President Donald Trump and some of his top advisers have routinely insisted that the administration's new, higher tariffs would not burden American consumers because foreign governments or corporations would pay for those tax increases.

But with inflation rising and consumers (and voters) increasingly grumpy about the cost of living, the White House has turned to a telling strategy: cutting tariffs to make some products less expensive.

On Monday, the White House issued a presidential proclamation reducing tariffs on a wide range of agricultural and industrial equipment, including tractors, forklifts, and air conditioning equipment. Those imports will now be subject to a tariff of 15 percent rather than 25 percent, Trump announced.

The same announcement also rolls back one of the more insane aspects of Trump's tariff regime: a rule implemented last year that would apply tariffs on raw steel and aluminum to imported products made from steel or aluminum. Under the new terms Trump announced on Monday, some "derivative" steel, aluminum, and copper products will be subject to a tariff of 10 percent instead of 25 percent.

Of course, the White House is not calling this a retreat or a necessary response to the entirely predictable consequences of its own policies. No, no. This is a move that will "more effectively address national security threats, spur investment in American agriculture, housing, and manufacturing, and facilitate U.S. production of related products," according to the Trump administration.

In reality, this is yet another admission that tariffs are raising prices. In April, the Trump administration cut the tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper imports from 50 percent to 25 percent. The president has also been quietly reducing or eliminating tariffs on agricultural products such as beef, coffee, and fruit.

The administration has also backed off from previously announced plans to raise tariffs. In January, a planned tariff hike on furniture, cabinets, and other lumber products was postponed and has seemingly been forgotten.

An optimist might look at this pattern of behavior and conclude that the Trump administration has realized the folly of its maximalist tariff strategy. After winning an election on the promise of lowering prices, the Trump administration's signature second-term policy has been a series of deliberate and significant tax increases that are costing the average household thousands of dollars annually. Even in an administration that excels at crafting its own version of reality, that was eventually going to be a problem.

But I'm not sure I buy the sunniest interpretation here.

For one, if the administration were serious about providing tariff relief to Americans, why cut the tariffs on farm equipment and air conditioners from 25 percent to 15 percent? There are a lot of numbers lower than 15. That new tariff rate is just another arbitrary figure plucked out of thin air.

In fact, the new proclamation only serves to underline how ridiculous this entire exercise has become. Take this line as an example (emphasis mine):

I determine that it is appropriate to modify the threshold for imported products to qualify as made "entirely" from American aluminum, steel, or copper, as that term is used in Proclamation 11021. The current threshold of 95 percent shall be modified to 85 percent. In my judgment, this modification will incentivize increased use of American aluminum, steel, and copper in downstream derivative products.

The doublespeak is kind of astonishing. Trump is announcing a policy that lowers the threshold for what counts as an "American-made" metal product (so more goods can be imported without tariffs) while claiming this will incentivize more American-made production.

Cynically, I assume this is setting the stage for the White House to blast out some charts in a few months showing growth in "American-made" metal products, allegedly due to the tariffs—when in reality, all that's changed is what products are being counted in that category.

More to the point: All this monkeying around with the tariff rates and import thresholds is only adding to the complexity and uncertainty that the White House has created. Some of the changes Trump announced on Monday are meant to "adjust" policies announced in "Proclamation 11021," which was issued on April 2—just two months ago.

Given this administration's track record, it seems likely that further adjustments will be made in the next few months. That makes it impossible for business owners to plan for the future. If you'd waited a few months, that new tractor might have only been taxed at 15 percent instead of 25 percent. If you can wait a little longer, maybe it will be taxed even less.

This all points back to why Congress, not the president, is supposed to be responsible for setting tariffs and trade policy. The deliberative legislative process would have prevented many of these tariffs—tariffs that the White House is now scrambling to roll back—from being implemented in the first place. And it would have provided some stability and certainty for businesses that currently have no idea what tariffs might be increased or reduced next week or the week after that.

Even as the White House backs away from its foolish tariff plans, the Trump administration keeps revealing why it should never have had these powers in the first place.

The post Cutting Tariffs on Farm Equipment Is Another Admission That Trump's Trade Policies Are Increasing Prices appeared first on Reason.com.

The President's Echo System: How Foreign Policy Is Sold to Americans, by Chad Levinson, Harvard University Press, 288 pages, $39.95

The modern presidency frequently sells its foreign policy to the American people via nominally private institutions, thereby bypassing official sanctions against propagandizing the public. So argues Chad Levinson, a political scientist at Virginia Tech, in The President's Echo System.

These political pressure groups have ranged from the Century Group, which operated during the run-up to America's entry into World War II, to the Project for the New American Century, active at the height of American hegemony in the 1990s. Levinson calls them extragovernmental organizations (EGOs): a web of private but government-aligned think tanks, pressure groups, and other players that lobby Congress and the public for foreign policies aligned with the president's agenda. Pushing back against earlier scholars of elite machinations, such as C. Wright Mills, Levinson argues that the relationship between EGOs and the presidency is "symbiotic rather than coercive": The White House serves as the senior partner, with their private counterparts playing a role akin to a "contemporary flash mob," springing into action to amplify the president's agenda.

Levinson opens by describing how EGOs operate in a public space defined by popular apathy toward foreign affairs. ("Left unprovoked," he notes, "the US public pays little attention to foreign affairs.") After America's disastrous experience with the Committee on Public Information during World War I, Congress placed significant roadblocks on the executive's ability to use overt propaganda. Meanwhile, Levinson notes, "Nonofficial propaganda…is protected by the freedoms of association and speech," even when acting in coordination with the White House. He argues that EGOs are heavily slanted toward intervention: Such groups respond to incentives set by the executive branch—and broadly speaking, "Presidential ambitions…favor interventionism." There are exceptions, of course: Levinson illustrates how President Barack Obama's adviser Ben Rhodes enlisted EGOs to sell the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, and how President Jimmy Carter used the Committee of Americans for the Canal Treaty to return the Panama Canal to Panama. But those were relatively dovish exceptions to a generally hawkish rule.

The ensuing chapters offer a series of historical case studies. The strongest one illustrates how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt coordinated with the Century Group, later known as the Fight For Freedom Committee and the Committee to Defend America (CDA), on messaging prior to America's formal entry into World War II. Roosevelt allowed himself to be narratively paced by his EGO counterparts, delegating the responsibility of floating new policy ideas, creating the sense of public momentum, and creating a political space for the president to act. After America entered the war, EGO figures entered Roosevelt's government, filling out public relations positions. Adlai Stevenson, for example, went from running the CDA's Chicago chapter to working for the Department of the Navy.

A chapter on the early Cold War expands on these continuities, illustrating how the playbook used to sell Americans on entering World War II was repurposed to sell them on the Marshall Plan. The Democrats' EGO model was so successful that the Republican wing of the Cold War consensus emulated it, with President Dwight Eisenhower launching his own EGOs, such as the Committee for the Marshall Plan, to promote his policies.

The ensuing chapters show how EGOs operated during the height of the Cold War. During the run-up to American involvement in the Vietnam War, Levinson notes, President Lyndon B. Johnson did not use EGOs to sell his policies: He didn't need them, since the American people and Capitol Hill were at that point broadly supportive of Washington's involvement in Southeast Asia. Such was not the case by the time President Richard Nixon took over the war, and the Nixon White House breathed new life into the long-established but politically inert American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to help sell his policy of Vietnamization.

Levinson's chapter on the late Cold War, focused on President Ronald Reagan's use of EGOs, shows yet more continuities. The EGO network born in the 1980s, built around such organizations as the Heritage Foundation and various Cuban exile groups, served as the backbone of right-wing foreign-policy politics that extended well into the 1990s and informed Republican thinking during the war on terror.

Unlike John Mearsheimer and Stephan Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Levinson places the onus of American interventionism upon the presidency. Pressure groups such as the Iraqi National Congress and the Project for the New American Century "did not coerce the [George W. Bush] administration into doing something it did not want to do," he argues, but rather served as an external partner that "helped persuade the public and Congress to go along." Noting that both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had backgrounds in the oil industry and were primed to "identify a national security interest in promoting the stability of the supply for oil," he suggests that they "needed no prodding from the outside."

Levinson concludes by looking forward, speculating about the new forms propaganda-laundering will take in the digital era. Interwar organizations had to operate on a hub-and-spoke model, headquartered in New York or Washington with local chapters staffed through standing social and professional networks. Not so now, when the costs of organizing and the barriers to disseminating information have both come down. The same absence of friction that enables people to challenge the existing status quo can be used to propagandize them back into it.

Like all good books, The President's Echo System raises further questions. Does Levinson's thesis hold as firmly in the late Cold War and beyond as it did in World War II and the early U.S.–Soviet confrontation? Or did presidential agency diminish once an interventionist consensus hardened into not just a norm of the presidency but an entrenched feature of the state itself, with a Congress that at times has been more hawkish than the president? No book serves as a final word on any given subject, but Levinson's work is a welcome addition to this evolving literature.

Despite such strengths, the book does contain a few historical inaccuracies. For instance, Levinson's chapter on World War II says that Sen. Robert A. Taft (R–Ohio) was "among a small number of legislators who had opposed sending aid to the Allies before Pearl Harbor." That misstates Taft's position: Like a number of conservative Republicans on the eve of the war, Taft did not oppose aiding Great Britain per se, but he compromised on the issue by reluctantly endorsing the "cash and carry" provision in later iterations of the Neutrality Act. The provision held that the Allies could purchase munitions and other supplies so long as they paid for them up front and transported the items themselves. The difference may seem pedantic, but such policy minutiae fed into the EGOs' work as they collapsed these distinctions and treated aid to the Allies as a binary policy choice when it was anything but.

Levinson has another lapse when he describes a photo of Sen. Burton K. Wheeler (D–Mont.) and the aviator turned America First activist Charles Lindbergh with "arms raised in the Nazi salute." In fact, Wheeler and Lindbergh were not Sieg Heil-ing; they were doing the aesthetically similar Bellamy salute, which Americans used to perform during the Pledge of Allegiance. Levinson's citations for the incident are a polemical essay in The New York Review of Books and the Rachel Maddow podcast Ultra, neither of which is a rigorous secondary source.

But these are small problems. The President's Echo System is a worthy examination of how foreign policy propaganda operates in the United States. If you're among those arrayed against that system, it's a valuable tool for understanding what you face.

The post How To Sell a War appeared first on Reason.com.

Next, the editors discuss former Vice President Mike Pence's claim that "Democrats have lost their mind" and examine the Democratic Party's continuing attraction to polarizing candidates, from Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner to California's unsettled gubernatorial race. The panel then checks in on the endlessly unresolved Iran conflict, before debating a proposal to eliminate property taxes for senior citizens and what it reveals about the growing trend toward narrowly targeted tax breaks. Finally, the editors answer a listener's question about whether late Sen. John McCain's (R–Ariz.) opposition to mixed martial arts helped shape the cultural forces that eventually brought the UFC to the White House lawn.

0:00—The Commission on Government Efficiency

14:04—Mike Pence's comments on Democratic Party

22:21—Graham Platner and Democratic candidate quality

30:19—Iran war update

33:01—Listener question on the White House UFC event

42:30—Should seniors pay property tax?

50:05—Weekly cultural recommendations

Mentioned in the podcast:

"Elon Did DOGE. Now Mamdani Is Trying COGE," by Megan O'Rourke

"Mamdani 'Balanced' New York City's Budget—With a Bailout From Albany," by Joe Lancaster

"Confidence in Market Principles," by Mike Pence

"Mike Pence's Sensible (and Probably Doomed) Plan To Fix the National Debt," by Eric Boehm

"Today Mike Pence May Find That All His Temporizing and Obfuscation About the Election Sacrificed His Integrity for Nothing," by Jacob Sullum

"Ken Paxton's Primary Victory Shows How Trump's Grudges Undermine His Party's Interests," by Jacob Sullum

"Don't Get a Nazi Tattoo or Praise Hitler: Advice for New Politicians," by Robby Soave

"Bleeding into the Mainstream," by Greg Beato

"Government's Ongoing Effort to Shutter Mixed Martial Arts," by Kerry Howley

"UFC: One Man's Brutal Spectacle Is Another's Eden," by A. Barton Hinkle

"Stop Giving Property Tax Breaks to Senior Citizens," by Eric Boehm

"Baby Boomers Are the Richest Generation in History. Why Do Politicians Keep Spending More on Them?" by Eric Boehm

"Abolish Property Taxes?" by Christian Britschgi

"Helen Lewis: The Dark Side of Genius," by Nick Gillespie

The post Why Socialism Won't Deliver Government Efficiency appeared first on Reason.com.

Most Americans knew the late Scott Adams for Dilbert, his beloved comic strip about an office worker and his dimwitted colleagues. Later in life, Adams became known as a kind of right-wing shock jockey. But the cartoonist caught the FBI's attention for something a little bit different: the sex crimes investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fl.) and a bizarre blackmail scheme that grew out of it.

The FBI released its files on Adams last week, five months after his death, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Reason. The records include the heavily redacted results of a background check and a request to Twitter—the social media network later renamed X—to preserve Adams' account data, including his private messages.

The investigation into Adams seems to have begun in the spring of 2021, when he was entangled in the Gaetz scandal. On March 30, 2021, The New York Times reported that Gaetz was under federal investigation for having sex with an underage teenager. Gaetz claimed that he was actually the victim of blackmail, and the federal investigation focused on the extortionists.

Three days later, The American Conservative published screenshots of a text conversation between Adams and Jake Novak, a former journalist who was then working on the media staff of the Israeli consulate in New York. (The Israeli consulate later told Politico that Novak's involvement in the Gaetz case "was not in any way, shape or form a part of his role at the consulate.")

Novak wrote to Adams that the investigation into Gaetz "is screwing up my efforts to free Bob Levinson," a former FBI agent who disappeared in 2013 while conducting an unauthorized mission for the CIA in Iran. "Gaetz's dad was secretly finding [sic] us. So I'm very much wanting this to be untrue. I've got a commando team leader friend of mine nervously waiting for wire transfers to clear," Novak explained. He claimed that Gaetz's extortion claim "burned" Bob Kent, a private investigator involved in the efforts to free Levinson.

Those efforts were unlikely to succeed. The federal government declared in 2020 that Levinson had died in Iranian captivity.

In a CNN interview, Kent acknowledged that he asked Gaetz's father for money to help rescue Levinson, but denied making any "threats" or "demands." A few months later, Florida businessman Stephen Alford—whom prosecutors called Kent's "associate"—pleaded guilty to making "materially false promises" of a pardon for Gaetz in exchange for funding the Levinson mission. Kent and Novak were not charged with crimes.

Years later, a congressional investigation concluded that Gaetz had indeed paid a 17-year-old girl for sex, though the federal government declined to prosecute him.

Adams never quite gave a satisfying explanation for why he was involved in the case. "Jake [Novak] and I shared an interest in the mechanics of persuasion, and in interesting business/political stories in general. Most often the stuff with a persuasion or Israel angle. That was our initial connection…people often tell me their scoops before they hit the news just to build credibility. Might have been that," he told Politico.

The FBI files do little to shed light on that mystery, but they do put some of Adams' old comments in a new light. "Do you think they looked at my personal data because I ever had a conversation with somebody from another country? Probably. And I can't find that out, can I? If I sued the government, could I find out if they looked at my data? I could FOIA the FBI," he said in a 2022 livestream. It turns out that the answer to these questions was yes.

The post Why did the FBI Want <i>Dilbert</i> Creator Scott Adams' Twitter Data? appeared first on Reason.com.

The trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts flouted the will of Congress when they renamed the institution after President Donald Trump, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled on Friday. Whatever your opinion of Trump or JFK, the decision is a useful reminder that the president, no matter what he might think, is not above the law.

The Kennedy Center's Board of Trustees, which is chaired by Trump himself and stacked with his cronies, "overstepped its statutory bounds by unilaterally renaming the Kennedy Center after President Trump," U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper concluded in Beatty v. Trump. "In 1964, Congress deliberately rechristened the 'National Cultural Center' the 'John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.' The text, structure, and evolution of the organic statute makes the institution's name abundantly clear."

Trump was predictably outraged by Cooper's assault on his vanity. "Judge Cooper ruled that the 36 Member Board of Trustees, which unanimously voted to add the name 'TRUMP' onto the former Kennedy Center, making it The Trump Kennedy Center, did not have the right to do such an addition, and the name, 'TRUMP,' must be removed," the president huffed on Truth Social. "Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself!"

Trump's complaint is striking for two reasons. First, it suggests that Trump, contrary to what you might have surmised from this controversy and decades of similar evidence, is familiar with the concept of shame. Second, Trump makes no attempt to argue that Cooper got the law wrong. As usual, Trump is simply frustrated by the limits that the law imposes on his whims.

On December 18, the Kennedy Center's board voted to change the institution's name. The very next day, 17 letters were added to the building's portico, giving the place an awkward new name: "THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS."

Although she is officially a member of the center's board, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D–Ohio) had no say in that decision. In addition to Trump and 32 other presidential appointees, the board includes 23 ex officio members who serve by virtue of their positions in federal or local government. But in May 2025, the board decided that ex officio trustees like Beatty would no longer be allowed to vote. Beatty instead expressed her displeasure at the name change by filing a federal lawsuit. Her argument was straightforward: "Because Congress named the center by statute, changing the Kennedy Center's name requires an act of Congress."

It is not hard to see why Cooper agreed with Beatty. When Congress amended the National Cultural Center Act in 1964, it established a "bureau" within the Smithsonian Institution that "shall be directed by a board to be known as the Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts." It instructed the trustees to "construct within the Smithsonian Institution…a building to be designated as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts."

The board's "duty," Congress said, "shall be to maintain and administer the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and site thereof as the National Center for the Performing Arts, a living memorial to John Fitzgerald Kennedy." It added that the Kennedy Center would be "the sole national memorial to the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy within the city of Washington and its environs."

The amendments changed the name of the law to the "John F. Kennedy Center Act" and replaced all references to the "National Cultural Center" with "John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts." Congress added that "any designation or reference to the National Cultural Center in any other law, map, regulation, document, record, or other paper of the United States shall be held to designate or refer to such Center as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts."

The law "refers to the institution as the 'John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' no fewer than two dozen times," Cooper noted. "There can be no confusion about the name Congress gave it." In fact, he said, "it is hard to imagine a more intentional legislative effort to call the Center by its chosen name."

Trump et al. "do not contest that the Center must be named for President Kennedy," Cooper wrote. Instead, they "posit that the 'Trump Kennedy Center' is merely a
'secondary name.'" But "that convenient reframing is too cute by half—and belied by the record."

On December 18, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the trustees "have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center." The next day, "President Trump's name was affixed to the front portico of the main Kennedy Center building—above President Kennedy's, to boot," Cooper noted. "The joint name has since been featured on the Center's official website, email communications, letterhead, and logo. The Center even filed a trademark application with the institution's new name and logo. These official changes reflect far more than an innocuous nicknaming."

In short, Cooper said, "the 'Trump Kennedy Center' label adds an entirely new name to the Center's formal title and relegates President Kennedy's name to second place. If that is not a renaming, what is?"

Cooper identified another way in which Trump's self-aggrandizement violated federal law. A provision that Congress enacted in 1983 says "no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts." It makes exceptions for "any plaque acknowledging a gift from a foreign country," "any plaque on a theater chair or a theater box acknowledging the gift of such chair or box," and "any inscription on the marble walls in the north or south galleries, the Hall of States, or the Hall of Nations acknowledging a major contribution." In 2012, Congress imposed another restriction, prohibiting donor acknowledgments on the exterior of the building.

Trump et al. argued that adding his name to the portico did not qualify as a memorial. "That suggestion is risible, both in light of the record evidence and as a matter of common sense," Cooper said. "The lettering literally reads: 'The Donald J. Trump and [the] John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.'"

When Leavitt announced the new name, she said it was meant to recognize "the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building"—"not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation." Roma Daravi, the center's vice president for public relations, likewise said the name change "recognizes that the current Chairman saved the institution from financial ruin and physical destruction."

The renaming clearly "was meant to honor President Trump's work on the Center," Cooper said. "And no wonder—why add an individual's name to the very title of an institution if not to commemorate him?"

Trump et al. "quibble with the terms of Congress's clear proscription, arguing, for
instance, that the lettering on the front portico is permissible because a 'memorial' can only honor some 'past impression' of a person or entity, and Mr. Trump is the sitting president," Cooper noted. "This is more than a stretch. As a textual matter, Congress has not just banned public 'memorials' at the site, but 'plaques in the nature of memorials.' In any event, according to the Press Secretary, the 'Trump Kennedy Center' name recognized the 'unbelievable work President Trump' had already done to 'salvag[e]' the building during the first year of his second term. The renaming was thus an effort to ensure that future visitors would be aware of the President's 'past' work."

The defendants also argued that a "memorial" cannot honor someone who is still alive. Cooper disagreed: "Nothing in the plain text of the statute endorses such a constricted reading. And nothing in the ordinary meaning of 'memorial' suggests that the word necessarily denotes posthumous commemoration, even by the Defendants' own cited dictionary definition." The exceptions that Congress made, which allowed "plaques in the nature of memorials" acknowledging financial supporters, likewise indicate that the category goes beyond references to dead people.

You might not care what this particular entertainment venue is called. You might even question whether the federal government should be funding such a facility at all. But as with Trump's grand plans for replacing the demolished East Wing of the White House, the issue here goes beyond the embarrassment of the president's unquenchable thirst for self-glorification and public adulation.

In ways large and small, Trump has repeatedly acted as if he can do whatever he wants, without regard to the rule of law or the separation of powers. Given that track record, Cooper's rebuke is a modest but welcome vindication of those principles.

The post Trump Broke the Law When He Slapped His Name on the Kennedy Center, a Federal Judge Says appeared first on Reason.com.

Federal officials can't get their story straight on whether there is a hunger strike going on at an immigration detention center in New Jersey.

New Jersey activist groups say hundreds of detainees inside Delaney Hall, a privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Newark, launched a hunger strike over Memorial Day weekend to protest insufficient and spoiled food, medical neglect, poor living conditions, and abuse. The allegations have led to daily protests and violent skirmishes outside the detention center. The Guardian reported on Saturday that the hunger strike was entering its ninth day.

But the government's position on the hunger strike has shifted between claiming it doesn't exist, to threatening to force-feed the nonexistent strikers, to claiming there was only a handful of detainees on hunger strike.

Last Tuesday, an official Department of Homeland Security (DHS) social media account posted that there was "NO HUNGER STRIKE" at Delaney Hall. This response was not surprising. There have been multiple reports of hunger strikes at various DHS detention centers, but the DHS has denied all of them.

But White House border czar Tom Homan said in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that same day that strikers would be force-fed "if it gets bad enough."

"And matter of fact, if it gets bad enough and the prisoners feel like they're putting themselves in extreme danger, medical danger, then we'll force-feed them," Homan said. "We will get a court order and force-feed them."

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin added to the confusion on Wednesday when he said during a meeting of President Donald Trump's Cabinet that there were "only a handful of individuals" refusing to eat and that it was only because they wanted their "ethnic right food."

"They can go back to their country and get whatever food they want," Mullin continued.

The immigrant advocacy group Cosecha published a handwritten letter reportedly signed by nearly 300 Delaney detainees. The letter said that the signees have witnessed individuals with "illnesses such as HIV, cancer, diabetes, heart problems, among others, who are not receiving proper medical attention for the aforementioned conditions."

"It is public knowledge that agents have arrested individuals with physical limitations such as deaf, mute, blind individuals, elderly persons, and even pregnant women," the letter continued. "We see young people with approved juvenile status cases, with whom we are living in detention centers. There is also a high spread of COVID-19 in detention centers, and the flu is constant among detainees, which could lead to outbreaks of illnesses or epidemics."

Lawyers for the detainees also pushed back against Mullin's claim that their dispute was over food preference, rather than food edibility.

"Many detainees have been subjected to having worms in their food, and I wouldn't say, as Mr. Mullin stated, that is an 'ethnic' choice of food," Alex Minogue, an attorney at Nova Law Group who represents detainees being held at Delaney Hall, told CNN Saturday. "I think they just don't want to eat worms."

On Saturday, the DHS published a press release claiming to debunk "categorically false smears" about Delaney Hall being spread by "sanctuary politicians," which presumably doesn't include Homan and Mullin. The press release said there was no hunger strike at Delaney Hall, nor was there any medical neglect or lack of nutrition.

"No lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been better treated than illegal aliens," DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in the statement. "They are provided 3 meals a day, medical care, and receive full due process."

A medical examiner's report recently concluded that an ICE detainee in Arizona died from complications from a severe tooth infection.

The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

The post DHS Can't Decide If There's a Hunger Strike Going on at a New Jersey Detention Center appeared first on Reason.com.

More than $30,000 in cash seized from two Indiana massage parlors is missing.

Police seized the money in November 2023 as part of a joint state and local raid on two northern Indiana massage parlors—Jade Massage in Winfield and Relax Spa in Crown Point—and associated businesses and houses. Authorities began investigating the spas after allegedly receiving anonymous tips that prostitution took place there.

Four penis massages for an undercover detective later, authorities raided the businesses and seized more than $97,000 in cash, along with a car. Spa owners Guan Yu and Wujiao Liu, a married couple, were arrested. Their case is ongoing—and their cash is missing.

State police are now investigating what happened. Maybe there's an innocent explanation for the missing cash; this could well come down to carelessness, not corruption. Regardless, this case represents yet another instance of police profiting off sex work criminalization.

The Search for the Missing Cash

Robert Byrd, who was sworn in as Winfield's town marshal in April 2025, "assumed that the money had been placed in a secure account established through the Winfield Clerk-treasurer's Office or a local bank," reports the Post-Tribune.

It wasn't.

Eventually, Byrd tracked some of the seized cash down to a rented storage locker, where bills and coins were stashed in plastic bins.

But Byrd could locate only $63,473.86 of the $97,014.37 that was taken. $33,540.51 was missing.

Lake County prosecutor Bernard A. Carter has now asked Indiana state police "to thoroughly investigate this matter and to make every effort to recover the missing funds." The state police agreed.

The fact that it took some sleuthing for Byrd to discover where the money was stored is itself incredible. Evidence is supposed to be well-tracked and well-documented. And cash seized during an investigation could eventually need to be returned (remember, no one has yet been convicted in this case).

And if this turns out to be more than just sloppy police work? That wouldn't exactly be surprising, given the perverse incentives and ample opportunities for corruption that massage parlor prostitution cases present.

The Massage Parlor Raid Racket  

Anonymous tips about sexual services being offered along with massages can be used to justify months of undercover visits from law enforcement agents seeking massages. (Later, they will say the masseuses could be trafficking victims—which, if true, would make their months of visits without intervention especially cruel.) And any offer of sex acts with massages can be used to justify raids.

Asian massage parlors tend to be cash-heavy businesses, so there's often plenty of cash around to seize—and, unlike when you seize money from bank accounts, no definitive record trail. The workers and owners at these businesses are often immigrants, for whom language barriers and other considerations could make it harder to fight back. And if police throw a "human trafficking" allegation in there, no mater how unsubstantiated, everyone just shrugs at whatever happens to those arrested and pats police on the back for a job well done.

Missing money aside, the Winfield case is a fine indictment of how so many massage parlor raid cases operate.

The Search for Penis Masseuses

Months before the spa raid, Detective Benjamin Moyars, co-chair of the Indiana Protection for Abused and Trafficked Humans Law Enforcement Task Force, went to Jade Massage and got his butt and penis massaged using police funds, according to a probable cause affidavit. ("He did not ejaculate," it says.) That was on March 3, 2023.

In April, he went back and got a penis massage from two women this time. One of them "appeared to not speak English," the affidavit says.

In June, Moyars went back twice—once to Jade Massage and once to Relax Massage. Same thing.

Over the course of the four months, Moyars spent $385—and who knows how much in police time and expenses—on proving that three women would massage his genitals along with the rest of his body.

After that, authorities spent several more months surveilling the businesses. Nothing in the probable cause affidavit indicates that they observed signs of forced prostitution, a.k.a. sex trafficking, during this surveillance.

Nonetheless, police raided the businesses and Liu and Yu were charged with not just promoting prostitution but also promotion of human sexual trafficking, in addition to being charged for failing to remit sales tax. Liu was also charged with battery against a public safety official after allegedly spitting at an officer during the course of her arrest.

According to the probable cause affidavit, a sign glimpsed in Relax Massage during the raid stated: "Therapist should stick to the work principle. Don't practice the therapy as porn or you will have the consequence."

But—in a fine example of how police often twist language in order to turn ordinary prostitution cases into sex trafficking cases—the affidavit states that "Detective Moyars advised in his experience with human trafficking and prostitution investigations, owners pay the female employees so little that they are effectively forced to perform sexual services in the hopes of cash tips to support themselves." Voila: Even if the owners did not condone the sex acts, let alone make anyone perform them, they are deemed guilty of "forcing" people into prostitution.

Interviews with four "victims"—two of them the same women who allegedly massaged Moyar's penis—suggest that these women came to work at Jade and Relax spas voluntarily, were not confined there by the owners, were not subject to violence or threats, and were paid for their work.

In the News

If Mayday Health and the abortion lobby want to sue us for defending unborn life, bring it on. pic.twitter.com/MTqiDuItGj

— Larry Rhoden (@LarryRhodenSD) May 29, 2026

Abortion advertising ban is unconstitutional, says Mayday Health. A New York–based nonprofit that provides information about accessing abortion pills is suing South Dakota over its ban on abortion-related advertising. Mayday Health "and a Democratic former South Dakota lawmaker, Nancy Turbak Berry, filed the lawsuit Friday in federal court against South Dakota's Republican governor and attorney general," South Dakota Searchlight reports:

The new law says no person may knowingly dispense, distribute, sell or advertise an article or thing designed, adapted or intended to produce an abortion. The ban also covers any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing that is "advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing an abortion."

Violations are felonies punishable by up to two years in prison and a $4,000 fine. The law also gives the state attorney general authority to recover civil penalties of $10,000 per violation.

The lawsuit alleges it's unconstitutional to prohibit advertising that's protected by the free speech guarantees in the First Amendment.

Mayday was involved in a previous legal tussle with South Dakota (which this newsletter covered in January), after South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley went after Mayday over ads that it had taken out at gas stations.

The ads said: "Pregnant? Don't want to be? Learn more at Mayday.Health."

Jackley said this constituted deceptive advertising because the ads didn't point out that abortion is illegal in South Dakota.

Mayday counter-sued Jackley, seeking to prevent him "from punishing Plaintiff Mayday Health for publishing truthful information about reproductive healthcare."

South Dakota and Mayday ultimately settled those cases. The agreement involved Mayday yanking the gas station ads.

On Substack

Eminent domain for data centers? Bonnie Kristian reports on Georgia officials using eminent domain power to seize 20 to 30 homes so a private company called Georgia Power can build new power lines. A woman named Ansley Brown has been speaking out about this on TikTok, blaming artificial intelligence. The power lines are not set to serve only data centers, but "a local news story confirms that at least one data center is involved here, and it's plausible that the data center(s) is the straw that broke the camel's back, even if there's a lot more straw," Kristian writes.

"Now, there's a sense in which the artificial intelligence piece of this story is a distraction," she continues:

My point is not that it's bad for Brown's mom to lose her house because AI is bad and therefore there should be no data centers.

I'm very skeptical of many proposed uses for AI, but as I've argued here before, its utility costs are wholly relative to the value of its output. If AI is doing a lot of good, then probably we do want to use a lot of electricity for it, which may well mean building new data centers and power lines. And as skeptical as I am, I think the good it does is not zero, so I'm not categorically against this kind of construction.

The issue is that Georgia Power is a private company that appears to be using eminent domain to take people's homes against their will to meet other private companies' expansion plans.

As Kristian points out, it's not entirely clear whether the new power lines would be needed even if a new data center wasn't being constructed. But regardless of what sort of construction is primarily driving the Georgia Power situation, eminent domain issues may become a bigger issue as construction of data centers expands. It seems important for people who are not hyperbolic AI-doomers to be speaking out against this.

Read This Thread

Hard to express just how utterly divorced the political rhetoric around porn is from the reality. I've worked in the industry for more than 20 years. I see porn all day long. I have never once seen necrophilia or bestiality on an adult site.But that's what's being used to push antiporn laws.

— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile.bsky.social) 2026-05-28T16:10:49.858Z

More Sex & Tech

• The Department of Homeland Security is ramping up spending on iris scanners.

• "Texas for now can require proof of age to download a smart phone app, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday, unpausing a trial court injunction that halted the law on First Amendment grounds," Bloomberg Law reports.

• Lizzie Borden, director of the 1986 drama Working Girls, talks about the ways sex work has changed over the past 40 years and the ways it hasn't. "There's a lot of argument about whether prostitution be legalised or be the Scandinavian model," said Borden. "Decriminalisation would be best because that's the only way nobody gets punished, so sex workers still have customers."

• "A federal judge had an extramarital affair with a high-ranking police officer—including having sex in the judge's chambers that was overheard by staff—and initially lied about the actions but remains on the bench after receiving a 'private reprimand,'" the Associated Press reports.

The post Indiana Police Misplace More Than $30,000 Seized in Massage Parlor Raids appeared first on Reason.com.