"We're probably not going to use grenades on this one, right? Because I got 'em."

James Jacobs had hired a motley crew of toughs online to help him clear squatters out of an Oakland, California, apartment building. None of the hired muscle accept the offer of smoke grenades. They intend to complete this job with the baseball bats and firearms they brought from home.

"All right, let's do this," says Jacobs. He grabs his katana and sets off in his long black leather jacket toward the apartment. His improvised militia follows single-file behind him. Half a minute later, they confidently walk through the front door of a two-story building off of Oakland's busy International Boulevard.

From across the street, I watch them enter and wait anxiously for the sound of gunshots. 

It was another battle in California's low-burning turf war between the squatters who invade homes and the enforcers hired to reclaim them.

Across the Golden State, uninvited occupants have taken over countless residential properties and then refused to vacate. Homes undergoing renovations, vacant rental units, and even whole apartment buildings have fallen prey to squatters. Once they move in squatters are very difficult to dislodge. The legal process to remove them is expensive and can take months or years.

In their desperation, owners are increasingly turning to a rising crop of private rights enforcers to solve the problem. That includes Jacobs and his company, ASAP Squatter Removal.

Jacobs claims to have developed a long list of tools and tactics that enable him to remove squatters far faster than the court system, all while staying within the bounds of the law. Chief among them is a weapon he carries on every job: a katana, a curved Japanese sword that's more synonymous with samurai warriors than clearing squatters.

"In most industries, swords just don't make any damn sense," Jacobs says. "In this particular one, it actually does." The lightly regulated katana, he explains, is an ideal weapon for indoor self-defense and intimidation.

It's also an ingenious marketing ploy in the competitive world of squatter removal services. Jacobs' company has received a healthy amount of media attention from local and international outlets that never fail to mention his sword in the headline.

According to Jacobs, his company has had a near-perfect success rate of removing squatters. 

If they were Jacobs' only adversary, his katana might be the only weapon he needs. But ASAP Squatter Removal is engaged in a two-front war. His main competition comes from law enforcement agencies that are none too keen on ceding their monopoly on the use of force to people like Jacobs.

Every job that ASAP Squatter Removal performs requires it to dodge criminal charges. The company has had only mixed success on the latter front. In January, Jacobs and two associates were charged with a long list of felonies stemming from one of their jobs.

The legal and physical risks inherent in anti-squatter work are why California's landlords have called for more systemic reforms that would make Jacobs' business obsolete.

But with reforms stalled in the state legislature, many property owners feel they have no choice but to turn to gray market services and the unique set of characters, with a very particular set of skills, willing to take on this dangerous work.

On the streets, it's samurai versus squatters.

Why Won't California Police Remove Squatters? 'It's a Civil Matter.'

Though aggregate numbers are hard to come by, squatting appears to be on the rise in California. The state's housing cost crisis has helped produce the nation's largest population of homeless and housing-insecure people—many of whom are willing to take on the risks of squatting.

High home prices and an arduous eviction system have also helped make squatting a lucrative scam. Owners will often pay squatters exorbitant sums in "cash-for-keys" agreements to reclaim their valuable real estate.

Meanwhile, property owners who call the police about a squatting situation will receive a near-universal response from law enforcement: "It's a civil matter," meaning, "It's not our problem."

Responding officers often feel they lack the competence to tell on the spot whether someone is an illegal squatter or a lawful occupant. They are thus eager to avoid the legal liability that would come from charging a lawful occupant with a misdemeanor trespassing offense.

Police "have been told in training: If somebody says, 'I live here,' leave them alone. Why risk the lawsuit of removing somebody from a house that they may lawfully occupy?" says Sidharda Lakireddy, who manages a few hundred units in the Bay Area and has dealt with multiple squatting situations.

Even in seemingly clear-cut cases, the first instinct of many police officers is to avoid getting involved.

Devlin Creighton tells the story of a squatter who moved into a rental unit he owns in San Jose just a few hours after he managed to convince the previous squatting occupant to leave in a cash-for-keys arrangement.

When the police showed up at the property, they initially told Creighton he'd have to follow the months-long civil eviction process to get his squatter out.

"I'm like, 'She's not going to live here for three months for free. She got here today!'" Creighton recalls telling the officers. "The police, these new guys, were like, 'Well, you know, it's not our job. We're crime. This is civil.'"

Fortunately for Creighton, a more seasoned police sergeant soon arrived who was more willing to hear his side of the story. Creighton's new squatter couldn't answer the sergeant's basic questions, such as "What is your address?" and "When's trash day?" So he forced her to leave. But if the sergeant hadn't been willing to hear Creighton out, the property owner would have had no choice but to go to civil court.

Having to go through a court process to remove a squatter isn't inherently unreasonable. Most states treat squatting as a civil matter to be handled by the courts. California's civil courts move slowly, however. The civil eviction process also enables squatters to claim a long list of procedural rights granted to legal tenants (which they are not) that can stretch a case out for months or longer.

Some lawyers openly sell themselves to potential clients based on their ability to stretch out the eviction process in court. "When it comes to you, the landlord is not stepping on a cockroach; he is stepping on a landmine," reads one eviction defense attorney's website which claims that fighting an eviction in court can prolong one's occupancy for years. "All during the [civil eviction process], you are paying no rent," it says. 

The experience some landlords have removing squatters shows this landmine claim is not a bluff.

How Long Does It Take to Remove a Squatter in California?

Zachary, a landlord who owns seven units in the Los Angeles area and who asked only to be referred to by his first name because he fears retaliation from squatters, learned just how lengthy and expensive the civil court process can be when a longtime tenant died in January 2025.

When Zachary went to reclaim the unit, he found four strangers already inside.

"They definitely looked disheveled," he says. "They were people who lived out of suitcases. Their clothes weren't well-kept."

The men showed Zachary a letter claiming they were subtenants of the deceased. They claimed they had a legal right to take over the unit after that person's death.

Zachary's lease with his deceased tenant explicitly forbade subletting, making this claim a legal nonstarter. But when the squatters refused to leave and police refused to eject them, Zachary was forced to file for an eviction in Superior Court of Los Angeles County in February 2025.

Zachary describes the following months as a nightmare. In response to his eviction filing, the new occupants of his home countersued him. They produced phony documents purporting to show they were legal tenants being harassed after they raised habitability issues with the unit. While Zachary waited for a court hearing on the case, his squatters also allegedly moved in several more occupants who proceeded to trash his units, do drugs on the property, and menace his legitimate tenants—some of whom moved out.

The squatters also demanded $50,000 in compensation for the emotional and financial toll that Zachary's "illegal" eviction efforts had caused them.

When a hearing on Zachary's eviction complaint and his squatters' counterclaims was finally held in late March 2025, the judge ruled in his favor in a matter of minutes. Through appeals and hardship claims, however, the squatters managed to delay their actual eviction for another two months.

When Zachary finally reclaimed the apartment in late May, "It was really in disarray. They had left needles and rotting food. They had a cat that had made a mess in there. It was really a terrible scene."

After they'd left, Zachary found out more about who his squatters were. In the papers of his deceased tenant, there was a request for a restraining order against the squatters. That request described how his former tenant had met the squatters on a dating app and agreed to let them stay in his spare bedroom for a week when they claimed to have nowhere else to go.

When his former tenant finally asked them to leave, the document said, they blackmailed him: The squatters said they'd accuse him of rape if he called the cops to kick them out.

Per the restraining order statement, Zachary's former tenant did eventually call the cops on the squatters. The police did not believe their claims of being raped, but they also told Zachary's former tenant that they couldn't remove the squatters without a court order. An officer encouraged the former tenant to file for a restraining order instead.

California's tenants' rights advocates, who uniformly oppose any efforts to expedite the removal of squatters, would describe Zachary's experience as an example of the system working as intended: A property dispute was raised, and after a few months of process, the legal owner was able to reclaim his unit.

But during the time it took for that process to play out, the squatters were able to exploit procedural protections designed to safeguard tenants' rights to menace actual tenants and destroy Zachary's property.

Zachary estimates he spent $14,000 on fees to lawyers and to Squatter Squad, a Los Angeles–based outfit that handled direct negotiations with the squatters, served them legal documents, and helped secure the unit when it was finally vacated. He had to pay another $43,000 to fix the damage the squatters had done to the unit. He also lost rent on both the squatter-occupied unit and on those neighboring units that were vacated because of the squatters' disruption.

Given the costs and ordeal, it's unsurprising other property owners in desperate situations would turn to solutions outside of the court system, such as katana-wielding men in black leather coats.

How James Jacobs Became a Squatter Removal Enforcer

Jacobs got his start in squatter removal while working in property management after college. Occasionally, a unit would get taken over by a squatter and the owner would pay him some extra money to figure out a way to get rid of the intruder.

One of his first jobs involved a reclusive squatter who had barricaded himself in a vacant apartment unit. Since the squatter almost never left the unit, Jacobs couldn't simply wait for him to leave and change the locks.

Instead, he settled on a blunter solution: He damaged a water line leading to the apartment. As the property manager, he was then responsible for hiring the plumber to fix it. He hired a plumber friend who continually delayed the job. Without water in the unit, the squatter eventually left.

More anti-squatter jobs soon followed. His day job in property management also gave Jacobs a free legal education in the laws squatters used to stay in units and how the law could be used to get them out.

Over time, Jacobs saw demand for squatter removal services grow.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most of public life, including the civil courts that process squatting cases. The state of California effectively banned landlords from evicting tenants through 2022. Local eviction moratoriums and other restrictions persisted for years after that.

Eviction filings predictably fell, dropping from around 120,000 per year pre-pandemic to 35,000 in 2021. The number of these filings that led to actual tenant removals is far less. In effect, property owners were stuck with whoever was occupying their home, be they delinquent tenants or illegal squatters. Moreover, the rising price of real estate also raised the returns squatters could demand through extortionary cash-for-keys schemes.

Though California treats squatting as a crime on paper, the cumbersome civil process that determines who is and isn't squatting means the law's criminal penalties mean little in practice.

In 2025, California landlords supported a bipartisan bill—S.B. 448, authored by state Sen. Tom Umberg (D–Santa Ana)—that would have required law enforcement to remove squatters "without unreasonable delay" if they did not vacate a property within 72 hours. Critics of the bill included social justice advocates and legal aid groups who argued that lawful tenants without formal written rental agreements would have no effective protections against eviction.

"This has the potential to target undocumented and marginalized communities without due process of law," said the Western Center on Law & Poverty's Benjamin Henderson in an April 2025 committee hearing. In additional written testimony the center said: "The right to one's home is too fundamental to ignore constitutional due process." Landlords counter that requiring owners to spend months in civil court to reclaim their property poses its own due process problems.

California's S.B. 448 passed unanimously out of two Senate committees in 2025, but it stalled in the legislative process. Lawmakers have not taken up the bill this year.

Meanwhile, California passed legislation giving tenants more time to file responses to their landlord's eviction complaints. It's another procedural right that squatters can claim while delaying their removal.

In Jacobs' view, the entire situation provides a powerful incentive for people to become squatters. "People are realizing, 'Oh yeah, there's money to be made, and I'm not going to get arrested for this," he says.

That insight led him to recognize a business opportunity of his own. He started ASAP Squatter Removal in 2020 as a standalone "eviction alternative" service provider.

How Do Professional Squatter Removal Services Work? 

For all the laws and regulations that govern real estate in California, Jacobs' business operates on a more anarchic principle: You truly own only what you physically possess.

The standard ASAP Squatter Removal job involves surveilling a property, reclaiming it through a "breach-and-clear" operation when the squatter leaves for the day, and then boarding up the unit and holding it down for as long as necessary.

This seemingly simple process can get complicated fast.

In a world of real estate scams, Jacobs has to do legal due diligence to ensure that the person hiring him is the actual owner and the people to be removed are, in fact, illegal squatters.

"I've been hired to kick out the owner of the property. That's disgusting," he says. "Sometimes the client is a scumbag."

When homes have been taken over by multiple squatters or by organized gangs, it's also not always possible to breach and clear an empty unit. When the squatters are still inside, the risk of physical altercations is high.

For that reason, Jacobs has his clients sign up him and his fellow squatter removers as tenants of the property to be reclaimed. California is a "castle doctrine" state, meaning you can physically defend yourself in your own home. Jacobs claims the castle doctrine has saved him from legal jeopardy when he or one of his hired contractors has shot a squatter in self-defense. (He declined to provide details on these incidents for fear of getting sued by squatters he's removed.)

ASAP Squatter Removal's website claims a 95 percent success rate. The company's (now private) YouTube channel and Yelp page both include effusive praise from clients who've used Jacobs' services to reclaim their property. 

"I was faced with a very difficult squatter situation & no help from local law enforcement. ASAP Squatter Removal resolved my squatter problem in just 3 days!" reads a review on the company's Yelp page.

But happy customers don't negate the physical or legal perils of Jacobs' work.

The risk of serious criminal charges is one reason Jacobs has transitioned to using a sword on jobs. "There's really no gun defense. It's really just gun offense," he says. "But with swords, there is [defense]. I can make a cut towards somebody's hand and disable their hand. And that's not attempted manslaughter."

On the more complex jobs, Jacobs needs every defense he can muster.

Why California Landlords Are Hiring Private Enforcers

The Oakland building Jacobs was hired to clear was one such complex job. 

The owner, Maria Auervonderhaid, and a partner purchased the 11-unit building in the late 1990s. For decades, they rented out apartments without incident.

Shortly before the pandemic, Auervonderhaid's business partner died suddenly, leaving her to manage the building by herself—a challenge the aging woman, now in her 80s, was not fully up for. Auervonderhaid also started to show signs of Alzheimer's, which further eroded her ability to take care of her property.

Conditions at the building started to deteriorate. Protected by pandemic-era eviction moratoriums, her tenants also stopped paying rent. Soon word got around that Auervonderhaid was losing her grip on the property.

Her "declining health became readily apparent to people to take advantage of," says Auervonderhaid's lawyer, Thomas Meagher. "Before, she was capable of managing the building. That has changed, and obviously other people saw that too."

Squatters moved into some of the units and changed the locks. Evidence of criminal activity followed. Neighboring business owners reported seeing drug deals, weapon sales, and prostitution at the property.

Maria's son, Theo Auervonderhaid, took over managing the building. He says one of the occupants pulled a gun on his uncle when he showed up to remove accumulated trash. The occupants also ran up enormous power bills by charging allegedly stolen electric vehicles, according to Meagher.

In 2024, Auervonderhaid's nonpaying tenants sued her, citing numerous habitability issues at the property, including pests, overflowing trash, and a lack of security. Meagher says that many of these issues were caused by the squatters themselves—and can't be fixed so long as squatters threaten anyone hired to repair the property.

The police have also been of little help in getting the property under control. Theo Auervonderhaid says that when the cops do respond to calls at the building, they write a report and quickly leave. Meagher says that he's even contacted the FBI to report gang activity at the property, and that they also proved to be no help.

At this point, Theo Auervonderhaid says, he would like to sell the property and be done with it. "I have to take care of my mom's healthcare needs, and I want to go back to work. I don't want this to dominate my life like it has been," he says. "The building has become a money pit."

But the presence of menacing squatters means almost no one is willing to buy it. Before anything can get better at the property, the squatters have to go.

Initially, Theo Auervonderhaid and Meagher had tried to hire conventional security guards to provide protection so that work crews could clear trash and make repairs.

"Security [companies] said we'd need a really aggressive crew to do this one," says Meagher. "What does aggressive mean? You find out when you do research."

Meagher's online research turned up Jacobs, who had been profiled by the local outlet Oaklandside in September 2025 and had since done a number of media hits touting his expertise at removing squatters. At first, Meagher says, hiring someone like Jacobs did not seem appealing. "We did not consider that a choice." But as problems at the property continued to mount, Meagher and his client started to get desperate. "You cycle back to the unpleasant choices like ASAP Squatter," says Meagher.

By February, Meagher had hired Jacobs' crew to do surveillance of the property, figuring that this would at least give him and his client a better idea of what was going on.

Squatters Don't Just Hurt Landlords, They Ruin Neighborhoods

The complex situation at Auervonderhaid's apartment building, with its mix of legal tenants, nonthreatening squatters, and others who Meagher describes as likely gang members, required a lot of surveillance before any move could be made on the property. Jacobs hoped his men could gain a foothold by occupying an empty unit and then go room by room, removing the squatters in whatever way worked.

ASAP Squatter Removal signed an initial three-day contract with Meagher to observe the property. This work began in earnest on Valentine's Day. Jacobs agreed to let me shadow him during this surveillance phase.

At the beginning of the night, we stationed ourselves across the street from the target property in a parking lot that had been taken over by temporary stands offering flowers and oversized teddy bears. Unfortunately for Jacobs, his initial scouting from earlier in the day had turned up no good news.

A unit on the top floor of the building was boarded up and dark. Jacobs declared this a likely sign of counter-surveillance being conducted by the gangsters squatting in the building. He speculated they were filming the street from that unit to ensure that no one, be they police or rival gangs, was sneaking up on them.

There was also a lot of nighttime activity in front of the building. One heavyset man poured gas into a generator out front. A half dozen people appeared to be occupying one of the ground-floor storefront units, which from the outside looked like a drug den.

In the alcove entrance of the neighboring tattoo parlor, we saw what looked like a few drug deals going down. That was bad news too. The outdoor drug dealing meant Jacobs can't pose as a buyer to get inside the building and see the situation from the inside.

Since he was stuck on the outside looking in, Jacobs started circling the property, looking for additional entrances that could be used in an eventual breach-and-clear operation.

The key to good surveillance, Jacobs told me, is to not be detected by the squatters. To avoid attention, Jacobs will sometimes observe a property from a camper van with blacked-out windows. Other times, he'll disguise himself as a homeless person. "You should see me in my rags," he laughs.

On that Valentine's Day, he opted for a simpler dark hoodie and beanie.

As we circled the property, Jacobs said he saw his business as a mission. Squatters don't just victimize property owners, he told me; they ruin neighborhoods. "I'm just trying to make the world a better place," he said, stepping around a homeless guy smoking a white powder off a piece of tin foil.

Our walk revealed no easy additional entrances. The property was sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and a funeral home. Residences covered the rear of the property. Jacobs likes to secure three points of entry, to avoid dangerous bottlenecks during a breach-and-clear operation; that would require traversing other properties.

That looked doable, especially if Jacobs could obtain permission from the adjacent owners to stage on their property. Normally, he said, that's something the neighbors agree to, given the problems squatters can also cause for them. But having to hop a few fences makes it much more difficult to coordinate simultaneous entry of the property from multiple angles.

With this information, we made our way back to the parking lot across the road from the target property, where we met up with Arthur Gutierrez, a tall man in a backward baseball cap who serves as Jacobs' right-hand man.

In the parking lot, Jacobs and Gutierrez hit a marijuana vape pen and reviewed intelligence emailed by the client. Jacobs became excited when he saw that squatters were using the property for a pimping operation. Maybe they could hire a girl to pose as a prostitute to gain access to the building, he suggested.

Gutierrez thought it would be simpler to pose as a john "looking for some ass." Jacobs readily agreed and tried to give Gutierrez some cash to pull off the ruse that night. The latter demurred, joking that he'd need additional hazard pay for that. Besides, the heavyset man feeding gas into the generator had been giving us hard stares the whole time we'd been hanging out in the parking lot. Gutierrez proposed returning a day later, when hopefully there would be fewer prying eyes around.

The next day, the scene outside the building was sleepier. The lack of activity gave Jacobs enough confidence to try to get inside on the pretext of looking for "Sharice."

A few minutes after setting off on this gambit, he comes back with both good and bad news.

The good news was that the heavyset man who'd been giving us hard stares the night before was now sitting in front of the property, so stoned that he didn't recognize Jacobs. Incapacitated drug users will likely offer less resistance in a breach-and-clear operation.

The bad news was that the front door opened onto a single long hallway with a staircase to the second floor at the back and no doors on either side. That could make for a dangerous bottleneck if Jacobs and his men eventually try to take the property.

Jacobs soon left to meet with the client, leaving Gutierrez and me at the property. We left when about a half-dozen young men left the building and started striding toward us. "Let's take a walk," said Gutierrez.

'That's Why It Pays To Rock the Sword'

Gutierrez needed to charge his phone, so I invited him back to my nearby Airbnb. While there, he expressed some trepidation about the Oakland job.

Gutierrez told me he initially connected with Jacobs through a friend who had met the latter in a bar. Jacobs had mentioned that he was looking to hire military veterans for jobs removing squatters from homes.

That kind of work sounded perfect for Gutierrez. He had served in Iraq during the height of the surge, but after getting out of the military he "didn't have the tools in my tool-belt" for civilian employment. What Jacobs was offering sounded more familiar. "I was infantry. Clearing rooms? That's cake."

Most of the ASAP Squatter Removal jobs he'd worked on had been straightforward operations in which they'd move in on a property, board it up, and hold it down, sometimes for months at a time. Gutierrez said he was getting good enough at it that Jacobs had even floated the idea of him starting a Los Angeles branch of the operation.

But things had gone south on a job in San Bruno in January.

The target property was a single-family home their client had purchased in an estate sale. The last legal occupant was a widow who had since moved out. But her son, whom Gutierrez describes as a hoarder with a history of substance abuse, had occupied the property and refused to leave.

ASAP Squatter Removal had managed to secure the property once, but the son had resumed squatting after the client let him return to retrieve some belongings. Then some of the squatter's friends moved in too.

Jacobs later showed me screenshots of texts a woman named Dawn had sent to the new owner. The messages said the son would leave only after being paid $60,000 for moving expenses and lost wages. With the client unwilling to submit to this apparent extortion, ASAP Squatter Removal was hired to go back in.

This time the strategy would be more inventive—and more risky. The plan was to sign Gutierrez, a registered firearm owner, up as the tenant. Because several of the squatters were reportedly out on parole for felony charges, and because felony parolees can't have guns at home, Gutierrez's presence would technically violate their parole and hopefully lead the cops to arrest and remove them.

It was a clever idea, in theory. But it didn't work out well in practice, as the bodycam footage Gutierrez recorded during the operation makes clear.

The video shows eight men entering the property in the middle of the night through a locked side gate that they destroy with a battering ram. "We're the new tenants. We're moving in," the men shout in the same kind of harsh bark used by cops announcing a search warrant.

They encounter the first squatter on the ground floor, a man who appears to be so high that he doesn't even get up when the men burst in.

Things get more tense as the ASAP Squatter Removal crew try to move to the second floor. "If you come up these stairs, we'll shoot you in the face," a woman shouts. 

At that threat, both Gutierrez and Angel, a heavyset man who'd taken point, draw firearms. Angel continues up the stairs, his weapon aimed in front of him. Gutierrez follows with his pistol aimed at the ground.

The woman's claim was a bluff. Gutierrez's bodycam footage shows no gun in sight. Instead, they find the woman with a man screaming that he's the real tenant.

"I've been paying the electricity bill. I've lived here for 48 years," he declares.

"48 years? Well, you should have started paying some rent," Gutierrez responds.

Jacobs comes up the stairs. Wire-thin and about 5'8'', he normally cuts a slight figure. That night, confidently strolling through the recaptured home in his black coat, sword at his side, he has all the gravitas of a victorious battlefield commander.

But the victory proves short-lived as the male squatter from upstairs announces that he's calling the cops. "Hide the weapons," Jacobs can be heard saying on Gutierrez's bodycam footage.

Then Gutierrez realizes that he left his phone in his car and that it has their only copy of the lease on it. He grabs Angel and they hustle out to get it.

That's the end of the footage. According to Gutierrez, things only went further downhill after they left.

On their way to get the lease, Angel admitted that he's a felon and is therefore in unlawful possession of a firearm. Meanwhile, the property was now swarming with cops and the rest of the crew were put in handcuffs, though nobody was arrested.

A few days later, Gutierrez was invited to the police station to help account for the situation. When he explained their parole violation plan, the police were not happy to hear it.

Worse still, Jacobs had posted the bodycam footage to the company's YouTube channel, including the part showing the drawn firearms and the part where you can hear him telling the crew to hide the guns. All of which led to the arrests of Gutierrez and Jacobs, who were charged with a litany of felonies, including burglary, kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, and a long list of gun enhancements.

At an arraignment hearing in March, Jacobs and Gutierrez arrived without lawyers and entered not guilty pleas to all the charges they'd been hit with. Angel was absent from the arraignment hearing. A warrant for his arrest was issued in January. He was not reachable for comment.

The presiding judge issued a "no contact" order forbidding Jacobs and Gutierrez from going near either the San Bruno property or the alleged victims. The order also forbade them from possessing firearms and body armor.

Outside the hearing room, a defense attorney whom the judge had provisionally asked to represent Jacobs advised the two men to quickly comply with the order and surrender their guns. 

At any moment, the police could kick down their door looking for forbidden firearms, he said. That would be an additional charge. "I've seen it a thousand times," said the lawyer, before giving the two a quick fist bump and walking off.

Gutierrez seemed dismayed by this outcome. But when I asked Jacobs about it, he told me he was ecstatic. "That went so well!" he gushed. He'd been afraid they were going to be arrested again at the hearing.

But what, I asked, about the terms of the no-contact order? Will he still be able to do the Oakland job, or any job, without guns or body armor?

"That's why it pays to rock the sword!" he laughed, slapping me on the back. "They didn't say anything about swords!"

The Oakland job was still on.

Some Landlord Advocates Say It's the 'Wrong Way to Handle It'

Professional advocates for property owners advise against using services like ASAP Squatter Removal, citing the legal risks and the potential for physical violence.

"Sure, it's effective, but eventually a property owner is going to be hurt trying to deal with it themselves, a squatter is going to get hurt," says Daniel Yukelson, head of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles. "It's just the wrong way to handle it."

But the fact that people are turning to such extreme solutions is evidence of how broken the state's system for dealing with squatters has become. In a 2024 survey of California landlords conducted by Yukelson's group, 26 percent of respondents had personally been victimized by a squatter at some point.

"I think if you find anybody who's been in the business long enough, it would be hard for us to find somebody who hasn't had to deal with" a squatter, concurs Lakireddy, the Bay Area landlord.

As media coverage of squatting has picked up, some states have passed laws increasing penalties for squatters and expediting the process for evicting them.

In 2024, eight states had laws that criminalized squatting, according to a research brief published by the Pacific Legal Foundation. In 2025, another 15 states made squatting a criminal offence.

Kyle Sweetland, co-author of the brief, says that whether squatting is a criminal offense is a secondary concern. The real issue is whether owners can quickly reclaim their property in court.

Sweetland says states can strike a balance between the rights of owners and tenants by creating expedited civil proceedings for removing squatters. He cites recent reforms in Georgia as a model. Under that state's new system, property owners can serve alleged squatters with a notice to either clear the property in three days, under threat of misdemeanor charges if they don't, or else produce a valid lease.

If occupants do produce a lease, a court must hold a hearing within seven days to determine its validity. If the lease is fake, law enforcement must remove the squatter and the squatter is charged with a felony.

In California, however, reforms like that still remain elusive.

A Squatter Removal Attempt in Oakland: How It Unfolded

In the days following his arraignment over the San Bruno job, Jacobs did some more surveillance of Auervonderhaid's building in Oakland. He didn't learn much from it. It was time to attempt a breach-and-clear, he told me, which he scheduled for the upcoming Saturday.

Now a squad of about a half-dozen rough-looking auxiliaries is mustering in the parking lot of a laundromat a few hundred feet from Auervonderhaid's property. One of the men is wearing a vest with a "security" label and a gun strapped to his thigh. Two others are gripping baseball bats and sipping on McDonald's milkshakes.

Jacobs arrives in his leather jacket, carrying his katana and a large bag of body armor.

It's immediately apparent that things are not going according to plan. Jacobs had told me he wanted at least 12 guys for the Oakland job, so he's about six men short. Gutierrez is noticeably absent.

To make matters worse, no one brought bolt cutters or crowbars to clear any physical barricades they might encounter. Jacobs showed up without the particle board they'd need to board up any units they do manage to secure.

Jacobs is undeterred. "We got to do this smart," he says. "It just takes one slip-up."

Though he's just a few hundred feet from the property they're planning to take down, Jacobs then launches into a loud description of breach-and-clear tactics. As he explains how to enter a hostile building, I recognize several apparent squatters from the earlier days' surveillance passing behind him on their way to get gas for the generator. They look quizzically at the very conspicuous crowd of men with baseball bats and guns. An Oakland police cruiser makes several slow, repeated passes on the street.

During Jacobs' demonstration, a few of his hired helpers start to look side-eyed at each other. This is clearly not the kind of work they signed up for.

With Gutierrez absent, Jacobs has a spare sword that he offers to anyone who wants it. No one takes him up on the offer.

"I'm more proficient with a bat," says one of the men. "I ain't trying to chop someone's head off for someone else's stuff."

Finished with his tactical briefing, Jacobs runs back to his car to grab the leases he's printed off for the job. While he's gone, two of the men, including the one with the security vest and the gun, walk off without saying anything.

After Jacobs returns, he and the remaining enforcers sign the papers that they hope will protect them from any criminal charges if they get into a fight with the squatters.

With the papers signed, Jacobs offers the smoke grenades. With no takers, he and his improvised militia set off down the street to take the apartment.

An exceptionally chaotic scene follows.

From across the street, I watch Jacobs' men enter the property. They are inside for 30 minutes, during which time some of the occupants start to filter out the front door. Jacobs then reappears and runs back to the parking lot, where he meets a late-arriving guard-for-hire.

The two men go back into the building for a few minutes before coming back out. In the parking lot, they both claim that people on the second floor flashed guns at them.

They were only pistols, the late-arriving guard assures me. "No ARs or shotguns or nothing," he says. "They won't blow your legs off."

Jacobs and the late arrival then take off in a car to a Home Depot 20 minutes away to grab the wood they'll use to board up the recaptured units. The rest of the hired muscle is still inside the building.

A few more tense minutes pass before the police arrive.

From across the street, I see the ASAP Squatter Removal men filter out onto the street with their leases in hand. After a brief conversation with the cops, the officers leave and these men start walking back down the street toward the parking lot where they'd initially mustered. Jacobs is nowhere to be seen.

When I approach the rousted anti-squatter crew, they tell me the cops told them to leave after taking a quick report.

"They just looked at [the lease] and said, 'It's a civil matter. You have to go to court,'" one of the men tells me.

One of Jacobs' hired men lights up a cigarette and shakes his head. I ask him if he's ever been hired to remove squatters before. He nods. To do it successfully, you have to be willing to really intimidate people, he says with a dark look in his eyes.

As we stand in the parking lot, some of the squatters who'd left the building start returning to the property. One of them goes to a car, pulls out a sheathed machete, and starts to walk towards us.

I take this as my cue to leave. The job is over. The squatters won the day.

"We made an honest attempt," Jacobs tells me later. "It should have worked." The cops are more interested in protecting the squatters, he complains.

Now that there's been an incident at the property, Jacobs says there's too much heat to attempt another breach-and-clear. He suggests he might try to get the property condemned so that code enforcement will remove all of the occupants. He also shares a few more elaborate ideas for clearing the property, which he asks me not to print.

Will California Ever Reform Its Squatter Eviction Process?

A critical legislative committee assessment of California's S.B. 448, the stalled reform measure, noted that modern eviction procedures are descended from medieval laws that sought to reduce the violence that came with removing illegal occupants from a landlord's property. The idea was for the state to provide an orderly legal process as an alternative to such violence.

Few would deny the orderliness of California's process for evicting squatters. Voluminous tenant protections and civil procedures ensure that every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed before an owner can reclaim what's been taken from them.

Yet this very process has produced its own form of chaos. People have learned that if they invade a property, they can physically occupy it for months or, in extreme cases, even for years, all while the legal owner spins his or her wheels in costly court proceedings.

Meanwhile, the police, who hold a monopoly on the lawful use of force, cite the same orderly process as an excuse to wash their hands of the squatter problem and reduce the services they provide to property owners. When new market entrants arrive to provide their own rough form of property-rights enforcement, police and prosecutors respond, as legal monopolies typically do, by seeking to crush the competition.

The criminal cases against Jacobs, Gutierrez, and Angel are ongoing. A preliminary hearing on the charges was held in March. And while the presiding judge dismissed the kidnapping counts, the other charges, including assault with a deadly weapon, still stand. A trial readiness hearing is currently scheduled for mid-July.

Jacobs founded ASAP Squatter Removal for the same reasons any entrepreneur starts a business. He observed a demand for a service that was not being provided. He believed he had developed some innovative techniques that would succeed where others had failed. He was willing to absorb the associated risks.

In a more anarchic world, Jacobs might be more successful. In a world where the state was a more effective guarantor of property rights, there might be no demand for eviction alternative services to begin with.

But in this world, as long as California's eviction system remains ineffective and unreformed, some entrepreneur with a sword, literal or figurative, will always step forward to meet the need.

On the streets, it'll still be samurai versus squatters.

The post Samurai vs. Squatters: On the Street With the Hired Swords Reclaiming California Property Owners' Stolen Homes appeared first on Reason.com.

Friends of Rep. Thomas Massie flocked to his Kentucky district to campaign for him over the weekend, drawing the ire of the libertarian-leaning Republican's number one hater: Donald Trump. The furious president called for a new wave of reprisals against those who would defy him, including Rep. Lauren Boebert (R–Col.), who said she supported both Massie and Trump.

"Boebert is campaigning for the Worst 'Republican' Congressman in the History of our Country, Thomas Massie, of the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky, and anybody who can be that dumb deserves a good Primary fight!" seethed Trump on Truth Social. "Even though I long ago endorsed Boebert, if the right person came along, it would be my Honor to withdraw that Endorsement, and endorse a good and proper alternative."

Boebert, to her credit, was not cowed, replying on X that she was "proud to stand by my friend Thomas Massie."

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and Rep. Victoria Spartz (R–Ind.) have also campaigned for Massie.

Massie's Race Matters! pic.twitter.com/gdiW7kIUkE

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) May 18, 2026

The president's allies are throwing everything they can at Massie, including a last-minute accusation of personal misconduct involving a former girlfriend. Despite headline after headline proclaiming that the congressman was involved with some sort of "hush money" payment, the actual details are not nearly so salacious: According to Massie, he gave the ex-girlfriend, Cynthia West, between $5,000 and $10,000 to help her move to Washington, D.C. West subsequently obtained, and then lost, a job in Sparz's office, and filed a wrongful termination suit. Both Massie and Sparz deny that she was offered "hush money" by Massie. On the contrary, the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights offered her $60,000 to settle the suit, which she refused.

It's the sort of non-scandal that wouldn't even merit media coverage, but Trump's social media boosters have seized upon it. Laura Loomer has posted about Massie incessantly on X, and is even planning to release some sort of interview with West.

This all goes to show that within the Republican Party, crossing Trump is still a risky move. Massie is popular within his district, but Trump is putting everything he can to tip the scales in favor of Massie's challenger, Ed Gallrein. With both sides spending a combined $35 million on the race, it has already become the most expensive congressional primary in history.

Meanwhile, Gallrein is running an anemic campaign that consists entirely of coasting on Trump's endorsement. Gallrein has skipped every debate and refused to answer basic questions about his background. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein notes that Gallrien has been deliberately vague about his time as a Navy SEAL, leaving voters to assume that he was involved in secret missions. Gallrein has bragged that Trump reviewed his classified files—and if he's good enough for Trump, he suggests, he should be good enough for Republican primary voters.

Needless to say, Gallrein has dutifully backed Trump completely, even on issues that are a tough sell for some Republicans, to say nothing of general election voters. Gallrein has defended Trump's war with Iran and dismissed concerns from constituents about higher gas prices. He has claimed that Trump is playing "five-dimensional chess" against the Iranians. He subsequently altered the analogy to "nine-dimensional chess." Trump's ability to win at chess is expanding beyond the physical constraints of this universe.

Tuesday's primary is expected to be close. Some recent polling has Massie trailing Gallrein, and the challenger is also ahead in prediction markets. Another occasional Trump foe, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.), lost his primary over the weekend, coming in third and missing the run-off. Cassidy had voted to remove Trump from office after January 6 and thwarted some of the Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s initiatives. Now he's gone: Trump may be unpopular in national polls, but within the Republican Party, he's still collecting scalps.

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: It was a gorgeous weekend in the nation's capital, with temperatures finally consistently in the 80s on Sunday. I attended a graduation party, a brunch with other journalists, and the annual Dragon Boat Festival, a Taiwanese cultural event.

QUICK HITS

• Trump's statements about delaying weapons sales to Taiwan have raised some eyebrows.
• Trump also said that China pledged not to provide military assistance to Iran during the current war.
• Some students protested Jonathan Haidt, who spoke at New York University's commencement last week. His remarks were published by The Atlantic.
• New data center construction is becoming more and more controversial.
• Megan McArdle: "Is France really poorer than Mississippi?" The answer is yes.
• Elon Musk just can't stop complaining about the casting for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Here is the academic Oliver Traldi's excellent contribution to this idiotic discourse:

To settle a troublesome discourse, I have provided here the most faithful and poetic possible translation of the beginning of the Odyssey.

We male sex. We
complex. We

fake horse. We
off course. We

sail long. We
hear song. We

pig crew. We
home soon.

— Oliver Traldi (@olivertraldi) May 17, 2026

The post Thomas Massie's Moment Has Come appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Stewart Brand on Fixing Stuff, Modern Environmentalism, and the Nuclear Future appeared first on Reason.com.

PJM Interconnection, the largest electricity grid operator in the nation, held its annual company meeting in Baltimore earlier this week. For Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, the event was an opportunity to voice grievances about rising energy costs. 

"I am here to say plainly that PJM can—and must—do more for ratepayers," Moore said, adding that PJM's system "isn't working." Moore's comments come as the price of residential electricity in the state has reached 22.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. This is 24 percent higher than the national average and 6.4 percent more than last year. 

Maryland is not alone. Across the country, residential electricity prices rose by 7.4 percent from February 2025 to February 2026, the most recent month for which federal data are available. While data centers have become an easy scapegoat for rising wholesale prices, there are a range of factors behind these price hikes, including upgrades to aging grids, fluctuating natural gas prices, supply chain constraints, and growing demand that has simply outpaced supply.

As Jeffrey Shields, PJM's senior manager of external communications, tells Reason, the operator is "working with relentless focus to accelerate the connection of new generation." Any problems PJM faced with its interconnection process—pilloried by Moore—are a thing of the past, according to Shields. 

Facing a backlog of new energy generation and storage projects, PJM closed its interconnection queue in 2022, revamping its process from first-come, first-served to what Shields calls a "cluster" approach, resulting in 811 new generation projects in its first cycle this year. 

While Moore castigates PJM, he has consistently supported policies such as price caps and clean energy mandates that distort the market and increase costs for Maryland residents. This includes two bills recently signed by the governor that purport to "protect Maryland families from rising utility costs and make Maryland's economy more business-friendly" but will likely have the opposite effect.

One of those bills, the Utility RELIEF Act, will allegedly save residents "at least $150 on their energy bills every year." The law includes $100 million for refunds or credits to ratepayers drawn from the state's Strategic Energy Investment Fund (SEIF). Another $100 million will go to the Maryland Energy Administration to "conduct a competitive, low-bid auction" for renewable energy projects. 

Funded by "alternative compliance payments" from utilities, the SEIF has seen payments grow from $77 million in FY 2022 to $365 million by FY 2025, according to the state's energy administration. 

According to Josh Smith, a senior fellow at the Pacific Legal Foundation, actions like those spelled out in the RELIEF Act "tend to make things more expensive," deterring suppliers from serving the market. 

Another bill touted by the Moore administration, the DECADE Act, will reportedly improve Maryland's ability to "attract, develop, and grow businesses" through a series of tax credits and carve-outs designed to counter the state's 3 percent tech tax, which Moore signed into law last May. The bill's major provisions—including economic development zones, film tax credits, job creation credits, and R&D credits—seem representative of a state government that believes it's better at allocating capital than the market. 

Max Gulker, managing director of technology policy at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason, says Maryland's problems require the state to consider expanding existing infrastructure and building new grids.

Easier said than done. The Piedmont Reliability Project, intended to increase the state's transmission capacity, has faced regulatory and legal challenges from the state since it was first announced in 2024, according to local NBC affiliate WBALTV11. A decision by the state's utility commission on the project's viability isn't expected until 2027.

Maryland has sought to streamline its permitting process for interconnection requests aligned with the state's clean energy goals. Under the Next Generation Energy Act, eligible applicants can receive permits within 295 days. For a project to be eligible, its greenhouse gas emissions must be lower than those of coal or oil, and it must be capable of generating energy quickly during peak demand.

While this may appear to be a blatant example of the government picking energy winners and losers, such policies are common. As Maryland Public Service Commission Chairman Kumar Barve tells Reason, "all 50 states in the union have incentives for different kinds of energy….There's not a single free market state in the union, not Texas, not Oklahoma, not anybody."

And just as Maryland is not the only state to tilt the scales in favor of renewables, Moore is not the only governor to blame PJM for the price hikes from these policies. 

In New Jersey—which has long subsidized renewables and, until recently, banned construction of nuclear power plants—Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill has frozen utility rate increases. "I'm going to crack down on PJM, get new energy hooked into the grid, and sue to prevent excessive rate hikes," she said while on the campaign trail last year.

The post Maryland's Energy Crisis Was Created In Annapolis appeared first on Reason.com.