh - May 11, 2026 at 03:00AM

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Ted Turner, Entrepreneur of His Age

2026-05-10T09:29:44.676-04:00

By Thomas W. Hazlett - May 10, 2026 at 07:00AM

Ted Turner, who just graduated from this earthly academy at age 87, was a bon vivant, Playgirl's man of the year, and a public embarrassment. He made billion-dollar deals when, you know, a billion was a really big number. He sailed the seas as a champion of the yachting crowd, winning the 1977 America's Cup aboard the Courageous. He married a beautiful actress, made her do the politically incorrect Tomahawk chops to cheer his Atlanta Braves, and cycled through the ideological spectrum from Randian to Mouth of the South to globalist U.N. benefactor to environmentalist rescuing bison. Jane Fonda, his third wife, deemed him a "romantic swashbuckling pirate" and "my favorite ex-husband."

The cartoon character he cultivated was for fun and to amortize the lithium load. His real role was Entrepreneur of His Age. Turner held the lead spear when the Late 20th Century Barbarians stormed the gates of the Old Order in American media. Meeting the moment at the perfect instant—when a "deregulation wave" was opening doors long shut—Turner flipped the script on "public interest" regulation concocted during the Progressive Era. Intellectuals largely bemoaned the passing of the administrative state, and the Cronkite audience it favored, devoid of controversy and offered as the "news from nowhere" (as a CBS executive bragged). But the closed-loop spoon feeding was inimical to freedom, open inquiry, and honest debate.

Even before he was finished, the creative destruction triggered by Ted Turner's wild gambits had left the tyranny of licensed, bureaucratic TV in rubble. What came next may not always look pretty. But freedom of expression has a renewed life, as soon even the chatbots will discover.

Born in 1938 to an affluent family, Turner inherited Rhett Butler good looks, a ticket to Brown, a multi-million-dollar billboard business, and unspeakable tragedy. His financially successful father, Ed Turner, told the Ivy League boy that he was squandering his legacy on scholarly frivolities dangled by poofy professors. When dad held his nose and brought the young graduate into the family business, though, he made his sharper point. Staging a weirdly competitive relationship with his boy, Ed Turner leveraged assets to swallow a far bigger competitor. This, thought Ted, was to teach him about risk-taking.

After they argued over breakfast at the family home in Atlanta, Ed Turner trudged upstairs and put a bullet in his head. Ted, downstairs, was 24.

The tragic start was an unlikely ramp to entrepreneurial success. Managing to salvage what was left of the family business, Ted bought a few backwater radio stations and then acquired WJRJ-TV in Atlanta in 1970—cheap because it was losing $50,000 a month. In 1972, Turner grabbed another UHF bargain, WRET-TV in Charlotte.

The Atlanta property, renamed WTBS (for "Turner Broadcasting System"), took off. In 1976 it became the first national channel, a "superstation" distributed by satellite to thousands of cable systems coast-to-coast. That virtually worthless UHF license was now the foundation of what would be a vast cable programming empire.

The Charlotte station had been an even hotter mess than the Atlanta money loser. Turner's company board had risen up in opposition, blocking his planned purchase, so Turner mortgaged his personal residence and bought the station himself. The property then ballooned in value. In 1979 he sold it to Westinghouse for $20 million—the most recorded for any UHF station in history.

That sale gave Turner the capital to create CNN—America's first true 24/7 cable news outlet—in 1980. What happened then was far more than the making of a mogul. It was the transformation of the world's information flow.

Before then, American broadcasting had been trapped in a pre-constitutional political model. Instead of open competition and robust debate, licensed media reigned. Radio and television were not only limited by regulations, such as the equal time rule and the fairness doctrine, but constrained to artificial scarcity by bureaucratic fiat and then subjected to license renewals under the watchful eyes of powerful congressmen and commissioners. Turner came along when a shard of light was about to shine; he spied the illumination and ran to it at a time when the conventional wisdom missed it.

Ted Turner arbitraged the past into the future. Buy low (UHF licenses regulated into oblivion) and sell high (satellite beams forming the new mass media). The regulated wasteland blossomed into a competitive cornucopia.

A young Malcolm Gladwell ridiculed the upstart Turner in "Ted Turner's Cable Scam," a 1987 essay in The American Spectator. In Gladwell's account, "Turner went to Congress in 1976, asking for special favors for his fledgling industry." Gladwell deemed Turner a Svengali, selling naïve policy makers a bill of goods. "Over and over again," he complained, "the regulatory and legislative bodies responsible for cable television's direction have ratified Turner's vision of cable as the salvation of television." Gladwell thought it "incredible, in retrospect, that Turner was able to get away with this," given that all the Mouth of the South brought to the table was a product of "technological breakthrough and really not much else."

Just the reverse! The technologies being liberated had long been boxed in by regulation, and freeing them unleashed a new world. It began with satellite, which in 1962 was monopolized by COMSAT, a partnership between the private AT&T and the public U.S. government that had been given legal dominion over all space communications. Prices were high and innovation anemic until the Open Skies policy was implemented in 1975. Then rivals were legalized, and the purportedly "natural" monopoly was defunct. Hughes, GTE, RCA, Western Union, and other AT&T substitutes emerged. Transmission prices to distribute nationwide programming dropped 95 percent. This data transport opening made a national cable TV market possible.

As competitive rivalry became a thing, new questions were asked. Why shouldn't the 81 channels set aside for broadcast television in 1952 endow scores of program choices in each market? Because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted the CBS plan to nurture exactly three national networks, killing off a bitterly protesting fourth network, Dumont, in 1955. In the 1960s, the commission demagogued TV's "vast wasteland" while carrying water for that wasteland's purveyors, shooting its wannabe cable rivals. Cable TV was found to threaten the "public interest" by potentially "siphoning" viewership from the incumbent broadcasters, and so it was throttled by regulatory force.

In 1970, cable TV service was essentially outlawed in 90 percent of American households. The powerful VHF stations, dominated by the NBC-CBS-ABC triopoly, ruled the world. Weak UHF stations were virtually worthless, given their stunted reception under FCC rules, though cable operators wanted to retransmit their signals to homes in crystal clarity.

Turner's simple vision was to think of a world with such stupid rules gone. Then a nothingburger outlet in Charlotte could be delivered via cable, ending its "UHF discount." Then a losing proposition like WTBS could bounce its product to 30,000 communities via satellite, produce its own popular programs, and compete head-to-head—against the choice set of My Mother the Car, Hello Larry, or SuperTrain—in households everywhere.

Turner picked just the right time. What the TV insiders (and Malcolm Gladwell) decried as a sop to Turner was officially labeled the "deregulation of cable TV" at the Carter-era FCC. As The New York Times softly described them, these 1980 rulings "reversed 15 years of emphasis placed by the commission on protecting broadcast stations from significant inroads by the cable companies. They opened the possibility that broadcasters and cable TV outlets would be able to compete more equally for viewers and advertisers."

Gladwell finished his exposé by condemning Ted Turner as a business simpleton. "Turner has played embattled entrepreneur, television savior, right-wing point man, and—for his own whims—communications peacemaker. What he really wants to do is make a lot of money."

Yes. That's the beauty of the system. Ted was no saint, but no saint was needed. Ted was no genius, but…well. The big, beautiful investments that let his personal wealth soar to $11 billion when TBS was acquired by Time Warner (in 1996) and then AOL (in 2000) seem of the same gene that let him hold on during the dot-com bust, when his fortune sank to a paltry $2 billion.

Turner had a belief about the future and took a string of incredible gambles. He saw what others did not. And with it, he poked a hole in the 1952 TV Allocation Table and put American media on a new, less regulated path that seamlessly melded into the Internet of today: unregulated, unlicensed, and unleashed. It's not nirvana. But it gives the First Amendment a fighting chance, and it beats the News from Nowhere. Nice work, Ted. You one crazy bastard.

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He's a U.S. Citizen and Combat Veteran. ICE Tear-Gassed, Jailed, and Falsely Accused Him.

2026-05-10T08:29:28.317-04:00

By Autumn Billings - May 10, 2026 at 06:00AM

George Retes woke up on July 10, 2025, hoping the day would change his life for the better. Retes, an Army veteran, worked as a security contractor for a legal cannabis farm in Ventura County, California. After seven months on the graveyard shift, working from midnight to 8 a.m., Retes was eager to move to a daytime schedule and spend more waking hours with his family.

"I do everything for my kids," says the 25-year-old father. "That's what it's all for." When he finally got the new schedule, he saw it as a perfect opportunity.

Things seemed normal that Thursday as he drove along the back roads to work his first day shift. But as Retes pulled up to the entrance to his workplace, he saw pandemonium: cars everywhere blocking the road, cars without drivers, drivers zigzagging around other cars. Along with other federal agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was out in force, and so were people protesting.

President Donald Trump had started to roll out his mass deportation campaign in early 2025. By June, workplace raids were happening across Southern California as agents tried to reach a goal of 3,000 arrests a day, inciting widespread panic and disorder. After protests erupted in Los Angeles, Trump sent in roughly 4,000 National Guard members to quell the turmoil.

But without a call from work warning him not to come in, Retes pressed on. "I still got to go to work like normal," he says. "I need to get paid. I still need to keep a roof over my kids' heads."

Such stories have played out thousands of times during the second Trump administration. People leave their homes for work, school, or an appointment. The routine trip turns into chaos when they stumble into an immigration raid.

Making his way through parked cars and protesters, Retes eventually reached a line of agents blocking him in the middle of the road. Still hoping to make it in on time, he pulled up and asked to pass. "I was a good distance away, and I put my car in park," he says. "I got out, stood by my car."

The agents started yelling, Retes says. "Get the fuck out of here!" "Leave!" "Get back in your car!" "Pull over to the side!" "You're not going to work." "Work is closed." Retes asked for a badge number that he could give to his boss when he didn't show up on time. But that made the agents madder.

Roughly three out of four ICE detainees have no criminal record, according to a November 2025 Cato Institute report, and are otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants—but some of the people arrested are, like Retes, U.S. citizens.

"Literally the first words out of my mouth was that I was a U.S. citizen, that I'm just trying to get work…and they just didn't care," Retes says. "They were immediately hostile from the get-go."

Rather than escalate any further, Retes got back into his car to follow the agents' directions and leave. But the agents unexpectedly moved forward, surrounded the car, and started banging on its windows and pulling on its door handles, telling him to get out. Another agent yelled at him to reverse, and another told him to pull over to the side of the road. "They're all yelling contradictory things when all I was already trying to do was leave like they were asking me to do," says Retes. "Like, what am I supposed to do?"

Retes reversed into the right lane to get out of the way. As he pulled back, agents threw tear gas into the protesters behind him, engulfing his car. He was trapped.

'Just a Ragdoll'

"You go through it in basic training, so I've been through tear gas before," Retes says. "But it was just so different because I wasn't in the environment….I'm a civilian now." For a moment, the agents left Retes alone. Unable to see from the tear gas and not wanting to hit any of the people behind him, he felt the only logical thing to do was to stay put, hold out, and hope for the best.

But then agents approached again, banging on the car windows and pulling on door handles. Retes, coughing and trying to catch his breath, pleaded with the officers that he was trying to leave. Then glass went flying everywhere. An agent immediately reached through Retes' shattered window to pepper-spray him in the face. A split second later, Retes was dragged out of his car.

Unsure what the armed officers would do next, Retes didn't resist. "At that point," he recalls, "I'm just a ragdoll." Regardless, one agent felt the need to kneel on Retes' back, and another on his neck. "I was just pleading with them, telling them I couldn't breathe," he says. "They didn't care."

Retes isn't sure how long he was held down before someone zip-tied his hands. Agents picked him up and walked him to the farm where he works. Officers began asking who would be responsible for Retes. "The entire time they were walking me back, they were passing me off to other agents, asking, 'Who's going to take responsibility for what happened to him?'" he says.

Confused as to what had just happened and why, Retes waited for an opportunity to prove he was a citizen. "I mean, I didn't do anything wrong," he says. "I just figured they were going to finish doing whatever they were doing and they were going to let me go." Retes sat zip-tied in the dirt for four hours. "The entire time I was sitting there, they only asked for my ID once," he says. He told them it was in his car—the one with the disabled veterans license plate. "I don't know if they ever went to go check my ID."

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had been adamant that its immigration raids were focused on the "worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens." So it was reasonable for Retes, who was perhaps racially profiled by officers, to think he'd be free to leave after proving his citizenship.

But a new practice was emerging. By October 2025, ProPublica had identified at least 170 Americans who'd been detained, sometimes violently, and held by immigration agents. (The full number is unknown, since the federal government doesn't collect data on how many U.S. citizens are detained during immigration enforcement.) One citizen, arrested twice by immigration agents in Alabama, says that officers called his REAL ID fake. A woman in Los Angeles was tackled to the ground when her mother dropped her off for work near an immigration sting.

Eventually, agents put Retes into an unmarked car and drove him to a Navy base. There, authorities took his fingerprints, his picture, and a mouth swab for DNA. "They ended up reading me my rights and just told me that they were just investigating everything that happened…and why I was there," says Retes. "They never said I was being charged with anything. They never said that I was getting arrested."

Photo: Federal immigration officers arrest George Retes in Camarillo, California, on July 10, 2025; Blake Fagan/AFP/Getty

'There Was No Explanation'

Retes says he complied with every order. He figured that once the officials got all the proof they needed that he was a citizen, they would let him go. Instead, they drove him to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.

"When they took me to the prison…it was just like one thing after another, and I was just so confused," Retes says. "There was no explanation." He was processed and strip-searched like any other inmate. When he asked if he could call his family or a lawyer, Retes says, he was simply ignored. So were his requests for a shower to wash away the still-burning tear gas and pepper spray.

"That entire Thursday night, my body's on fire," Retes recalls. "My hands, my face…literally a heat I cannot describe. Just imagine being on fire and just not being able to do anything."

The following morning, after a medical evaluation that included some mental health questions, Retes was placed in a suicide watch cell: a yellow concrete room with a thin mattress top, a tiny rectangular window, and constant light. "A guard sits there 24/7, writing down what I'm doing every 10 minutes, and I'm in there naked in a hospital dress," he says. Despite his many requests, he was never allowed to make a phone call.

"That Sunday morning, close to afternoon…an officer walked up to the cell and said I was off suicide watch and I was going to be released. And he just walked away," says Retes. Hours later, another officer finally opened the door to his cell. As he changed back into his clothes and signed for his possessions, officers told him he was finally free to go after spending over three full days in custody.

"So I asked them, like, 'So I was locked up in here, and I missed my daughter's birthday for no reason?'" he recalls. What followed, Retes says, was "the loudest silence ever."

'This Is Much Bigger Than Just Me'

Retes didn't get an explanation for his arrest until he described his harrowing experience in a September op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle. DHS responded with a post on X claiming that Retes had been arrested for assaulting law enforcement.

"It was the only explanation I got from that entire thing…a tweet…and it was a lie," says Retes. "I was just in shock." Footage of the incident was widely available, yet the agency was still trying to avoid any accountability.

"I knew everything that had happened wasn't right," he says. "I knew from the moment I was in there if I ever got out…I need accountability. I need an explanation."

This wasn't the only time the agency had resorted to lies after its aggressive immigration enforcement tactics were scrutinized. Over the course of Trump's second term, DHS has grown increasingly comfortable with claiming falsely that people arrested, injured, or killed by immigration officers had been "violent" or even "terrorists."

Those lies became infamous after the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026, when DHS officials asserted wrongly that both had intended to commit acts of domestic terrorism. But DHS had been regularly lying to the American public for months before then.

In Chicago, for example, after an immigration officer shot an American woman five times, DHS claimed that agents had been "boxed in" by domestic terrorists and had shot defensively after their vehicle was "rammed" by the woman. But the woman lived, and federal charges against her were dropped when the evidence contradicted the shooting agent's story.

At the time of this publication, DHS has not recanted its lies about Retes.

Unfortunately, holding government agents accountable is a steep uphill battle. Suing federal officers for violating constitutional rights is notoriously difficult. Although the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1971) recognized that Americans may sue federal officials for damages arising from Fourth Amendment violations, that case has been practically overruled in recent years. This lack of redressability is why some members of Congress are attempting to codify the Court's Bivens ruling into federal law. By amending a federal statute known as Section 1983 to include federal officers, legislators would clear a pathway for citizens to bring law enforcement to court for misconduct.

When Retes learned from his lawyers at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm, just how difficult it would be to hold the officer involved in his case accountable, he was shocked. "If someone violates your rights, you should be able to get accountability and justice for what happened to you," says Retes. But after understanding the legal barriers ahead, Retes said it was like flipping a switch. "This is much bigger than just me," he says. "There's all these people that this is happening to."

Rather than "mope and cry about it," Retes and his attorneys have filed suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the federal agencies involved in his three-day-long detention, arguing that they violated his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. They are also using a California law to sue the unknown officers involved in his case for interfering with Retes' enjoyment of his constitutional rights. While waiting to see if the courts will take his claims seriously, Retes has flown to D.C. multiple times to speak with members of Congress about amending Section 1983. He testified before a bicameral public forum last December, and he attended the State of the Union address in February to represent those who have been victimized by unconstitutional actions taken by federal agents.

"I understand that my case resonates with a lot of people," Retes says. He doesn't just want a solution for himself; he wants "a pathway for everyone else" to get justice. "It shouldn't matter that you're a veteran or the color of your skin or if I'm an immigrant," he says. "We all deserve to be treated fairly and with human dignity."

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Generic Blog News and Commentary

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Open Thread

Memories of a Different Planet: Roentgenizdat

Archives: The Best of Brian Doherty

3 years ago March 2023

6 years ago December 2020

8 years ago January 2018

12 years ago December 2014

14 years ago November 2012

16 years ago October 2010

18 years ago December 2008

26 years ago October 2000

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