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]]>There truly is nothing new here. Other than a handful of cases filed during Trump 2.0, the story is completely a rehash of what has been written before. I do not understand why the Times felt compelled to invest resources in this story, which again, had nothing new.
Left unsaid, of course, is how liberal groups are judge shopping in the District of Rhode Island and the District of Massachusetts. But you might protest that cases in those districts are randomly assigned! But there is still 100% chance of drawing a favorable liberal judge. When the the number of progressives in the numerator is the same as the number of progressives in the denominator, Boston may as well be Wichita Falls. I'd love to see an expose about how many times Judges Talwani, Murphy, and others, have been stayed and reversed by the Supreme Court.
Anyway, nothing new to see here. And remember, sending a pizza to a judge is a threat to the rule of law but parking a guillotine in front of the Supreme Court is free expression.
128 retired federal judges: "We are going to file a frivolous barfare complaint against a government attorney because of his mean tweets. People might get so mad the mean tweets could be threats!"
Active judge: "A man brought a real guillotine to the Supreme Court? No big deal." pic.twitter.com/Xc9OIImuoM
— Eric W. (@EWess92) August 27, 2026
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]]>Andrew Langer of the Institute for Liberty explains some of the follies in Vance's account in the Wall Street Journal. As Langer details, Vance seems to misunderstand markets, the importance of limited government, and the Hamiltonian ideals he purports to embrace. in the op-ed, "What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Hamilton," Langer notes
Mr. Vance's invocation of Hamilton obscures a fundamental disagreement extending back to the founding. Hamilton was a great statesman, but his political economy wasn't the uncontested expression of American republicanism. . .
Notes Langer, the policy choice today "isn't between the authentically American Hamilton and the alien Friedman. It is the continuation of an old American argument over centralization, economic direction and individual liberty."
Vance seems to think that adherence to free market principles (such as it was) is responsible for virtue's decline. Yet as Langer notes, this is a bit backwards.
Mr. Vance's history of America's institutional decline may have the causation backward. Laissez-faire economics didn't create the welfare state. It didn't transfer responsibility for human needs from local communities to Washington. Over several generations, government programs assumed functions previously performed by families, churches, mutual-aid societies, fraternal organizations and local charities.
Government expansion didn't single-handedly cause the decline of religious participation or civic life. But public provision frequently displaced voluntary provision. Americans increasingly looked to bureaucracies rather than to neighbors and communities for assistance.
Mr. Vance now cites the weakness of these institutions as a reason laissez-faire is no longer sufficient. But if government expansion weakened them, the answer can't be another round of centralization. That creates a self-reinforcing cycle: Government assumes responsibilities once exercised by civil society; civil society weakens; its weakness then becomes evidence that government must assume still more responsibility.
Langer concludes:
Government has a legitimate role in protecting rights, enforcing contracts, punishing fraud and preserving the conditions of ordered liberty. It can't manufacture faith, belonging, solidarity or moral purpose through economic planning. Those arise from relationships freely entered and responsibilities willingly undertaken.
People don't flourish because government determines how the economy should serve them. When people are free to pursue better lives, flourishing follows. A free society benefits from strong moral institutions—but neither markets nor liberty depends on government to impose them.
It would be good if more of our political leaders understood this.
The post What J.D. Vance Gets Wrong About Hamilton (and Markets and Milton Friedman) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last night I had a new variant of that dream, which was an actual Supreme Court nightmare. In the dream, I was co-counsel in a case set for argument. We are at the Supreme Court. The bench looks the same, but the bar section is much smaller. Chief Justice Roberts calls the case. Our lead counsel looks at me, and says "I can't do it." He steps down. I immediately panicked, as I hadn't prepared for the argument at all. But I realize someone had to go to the podium, so it would have to be me. I walk to the podium, and say "Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court." My mind then turns blank. I don't know anything. I can't even remember the name of the case. I don't even know the name of our client. I just stand there in silence (something that has never happened before.) Justice Thomas, as per tradition, asks the first question. I have no clue what he is asking me, though I realize it is a softball to help me out.
At that point I turn around to look at the lead counsel to see if he can jump in, and he shakes his head no.
I then say "We will rely on the submissions in our brief," and sit down. Given the circumstances, that was actually a pretty good save. I'm proud my dream-brain thought of that argument on the fly. The Chief Justice said "Thank you." I don't remember the Respondent arguing, and I didn't give a rebuttal.
After the argument concludes, I walk down to the cafeteria. I am dreading all the hate mail I will get, so I didn't even look at my phone. Several people at the Court are trying to cheer me up and tell me I did good by subbing in at the last second. I am still mortified.
So yes, the Supreme Court is always on my mind, even in my nightmares.
I searched through some old posts about law-related dreams. There were many: when Justice Kagan yelled at me, when Judge Posner yelled at me, when SCOTUS issued a cease and desist order against me, when Justice Kagan sang her hand-down of a Shelby County dissent, when the Solicitor General received an award from the Chief Justice, when Justice Thomas came to one of my book talks, when I showed Justice Breyer galleys of my book, and more.
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]]>The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 30, 1967 appeared first on Reason.com.
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The night the socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was captured, thousands of political prisoners across the country shouted in celebration: "Down with the dictatorship!" For Jesús Armas, an activist locked inside the infamous prison known as El Helicoide, it seemed possible the regime that had abducted and tortured him was finally beginning to break.
It wasn't. Maduro is gone, American oil investment is returning to Venezuela, and yet the apparatus of repression remains intact.
In the months after the 2024 presidential election, Maduro's government detained more than 2,000 Venezuelans in a campaign of repression. Armas was among the hunted. His crime was helping prove the electoral results that the regime refused to publish.
The opposition to the socialist regime, led by now-Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado despite her forced absence from the ballot, understood that an election under dictatorship would never be a contest between equals. So it devised a sweeping effort to collect as many voting tallies as possible and post them online. Armas was in charge of gathering tally sheets in Libertador—Caracas' largest municipality, which accounted for roughly 10 percent of the national total vote. He knew the regime was already watching him.
Then came election day: July 28, 2024. Maduro won only about 30 percent of the vote, at least according to the evidence published by Armas and thousands of other activists. The opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won nearly 70 percent. Even so, the electoral authority declared Maduro the winner with about 52 percent of the vote, and then unleashed a fierce crackdown on everyone involved in the election transparency effort.
Armas and his collaborators went underground—moving from one safe house to another in Caracas, changing locations every week, spending as little time outside as possible. It was an anguishing way to live.
By late 2024, Armas had spent five months moving through borrowed apartments and friends' spare rooms. He was exhausted by the impossibility of living anything like a normal life. Days later, he decided to come out of hiding. He went to a café to get a drink and work on his laptop. He was supposed to meet a friend. He sent a few messages saying where he was and waited. A long while passed. The friend, usually punctual, did not arrive. When Armas tried messaging him again, the messages would not go through. Something was wrong.
The delay felt ominous. He packed up, stepped outside, and walked toward his car. After he opened the door, someone caught it. Armas turned and saw a masked man dressed in black, holding a submachine gun. Another seven men were closing in, coming from two unmarked SUVs. None of them wore any identification. "It felt more like an ordinary kidnapping," Armas tells Reason. They shoved him into one of the vehicles, pulled a hood over his head, and handcuffed him.
Blindfolded, he tried to make sense of the route through motion alone: the jolts of narrow streets, the sudden smoothness of the highway, a slow and twisting climb uphill.
They brought him to Quinta La Arenosa, a house in a hillside residential enclave in southern Caracas, tucked behind private streets and successive security checkpoints. The building occupied an entire corner lot. Its white walls and imposing entrance suggested a home that had once belonged to a wealthy family.
La Arenosa was part of a network of clandestine houses where intelligence agencies tortured opposition dissidents, a pattern identified by the United Nations.
Still hooded, Armas was led inside the house. When his captors finally pulled his hood off, he found himself in a kitchen. There, almost at once, his captors slipped a plastic bag over his head and tightened it until he felt he was drowning. "That struck me as macabre," Armas says. "They were torturing me in the kitchen of a family house." It would not be the last time.
He spent four days in La Arenosa. The interrogations were relentless.
Morning, afternoon, and again in the dead of night, when his captors would wake him and begin again with the same questions while he was disoriented. They tortured him repeatedly, threatened his family, and demanded to know where opposition leader Machado was hiding and what her movement was planning next. Armas says he gave them nothing.
Over those four days, as they moved Armas handcuffed through the house, he began to understand the building's layout. Upstairs were the agents' quarters, rooms lined with bunk beds, bags, and clothes, as if the men stationed there lived on-site for weeks at a time. Another room was for weapons and equipment, and an office where they seemed to be building the case against him. From a bathroom window, he glimpsed a sign with an address: "Ramal 2, Colinas de Santa Mónica." That was how he learned where he was.
After four days, they prepared to move Armas out of La Arenosa. Then the man in charge arrived. The man allowed Armas to take his daily asthma medication—he had been denied the medicine since arriving—and gave him a few minutes to wash. Then he made an offer. "Tell us where the other activists are," he said. "Tell us what they are planning. Cooperate, and this can end here. No one will harm you. You can go free. You can go back to your normal life, see your family, and resume your life."
For Armas, there was nothing to weigh. Whatever relief cooperation might have brought him personally was insignificant beside the cause of Venezuelan freedom. He refused. The man flew into a rage. And then his captors decided to move him somewhere worse.
The truck stopped first in Maripérez, at police headquarters on the slopes of El Ávila, the mountain looming over Caracas that separates the city's valley from the Caribbean coast. There, Armas was brought before a judge for his initial hearing, held remotely through a TV screen connected to Zoom. He was denied a private lawyer and barred from making any phone calls. A public defender was assigned to him; she knew nothing about the case, and the prosecutor offered no evidence to examine. Even so, Armas says he was charged with five crimes: treason, criminal association, terrorism, financing of terrorism, and conspiracy with a foreign government. Together, the charges exposed him to a sentence of up to 30 years in prison, the maximum permitted under Venezuelan law.
"At least they were not going to kill me, because I was in a public detention center," he says. "But when you enter a clandestine house, and the first things you receive are threats and torture, you wonder: what comes next?" For Armas, the worst was still ahead.
From Maripérez, they transferred Armas to Zona 7, a white building with green gates and a giant banner of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro stretched across its facade. For five days, he was crammed into a tiny cell with 37 other men, where hammocks hung in three stacked rows, and those without them slept on the floor. Rats moved through the corners even in daylight. There was no bathroom; the prisoners relieved themselves in bags and threw them out the window. His captors denied Armas food, water, and visits. He survived only because the other inmates, men who spoke casually of drug trafficking, murder, and domestic abuse, shared the meals their families brought.
After a few days, they transferred him to El Helicoide, the headquarters of the regime's intelligence service and the country's most infamous prison for political detainees. The building had been conceived in the mid-1950s as a monument to Venezuelan modernity: a vast concrete spiral rising up a rocky hill in south-central Caracas, topped by a geodesic dome. But the mall was never completed. What its architects designed as shops and offices were eventually converted into cells. The United Nations has reported that the building contains torture rooms, and political prisoners have been held there incommunicado.
For the first 10 months, Armas was cut off from the outside world. His family had no official confirmation that he was there, only rumors. He received no visits, and no contact with prisoners held elsewhere in the building. To survive, he understood that he needed a routine. The guards understood that too, and they worked so hard to destroy it. Whenever he managed to find even a measure of inner calm, they upset it: moving him to another cell, searching his belongings, confiscating whatever seemed to help. "They were always looking for a way to emotionally break us", Armas remembers.
One of the few things that helped was a small MP3 player, an old model that used memory cards and could not connect to the internet. Armas persuaded the guards that, because of his anxiety, music was a kind of therapy. His friends know he loves rock music, so the first memory card he received was filled with bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Linkin Park, and Bring Me the Horizon. To get new music, he slipped tiny handwritten notes into the folds of the clothes sent outside for laundry.
Books became another refuge. In Letters to Olga, written behind bars by the Czech dissident and future president Václav Havel, Armas found echoes of his own ordeal. When Armas later developed a severe respiratory infection due to his untreated asthma and was denied medical care, Havel's example gave him a model. If Havel could endure recurring bouts of the flu, severe fevers, and medical neglect and still emerge ready to lead his country's democratic transition, Armas reasoned, then he could withstand his health problems too.
Over time, conditions eased slightly. Armas believes the shift was partly driven by U.S. pressure on the Maduro regime. He was allowed visits from his mother and father, and he had a video call with his partner, Sairam Rivas. But the authorities issued an arrest warrant for Rivas too. From the first day of Armas' disappearance, she had denounced his kidnapping and helped organize the relatives of other political prisoners to keep their cases in the public eye. For that, she was forced into exile.
Inside El Helicoide, Armas discovered the ranks of political prisoners extended far beyond the opposition. There were members of the ruling party there. Other detainees were police officers or intelligence agents. There were influencers jailed for posting videos mocking the regime. El Helicoide had a little bit of everything.
One of the strangest reversals came when Armas discovered that one of his guards from La Arenosa was now imprisoned in El Helicoide, in the cell next to his. He wasn't the only one. Several officials involved in Armas' kidnapping and in the abduction of other political prisoners had ended up there, where they feared revenge from the men they had once helped abduct.
One of them tried to explain himself. Only after being tortured himself, he told Armas, did he understand what they had put others through. Then he lifted his upper lip, revealing teeth shattered under torture. "In the end, we are all in the same condition, with the same tormentor," Armas says.
Then came January 3, 2026. Deep in the night, Armas heard an explosion. His cell had no windows. Everything began to shake, and for a moment, no one understood what was happening. Then the power went out, and the emergency generator kicked in. His first thought was that another electrical transformer had blown, the kind of failure that had become routine in a socialist country whose power grid had been left to decay.
Through the bars, Armas saw guards running up and down the corridor, visibly panicked. He caught sight of the prison director and the fear on his face, a look Armas would not have thought possible in someone so deeply implicated in concealing the regime's crimes. Prisoners began calling to one another from their cells, trying to make sense of the chaos and preparing for whatever might come next.
Around 3 a.m., as Armas pulled on his shoes, another prisoner began to sing the Venezuelan national anthem. He still did not know what was happening, but found himself singing along. Soon the prisoners were shouting, "Down with the dictatorship!" A rumor had begun to spread, passed along by one of the guards: American forces had captured Maduro. "We started jumping like a couple of little kids," Armas says.
What followed was the most anxious period Armas experienced in prison. Before that, he had managed his expectations by telling himself that his imprisonment would take a long time, that he would need patience, and that he was facing years in jail. Suddenly, the horizon had changed. Freedom seemed close enough to unsettle him. It became harder to sleep.
A fellow prisoner gave Armas his books. Among them was Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. Reading it, Armas recognized a familiar logic in the petty absurdities of prison. "I don't want to compare myself to Mandela," Armas says, "but if he could handle that for 20 years, I could hold on for 20 more days". In one passage, a prison officer mistakes The Law of Torts for "The Law of Torches" and treats it as evidence of sabotage. El Helicoide worked in much the same way. Guards blocked Henry Kissinger's Leadership because they said they did not know English, and another prisoner was denied a Spanish edition of Sun Tzu's The Art of War on the assumption that it sounded dangerous.
On the morning of February 8, Armas began to sense that something had shifted. Each day, he was allowed about five minutes in the cell of Luis Tarbay, who had coordinated the international teams of the opposition's presidential campaign and was being held alone. That morning, Tarbay was gone, but his bags were still there. "They're going to release him," Armas thought. He walked away happy.
Later that day, Armas was taken to the visiting room, where his mother had come to see him. They had been talking for more than an hour when the director of El Helicoide cut the visit short. "Stand up. Come with me. Don't turn around, and don't say anything to anyone," he said. The director told Armas they were taking him for a medical checkup.
When Armas asked why, the director looked at him and said, "You know you're leaving today."
The officers put Armas and his mother in a vehicle and drove them straight home. They were not allowed to leave on their own. Outside El Helicoide, relatives of political prisoners and activists had gathered in protest, waiting for the release of every political prisoner.
Minutes after getting home, Armas got a call from an activist urging him to come to Plaza Madariaga, a small public square near his home, where a celebration of the release of political prisoners was beginning. The gathering was also a challenge to the regime's repression, but many felt it was necessary. Armas, thinking of Havel, did too. A crowd of activists, neighbors, relatives, and friends was waiting for him there, amid dozens of motorcycles. Only then, more than a month after Maduro's capture, did he see the videos of the bombings and the American helicopters flying over Caracas.
Then Juan Pablo Guanipa called. Guanipa, one of María Corina Machado's closest allies and one of the best-known politicians opposing the socialist regime, had gone into hiding with Armas after the election and had been arrested months later, in May 2025, after months underground. Armas had not known that Guanipa, also long imprisoned, had been released that day.
"Brother, where are you? Let's meet," Guanipa said. Minutes later, he arrived, and together they joined a caravan winding through Caracas toward El Helicoide and Zona 7, where families were still protesting for the release of political prisoners.
Guanipa invited him to dinner, but Armas declined. It was his first day out of prison, and he wanted to go home to his parents.
That same night, three SUVs intercepted Guanipa. Armed men from the secret police jumped out and took him away. For hours, no one knew where the man was. Only later did word come that he had been placed under house arrest. At least, Armas thought, Guanipa would be with his family.
On his first night home, Armas spent hours talking on the phone with friends in Venezuela and elsewhere in the region. By dawn, calls from Europe had started coming in, and he stayed awake through them all. In the early morning, he got up to go to the bathroom and, through the window, saw the sunrise.
The sight stunned him. Sunrise is the kind of thing one assumes will always be there. "I thought about all the sunrises I had missed, and all the times I took sunrises for granted," he says to Reason.
But political change in Venezuela has yet to be achieved. The Trump administration has backed Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro's vice president, as interim president, and designed negotiations intended to produce concrete steps toward a transfer of power. María Corina Machado and her closest allies, however, have largely been excluded from those talks.
The regime's continued treatment of political prisoners shows the limit of that opening. Although hundreds of detainees, including Armas, have been released, more than 400 political prisoners remain in jail, according to Venezuelan human rights organization Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón. Political prisoners have also continued to die in state custody.
Release does not necessarily bring full freedom. Perkins Rocha, an attorney for Machado, spent about 17 months in El Helicoide before his release in February. He remains under house arrest with an ankle monitor.
Rodríguez has replaced roughly 40 percent of Maduro's cabinet, while preserving key parts of the regime's coercive apparatus. Diosdado Cabello remains interior minister, overseeing the country's police and intelligence forces. The United States still offers a reward up to $25 million for information leading to his arrest on federal drug-trafficking charges. Yet in July, Cabello was photographed greeting Gen. Francis Donovan, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, and John Barrett, Washington's chargé d'affairs in Caracas.
Armas is no longer in a windowless prison cell, but "deep down, nothing has changed," he says. The people who ordered his kidnapping are still in power, using it as they always have—arbitrarily, and with contempt for human rights.
The post Inside Venezuela's El Helicoide Prison: How Dissident Jesús Armas Endured Torture and Outlasted Maduro appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Plaintiffs, Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation and Jane Doe, a noncitizen student holding an F-1 visa issued by the United States, bring their claims against Marco Rubio, in his official capacity as Secretary of State, and Markwayne Mullin, in his official capacity as Secretary of Homeland Security …. Plaintiffs allege that, since March 2025, the government has changed its immigration policy and pattern of enforcement, namely by arresting, detaining, and deporting students with F-1 visas when those students use their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government does not like—such as expressing support or empathy for Palestinian people, or criticizing Israel's actions regarding Palestine or the conflict in Gaza.
Plaintiffs argue that the provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act … that the government relies on for its authority to cancel student visas and initiate deportation proceedings are unconstitutional…. [Those provisions are that an alien may be deported] if "… the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien's [presence] would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest" … [and that] "[a]fter the issuance of a visa or other documentation to any alien, the consular officer or the Secretary of State may at any time, in his discretion, revoke such visa or other documentation."
The court concluded that the First Amendment generally fully protects resident aliens pretty much the same way as it protects aliens:
The First Amendment acknowledges no "distinction between citizens and resident aliens." The right to freedom of speech, and its correlative protection from government retribution based on hostility towards speech, has generally been accorded to noncitizens living in the United States. Am.-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm. v. Reno ("AADC") (9th Cir. 1995); Bridges v. Wixon (1945) ("Freedom of speech and of press is accorded [to noncitizens] residing in this country.").
In AADC, the Ninth Circuit held the First Amendment prohibits deporting aliens for protected speech. As the court explained, "The Framers explicitly recognized that aliens within this country participate in a reciprocal relationship of societal obligations and correlative protection. 'As [aliens] owe, on one hand, a temporary obedience, they are entitled, in return, to their protection and advantage.'" Therefore, "the values underlying the First Amendment require the full applicability of First Amendment rights to the deportation setting." After all, "[i]f aliens do not have First Amendment rights at deportation, then their First Amendment rights in other contexts are a nullity, because the omnipresent threat of deportation would permanently chill their expressive and associational activities."
For reasons I'll explain below, I think this decision, like AAUP v. Rubio (D. Mass. 2025), is a plausible interpretation of the First Amendment precedents, but not the only plausible one. We'll likely know more when the First Circuit decides the appeal in that case, and then later when the Ninth Circuit decides the likely appeal in this one. And I expect that the matter will get to the Supreme Court if at least one appellate court rules in favor of the First Amendment claimants. Meantime, more from the opinion:
The government argues that noncitizens present in the United States have "reduced" First Amendment protection that "varies" based on an "ascending scale." The government fails to cite any case applying their purported "ascending scale" doctrine to lawfully present noncitizens' First Amendment rights. The Ninth Circuit, considering similar arguments, held it is an "uncontested proposition" that student visa holders in the United States can assert claims under the First Amendment. Ibrahim v. Dep't of Homeland Sec. (9th Cir. 2012) (further holding that the plaintiff, a Stanford student, whose student visa was revoked while traveling outside the United States, could assert First Amendment claims). Indeed, the government does not explain what First Amendment protections it believes are accorded noncitizens – it only states that whatever "reduced" First Amendment rights "nonimmigrant visa-holders" may have are insufficient for purposes of challenging the Revocation and Deportation Provisions.
{The government also relies on authority holding that noncitizens are subject to one unique speech abridgment: restrictions on financial contributions to federal election campaigns. The government chiefly points to then-Judge Kavanaugh's opinion in Bluman v. FEC (D.D.C. 2011). But Bluman did not hold that noncitizens have reduced First Amendment rights. Instead, it upheld the contribution restriction under a line of authority allowing the government "to bar [noncitizens] from voting, serving as jurors, working as police or probation officers, or working as public school teachers" because the activities are integral to "democratic self-government." The court reasoned that direct campaign expenditures "constitute part of the process of democratic self-government." Critically, Bluman explicitly cited Wixon as mandating that "resident aliens [are] protected by the First Amendment in the context of deportation." And the court explicitly cautioned that "speaking on issues of general public interest is a quite different context from participation in a political campaign for election."}
Some of the government's proffered authority involves exclusion or admissibility of noncitizens (i.e., refusal to permit entry) rather than removal of lawfully present noncitizens. See, e.g., ECF No. 84 at 17 (citing Dep't of State v. Muñoz (2024); Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972)). But the Supreme Court has explained that "[t]he distinction between an alien who has effected an entry into the United States and one who has never entered runs throughout immigration law." Zadvydas v. Davis (2001).
"The Supreme Court has consistently distinguished between aliens in the United States and those seeking to enter from outside the country, and has accorded to aliens living in the United States those protections of the Bill of Rights that are not, by the text of the Constitution, restricted to citizens." AADC; see also id. ("[W]e decline to extend Kleindienst to apply to the deportation context."). And the very authority the government relies upon confirms that "resident aliens [are] protected by the First Amendment in the context of deportation." Bluman v. FEC (D.D.C. 2011) (Kavanaugh, J.) (citing Wixon). Plaintiffs' claims here do not concern questions of admissibility or exclusion, so the government's references to legal authority that addresses admissibility or exclusion instead of visa revocation or deportation, are not relevant.
As to the Fifth Amendment's prohibition against vague laws, it equally protects citizens and noncitizens, including in the immigration context. In Sessions, the Supreme Court held that because deportation is a "grave" and "drastic measure, often amounting to lifelong banishment or exile," the "most exacting vagueness standard" applicable to criminal laws also applies to immigration laws. Sessions v. Dimaya (2018) (plurality op.) (applying heightened vagueness test to invalidate an INA provision).
The court's decision fits well with the Ninth Circuit AADC case, as well as a similar decision from the Fourth Circuit, Parcham v. INS (4th Cir. 1985). But it doesn't discuss a different view set forth by Price v. INS (9th Cir. 1991) (which, to be sure, said this in the context of a decision to deny citizenship, not a deportation decision):
[T]he protection afforded resident aliens may be limited…. [T]he Court has historically afforded Congress great deference in the area of immigration and naturalization…. "[I]n the exercise of its broad power over immigration and naturalization, 'Congress regularly makes rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens.'" [A]lthough Price [as a lawful permanent resident] is justified in expecting the greatest degree of constitutional protection afforded a non-citizen, the protection afforded him under the First Amendment certainly is not greater than that of the citizen plaintiffs in Kleindienst [whose First Amendment claims challenging the denial of a visa to a foreigner were rejected -EV].
It also doesn't discuss another passage from then-Judge Kavanaugh's opinion in Bluman:
"The Court has further indicated that aliens' First Amendment rights might be less robust than those of citizens in certain discrete areas. See Harisiades v. Shaugnessy (1952) (First Amendment does not protect aliens from deportation because of membership in the Communist Party)."
To be sure, the First Amendment discussion in Harisiades rested on the conclusion that active membership in the Communist Party was substantively unprotected by the First Amendment—both for citizens and noncitizens—which was the law at the time (see Dennis v. United States (1951)). But in its Due Process Clause discussion, Harisiades, spoke generally about the breadth of Congressional power to authorize deportation of aliens:
Under our law, the alien in several respects stands on an equal footing with citizens, but in others has never been conceded legal parity with the citizen. Most importantly, to protract this ambiguous status within the country is not his right but is a matter of permission and tolerance. The Government's power to terminate its hospitality has been asserted and sustained by this Court since the question first arose….
It is pertinent to observe that any policy toward aliens is vitally and intricately interwoven with contemporaneous policies in regard to the conduct of foreign relations, the war power, and the maintenance of a republican form of government. Such matters are so exclusively entrusted to the political branches of government as to be largely immune from judicial inquiry or interference.
The district court decision in this case (Stanford Daily) didn't discuss Harisiades, either, nor did it discuss the Supreme Court's decision in a follow-up phase of the AADC case, Reno v. AADC (1999), which held that the usual First Amendment protections against selective enforcement of laws based on speech generally didn't apply to deportation.
Colin McDonell, Conor Fitzpatrick, and Daniel Zahn (FIRE) and John Sinodis, Marc Van Der Hout, and Oona Cahill (Van Der Hout, LLP) represent plaintiffs.
The post First Amendment Broadly Protects Against Speech-Based Deportation of Noncitizens, Court Rules appeared first on Reason.com.
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Yesterday, in Stanford Daily Publishing Corp. v. Rubio, federal district Judge Noel Wise ruled that speech-based deportations of non-citizens violate the First Amendment. The decision is similar to previous rulings on recent Trump Administration efforts to deport non-citizen academics and students for speech the administration officials object to. But this one goes somewhat further in ruling that the statutes the administration is relying on are themselves unconstitutional, because they grant the Secretary of State nearly unlimited power to deport non-citizens if he deems their speech to be somehow adverse to a "compelling" US "foreign policy interest." Judge Wise's reasoning is similar to that of the the late Judge Maryanne Trump Barry (Donald Trump's sister), who ruled in 1996 that one of these laws was unconstitutional because of its extreme vagueness.
Here is an excerpt from yesterday's ruling:
[T]he Challenged Portion of the Deportation Provision is an intentionally broad delegation providing the Secretary of State leeway to suppress opinions that he deems harmful to foreign policy. The Secretary of State has wide latitude to enforce the provision with no limiting principles on how enforcement priorities are determined. The Challenged Portion of the Deportation Provision provides unlimited (and, in the government's view, unreviewable) discretion to the Secretary of State to decide which "beliefs, statements, or associations" endanger foreign policy. 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3)(C)(iii). This cannot be squared with First Amendment protections…
Freedom of speech is illusory if we are only "free" to express complementary views about the government and its leaders. The true freedom in the United States is our "profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide- open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials." New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964).
I agree with Judge Wise's reasoning on these points. She also rightly strikes down the relevant laws based on their unconstitutional vagueness.
The decision also includes a massive compilation of evidence showing that the administration does indeed have a speech-based deportation policy, particularly when it comes to students and academics expressing pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli views. I am, to understate the point, no fan of many of these views. But the First Amendment protects speech we (or the party in power) disapprove of no less than speech we like, and awful views no less than benign ones.
Like other similar recent rulings, this one - following Supreme Court precedent - distinguishes between speech-based initial exclusions and speech-based deportations (allowing greater scope for the former). I recognize lower courts' hands may be tied on this point. But I would argue both are equally unconstitutional.
I do wish Judge Wise had devoted a bit more effort to addressing the argument that the First Amendment doesn't cover non-citizens or protects them only to a very minor degree. This issue was better covered by Judge Young in AAUP v. Rubio (decided last September).
I have myself explained why there is no immigration exception to the First Amendment in earlier writings (e.g. - here, here, and here). Most importantly, as I have pointed out previously, the First Amendment - like most constitutional rights is phrased as a generalized limitation on government power - not a privilege limited to a specific group, such as citizens. And the First Amendment bars speech-based deportations even if the federal government can exclude non-citizens for other reasons:
A standard response to [my] view is the idea that, even if non-citizens have a right to free speech, they don't have a constitutional right to stay in the US. Thus, deporting them for their speech doesn't violate the Constitution. But, in virtually every other context, it is clear that depriving people of a right as punishment for their speech violates the First Amendment, even if the right they lose does not itself have constitutional status. For example, there is no constitutional right to get Social Security benefits. But a law that barred critics of the President from getting those benefits would obviously violate the First Amendment. The same logic applies in the immigration context.
Judge Wise's decision also covers a range of procedural issues that I will not attempt to comment on here.
In a forthcoming chapter in an Oxford University Press book on Academic Freedom in the Era of Trump, I explain why speech-based immigration restrictions violate academic freedom, as well as freedom of speech; and that includes the academic freedom of US-citizen students and researchers, as well as non-citizen immigrants.
In February of this year, I explained in testimony before the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, why religion-based immigration restrictions also violate the First Amendment. This precludes proposed legislation to bar or deport all or nearly non-citizen Muslims.
Finally, I would like to commend the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) for successfully representing the plaintiffs in this case. In a world extensive partisan bias and double standards, FIRE deserves respect for consistently defending freedom of speech and expression, regardless of whether the threat to it comes from the right or the left.
NOTE: In the initial version of this post, I wrongly assumed Judge Noel Wise is a man, rather than a woman. I apologize for the error, which I have now corrected.
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It may sound Farfetch'd, but lawmakers are advancing a bill that would stop minors from nicknaming their Pokémon online—in violation of the First Amendment.
Last month, the House of Representatives passed the KIDS Act, a wide-ranging package of youth online safety bills. It includes the Safer GAMING Act, which would require interactive online video games to "limit communication between" players "under the age of 17" and "any other user."
That limit must be "enabled by default" and "set to the most restrictive setting," automatically blocking all "verbal, written, or visual messages" to and from minor users. Parents could adjust the safeguard "to a less restrictive setting," but silence is the starting point, in every online game.
This sweeping regulation would violate the First Amendment. Minors have a First Amendment right to both speak and receive information, including through video games and the internet. As the Supreme Court explained in 1975 in Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, "minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection…and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them."
The Safer GAMING Act goes far beyond that. The act draws no line between certain restricted categories of speech, such as material that is obscene to minors and true threats, and gamer chatter.
Even if courts ruled that the Safer GAMING Act is content-neutral—regulating only the time, place, or manner of speech rather than its substance—it would still fail intermediate scrutiny, because it fails to "leave open 'ample alternative channels for communication.'" The act cuts off every channel by default, including "written" and "visual messages," leaving minors with no way to reach their "intended audience" of other gamers.
The prohibition also reaches well past in-game chat, into far more innocuous communication. In the Pokémon games, for example, gamers can give their Pokémon nicknames. When they battle online, they see their opponents' nicknames, communicating without messaging directly. Players often nickname for fun—expressing themselves, cracking jokes, and riffing on memes. Nicknames can also be strategic, used to intimidate, tease, or trick opponents. Either way, Pokémon nicknames qualify as "written messages" exchanged online within the meaning of the act. If enacted, this harmless feature would be switched off for young gamers by default.
The bill also bans "visual messages" such as taunts in Super Smash Bros., moves "unrelated to battle" that "show your opponent a little flair." Taunts work online too, letting players celebrate, "provoke, intimidate, annoy or mock opponents." Mario taunts by spinning around; others include audio, like Sonic the Hedgehog saying, "You're too slow." These are visual or verbal "messages" exchanged between online users, and therefore banned by the act as applied to minors.
Allowing parents to change the default setting does not save the bill. In 2011, the Supreme Court struck down a California law banning the sale of violent video games to children without parental approval because "such laws do not enforce parental authority over children's speech and religion; they impose governmental authority, subject only to a parental veto." Under the First Amendment, the government lacks "the power to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parents' prior consent."
Congress banning nicknames and taunts may seem implausible—lawmakers, one assumes, meant something narrower. But judges interpret laws by the "plain and ordinary meaning of the statute's terms," not by what drafters may have intended. On its plain terms, the Safer GAMING Act draws no line between a slur and a Pikachu nickname, between a threat and a Mario taunt.
Ignoring the First Amendment and attempting to silence minors in online video games is a Team Rocket–level blunder. Unfortunately, Congress is blasting off again.
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Like many others in the Washington, D.C., or New York metro areas, my experience of 9/11 was horrifying and yet unremarkable at the same time.
I was a 16-year-old British student spending a year in an American high school in Arlington, Virginia, just a few miles from the Pentagon. That Tuesday morning dawned like any other. It was sunny and warm; D.C. was experiencing its traditional third or fourth blast of summer heat well into September. In second period, someone flipped on the TV, which was showing images of a plane disaster in New York. Tragic, but hardly cause to break routine. The band teacher flipped it back off and returned to teaching.
It wasn't long, though, before things went off the rails. While walking to my next class, there was a commotion down the hall: someone screaming, the hysterical sound bouncing off the tiled corridor. I would later learn that a girl was trying to reach her parents at work in the Pentagon—and failing. By the time the principal made the announcement that school was closed, rumors and panic had begun to spread throughout the student body.
Things after that are a disconnected blur. Waiting in classrooms for parents to come and collect students without transportation; some arrived crying. My mother managed to get a phone line and briefly call me. She was trapped on a Metro platform, the trains disgorging all their passengers and going out of service. Even the television news was frenetic and unclear: Another plane was headed for the White House. No, it was headed for CIA headquarters in McLean. There are car bombs downtown. The president has been taken to a secret location. One classmate's father, who worked at the Pentagon, saw the crash in his rearview mirror as he drove to a dentist's appointment.
My mother finally made it to school and took me home. It would take several more hours for my father, who worked mere blocks from the White House, to arrive: Like many others, he had been forced to walk out of Washington, across the bridges, and through miles of suburbs to get home.
These experiences remain etched in my mind, horrible enough to be fresh even all these years later, and yet they were in no way unique. In the days, months, and years to follow, I would hear so many distinct variants of the same story: a group of students on a trip who'd seen the plane as it descended toward the building; a classmate whose father was whisked away by government helicopter to some unknown location, leaving them to wonder where he was; a think-tanker whose child attended an on-site daycare at the Pentagon. I kept thinking back to that last story after I became a mother myself. Could I even imagine the panic and terror of a parent in that situation?
It's tempting to look back at the shock and horror of 9/11, a trauma shared by much of Washington's foreign policy class, as the genesis of many foreign policy mistakes that would follow. Hurt people, as the saying goes, hurt people. And as the events of the following years unfurled—the toppling of the Taliban, the invasion of Iraq, the internments at Guantánamo Bay, the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, and so on—it became tempting to blame it all on that singular day of pain and horror.
But as we approach the 25th anniversary of the attacks, it's important to understand the limits of that story. The events of 9/11 undoubtedly had a major impact on foreign policy. Yet this impact was less a change of direction and more an intensification of already existing trends. The 9/11 attacks would create a permissive political and psychological environment for a particular foreign policy vision, but it did not set America on the path to liberal interventionism and forever war all by itself. For that, we must look back into the 1990s.
The collapse of the Soviet Union unchained America. Economic and social malaise had been undermining the USSR for decades, as an aging parade of apparatchiks presided over stagnation and discontent. The rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and a sudden, unexpected series of arms-control agreements brought an era of détente, while a series of popular revolutions in Eastern Europe severed the USSR from its Eastern bloc dependencies. By the time the Soviet flag was lowered on the Kremlin walls on Christmas Day 1991, it was clear to all involved that America had won the Cold War.
This outcome raised hopes in Washington of a better world. As President George H.W. Bush told Congress, the dawning of something better might be visible: "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge….An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony." The Soviet collapse, leaving America as the only superpower, offered policymakers a chance to use America's overwhelming power to build that better world.
The end of the Cold War was thus marked not only with a sense of righteous victory, but also with a feeling in Washington that a new foreign policy consensus needed to be forged. The early 1990s was nicknamed the "Kennan Sweepstakes." Thinkers vied to become the next George Kennan, whose 1946 telegram created a doctrine for the Cold War, with new missions and new rationales for U.S. foreign policy. The bipartisan consensus that emerged married Republican primacists and neoconservatives to Democratic liberal internationalists around a form of "liberal hegemony."
What united these groups was a conviction that America—the "indispensable nation"—could transform the world into something better, whether that was by toppling prospective enemies of the United States or engaging in humanitarian intervention. Each administration from Bill Clinton to at least Barack Obama held it as an article of faith that if America could make the world more interconnected and more liberal, it could also make the world more peaceful.
U.S. foreign policy thus became increasingly assertive. It is an oft-forgotten irony that George W. Bush was elected in 2000 promising to reject excessive humanitarian intervention and nation building, sentiments that helped him to win the Republican nomination over noted hawk John McCain.
The nation building in question was President Clinton's repeated interventions in the Balkans, designed to prevent atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. Crimes like the mass killing at Srebrenica in the 1990s led U.S. officials to embrace the "responsibility to protect"—the notion that if a state did not or could not protect its own citizens, the international community was obliged to intervene to protect civilians. In practice, "the international community" meant the United States.
Indeed, when conflict broke out between Serbian forces and Kosovar separatists, the Clinton administration ran an air campaign not with the approval of the U.N. Security Council, where Russian and Chinese vetoes prevented action, but under the auspices of NATO. The campaign forced Serbia to accept a peace deal and in effect created a new country in Kosovo.
Other elements of U.S. foreign policy under Clinton were similarly ambitious and transformative. His administration engaged in strenuous negotiations with Congress over the admission of China to the World Trade Organization. Concerns about China's growing economy and undemocratic government were smoothed over by the notion that greater trade and interdependence could bring greater global stability in the long run. By bringing China into the community of nations in this way, it was believed, China's rise could be managed, turning it into a "responsible stakeholder" in the existing American-led order.
Then there was NATO expansion. With the collapse of the USSR, NATO no longer had an enemy to protect against, raising the possibility that the alliance was obsolete. But as early as George H.W. Bush's administration, U.S. policymakers demanded that a unified Germany stay in NATO, inherently implying that the pact still had a role to play in European security.
It was the Clinton administration that suggested that NATO might also have a place for the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. By the end of his term, Clinton had authorized the first round of NATO expansion and set the stage for more. NATO expansion was increasingly seen as a way to lock in stability, democracy, and economic reform in Eastern Europe.
NATO's expansion was coupled with an American push to expand its scope, transforming it from a deterrence force inside Europe to a global peacekeeping army that could act when the United Nations could not. More than 60,000 NATO-associated troops participated in the Bosnian implementation and stabilization efforts that followed the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995.
What tied many of these Clinton-era policies together was the aim of prolonging the post–Cold War period of American predominance over both allies and adversaries. One way this manifested itself was the idea that the United States should not withdraw from European security, keeping European allies purposefully weak. Another way was a policy of "dual containment" against both Iraq and Iran. Across the 1990s, the U.S. would sustain a no-fly zone over Iraq, enforce U.N. sanctions on Iraqi oil, and engage in several bombing campaigns against Iraqi military targets and to protect civilians in Kurdish areas.
As we exited the 1990s, American policymakers were riding high. No challengers were on the horizon, proto–rogue states like Iraq were contained, and globalization and liberalization were flourishing around the world. Perhaps nothing exemplified the mood surrounding U.S. foreign policy better than a declaration by Madeleine Albright, Clinton's secretary of state: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future." At home, the president might have been embroiled in a sex scandal, but abroad, America's destiny as leader and prophet of the post–Cold War world seemed assured.
It was in this messianic ground that the seeds of 9/11 were sown. An introspective observer might have wondered how the nation who "saw further into the future" had so disastrously missed the threat from Al Qaeda. Future inquiries would conclude that the attacks would not have been possible without serious lapses in both Clinton and Bush's counterterrorism policies, as well as institutional and intelligence failures.
The 9/11 attacks were clearly terror and barbarism; thousands of grieving American families at funerals proved that beyond any doubt. But they were also a challenge to America's post–Cold War image. A terrorist group had been able to hatch a plan in caves in one of the world's poorest and most isolated countries (never mind that most of the actual plotting and preparation had taken place in Germany!), turning the very tools of global connectivity against America. The attacks came to be seen as an affront to America's new world—a challenge to the forces of civilized, liberal order.
The invasion of Afghanistan was a logical and justified response to the attacks. The Taliban had sheltered Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden; they had, in a very real sense, declared war on the United States. The toppling of the Taliban was swift and merciless. Less than three months after the attacks, Kabul was conquered and an interim Afghan government was in place.
But in the atmosphere of the time, mere military victory was not enough. Bin Laden and many of his top lieutenants were still at large. "Rogue states" such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, and North Korea might need to be deterred. Other "ungoverned spaces" might pose a similar threat in future.
In response, the Bush administration formulated the "freedom agenda," a hugely ambitious strategy that sought to address all of these problems at their root. This freedom agenda turned the war in Afghanistan into an exercise in modernization and nation building, which was used to sell a separate war of regime change in Iraq. In each case, U.S. military power was to transform whole societies. Iraq and Afghanistan were prototypes, proving grounds for the idea that a democratization campaign could act as a catalyst for change across the whole of the Middle East. "The great strength of this nation," the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy document put it, "must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom."
Though U.S. public opinion began to turn decisively against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as Bush's presidency ended, his successors continued to pursue similarly transformative goals on the world stage. President Barack Obama, for example, had come into office promising to pull back from the global war on terror, but he ended up surging troops into both Afghanistan and Iraq. His administration also engaged in regime change in Libya and covert intervention in Syria.
Obama was building not just on Bush's freedom agenda but on the Clinton administration's invocation of the responsibility to protect. Several of Obama's foreign policy advisers—Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, Susan Rice—were true believers in using U.S. power to protect human rights and spread democracy. As the Arab Spring crashed across the Middle East in 2011 and mass protests in Libya spilled into open civil war, the administration authorized a NATO-led campaign that quickly advanced from a no-fly zone designed to protect civilians to an open campaign of regime change.
America's Middle East interventions after 9/11 even bolstered its other ambitious post–Cold War policies. For example, NATO now had more impetus to focus on expeditionary and "out of area" capabilities. The alliance played an active role in the International Security Assistance Force process in Afghanistan and then in the Libya campaign. NATO expansion and the war on terror would become practically symbiotic: For newer members, providing political support and token military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan was viewed as a quid pro quo for membership, while the sacrifices made by their soldiers became a justification for that membership.
Public disillusionment with all of these policies grew throughout the 2000s and 2010s. By 2016, Donald Trump was reaching swing voters by declaring the Iraq War a mistake; by 2020, Democratic primary candidates would be pledging en masse to extricate the U.S. from the Middle East. Twenty-five years after 9/11, elements of the war on terror still linger across the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa—and the war is generally viewed as a failure. The Middle East became less a proving ground for democracy and human rights promotion, and more a graveyard for the notion that freedom can be built at the point of a gun.
Yet with 25 years of space, it also becomes easier to see how the war on terror fits into the broader trajectory of post–Cold War U.S. foreign policy. America's response to 9/11 turbocharged many of its worst impulses but did not fundamentally change its direction. The zeal of the indispensable nation mixed with the shock of a large-scale terrorist attack—one experienced firsthand by many of Washington's foreign policy elites—created a permissive environment in which ambitious theories of global peace and change could flourish.
The war on terror is simply the best-known and most visible of the transformative impulses that characterized the post–Cold War pursuit of liberal hegemony. Would regime-change wars in Iraq or Libya have happened without 9/11? Would America have spent two decades bogged down in the Middle East, wasting blood and treasure while China rose quietly? Perhaps not. But a quarter-century later, we should ask ourselves how much of what followed the 9/11 attacks stemmed from shared trauma and panic—and how much was merely an intensification of existing trends.
The post 9/11 Turbocharged America's Worst Foreign Policy Impulses—but Didn't Change Its Direction appeared first on Reason.com.
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"What is the etiquette if you are going about your business and find yourself observing an [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raid?" the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos asked on X last year. "I want to show a little respect and decency. Are you allowed to masturbate where you stand, in the street, or should you find some kind of awning or motor vehicle?"
It is unclear if Yiannopoulos ever tested this theory. A British national masturbating in front of immigration authorities would be a reliable way to land in ICE detention, where Yiannopoulos now sits, according to government records.
That is not actually the reason, although it would be hard to put it past him. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said Yiannopoulos entered legally but "chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation's laws," and that he was issued a final order of removal "after failing to show up for his immigration hearing."
On August 27, ICE arrested Milo Yiannopoulos, an illegal alien from the United Kingdom, at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY) in Kenner, Louisiana. Yiannopoulos legally entered the country on May 14, 2019, through New York City, New York. He chose to… https://t.co/Hk6QBUmGDI pic.twitter.com/DbIhv8Z6PI
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 28, 2026
The British commentator, who now works for Kanye West, made a name for himself with his flamboyant strain of shock-and-awe political theater, which focuses less on substance and more on eliciting outrage. ("I'm grateful for Father Michael," he once said. "I wouldn't give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him.") Originally a die-hard supporter of President Donald Trump, he soured on him in later years.
But one view of Yiannopoulos' has remained steadfast. "California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings," he wrote in June of last year, "with on the spot deportation for anyone who can't prove they are in the US legally." In October, he taunted that he was "making sure…the right people" knew to deport left-leaning British commentator Mehdi Hasan, an American citizen. "Let him squeal 'I'm more American than you!' as they are dragging him onto his one way flight," Yiannopoulos wrote. All in all, he summed his views up thusly: "We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people," because "without that, nothing else matters."
It appears he will now be one of them. We was always a strange word choice, after all, when considering Yiannopoulos is not an American. But Yiannopoulos did not think this scrutiny would apply to him. "I mean bad immigrants," he said in an interview with Joe Rogan in 2016. "I don't mean handsome, charming, successful, blonde-haired British immigrants….It's about culture."
Laura Loomer—another right-wing provocateur, although one still on the side of MAGA faithfuls—has claimed credit for alerting authorities to him; The Telegraph, meanwhile, reports that Yiannopoulos' "visa status is understood to have been brought to attention after he fell out of favour with senior officials over his increasingly hostile remarks." While it is unwise to take Loomer's words at face value, it is a reminder, at a minimum, that culture is in the eye of the beholder.
A few years ago, I wrote that the "Queers for Palestine" movement was about as convincing as "minks for fur coats." The analogy is also apt here: a man who allegedly overstayed his visa, gleefully cheering on the ICE raids that "we" need. Maybe he will now take issue with indiscriminate deportations, including for people whose ideas are deemed offensive, like the Trump administration's attempt to expel Rumeysa Ozturk, then a Tufts University doctoral student, over an op-ed. Yiannopoulos—sincerely—deserves due process, and humane treatment in detention, which ICE centers are not always known for providing. And maybe he will come away finding those raids, and the apparatus behind them, a little less arousing.
The post Milo Yiannopoulos Wanted Millions Deported. He Didn't Mean Himself. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Defendant Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, moved for leave to file a second notice of removal. I denied his motion, but the Court of Appeals vacated and remanded and, on remand, I was directed to consider (1) whether then former President Trump demonstrated good cause for filing an untimely notice of removal after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Trump v. United States (2024), and diligently sought removal; (2) whether removal under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1442(a)(1) and 1455(b)(1) is available at this stage of the state court proceedings; and (3) whether Trump's prosecution is for or relating to an act under color of federal office and whether he raises a colorable federal defense.
To remind people of the prosecution:
On March 30, 2023, a New York State grand jury indicted then former President Donald Trump on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records in the First Degree in violation of N.Y. Penal Law § 175.10…. The New York County District Attorney's Office (the "People") alleged that from August 2015 to December 2017, Trump orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election, by suppressing negative information about him to benefit his electoral prospects.
As a part of this scheme, the People alleged that, at Trump's request, a lawyer who worked for the Trump Organization as Special Counsel to Trump, Michael Cohen, "covertly paid $130,000 to an adult film actress shortly before the election to prevent her from publicizing a sexual encounter with" Trump. Cohen, following Trump's instructions, proceeded to pay the adult film star, Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels), using a shell corporation. After the election Trump reimbursed Cohen, disguising each check "as a payment for legal services rendered in a given month of 2017 pursuant to a retainer agreement." …
On December 16, 2024, the New York Supreme Court denied Trump's motion to dismiss the indictment and vacate the jury's verdict, filed in light of Trump v. United States. On January 10, 2025, the N.Y. Supreme Court sentenced Trump to unconditional discharge, and entered judgment. Trump's appeal to the Appellate Division, First Department, is pending….
Those who want to know more about removal, timeliness, presidential immunity, and more need to read the opinion.
The post Federal Judge Concludes Then-Candidate Trump's Attempt to Remove N.Y. Hush Money Non-Reporting Prosecution to Federal Court Came Too Late appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I hadn't heard of this law until yesterday, so my apologies if I'm getting the details wrong. But as I understand it, the law requires federally licensed firearms dealers (which I'll just call "gun shops" for short, if that's not too inaccurate) to have 24/7 video surveillance of "interior views of all entries or exits to the premises, [a]ll areas where firearms are displayed[, and] all points of sale, sufficient to identify the parties involved in the transaction." They have to store the video for at least a year, and agree to turn over video records in response to a search warrant or other court order.
From a Fourth Amendment perspective, this is a hard law school exam question. For starters, you have to figure out what to make of the order to have the system. Is the requirement of installation and use (to the extent a particular shop doesn't already have such a system) forcing the gun shop owner to act as a state actor, installing the device? If so, what exactly is searched, and whose interests are implicated— those of the gun store owner, or the customers and others in the gun store? Does this fall within the famously murky record-keeping framework of California Bankers Association v. Schultz, or is it more like an order to compel records as in Carpenter or Chatrie?
But wait, there's more. Under Maryland v. Macon, there's no reasonable expectation of privacy in a store open to the public, but here the surveillance is 24/7, and you don't know what might get recorded after work hours. So would there be Fourth Amendment rights in the video itself, or would it depend on which time window of video the government later tries to compel? And which of these issues can be addressed in a facial challenge, and how might the closely regulated industries exception apply or not apply, under City of Los Angeles v. Patel?
I don't have time for a long post to do the case justice, unfortunately. But here's one part I want flag that strikes me as at the very least incomplete, if not likely wrong: The state action analysis. At one point in the case, the panel discusses the plaintiffs' argument that the law made gun shops state actors under the Fourth Amendment. Here's what the court says:
Unable to articulate any physical intrusion or actual access of audiovisual recordings by the government, Plaintiffs instead argue that Section 26806 transforms FFLs into state actors for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. To support this argument, Plaintiffs argue that they satisfy three tests discussed in Brunette v. Humane Society of Ventura County for determining when a private party has engaged in state action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983: (1) the "joint action" test, (2) the "symbiotic relationship" test, and (3) the "public functions" test. See 294 F.3d 1205, 1210 (9th Cir. 2002). Again, we disagree.
This seems odd.
First, Fourth Amendment state action is generally an agency test that looks at whether the private party was acting as the government's agent, which in turn looks to knowledge, acquiescence, and the like. The Ninth Circuit has sometimes instead in Fourth Amendment cases tried to summarize state action analysis from outside Fourth Amendment law, which is what the panel is doing here, and was doing in Brunette. But even if you try to apply the different "tests" from outside Fourth Amendment law, the 2002 Brunette case did not purport to provide a comprehensive list of theories of state action.
Of particular relevance, Brunette did not ask the court to consider the "state compulsion" test. As the court put it in Children's Health Defense v. Meta Platforms, quoting Supreme Court caselaw:
As we have explained, the Supreme Court has identified four tests for when a private party "may fairly be said to be a state actor": (1) the public function test, (2) the joint action test, (3) the state compulsion test, and (4) the nexus test. Lugar, 457 U.S. at 937, 939, 102 S.Ct. 2744.
The Supreme Court in Lugar rooted this test in Adickes v. SH Kress & Co., which held that a restaurant would be a state actor if it refused service to a customer because of a state-enforced custom of segregating the races in public restaurants. Adickes noted:
For state action purposes it makes no difference of course whether the racially discriminatory act by the private party is compelled by a statutory provision or by a custom having the force of law—in either case it is the State that has commanded the result by its law.
I wonder, why isn't a gun shop turned into a state actor by a statutory provision requiring action under this state compulsion test? Maybe the resulting act wasn't a search or seizure, and maybe it's not an issue that can be address in a facial challenge. But I'm not sure why whatever action is compelled wouldn't be state action.
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The CIA has been using artificial intelligence to write "open source intelligence" analyses, which are being distributed to local police via the Department of Homeland Security's "fusion centers," according to documents obtained by Reason.
CIA officials have been alluding to this new AI tool. Open Source Enterprise (OSE) Director Randy Nixon told Bloomberg in a 2023 interview that the agency was building a new chatbot for intelligence analysts to use, and CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis said at an April 2026 conference that it had produced an entirely AI-generated report for the first time.
The use of AI has clearly grown quickly since then. OSE was creating daily reports on the security situation in Canada and Mexico during this year's soccer World Cup. Reason obtained the reports during an unrelated request under the Washington Public Records Act for World Cup–related police bulletins.
The reports don't contain anything secret or particularly shocking. They are an example of "open source intelligence," a longstanding practice of combing through public media for potential indicators. But they are a rare glimpse into how the CIA uses new technologies—and how U.S. intelligence agencies are integrated into local policing.
"OSE used a keyword search and a keyword relevancy algorithm to select these articles from major outlets in host countries. OSE used [generative AI] to refine the selection, translate the titles, summarize the selected articles. OSE officers reviewed and validated the GAI outputs at each stage to ensure they accurately reflected source material upon initial setup of this serial report," the methodology note on each of the reports states.
The note names GPT-4.1—which is also commercially available to the public—as the particular generative AI model used for these reports. In other words, CIA analysts are plugging international news stories into ChatGPT and passing on the results.
The reports were passed on to the Washington State Fusion Center, an office for sharing intelligence between federal, state, and local law enforcement. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the new Department of Homeland Security created the national fusion center network, which has often been criticized for wasting resources and spreading downright incorrect information.
It's not clear what, if anything, police in Washington state did with the CIA reports. The fusion center redacted several of the documents it provided to Reason for security reasons.
The U.S. government has been increasingly integrating AI into the national security apparatus. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using AI tools for facial recognition and real-time tracking of individuals, based on massive amounts of data vacuumed up from other government agencies and private industry. The FBI recently put out a request for contractors to build an AI software for maintaining watch lists, as Reason first reported.
Most consequentially, the military uses AI targeting systems, such as Project Maven, to mark enemy targets faster than a human being could. After the Minab school bombing, in which the U.S. military killed dozens of Iranian schoolchildren, there was early speculation that the school was targeted by a mistaken AI program. However, the attack turned out to be a likely case of human error instead.
As the fusion center documents show, artificial intelligence is making its way into national security work in much more mundane ways. And it's letting the government do more of what it already wanted to do in the first place—in this case, filling fusion centers with paperwork.
The post The CIA Is Making AI-Generated Reports for Local Police appeared first on Reason.com.
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Anthropic was never a legitimate national security risk.
That's the takeaway from Thursday's decision in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment and unlawfully retaliated against Anthropic for engaging in "constitutionally protected expressive activities" when it designated the company as a supply chain risk. Lin also found the government's actions violate the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause "because they deprive Anthropic of constitutionally protected liberty interests without sufficient pre-deprivation notice or opportunity to be heard."
The legal battle between the AI firm and the government started in February, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei traded public statements about the Pentagon's use of Anthropic's models. Amodei refused to acquiesce to Hegseth's demand that Anthropic's model be "free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military applications." Anthropic insisted its contract with the Pentagon include limits on using its technology for fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Hegseth then threatened to nationalize the company and label it a supply chain risk.
When Anthropic still didn't comply, President Donald Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using the company's technology. Hegseth told Defense Department contractors, suppliers, and partners to cease commercial activity with Anthropic, designating it a supply chain risk.
This directive, Lin ruled, was "arbitrary, capricious, and in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations" under the Administrative Procedure Act. Hegseth, she wrote, acted "without observance of procedure required by law."
The initial directive from Trump extending Anthropic's designation as a supply chain risk to other federal agencies—such as the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget—was likewise vacated. Lin ruled the president had imposed these conditions "without jurisdiction delegated to those agencies and without authorization by law."
Lin permanently enjoined the Defense Department from "implementing, enforcing, or giving effect to" Hegseth's directive labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk. She ordered the department to rescind its previous "guidance, directives, communications, or instructions" on the supply chain designation and to take "all necessary actions" to prevent the designation from being implemented.
Ironically, the Pentagon was undone by its own words. In her 59-page opinion, Lin states that "it is undisputed Anthropic was given high levels of security clearance and was consistently praised," adding there was "no discussion of Anthropic's untrustworthiness or of a potential supply chain risk anywhere in the record" until its dispute with the Defense Department became public.
It didn't help the government's case when the Defense Department couldn't answer whether "terminating a contract for the undisputed sole purpose of 'stop[ping] public criticism of the President' would violate the First Amendment." But federal courts have already answered that question. "Criticism of government is at the very center of the constitutionally protected area of free discussion," Lin notes.
It's not all roses for Anthropic. There's still a path for the Trump administration to decouple the company's technology from the federal government. Lin states her order doesn't prevent the government from "taking any lawful action that would have been available" to it before issuing the designation.
Anthropic's refusal to let its technology be used for mass surveillance was insufficient grounds to consider the company a national security threat. Government skeptics recognized that immediately, and now, thankfully, the courts have too.
The post Judge Says Trump's Clampdown on Anthropic Violates the First Amendment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New case! IJ clients Charles and Eli Copley own 50 wooded acres in Roxbury, Conn., where they've always welcomed hikers for a small hourly fee, an absolutely harmless use that is not visible to the neighbors. But the town says that might violate the zoning code—just not any part of the code that is written down—and the Copleys haven't been able to have any hikers for a year. Outrageous! Click here to learn more.
New on the Short Circuit podcast: Our #12Months12Circuits series makes it to the Eighth. There's irreparable harm and contractor speech.
Victory! For years, Humboldt County, Calif. officials abused their code-enforcement powers and fined property owners exorbitant, unpayable sums for cannabis-related violations—without a care as to whether anyone actually grew cannabis. When people sought to contest those fines, the county endlessly delayed holding hearings, even as the $30k-per-day fines continued to accrue. For instance, IJ client Blu Graham requested a hearing to show that his greenhouse contained vegetables, not cannabis, and he was kept waiting over four and a half years (and, in fact, only got a hearing as we were preparing to file suit). In 2024, the Ninth Circuit said all that did indeed raise some concerns. And after we started deposing officials, the county decided to settle, agreeing to make our clients whole and to respect the Constitution going forward. Click here to learn more.
The post Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal appeared first on Reason.com.
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America is in the grip of two targeted anti-tech backlashes.
The first is against automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), which are mostly, but not exclusively, supplied to thousands of local police departments by the company Flock Safety.
The second is against data centers writ large: large boxy facilities housing rows of servers doing everything from hosting streaming services to powering advances in AI.
Neither technology is particularly new. Police departments have been using ALPRs for decades. Data centers predate the internet.
That makes the sudden negative turn against both so startling.
At the end of last year, the public was mostly unaware and unconcerned about data centers. Now up to three-quarters of Americans would oppose their construction in their community. More people say they would rather live next to a steel mill or a nuclear plant than a hyperscale data center.
Newly released YouGov polling reported today by The Washington Post shows a complete 180 in public opinion on ALPRs as well. Last August, 45 percent of people supported the technology and 33 percent opposed. This year, 46 percent are opposed to ALPRs and 38 percent support it.
When progressive polling group Data For Progress asked about Flock specifically, they found the company's tech had a net negative 19 percent favorability rating.
The turn in public opinion follows a wave of reporting on law enforcement's many abuses and misuses of ALPR cameras (including by Reason).
It might be tempting to lump these two backlashes into a generalized revolt against technology.
But polling on AI and tech companies generally shows only a modest cooling of the public's attitude toward them. Nothing like the sharp collapse in public support we've seen for Flock and data centers specifically.
When people are asked why they oppose data centers, environmental concerns are top of the list, not an opposition to technology.
Instead, what we're seeing appears to be popular revolts against two things Americans like to get panicked about: Big Brother and Big Development.
People naturally object to the government spying on them. They're also primed to oppose new construction, regardless of what's being built.
In a country witnessing a massive boom in data center construction and a comprehensive nationwide rollout of ALPRs, a bottom-up, popular revolt was perhaps inevitable.
And to be clear, these are popular, bottom-up revolts.
When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) proposed a national moratorium on data centers last year, even his fellow progressive Democrats rolled their eyes. The sudden shift in public opinion is now prompting once explicitly pro–data center governors from both parties to impose their own data center restrictions (of varying severity).
Ron DeSantis is now Flock's No. 1 critic, despite Florida state police making heavy use of ALPRs for immigration enforcement.
Dozens of localities are canceling Flock contracts early or choosing not to renew them.
That the politicians are lagging indicators of public opinion shows that populism continues to have real juice in American politics. When ordinary citizens get mad about something suddenly all at once, politicians rush to agree with them, even if that means contradicting their own positions from five minutes ago.
If the revolt against Flock and data centers demonstrates the power of populism to move politicians on an issue, it also highlights the limits of populism for protecting liberty.
There's a world of difference between the government tracking citizens in public and landowners developing their private property. An angry populace isn't making those distinctions.
ALPR technology poses serious privacy concerns. Its many misuses and abuses are scandalous. The public's turn against it is provoking a belated conversation about the benefits, costs, and constitutionality of the 120,000 Flock cameras already in the field.
It's far harder to see anything positive in the sudden revolt against data centers.
These facilities' critics are not stopping at demanding more mitigation of their relatively few externalities. Nor are they simply calling for an end to unfair subsidies or tax credits some data center projects receive.
Instead, people's misplaced concerns about data centers' overhyped environmental impacts are leading states and localities to impose some of the tightest land use restrictions on one of the more innocuous forms of development imaginable.
In the more extreme cases, New York has imposed a moratorium on hyperscale data center development, and Nashville is going so far as to try to seize private land via eminent domain in order to stop a data center development.
None of this backlash is proportional to data centers' impacts. None of it considers the immense economic benefits data centers provide. Some of this backlash, like Nashville's land grab, is arguably unconstitutional.
Moral panics are inevitable. In any reasonably free country, those panics are going to drive policy changes. That's not always a bad thing, but it often is.
There's a reason we have a constitution to temper momentarily flare ups of public opinion. The Constitution would seem to impose a lot of limits on the use of ALPR technology and afford a lot of protections to data center developers.
The post A Tale of Two Tech Revolts appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This case begins with a viral video. Plaintiff Danesh Noshirvan is a citizen journalist who built a social media following by exposing bad behavior in public spaces. In January 2022, he posted a video of Defendant Jennifer Couture confronting a young woman in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot. The video caught fire, resulting in criminal charges for Couture and public backlash. Couture and her now-husband, Defendant Dr. Ralph Garramone, allegedly decided to get even.
According to Noshirvan, Couture and Garramone—acting individually and through Garramone's various business entities—hired a convicted computer hacker named Joseph Camp to retaliate. Camp, in turn, connected the couple with Defendant Patrick Trainor, a New Jersey lawyer who operates the Anti-Doxing League. What followed, Noshirvan alleges, was a retaliatory conspiracy by these defendants to systematically destroy his life and livelihood.
Trainor responded to Noshirvan's lawsuit with counterclaims for defamation and civil conspiracy. According to Trainor, Noshirvan used his social media account to falsely brand Trainor as a "Nazi," a "White supremacist," and a "pedophile."
Trainor also alleges that Noshirvan enlisted two non-parties—James McGibney (who runs the account @bullyville) and an anonymous user known as @credibleintel—to amplify the smear campaign and republish the offending statements. Noshirvan then allegedly weaponized these posts to file bogus complaints against Trainor with state and federal law enforcement, as well as the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics. …
The conflict with Trainor ignited in January 2024, when McGibney emailed Trainor to accuse him of misrepresenting facts to a court. That private dispute quickly spilled onto the internet. Between February 2024 and 2025, Noshirvan, McGibney, and @credibleintel unleashed a barrage of social media posts targeting Trainor. The publications accused him of harassment, professional misconduct, conspiring with a fugitive, and being a Neo-Nazi and pedophile. According to Trainor, the offending posts remain publicly visible today….
The court threw out Trainor's claims against Noshirvan, concluding:
Trainor cannot defeat summary judgment with a patchwork of stale claims, non-actionable opinions, and a conspiracy theory lacking an actual agreement. Yet that is all he offers. Trainor has failed to muster the specific facts necessary to show a conspiratorial agreement between Noshirvan and his associates. Strip away the conspiracy framework, and Trainor's defamation case reduces to statements that are either time-barred or constitutionally protected hyperbole.
The court concluded that defamation claims based on statements from before July 30, 2024 are barred by New Jersey's one-year defamation statute of limitations. The court also rejected Trainor's civil conspiracy claims, as well as Trainor's attempt to hold Noshirvan liable for McGibney's claims:
Viewing the documents cited by Trainor that he contends evidence a conspiracy between Noshirvan and McGibney, no reasonable jury could find an agreement to defame. Trainor's first document reflects McGibney offering to post about Noshirvan's lawsuit on two social media accounts "couture.camp" and "bullyville"—nothing more. Other communications between Noshirvan and McGibney are either too temporally disjunctive from the underlying conspiracy, do not relate to any conspiracy at all, or discuss a motion filed by Trainor or a drafted filing rather than the alleged defamatory posts. Through no stretch of the imagination could a reasonable jury conclude Noshirvan, McGibney, and @credibleintel entered an agreement to defame Trainor based on these documents.
And the court concluded that the post-July 30, 2024 statement by Noshirvan is not actionable:
The post features a screenshot of Senator Dick Durbin questioning [Kash] Patel about his appearances on a podcast whose host "promotes conspiracy theories and worked with a neo-Nazi." Below the exchange, a caption reads, "Sounds like Patrick Trainor." Trainor insists this post is actionable because it effectively brands him a neo-Nazi.
But rhetorical hyperbole and name-calling do not amount to defamation. Under New Jersey law, a general statement accusing someone of bias is an opinion. Instead, there must be some other "reasonably specific facts that are capable of objective proof of truth or falsity." Generalized accusations of bigotry or extreme bias—without a tether to specific, verifiable facts—are protected opinions. Gomez Noriega v. City of Jersey City (D.N.J. 2025) (statement that the plaintiffs "hate Jews" was not actionable as defamation); Jorjani v. New Jersey Inst. of Tech. (D.N.J. 2019) ("[C]alling someone a racist, hater, or bigot—without more—will not result in defamation liability[.]"). Noshirvan's snarky caption is a textbook example of a non-actionable, rhetorical comparison….
Nicholas A. Chiappetta (Chiappetta Trial Lawyers) represents Noshirvan.
The post "This Case Begins with a Viral Video" (and Goes on to Involve "the Anti-Doxing League") appeared first on Reason.com.
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After losing a legal battle in New York, Elon Musk's X Corp. must now disclose its content moderation policies to New York's attorney general.
On Wednesday, a federal judge tossed out a lawsuit by Musk's social media company challenging New York's "Stop Hiding Hate Act." The act requires social media companies operating in the state and generating more than $100 million in annual revenue to submit two reports per year to the New York state attorney general that disclose "whether and how platforms define hate speech, disinformation, extremist or racist content, harassment, and foreign political interference."
In June of 2025, X Corp. sued New York Attorney General Letitia James, arguing that provisions of the law "impermissibly [interfere] with the First Amendment-protected editorial judgments of companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize such speech on their platforms."
In his ruling on Wednesday, District Judge John Cronan of the Southern District of New York rejected X's claim that the law infringes upon the First Amendment.
Cronan acknowledged that "businesses might not always want to share every detail about the products or services they offer." Still, he wrote, "when the government requires those businesses to speak truthfully about their offerings, the First Amendment typically allows for that kind of disclosure requirement."
"Businesses always exercise their discretion, judgment, and opinions when deciding what goods or services to offer," he added. "Burger King chooses to generally offer higher-calorie items than, say, Sweetgreen, but the 'disclosure of calorie information' remains purely factual."
As Eugene Volokh, professor emeritus at UCLA School of Law, noted in The Volokh Conspiracy, "the court also held that the law wasn't preempted by [Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act] because it doesn't actually forbid or mandate any content moderation."
Although New York's law was upheld, a similar law in California was previously declared unconstitutional. In 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that provisions of California Assembly Bill 587, which Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in 2022, likely violated the First Amendment after a separate challenge by X Corp. The federal appeals court ruling temporarily blocked the state from enforcing the law's Content Category Report provisions, which require social media companies to report whether and how they define content categories including hate speech, racism, extremism, disinformation, and harassment.
In February of 2025, the state's attorney general, Rob Bonta, and X Corp. reached a settlement in which both "parties agreed that the provisions that required large social media companies to disclose their content moderation and hate speech policies violated the First Amendment, and the Attorney General would not be able to enforce those parts of the law," according to Tech Policy Press.
Hypothetically, disclosures about a company's social media moderation policies could benefit users seeking more transparency regarding content regulation. Some users may want to use a more heavily moderated platform while others may opt for a less restrictive environment with the understanding they may encounter "hate" (however that is defined). But the authors of these forced disclosure laws seem more interested in stamping out "hate," which is constitutionally protected, than simply promoting informed consumer choice.
When Newsom signed A.B. 587 into law, he said "California will not stand by as social media is weaponized to spread hate and disinformation that threaten our communities and foundational values as a country." He added, "Californians deserve to know how these platforms are impacting our public discourse, and this action brings much-needed transparency and accountability to the policies that shape the social media content we consume every day."
When New York's law went into effect in 2025, James warned that "with violence and polarization on the rise, social media companies must ensure that their platforms don't fuel hateful rhetoric and disinformation." The law was also supported by the Anti-Defamation League, which said "social media is used to spread hate speech, racism and misinformation" and companies "haven't even provided clear reports on their policies and enforcement."
The New York law's co-sponsors have said the law does not intend to violate the First Amendment and that it is meant to help "consumers to better decide which social media platforms they utilize." Still, it's concerning that New York officials, who openly believe these companies are hiding "hate," should have such an interest in a social media platform's moderation policies at all.
The post Elon Musk's X Loses First Amendment Challenge to New York's 'Stop Hiding Hate Act' appeared first on Reason.com.
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Are AI companies acquiring books, scanning them for training data, and destroying the physical copies? Yes, but the reality is much less dire than popular coverage suggests.
Last week, the Demand Progress Education Fund sent a coalition letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to investigate whether such bulk book digitization, "including [of] rare, out-of-print titles with few surviving copies," is anticompetitive behavior that illegally protects AI companies from competition. The focal point of the letter is Project Panama, Anthropic's self-described "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world."
A destructive scan, one in which a physical book is destroyed in the process of being digitized, sounds sinister, but this method is a highly efficient way to convert books from bits to bytes. It also helps ensure compliance with copyright law. As federal Judge William Alsup found in Bartz v. Anthropic (2025), destructive scanning to be fair use because the one-to-one transformation from one form (physical) to another (digital), while neither multiplying nor redistributing copies, "was even more clearly transformative than those [fair use cases] (where the number of copies went up by at least one)."
The coalition letter tries to sidestep this issue by noting that "a fair-use determination is…not a license to foreclose competition." That's true, but it does little to support their argument that AI companies are violating antitrust laws.
The coalition claims that "pre-AI human-authored text is a finite resource with an inelastic supply," but in many cases publishers are ready, willing, and able to publish more copies. In other words, supply is elastic. In cases concerning truly out-of-print works (inelastic supply), the existing supply is often abundant. For example, even though the Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th edition has been out of print for over a decade, a complete, 32-volume set can be readily found and purchased for a couple hundred dollars online.
In the case of materials for which there remains only one copy—that is, supply is low and inelastic—there's no reason to believe these inputs are so essential to AI model development that their digitization would result in "an insurmountable systemic moat around AI incumbents." The market for AI development remains wide open because other training data abounds. For instance, Project Gutenberg hosts and freely distributes over 75,000 digitized books. Moreover, data derived from physical books isn't the only kind used to train AI models; developers also use data from synthetic data, publicly available data, licensed data, and user-generated data, among other sources.
The coalition's theory of harm is unable to satisfy the legal standards of the sort of predatory overbuying claim it presents. Per the Supreme Court's opinion in Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Ross-Simmons Hardwood Lumber Co. (2007), such a claim involves "bidding up input prices through the exercise of monopsony power." But there's no evidence that prices in the out-of-print book market have been generally bid up to the point that only incumbent AI companies can afford them.
Furthermore, bulk book digitization is accompanied by substantial procompetitive effects, including benefits to consumers from improved AI models, many of which are available for free. Insofar as copyright law compels an AI company to unintentionally destroy the last copy of a 50-something-year-old book, the information contained within becomes far more useful and accessible to mankind by being incorporated into an AI model rather than remaining in its physical copy and in the possession of a single person.
Booksellers also benefit: One told 404Media that AI companies' bulk book purchases benefit him "financially…by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell." In fact, this seller also revealed that the bulk purchases "were of books [that] all had ISBNs," an identification system adopted in 1970. This implies that no antiquarian works are being targeted for digitization and destruction. (This should come as no surprise because such works, when not in the custody of a university or museum, are purchased at auctions, not as part of a bulk order. Moreover, there's no obvious reason for an AI company to train its model on an original Shakespeare folio, which costs millions of dollars, when the text can be accessed for free.)
AI companies digitizing one copy of the plenitude of out-of-print works does not threaten humanity's cultural inheritance. Moreover, the FTC should not waste its limited resources investigating a practice that evinces fierce, dynamic competition between AI developers, not market foreclosure.
The post AI Companies Are Destroying Books. That's Not Nearly as Scary as It Sounds. appeared first on Reason.com.
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Having stripped more than 300,000 Haitian immigrants of a special legal status that allowed them to live and work in the United States, the Trump administration is now beginning efforts to deport them.
The administration is planning to "expel thousands of Haitians" who won't willingly return to the war-torn, earthquake-prone country, The New York Times reported on Thursday. According to documents reviewed by the Times, the administration is now seeking to "increase the pace of flights from once a month to once a week."
One deportation flight, with 57 people on board (including several children), landed in Haiti on Thursday, according to the Miami Herald. A flight last week carried 160 deportees.
But let's do a little back-of-the-envelope math—with a hat tip to Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute.
Assume the Trump administration is able to achieve its goal of one deportation flight to Haiti every week. And assume that each of those flights will be full. We'll give them the full benefit of the doubt and assume that means there are 200 deportees on each plane.
That's 10,400 deportations in a year. Not a small number by any means. But maybe you're willing to believe that the government won't make any mistakes and every single deportee is a hardened criminal (even the kids, apparently) who deserves to be thrown into one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
That's still just 10,400 people out of more than 300,000 Haitians in the U.S. who had temporary protected status (TPS) before the Trump administration revoked it.
Those 300,000 Haitians were able to work here legally under TPS, which means they were also paying taxes. Now, with their legal status revoked, they cannot do that.
In Florida, where about half of the Haitian TPS population lives, that could mean the loss of "$1.5 billion in annual economic contributions, along with $174 million in federal and payroll taxes, and $176 million in state and local taxes," according to a Princeton University analysis published by the Miami Herald.
Before their TPS status was revoked, Haitians accounted for about 25 percent of the total TPS population in the U.S., a group that has "a labor force participation rate nearly 15 percentage points higher than U.S.-born individuals," according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model. That same study found that TPS recipients are "5.4 times more likely than U.S.-born workers to work in building and grounds cleaning and maintenance" and were "3.2 times more likely to be employed in construction."
In other words, this is a population that is working at high rates, filling jobs that few Americans are doing—and, particularly when it comes to construction, helping to offset a serious labor shortage.
Now, those Haitian immigrants can't work legally and can't pay taxes. But even if you assume the Trump administration hits all its deportation goals, most of those Haitians won't be deported anytime soon.
What will they do instead? Many will keep working, but illegally. Some might turn to crime. Those who need emergency health care and other public services will now do so without paying taxes to help support them. The Trump administration sees undocumented immigrants as a burden on America—but by kicking all these Haitians out of their jobs, hasn't it contributed to the very problem it claims to be solving?
All of that, just so the Trump administration can make a show of deporting a few thousand Haitians. The math doesn't work.
The post The Math on Trump's Haitian Deportation Flights Doesn't Add Up appeared first on Reason.com.
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Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana so far, representing a major shift in drug policy. But the legalization movement has slowed, and in several states, activists are mounting campaigns to make recreational THC products illegal once again, including in Maine and Arizona. In November, Massachusetts voters will decide on whether to repeal the legalization measure approved in 2016. Ohio recently narrowed the cannabis legalization law passed in 2023.
One of the main concerns cited by anti-weed activists is that legalization has led to a spike in traffic accidents because more people are driving while high. But the body of research they point to has actually failed to show that marijuana legalization has increased traffic accidents or deaths.
Last October, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled "More Marijuana Users Are Crash Dummies."
"How much social and public-health damage will Americans suffer before doing a U-turn on marijuana promotion?" the editorial begins. "A new study finds that more than 40% of drivers who died in car accidents in one U.S. county over the last six years had elevated levels of the drug in their blood."
The "new study" they cited is available only as an abstract and a short press release describing a conference presentation of an unpublished report, with no supporting details. After the Journal editorial appeared, we made several attempts to speak with the lead author, Wright State University professor of surgery Akpofure P. Ekeh, to obtain a copy of the draft study and answer some basic questions. We were unable to reach him. A public information officer at the American College of Surgeons, where Ekeh is a member, told us via email that the study "is a research-in-progress, meaning there is not yet a complete study that I am able to provide."
The press release and abstract alone are enough to undermine the study's conclusions. The claim that 40 percent of deceased drivers had elevated levels of marijuana in their blood isn't trustworthy because THC testing is only ordered in some cases, presumably the ones when driver impairment is suspected. So the study is likely based on a biased sample. Drivers were likely tested because they were suspected of intoxication.
Also, testing the blood of autopsied drivers doesn't mean they were high while driving. THC in the blood generally indicates that someone has used marijuana in the previous few days. Postmortem THC tests are particularly unreliable.
The press release also had no mention of a control, so we have no idea if the drivers' THC-positive rate is higher or lower than for the general population. Scientific studies require a control. It also looked at one county in Ohio, covering data before and after marijuana was legalized there in 2023, and there was no significant change in the ratio of drivers with THC in their blood.
So the study, if it ever does appear, will have nothing to say on the impact of marijuana legalization on driving while high, and it won't present evidence that this practice is on the rise. That didn't stop The Wall Street Journal in its coverage of this yet-to-materialize study from claiming in its subhead that "high-on-pot drivers are contributing to more highway accident deaths."
Another study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety did claim to show a difference between pre- and post-legalization of marijuana use by drivers by examining changes in accident rates in five Western states. It found that legalization was associated with a 2.3 percent increase in fatal crash rates.
Here's how the authors presented the data.
The blue dots represent seasonally adjusted monthly motor-vehicle fatalities before legalization, the orange dots represent those after legalization, and the dashed lines show the averages before and after legalization.
The three-year average traffic death rate in legalization states was 9.5 percent higher after legalization than before. The pattern was the same in the control states that did not legalize, but they had only a 6.5 percent increase. After some complex adjustments, the authors attributed a 2.3 percent increase to legalization. It looks like a big jump. But that's because the chart presented the data in a misleading way.
I recharted the data and, unlike the authors, I made it into a time series, accounting for changes in the rate of traffic deaths during the study period. This way, you can see the trends, which undercut the authors' thesis.
See how the blue line is rising much faster than the orange line. That shows the rate of increase in traffic deaths slowed considerably after legalization.
Does that mean that marijuana legalization meant fewer highway deaths? No, because correlation isn't causation, and we don't know what caused the decline. But the study's authors' reverse claim is clearly contradicted by the data.
In an email exchange, Charles M. Farmer, the lead author of the study, defended his methodology, arguing that it included a time variable. The problem is that his time variable was held constant pre- and post-legalization, so it doesn't capture the change in slope and intercept that occurred at legalization.
The most explosive finding about the dangers of legal weed comes from a study by a team of Canadian researchers, who looked at emergency room records in Ontario before and after legalization took effect in October 2018. As CNN summarized it, the study found that "documented marijuana-related traffic accidents that required treatment in an emergency room rose 475% between 2010 and 2021."
Why is the 475 percent claim misleading? For starters, the news coverage didn't mention that we're talking about a very small number of people. During the period when marijuana was legalized and commercialized, 120,569 people showed up in Ontario emergency rooms due to traffic accidents. Just 125 people, or 0.1 percent of the total, "had documented cannabis involvement," according to the clinical judgment of the onsite medical team. Moreover, for every cannabis involvement patient, there were 18 with alcohol impairment. Of the people with cannabis involvement, 42 percent also had alcohol involvement. Cannabis alone does not seem to be the major intoxicant choice to impair driving.
The tally of 125 people over 20 months works out to about six people per month. Before legalization, there were two people per month showing up at emergency rooms with "cannabis involvement." That's a 200 percent increase, not a 475 percent increase. Why did the authors claim a 475 percent increase?
Marijuana legalization overlapped with the COVID-19 lockdowns. During the pandemic, people were driving much less, leading to a decline in total car accidents.
The authors wanted to adjust for this unusual situation, so they assumed that if people had been driving normally, there would have been many more marijuana-related accidents. That assumption, along with a few other adjustments, led them to raise the 200 percent increase to 475 percent.
This adjustment isn't valid. You can't compare COVID lockdown data with pre-COVID data because life was so abnormal. School closures in Ontario meant people were driving their kids to school less often, and many were working from home or were unemployed. Since most people who drive while high are less likely to do so while heading to work or taking their kids to school, you would expect an increase in the proportion of drivers on the road with marijuana in their system during the lockdowns, even if the absolute number stayed the same.
Another problem is that the 125 people counted by the researchers weren't necessarily high while driving. Just because they were classified as cannabis users in the E.R. doesn't mean they were under the influence at the time of the accident, or that marijuana caused them to crash their cars.
Some of those 125 people were passengers rather than drivers, which makes the inference that marijuana contributed to the crashes even more dubious. If someone who didn't use marijuana was giving a ride to a friend because he was too stoned to drive, and they still got into an accident, the passenger would have been counted as a patient with "documented cannabis involvement." That tells us nothing about whether marijuana legalization led to more traffic accidents.
Another problem with the dataset is that many of the people were counted because they admitted to the doctor at the E.R. that they were marijuana users. Patients would have been more willing to admit to their drug habit after legalization than before, which further biased the data.
In the end, the 475 percent figure is based on a small absolute number, an invalid adjustment that boosted the percentage increase, and a tainted dataset. We emailed University of Ottawa professor of medicine Daniel Myran, the lead author of the study, to explain our concerns about his data and methodology. A spokesperson replied on his behalf: "This study was published in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed journal, and underwent independent evaluation of its methodology and findings before publication."
No researcher has demonstrated a convincing association, let alone a causal link, between marijuana legalization and a significant increase in traffic accidents in any state. There is a long list of things that legalization might affect: traffic fatalities, teenage pregnancy, suicides, violent crime, property crime, bankruptcies, high school graduation rates, etc. These indicators go up and down for reasons that are typically not well understood. If you choose one social indicator to study, there's close to a 50 percent chance that it got worse after legalization, creating opportunities to use statistical techniques to make it look as if there were a causal relationship.
Since states started legalizing marijuana, there has been no detectable social harm. Predictions that legal weed would have catastrophic consequences have turned out to be hyperbolic.
Draconian drug laws were passed due to claims that the alternative was massive social and individual harm. Harry Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, wrote, "How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, holdups, burglaries, and deeds of maniacal insanity [marijuana] causes each year…can be only conjectured." Apocalyptic predictions were necessary to justify the enormous violence, cost, law enforcement corruption, and infringement of rights the drug war required.
Legalization disproved the claims. They're being replaced by claims that legalization increases traffic accidents by 2.3 percent. Even if there were solid evidence for that claim, it's laughably inadequate to support a drug war.
The real story is that we legalized marijuana in many states, and the sky did not fall.
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The post No, Marijuana Legalization Didn't Fill Emergency Rooms With Stoned Drivers appeared first on Reason.com.
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During my adult life, Republicans have made the same pitch: Vote for them to get control of outrageous government spending and restore fiscal discipline. Yet with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, the feds hit a fiscal milestone: $40 trillion in debt. The country is setting new spending records however you cut and slice it.
"Publicly held debt—now approaching World War II levels at about 100% of the country's annual GDP—was just 31.5% of GDP in 2001," The Wall Street Journal reported. Both parties deserve blame, with each one spending wildly on different priorities. I'm picking on Republicans because of their tired rhetoric about reining in spending. Anyone who believes them at this point is gullible.
This column isn't about the federal fiscal disaster, but the one in California. Democrats get the lion's share of brickbats given that they have controlled every state constitutional office and have held supermajorities in the Legislature for years. Four years ago, California enjoyed an astounding $97.5 billion surplus, but now the supposedly "balanced" budget faces an intractable structural deficit, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office.
California Republicans issue their usual statements rightly complaining about out-of-control spending, but when it matters they eagerly join the Democrats in vastly hiking spending. I'm not giving Democrats a pass, but at least we don't have to listen to them prattle about budget restraint.
The latest budget-busting bill in Sacramento is Assembly Bill 1383. A union giveaway, it would obliterate the reforms that former Gov. Jerry Brown assembled during the 2011 budget crisis. At the time, spending on massive pensions for public employees—especially public safety officials—was consuming larger chunks of the state budget and pushing localities to the brink of bankruptcy. This was a modest bill, but a good one.
Because of the so-called California Rule, governments here cannot reduce pension benefits for existing employees. No lawmakers ever proposed slashing existing retiree benefits or even cutting the accrued benefits of current employees. But in the private sector, companies can reduce the pension formulas going forward—i.e., starting tomorrow. California forbids such changes for public employees, so that ties lawmakers' hands as pension debts soar.
Brown argued the state can get control of its soaring pension debts by reducing the formulas for new hires only. The thinking was sound: In around 15 years, the state would be on a sustainable path as lower-formula new hires would replace higher-formula workers and retirees would pass away. The reforms are now doing their job, but the unions want to gut Public Employee Pension Reform Act savings by lowering the retirement age and increasing the pensionable benefits cap. Just as PEPRA is working, lawmakers want to gut it.
The premise is based on a myth. As the Reason Foundation notes, California is not facing a public-safety retention crisis. The rate is similar to what it always has been. There are still long lines for firefighter jobs. One need only look at Transparent California to see the eye-popping pay and benefit levels—often well above $500,000—earned by California police and firefighters. The new benefit will cost the state dearly and fall particularly hard on local governments, which have been cutting services and raising taxes to pay their escalating pension bills.
In 1999, Senate Bill 400 sparked that 2011 crisis by dramatically increasing California Highway Patrol pensions. Unions and their allied lawmakers knew that after boosting CHP pensions by as much as 50 percent retroactively, most other state and local agencies would follow suit. Likewise, AB 1383's supporters focus on police, but they know these changes will spread. During the SB 400 debate, the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) claimed SB 400 wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime—but they were off by billions and billions of dimes.
California Democrats are the party of government and unions, so their support is wrong but expected. But where is the party of fiscal responsibility? Republicans don't have much power, but they could be sounding the fiscal alarm bells before the state embarks on yet another fiscal disaster. They could echo Jerry Brown, who routinely warned that recession is always around the corner. Instead they are tripping over themselves to support AB 1383.
Most Republicans also are supporting Assembly Bill 1054, which would allow these highly compensated employees to retire with giant lump-sum payouts. Deferred Retirement Option Plans allow retirees to keep working after they hit their retirement agents. The existence of DROPs points to the real reason for any alleged retention crisis: Retirement formulas are so generous that they incentivize public employees to retire early, even if they want to keep working.
The only "no" votes on AB 1383 so far are Assemblyman Carl DeMaio (R–San Diego) and Assemblyman David Tangipa (R–Fresno). DeMaio is the only "no" vote on AB 1054. If any other Republican legislators prattle about fiscal responsibility, you can just laugh out loud.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post Democrats Are Undoing California's Pension Reforms. Why Are Republicans Going Along With It? appeared first on Reason.com.
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Was Jonathan Haidt right all along? Readers of this newsletter—and writers at Reason—are surely divided on this one. On Wednesday of this week, news broke that Meta had reached a humongous $17.1 billion settlement with 47 states and the District of Columbia, forced to pay damages due to child-endangerment claims stemming from its social media algorithms and platforms.
"The owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states' consumer protection laws, the states announced," reports The New York Times. "Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company's business of engagement for advertising."
"The settlement effectively ends a bellwether federal trial in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were seeking roughly $200 billion over accusations that Meta harmed children," adds the Times. Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, at times invoked a Section 230 defense, the "First Amendment of the internet" that makes it so companies don't bear liability for the posts of their users—which Reason has repeatedly defended amid a media landscape that doesn't seem to understand the value of Section 230.
"After years of being barred from suing social platforms, state prosecutors have gotten creative," wrote Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown earlier this month about the California/Colorado/Kentucky/New Jersey suit. "They're now claiming that this isn't about user-generated speech but about tech companies' product design. In this case, the states claim that providing photo filters is contributing to teens' body dysmorphia and that 'psychologically manipulative' features like displaying post 'like' counts, sending notifications, and using algorithms to curate content around a user's particular interests are what's keeping kids hooked, not the actual content on Facebook and Instagram. It's a silly claim, since clearly there could be no 'addiction' to social media if not for the content or communications contained on these platforms."
"The attorneys general and plaintiffs say that Meta's algorithms trap its users in the infinite scroll, hours of time spent staring at half-naked influencers or malnourished celebrities, images that breed body dysmorphia, anxiety and depression," reads a different Times article. This case was very explicitly built off of arguments and research found in Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation, which has enjoyed mainstream appeal. "Mr. Haidt met with some of the attorneys general on Zoom, briefing them on his research," the Times continues.
"We're now seeing the dark side of digital technologies in a way that makes it possible for a cultural rejection, a cultural awakening that we can't live this way," Haidt told the Times.
Brown smartly noted earlier this month that "no one can actually say whether social media use causes teen problems or whether excessive reliance on social media is simply a symptom of struggling socially or already suffering from mental distress."
Regardless of where you come down on child-harm arguments, the real thing that should unite libertarians is the fact that Meta's predictably interested in using the levers of the law to screw over its competitors:
after the initial shock of the settlement headlines yesterday, it took me a bit to see just how much Meta is putting the screws to its competitors https://t.co/yyxaxIMSig pic.twitter.com/rwHnjmGeRy
— rat king
(@MikeIsaac) August 27, 2026
"In the sunlight of the next day, Meta's settlement looks less like a child safety 'win' and more like a prosecutorial gun aimed at TikTok, Snap, and YouTube," writes Adam Kovacevich, who works in tech messaging for Democrats, on X. "Meta's contingent settlement payment is essentially a bounty: billions more for states if its rivals are brought into the settlement regime. Meta even admitted that teens restricted on Instagram will migrate elsewhere, so its goal is to make its competitors less engaging for teens too."
Predictable, yes.
In an ideal world, the mechanisms through which we would curb teen's social media use—which I feel awfully Haidt-aligned on, personally—would be smaller-scale and not enforced by the government: Parents would refuse to give children and teenagers phones until they have already developed both attention spans and a modicum of self-regulation; schools would aggressively crackdown on smartphone use during instructional hours; social-media time would be limited by families. There's still such a thing as parenting, you know, and it's kind of wild how (to borrow from Haidt), we're dealing with "overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world" en masse, when this is a choice made by today's parents. The companies aren't forcing their hands.
That said, it's a very difficult collective action problem: When schools and other parents aren't adopting common-sense restrictions, it becomes more fraught for one single family to do so, thus relegating their teenager to years of pariahdom. Haidt understands this, and even cites research on how young adults say "they would PREFER to live in a world with no TikTok or Instagram," that "they feel trapped" and feel like "they have to use these platforms because….everyone else is using them, and they would pay money to have everyone stop, which would allow them to stop."
Scenes from New York: Former Reasoner Emma Camp is on fire right now:
Since everyone liked my rent control video so much, I thought you might enjoy another video I made about some maddening NYC housing policy.pic.twitter.com/mxVcWjmcfk
— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) August 27, 2026
The post Haidt's Moment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 28, 1958 appeared first on Reason.com.
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Towards the beginning of the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles, Sheriff Bart, confronted by hostile but not especially bright townspeople, takes himself hostage to make his escape. It's hilarious precisely because it makes no sense. Just as nuts but less funny is the recent confrontation between United States President Donald Trump and Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney in which the Canadian matched the American's protectionist threats by vowing to force his own people to pay high tariffs on goods imported from the U.S. It's silver-screen-quality idiocy, but it's not very entertaining if you understand the advantages of free trade and the pointlessness of holding your own side hostage.
After trade talks between Canada and the U.S. fell apart over the weekend, the prime minister's office warned, "at midnight tonight, the U.S. intends to impose a 50% tariff on roughly $28 billion of Canadian goods. Canada will match those tariffs dollar for dollar to protect our workers and businesses."
Sure enough, in dueling announcements, the White House growled, "Canada has been ripping off the United States for decades—and President Donald J. Trump is done letting them get away with it," while the Canadian government answered, "effective September 8, Canada will impose counter-tariffs of 15, 25 and 50 per cent on products drawn from those targeted by U.S. Section 338 and Section 232 tariffs, with the rate for each product matching the corresponding U.S. rate."
It was an impressive demonstration of political chest-beating—impressively moronic if you understand that tariffs are largely paid by businesses and consumers in the countries that impose them.
"When the US imposes tariffs on imports, businesses in the United States directly pay import taxes to the US government on their purchases from abroad," Tax Foundation Senior Economist Alex Durante pointed out last year. "The economic burden of the tariffs, however, could fall on others besides the US business directly paying the tax, including foreign businesses selling goods to US businesses (if foreigners lower their prices to absorb some of the tariffs) or US consumers ultimately purchasing the goods (if US businesses raise their prices to pass on the tariffs)."
Businesses and consumers might also substitute goods imported from other countries or produced locally. But there's often a cost or quality reason they weren't buying those alternatives to begin with. Ultimately, Americans end up worse off than they were.
Last month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that in the U.S. "small businesses were particularly challenged by higher tariffs in 2025 to which they mostly responded by passing on higher tariff costs to their customers."
The same consideration applies to other countries, including Canada. That is, the U.S. government mostly hurts Americans with tariffs imposed on Canadian goods, and the Canadian government mainly harms its own people with retaliatory tariffs. It's the townspeople vs. Sheriff Bart all over again.
"Think about what retaliation actually means," comments Quebec-born Vincent Geloso, an economics professor at Virginia's George Mason University. "Trump imposes a tax on Americans who buy Canadian goods. So our response is supposed to be…imposing a tax on Canadians who buy American goods? How exactly does making Canadians poorer punish Donald Trump?"
"Canadian retaliation will lead to higher costs for our firms and consumers, put additional strain on integrated North American supply chains, and slow overall economic growth on our side of the border," agree Jock Finlayson and Steven Globerman of Canada's Fraser Institute.
Carney's defenders north of the border argue that retaliation is the only way to get American attention—Canada must punish itself with tariffs to convince the U.S. to back down on its own trade barriers. Many economists remain unconvinced that this sort of self-inflicted pain will prove decisive.
"Retaliatory tariffs will increase the cost of living for Canadian households but are unlikely to weaken Trump's tariff fixation," caution Finlayson and Globerman. "Indeed, the Trump administration may respond to any incremental Canadian 'retaliation' by announcing additional market access restrictions targeting various Canadian industries."
"Canadian Prime Minister Carney's retaliatory tariffs come from understandable feelings of frustration and betrayal but will not change Trump's behavior," adds Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Economist Ryan Young. "Restraint is difficult in the face of such taunting but is probably the right thing to do."
Geloso notes that Canada has attempted countering American protectionism in the past with retaliatory tariffs that did more harm than good: "Canada tried this in the 1930s in response to Smoot-Hawley. It changed absolutely nothing for the better. If anything, it simply deepened the Depression in Canada."
Worse, Geloso adds, imposing protectionist measures creates an environment in which companies expect and demand special favors: "What you ultimately get is more protection, more subsidies, higher costs, less competitiveness, and, yes, even more collusion between firms."
Geloso's advice to Carney and company is that "Canada's response to American tariffs should be incredibly simple: slash our own tariffs and trade barriers. And do not impose counter-tariffs." He adds that "free trade does not require the other guy to be smart enough to reciprocate. Historically, a huge share of trade liberalization has been unilateral."
In this, Geloso is hardly alone. His suggestion is the same that Milton Friedman offered decades ago when Americans were worried that Japan would outcompete the United States while closing its own markets.
"We only increase the hurt to us—and also to them—by imposing additional restrictions in our turn," the prominent economist wrote. "The wise course for us is precisely the opposite—to move unilaterally toward free trade. If they still choose to impose restrictions, that is too bad but at least we have not added insult to injury."
Undoubtedly, it's emotionally and politically satisfying to push back against Trump's bullying. But countering self-inflicted harm on Americans with self-inflicted harm on Canadians doesn't lead anywhere good. Carney's threats against his own people aren't likely to end as well as things did for Sheriff Bart.
The post Canada Should Ignore Trump's Protectionism and Unilaterally Enact Free Trade appeared first on Reason.com.
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In Ottumwa, Iowa, U.S. Postal Service carrier Jill Ranae Brown has been charged with fourth-degree theft after investigators say she stole Menards rebates from the mail and redeemed them. The Wapello County Sheriff's Office began investigating after a customer reported that a Menards rebate had been stolen and later used at the Ottumwa store. Investigators, working with Menards and the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General, say they uncovered a pattern dating back to 2024 in which rebates mailed to customers were allegedly taken before delivery. They also say that Brown stole receipts that Menards had customers mailed in to claim rebates, and submitted them under her own name.
The post Brickbat: No-Time Delivery appeared first on Reason.com.
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Bloomberg News (Jordan Fischer) seems to have broken the story. Culver is also accused of impersonating an NSA agent, a Supreme Court Special Master, and "the Director of Tailored Access Operations ('TAO'), a purported intelligence agency."
Here are the docket entries that apparently reflect the filing of the purported Chief Justice order:
The post Prosecution for Forging Court Order, Purportedly from Chief Justice Roberts appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This case arises from three incidents that occurred on three separate days in March and May of 2024 during demonstrations in front of the Israeli embassy….
Ms. Rokhvand and Ms. Barmada were engaged in a multi-month demonstration in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. in protest of Israel's recent military actions in Gaza…. The protesters used a designated area outside the embassy to set up their display of flags, tents, and signs and to engage in "noise demonstrations," during which they spoke into megaphones, played Palestinian music, or used noise machines. They displayed large signs with messages against Israel's military actions in Gaza, as well as a sign offering earplugs to passersby, along the sidewalk.
Rabbi Herzfeld is the rabbi of a Washington, D.C. congregation and the founder and leader of a Jewish school. During his tenure in D.C., Rabbi Herzfeld has been involved in the wider community and worked with other local faith leaders and elected officials. Rabbi Herzfeld has close relationships with family and friends in Israel and was "devastat[ed]" by the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Rabbi Herzfeld did not know of Ms. Barmada or Ms. Rokhvand before his interactions with them at the Israeli embassy. Likewise, neither Ms. Barmada nor Ms. Rokhvand had heard of or met Rabbi Herzfeld before their interactions with him during the embassy demonstrations.
The first incident occurred in the middle of the day while Ms. Barmada and a few other protesters, not including Ms. Rokhvand, were at the protest site. According to Ms. Barmada, a group of men including Rabbi Herzfeld approached the protest site and began slowly walking through the demonstration and "intensely … looking around." Ms. Barmada heard Rabbi Herzfeld call her a "Hamas supporter" and a "terrorist" who supported "raping women" and "beheading babies." Another man in the group called Ms. Barmada a "Nazi bitch" and said that she should "go to the concentration camp."
Rabbi Herzfeld began speaking about the protesters, pointing at Ms. Barmada and referring to the protesters as the "wicked people" that "we will defeat." The group of men again approached the protesters and walked back and forth in front of them, during which time Ms. Barmada and Rabbi Herzfeld exchanged a couple of remarks and Rabbi Herzfeld took something out of his pocket and stood near Ms. Barmada with his group. Ms. Barmada perceived the interaction to be a threat designed to "intimidate" her. She felt "scared" and "harassed" and that the incident was "violating."
Rabbi Herzfeld testified that the first incident occurred on a Jewish holy day commemorating the biblical story of Esther, a Queen who saved the Jewish people from annihilation. Rabbi Herzfeld went to the embassy to pray for the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. He and a few others arrived to a "surreal scene" of people "shouting all sorts of terrible things." As the group was walking through the protest, Ms. Barmada spoke into a megaphone and accused the group of "celebrating terror" and being "proud of terrorizing children."
Rabbi Herzfeld did not call Ms. Barmada a name and did not ask anyone he was with to do so. Rabbi Herzfeld had to yell in order to speak to the group he was with, because the protesters spoke into megaphones while Rabbi Herzfeld was speaking. He spoke about the protesters being akin to the supporters of the king in the story of Esther, because the protesters did not want Israel to defend itself from attacks by Hamas. Rabbi Herzfeld took out a prayer book but was "not able to concentrate properly" due to the protesters' noise.
Rabbi Herzfeld filed a lawsuit against Ms. Rokhvand and Ms. Barmada in federal court related to the first incident, claiming that the protesters had assaulted him and caused him a noise injury. He did an interview with Fox News about the lawsuit, during which he characterized the incident as part of a "dangerous trend" of "targeting Jews, attacking Jews."
The press coverage regarding the lawsuit made Ms. Rokhvand "very terrified." Ms. Rokhvand was concerned because her full name had been publicly associated with claims that she was "doing things … against Jewish people which weren't true" on a day that she was not even present at the embassy. Ms. Rokhvand believed that the suit and the resulting press coverage had "put a target on [her] back" as a pro-Palestinian activist.
The second incident took place over a month later, the day after Ms. Barmada and Ms. Rokhvand were served in Rabbi Herzfeld's federal lawsuit. According to Ms. Barmada, a car approached the protest site, moving very slowly even though no other cars were on the road. Ms. Barmada saw a man in the passenger seat staring "intensely" out the window at her with "a very taunting look." Ms. Barmada was "alarmed" by the situation and then "felt panicked" once she recognized the man in the car as Rabbi Herzfeld. Ms. Rokhvand also saw these things, which made Ms. Rokhvand "very concerned."
Rabbi Herzfeld then rolled down the window of the car with an "eerie smile on his face" and said, "How come you support people raping innocent women?" Rabbi Herzfeld then rolled up his window, and the car continued down the street. The interaction made Ms. Barmada feel like she was being "harassed" and "watched and monitored."
According to Rabbi Herzfeld, he did not know that Ms. Barmada or Ms. Rokhvand were at the protest site when he asked his driver to slow down so that he could read the protesters' signs. Rabbi Herzfeld never went to the embassy "with the understanding" that either Ms. Barmada or Ms. Rokhvand would be there. Rabbi Herzfeld asked the protesters if they supported raping innocent women because he had recently watched a movie about the "weaponization of sexual assault" on October 7th.
The third incident took place later that week, again during the day at the protest site. According to Ms. Rokhvand and Ms. Barmada, Rabbi Herzfeld and a couple of other men arrived and walked through the demonstration, while Rabbi Herzfeld loudly requested that one of the people with him take pictures of the posters and items at the site, including the container of earplugs. Ms. Rokhvand made a "frantic phone call" to Ms. Barmada, who had stepped away from the demonstration, because she was "scared and worried" about Rabbi Herzfeld's presence.
Ms. Rokhvand saw Rabbi Herzfeld speaking with his companions while looking and pointing at her, and she began recording the group on her phone. Immediately after, one of the men approached Ms. Rokhvand with his phone raised and got very close to her, stating among other things that it was "very interesting the fear you are showing here" and that it seemed she did not want to show her face. The man put his face right up against Ms. Rokhvand's phone camera, stating "see I'll show my face to you" and "I'll go to take a look and find out who you guys really are." The man then returned to where Rabbi Herzfeld was standing across the street and gestured back toward Ms. Rokhvand. After the interaction with the man, Ms. Rokhvand called Ms. Barmada and told her that the men made "threatening" comments.
According to Rabbi Herzfeld, he went to the embassy to do a press conference about his federal lawsuit. Rabbi Herzfeld approached the protest to look at the signs, but he did not "go through anyone's stuff." Rabbi Herzfeld moved on to the embassy. Rabbi Herzfeld said that he did not encourage, instruct, or prompt the man who approached Ms. Rokhvand. Rabbi Herzfeld "had no interest in any interaction with [Ms. Rokhvand] that day."
Ms. Barmada implemented security measures after the incidents with Rabbi Herzfeld, including a buddy system for the protesters and additional security cameras at her home. Ms. Rokhvand also installed a security system in her home and taught her children to be alert for Rabbi Herzfeld and the man who had approached her during the third incident….
Barmada and Rokhvand sought anti-stalking orders against Herzfeld, but the court affirmed the denial of their petitions, concluding that Herzfeld's conduct wasn't a constitutionally unprotected true threat:
The trial court found that there were no explicit "threat[s] to do bodily harm" made during the incidents, and the record supports that finding. The trial court acknowledged that "there[ were] nasty comments" made in which Rabbi Herzfeld "basically … suggest[ed] [that] people who are at the protest are people who support bad conduct" and said that "these are the wicked people; we will defeat them."
With regard to the first incident, during which Rabbi Herzfeld referred to the protesters as "wicked people" who would be defeated, the trial court found that Rabbi Herzfeld was not directing his speech specifically at Ms. Barmada (or Ms. Rokhvand, who was not present). Regarding the second incident, in which Rabbi Herzfeld asked why the protesters supported rape, the trial court found that it was "the kind of provocative comment that people make at protests," even though the question would be upsetting. The above findings are supported by the video record and testimony in the case, and we do not understand Ms. Rokhvand and Ms. Barmada to specifically contest them.
As the trial court concluded, these "nasty comments" in the context of a public protest were not threats and are "exactly the kind of things that are constitutionally protected." … Even speech that, if taken literally, threatens unlawful violence against another person (which we do not have in this case) may not be a true threat when made in the context of a political demonstration, such that the speech "[could] not reasonably be perceived as a threat." Within that legal framework, Rabbi Herzfeld's comments, which were not literally threatening and largely were not specifically directed at Ms. Rokhvand or Ms. Barmada, fall comfortably on the protected-speech side of the line between political hyperbole and true threats….
Ms. Rokhvand and Ms. Barmada argue that it was error for the trial court to fail to adequately consider threats made by "intermediar[ies] or co-conspirator[s]" of Rabbi Herzfeld. We decline to address the question whether others' conduct could be attributed to Rabbi Herzfeld because, even considering all the conduct by third parties raised at trial, that conduct does not establish two or more instances of true threats.
During the first incident, one of the men with Rabbi Herzfeld called Ms. Barmada a "Nazi bitch" and said that she should "go to the concentration camp," while Ms. Barmada spoke into a megaphone and accused the group of men of "celebrating terror" and being "proud of terrorizing children." The man's comments were, like Rabbi Herzfeld's comments discussed above, political speech that "an ordinary reasonable recipient who is familiar with the context of the statement" would not interpret as a threat.
That leaves the encounter with another of Rabbi Herzfeld's companions during the third incident, during which a man who approached the embassy area with Rabbi Herzfeld came very close to Ms. Rokhvand and made a number of comments to her. This encounter was the subject of another anti-stalking petition brought by Ms. Rokhvand against the man in question, which the trial court denied. The trial court concluded, in a decision included by the parties in their appendix in this court, that the encounter did not contribute to a course of conduct of stalking, in part because the man did not threaten Ms. Rokhvand. In any event, this encounter standing alone cannot make up a course of conduct of stalking….
The court also held that the D.C. anti-SLAPP statute applied to anti-stalking order requests as much as to other claims. That statute provides for prompt dismissal of meritless cases brought based on speech on public matters, and provides that a losing plaintiff in such a case has to pay the defendant's attorney fees; but how that plays out as to the attorney fee request here is left for the trial court (for reasons you can read about in the opinion).
Robert Parker, Steven Lieberman, and Nicole DeAbrantes represent Herzfeld.
The post No Anti-Stalking Order Against Rabbi Based on His Actions Opposing Anti-Israel Protest appeared first on Reason.com.
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September 1 marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Mike Judge's cult classic Idiocracy, a time-travel comedy in which a dimwitted and lazy Army librarian named Joe Bauers wakes up 500 years in the future to find himself the smartest man alive in a world gone horribly wrong. As a voiceover intones at the start of the movie, smart people increasingly put off having kids, resulting in a precipitous, uninterrupted, and compounded "dumbing down" of the population. Combined with an emphasis on physical comfort—everyone wears some version of athleisure and then-unknown Crocs for footwear—"the intelligent" became "an endangered species." But Joe eventually saves America by replacing the ubiquitous use of a salty sports drink called Brawndo ("the thirst mutilator!") with water in industrial agriculture.
Despite a tiny budget of around $2.4 million, a rushed production schedule and mixed reviews, the movie, cowritten by Judge and frequent collaborator Etan Cohen, quickly became a shorthand for an America that seemed to be getting dumber and dumber at an accelerating rate, especially in the political arena. By as early as 2008, people on message boards were asking, "Who here thinks we're well on our way to Idiocracy becoming reality?" The November 2008 issue of Reason features a review of the utterly forgotten film Swing Vote titled "Idiocracy Now!", and in 2015 Matt Welch dubbed Donald Trump "the Idiocracy candidate." No explanation in either case was offered, or necessary, a sign of the film's cultural relevance.
Idiocracy is an explicitly political movie, with Joe (played by Luke Wilson) quickly coming to the attention of the former professional wrestler who resides in White House, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews, clad like a combination of Afroman and the late Hulk Hogan), known to punctuate his press conferences with bursts of machine-gun fire. Despite being released by 20th Century Fox, a running gag is that Fox News is anchored by a buxom babe and topless male bodybuilder who flexes his pecs while reading headlines (shades of Naked News, which went live in 1999, just a few years prior). By the end of the movie, Joe has succeeded President Camacho in the White House. Any sentient being watching the 2024 Republican National Convention—especially the moment in which Hulk Hogan tore off his own shirt and declared "Let Trumpamania run wild, brother!"—would have to compare that spectacle to Idiocracy. The same goes for this summer's UFC Freedom 250 mixed-martial arts event at the White House. And, in all honesty, former President Joe Biden's dementia, former Vice President Kamala Harris' endless word salads, and headlines like this one about former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner.
Yet for all that, the deeper reasons that Idiocracy still resonates go beyond politics and into our contemporary culture of fetishizing fertility rates (up or down), branded content, lazy thinking, and general social disinhibition. Not all of these things are always bad, but we live in a world of social mores few would have imagined even two decades ago. In 2022, science vlogger Hank Green, wrote that given the film's opening sequence discussing general intelligence, "Idiocracy is, at minimum, implicitly pro-eugenics." Eh, probably not, especially given how terrible the high-IQ couple who bicker onscreen at the start of the movie come across; Trevor (138 I.Q.) and Carol (141) are as plainly risible as the lower-scoring people with lots of kids. If these are the smart people, we are probably better off with fewer of them, especially compared to midwits like Joe, who is at least a decent human being.
Which isn't to say that the future in which Joe awakens isn't a hellscape of overwhelming corporate sponsorships and blandly repeated slogans that are invoked like religious cliches or cult affirmations. "Welcome to Costco. I love you," say greeters at the warehouse store which has metastasized to infinite proportions. Whenever the sports drink Brawndo, which fully owns the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission, is invoked, someone inevitably follows up with some variation of "it's got electrolytes, what plants crave." Starbucks serves up sexual favors (e.g. Gentlemen's Lattes) alongside coffee drinks, as does H&R Block (which offers "tax returns and relief"). Texas-based Fuddruckers has become Buttfuckers, and the West Coast burger chain Carl's Jr., known for its founder's conservative politics and hyper-sexualized commercials, has changed its tag line from "Don't bother me, I'm eating" to "Fuck you, I'm eating." After being appointed secretary of the interior by President Camacho, Joe earns the devotion of his idiotic fellow cabinet members by invoking the hackneyed catchphrase of Lee Iacocca, who was credited with saving Chrysler from bankruptcy in the late 1970s: "You lead, follow, or get out of the way." And by asserting that he can talk to plants.
The most popular show on TV is Ow! My Balls! (think Jackass or Judge's own Beavis and Butt-Head, but with less subtlety or insight into the human condition), starring Hormel Chavez, who is hardly alone in being named after some kind of brand or product. Beyond President "Mountain Dew" Camacho, there are characters such as Tylenol Jones, Frito Pendejo, Dr. Lexus, and Beef Supreme. Which seems increasingly on the nose in an America in which parents are, according to the Social Security Administration, naming their kids after gun makers such as Wesson, Remington, Colt, Ruger, and Winchester.
Most distressing is not simply the mental dullness of Idiocracy's future, but the open hostility toward any sort of intellectual pretense or even basic literacy. Joel Miller has rightly questioned apocalyptic warnings that we are officially done with reading as a society, but there's no doubt that reading and writing have been downgraded by the culture at large for decades now. When the conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page is defending AI-generated slop on the one hand and progressive academics are defining plagiarism downward because it suits their immediate needs in a given culture-war battle on the other, we're enacting our version of Idiocracy.
Joe's first speech as president hits home in 2026 more than it did in 2006, if only because we're 20 years older and almost certainly dumber as a society. Throughout Idiocracy, the easiest putdown any character can make is to call someone gay—a lazy epithet that has all but vanished from popular discourse except in the far reaches of the manosphere.
"There was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!"
All crudeness aside, Joe's call for renewal would be welcome from elected officials and culture figures today. Idiocracy explains too much of our world not to take it seriously.
The post <i>Idiocracy</i> Predicted Our World, But Not in the Way You Think appeared first on Reason.com.
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Flock Safety is feeling the heat from ongoing public backlash against the company's controversial surveillance technology. Amid mounting contract cancellations and anti-Flock vigilantes targeting automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras across the country, CEO Garrett Langley appeared on Fox News earlier this week beseeching a national "compromise" to save the company from efforts to ban the technology outright.
But while many privacy advocates may relish seeing Flock on the run, civil liberties experts warn against losing sight of what truly matters: passing strong legal protections that outlive Flock's dominance.
The attention on Flock is certainly justified. As the largest provider of ALPRs, Flock has 120,000 cameras across 49 states, works with over 5,000 law enforcement agencies, and captures more than 20 billion license plate scans every month. But Flock is far from the only ALPR provider in town. And while the company bears the brunt of the public's animosity, competitors are watching, learning, and waiting, ready to swoop in on whatever infrastructure Flock leaves behind after the public-relations shitstorm passes.
And whatever comes after could potentially be even worse, unless government actors start taking privacy rights seriously, according to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
Motorola Solutions, currently Flock's "most significant" competitor, "has been expanding its police technology offerings through an aggressive acquisition strategy in recent years," writes Stanley in a new analysis published on Tuesday. And through the company's nationwide Digital Recognition Network, over 500 million monthly plate scans are made available to participating law enforcement agencies.
But unlike Flock, which has responded to criticism by adjusting its controversial 30-day default retention policy down to seven days and introducing limits on police access to data, Motorola has made no such changes. Instead, Motorola has no default retention period and imposes no enforced limits on how long customers, including law enforcement, can retain ALPR data. (Flock enforces a maximum one-year retention policy.) For example, the New York Police Department retains data from Motorola's ALPRs for a whopping five years, according to Stanley.
Such long retention periods of law-abiding citizens' location data are concerning given the risk of misuse and mission creep. Indeed, Motorola has contracted with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since at least 2018, and in September 2023 was "awarded a $15.6 million contract…to 'implement and maintain' ICE's tactical communication infrastructure," according to Forbes, giving ICE direct access to Motorola's surveillance database.
Another one of Flock's competitors, Axon, is also gunning for a top police surveillance position. Formerly known as Taser, the company got its start with the TASER energy weapon and has since grown its police offerings to include body-worn cameras and digital evidence management software. The company's newest products include ALPR services, which it began selling through dashboard and in-car camera products in 2021 and fixed-cameras in 2025, according to Stanley.
Since "many Flock customers already have contracts with Axon for body cameras and other products," argues Stanley, switching from Flock to Axon may be an easy and attractive option for government officials during this time of anti-Flock fervor. But that may be unwise.
Even though Axon, unlike Flock and Motorola, doesn't offer nationwide data sharing, the company's policies on handling ALPR data still fall short of protecting privacy. From long data retention periods to the experimental use of AI analytics, whatever Axon and many other surveillance competitors' policies and capabilities may look like now, they simply can't be trusted to protect civil liberties over the long term.
"Communities should not gain too much comfort from what companies are and are not doing right now, but instead keep their eye on the longer game by putting protections into law," writes Stanley. Whether a community chooses to use ALPR surveillance or not, Stanley recommends a handful of legal protections, including a retention period of no more than 48 hours, disallowing nationwide data sharing, storing data locally, and declining AI analytics software.
Mandating such policies—along with requiring police to obtain a warrant before searching ALPR data—can help ensure Americans' civil liberties remain proactively protected no matter which surveillance technology company dominates.
The post Getting Rid of Flock Isn't Enough To Solve America's Surveillance Problem appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Later, they remember Dolly Parton as one of the rare American heroes almost everyone liked, and they celebrate the great Tim Curry by talking about his unforgettable movies.
Plus: AI-generated articles in The Wall Street Journal, the end of summer, and the national debt hitting $40 trillion.
0:00—Newsom apparently likes tariffs?
4:20—Which moral panic is worse: data centers or children on social media?
17:57—Robby got in a scooter accident.
24:03—How do social media companies measure harm?
31:33—Are young men playing too many video games?
43:12—Parton was one of the few American heroes whom everyone liked.
45:44—So much love for Curry and all of his movies.
51:01—Karen Attiah got re-hired by The Washington Post.
55:05— AI is writing articles in The Wall Street Journal.
1:07:28—Robby is going to miss summer, and the national debt hit $40 trillion!
The post Gavin Newsom Admits He Might Keep Tariffs? appeared first on Reason.com.
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Are men, particularly young men, spending all their time playing video games, gambling, and watching porn—and hating their lives because of this? Those are the apparent implications of a new report from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) that offers some intriguing insights and perhaps reasons for concern…while also conflating several fundamentally distinct habits.
For starters, video games are not at all like gambling and porn, and lumping all three things together under the nebulous category of vice is a huge mistake. Yet the reason for doing so is obvious: The authors want to show that men en masse are succumbing to the "addiction economy," which is making them miserable. The report has policy implications: IFS senior fellow Brad Wilcox and media director James Lynch write in Compact that the "libertine wing of the Republican Party" must be reined in.
"The American founders were not libertarian about vice," they write. "They understood that a republic whose young men cannot govern themselves will not govern anyone else for long. A political vision for American men necessitates rediscovering the fact that liberty and license are not the same thing."
Yet it's hard to take their calls to restrict liberty seriously when their target is so broad—and in the case of video games at least, entirely undeserving. Yet the IFS study takes every effort to lump in video games with porn consumption and gambling: On X, research fellow Grant Bailey calls attention to the fact that just 2 percent of men don't engage in any of these activities, and Wilcox notes the "staggering" number of young men who do all three—a fate he considers to be obviously characteristic of "addiction."
We have a generation of young men trapped in the "addiction economy"—and the numbers are staggering:
1-in-8 use porn, gamble & game daily
— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) August 25, 2026
So let's start with the obvious: Is someone who plays video games every day addicted to video games? The answer is certainly not.
For starters, the study does not really have a good sense of what it means to play video games too much. It tracks how often young men play video games: many times a day, daily, several times a week, or less/often never. But what does it mean to play video games "many times a day"? Surely a better measure would be how many hours a day a person spends gaming. Someone who takes a break from work to play a quick round or two of Super Smash Bros. a couple times a day is not actually playing video games with as much intensity as someone who plays once a day but for 10 hours straight. By this measure, I myself would fall into the category of the highest level of addiction, since I pause to play the online card game Dominion, which lasts about five to 20 minutes per game, many times throughout the day. But I am quite obviously not addicted to video games, nor am I negatively impacted by playing them.
To its credit, the study does acknowledge some positive aspects of video games, describing them partly as "a source of camaraderie and collaboration, which, as we have seen, is often in short supply." But overall, the study is understating the fact that video games are very often—though not always—a source of positive social interaction for young men. This includes in-person socialization and virtual socialization: Many guys play games while wearing headsets for communication with teammates and rivals so that they can collaborate to solve problems and clear obstacles. Yet the study's authors lament that frequent gaming is "enervating, at odds with other valuable goods in life, including relationships, and yet another cause and effect of demoralization."
Let's consider that claim: Video games are getting in the way of "other valuable goods in life." In some sense, it's absolutely true. Doing anything in excess is bad for you and will conflict with other healthy activities you could be doing. But it seems to me these endless efforts at diagnosing what is supposedly causing people to be unhappy make a lot of casual assumptions about what men would be doing with their time if they weren't playing video games or scrolling social media. Maybe they would just do nothing and be bored! Maybe they would sit on the couch all day watching television, a technology that has been around a lot longer than smartphones and video games. Maybe they would binge drink and beat each other with their fists: It used to be far, far more common for people (mostly men) to get in physical confrontations with each other, but the inclination toward violence has fallen rapidly in part because there are so many other (better) uses of a person's time.
That doesn't mean we need to accept increased feelings of loneliness as the price we pay for a much safer society, although it is always useful to counteract overt romanticization of the past with cold, hard facts. But with growing calls from both sides of the aisle to regulate all the ways that people—particularly young people and young men—freely choose to preoccupy themselves, we should challenge policymakers to be very precise about the professed harms and the proposed solutions. For example, as a result of its $17.1 billion settlement with various state attorneys general, Meta will be implementing measures to curtail young people's usage, even though there is scant evidence that Facebook and Instagram have a widespread pernicious effect on this group.
RIP Tim Curry, one of my favorite actors and a man I truly admired. He appeared in so many of the films and TV shows I enjoyed as a kid that it's difficult to remember them all: from his mustache-twirling turn as the villainous Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers to his characteristically earnest portrayal of Long John Silver in Muppets Treasure Island (alongside the decidedly less serious Muppets) to his many random appearances on '90s and '00s cartoon shows like The Wild Thornberries, Hey Arnold!, Batman Beyond, and Samurai Jack. He even voiced Big Brother in the special 1984-themed episode of Johnny Bravo—please stop what you are doing and watch this clip.
Of course, the performance of Curry's that I treasure most dearly is Wadsworth the butler in Clue. The entire cast is great, but it just wouldn't work without Curry's mania.
The post Video Games Are Not Making Men Miserable appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Plaintiff's claims under Title VII, the NYSHRL, the NYCHRL, and Section 1983 are largely premised upon expressions of political speech regarding Israel, Zionism, and the Palestinian conflict that the [Complaint] characterizes as antisemitic. This raises a preliminary question as to what extent such expressive conduct, no matter how personally offensive or hateful to individuals based upon a protected characteristic, can be actionable as workplace discrimination or harassment under federal or state antidiscrimination laws.
Title VII prohibits "harassment so severe or pervasive as 'to alter the conditions of the victim's employment and create an abusive working environment.'" Abusive and offensive speech, no less than abusive conduct, can undoubtedly cause a multitude of psychic harms that would render a workplace hostile.
Antidiscrimination laws do not create a categorical "'harassment exception' to the First Amendment's free speech clause," however. "[T]he Supreme Court has consistently held that expression motivated by bias, hatred, or bigotry falls within the First Amendment's protection." "[I]f there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."
Accordingly, while there is "no question that non-expressive, physically harassing conduct is entirely outside the ambit of the free speech clause," it is equally clear that "[w]here pure expression is involved, anti-discrimination law steers into the territory of the First Amendment."
The potential conflict between the First Amendment and federal and state antidiscrimination laws is heightened when the offensive speech concerns matters of public concern…. [R]estriction of political speech based upon the viewpoint expressed will almost never pass constitutional muster. The First Amendment abhors political orthodoxy….
"In light of the competing interests … , courts have emphasized the need to exercise special caution when applying anti-discrimination law to matters involving traditionally protected areas of speech." "A statute that burdens protected speech must comport with the First Amendment regardless of whether it does so directly, such as by prohibiting certain speech outright, or indirectly, such as by requiring a court adjudicating a civil lawsuit between private parties to apply a rule of law that has the effect of imposing invalid restrictions on the defendant's constitutional freedom of speech."
In determining where the line between protected speech under the First Amendment and actionable harassment falls, the reasoning behind the prohibition on harassment in the workplace is instructive. "[G]overnment may constitutionally prohibit speech whose non-expressive qualities promote discrimination. For example, a supervisor's statement 'sleep with me or you're fired' may be proscribed not on the ground of any expressive idea that the statement communicates, but rather because it facilitates the threat of discriminatory conduct." … "[R]acial insults or sexual advances directed at particular individuals in the workplace may be prohibited on the basis of their non-expressive qualities, as they do not 'seek to disseminate a message to the general public, but to intrude upon the targeted [listener], and to do so in an especially offensive way.'" Thus, "[h]arassment law generally targets conduct, and it sweeps in speech as harassment only when consistent with the First Amendment."
When reconciling discrimination claims with the First Amendment, courts have explained that "the objective measure of what conduct is severe or pervasive … will distinguish between speech on matters of public concern directed to the community at large through generally accepted methods of communication, and speech that constitutes targeted, personal harassment aimed at a particular individual or individuals." …
Accordingly, before the Court considers whether Plaintiff has stated a claim under federal or state antidiscrimination laws, the Court must first filter out all "allegations deemed to be non-actionable political speech" from its analysis.
Applying this test, the Court holds that Plaintiff's discrimination claims based upon CUNY's sponsorship of the Palestinian Solidarity Series are not actionable under either federal or state antidiscrimination laws. A poster exhibit, the screening of a film, and a political discussion are all instances of speech that are "reasonably designed or intended to contribute to an ongoing debate regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." There is no allegation that any of this speech was directed specifically at Plaintiff, or any other Jewish student or CUNY employee. Nor is there any allegation that Plaintiff or any other individual was physically threatened or intimidated during these events. This speech on matters of public and academic concern occurring in a university setting is protected under the First Amendment.
The SJEC Multi-Cultural Center's circulation of a petition … in response to the media coverage criticizing the Palestinian Solidarity Series is likewise political speech. According to the [Complaint], the petition stated that the BMCC SJEC display was intended to educate the community regarding the "theft" of Palestinian land. It described the March 2023 poster exhibit as the "history" of "Zionist settler colonial rule." "[A] college professor's expression on a matter of public concern, directed to the college community, [does not] constitute unlawful harassment …."
Although the [Complaint] alleges that the petition mentions Plaintiff, this too is protected free speech. "[T]he First Amendment provides speakers with latitude to criticize others, particularly authority figures, in the context of a genuine public debate." The [Complaint] alleges that the petition described "Plaintiff's request for anti-discrimination education on Jewish indigeneity in Israel" as part of an "intimidation tactic." The petition also described Plaintiff's opposition to the poster display as a "Zionist tactic." Even if the petition explicitly referred to Plaintiff by name, it did so in the context of commenting on statements made by Plaintiff on a topic of urgent national debate, directed to the college community at large. Robust exchanges on matters of widespread public concern fall within the heartland of the First Amendment….
The court cited similar recent decisions, including Gartenberg v. Cooper Union(S.D.N.Y. 2025), Landau v. Corp. of Haverford College (E.D. Pa. 2025), Garrett v. CUNY(S.D.N.Y. 2025), and Kopmar v. Ass'n of Legal Aid Attorneys (S.D.N.Y. 2025), and Stand with Us Center for Legal Justice v. MIT (1st Cir. 2025). I agree with the court that the First Amendment limits workplace and educational harassment claims, and generally think the court's First Amendment analysis is sound, even if I would personally draw the lines slightly differently.
The court dismissed many of plaintiff's claims on First Amendment grounds. Here is what the court had to say as to the statements and actions that it found weren't immunized by the First Amendment:
CUNY's Investigation into Plaintiff Following Defendant Saleh's Complaint …
CUNY's investigation into Plaintiff arising from Saleh's complaint does not result in a cognizable harm. [Saleh was the Coordinator of the Multi-Cultural Center, one of the Social Justice and Equity Center centers. -EV]]. Because "an employer's investigation of a … complaint is not a gratuitous or optional undertaking" but rather "under federal law, an employer's failure to investigate may allow a jury to impose liability on the employer," the investigation into Plaintiff cannot in itself constitute an "injury in employment terms or conditions."
True, Plaintiff alleges the investigation was needlessly kept open for 15 months. Yet the Complaint fails to allege any facts indicating that this made Plaintiff "worse off." There are no allegations, for example, that plausibly suggest that Plaintiff was denied promotions or other career opportunities as a result of the pending investigation….
CUNY's Failure to Appoint Plaintiff to the Advisory Council on Jewish Life
Plaintiff fails to allege facts that directly or indirectly give rise to a plausible inference that he was not appointed to the Advisory Council at least in part because of his Jewish religion or Israeli national origin. Plaintiff conclusorily asserts that he "was and is more qualified to serve on Defendant's Advisory Council on Jewish Life" than those who were chosen.
Yet he does not outline the qualifications for a position on the Advisory Council. For example, he alleges that certain individuals appointed to the Advisory Council held "lower level positions at CUNY" than did Plaintiff, but nowhere explains how this correlates with the qualifications to serve on the Advisory Council.
Moreover, Plaintiff has not provided the religion or nationality of those chosen for the Advisory Council in his stead. He thus fails to establish that any of the individuals who were appointed were "outside his protected class." …
BMCC's Alleged Failure to Conduct a Good Faith Investigation into Plaintiff's Claims
Plaintiff alleges that CUNY and BMCC failed to conduct a good faith reasonable investigation of Plaintiff's reports of antisemitic, anti-Israeli treatment. Specifically, he claims that they did not timely investigate or provide redress for his March 2023 complaint regarding the RateMyProfessor.com reviews; his May 2023 complaints regarding the petition; or his June 2023 submission to the online portal regarding the poster exhibit, the circulation of the April 2023 petition, the RateMyProfessor.com comments, and his unanswered request for education on Jewish indigeneity in Israel….
Plaintiff does not plausibly allege that CUNY's failure to investigate his claim resulted in a "demonstrable harm." The conduct that was the subject of Plaintiff's complaints was largely protected First Amendment activity. Plaintiff thus did not suffer any cognizable harm from CUNY and BMCC's inaction.
Plaintiff offers no explanation as to how BMCC and CUNY's decision not to provide education on Jewish indigeneity in Israel, as requested by Plaintiff, caused Plaintiff to suffer an injury to the terms and conditions of his employment. Certainly, Plaintiff is not entitled to dictate to CUNY and BMCC the contents of its course offerings or educational materials….
[RateMyProfessor.com Reviews]
{First Amendment protection does not extend to speech that is defamatory, and thus discrimination claims can be premised upon the circulation of false statements regarding an individual…. As alleged in the TAC, {[t]he RateMyProfessor.com reviews} did not take place in the context of a public debate, but were "targeted, personal harassment aimed at a particular individual." The reviews purported to provide commentary on Plaintiff in his role as a professor and accused him of exhibiting racism towards Muslim and Palestinian students. In doing so, they referenced non-existent classes or classes that Plaintiff did not teach.
False accusations of misconduct can permissibly be considered as contributing to the creation of a hostile work environment.} If these comments were sufficiently severe and pervasive to create a hostile work environment for Plaintiff, then CUNY and BMCC's failure to adequately investigate and remediate his working conditions could have resulted in an injury actionable under Title VII.
{Although Plaintiff has not alleged any facts from which it can plausibly be inferred that it was a BMCC or CUNY employee who left the RateMyProfessor.com comments, Plaintiff argues that BMCC and CUNY can be held liable for their negligent failure to take appropriate action once he alerted the administration. Liability can be imputed to an employer for harassment committed by a non-supervisory employee or a non-employee if the employer acted negligently by failing "to provide a reasonable avenue for complaint or that it knew, or in the exercise of reasonable care should have known, about the harassment yet failed to take appropriate remedial action." "In determining the appropriateness of an employer's response, we look to whether the response was immediate or timely and appropriate in light of the circumstances, particularly the level of control and legal responsibility the employer has" over the behavior of the responsible individual. Plaintiff argues that BMCC and CUNY did not act immediately or timely in response to his complaints relating to the petition or the anonymous RateMyProfessor.com comments. In light of the anonymous nature of the comments, it is unclear to what extent CUNY had any level of control over the individuals who posted online.
For purposes of this motion, the Court assumes, without deciding, that Plaintiff has pleaded facts sufficient to impute liability to CUNY and BMCC for the reviews.} [And a]ssuming arguendo that liability for the RateMyProfessor.com comments can be imputed to CUNY or BMCC, … anonymous comments on a third-party website, even when coupled with the other actionable allegations, do not cumulatively rise to the level of severe and pervasive. They were of limited duration and frequency. Plaintiff was not subject to epithets based on his religion or national origin, let alone a "steady barrage" of such comments. None of the alleged conduct rose to the level of physical threat or humiliation. The hostile work environment claim is therefore dismissed.
Karen Rhau (NYC Law Department, Office of the Corporation Counsel) represents CUNY.
The post Court Rejects Harassment Lawsuit Over Anti-Israel Speech at CUNY, Largely on First Amendment Grounds appeared first on Reason.com.
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American ranchers have beef with the Trump administration.
Last week, President Donald Trump announced that he would allow imports of "up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef" above the volume limit of the U.S. beef tariff-rate quota system without any tariffs for 90 days. The proposal has drawn the ire of cattlemen, farmers, and lawmakers alike.
In a protectionist bid to preserve her state's share of the American beef industry, Sen. Deb Fischer (R–Neb.) said she was "extremely disappointed" with the plan. Similarly, Sen. John Barrasso (R–Wyo.) said Americans "want U.S. beef on the table—not foreign imports," while Sen. Tim Sheehy (R–Mont.) admitted that while the president's "heart is in the right place," his plan will "make it more difficult for American ranchers to rebuild our herd and bring prices down for the American people."
Under his plan, the president says the imported beef will be "sold at 25 percent below current market prices," though no details have been released. However, CNBC reports the president will "formally sign an executive order on the tariff waiver" in the next two weeks. Altin Kalo, head economist at Steiner Consulting Group, told the outlet that imported beef is already "trading at a steep discount." If that's true, that's good news for consumers who have seen the price of beef increase by 24 percent since the start of Trump's second term. (This has happened even as the U.S. has increased its beef imports from last year by 12 percent.)
However, it's likely bad news for American beef producers. In a statement, Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA), said the organization was "disappointed by the President's statement."
"While America's cattle producers share the goal of keeping groceries affordable for consumers," he added, "flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd." Woodall said the plan and "other market interventions" by the Trump administration "throw cold water on the prospect of herd expansion and sacrifices long-term stability for short term messaging." Beef producers in Ohio, Missouri, Texas, and Minnesota issued similar statements denouncing the move as bad for the industry's current prospects and any opportunities for future growth.
Woodall is right that a 90-day easement on tariffs is a short-term solution to the president's political problems that ignores the real culprit behind high beef prices: a supply shortage. The number of U.S. beef cows, calves, and beef cattle in feedlots is down from the previous year, and the U.S. herd is at its lowest point since the 1950s, according to the Department of Agriculture.
With over 79 percent of the beef cattle across America's 26 largest cattle-producing states facing persistent drought and poor weather conditions, rebuilding the U.S. herd would take time and the kind of long-term policy-thinking absent in the Trump administration. This is, after all, the same administration that sent farmers a $12 billion bailout last December "in response to temporary trade market disruptions and increased production costs" caused by the president's trade wars.
Still, the domestic beef industry is not without fault: It cannot meet market demand, yet in a self-serving move, it is determined to keep out competition that would serve its consumers because it no longer has the advantage of tariffs.
Rebuilding America's cattle herds is possible, but it'd require government and beef producers to eschew the easy trappings of subsidies and protectionism. While it recognizes that Trump's latest move is bad for its long-term health, the industry has historically been willing to accept government meddling when it suits its bottom line.
By cutting tariffs to lower the price of beef, the Trump administration is ultimately conceding that tariffs do, in fact, raise prices.
However, the president's approach is shortsighted; if he were serious about lowering prices, he'd ask Congress to lift all tariffs and quotas on beef imports in perpetuity, not just for 90 days. Instead, it seems like a maneuver to boost his party's prospects in the midterms.
The post A 90-Day Waiver on Beef Tariffs Won't Rescue America's Cattle Industry appeared first on Reason.com.
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Later today, a federal judge in Minneapolis will hear a motion for discovery in the Minnesota 15 antifa case. If granted, it could eventually reveal just how far the tentacles of the Trump administration's vast surveillance, harassment, and intimidation campaign against its critics in Minnesota reached—and how much of it continues today.
In mid-June, the federal government unsealed an eight-count indictment against 15 activists for allegedly interfering, sometimes violently, with the federal immigration crackdown that roiled the Twin Cities last winter, during which federal agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti. One of those indicted, Isaac Sant, faces two counts: conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer and interstate stalking.
Sant will have his day in court, and if the case goes to trial, a jury will decide whether the government has proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. But as he and his attorney mount a defense, they have filed a motion for discovery accusing the federal government of "an unprecedented campaign by DHS (Department of Homeland Security) to spy on Minnesotans," based on the government's own initial disclosures.
Alleging that his prosecution is the result of a political witch hunt based on First-Amendment-protected activity, Sant and his attorney, Kevin C. Riach, are asking a federal court in Minnesota to force the government to release any and all communications and materials related to the charges Sant faces. (Earlier this week, Protect Democracy filed an amicus brief in support of Sant's discovery motion on behalf of the Cato Institute, the Society for the Rule of Law, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.)
What has already been revealed in this case conjures up the ghosts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisc.) and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. At the center of it all is Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the DHS' principal criminal investigative arm, which is acting more like a domestic spy agency than a law enforcement agency bound by the Constitution.
During last winter's Operation Metro Surge, undercover HSI agents surveilled and infiltrated meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools, and union halls and gained access to encrypted Signal chats under initiatives dubbed "Operation Keyhole," "Operation Puppet Master," and "Project Whipple Shield."
In one incident in February, an undercover agent wormed their way into a meeting at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb bordering the Twin Cities. The undercover agent recorded the license plates of activists opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity and then matched the plates to their owners, creating dossiers that included names, photos, addresses, and even more intimate details, such as information about their families and employment.
"None of these individuals did anything other than engage in First Amendment speech in a church meeting room," wrote Riach in the discovery motion. "Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a DHS dossier."
During a recent service at the church, interim pastor Steve Sylvester told his congregation that the federal government had surveilled the church last winter. "It feels weird," Sylvester told NPR. "It feels like I'm living in 1950s Eastern Europe." Sylvester's church wasn't the only one under watch in this American remake of The Lives of Others.
In May, another undercover agent wore a wire to a training held at University Baptist Church in Minneapolis and hosted by Left Jab, a lefty mixed martial arts club dedicated to "community self-defense." The surveillance led to some black comedy. "Due to the physicality of the event," reads the HSI report of investigation, the undercover agent's "concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium near the end of the training. UCA–5022 briefly left the gymnasium, realized she no longer had the device, and returned to the gymnasium to retrieve the device from the floor."
But Cody Sanders, interim pastor of University Baptist, wasn't laughing. "I do imagine people will look over their shoulder a little more and wonder, 'Is there someone here who's trying to gather information?' Or when they see a strange car in the parking lot," Sanders told NPR. "I hope we can resist the kind of suspicion that this is likely to generate."
But that's a feature, not a bug, of these kinds of police-state tactics. Revelations like these supercharge the corrosive power of paranoia, making people fear that something they say or someone they associate with could land them in a federal database. Constitutional rights don't mean much if you're afraid to exercise them.
The authoritarian tactics, however, don't stop there. Bypassing judicial scrutiny, HSI issued administrative summonses and subpoenas targeting the financial records of labor unions and progressive nonprofits. Without the organizations' knowledge, the agency sought more than three years' worth of records from the Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. They also sought financial records from the Sunrise Movement and Voices for Racial Justice, both progressive groups.
The federal government itself ties this investigation to National Security Presidential Memorandum–7 (NSPM–7). In HSI's own report of investigation, the synopsis states plainly that the investigation at Prince of Peace church was opened in "accordance with" the memorandum.
Issued by President Donald Trump after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, NSPM–7 explicitly places political beliefs within its domestic terrorism framework. The policy directive describes "anti-fascism" as an umbrella under which "violent and terroristic activities" occur and lists beliefs such as "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity," as well as what it calls "extremism on migration, race, and gender," as among the "common threads" animating violent conduct. It then tasks the national and local Joint Terrorism Task Forces with coordinating and supervising "a comprehensive national strategy" and directs the Justice Department to pursue prosecutions.
In her December memo implementing NSPM–7, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi addressed civil liberties concerns in a footnote. "The United States Government does not investigate, collect, or maintain information on U.S. persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment," the second footnote reads. "No investigation may be opened based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment or the lawful exercise of rights secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States."
When NSPM–7 was issued, civil liberties organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) warned that the policy directive and its implementation would likely lead to the feds investigating government critics for First Amendment-protected activities absent any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. That prediction is now unfortunately coming true, despite the government's assurances it wouldn't cross the line.
In the months and years ahead, activists, journalists, lawyers, and legislators will try to get to the bottom of NSPM-7's vast surveillance apparatus. Time will tell how many Americans were swept into these programs without evidence of wrongdoing and how many were chilled from exercising their rights to free speech and association.
This discovery motion is one of the first attempts to help uncover the truth.
The post This Federal Case Against Minnesota Protesters Is Worth Watching if You Care About Your Civil Liberties appeared first on Reason.com.
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Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a press conference Wednesday that automated license plate cameras such as Flock are "out of control" in the state and called for new privacy regulations, addressing wide public criticism of the AI-powered surveillance technology.
"I'm all about law enforcement having tools to hold criminals accountable," DeSantis told media at Florida International University. "I think that's important that we do that, and no one's been stronger on law enforcement than me, but I don't want to have this become a surveillance state."
Too late.
Florida is already flooded with police surveillance technology, a trend that started in the post-9/11 era and accelerated rapidly in the past two years as the DeSantis administration embraced the White House's mass deportation campaign. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy advocacy group, publishes an "Atlas of Surveillance" showing Florida agencies widely have access to automated license plate readers, facial recognition technology, third-party investigative services, and "predictive policing" software.
For example, the Florida Highway Patrol leaned heavily on Flock's surveillance network last year to identify targets for a joint state and federal immigration enforcement operation.
The Florida Phoenix reported in February that DeSantis and his cabinet approved $40 million in immigration grants to local law enforcement. Those grants included funds for more license plate readers, biometric eyeball scanners, and AI-powered mobile surveillance towers.
While much of the public concern over Flock cameras has come from stories of police officers misusing the technology to stalk women, arrest the wrong people, and generally be creeps, police already have access to similar information—and frequently abused it before Flock came along. Flock cameras are simply another, more powerful tool.
In Florida, police officers can access the state's Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID) system to look up information on residents, but only for legitimate law enforcement purposes. Officers are frequently disciplined or fired for running illegal DAVID searches.
Florida has laws regulating access to automated license plate reader (ALPR) information and limiting retention of data to three years.
However, critics of state and local officials in Florida have found themselves subjected to the sort of surveillance state that DeSantis decries.
Environmental activists recently discovered that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spied on their driving records using the DAVID system after they spoke out in public opposing the agency's policies.
Reason has covered numerous other cases of alleged First Amendment retaliation in Florida: A 77-year-old Florida veteran was investigated by state law enforcement for sending a postcard to Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia that simply read, "You lack values!"
Likewise, a Miami Beach woman was interviewed by detectives for writing a Facebook post criticizing the Miami Beach mayor's stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Last year, the Hendry County Sheriff accused Captains for Clean Water, an environmental advocacy group of Florida fishing guides, of inciting threats against public officials.
In 2024, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office ended a "predictive policing" program to settle a lawsuit alleging that targets on the algorithm-based list were subjected to unconstitutional harassment by deputies.
DeSantis criticized the Florida legislature for not passing an "AI bill of rights" that he proposed last year, which would have enacted sweeping regulations on AI technology and data centers.
"I think it's going to get a lot worse unless we have some protections for the people in Florida and so it's going to need to be there," DeSantis said at the press conference. "But the only way it could be dealt with is legislatively."
The post Ron DeSantis Says Flock Cameras Are 'Out of Control,' But Florida's Already Flooded With Surveillance appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This is a state-law tort action arising out of an online "doxing" incident that preceded Plaintiff's termination from her prior employer, Chartwell Law Offices LLP ("Chartwell"). Defendant Gadi Beer helped launch Chartwell in 2002 and served in senior leadership roles before leaving the firm in early 2023. Plaintiff alleges, upon information and belief, that he retained an equity interest in the firm and remained in regular contact with its founding partners. Defendant Beth Beer, Gadi Beer's wife, is a licensed attorney who served as a Regional Director in the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights during the relevant period.
Plaintiff, a Muslim woman of Pakistani origin, was employed as an associate attorney in Chartwell's Miami office from 2018 until her termination on February 29, 2024. Throughout her employment, Plaintiff maintained a public Instagram account, "thatlawyermomlife," using her real name and the same profile picture that appeared on Chartwell's website, but her Instagram page did not include any reference to Chartwell or her place of employment.
After the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Plaintiff began posting prolifically in support of the Palestinian cause. She alleges she was "well-aware" that her posts "could be misconstrued by some people as antisemitism" and therefore consciously avoided negative references to Jews or Judaism, directing her criticism instead at Israel's government, the IDF, and Zionism. Her account was known to coworkers, some of whom followed and engaged with her content.
Beginning in late November 2023, Plaintiff alleges that an account using the handle "Beth Margot" attacked nearly every one of her posts about Gaza. The comments became "increasingly obsessive, vile and hateful," so Plaintiff blocked the account. Plaintiff later determined that "Beth Margot" was a pseudonym used by Defendant Beth Beer.
On January 11, 2024, the firm's two founding partners, General Counsel, and HR Director met with Plaintiff, telling her that the firm had been monitoring her posts after unidentified individuals expressed "concerns" that some could be perceived as antisemitic. In this meeting, Plaintiff was counseled to be "mindful" and "positive" going forward. During a second meeting about eight days later, firm leadership raised similar concerns. Plaintiff contends, however, that at no time was she told any post violated firm policy, asked to remove any post, or directed to stop posting entirely. Plaintiff also notes she posted more than fifty additional times between January 19 and February 29, 2024, but "Chartwell did not find issues with her content during that time frame."
On February 18, 2024, Plaintiff was "doxed" on an Instagram page called "Jew Hate Database" ("Jewhatedb"), which Plaintiff alleges is operated by the organization StopAntisemitism.org. The Jewhatedb Instagram post displayed an altered version of one of Plaintiff's Instagram posts: the page claimed to have "fixed it" by crossing out the pronoun "they" and substituting the word "Jews." The image did not state Plaintiff's name or employer, but it displayed her Instagram account handle, on which Plaintiff's real name was disclosed. The post generated dozens of hostile comments, speculation about where she worked, and demands that her employer fire her.
Plaintiff alleges, upon information and belief, that Defendants "conspired to submit Plaintiff's Instagram post to the Jewhatedb Instagram page and had advance notice" of the February 18 post, and that their "simultaneous appearances in the comments section … immediately following the posting" on Jewhatedb served "the sole and improper purpose of providing the critical missing information that was required to launch the doxing attack: Plaintiff's real name and a link to her firm profile." As to the comments themselves, Plaintiff alleges the following sequence:
- A commenter urged others to "find out who this person is and have her fired … she's a lawyer, should be easy to find her."
- Defendant Beth Beer, posting as "Beth Margot," responded that Plaintiff "works at Chartwell Law Offices" and posted a link to Plaintiff's firm profile, which included her work email, telephone number, and the Miami office's contact information.
- She also commented: "I wonder how her Jewish clients would feel about her public posts. This one is innocuous compared to her regular posts. It's disgraceful."
- Defendant Gadi Beer reposted the link to Chartwell Law that "Beth Margot" had originally posted.
Plaintiff alleges the reference to her Jewish clients rested on "non-public and highly confidential information … that only [Beth Beer] and her husband possessed." After another commenter stated he "[f]ound her in a second" using the link, Gadi Beer re-posted the same link to Plaintiff's Chartwell profile.
Ten days later, on February 28, 2024, Plaintiff was doxed a second time by StopAntisemitism.org's X account, which has more than 237,000 followers and which identified Plaintiff by name and by her position at Chartwell. That afternoon, Plaintiff received dozens of threatening emails, voicemails, and calls at work, and Chartwell began receiving "an overwhelming number" of communications demanding her termination.
The next morning, February 29, 2024, one of the firm's founding partners, its General Counsel, and its HR Manager informed Plaintiff she was being terminated "because the doxing incident on February 28 had resulted in widespread criticism and hostility towards Chartwell Law on its own social media pages," had damaged the firm's reputation and client relationships, and had made some Jewish employees fearful of working with her. Plaintiff alleges that Chartwell "itself referred to" the February 28 doxing incident as "the climactic triggering event" that resulted in her termination. The Amended Complaint does not allege that Defendants authored, contributed to, or had advance knowledge of the February 28 StopAntisemitism.org post, nor that Chartwell viewed Defendants' February 18 comments…
The court rejected plaintiff's tortious interference with a business relationship claim:
Under Florida law, a claim for tortious interference with a business relationship requires: (1) the existence of a business relationship under which the plaintiff has legal rights; (2) the defendant's knowledge of the relationship; (3) an intentional and unjustified interference with the relationship by the defendant; and (4) damage to the plaintiff as a result of the breach of the relationship…. [But t]he Second Restatement of Torts [which] { "… seems to reflect the law of Florida"} states:
One who intentionally causes a third person not to perform a contract or not to enter into a prospective contractual relation with another does not improperly interfere with the other's contractual relation, by giving the third person (a) truthful information …
The Eleventh Circuit recognized this principle in Worldwide Primates, Inc. v. McGreal (11th Cir. 1994). In Worldwide Primates, the defendant obtained government inspection reports documenting the plaintiff's treatment of its animals, excerpted their most damaging portions, and mailed them to the plaintiff's prospective business partner with a cover letter designed to end the relationship…. The Worldwide Primates court reasoned that the plaintiff "could establish no cause of action for interference with its business relationship … when all [the defendant] did was give [the recipient] truthful information." In so doing, the Court relied upon § 772 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, as well as the comment to it, which states that:
There is of course no liability for interference with a contract or with a prospective contractual relation on the part of one who merely gives truthful information to another. The interference in this instance is clearly not improper. This is true even though the facts are marshaled in such a way that they speak for themselves and the person to whom the information is given immediately recognizes them as a reason for breaking his contract or refusing to deal with another….
Notably, Worldwide Primates demonstrates that truthful information is non-actionable interference regardless of motive. In Worldwide Primates, the activist's letters were expressly designed to end the plaintiff's business relationship, yet the Eleventh Circuit still held that the plaintiff's tortious interference claim had no basis in law because the information was truthful….
The court also rejected plaintiff's "defamation by implication" claim:
Plaintiff alleges that Defendant Beth Beer defamed Plaintiff by implication when she commented on the February 18 Jewhatedb post: "I wonder how her Jewish clients would feel about her public posts. This one is innocuous compared to her regular posts. It's disgraceful." Plaintiff alleges that, in context, the comment falsely implied that she is "a virulent and irredeemable antisemite" unfit to represent Jewish clients. …
[But such an implication] is a subjective characterization of her publicly available posts [and thus a nonactionable opinion], not a verifiable assertion of fact. "Whether an accusation of bigotry is actionable depends on whether the statement appeared to be supported by reasonably specific facts that are capable of objective proof of truth or falsity." That is not the case here.
Plaintiff alleges that her posts are criticisms of Israel's government rather than its people, while Defendant Beth Beer allegedly reads them to mean she is an "antisemite." Yet, neither reading of the same public posts can be proven true or false because it is a subjective assessment and thus, an opinion….
And the court rejected plaintiff's civil conspiracy claim:
[C]ivil conspiracy is not an independent tort and thus requires an underlying actionable wrong [which the court held was absent here, for the reasons given above -EV] …. Florida recognizes a narrow exception [to that principle] and allows civil conspiracy to be an independent tort where the plaintiff can show a "peculiar power of coercion" possessed by the conspirators by virtue of their combining forces; importantly, this must be a power that no individual acting alone would possess…. Although Plaintiff alleges that Defendants possessed a peculiar power of coercion, thereby relieving her of the underlying tort requirement, other allegations of the Amended Complaint contradict this assertion.
Plaintiff affirmatively alleges that "there was a possibility that the commentators calling for Plaintiff's termination would eventually discover the information themselves," given that Plaintiff's real name appeared on her public Instagram page. Plaintiff also alleges that a commentator "exclaimed that he 'Found [Plaintiff] in a second' with the link provided," which demonstrates that Defendants could have carried out the act alone, possessing the same power together as they would have separately.
While Plaintiff alleges that Defendants "utilized" the Jewhatedb and StopAntisemitism.org platforms "to publicly expose Plaintiff as an alleged Jew hater and antisemite … and ultimately interfere with her employment relationship with Chartwell Law," the Amended Complaint is devoid of facts showing that Defendants submitted Plaintiff's Instagram post to either platform. Plaintiff merely alleges "[u]pon information and belief" that Defendants "conspired to submit Plaintiff's Instagram post to the Jewhatedb Instagram page …."
Even if the Jewhatedb Instagram post interfered with Plaintiff's employment—Plaintiff does not allege that it did—this allegation is insufficient to survive a motion to dismiss…. The only fact Plaintiff alleges is that each Defendant commented on the February 18 Jewhatedb Instagram post. However, Plaintiff alleges that Chartwell terminated her because of the StopAntisemitism.org doxing incident on February 28—not the February 18 Jewhatedb Instagram post. As such, Defendants' February 18 comments do not support the inference that they possessed a peculiar power of coercion by combining forces with each other or with Jewhatedb to achieve Plaintiff's termination. Further, Defendants' actions in commenting on the February 18 Jewhatedb Instagram post alone cannot give rise to a reasonable inference of "coercion through numbers or economic influence" lest every person who comments on a public Instagram post automatically becomes a co-conspirator. It bears repeating that "peculiar power of coercion" is a "narrow exception." …
David Andrew Hayes and Kenneth George Turkel (Turkel Cuva Barrios), Jaclyn Sara Clark (The Lawfare Project), and Marc Randazza (Randazza Legal Group, PLLC) represent defendants.
The post Pro-Palestinian Poster's "Doxing" Claim, Stemming from Her Firing as a Result of Public Criticism, Rejected appeared first on Reason.com.
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The U.S. State Department and U.S. Treasury placed the anarchist-aligned Italian tech support collective Autistici/Inventati on the "specially designated global terrorist" list on Wednesday. This designation makes it illegal for Americans to engage in any "transactions" with Autistici/Inventati.
The U.S. government hasn't accused Autistici/Inventati of committing any crimes. Instead, the State Department announcement states that the group "builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world," allowing these "militants" to "disseminate target information, tactical manuals and techniques, and communiqués about recent attacks" while staying "anonymous, untraceable, and beyond the reach of the law."
In other words, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is attacking the group for running an online platform that the U.S. government can't spy on and for facilitating communications the U.S. government doesn't like. But precisely because Autistici/Inventati is based in another country—Italy—the U.S. government has basically unchecked power to impose counterterrorism sanctions on it.
The Autistici/Inventati case has strong parallels to the recent TikTok ban: Congress banned the social media network under foreign-policy pretexts because American youth were using it to share otherwise First Amendment–protected content. As with the TikTok ban, outlawing Autistici/Inventati is a way to force users to move to services that are more easily monitored and controlled by the U.S. government.
"The idea that an organization that is an alternative host—for email, websites, and other services—could be designated a terrorist organization simply for providing a service that a lot of people want…is scary," says Jillian York, director of international freedom of expression at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This may sound a little conspiratorial, but the fact that this comes from an administration that is quite cozy with Silicon Valley giants, at a time when distrust of those companies is quite high from various parts of society, doesn't seem to me a coincidence."
Autistici/Inventati offers free email accounts, web hosting, videoconferencing, and other communications services on request to those who can demonstrate need and "share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism." Unlike commercial email providers, Autistici/Inventati stores only the bare minimum of user data and doesn't peek into users' inboxes, making it appealing to "paranoids," as the group describes itself.
"We deny all allegations included in the statements, while we strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations," Autistici/Inventati wrote in a statement in English and Italian responding to the U.S. designation. "We will not back down, we will keep doing what we have been doing all these years and we will do whatever is in our possibility to counter the false allegations made by a politically desperate administration with the sole intention of swaying people and media attention away from their own violence and warmongering."
The terrorist designation will immediately cut off Autistici/Inventati's ability to collect donations, its only way to cover operating expenses, through any bank or credit card processor connected to the U.S. dollar system. It may also allow the U.S. government to seize the autistici.org domain name. The U.S. government has long argued that, because the registries for .com and .org domains are located on American soil, it is illegal to host websites for organizations under U.S. economic sanctions.
Whether the designation makes Autistici/Inventati's email services illegal to use is unclear. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the Trump administration is using to sanction Autistici/Inventati, technically exempts any "personal communication, which does not involve a transfer of anything of value" from U.S. sanctions, in order to respect First Amendment protections.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says its lawyers believe that "simply utilizing these services, while providing no financial support to them, does not constitute material support for terrorism." But Peter Harrell, a former Biden administration official who is now a visiting scholar at Georgetown Law School, writes that it's an open question how courts would rule in this case.
The Treasury did not respond to a question from Reason about its interpretation of the law.
The Trump administration has increasingly used these kinds of foreign policy powers against dissidents, especially self-declared "anti-fascists." Last year, the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) ordered federal agencies to prioritize terrorism from the left. Rubio designated the German "hammer gang" Antifa Ost as terrorists soon after.
"There will be no refuge for violent extremists who wage war on our civilization and plot to undermine law and order, destroy critical infrastructure, assault political opponents, or conspire to conceal their crimes from authorities," Rubio told Fox News about the Autistici/Inventati designation.
The administration also tied its action against Autistici/Inventati to the campaign against Israel's enemies. The Treasury announced sanctions on Autistici/Inventati alongside new sanctions on the British organization Palestine Action for "breaking into defense infrastructure and British military installations," and the Palestinian diaspora party Masar Badil for being "a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization."
The State Department's announcement, meanwhile, blames Autistici/Inventati for allowing one of its users "to publish official communiqués and calls to action for U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations," naming Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Fox News reported that the State Department announcement "reveals Portland Antifa connection to Hamas, Iran's IRGC," because of those third-party posts. Of course, by that same logic, there is a "connection" between Rubio himself and all of the same designated terrorists because their messages are disseminated on the same social media.
The Treasury's announcement at least pointed to a designated terrorist organization that actually used Autistici/Inventati's services: the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). But though the U.S. government considers the PKK terrorists, U.S. forces have also worked with its members and affiliates in Syria for more than a decade. Rubio met with Kurdish commander Mazloum Abdi, a former PKK member, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference earlier this year.
Some people, it seems, are friendly enough to have an audience with cabinet officials, yet too dangerous to have an email address.
The post Rubio Uses Terrorism Law To Ban Secure Email Service appeared first on Reason.com.
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The U.S. national debt just crossed the $40 trillion threshold, doubling in less than a decade. Washington politicians have responded with their favorite fiscal game: blaming the other party. Democrats say Republican tax cuts are the culprit. Republicans say Democratic spending is the root cause. But both parties are responsible, with both hiding behind a lie of omission. And if we let them, they'll keep driving us into the same wall together.
Sen. Patty Murray (D–Wash.) recently called Republican tax cuts "the single biggest driver" of the debt across the last 25 years. The number uses an unrealistic 2001 baseline that projected endless surpluses, as if the late-1990s revenue windfall would last forever. The Brookings Institution's Jessica Riedl makes a more honest comparison by lining up the actual budget in 2000 against 2026. Tax cuts have reduced revenue by roughly 2 percent of gross domestic product. Spending rose by 5.7 percent, nearly three times as much.
Its a common and effective talking point, but not true. Below is a comparison of the 2000 vs. 2026 federal budget. Tax cuts have totalled 2% of GDP (unrelated economic factors also reduced revenues). But spending has jumped 5.7% of GDP since 2000. Lots of blame to go around. https://t.co/JZUBKyYDS7 pic.twitter.com/8AkqGMps9B
— Jessica Riedl
(@JessicaBRiedl) August 22, 2026
Tax cuts can be great, especially when structured to move us toward a better overall tax code. But they are not free and often do not pay for themselves, largely because they come with lots of nonproductive handouts to special interests.
Yet the fact of the matter is that despite every tax cut since 2001, revenue today sits near its long-run average as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP). With spending climbing nearly six points, we know exactly where the problem lies.
The Congressional Budget Office projects federal spending to rise further, from 23.3 percent of GDP this year to 24.4 percent in 2036. For those paying attention, the drivers won't come as a surprise: entitlement programs and interest payments. Discretionary spending, defense included, is poised to shrink relative to GDP. Revenue holds near its average.
But while Republicans blame Democrats for expanding spending, they have joyfully participated. As David Stockman documented in his 1986 book, The Triumph of Politics, the Reagan Revolution failed to truly reform welfare and entitlement spending because Republicans were active in their expansion in the decades before.
More recently, Republicans who spent years complaining about Obamacare have failed to abolish it, let alone reform its finances. Today, you don't hear a peep out of Republicans about reforming Social Security and Medicare, though they have made some cosmetic adjustments to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as they were cutting taxes.
This is not new. About 26 years ago, Social Security's trustees were already projecting the trust funds to run dry in 2037, after which payroll taxes would cover only 72 percent of benefits. Today, the trustees expect the old-age fund to be depleted by around 2032, covering about 77 percent of benefits thereafter. And we have always known why: longer lives, lower birth rates, fewer workers per retiree. Maintaining these benefits without crushing taxes was always going to mean a lot of debt.
Medicare's Hospital Insurance fund is estimated to run dry around the same time. But as the Hoover Institution's Tom Church notes, Medicare's real fiscal problem is that we now rely on general revenue to cover more than half of its outlays. This amounts to roughly $10 trillion over 2026-2035, mostly from Part B (a medical insurance program for outpatient and doctors' visits). That's huge, but it's not news, either.
All of this has frustrated me for years. Those of us warning about debt have been dismissed as primitives. When interest rates were low, debt was cheap. We were assured that if growth beat the borrowing rate, we could roll it over almost for free. The reality is that even low rates on explosive debt aren't cheap, and there was little chance that rates would stay low forever.
Here's what the low-rate crowd never understood, and what this decade's inflation should have taught everyone: Government debt is a promise to run future surpluses. The market expects no less, and thus, the debt's real value depends on whether investors believe that promise.
When Washington dropped roughly $5 trillion in pandemic dollars into the economy with no plan to pay for any of it, investors reappraised this promise and the price level adjusted. The inflation of 2021 and 2022 was not an unlucky storm. It was the market's response to a government taking on debt it didn't have fiscal backing for. Higher interest rates followed, and we are still living with them.
That's the risk Washington is not pricing into its complacency. The danger of an unreformed entitlement state is about more than interest payments crowding out the rest of the budget. It's that bondholders will stop believing future surpluses will materialize, and the adjustment comes through the price level again. Unfunded Social Security and Medicare promises are, in effect, a standing commitment to more debt and future inflation.
So, the question is whether the politicians who claim to be alarmed by the crossing of this threshold will stand up and turn the tide of red ink heading our way.
COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM
The post The National Debt Has Crossed $40 Trillion. Both Parties Are Responsible. appeared first on Reason.com.
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Weed has come a long way since Up in Smoke. While there are disagreements about the potency advertised by retailers, there is little dispute that cannabis products have higher THC content than ever before. Concerns about that development were recently heightened by a study challenging the idea that cannabis has low addictive potential.
The study, published in JAMA Psychiatry last week, is based on data for Americans 18 or older from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Nora Volkow and her three co-authors report that 9.3 percent of men and 5.6 percent of women reported at least two symptoms of cannabis use disorder (CUD) in 2024, up from about 7.3 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively, in 2021.
The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines CUD based on 11 criteria, including a strong desire to use cannabis, consuming more than intended, devoting a lot of time to using cannabis or recovering from its effects, forgoing other activities, use in physically hazardous situations, unsuccessful attempts to cut back or quit, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, cannabis-related problems at work or school, impairment of interpersonal relationships, and continued use despite negative effects. CUD is deemed "mild" when two or three symptoms are reported, "moderate" when four or five criteria are met, and "severe" in cases involving six or more symptoms. To measure CUD incidence, the NSDUH asked respondents whether they had experienced any of these symptoms.
Between 2021 and 2024, Volkow et al. report, the rate of "moderate-to-severe CUD" rose from 3.1 percent to 4.1 percent among men and from 1.7 percent to 2.5 percent among women. The increase was especially noticeable among men 35 or older and women 21 or older. Overall, moderate-to-severe CUD was most common among 18-to-20-year-olds.
The study "suggests that cannabis products available today have significant addiction potential," Volkow tells Reason. "The challenge is that we lack comprehensive data on the types of cannabis that people are using—including the concentrations of delta-9-THC and other cannabinoids—and how those relate to addiction potential." Since the NSDUH data did not include information about potency, the study does not directly assess whether the increase in CUD rates was associated with an increase in THC levels.
According to the NSDUH, the share of Americans 12 or older who reported using marijuana during the previous year rose from 19 percent in 2021 to 21.2 percent in 2025, while past-month use rose from 13.2 percent to 15.1 percent. Although cannabis use declined among Americans 25 or younger, it increased in older groups. Overall, the widespread availability of THC in the form of flower, edibles, gummies, and vapes seems to have increased the drug's popularity, leading to heated debates about the consequences of legalization.
Although addressing the hazards of cannabis use does not require prohibition, it does require careful consideration of the "principles and rules that we in a free society apply to restricting government interference in adult choices," says Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University. "A total laissez faire, caveat emptor approach is going to mean that many millions of people have lives substantially damaged."
That danger raises a "real question that we as a democratic society need to engage with," Caulkins says. "To what degree can we ask the majority to sacrifice some of their fun and some of their freedom to protect the minority, who will badly harm themselves and their families and the people around them with their poor choices?"
Jeffrey A. Singer, a health policy expert at the Cato Institute and a practicing surgeon, has a different view. CUD shouldn't "become the basis for a new moral panic," he said in response to the JAMA study. Instead, he suggested, "we should educate people about cannabis's risks" and "not assume that today's trends represent the long-run effects of legalization—or that prohibition is the answer."
Some politicians and activists see the commercialization of cannabis as a growing problem. This fall in Massachusetts, voters will decide whether to repeal the state's legalization of recreational marijuana and home cultivation.
Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which supports that ballot initiative, is using research like the JAMA Psychiatry study to bolster the campaign. The organization's action committee has contributed more than $1.5 million to the Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts, the initiative's main sponsor. If the measure passes, possessing one to two ounces of marijuana will be a civil offense punishable by a $100 fine and forfeiture of the weed.
Jodi Gilman, director of neuroscience at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Addiction Medicine, argues that the abuse potential highlighted by the JAMA Psychiatry study does not justify a revival of the war on weed. "It's not surprising that there are more cannabis use disorders with this flooding of the marketplace with highly potent products," she says. Gilman thinks people should "appreciate that this is a psychoactive substance that can be very strong," which "carries risks like any other psychoactive substance." Still, the best treatment for CUD isn't jail, she says; it's "motivational interviewing or cognitive behavioral therapy."
If legalization means treating marijuana like alcohol, that includes fostering a culture of responsible use, which is hard to do under prohibition. "We don't ban alcohol because some people use it unwisely or develop alcohol use disorder," Singer notes. "Autonomous adults should remain free to make choices others consider unwise so long as they don't violate the rights of others."
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Do you remember the rumors that were swirling around earlier this year about the "impending" retirement of Justice Samuel Alito from the U.S. Supreme Court? Well, if you still harbored any lingering hopes or fears of those rumors coming true in 2026, Alito himself has now put them to rest.
"Obviously I'm here for another term," the justice recently told The Wall Street Journal. Ironically, the idea of Alito sticking around for a little longer is probably more popular right now among progressives than it is among conservatives.
Remember that conservatives were the ones lobbying for Alito to step down in the first place. They have been desperate to avoid what we might call the Ruth Bader Ginsburg scenario, in which an aging justice remains on the bench so long that his or her party loses control of the White House or Senate (or both) and thus loses the ability to pick the justice's replacement. If the GOP loses control of the Senate in this year's midterm elections, those fears could be realized.
Progressives began publicly calling for Ginsburg's retirement as early as 2011, when the reelection of President Barack Obama was no certain thing. "If Obama loses," liberal law professor Randall Kennedy wrote in The New Republic, Ginsburg's failure to retire will "have contributed to a disaster." A few years later, when Democratic control of the Senate looked to be slipping away during Obama's second term, liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times in a similar effort to push her out the door. "Only by resigning this summer," he wrote, "can [Ginsburg] ensure that a Democratic president will be able to choose a successor who shares her views and values."
Chemerinsky was proven right on that particular point. When Obama tried to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in the spring of 2016 after the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the Republican-controlled Senate basically filibustered the nomination, keeping the seat open until the Republicans won the White House in the November election and President Donald Trump was able to appoint Neil Gorsuch to SCOTUS instead in 2017.
So Ginsburg really did lose her chance to retire when a Democratic president could have still picked her replacement. In the end, Ginsburg would remain on the Supreme Court until her death in 2020 at the age of 87. And then, of course, Ginsburg was replaced by Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett.
Alito seemed to be mulling over these events when he discussed his non-retirement plans with The Wall Street Journal. "It's not pleasant, in the sense that it's a reminder of mortality," Alito said, referring to the conservative calls for him to move along for the good of the legal right. "It's like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure."
Ginsburg also heard the buzzing of the carrion-feeders and chose to tune out the sound. Perhaps this is the rare case in which Alito is truly in harmony with Ginsburg. Like her, he may be perfectly content to continue doing a job he enjoys for as long as he possibly can—which just happens to be one of the most important jobs in the country—all while ignoring the circling vultures and disappointing his supposed allies.
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]]>We have, for instance, in our community a large number of Jews. They are a highly intellectual race, and are generally obedient to the laws of the country.
Thank you, Justice! (Recall that this was a time when "race" was used to include what we would today call an "ethnic group," such as Norwegians, Italians, and the like.) Meantime, the broader context of the case, which isn't about us at all (not everything is about us):
The plaintiff is a subject of the emperor of China, and the present action is brought to recover damages for his alleged maltreatment by the defendant, a citizen of the state of California and the sheriff of the city and county of San Francisco. The maltreatment consisted in having wantonly and maliciously cut off the queue of the plaintiff, a queue being worn by all Chinamen, and its deprivation being regarded by them as degrading and as entailing future suffering.
It appears that in April, 1876, the legislature of California passed an act 'concerning lodging-houses and sleeping apartments within the limits of incorporated cities,' declaring, among other things, that any person found sleeping or lodging in a room or an apartment containing less than five hundred cubic feet of space in the clear for each person occupying it, should be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof be punished by a fine of not less than ten or more than fifty dollars, or imprisonment in the county jail, or by both such fine and imprisonment. Under this act the plaintiff, in April, 1878, was convicted and sentenced to pay a fine of ten dollars, or in default of such payment to be imprisoned five days in the county jail. Failing to pay the fine, he was imprisoned.
The defendant, as sheriff of the city and county, had charge of the jail, and during the imprisonment of the plaintiff cut off his queue, as alleged. The complaint avers that it is the custom of Chinamen to shave the hair from the front of the head and to wear the remainder of it braided into a queue; that the deprivation of the queue is regarded by them as a mark of disgrace, and is attended, according to their religious faith, with misfortune and suffering after death; that the defendant knew of this custom and religious faith of the Chinese, and knew also that the plaintiff venerated the custom and held the faith; yet, in disregard of his rights, inflicted the injury complained of; and that the plaintiff has, in consequence of it, suffered great mental anguish, been disgraced in the eyes of his friends and relatives, and ostracised from association with his countrymen; and that hence he has been damaged to the amount of ten thousand dollars….
The cutting off the hair of every male person within an inch of his scalp, on his arrival at the jail, was not intended and cannot be maintained as a measure of discipline or as a sanitary regulation. The act by itself has no tendency to promote discipline, and can only be a measure of health in exceptional cases. Had the ordinance contemplated a mere sanitary regulation it would have been limited to such cases and made applicable to females as well as to males, and to persons awaiting trial as well as to persons under conviction. The close cutting of the hair which is practiced upon inmates of the state penitentiary, like dressing them in striped clothing, is partly to distinguish them from others, and thus prevent their escape and facilitate their recapture. They are measures of precaution, as well as parts of a general system of treatment prescribed by the directors of the penitentiary under the authority of the state, for parties convicted of and imprisoned for felonies. Nothing of the kind is prescribed or would be tolerated with respect to persons confined in a county jail for simple misdemeanors, most of which are not of a very grave character. For the discipline or detention of the plaintiff in this case, who had the option of paying a fine of ten dollars, or of being imprisoned for five days, no such clipping of the hair was required. It was done to add to the severity of his punishment….
The ordinance was intended only for the Chinese in San Francisco. This was avowed by the supervisors on its passage, and was so understood by every one. The ordinance is known in the community as the 'Queue Ordinance,' being so designated from its purpose to reach the queues of the Chinese, and it is not enforced against any other persons. The reason advanced for its adoption, and now urged for its continuance, is, that only the dread of the loss of his queue will induce a Chinaman to pay his fine. That is to say, in order to enforce the payment of a fine imposed upon him, it is necessary that torture should be superadded to imprisonment. Then, it is said, the Chinaman will not accept the alternative, which the law allows, of working out his fine by his imprisonment, and the state or county will be saved the expense of keeping him during the imprisonment. Probably the bastinado, or the knout, or the thumbscrew, or the rack, would accomplish the same end; and no doubt the Chinaman would prefer either of these modes of torture to that which entails upon him disgrace among his countrymen and carries with it the constant dread of misfortune and suffering after death. It is not creditable to the humanity and civilization of our people, much less to their Christianity, that an ordinance of this character was possible….
Many illustrations might be given where ordinances, general in their terms, would operate only upon a special class, or upon a class, with exceptional severity, and thus incur the odium and be subject to the legal objection of intended hostile legislation against them. We have, for instance, in our community a large number of Jews. They are a highly intellectual race, and are generally obedient to the laws of the country. But, as is well known, they have peculiar opinions with respect to the use of certain articles of food, which they cannot be forced to disregard without extreme pain and suffering. They look, for example, upon the eating of pork with loathing. It is an offense against their religion, and is associated in their minds with uncleanness and impurity. Now, if they should in some quarter of the city overcrowd their dwellings and thus become amenable, like the Chinese, to the act concerning lodging-houses and sleeping apartments, an ordinance of the supervisors requiring that all prisoners confined in the county jail should be fed on pork would be seen by every one to be leveled at them; and, notwithstanding its general terms, would be regarded as a special law in its purpose and operation….
We are aware of the general feeling—amounting to positive hostility—prevailing in California against the Chinese, which would prevent their further immigration hither and expel from the state those already here. Their dissimilarity in physical characteristics, in language, manners and religion would seem, from past experience, to prevent the possibility of their assimilation with our people. And thoughtful persons, looking at the millions which crowd the opposite shores of the Pacific, and the possibility at no distant day of their pouring over in vast hordes among us, giving rise to fierce antagonisms of race, hope that some way may be devised to prevent their further immigration.
We feel the force and importance of these considerations; but the remedy for the apprehended evil is to be sought from the general government, where, except in certain special cases, all power over the subject lies. To that government belong exclusively the treaty-making power and the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, which includes intercourse as well as traffic, and, with the exceptions presently mentioned, the power to prescribe the conditions of immigration or importation of persons. The state in these particulars, with those exceptions, is powerless, and nothing is gained by the attempted assertion of a control which can never be admitted….
Whatever is done by way of exclusion beyond this must come from the general government. That government alone can determine what aliens shall be permitted to land within the United States and upon what conditions they shall be permitted to remain; whether they shall be restricted in business transactions to such as appertain to foreign commerce, as is practically the case with our people in China, or whether they shall be allowed to engage in all pursuits equally with citizens. For restrictions necessary or desirable in these matters, the appeal must be made to the general government; and it is not believed that the appeal will ultimately be disregarded. Be that as it may, nothing can be accomplished in that direction by hostile and spiteful legislation on the part of the state, or of its municipal bodies, like the ordinance in question—legislation which is unworthy of a brave and manly people….
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President Donald Trump loves a data center: Last year, the president signed an executive order that "expedites federal permitting, facilitates construction on federal land and makes qualifying projects eligible for financial incentives," notes The Washington Post. Trump is a huge fan, but much of the rest of his party reflects voters' fears that data centers will burden residential areas.
Data centers—the huge warehouses needed to store all the specialized hardware that's required to run AI models—have grown in salience as a political problem in recent months.
Building out and using AI models at scale requires enormous computational demands; data centers, which consume large amounts of energy, are necessary to power these models. A huge data center could create demands that power grids weren't built for and can't effectively handle, leading to service outages for residential areas. It's also possible that costs of improving grids—to serve AI companies—could be passed on to households via rate increases paid by all customers.
That said, if we want more AI applications, and believe them to potentially be transformative, we're going to need more computing power. And we're going to need more data centers. (But you can perhaps understand why some people, when met with the "AI might render work as we know it obsolete" line, don't feel especially accommodating.)
"If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous," Trump said last week.
Contrast this with how Republican politicians are talking about them. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a moratorium on data centers within his state earlier this month, saying his regulators need to determine whether the power grid can handle the new facilities. (Right now, Texas appears to have 335 data centers, second in number only to Virginia.) The Wisconsin gubernatorial race has featured Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican, repeatedly arguing that his opponent, Democrat David Crowley, is soft on data centers, and that Tiffany will protect residents of his state from the scourge. In Michigan, Mike Rogers—who is running for Senate as the Republican against Democrat/socialist Abdul El-Sayed—has called for a moratorium on new data center construction (a reversal of how he had been talking about them). In Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds, who won the Republican primary for governor, says he'll "protect" the state from data centers, also a reversal of how he had formerly approached the issue.
"The Senate GOP campaign arm, in a private memo to top AI companies, warns that toxic views of U.S. data centers are killing the party's chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio," reported Axios last week. "In the memo, obtained by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee says Democrats have made data centers a 'centerpiece' of their campaign to defeat Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio)—and that it's working. 'If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice—and they will not go near the next one,' the memo says. 'This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.'"
So why are so many Republicans so willing to break with Trump on this issue, when fealty to El Jefe has for so long been table stakes?
"Trump just personally cares about this topic," an anonymous source familiar with his thinking told The Washington Post. "You just can't change his mind about it." But polling data indicates other Republicans are doing a better job of reading the room: Per Pew data back in March, "around one-in-five Americans or more say they aren't sure of data centers' impact in each of the five areas we asked about. Others say these facilities have neither a positive nor negative impact in each area or haven't heard about data centers at all." Now, voters seem to have heard an awful lot more about them, and made up their minds: An August poll from The Economist/YouGov found that 61 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their community, including 47 percent of Republicans. More than half of Americans disagree with Trump's perspective on data centers when asked about it.
"There are roughly 1,600 data centers in the United States these days by one count," reports Time. "They consume 4% of total U.S. electric consumption. The biggest hub is Virginia, with 184 sites—using enough electricity to serve 2.3 million homes, according to a consulting firm based in Tyler, Texas, that tracks the industry. Eisenbach Consulting's tracking estimates a full 25% of Virginia's energy now goes to data centers." Other counts claim the number is nearly double. Improving power-grid resilience would be a path forward to allowing more localities to welcome data centers, but in our zero-sum political world: fat chance.
Scenes from New York: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) just renewed her lapsed membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) after a seven-year hiatus. What could this mean? Is she gearing up for a presidential run? A Senate run? Something more nefarious?
This, btw, would be revolutionary: Make a walkability index. Then empirically measure if people are walking more in the "more walkable" places. https://t.co/CQ1cDW9eHL
— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) August 26, 2026
Breaking: The US State Dept has connected Portland's Rose City Antifa to a foreign tech company that provides infrastructure to violent far-left extremist organizations.
The Oregon-based terror group has been using Italy-based A/I Collective to disseminate target information,…
— Katie Daviscourt
(@KatieDaviscourt) August 26, 2026
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