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DOGE Claimed $110 Billion in Spending Cuts That Couldn't Be Verified, Audit Finds

2026-08-06T18:56:48Z

When Elon Musk and President Donald Trump launched the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), they promised to cut trillions in federal spending and bring the receipts.

In the end, they didn't cut nearly as much as was promised.

As for the "wall of receipts" that DOGE highlighted on its website? Many of those seem to have been exaggerated, fabricated, or impossible to verify, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

In all, $110 billion of DOGE's claimed savings could not be verified by GAO auditors. That doesn't mean those savings did not occur, but it certainly underscores the chaotic manner by which DOGE operated, which likely limited its effectiveness.

The GAO says it could not verify a staggering 96 percent of the savings DOGE claimed from cutting various federal grants because the department "did not provide sufficient information to verify" those cuts. Similarly, the GAO points out that "several issues limit the transparency and reliability" of savings DOGE claimed to have achieved by terminating federal contracts and leases.

In some cases, DOGE seems to have completely fabricated those "savings."

For example, DOGE initially called for terminating a $1.7 billion contract that provides information technology assistance to military medical facilities around the world. After meeting with Pentagon officials, however, DOGE "agreed no action should be taken to terminate the contract," the GAO report explains.

The contract was never terminated. No spending was cut. And yet, that $1.7 billion is included in the "savings" listed on DOGE's "wall of receipts."

That's hardly the only example.

There are 13,476 contracts listed on the DOGE "wall of receipts" that were supposedly terminated to save taxpayers about $61 billion, but in many cases those contracts were never actually ended, the GAO found. "No termination action was taken on 2,503 of the contracts, representing $27.4 billion of reported savings," the GAO reports.

The new GAO report seems to confirm earlier reports by various media outlets that raised questions about the validity and accuracy of DOGE's claimed savings.

While the DOGE remains perhaps the best policy idea of the second Trump administration, the effort was undeniably hamstrung by a lack of execution and a preference for scoring political points rather than a serious attempt at reducing spending. As I've argued before, DOGE should have sought more assistance from libertarians and conservatives who actually understand how the federal budget works.

Yes, Congress did pass a paltry rescission bill that cut $9 billion in federal spending as a direct result of the DOGE effort. Despite that, overall government spending increased during Trump's first year in office.

The conclusion is inescapable. DOGE was a well-intentioned failure that may have harmed future, hopefully more serious, attempts at cutting spending.

"The data quality issues identified in this report limit the value of the Wall of Receipts to policymakers," concludes the GAO report. "In addition, when government data are not reliable, it can hinder the public's trust in government."

The DOGE was a good idea, but the Trump administration failed to deliver on its promise.

The post DOGE Claimed $110 Billion in Spending Cuts That Couldn't Be Verified, Audit Finds appeared first on Reason.com.

Courts Say the Justice Department Is Shredding the 'Presumption of Regularity.' It Never Deserved Extra Trust

2026-08-06T18:36:16Z

Federal judges across the country say the Trump administration has lost the confidence of courts, complaining that the "presumption of regularity"—the traditional trust that the government is acting in good faith—has been "dislodged," "destroyed," and "undeniably eroded."

The warnings come amid the Trump administration's radical makeover of the Department of Justice (DOJ), which has seen the exodus of hundreds of career attorneys and the elevation of others based largely on loyalty to the president. This has led to a noticeable decline in the quality of court filings by the DOJ, repeated instances of its attorneys being threatened with sanctions, and an end to the department's traditionally near-perfect record in high-profile prosecutions.

But it certainly might not be a bad thing if judges were more skeptical of the government.

The presumption of regularity is a formal legal principle that raises the burden of proof for parties in court alleging things like government retaliation or selective prosecution, but it's also "a mindset or a cultural commitment within the federal courts to give the government the benefit of the doubt," Carissa Hessick, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, tells Reason.

The cultural side of the presumption of regularity is based largely on federal judges' perception that the Justice Department holds its attorneys to particularly high professional standards, but in case after case, federal judges say those standards have disappeared. A recent ProPublica review found more than 40 recent cases in which judges referenced the presumption of regularity in their opinions. The New York Times also recently noted the rising frustration of judges.

However, former U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady, who was appointed to the Eastern District of Virginia in 2007 and retired in 2023, says the presumption is "overstated in its importance."

"District judges look at prosecutors individually and assess whether they're honest, whether they're ethical and credible based in part on their reputation," O'Grady tells Reason. "So maybe that's a presumption of regularity, but also what happens in the courtroom."

The language in some of the cases, though, has been striking. In one of the most high-profile cases, the government's illegal deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis wrote, "You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you've destroyed it."

With exceptions for notable stylists or would-be stylists, federal judges have typically strived to maintain a measured, impersonal tone and have been hesitant to accuse the government of blatant misconduct in their opinions.

In a May 14 ruling, U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy wrote that the government "has proven unworthy of this trust at every point."

"The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ's tactics in this case is unsettling," McElroy wrote. "The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that '[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.'"

Is the presumption of regularity worth saving, though? The idea that the government deserves a higher level of trust than a private party simply because it is the government would strike many outside of a courtroom as illogical, if not dangerous.

"I don't know that you need to have purposeful misconduct on the part of attorneys to say maybe the presumption of regularity isn't the best idea," Hessick says.

Hessick wrote in a 2019 blog post that the presumption is built on a "shaky foundation" of a few cases, which do little more than invoke the phrase.

Most notably, the Supreme Court cited the presumption of regularity in U.S. v. Armstrong, a 1996 case in which defendants charged with crack cocaine and firearms offenses unsuccessfully tried to compel the federal government to disclose charging data showing that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) was selectively targeting black men.

In essence, the Court ruled that litigants alleging government impropriety face a higher burden of proof than they would against a private party because of the courts' self-referencing assumption that government officials are acting in the faithful furtherance of their official duties.

The Court would later write in a 2004 Freedom of Information Act case that "there is a presumption of legitimacy accorded to the Government's official conduct. The presumption perhaps is less a rule of evidence than a general working principle. However the rule is characterized, where the presumption is applicable, clear evidence is usually required to displace it."

Hessick argues that the current presumption mutated out of a much older and more benign legal principle that, in a dispute between two parties, a record like a bank statement or ledger was assumed to be correct—that is, presumed regular—unless contrary evidence was introduced.

"It was really just a way of figuring out how to deal with evidence and how to set up a tie-break," Hessick says. "It got distorted from a rule about how we're going to treat evidence into a reason to not make the government play by the same rules as other people."

Consistent with his belief that individual reputation matters more to federal judges than a vague concept, O'Grady believes that holding individual federal prosecutors responsible for their actions will solve the larger question of the DOJ's professionalism.

O'Grady is a member of the Article III Coalition of Keep Our Republic, a nonprofit civic engagement group. The coalition of more than 50 retired judges advocates judicial independence.

For assistant U.S. attorneys forced to choose between doing something unethical or leaving the department, O'Grady says the choice is clear: Every Justice Department attorney has a law license that requires ethical conduct and has taken an oath to uphold the rule of law.

"It's a shame, but we move forward," O'Grady says. "The rule of law is what separates us from the rest of the world and has held us together for 250 years over some really significant, traumatic times, whether you're talking about the internment of the Japanese, 'separate but equal,' or some of the 9/11 interrogations. We've made some significant mistakes, but the rule of law has eventually gotten it right. It's made most of the decisions that are made here good ones, so this, too, will be resolved."

The post Courts Say the Justice Department Is Shredding the 'Presumption of Regularity.' It Never Deserved Extra Trust appeared first on Reason.com.

A Major 'Online Safety' Bill Cleared a Senate Committee. More Crackdowns on Internet Freedom Could Be Coming.

2026-08-06T18:11:40Z

The bipartisan push to restrict internet freedom is gaining momentum.

On Wednesday, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee voted on five bills related to online safety and AI, including the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act and Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which free speech advocates have warned would threaten online privacy and freedom.

The SCREEN Act, introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), would require pornography websites to block minors using age verification. The bill states that "shielding minors from access to online pornographic content is a compelling government interest" and its proposed measures are the "least restrictive means for Congress" to achieve this goal. Simple age attestation on a website (entering a birthday) is not enough to shield children's retinas; companies must verify IP addresses as well.

Such verification measures would effectively "force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they access lawful speech," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The online freedom organization also notes that the bill does not just apply to minors. EFF warns, "If websites and apps are expected to reliably identify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults."

Despite these privacy concerns, a majority of the committee voted in favor of the SCREEN Act, but the bill did not advance because the members did not meet quorum. The committee did, however, unanimously support KOSA, another online safety bill that free speech lawyer Ari Cohn called a "constitutional fiasco."

"It imposes what courts have refused—on First Amendment grounds—to impose for decades: a duty to protect listeners from subjective, unknowable reactions to constitutionally protected speech," Cohn wrote on Wednesday.

KOSA, which Congress has considered in various forms since 2022, requires "covered online platforms" like social media sites and video streaming services to "implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17." The most recent version of Sen. Marsha Blackburn's (R–Tenn.) bill is expected to pass, but could face opposition from the House of Representatives, reports The Hill. The main point of disagreement between the two chambers is a "duty of care" measure, which would require social media companies to "prevent and mitigate certain harms that they know their platforms and products are causing to young users." An FAQ page by cosponsor Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) claims the "Kids Online Safety Act would not censor, block, or remove any content from the internet," and that the duty of care "requires social media companies to prevent and mitigate certain harms that they know their platforms and products are causing to young users as a result of their own design choices." But, as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has noted, "design features" can be "broadly defined to include any feature of the platform that would cause minors to spend time on it."

The committee's children's safety push did not end with KOSA. The committee also advanced a bill that would require users under 18 to get parental consent before using chatbots, and another "requiring AI companies to implement critical privacy safeguards" on chatbots. It also supported the Children's Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act, which would require the Federal Trade Commission to make a plan to "address" the potential harms from AI-enabled toy products and would require the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to conduct a comprehensive study about the potential harms of AI-enabled toys. The committee reportedly planned to mark up additional AI bills, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) told Politico last week that the committee moved the markup to September due to a lack of "bipartisan agreement" on the issue.

And there may be even more opportunities for lawmakers to regulate the digital world. On Tuesday, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D–Ariz.) introduced the Parental Approval for Youth Social Media Act, which would "require social media platform providers to obtain parental consent with respect to children creating or maintaining accounts or profiles on their platforms." The bill would also "require platforms to verify users' ages and parental authorization before allowing minors to access social media." As The Hill noted, Gallego was inspired to propose the bill after France banned social media use for children under 15. Gallego wrote on X that the required age to use social media should be higher.

Preventing children from having too much screen time or watching inappropriate content used to be the role of parents. Unfortunately, lawmakers and much of the American public now believe the state is the best arbiter of the online realm. If KOSA and other "online safety" bills become law, the U.S. will join the rest of the Western world in eroding online freedom rather than defending it.

The post A Major 'Online Safety' Bill Cleared a Senate Committee. More Crackdowns on Internet Freedom Could Be Coming. appeared first on Reason.com.

A Federal Judge Rejects National Firearms Act Regulations, Saying Their Tax Rationale No Longer Applies

2026-08-06T17:30:52Z

When Congress approved the National Firearms Act (NFA) in 1934, it framed the law as a tax measure, justifying its regulations as tools to facilitate the generation of revenue. That choice matters, a federal judge in Texas ruled on Wednesday, because several NFA provisions no longer serve that function. When Congress eliminated the federal taxes on making and transferring sound suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns in 2025, U.S. District Judge James Hendrix concluded, it also eliminated the constitutional basis for the ancillary rules governing those activities.

Since the decision in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF bars enforcement of the challenged firearm regulations against the plaintiffs, it might look like a victory for gun rights. But it does not hinge on the Second Amendment, and it upholds a broader principle: The federal government's powers are limited to those enumerated in the Constitution, and congressional legislation must be authorized by one of those powers.

"Because today's NFA does not generate any revenue from untaxed firearms, its regulatory provisions cannot be upheld under the taxing power," Hendrix writes. "And there is no sign in the NFA's text, structure, or statutory history that Congress invoked any other power in crafting the NFA provisions at issue. Thus, the regulatory provisions must be enjoined as unconstitutional because they exceed Congress's enumerated powers."

The decision addresses consolidated lawsuits by two sets of plaintiffs, including gun owners, businesses, gun rights groups, and 15 states. Although the plaintiffs also argued that the NFA provisions they challenged violated the Second Amendment, they conceded that Hendrix did not need to reach that issue if he concluded that the regulations are no longer a valid exercise of congressional powers.

The NFA targeted weapons thought to be favored by gangsters, including machine guns and "destructive devices" such as bombs and grenades as well as "any silencer," rifles with barrels shorter than 16 inches, and shotguns with barrels shorter than 18 inches. In addition to an annual occupational tax on importers, manufacturers, and dealers, it imposed a $200 tax on the production and transfer of the covered products. That tax, equivalent to about $5,000 today, was meant to be prohibitive.

Legislators were clear that they were relying on their tax power, the same rationale they had offered for the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914 and would again invoke when they approved the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937. Although that excuse might seem puzzling today, since Congress has long invoked its authority to regulate interstate commerce as an all-purpose license to legislate, the idea that the latter power could justify outright bans on politically disfavored products had yet to gain currency. The Commerce Clause did not become the go-to rationale for federal legislation until the Supreme Court expanded its meaning to encompass pretty much anything Congress wanted to do.

The NFA was enacted as part of the Internal Revenue Code, and Attorney General Homer S. Cummings explained why when he testified in favor of the bill. He noted that the federal government "of course" had "no inherent police powers to go into certain localities and deal with local crime." Still, he said, "the power of taxation" could be used to restrict guns and accessories that Congress viewed as especially dangerous.

"If we made a statute absolutely forbidding any human being to have a machine gun," Cummings explained, "you might say there is some constitutional question involved. But when you say, 'We will tax the machine gun,' and when you say that the absence of a license showing payment of the tax has been made indicates that a crime has been perpetrated, you are easily within the law."

The NFA included various requirements ostensibly aimed at facilitating the collection of taxes. Anyone who wanted to make or receive a covered product had to file an application for approval and registration with the Treasury Department, accompanied by fingerprints, a photograph, personal information, and a detailed description of the relevant firearm or accessory. He had to send a copy of the application to the chief law enforcement officer in his local jurisdiction, who was instructed to supply any information that might disqualify the applicant.

That process is currently handled by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), which used to be part of the Treasury Department but has been a division of the Justice Department since 2003. ATF approval "can take weeks," Hendrix notes.

These requirements were presented as part of a revenue-raising scheme. But last year, Hendrix says, Congress fatally undermined that rationale with respect to most of the covered products by passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which repealed the taxes on their production and transfer. "By zeroing out the transfer and making taxes on 'any firearm' except for 'a machinegun or a destructive device,'" he writes, "the One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated the constitutional basis for the NFA's regulation of those firearms."

The Trump administration argued that the NFA's registration, reporting, and record-keeping requirements could still be justified under the Commerce Clause. Hendrix, a Donald Trump appointee, disagreed.

"Because Congress enacted the challenged NFA provisions under the Taxing Clause only, the NFA cannot be retroactively justified under another power that Congress never invoked, such as its authority to regulate interstate commerce," Hendrix writes. "Although a statute's constitutionality does not depend on express recitals of an enumerated power, courts must be able to discern the constitutional basis on which Congress relied. And there is no sign here that Congress relied on its commerce power to craft the provisions."

In fact, Hendrix notes, the NFA's scope extends beyond interstate commerce in some ways. The law covers a firearm or suppressor "made in one's home or transferred in a private sale between neighbors (an intrastate activity)" as well as a firearm or suppressor "purchased commercially and shipped to a customer in another state (an interstate activity)."

The government "cannot employ post-hoc justifications to save a statute based on an enumerated power that Congress never invoked," Hendrix writes. "The same goes for the courts."

Hendrix issued a permanent injunction that encompasses suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and (for one set of plaintiffs) a miscellaneous category that the NFA confusingly describes as "any other weapon." The order bars the federal government from enforcing the NFA's regulations "against the plaintiffs and, where applicable, the plaintiffs' agencies, political subdivisions, members, and customers."

The Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), which joined one of the lawsuits, welcomed Hendrix's decision. "This is a massive win and an important step forward in our strategic plan to end the NFA," FPC President Brandon Combs said. "We cannot wait to fully and finally eliminate this unconstitutional scheme so people can exercise their rights when, where, and how they choose."

The post A Federal Judge Rejects National Firearms Act Regulations, Saying Their Tax Rationale No Longer Applies appeared first on Reason.com.

Hawaii's End Run Around Citizens United Faces a First Amendment Roadblock

2026-08-06T16:38:46Z

When the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, the majority opinion reaffirmed that political speech is "indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true simply because the speech comes from a corporation."

The state of Hawaii disagrees. In May, Democratic Gov. Josh Green signed Act 11 into law, which strips away corporations' "power to spend money or contribute anything of value to influence elections or ballot measures" in the state. This means that under the law, all corporations—except for political action committees, political parties, and candidate committees—cannot fund initiatives on ballot measures, support proposed amendments, or contribute money to campaigns.

The law cuts directly into the mission of organizations such as the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, a nonprofit that engages in political advocacy and education on ballot measures, legislation, and candidates.

In June, the group sued the state in district court, with the help of the Institute for Free Speech. The nonprofit is asking the court to void the law as a violation of the First and 14th Amendments. It has also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to prevent Hawaii from enforcing the law while the court process plays out.

Tom Moore, senior fellow at the progressive think tank the Center for American Progress (CAP)—and the leading mind behind Hawaii's law and dozens more like it—tells Reason that every right a corporation has "attaches to some kind of power" bestowed by the state. Moore says the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United was "based on a false assumption" that states would "never change the underlying power grant."

Hawaii's argument rests on its use of the word "power" as opposed to "right." As the Legislature put it, "these political spending powers were never intended to be among the powers granted to corporations or other artificial persons by the State." In the state's telling, the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United merely "interpreted" the powers granted to corporations by the state, meaning Hawaii can revoke those powers at its discretion.

However, Owen Yeates, senior attorney at the Institute for Free Speech and counsel for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, tells Reason that Hawaii's law is "unconstitutionally vague" and "ignores 50 years of history." He says the Supreme Court has consistently found that corporations are "entities or groups" used by individuals to "exercise and give effect to their individual rights." That principle appears in cases such as NAACP v. Alabama (1958), Citizens United, Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta (2021), and First Choice Women's Resource Centers, Inc. v. Davenport (2026). In Bonta, the Court held that government regulations on the First Amendment cannot be "broad" or "broadly stifle" speech and must be done with "narrow specificity."

Hawaii's law would appear to violate that rule, with sweeping restrictions on what constitutes political activity and how corporations engage in it. Under the law, a Hawaii resident interested in a ballot measure or constitutional amendment up for a vote would be prohibited from pooling money with neighbors or friends through a nonprofit or association.

Collective group advocacy would also be impossible, unless done through a specified, state-sanctioned medium like a political action committee (PAC) or political party. Yeates says that's a violation of the right to association, which is essential to "maintaining our liberty." Associations give us "some power and control" over the political process, he adds.

While the state can create benefits granted to corporations, benefits cannot be "conditioned" on "giving up constitutional rights." That would violate the Supreme Court's unconstitutional conditions doctrine, which holds that the government "may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interests."

Moore says Hawaii's law is not an attempt to regulate corporate speech—a constitutionally protected interest; instead, it's a stipulation of the powers granted to corporations by the state. In his opinion, because the law doesn't "tell you that some things are allowed and some things are not allowed," there's no First Amendment quandary. "This is the state saying…we just don't create that kind of corporation anymore."

James Bopp Jr., the corporate and tax law attorney who represented Citizens United in its Supreme Court case, tells Reason Hawaii's logic is "absurd." He says the law is "so fraught with unconstitutional provisions, it's almost shocking that someone would propose it."

Bopp isn't the only one shocked by Hawaii throwing down the gauntlet.

Testifying before the state's Senate Committee on Commerce and Consumer Protection, Hawaii's Department of the Attorney General told lawmakers that "although states have the authority to determine what powers a corporation has, if a state tries to remove a corporation's power to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity, under Citizens United, a state would then be attempting to take away a corporation's right to speak."

It added that the state's prohibition on speech related to elections and ballot initiatives constitutes a "content-based speech restriction" and is likely a violation of the First Amendment.

Moore welcomes the legal challenge. He says the point of CAP's campaign is to get legislation like Hawaii's "passed somewhere" to "get a federal lawsuit going."

While Hawaii is the only state so far to enact his proposal, the nonprofit People United for Privacy (PUFP) has identified 20 states that have tried to pass similar laws in the past year through the legislative process, a ballot measure, or a constitutional amendment. However, none have been as successful as the Aloha State.

The idea has died in committee in all but three states, excluding a ballot measure proposed in Montana, two bills and a constitutional amendment being debated in Michigan, and a bill currently being considered in California that is expected to fail.

Zac Morgan, an attorney and senior fellow at PUFP, tells Reason these laws are "vague, arbitrary," and rely on "subjective standards." Still, the idea seems to have staying power. Matt Nese, vice president at PUFP, tells Reason he expects "reintroductions of all these other failed measures" in upcoming legislative sessions.

That's likely true. Moore says CAP has had "11 states approach us since Hawaii passed its laws." While he concedes that the Supreme Court is "never going to like this bill," he believes the Court will inevitably side with Hawaii because voiding the law would be akin to "tearing up two centuries of corporate law." Should it stand, Hawaii's law goes into effect on July 1, 2027.

Americans overwhelmingly think there's too much money in politics. Hawaii's carefully crafted wording may be good for public relations, but it's difficult to see how it passes constitutional muster.

The post Hawaii's End Run Around Citizens United Faces a First Amendment Roadblock appeared first on Reason.com.

Reality Show Participant's #Scandoval Sex Videos Aren't of "Public Interest" for California Anti-SLAPP Law Purposes

2026-08-06T16:38:10Z

From Leviss v. Madix, decided yesterday by California Court of Appeal Justice Victor Viramontes, joined by Justice Matthew Scherb:

This action arises out of the discovery of a private sexual affair, which garnered widespread media attention when news of the affair became public. Plaintiff and respondent Rachel Leviss had an affair with Tom Sandoval, the then-boyfriend of defendant and appellant Ariana Madix. At the time, Leviss, Madix, and Sandoval were all cast members on the reality television show, Vanderpump Rules.

Madix learned of the affair when she found sexually explicit videos of Leviss on Sandoval's cell phone, which Madix then recorded and sent to Leviss. After the affair became public, Leviss filed suit against Madix for Madix's alleged conduct in accessing, copying, and disseminating the videos.

Madix moved to strike the complaint under the California anti-SLAPP statute, which allows cases to be promptly dismissed when the cases are brought based on speech "in connection with a public issue," and are legally unfounded. If a case is thus dismissed, the prevailing defendant can recover her attorney fees from the losing plaintiff.

The majority rejected the motion, concluding that the defendant's alleged conduct wasn't speech on a public issue:

Here, the challenged activity that formed that basis of Leviss's claims against Madix was Madix's alleged conduct in accessing, copying, and disseminating sexually explicit videos of Leviss that Sandoval surreptitiously recorded on his cell phone…. Considering that Leviss chose to appear on a popular reality series that centered on its cast members' personal lives, Leviss's "romantic entanglements" may very well have been a topic of widespread public interest prior to the disclosure of her affair with her fellow cast member, Sandoval. However, Leviss's status as a person in the public eye does not mean that every aspect of her personal life was itself a matter of public concern.

For instance, in defining the scope of Penal Code section 647, the criminal "revenge porn" statute, the Legislature defined that the distribution of sexually explicit images "is not a matter of public concern or public interest solely because the depicted individual is a public figure." As our Supreme Court also has recognized, "legitimate public interest does not include 'a morbid and sensational prying into private lives for its own sake ….'"

At issue here are video recordings of Leviss engaging in a private sexual act at a private residence during a private FaceTime call with Sandoval. In her complaint, Leviss alleged that she never consented to Sandoval recording these calls, she was not aware that he was doing so, and she never intended for their intimate communications to be seen by anyone else.

While it appears both Leviss and Sandoval allowed Vanderpump Rules to film much of their personal lives as part of the reality show, there is no indication that the television cameras were rolling or that anyone else was present when Sandoval surreptitiously recorded Leviss engaging in a private sexual act…. [E]ven if Leviss's affair with Sandoval was widely known at the time due to their status as public figures, any public interest in their affair would not extend to private recordings depicting the most intimate aspects of the relationship….

To be clear, we do not suggest that any statements Madix may have made about the videos could not be in furtherance of her free speech rights in connection with an issue of public interest. If the actions giving rise to any of Leviss's claims against Madix were Madix's public comments about the videos, including their sexual content, then that speech could fall within the scope of [the anti-SLAPP law]. However, … … the actions that form the basis for Madix's purported liability and that we evaluate are not her statements about the videos, but her allegedly unauthorized acquisition and dissemination of the videos to Leviss and others….

As the dissent points out, Leviss's counsel did indicate that Leviss would be seeking damages for the "public scorn and ridicule" she faced because her counsel did not know how one could "separate out" those damages. However, to determine whether a plaintiff's claim arises out of protected activity under [the anti-SLAPP law], "we look to the allegedly wrongful and injurious conduct of the defendant, rather than the damage which flows from said conduct." Here, the allegedly wrongful and injurious conduct at issue in the anti-SLAPP motion was Madix's acquisition and dissemination of the videos, not the public scorn or ridicule that may have resulted from such dissemination….

[W]e express no opinion about the veracity of the allegations in the complaint or the merits of the claims alleged, including whether the conduct on which Leviss is basing her claims is actionable. In particular, we express no opinion as to whether Leviss can prove that Madix distributed the videos to anyone other than Leviss, or whether Leviss can prevail on her causes of action if, as Madix asserts, Leviss was the only person to whom Madix sent or showed the videos. For purposes of this appeal, we solely hold that Leviss's claims against Madix are not subject to … [an anti-SLAPP] motion to strike because Madix failed to satisfy her threshold burden of showing that the claims arose from constitutionally protected activity.

Justice John Shepard Wiley dissented:

Today's holding will astonish the enormous audience that followed #Scandoval.

Maybe you are not a fan of reality shows. Maybe you are like me: never heard of Vanderpump Rules or #Scandoval before this case.

You can get up to speed on these 15 minutes of popular culture by reading Aleksander, How Tom Sandoval Became the Most Hated Man in America, N.Y. Times Mag. [link added -EV]. This article, which the parties discussed in oral argument and urged us to consult, recounts the saga of three mass-marketed screen characters on a reality show. Tom Sandoval was in a committed relationship with Ariana Madix, who was close friends with Rachel Leviss. Madix discovered Sandoval was having an affair with Leviss. The betrayal launched a brouhaha the audience dubbed #Scandoval.

When a massive public audience gives a public name to an issue, that issue is of public concern. We judges can write all we want, but this public voted with its eyeballs.

The infamous sex tape was not "public": just three people saw it. But the discussion about the scandal has been whoppingly public. Leviss's complaint is filled with how the public nature of that discussion harmed her. At oral argument, Leviss's counsel stated Leviss's claims for damages would include compensation for the public scorn and ridicule. Leviss's counsel said he did not know how one could "separate out" those damages from the bad effects stemming from the sex tape alone. Because nearly nobody saw the tape, this case is mainly about the public scorn and ridicule. Leviss hated her national bad press and sued for redress. That is public, because a sustained national public found the whole affair fascinating. That is the goal of reality shows: grip a colossal audience. #Scandoval did.

Under Baral v. Schnitt (Cal. 2016), then, we have mixed causes of action: part private and part public. I would remand for the trial court to sort through this mixture.

The trial court denied Madix's motion on the grounds Madix broke the law by searching Sandoval's phone. But Madix's declaration can be read to say Sandoval gave Madix blanket consent to look through his phone. Under this reasonable interpretation, there was not enough to trigger the rule demanding "conclusive" proof.

Bryan J. Freedman, Summer E. Benson, and Jason H. Sunshine (Liner Freedman Taitelman + Cooley) and Mark J. Geragos and Kimberly M. Casper (Geragos & Geragos) represent Leviss.

The post Reality Show Participant's #Scandoval Sex Videos Aren't of "Public Interest" for California Anti-SLAPP Law Purposes appeared first on Reason.com.

"What the 2025-2026 Supreme Court Term Revealed About the Roberts Court"

2026-08-06T15:44:08Z

This week I recorded an episode of the National Constitution Center's "We the People" podcast on "What the 2025-2026 Supreme Court Term Revealed About the Roberts Court." I was joined by Masha Hansford of Davis Polk & Wardwell, and the conversation was moderated by the NCC's Julie Silverbrook. I enjoyed the discussion. I hope VC readers find it worthwhile.

The post "What the 2025-2026 Supreme Court Term Revealed About the Roberts Court" appeared first on Reason.com.

Socialist Moment

2026-08-06T14:10:59Z

Socialist calculation problem: Remember the libertarian moment? Well, this feels like the socialist moment.

Young insurgent candidates on the left, many of whom have current or former ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, are winning in the Democratic Party. It's basically the "socialism" rap from the 1998 Warren Beattie movie, Bulworth, played out in real life. And rather than fight back, the party's leadership seems to be mostly embracing those left-of-center wins.

Yes, as Shane Goldmacher reports in The New York Times, some avowedly moderate Democratic activist groups like Third Way want to fend off the takeover of what the group calls "radical, far-left candidates."

But the same article also notes that after progressive insurgent Abdul El-Sayed won yesterday's big Senate primary in Michigan on a campaign that harshly critiqued the party's center, "most party leaders—from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York to former Vice President Kamala Harris—quickly embraced Dr. El-Sayed's Senate candidacy, given the stakes of the Michigan seat at the play."

There are real questions, however, about whether El-Sayed can actually win that seat in November.

A separate Times story frames the upcoming midterm as a test of a long-running argument inside the party: "Since Senator Bernie Sanders exploded onto the national stage in 2016, progressives have argued that their party's path to victory runs through a populist economic agenda that can attract a broad coalition of working-class voters. Centrists have pushed back, saying such proposals alienate the moderate voters the party must sway to win back areas where it has lost ground in recent years." The centrists may have a point.

In the days leading up to the vote, El-Sayed's radical campaign looked like it would coast to victory. Some polls had him up by double digits. But in the end, he only won the primary by a narrow margin.

His problem, it turns out, is that like so many of the party's new radical-left up-and-comers, he doesn't perform well with the party's key voting blocks. Democrats know this. Puck reports that "Democratic lawmakers repeatedly pushed the D.S.C.C. [Democratic Senate Campaign Committee] to fund attack ads against El-Sayed," focusing on his dicey associations with controversial characters like Hasan Piker.

One question going into the primary was whether a loudly left-leaning candidate would play outside of deep blue, highly educated coastal metro areas—places like New York's so-called commie corridor.

So who is the constituency for El-Sayed's brand of fiery populism? Turns out that even in Michigan, it's basically the same demographic that lives in New York's commie corridor.

As The Wall Street Journal notes: "El-Sayed topped [moderate rival Haley] Stevens in counties where bachelor's degrees are plentiful, including those that are home to the University of Michigan and Michigan State. But he lagged behind in counties with lower educational attainment, a sign that working-class voters might be skeptical of candidates modeling themselves as champions of the working-class." El-Sayed is not an outlier in this respect. The new working-class populism, it turns out, is not very popular with the working class. But with El-Sayed's win, and others, Democratic leaders are standing behind it.

Burrito Wars. Socialism is dividing the left. So what's dividing the right? Burritos. Specifically, burritos that supposedly cost $20.

pic.twitter.com/TEGeIyoC06

— The Drunk Republican (@DrunkRepub) August 5, 2026

As is often the case with social media arguments, this one takes some twists and turns and doesn't exactly proceed in an easy-to-follow, linear fashion.

But Matt Yglesias had a terse, reasonably useful summary of how things went.

Matt Walsh says high grocery prices are a key vulnerability for Trump.

Andrew Kolvet says expensive Chipotle doesn't hurt either.

Thiessen defends Trump.

Vance calls Thiessen fat. pic.twitter.com/tpuaNktpuN

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 5, 2026

In many ways, this is a debate about inflation.

Burritos don't quite cost $20, unless you have them delivered (or you're eating really fancy burritos).

And there are ways to economize on food, though they require some advance planning and responsibility.

"A burrito shouldn't cost $20." But that's what it costs.

This is why I pack a lunch every single day, no exceptions! I almost forgot this morning, so I went back to the kitchen even though I was running late.

Note that when I was a financially irresponsible young person, I… https://t.co/kgeHP1Gvvc

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) August 5, 2026

But food prices really have gone up since COVID-19, thanks first to inflation resulting from former President Joe Biden's overspending, and then to price increases stemming from President Donald Trump's tariffs, war in Iran, and labor crackdowns.

But look deeper, and it's really an argument between the right's domestic populists and more internationally focused conservative hawks.

The intra-right burrito debate basically has two camps: On the one hand, there are folks like Ben Shapiro, who are more supportive of the war in Iran (at least in theory, if not necessarily the precise way it has been executed), but who would also like to see an end to Trump's tariffs and a revitalized focus on market-friendly domestic economic policy.

Current "common good conservative" inflation messaging: $20 burritos are a human right but also every serious methodology for making them cheaper (i.e. kill the tariffs, break the unions, and deregulate the food supply chain) isn't America First, so we need to complain a lot… https://t.co/GKST1az6jf

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 5, 2026

On the other side are right-wing war skeptics, some of whom have supported populist domestic economic policies, like tariffs.

So which is the more important conservative priority: Trump's unpopular tariffs or Trump's unpopular war?

Under Trump, it turns out, we get both.

Scenes from the greater Boston area: Boston's restaurants are in deep, deep trouble, reports The Boston Globe. I recently visited The Baldwin Bar, a fantastic Chinese bar/tiki bar hybrid in Woburn, Massachusetts, about half an hour from Boston proper. I've been several times before, and the food and drinks remain excellent. But even on a weekend night, it felt half empty. It's a shame; Boston could use a great food scene. But regulations, taxes, and overall food-price inflation have made it tougher than ever to operate a restaurant.

QUICK HITS

University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, once vaunted as the youngest black professor in the university's history, has resigned after mounting questions about plagiarism and fabrication in his academic work and personal history. Arday has denied academic malfeasance. But it has been pretty obvious that there were multiple serious problems with his work and his biographical claims; what's notable is how long Cambridge and others stood by him. Arday has a book scheduled to come out next week. When The New York Times asked about the book in light of the scandal, the publisher "had no comment beyond the statement about Arday it released last week, citing 'the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.'" We'll see how long that position can hold.
A Senate panel has obtained a copy of the iPhone Anthony Fauci used during COVID-19, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the government savings effort headed by Elon Musk, got a lot of details wrong, including touting some spending cuts that never actually happened, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.
James Cameron, the blockbuster director behind Aliens, the first two Terminator films, True Lies, and Titanic, might finally be moving on from the Avatar films. I hope he makes some non-Avatar movies!

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Supreme Court Term to Start Hot

2026-08-06T13:23:28Z

Suncor Energy (USA), Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, the dispute over whether federal law preempts claims against fossil fuel companies for alleged harms from climate changes exacerbated by the companies' alleged conduct, will be the very first case heard by the Supreme Court this October.

Grok

Suncor is obviously an important environmental case, but its significance is far broader. If the claims are allowed to proceed--and if the plaintiffs are able to overcome the other hurdles to making their case (a significant if)--quite a bit of money could be at stake. In addition, if the justices reach the merits, the case could dramatically alter the law of federal preemption.

Given the significance of the case, it should be no surprise that waves of amici filed briefs. By my count, there are forty top-side briefs supporting the fossil-fuel companies' preemption claims, including a brief by the Solicitor General. There are also twenty-eight bottom-side briefs arguing against preemption (including mine).

Most discussion of the case--and, indeed, many of the amicus briefs--focus on the policy context. Accordingly, folks who want urgent action to address climate change tend to support the respondents, and those who are skeptical of such policies (or who are concerned about energy prices), support the petitioners. This is understandable, but threatens to obscure the underlying legal issues, as does conspiratorial talk about what shadowy interests are supporting one side or the other.

As I try to show in my brief, there is no statute or precedent that supports wholly preempting these cases. This does not mean the claims should succeed, nor does it mean there are no constitutional or other grounds to force a narrowing of the claims. But those other grounds are not encompassed by the question presented and are not being advanced by the petitioners. What is before the Court is whether federal law or the constitution wholly precludes bringing claims under state-law for interstate harms of the sort alleged here. It is a narrow question. It is also one that I think is relatively easy and straightforward. We will see if a majority of the Court agrees.

for those interested, here are my prior posts on this subject:

Why State Common Law Nuisance Claims Against Fossil Fuel Companies Are Not Preempted, Oct. 27, 2021;
Third Circuit Rejects Oil Company Efforts to Remove Climate Claims to Federal Court, Aug. 17, 2022;
Oil Companies Fail to Convince the Eighth Circuit Climate Cases Should Be Removed to Federal Court (Updated), Mar. 25, 2023;
Is Climate Change Going Back to the Supreme Court? (Minnesota Edition) [UPDATED], Dec. 11, 2023;
D.C. Circuit Rejects Oil Company Attempt to Remove District's Climate Suit to Federal Court, Dec. 19, 2023;
William Barr Responds on American Petroleum Institute v. Minnesota, Dec. 26, 2023;
Supreme Court Takes a Pass on Minnesota Climate Change Case, Jan. 8, 2024;
Are State Law Climate Change Tort Suits Preempted by Federal Law?, May 3, 2024;
Supreme Court Denies Certiorari in Climate Tort Suits, Jan. 13, 2025;
Supreme Court Rejects Red State Attempt to Sue Blue States Over Climate Suits, Mar. 10, 2025;
William Barr Discovers the Economics of Tort Law (and Misrepresents the Law Governing Interstate Pollution), Nov. 3, 2025;
Placing Climate Tort Litigation in Context (Updated), Nov. 7, 2025;
A Second Round with William Barr on Litigation Over Interstate Pollution, Dec. 2, 2025;
Court Dismisses Trump Administration Effort to Block Michigan Climate Lawsuit, Feb. 4, 2026
Climate Change Goes Back to the Supreme Court -- Colorado Edition, Feb. 23, 2026.
Previewing Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, Mar. 6, 2026.
Amicus Brief in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, Aug. 3, 2026.

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#TheyLied Defamation Suit Over Sexual Assault Claims Involving High School Special Ed Students Can Proceed

2026-08-05T21:57:36Z

From O.A. v. Devita, decided June 25 by L.A. Superior Court Judge Dean Kitchens, but just recently posted to Westlaw:

The following summary is derived from the allegations in Plaintiff's complaint. Plaintiff is a high school boy with a disability who had a long-standing friendship with Defendant's son, M.S., another boy with a disability. Plaintiff is diagnosed with rare and serious genetic conditions causing neurocognitive delays. He also has a language disorder, anxiety, and specific learning disabilities…. Plaintiff has known M.S. for seven years and have been in many of the same special education classes. They also were a part of the same soccer league.

On October 10, 2022, Plaintiff went to M.S.'s home for a playdate allegedly supervised by Defendant and M.S.'s stepfather …. On November 4, 2022, the boys had another playdate allegedly supervised by Defendant. On May 12, 2023, M.S. reported to his teacher that Plaintiff had pressured him to do "sexual things." Plaintiff was suspended after the report pending an investigation.

During the initial investigation, Defendant allegedly posted several negative statements about Plaintiff on her Twitter account which were recognized by other members of the community. Defendant also allegedly called the coach of the boys' soccer league and stated that Plaintiff had sexually assaulted M.S. After calling the coach, Plaintiff alleges that Defendant approached them at a softball game and stated that Plaintiff had pulled a knife on M.S. and been physically and verbally abusive since grade school. Plaintiff also alleges that Defendant used the soccer league's member list to call other parents and warn them about him.

Plaintiff alleges that Defendant also called the director of Beyond Karate, where Plaintiff has been a participant, and told her that Plaintiff had assaulted M.S. She also allegedly communicated with other participants of the program, stating that Plaintiff had raped M.S. She also allegedly circulated a link containing documents related to her request for a restraining order against Plaintiff.

On June 16, 2023, the school concluded its investigation and determined that the actions between Plaintiff and M.S. were not forced. Defendant instituted separate proceedings that effectively expelled Plaintiff from high school for multiple months.

Plaintiff sued for, in relevant part, defamation, and the court allowed the case to go forward:

First, Defendant argues that the absolute defense of truth applies to each of her statements…. Here, Defendant presents evidence that Plaintiff admitted to the school principal he had not thought M.S. wanted to engage in sexual activity and that Plaintiff regretted his actions and admitted to "being dumb." This evidence would tend to show the veracity of Defendant's accusations that Plaintiff engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with her child.

Indeed, Defendant need not show the literal truth of every statement made. By proving that Plaintiff engaged in non-consensual sexual activity, Defendant would prove that the gist of her remarks were truthful. Thus, Defendant has met her burden of demonstrating the application of the complete defense of truth to Plaintiff's cause of action for defamation.

Plaintiff must then demonstrate the existence of a triable issue of material fact. Plaintiff presents evidence that M.S. did not accuse Plaintiff of rape or sexual assault. Additionally, Defendant acknowledged that the principal did not believe the conduct described by M.S. was forced.

Indeed, Plaintiff's suspension was later overturned, and he was exonerated of misconduct. This substantial evidence alone creates a triable issue of material fact as to the veracity of Defendant's statements. Thus, the Court finds that Plaintiff has met his burden as well. Accordingly, the Court does not grant summary adjudication based on Defendant's defense of truth.

Second, Defendant argues that her defamatory statements were opinions which are not provably false or true…. Here, Defendant presents evidence that she reconveyed the opinion of mental health professionals that M.S. had experienced "assault" and "physical abuse." While it is true that whether certain actions qualify as assault or abuse may be a matter of opinion, accusations of the same imply facts capable of proof…. While sexual assault can describe a range of conduct, it is not a matter of opinion as it declares or implies facts. Thus, Defendant has not met her burden of demonstrating that her statements were a matter of opinion.

Third, Defendant argues that she acted with reasonable care in making her statements. To prove defamation, a private individual plaintiff must show that the defendant did not act with reasonable care in checking the truth or falsity of information before publishing it. Here, Defendant offers evidence that at the time she made alleged defamatory statements, she had been briefed by the school of Plaintiff's assault and had been told by M.S. of the events. Based on this information from multiple sources, Defendant has met her burden of demonstrating that she acted with reasonable care in making the defamatory statements.

Plaintiff must then demonstrate the existence of a triable issue of material fact. Plaintiff submits evidence that Defendant failed to investigate what occurred on November 4, 2022, before accusing Plaintiff of assault. This was one of the dates on which M.S. allegedly reported he was assaulted. Yet Plaintiff submits evidence that Defendant did not ask M.S. what occurred that day or discuss the matter with Jason DeVita, even though he had been supervising the playdate.

A jury could determine that Defendant did not act reasonably in failing to properly investigate the matter before making accusations. Thus, Plaintiff has demonstrated that triable issues of material fact exist with respect to whether Defendant acted with reasonable care. Accordingly, the Court does not grant summary adjudication on this ground either.

Fourth, Defendant argues that her statements were privileged. Communications are privileged if made without malice to a person interested in that matter by one who is also interested. The privilege is recognized "where the communicator and the recipient have a common interest and the communication is of a kind reasonably calculated to protect or further that interest." Once a common interest is demonstrated, it is the plaintiff's burden to show that the defendant acted with actual malice in making false statements.

Here, Defendant has failed to demonstrate that all her statements are protected by the common interest privilege. Defendant argues that she made statements to a community of parents in the Santa Monica area with children with disabilities who fraternized together. These parents shared the interest of keeping their children safe.

However, whether these various individuals, including school parents, personnel, teachers, community members, and other people connected to the disability-serving program in which Plaintiff participated qualify as sharing a common interest is a disputed factual issue. Indeed, Plaintiff maintains that these individuals did not share a common interest under Civil Code section 47, subdivision (c). Defendant has not presented legal authority demonstrating that a common interest exists between all individuals who know or associate with Plaintiff. Thus, summary adjudication is not appropriate on this ground, either….

A plaintiff may recover punitive damages where it is proven by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant has been guilty of oppression, fraud, or malice…. In defamation cases, malice may be shown through Defendant's having reasons to doubt the truth or having relied on unreliable sources or failed to verify them. Here, Plaintiff presents evidence that Defendant failed to check with witnesses to the alleged assault before making accusations. This evidence suggests potential malice through Defendant's failure to verify her sources….

Ariel Harman-Holmes represents plaintiff.

The post #TheyLied Defamation Suit Over Sexual Assault Claims Involving High School Special Ed Students Can Proceed appeared first on Reason.com.

No Religious Exemption from Forum Selection Clause in Employment Agreement

2026-08-05T17:55:57Z

From Luzingu v. Abbott Labs., Inc., decided Friday by Chief Judge Lance Walker (D. Me.):

Plaintiff came to Maine from Angola in 2016, following persecution based on his work as a Christian pastor. He took a position as a Production Group Leader at Defendant's facilities in Westbrook and Scarborough, Maine, in November 2019. In April 2022, Defendant terminated his employment. Plaintiff alleges that Defendant discriminated against him on the basis of his race in the course of his employment and termination. He also alleges that Defendant retaliated against him after he engaged in protected conduct by making a scheduling decision that accommodated the needs of his Muslim subordinates during Ramadan.

The matter is currently before the Court because Plaintiff electronically signed Defendant's Employee Agreement as a precondition to his employment, and the Agreement contains a forum-selection clause stating that only the federal and state courts of Illinois will have jurisdiction to hear Plaintiff's claims….

Plaintiff argues that transfer would be unfair, unjust, and against public policies that favor the free exercise of religion and nondiscrimination. As alleged, Plaintiff is "the sole pastor at his church" and "leads three services per week." Because of his religious calling and his duties, he maintains, "[t]raveling to Illinois for a deposition or trial would make it far more difficult for him to fulfill his pastoral duties than if the deposition or trial occurred in Maine."

I am not persuaded that Plaintiff's religious practices and duties as a pastor justify giving him a special dispensation to avoid application of the Forum-Selection Clause of the Employee Agreement that he acknowledges signing as a precondition to his promotion to a supervisory position. And as for the burden itself, assuming that a special dispensation might be appropriate based on individual needs pertaining to the inconvenience of a particular forum, the Defendant has indicated that Plaintiff's deposition will take place in Maine.

Moreover, Defendant fairly observes that a trial in Illinois should take only a few days and that telecommunications technology enables Plaintiff to remain connected to his parishioners when court is not in session. I agree with Defendant that the limited time required to conduct a trial of this case in Illinois will not unduly disrupt Plaintiff's religious observance, even if religious observance is a proper basis to nullify the consequences of a forum-selection clause.

As for Maine law or policy concerning discrimination based on religion, it is unreasonable to suspect that Defendant is enforcing the Forum-Selection Clause against Plaintiff in a selective manner based on the burden that litigation in Illinois would impose on his pastoral duties. Defendant has similarly moved to enforce its forum-selection clause in cases brought by plaintiffs who do not point to their religious practice as cause to avoid the consequences of the Forum-Selection Clause.

In any event, Plaintiff has not identified in Maine law a strong public policy that individuals should be spared the ordinary burdens of contract compliance in matters involving, for example, forum selection or mandatory arbitration because of a temporary interruption in their religious practices….

Plaintiff argues that being forced to litigate this case in Illinois would effectively deprive him of his day in court. In support, he argues that both the emotional and the financial toll of litigating in another state are too much for him. Plaintiff's protests do not amount to a showing of grave difficulty or inconvenience tantamount to the practical denial of his day in court.

The plaintiffs' bar in Chicago no doubt includes attorneys who would be enthusiastic to champion Plaintiff's cause or help Plaintiff's current counsel to do so. The rules and procedures that will be applied by a federal court in Illinois will be familiar if Plaintiff's current counsel keeps the case. There is no reason to think that Plaintiff would be subject to any local prejudices in Illinois in terms of the jury pool.

Nor is it apparent that Plaintiff's case imposes a substantial financial burden that contingent-fee counsel would be unwilling to assist with, particularly as discovery proceedings will look much if not entirely the same in either forum. Plaintiff's arguments concern the ordinary toll associated with travel in support of litigation, which do not suffice as "grave."

This leaves individual considerations related to Plaintiff's religious practice and immigration status. Ultimately, I am unpersuaded that these considerations can fairly be leveraged to favor Plaintiff as compared to any other employee of Defendant who could not claim a special status based on religious practice or ethnicity or immigration status.

The import here is that Plaintiff should be treated like any other employee in his position, not that he should be favored based on his identity….

Hillary Joy Massey, Anthony S. Califano, and Christopher W. Kelleher (Seyfarth Shaw LLP) represent defendant.

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Is Environmental Science Less Objective?

2026-08-06T12:35:30Z

An interesting paper, "Science versus Subjectivity in Environmental Research," by Dominic Parker and Ngoc Ha Do at the University of Madison. Here is the abstract:

Objective science aims to uncover truths about environmental conditions, including those related to emission trends, biodiversity loss, climate change, and their economic costs. When and why do scientists use subjective language to describe these conditions with bias, emotion, or advocacy? To shed light, we study determinants and trends in subjective language within the abstracts, introductions, and conclusions of over 170,000 peer-reviewed articles published during 1990-2023 in top economics and science journals. Using machine learning to label and score text by subjectivity, we find that subjective language is more prevalent in articles focused on environmental topics relative to non-environmental topics: by 12% in economics and by 42% in science. After accounting for factors such as article age, author experience, number of authors, and journal quality, higher subjectivity scores associate positively with future academic citations in both science and economics, especially if the article is focused on an environmental topic. These findings, which imply subjective language has been rewarded in the academy, are consistent with informal theory suggesting subjective language will be used more frequently by scientists when expected rewards are high and risks are low.

The obvious question is whether this is just a finding about the use of language, or whether it indicates something about the underlying work.

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First Circuit Strikes Down Puerto Rico Ban on Certain Knowingly False Statements During Declared Emergencies

2026-08-05T21:57:21Z

Rodríguez-Cotto v. González-Colón, decided Tuesday by First Circuit Judges Gustavo Gelpí and Seth Aframe and Seventh Circuit Judge David Hamilton, struck down a Puerto Rico law (Article 5.14(a)) that makes it a crime "to purposefully, knowingly, or recklessly," "during a governor-declared state emergency or disaster,"

[g]ive[ ] a warning or false alarm, knowing that the information is false, in relation to the imminent occurrence of a catastrophe in Puerto Rico, or disseminate[ ], publish[ ], transmit[ ], transfer[ ] or circulate[ ] through any means of communication, including the media, social networks, or any other means of dissemination, publication or distribution of information, a notice or a false alarm, knowing that the information is false, when as a result of its conduct it puts the life, health, bodily integrity or safety of one or more persons at imminent risk, or endangers public or private property ….

The court concluded that the law was content-based, and didn't fit within existing First Amendment exceptions (such as the defamation exception). It also concluded that the law wouldn't fit within any special latitude provided by the extent Justice Breyer's two-Justice concurrence in U.S. v. Alvarez (2012), which provided the necessary votes to support the conclusion in that case:

Article 5.14(a) is not the kind of regulation governing "false statements about easily verifiable facts" to which Justice Breyer would apply less rigorous scrutiny…. In times of disaster and emergency covered by the statute, there are many kinds of false statements regulated by Article 5.14(a) that would not be easily or quickly verifiable. Consider, for example, statements about the efficacy of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic or the damage likely to arise from a storm that is presently offshore. These are assertions for which there is not easy verification but that would be covered by Article 5.14(a). Moreover, given that the law is about restricting speech related to a governor's action in declaring a state of emergency or disaster, Article 5.14(a) may operate in a "political context[ ]," which brings it outside the kinds of falsity laws that Justice Breyer views as permissible under his proposed lesser form of scrutiny.

Because of this, the law was unconstitutional unless it "furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest," which includes as an element the requirement that the law be the "least restrictive means" of furthering that interest. And, the court held, this test ("strict scrutiny") wasn't satisfied here:

A comparison of Article 5.14(a) with other false reporting statutes illustrates that the Puerto Rican regulation is far from the least restrictive means for achieving the Government's aim. Generally, regulations on false assertions comport with the First Amendment when they contain "limitations of context, requirements of proof of injury, and the like" which "narrow the statute to a subset of lies where [the] specific harm is more likely to occur." Certain false reporting or false alarm statutes pass constitutional muster because they "require proof that substantial public harm be directly foreseeable, or, if not, involve false statements that are very likely to bring about that harm."

The Government asserts that Article 5.14(a) is one such statute because it is "based [on] and significantly similar to Section 250.3" of the Model Penal Code ("MPC"), which "[p]resumably" would not contain unconstitutional language. Section 250.3 limits its scope to require the speaker to know that the false report "is likely" to cause harm. {["]A person is guilty of a misdemeanor if he initiates or circulates a report or warning of an impending bombing or other crime or catastrophe, knowing that the report or warning is false or baseless and that it is likely to cause evacuation of a building, place of assembly, or facility of public transport, or to cause public inconvenience or alarm.["]} And the FCC's Broadcast Hoaxes rule goes even a step further: To incur liability under this rule, it must be "foreseeable that broadcast[ing] [false] information will cause substantial public harm" and the broadcast must actually and "directly cause substantial public harm."

But even if Article 5.14(a) was modeled on one of these rules, the Puerto Rican statute does not contain analogous limitations. Under Article 5.14(a), liability attaches "when as a result" of making a false statement, persons or property are put "at imminent risk." No actual harm is required, no knowledge that a harm is likely to occur is mandated, and "risk" is undefined. "[I]mminent risk" is thus an inherently nebulous concept that provides little protection for a speaker. As such, Article 5.14(a) is far broader than both section 250.3, on which the Government relies, and the Broadcast Hoaxes rule, which was cited approvingly by Justice Breyer.

Moreover, Article 5.14(a) is unbounded in other dimensions. The federal hoaxes statute, also referenced by Justice Breyer in Alvarez, criminalizes the conveyance of false or misleading information (1) "where such information may reasonably be believed" and (2) when the information relates to specific violations of federal law or about the armed forces. By contrast, Article 5.14(a) contains no such restrictions. As we have already explained, the regulation establishes liability if there is an "imminent risk" of personal or property harm, regardless of what listeners actually believe.

Moreover, and as the Government concedes here, Article 5.14(a) could cover even "incredible assertions" so long as the statements are "in relation to the imminent occurrence of a catastrophe in Puerto Rico." The law could even cover jokes, satire, or fiction. {At oral argument, the Government suggested that whether liability would attach to a humorist stating King Kong and Godzilla were coming to destroy the island of Puerto Rico—in the vein of Orson Welles' faux radio broadcast of an alien invasion, The War of the Worlds—could be a matter that is left to prosecutorial discretion because such a scenario would fit within the text of Article 5.14(a). That Article 5.14(a) could result in liability for even such statements further indicates it would have a significant chilling effect on free speech and is not narrowly tailored.}

We further note that, unlike the FCC's Broadcast Hoaxes regulation, "catastrophe" appears to be undefined in Law 20, adding to our concern that Article 5.14(a) could be construed to reach innumerable statements regardless of their relation to public emergencies.

The Government also claims that a saving limitation on Article 5.14(a) is that it operates only during states of emergency. But Law 20 permits the Governor to declare such emergencies through proclamation, and since the law's enactment in 2017, at least four states of emergency have been declared, with one spanning over three years. Where "governmental power has no clear limiting principle," there is the potential for the government to exercise "broad censorial power" that chills free speech. We should be wary of regulations like Article 5.14(a) that permit the Government to so quell speech.

The Government has also failed to show that Article 5.14(a) is necessary to achieve its goals. Strict scrutiny requires that there "be a direct causal link between the restriction imposed and the injury to be prevented." Although the Government asserts that such a link exists, it "points to no evidence to support its claim" that the kinds of false information regulated by Article 5.14(a) endanger public safety during states of emergency. Without such evidence, the Government cannot establish this necessary causal link.

Finally, the Government "has not shown, and cannot show, why counter[ ]speech would not suffice to achieve its interest." The Government asserts—without record support—that counter speech would be ineffective because "[o]nce the false information is released, the damage is done." This does not explain why counter speech would be inadequate to achieve its interest.

Consider again the COVID-19 pandemic. Statements arguing that masks are ineffective to stop disease transmission could be countered by government messaging explaining the benefits of wearing masks. Perhaps there are false statements that immediately cause harm such that counter speech would be ineffective, but this law is not limited to that category.

In short, Article 5.14(a) does not meet the exacting standard of strict scrutiny. It represents an impermissible restriction of speech, particularly during times of emergency when it is most imperative that the public be well-informed and the government held to account. "[S]ince informed public opinion is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment," we look upon such a restriction "with grave concern." …

Brian Hauss, Tyler Takemoto, and Scarlet Kim (ACLU Foundation) and Fermín L. Arraiza-Navas (ACLU of Puerto Rico) represent the challengers.

The post First Circuit Strikes Down Puerto Rico Ban on Certain Knowingly False Statements During Declared Emergencies appeared first on Reason.com.

Why James Madison Wanted Greater Limits on States' Rights

2026-08-05T19:34:43Z

In its 1833 decision in Barron v. Baltimore, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed something about the American constitutional order that had been widely understood since the founding. Namely, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government and placed no limits on the authority of the states.

The First Amendment was actually quite explicit about it. "Congress shall make no law," it reads, "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Under the original Constitution, in other words, a state government was free to make laws that abridged the rights of speech, press, religion, and assembly without raising any First Amendment problems. Unless its own state constitution said otherwise, a state was free to impose such restrictive laws within its own state borders.

All of that changed, however, with the 1868 ratification of the 14th Amendment. "No State shall make or enforce any law," the 14th Amendment says, "which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

That language was understood to apply the Bill of Rights and other unenumerated rights against the states. The 14th Amendment was needed, explained Sen. Jacob Howard (R-Mich.), who introduced the amendment in the Senate in 1866 and successfully managed its passage, because the "mass of privileges, immunities, and rights" secured by the Constitution "do not operate in the slightest degree as a restraint or prohibition upon State legislation." According to Howard, "the great object of the first section of this [14th] amendment is, therefore, to restrict the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees."

The Supreme Court finally got around to affirming that 1868-era understanding of the First Amendment's limitations on state action in the 1925 case of Gitlow v. New York. Since Gitlow, it has been settled SCOTUS case law that the First Amendment binds both the federal government and the states.

Had one prominent founding father gotten his way, it never would have taken so long.

On June 8, 1789, James Madison announced the batch of proposed constitutional amendments that would eventually become enshrined as the Bill of Rights. One of Madison's would-be amendments, however, did not make the final cut, as it failed in the Senate after passing the House of Representatives. Here is what that lost Madisonian amendment to the Constitution would have said: "No state shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases."

Put differently, Madison wanted several parts of the Bill of Rights to apply equally against the federal government and the states. Why? "Because it must be admitted, on all hands," Madison said, "that the state governments are as liable to attack these invaluable privileges as the general [national] government is, and therefore ought to be as cautiously guarded against."

Madison was right to worry about state attacks on freedom of the press. In 1831, the Georgia legislature authorized a $5,000 bounty "to be paid by the Governor to any person or persons arresting and bringing to trial, under the laws of the State, and prosecuting to conviction, the editor or publisher of 'the Liberator,' or any other person who shall utter, publish, or circulate said paper in Georgia."

The Liberator was the pioneering antislavery newspaper published by the Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The state of Georgia literally made it a crime for Garrison and his allies to speak out against slavery. And Georgia was not the only one to do so. Other slaveholding states imposed similar bans on antislavery speech in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

It should probably go without saying, but every one of those laws was a blatant attack on bedrock free speech principles. Yet none of that proslavery state censorship violated the First Amendment at the time because the First Amendment did not (yet) bind the states.

Madison's unsuccessful constitutional amendment would have fixed that problem. He wisely recognized that the great liberties spelled out in the Bill of Rights were at risk from all levels of government. In a way, Madison's preferred solution might even be said to have prefigured some of what was eventually accomplished via the 14th Amendment.

Unfortunately, the "father of the Constitution" failed to sway his colleagues on this crucial point. It would fall to the framers and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment to finish the job that Madison began.

The post Why James Madison Wanted Greater Limits on States' Rights appeared first on Reason.com.

Today in Supreme Court History: August 6, 1792

2026-08-06T12:20:57Z

8/6/1792: Justice Thomas Johnson takes judicial oath.

Justice Thomas Johnson

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Brickbat: Cash Back

2026-08-04T14:27:32Z

New York Assemblywoman Nikki Lucas (D–Brooklyn) has proposed a bill that would require supermarkets and other retailers to give customers who use self-checkout a 10-percent discount. Lucas argues that shoppers are doing work once performed by cashiers, such as scanning and bagging, which saves the stores money on labor. Her proposal would give customers part of those savings in the form of a discount.

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Open Thread

2026-08-06T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

The Trump Administration Promises the 'Largest Denaturalization Effort Ever'

2026-08-05T22:25:17Z

The Trump administration pledged to define itself largely by a hard-line approach to immigration. In keeping with that promise, it is pursuing what the government calls the "largest denaturalization effort ever."

Denaturalization isn't new, but it has been used sparingly in modern history, in part because it is extremely costly and time-consuming amid finite resources. An immigrant may be denaturalized for a few reasons, including misrepresenting themselves to the government in a way that helped them obtain citizenship and committing certain crimes prior to naturalization occurring.

This week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it had pinpointed 25 naturalized immigrants whose citizenship it would seek to revoke. "Today's filings represent the largest coordinated denaturalization effort in Department history, but they are only the beginning," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement on Monday. "The Justice Department will continue to use every tool available to protect the integrity of the naturalization process and the safety of the American people."

The move comes shortly after the administration's July announcement that it would seek "to revoke U.S. citizenship from 10 naturalized criminals including child molesters, scammers, and drug dealers." The cases appear to be largely in line with the ones previous administrations pursued.

The departure is mostly that it is now a priority as opposed to an outlier. From 1990 to 2017, the DOJ filed 305 denaturalization cases. Trump's second administration, meanwhile, has filed 123 cases in a little over a year and a half, the government said. In April of this year, it was revealed that the Justice Department had 384 people in its sights for denaturalization; the administration has set a quota for denaturalization referrals from the Department of Homeland Security.

It is generally difficult to strip someone of citizenship after it has been conferred. The government must meet a high burden of proof, and the subjects of such cases are entitled to a much more robust process than non-naturalized potential deportees. The diversion of limited resources, The New York Times notes, may affect how the DOJ is able to approach priorities like "health-care fraud, procurement fraud, enforcement of civil rights laws, and asset forfeiture cases." (I will admit that the government focusing less on seizing assets from people who are potentially innocent, in favor of deporting offenders found guilty of crimes, does not necessarily seem scandalous to me. But I digress.)

As with the administration's earlier push to expel various students from the U.S., making denaturalization a priority will not do much to inflate the White House's raw deportation numbers. Though President Donald Trump came to office promising the largest mass deportation campaign in history, his administration has generally deported people at similar rates as previous presidents, to the dismay of some conservatives. But the rejiggering of priorities is a reminder that the bigger change here is one of public relations.

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Court Upholds African People's Socialist Party Convictions for Being Unregistered Russian Foreign Agents

2026-08-06T11:41:56Z

From today's decision in U.S. v. Romain by Eleventh Circuit Chief Judge William Pryor, joined by Judges Jill Pryor and Andrew Brasher:

For years, members of the African People's Socialist Party followed the direction of Alexander Ionov of the Russian Federation-backed "Anti-Globalization Movement." Ionov funded trips for Party leadership to Moscow, sponsored multiple Party events, told the Party to publish pro-Russian statements, and appeared on Party media…. [A] jury found {three Party members and one former member} … guilty of conspiracy {to act as foreign agents without notifying the attorney general}….

The court held that the prosecution didn't violate the First Amendment:

{"To violate [section] 951, … a person must act," "the action must be taken at the direction of or under the control of a foreign government" or foreign official, and "the person must fail to notify the Attorney General before taking such action."}

The indictment necessarily implicated speech. The indictment alleged that the defendants acted and conspired to act at Ionov's direction through several expressive and speech acts, including "author[ing] and publish[ing] articles," "drafting reports," organizing the encampment tour, "hosting virtual conferences" on political and social issues, and "mak[ing] public statements in support of the Russian Federation." So we must next determine whether the charged offenses are content neutral so that we can decide what level of judicial scrutiny applies….

Section 951 is content neutral because it applies equally to all acts taken under the direction or control of a foreign government without regard to the "content of the message" an agent spreads. Section 951 regulates conduct and speech regardless of which government directs it or what a foreign government directs.

Because section 951 is content neutral, we "subject [it] to an intermediate level of scrutiny." Under intermediate scrutiny, "we will sustain a content-neutral law if it advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests."

Section 951 satisfies intermediate scrutiny. "[T]he Government has an interest in knowing the identity of those acting on behalf of a foreign government within the United States, whether the action is legal or not." "That rationale is decidedly content agnostic" because it "neither references the content of speech [of agents] nor reflects disagreement with the message … [they] convey[]." And by requiring agents only to notify the attorney general before acting, section 951 advances that interest as narrowly as possible. Indeed, after notifying the attorney general about his status, an agent may engage in any speech or expressive conduct on any topic.

The defendants argue that we should apply strict scrutiny because Reed v. Town of Gilbert (2015), treats content-neutral laws as "content-based when used by the government to target speech." But Reed reaffirms only that "facially content neutral" regulations "will be considered content-based" when they "cannot be justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech" or "were adopted by the government because of disagreement with the message the speech conveys." Under that rule, section 951 is content neutral….

[F]ailure to notify the attorney general is an essential element of section 951. That element is "separately identifiable" from the defendants' speech and does not inherently convey any message. The notification requirement neither formally nor functionally repressed the Party's ability to express its political views. Cf. Meese v. Keene (1987) (holding that registration requirement of foreign "political propaganda" placed "no burden on protected expression" because it did "not prohibit, edit, or restrain [its] distribution").

Here are the facts, which the court found sufficed to show a § 951 violation:

[Defendant] Omali Yeshitela founded the African People's Socialist Party in 1972 and still chairs it today. Headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, the Party "supports the rights of African people throughout the world to be free from colonialism and exploitation." [Defendants] Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel are Party members, and [defendant] Augustus Romain was a member until 2018. After he left the Party, Romain formed the Black Hammer Party to prompt "the masses in America to revolution."

Aleksandr Ionov, a Russian citizen, directs the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, which purports to defend "the right of peoples to self-determination and [the] building of the multipolar world." Ionov is an asset of the Russian Federal Security Service. He regularly communicates with Service officers Yegor Popov and Aleksei Sukhodolov about Movement endeavors.

In May 2015, Ionov invited Party members on an "all expenses paid" trip to Russia to meet "other activists and establish close ties with Russian society." Yeshitela accepted the invitation. Before Yeshitela's trip, Hess told a Movement officer that Yeshitela would "like to meet with an official representative of the Russian government" and "[h]ave [his] own event to speak to students, anti-imperialists and workers about the struggle of African people."

After Yeshitela returned from Russia, Ionov and the Party formed, according to Hess, a "[d]eepening relationship." They were "in touch almost every day." In July, Ionov asked Hess whether the Party was interested in organizing events funded by the Movement. Later that month, Ionov donated $500 to the Party as part of a "Reparations Challenge." And that month, Ionov told Hess that he "need[ed] [her] to make [a] draft of [a] [United Nations] petition on [g]enocide of African people in [the] U.S. since the beginning of time." Ionov explained to Hess that the Movement could support the petition only "as cowriters/supporters" because "we're not exactly black to demand it for ourselves." Hess agreed, and Ionov told her to prepare it "ASAP." Ionov later requested it be posted "to the websites of White House and change.org" and that it be published two days later. Hess said she would "make that happen."

The next month, Ionov invited Yeshitela to the Movement's "Dialogue of Nations," an "international expert conference" held in Moscow involving discussion of "the right of peoples to self-determination." Yeshitela again agreed to attend, and Ionov paid for his travel expenses.

While Yeshitela was in Moscow, Hess emailed him, Romain, and Nevel news coverage of the conference. One article in The Guardian, titled "Russia Funds Moscow Conference for US, EU and Ukraine Separatists," explained that "the National Charity Fund, which was founded as the National Military Fund in 1999 by … Vladimir Putin," funded the event. And after Yeshitela returned, he confirmed to Party members that the Movement had Russian government connections:

Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia is a solid institution of Russian politic. Some articles said they got 30 percent funding from charity tied to Putin, et cetera, but it is clear that it is instrument of Russian government. This does not disturb us.

In January 2016, Ionov pledged $12,000 to the Party for a four-city encampment demonstration against genocide. Hess thanked Ionov for "envisioning such actions," and the Party held the tour. At a Party debriefing, Yeshitela explained that the Movement asked for the tour as "a big mobilization around the genocide question."

But Ionov sent only $7,000 of the promised $12,000. Yeshitela traced the underpayment back to Ionov "hav[ing] to justify … getting resources for this." Indeed, Movement agents asked Hess to "give [them] links or send a report about the action," including, for example, "where the action took place" and "how many people attended."

At the Movement's request, Party leadership also published pro-Russian statements on Party media. In May 2016, Ionov asked Hess to publish two articles about Russians detained in America. And another Movement agent asked Hess to post a statement supporting the Russian Olympic team after some members were banned from the 2016 Olympics. Hess and Yeshitela complied both times. Later, a Movement member asked Yeshitela to record a "video with congratulations to the residents of the Donetsk People's Republic" on the anniversary of their "self-determination." Yeshitela prepared the video, and Ionov sent it to Popov.

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Ionov sensed that Russia was "losi[ng] the whole information campaign." So he made several "emergency phone [calls] with some leaders of antiwar organizations" in the United States, including Party members. Ionov "request[ed] [the Party] … support Russia in the information war unleashed by the West," and asked Yeshitela to "make an official statement on the situation and show support for Russia."

Yeshitela published YouTube videos discussing "Russia's defensive war in Ukraine against the global colonial powers." One video, for example, displayed the promo: "APSP stands with Russia. APSP stands with Putin." Ionov also appeared on Yeshitela's YouTube broadcast.

Ionov then targeted Meta, Facebook's parent company, because he believed Meta "allow[ed] calls for violence against Russians." In March 2022, he asked both Party members and Romain, who by then had founded the Black Hammer Party, to protest outside Meta buildings. Yeshitela and his team scheduled a protest entitled "Unfriend Facebook Lies" in Silicon Valley and another demonstration "demanding an end to the censorship of Russia and Africa" in front of Facebook's San Francisco office.

Ionov also directed Romain to hold a protest at Meta and sent him banners to print, saying "Stop Meta Segregating Russian People. Stop Russian Segregation. Stop Meta Fascism" to display. Ionov booked flights and hotels for Romain and his associates. And he instructed Romain to send "a lot of videos and photos … that [he] c[ould] throw in the [Russian] media." …

Sufficient evidence supports the convictions. The defendants concede that they entered a voluntary "agreement" with each other and the Russians. Indeed, Yeshitela explained during Party meetings that the "Party developed a relationship with forces in Russia" and entered the relationship as "allies." Moreover, the defendants' agreement aimed to violate section 951.

The conspirators committed several overt acts to advance their objective. Yeshitela knew that the Movement was an "instrument of Russian government"—a fact he shared with the others. And Party members consistently obliged Ionov's "needs" and "requests," which allowed a reasonable jury to find that they agreed to be subject to his direction. Toward the beginning of their "[d]eepening relationship," Ionov told Hess he "need[ed] [her]" to draft the United Nations petition, and he later told her to prepare it "ASAP." Ionov "asked [the Party] for a big mobilization … around the genocide question" and "envision[ed]" the encampment tour as part of the mobilization.

The Party members knew that the Russian government sponsored the encampment because Ionov told Yeshitela he "need[ed] … details" from the tour to "justify … getting resources" for it. The Party members also agreed to Ionov's requests to post statements supporting the Russian Olympic team, to record a video of congratulations for the "Donetsk People's Republic", to use social media to support Russia during the Ukraine invasion, and to stage two protests outside of Meta. And none of the defendants notified the attorney general of those activities….

The jury could have reasonably found that the defendants subjected themselves to Ionov's guidance by carrying out his plans….

The court also concluded that § 951 doesn't require proof that defendants knew of their legal duty to register.

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The American Fingerprints on the Genocide in Sudan

2026-08-05T20:00:37Z

The civil war in Sudan is one of the most brutal conflicts in the world today. In October 2025, a group of mutineers known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur province. RSF fighters were videoed (or videoed themselves) shooting captives and brutalizing civilians. The corpses and blood in the streets were visible from space, and estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 150,000. The U.S. State Department and U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan have both accused the RSF of genocide.

A contractor tied to U.S. special operations may have helped the RSF during the siege, Reuters and a United Nations body recently reported. Reuters reported last month that companies owned by U.S. Army Special Forces veteran Steven Shaulis were flying jets between several RSF logistics hubs throughout 2025, including one airport that was "critical" to the siege of el-Fasher. Last week, the U.N. Panel of Experts ⁠on the Sudan wrote that it had "reliable information from four sources that the aircraft had transported RSF fighters and mercenaries, as well as ‌military equipment, including drones and weapons."

The Reuters report was clear that it was not accusing Shaulis of any wrongdoing. He did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters or a follow-up from Reason. His business partner Craig Munro told Reuters last month that reports about the flights—some of which were caught on camera or satellite imagery—were false, that they had no ties to the RSF, and that their air fleet was "carrying medical equipment for a client, in the ordinary course of our business."

The flights came to light because of an air raid on May 2, 2025. The Sudanese military blew up a Boeing 737 just after its flight from the military section of N'Djamena International Airport in Chad to an airfield in Nyala, a town in Darfur controlled by the RSF. The plane was operated by a crew from Occidental Support Services, a company in the United Arab Emirates fully owned by Shaulis. Reuters followed up and found other flights through RSF hubs by planes from Contractor Airways, a South African company co-owned by Shaulis and Munro.

Shaulis has extensive ties in Washington, receiving at least $419 million in U.S. military and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts over the past few decades. Jack Murphy, a journalist who covers special operations, wrote in response to the Reuters report that one of Shaulis' companies, CADG, "has been a commercial cover platform for [U.S. Joint Special Operations Command] for decades, almost exclusively by Delta [Force] these days." U.S. Special Operations Command and CADG did not respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. State Department and U.S. Treasury have imposed economic sanctions on both sides of Sudan's conflict for war crimes. But U.S. partners and allies have jumped into the fray. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Ukraine support the Sudanese central government. The UAE supports the RSF, reportedly sending in supplies and laundering gold stolen by the RSF. Crossing the Red Line, a forthcoming book about the Biden administration's foreign policy by journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed, quotes a U.S. official suggesting that the administration decided to overlook the UAE's role in Sudan as a reward for helping counter Iran in April 2024.

The civil war started in 2023 due to a split within Sudan's military junta, which had taken power in a 2021 coup d'etat against a pro-democracy revolution. RSF Gen. Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa mutinied against the Sudanese regular army, splitting the country in half. (He had previously been involved in the 2004 massacres in Darfur on behalf of the Sudanese government he is now fighting.) Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, and millions have been forced to flee.

Publicly, the U.S. government has rightfully stayed out of the conflict, which has only villains and worse villains. But the latest reporting raises questions about whether some people in Washington or their helpers may be discreetly throwing their weight behind one side.

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Trump's Newest Tariffs Could Protect America From the National Security Risk of Brass Instruments

2026-08-05T19:53:43Z

For years, a major threat to America's national security has marched its way through halftime shows, band camps, and concert halls—undermining the nation's strategic ska supply and jeopardizing the domestic reserve of polka.

Finally, the Trump administration is taking action.

Brass instruments and their parts could soon be subject to additional tariffs as part of a proposal published this week by the Department of Commerce. Those new 25 percent import taxes would be an extension of the tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper that the Trump administration has imposed under the guise of protecting American national security.

The Commerce Department is seeking to extend those tariffs to a variety of products made from those three materials. The six-page document published this week invokes "national security" nine times as it explains why higher tariffs should be charged on imported construction equipment, safes, fire extinguishers, and several other items.

Obviously, all those products are serious threats to American security, and deserve to be treated as such. But none present the sort of blaring, resonant risk posed by "brass-wind musical instruments and parts and accessories thereof," which are also included in the tariff plan.

The only people who could possibly object to this idea are just shilling for Big Tuba, right?

"It's not immediately clear why trumpets threaten to impair U.S. security," Bryan Riley, director of the free trade initiative at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, told Reason. "Is the Pentagon concerned that our adversaries plan to drop them on us from planes? And how exactly are trombones a security threat, but not saxophones?"

OK, Riley might have a point. Tariffs on musical instruments don't actually make sense—and the Trump administration should know that, because it has already hiked tariffs on most instruments, with negative consequences.

The effective tariff rate on all musical instruments hit 16.6 percent during the first quarter of 2026, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). That's three times higher than the effective rate in 2024.

Those higher taxes have caused Americans to buy fewer instruments. Musical instrument imports are down 20 percent since 2024, according to PIIE's analysis of federal trade data.

But, hey, fewer imports ought to be good news for American makers of musical instruments, right? That's the whole theory behind using tariffs: make imported goods more expensive to protect domestic suppliers.

Unfortunately, that promise seems to be falling flat. Conn Selmer, the Indiana-based company that has long been one of the world's leading producers of marching band instruments, announced in January that it would be closing its French horn factory in Ohio and offshoring those production lines.

The bottom line: "Higher tariffs have raised prices and suppressed imports—particularly of instruments for beginners—without boosting domestic production," explained Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow for PIIE, in May.

Higher tariffs on copper, which is a major component of making brass, have made it more costly for American instrument manufacturers to build everything from flugelhorns to sousaphones. The same is true across the rest of the economy because more than half of all American imports are raw materials or intermediate parts.

If the Trump administration wants to push the economy into a higher tempo, it should eliminate those tariffs—as it has done for farm equipment, food, and other items. Instead, the White House is putting more tariffs on finished instruments and asking American schools, parents, and musicians to pick up the tab.

That's an idea that's seriously out of tune at a time when Americans are trumpeting their worries about affordability.

And doing all this under the guise of "national security" is just nonsense. A tuba is not a semiconductor, and there is no indication that the military is running low on bugles. If the White House is going to use its national security tariff powers in such broad and bizarre ways, Congress ought to take those powers away.

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Abdul El-Sayed Says He's Not a Socialist. His Policy Agenda Says Otherwise.

2026-08-05T19:59:10Z

Abdul El-Sayed has won the Michigan Democratic Senate race, and socialists really think they are surging—but they're still lying when they say their supporters are working class.

This week, El-Sayed, a progressive, defeated the more moderate Rep. Haley Stevens (D–Mich.) even after campaigning alongside Hasan Piker, a far-left Twitch streamer who thinks America deserved 9/11 and that authoritarian China is the ideal.

That tells you everything you need to know about where the Democratic Party is headed: its primary voters absolutely hate the party establishment, and especially their leadership, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.).

They also increasingly view Israel/Gaza as a litmus test issue—and they will not stomach a candidate who is backed by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) money. There is a real case to be made that this is the main thing going on here: Democrats don't think it's acceptable to have a moderate position on Israel.

General election voters may feel differently. Michigan is a swing state that President Donald Trump won twice, and the Democrats might have nominated a candidate who is simply too extreme to win.

Though that's not how El-Sayed sees it. Like so many other progressives, El-Sayed thinks his economic policies—which align with the Democratic Socialists of America—are both popular and inevitable. He thinks they'll be embraced by the working class and he'll be swept to victory in November.

But as the other leftist candidates are discovering, it's not the working class falling in love with socialism: it's affluent professionals. According to available data, Stevens actually performed better with working-class people. She cleaned up among lower-income black voters. Meanwhile, El-Sayed's base of support is Ann Arbor. That's my old college town, where I attended the University of Michigan. It's full of young professionals succumbing to socialism's influences, not working-class folks.

Make no mistake: If elected to the Senate, Abdul El-Sayed will pursue socialist policies. He was celebrating his victory, first lamenting that the government is turning us against each other before pivoting to a call for Medicare for All, a policy that would give the federal government vastly more power over our lives.

Abdul El-Sayed: "It turns out that the reason so many of is ain't got is because of the system that has corrupted our politics to take it away from us. And that is the thing that we are taking on now." pic.twitter.com/ONKgsp4NbF

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 5, 2026

To the extent I could follow what he was saying, El-Sayed is pushing a mendacious claim: that people would be wealthier and more prosperous if they endured yet another massive transfer of money and power to a vast federal health bureaucracy. Most people want more options and better prices. But this will not be accomplished by further disguising the price of medical services via an expanding system of government controls, and rationing, and subsidies.

With left-progressives like El-Sayed, and even explicit socialist candidates prevailing in Democratic primaries, the party's identity is increasingly revealed: not a working-class party, but a party of discredited big-government ideas.

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The post Abdul El-Sayed Says He's Not a Socialist. His Policy Agenda Says Otherwise. appeared first on Reason.com.

New Draft Article: "The Fourth Amendment After Chatrie"

2026-08-05T18:13:31Z

This morning I posted a new draft article, The Fourth Amendment After Chatrie, on SSRN. It's about the Supreme Court's late June ruling, Chatrie v. United States. The article abstract:

At the end of the Supreme Court's recent Term, the Court handed down a Fourth Amendment ruling in Chatrie v. United States about what is a Fourth Amendment "search." Although the case has received little attention so far, it is a blockbuster. Chatrie presents itself as an application of precedent, but a close read shows that it repeatedly recasts old cases and adopts new principles for the Fourth Amendment. Chatrie is now the most important Fourth Amendment case on new technology, and it throws into question a wide range of existing surveillance practices.

This Article explains how Chatrie adopts a new course for the Fourth Amendment, and it explains three different readings of the case that lower courts will have to consider. The case can be read as a decision on special rules for location privacy, raising complex questions about what counts as a location record. It can alternatively be read as a decision on cell phone privacy, prompting difficult questions about how far it extends and how cell phone records are different from other records. And it can be read as a universal ruling on privacy in corporate-held records, which would require courts to confront challenging questions of what makes information private and what the ultimate goal of Fourth Amendment protection should be. We cannot know now which reading courts will adopt, but we can already see the three choices and the questions they each raise.

Comments very welcome!

The new article is just an early draft, written rather quickly to try to make the summer/fall law review submission season, so some of the footnotes are incomplete. (No need to comment on those, or typos and the like.) Also, I wrote this draft without reading other scholarly reactions that have come out in the five weeks since Chatrie was decided, as I wanted my first reaction to be my own, so I'll be adding more on that score soon. I'll plan to post an updated version when I do.

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"Did Fauci Properly Take the Fifth?"

2026-08-05T17:25:05Z

An excerpt from a detailed analysis at FoxNews.com from John Malcolm, a former federal prosecutor and current VP of the Meese Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom:

Several factors suggest Fauci's invocation [of the Fifth Amendment privilege] was improper. Two are critical.

The first is Fauci's pardon…. The second is time: Fauci retired in 2022, making it unlikely that any state crime he might have committed would fall within the applicable statute of limitations, assuming any state could credibly claim that he committed a crime or that venue was proper in that state. In Hoffman v. United States (1951), the Supreme Court said the privilege against self-incrimination protects against real dangers, not remote or speculative possibilities.

Two other things are clear. First, a witness can refuse to answer questions that might implicate him in a crime, not to avoid embarrassment…. Second, a witness cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment because he thinks he will be charged with perjury even if he provides truthful testimony.

On the other hand, there are factors in Fauci's favor. First, President Trump and several Republican congressmen are arguing that Biden's last-minute pardons, which would include Fauci's, are null and void because, they claim, Biden's staff used his autopen to sign those pardons without Biden's knowledge or approval. If Fauci's pardon is invalidated, he could be prosecuted by the Justice Department for federal crimes he might have committed during the period covered by the Biden pardon.

Second, several state attorneys general have now said they are initiating investigations to see whether Fauci committed any state crimes related to his government service. Perhaps they envision a perjury charge for deposition testimony Fauci provided in Covid-related litigation. That effort might end up going nowhere, but Fauci is certainly entitled to take them at their word that he still faces legal jeopardy. These statements alone make it far more likely that a judge would ultimately determine that Fauci's invocation of the Fifth was proper….

The whole thing is much worth reading.

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Senators Want To Claw Back Trump's Spending Power. They Should Just Pass a Real Budget Instead.

2026-08-05T21:19:42Z

You'd have an easier time hitting a fastball off Milwaukee Brewers phenom Jacob Misiorowski than getting Congress to take back wasteful spending it has appropriated, as the Trump administration is finding out.

On Monday, the Senate passed a continuing resolution to fund parts of the federal government through December 11. The bill includes a provision that temporarily blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing a rule change that would have given executive branch political appointees greater control over the disbursement of federal grants.

Proposed by the OMB in May, the rule has garnered over 62,123 public comments, most of which are in opposition. It would require "senior appointees" to review grant proposals for consistency with "applicable law, federal agency priorities, and the national interest." It also says agencies must ensure that funding proposals "advance the president's policy priorities."

The ban's inclusion in the funding bill appears to be a direct response from Sens. Patty Murray (D–Wash.) and Susan Collins (R–Maine), who didn't take kindly to the Trump administration's use of pocket rescissions last year. In her statement on the resolution, Collins said she was "pleased" that the bill "prevents" the OMB from implementing its proposed rule, which would "politicize grants" and "harm small, rural communities, families, and biomedical research." Murray was more direct, calling the rule a "corrupt policy that would allow [President Donald] Trump to hold even more federal grants hostage."

It's a fair assessment, considering Trump's record of brashly—and often illegally—cutting federal programs.

It started last March when Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began laying off federal employees and canceling grant programs it deemed wasteful. However, DOGE often failed to follow the proper process for many of the cuts it implemented, resulting in a host of lawsuits that have repealed or stymied those efforts. DOGE also exaggerated its accomplishments, leaving many of its claims about spending cuts unverified. As a result, the office, which is now shuttered, has delivered a fraction of the $2 trillion in cuts that Musk had promised.

The OMB has also targeted energy projects greenlighted by the Biden administration in states depending on whether they are represented by two Democratic senators or awarded electoral votes to Kamala Harris. Decisions like these have come under legal fire, including on Tuesday, when a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration illegally axed a multibillion-dollar program created by the Biden administration for green energy projects.

Credit where due, this White House has at least been willing to slash some of the billions spent on discretionary programs. However, its approach grows the powers of the executive branch and further diminishes Congress' constitutional authority.

Congress could easily reassert its power of the purse by going through the proper budgeting process each fiscal year. But that hasn't happened since 1997, and even then, it was only the fourth time in the last five decades.

It could also use its rescission authority more regularly. Since the Impoundment Control Act's passage in 1974—which gives presidents the authority to withhold or defer appropriated funds for 45 days—Congress has spent roughly $127 trillion, according to the OMB. Of that, less than 1 percent has been rescinded by lawmakers, according to the latest available data from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

That's not to say Congress doesn't know how to wield this power. When the president followed the process last year, Congress passed the Rescissions Act of 2025, reversing $9 billion in previously approved spending, including funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Of course, the best thing that Congress can do to curb the worst impulses of Trump and future presidents is to stop approving wasteful spending in the first place. As Citizens Against Government Waste points out, the FY 2026 funding bill includes $24 billion worth of earmarks, including $41.7 million set aside to "combat underwater pests." Murray is herself a chief culprit in this regard; the Washington senator has 96 earmarks in the FY 2026 budget, totaling $484 million in funding for her pet projects.

Still, it's encouraging that the Senate is finally taking an interest in reigning in Trump's takeover of the budget. However, absent Congress following its own appropriations process, we'll likely find ourselves in this situation again.

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Todd Blanche for Attorney General?

2026-08-05T17:22:54Z

Todd Blanche should not be the Attorney General of the United States, though it appears he is about to assume that office thanks to 50 Republican Senators* who are, it seems, going to confirm him for that position.

*As far as I am aware, Susan Collins is the only Republican Senator who has declared that she will vote against Blanche's nomination.

Senators Cronyn and Tillis withdrew their opposition when Blanche issued an order formally rescinding his earlier order setting up an "Anti-Weaponization Fund" as part of the "Settlement Agreement" reached between the IRS and our President, and limiting the "immunity" from tax liability granted to Trump and his children and associates by declaring that it only "applies retroactiviely."

The idea that this somehow is sufficient to warrant an appointment to be the chief federal law enforcement officer truly boggles the mind. The Settlement Agreement and the Anti-Weaponization Fund weren't just bad ideas; they were an attempt to perpetrate a fraud on the court and the American taxpayers, "ignor[ing] ethical norms, court rules, and legal authority to manipulate the judicial process [in order to] gild their efforts to gain unprecedented access to the public fisc with the patina of legitimacy."

Those are not my words; they are the words of Judge Kathleen Williams of SD Florida, in her July 13th Order imposing sanctions on the parties (our President and the I.R.S.) and the attorneys involved in the case (including Acting AG Blanche and Associate AG Stanley Woodward, as well as Daniel Epstein, signatory to the bogus "Settlement Agreement" as Counsel for the Plaintiffs).

More excerpts from Judge Williams' opinion are included below. Though her opinion is long (56 pages) and detailed, in the end she doesn't really uncover anything that wasn't already obvious to anyone who followed the whole "Settlement" shitshow at all closely:

"This action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute. The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law. . . ."

"This lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights; it was brought to manipulate the judicial process to pursue benefits unavailable in litigation because the Parties were not adverse" . . . .

"Plaintiffs improperly employed this lawsuit to justify a particular award in this matter—access to taxpayer funds and exemption from audits and other investigations—which was accomplished by leveraging control over Defendants. . . The Parties used the existence of federal litigation as a means of conferring legitimacy upon a course of action that they were unwilling to subject to judicial review. The context of the "settlement," the relationships of the people involved in negotiating and approving it, the ethical implications of their conduct, and the Parties' swift efforts to dismiss this case after the Court raised fundamental jurisdictional questions all support this conclusion. Accordingly, the Court expressly finds that Plaintiffs acted in bad faith.

Todd Blanche was a major participant in this fraudulent scheme (and was probably the one who dreamed it up).**

**Part of Judge Williams' sanctions order directed "the Clerk of Court to mail a copy of this Order to the State Bar of New York, of which Acting Attorney General Blanche is a member (No. 4192456), [and] where disciplinary proceedings are currently ongoing." As far as I am aware, Blanche has not indicated that he will appeal, nor has he formally contested any of Judge Williams' findings.

We could perhaps have a reasonable disagreement about whether this would disqualify him for, say, appointment as Ambassador to Luxembourg, or Assistant Undersecretary of Commerce. But Attorney General of the United States?

With all due respect to Sens. Cronyn and Tillis, rescinding the Slush Fund Order** doesn't change the historical facts: this is the man who tried his best to defraud the federal court and, unltimately, the American people. Surely, the one job in the United States for which he is not qualified is the one the Senate is, unless a few more Republicans can find their backbones, about to give him.

Excerpts from Judge Williams' Order [full-text here]

"The Complaint purports to present a controversy between Plaintiffs—President Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, LLC— and Defendants—the Internal Revenue Service and United States Treasury Department—claiming Defendants caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm for which they now seek "at least $10,000.000,000.00." At first glance, the Complaint seemingly satisfies Article III by establishing causes of action "arising under . . . the laws of the United States[.]" However, closer examination reveals that a justiciable case or controversy is absent; Plaintiffs and Defendants are not adverse, because one party controls this litigation.

Plaintiffs improperly employed this lawsuit to justify a particular award in this matter—access to taxpayer funds and exemption from audits and other investigations—which was accomplished by leveraging control over Defendants. . . .

"[Plaintiffs] filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit asserting claims that they knew, or should have known, were time-barred and for an amount of damages unsupported by facts or law. Plaintiffs could make no connection between the billions of dollars they sought, and the recovery authorized under the governing statute. See 26 U.S.C. § 7431(c)(1). Generally, the "central purpose" of a lawsuit must be to "vindicate rights through the judicial process." This lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights; it was brought to manipulate the judicial process to pursue benefits unavailable in litigation because the Parties were not adverse.

The Parties used the existence of federal litigation as a means of conferring legitimacy upon a course of action that they were unwilling to subject to judicial review. The context of the "settlement," the relationships of the people involved in negotiating and approving it, the ethical implications of their conduct, and the Parties' swift efforts to dismiss this case after the Court raised fundamental jurisdictional questions all support this conclusion. Accordingly, the Court expressly finds that Plaintiffs acted in bad faith.

These facts lead to the inexorable conclusion that the "settlement" terms, the individuals who signed the "settlement" as well as the putative beneficiaries of the "settlement," demonstrate a shared, unitary interest. And the unilateral revision and renunciation of the "Fund" component of the "settlement" demonstrate the fact that all Parties were aligned, and ultimately, undifferentiated. This action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute. The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.

Defendants chose not to "advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes" President Trump's opinion regarding this lawsuit. See Executive Order § 7. It is clear that obeisance to the mandate of his Executive Order has been fulfilled by Defendants' actions (or more accurately, inaction) in this case. Therefore, not only does the Executive Order demonstrate President Trump's espoused control over Defendants' conduct generally in litigation, it also demonstrates President Trump's actual control in this litigation.

Second, the "settlement agreement" is signed on behalf of Defendants by Stanley Woodward, Jr., the current Associate Attorney General at the DOJ, and Acting Attorney General Blanche. Before he went to the DOJ, Associate Attorney General Woodward represented several individuals charged in connection with the events of January 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol. He also represented Walt Nauta, who was President Trump's personal aide and a co-defendant in the criminal matter involving the return of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Before his appointment to the DOJ, Acting Attorney General Blanche served as President Trump's personal criminal defense attorney in several high-profile matters.

The gravamen of the "settlement agreement" is to fund claims premised on events including those arising from, inter alia, the Mar-a-Lago Documents Case and the events of January 6, 2021. Indeed, these two cases have been referenced as quintessential Anti-Weaponization and Lawfare claims. Instead of either recusing because of their previous representations or vigorously defending this lawsuit as required to do so by DOJ policies and procedures, these lawyers agreed to a "settlement" involving a staggering amount of money potentially benefitting former clients.

Moreover, the Release Order, signed only by Acting Attorney General Blanche, extends a blanket grant of immunity to all Plaintiffs and their families and "affiliates," and precludes all "current or possible" investigations or actions before any other agencies or departments. The Release Order also purports to bar the IRS from conducting any future tax audits of President Trump, his sons, and their entities. This provision directly contravenes 26 U.S.C. § 7217, titled "Prohibition on executive branch influence over taxpayer audits and other investigations," which states: It shall be unlawful for any applicable person to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer. The explicit text of this statute prohibits President Trump and his lawyers—one of whom was former White House Counsel—from asking for or promoting termination of an audit directed toward him.

In dismissing the non-parties' claims of collusion, Plaintiffs reveal the true position of the Parties and say the quiet part out loud: "Regardless of whether Plaintiffs had ever filed this action, the Government and Plaintiffs still had the power to resolve all disputes between the parties." The power to resolve was never a question before this Court. Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court. The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding "no": the Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest.

And because this fact was so obvious and so insurmountable, the Court finds that this matter was brought for an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a "settlement" that had no viable basis in law or fact. As was observed in another matter brought in this District, "this case is part of Mr. Trump's pattern of misusing the courts to serve political purposes."

Rule 11 sanctions are appropriate here. . . . The Parties (President Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, and the Internal Revenue Service and the United States Department of the Treasury) are prohibited from referring to the purported "settlement agreement," or using, offering, admitting, or citing any of its provisions in any judicial, administrative, regulatory, arbitration, or any other official proceeding as evidence of a "settlement" reached in this matter.

The key to unlocking a court's inherent power is a finding of bad faith." Barnes v. Dalton, 158 F.3d 1212, 1214 (11th Cir. 1998) (citations omitted). This is a subjective standard. Purchasing Power, LLC v. Bluestem Brands, Inc., 851 F.3d 1218, 1223 (11th Cir. 2017) ("As a starting point, the inherent-powers standard is a subjective bad-faith standard."). "Once unlocked, the power carries with it the authority to assess attorney's fees as a sanction for bad faith conduct." Bad faith is present if a court determines "that fraud has been practiced upon it, or that the very temple of justice has been defiled," or where a party is responsible for "delaying or disrupting the litigation[.]"

The conduct of the Parties triggers the Court's inherent authority. The Parties used the existence of federal litigation as a means of conferring legitimacy upon a course of action that they were unwilling to subject to judicial review. The context of the "settlement," the relationships of the people involved in negotiating and approving it, the ethical implications of their conduct, and the Parties' swift efforts to dismiss this case after the Court raised fundamental jurisdictional questions all support this conclusion. Accordingly, the Court expressly finds that Plaintiffs acted in bad faith. . . .

[T]he Clerk of Court is DIRECTED to mail a copy of this Order to the State Bar of New York, of which Acting Attorney General Blanche is a member (No. 4192456), AND to the District of Columbia Bar, of which Associate Attorney General Woodward is a member (No. 997320), where disciplinary proceedings are currently ongoing.

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Abdul El-Sayed's COVID Radicalism Is a Callback to a More United Party

2026-08-05T17:02:02Z

Most of the votes are in, and it looks like former public health official Abdul El-Sayed is going to win the Michigan Democratic Party's much-watched Senate primary.

Coverage of the race has treated it as the latest battle in Democrats' civil war; the progressive (but not officially socialist) El-Sayed was going up against the more moderate Rep. Haley Stevens (D–Mich.). El-Sayed's likely victory would seem to confirm that Democrats' left flank is ascendent in this intra-party struggle.

The well-covered fissures between El-Sayed and Stevens include their stances on Israel (El-Sayed calls Israel's war in Gaza a genocide, Stevens wants military aid to the country to continue) and healthcare (the former wants Medicare for All, the latter merely supports a public option).

Interestingly, one criticism that Stevens did not levy against El-Sayed was his extreme progressivism during COVID.

As right-wing websites have extensively covered in the final days of the primary, during the summer of 2020, El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former director of Wayne County's health department, expressed simultaneous support for lockdowns and mass demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd's death.

"There is no fair pitting of the protests for Black lives against public health," El-Sayed said to liberal podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen, per Breitbart. "Unless you devalue the lives that we're fighting for, which are Black lives, by saying that they're somehow less important to focus on than the lives that are lost to COVID-19, which, by the way, are disproportionately Black lives as well, then there is no coherent approach to pitting these protests against public health."

He was backing renewed lockdowns well into 2021.

One would think that this peak wokism might be a fruitful avenue of attack for Stevens as she tried to paint her opponent as excessively left-wing.

A possible reason that she demurred is that El-Sayed's pro-lockdown unless it's a left-wing protest position is the one that effectively everyone in the Democratic Party adopted during the summer of 2020.

For all the talk of a Democratic civil war, the pandemic shows how recently the left and liberal wings of the party were in lockstep on the issue of the day.

Stevens herself gave less explicit support for Black Lives Matter protests than El-Sayed, but she did express the requisite "love" for George Floyd at the time while signing on to Democrats' criminal justice legislation.

On COVID specifically, she urged people to "listen to Dr. Fauci" while she voted for trillions in pandemic stimulus funds and criticized efforts to target those stimulus funds to the truly needy.

During the primary, Stevens' moderate campaign bid received the support of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who issued lockdown orders that closed schools and banned people from buying seeds at the hardware store while also offering full-throated support for George Floyd protests.

The governor's support for demonstrations did come with the weak request that mass demonstrations follow "social distancing guidelines."

Support for COVID mandates, trillions in federal COVID spending, and anti-racist criminal justice reform was the glue that held the Democratic Party together during the presidency of Joe Biden.

Arguably, one of the reasons that no one in the party was able to launch a successful challenge to Biden's bid for a second term until long after it became undeniable he was not physically up for the job was that no one within the party (progressive or moderate) had a real policy critique to level at this COVID-era three-legged stool.

But COVID is far enough in the rearview mirror that it can't serve as a unifying force for the party anymore. It doesn't help that voters found extreme public health and fiscal interventions to counter the pandemic, and all the inflation and crime spikes that came with it, unpalatable enough to elect Donald Trump again.

Democrats are still united in their opposition to Trump. Yet the current president's unpopular wars, trade policies, and corruption haven't proven enough of a crisis to get all of the party on the same page.

Instead, issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict and socializing healthcare rule the day. They're divisive enough that while El-Sayed was expected to win, the primary was not a blowout by any means.

For Democrats to be united again, they'll need another pandemic. Until then, expect the intra-party civil war to continue.

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Socialist Hugo Chávez Destroyed Venezuela's Power Grid. Now the Regime Hopes Private Capital Will Rebuild It.

2026-08-05T20:00:30Z

Venezuela's electric grid was once the envy of Latin America. The Guri Dam, completed in 1986, was one of the world's largest hydroelectric plants, and the nation's grid reached 96 percent of households by the early 2000s. Today, after more than two decades of socialist rule, hours-long outages are routine in Venezuela. Blackouts disable water pumps, cellular service, electronic payments, and hospital equipment. The independent National Hospital Survey reported 233 deaths from 2019 through 2021 attributable to electrical failures, including patients who lost mechanical ventilation or could not reach operating rooms because elevators stopped. In March 2019, a nationwide blackout lasted roughly a week, provoking widespread looting and property destruction. By 2025, just 10 percent of households reported having no routine electricity interruptions.

The Venezuelan regime is now reversing the 19-year-old decision to nationalize the industry, which caused the system's rapid breakdown. The regime-controlled National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill that would open the electricity sector to private investment. The reform would allow private capital to participate in generation, transmission, distribution, and commercialization. However, the Energy Ministry would grant concessions, set rates, supervise operators, and retain broad intervention powers. Licenses could last up to 25 years, with a possible 15-year extension given to public-private companies. The bill's text is contradictory about what would happen to private investment capital once a license expires. The bill doesn't guarantee currency conversion, profit repatriation, state payment security, neutral arbitration, or an independent regulator, and it's unclear whether foreign investors will be willing to risk their capital to repair the nation's broken grid and power plants.

The destruction of Venezuela's power grid traces back to 2002, when President Hugo Chávez froze utility companies' rates. The regime historically cast the freeze as a social good, or the "democratization of access to electricity." Its officials would defend the policy for years: Rates were "absolutely subsidized" and had been "kept well below any limit of what should be charged," as Chávez's vice president Elías Jaua later put it.

Through rampant money printing, Chávez caused runaway hyperinflation. Prices spiraled, but electricity rates stayed frozen. Within a few years, electricity for the average Venezuelan cost next to nothing. Real billing revenue collapsed 83 percent from 1999 to 2015. The country's 14 regional power companies (a mix of private and public firms) were starved of the revenue they needed for routine maintenance. Electricity was virtually free, so bitcoin mining became a thriving industry in Venezuela.

Political meddling prevented experienced engineers from maintaining the grid. Miguel Lara, a former manager of OPSIS, Venezuela's once-independent grid planning and dispatch office, said the executive branch curtailed its authority in November 2001. Lara later said electricity-sector officials had warned the government in writing that year that the country would face a supply deficit in the following years.

In 2007, Chávez nationalized the electricity industry, creating Corporación Eléctrica Nacional S.A., or Corpoelec. "All of that which was privatized, let it be nationalized," he declared. PDVSA, the state oil company, bought the largest private company in the sector for about $739 million. Chávez folded all 14 utility companies into one vertically integrated state monopoly, Corpoelec, and replaced technical managers with political and military appointees.

"The government started bringing in people ideologically aligned but lacking in managerial skills," Lara recalls. "Abuses and mistreatment of personnel became rampant." The company was thoroughly politicized. "Anyone who wouldn't subjugate themselves, go on marches, wear a red shirt, or appear on Chávez's TV show, Aló Presidente, was fired," according to Lara.

By 2009, the grid had exhausted its operating reserve and entered permanent rationing. An El Niño drought reduced water flows into hydroelectric reservoirs and strained urban water supplies. Chávez blamed the weather and called for conservation. During a televised cabinet meeting, he urged Venezuelans to stop singing in the shower and wash in three minutes. "I've counted, three minutes, and I don't stink," he said. Jacuzzis, he joked with his ministers, were incompatible with communism.

As rationing became the norm, government offices closed at lunchtime, stores reduced lighting and refrigeration, restaurants lost food, and factories slowed or shut down. Chávez called rationing an "electricity diet" and predicted that Jesus would make it rain because he was a believer in the socialist movement. In February, Chávez declared a national electricity emergency. Later that year, the National Assembly enacted a new law reserving generation, transmission, distribution, electricity sales, and grid management to the state.

The emergency spending delivered far less electricity than promised. A 2017 investigation reported that Venezuela had spent over $39 billion on roughly 14,000 megawatts of thermal capacity, yet only about 4,000 megawatts were operational. The nonprofit watchdog group Transparencia Venezuela reviewed 40 generation projects initiated or contracted from 2000 through 2014. The group estimated that only 4,361 of the promised 17,513 megawatts became effective and that reported costs exceeded government planning benchmarks by $23 billion.

Several projects became symbols of the spending spree. Derwick Associates, founded by politically connected young businessmen, received emergency generation contracts and faced allegations of bribery and inflated pricing in investigations and civil litigation. The 2,160-megawatt Tocoma hydroelectric project, estimated to cost about $3.05 billion in 2006, and originally promised for 2012, missed successive completion dates and never generated commercial electricity. Available public records don't reflect how much was ultimately spent.

The regime has never offered a persuasive explanation for the grid's breakdown. Official accounts shifted from blaming the drought and El Niño in the 2010s to accusations of opposition sabotage backed by the CIA, claims that rats and iguanas were eating cables, and a U.S. cyberattack and electromagnetic attack directed from Houston and Chicago on Pentagon orders. Corpoelec lost roughly half of its workforce, including 14,700 engineers and technicians.

Today, Venezuela can't generate enough electricity to meet demand. Its power plants have a combined capacity of roughly 36,000 megawatts on paper, but fewer than 13,000 megawatts were available in May.

While Venezuela is racing to expand oil production under pressure from the Trump administration, extraction requires a steady supply of electricity. The electric grid is nowhere near up to the task. In April, a grid failure knocked out all 827 of Chevron's wells in the country, according to an internal document reported by Bloomberg.

Venezuela desperately needs private investment, but the regime doesn't want to surrender control, and it isn't offering any credible protection from future property seizures. Many of the very same people in power today have defrauded investors in the past.

At least the regime is paying lip service to reversing a socialist initiative that caused incalculable human suffering. Policymakers charged with unwinding Chávez's disastrous "Socialism for the 21st Century" continue to find it a lot harder to put things back together than it was to tear them apart in the first place.

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Minnesota's Nudification Ban Could Punish People Over Parodies and Stripped-Down Selfies. Elon Musk's xAI Is Suing.

2026-08-05T20:54:49Z

A Minnesota law that took effect August 1 says it's illegal to run a website, app, or software program that lets users "nudify" images. Elon Musk's xAI is challenging the law on First Amendment grounds—and it should win.

When it comes to nudify services, the behavior we want to stop is people using them to nonconsensually "strip" others of their clothes and then share these images in order to harass or embarrass someone or pretend that they have gotten nude in front of you when they have not.

Minnesota's law goes beyond targeting that undesirable behavior and sweeps in any use of artificial intelligence or other software programs to create images of anyone in a less than fully-clothed state.

It's broad enough to ban even satirical, journalistic, or artistic uses of "nudify" software—a term the state defines so broadly that even depicting someone's inner thigh or a shirtless man would be off limits.

Minnesota's nudify law is also broad enough to ban services from letting people ask AI to nudify themselves or to use it on an image of another person who has consented to that use. It's even broad enough to ban services from letting someone ask AI to generate an image of themself in a bikini.

As Mike Masnick points out at Techdirt, Minnesota's law is written so broadly that it could include a South Park parody featuring a fake video of Donald Trump wandering nude in a desert or even a fake image that Trump himself posted of him, Vance, and others swimming in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.

@realDonaldTrump/Truth Social

And, no, this law is not simply about stopping AI-generated nudes depicting minors, as Masnick points out. Such images would fall under the federal definition of "child sexual abuse material," or CSAM, and that "is already quite illegal under both state and federal law," notes Masnick. Besides, "nothing in [House File] 1606 is limited to images of minors."

The law, H.F. 1606, states that "a person who owns or controls a website, application, software, program, or other service must not" allow users "to nudify an image or video," nor "nudify an image or video on behalf of a user." It also bans advertising or promoting any nudification service. To nudify is defined as "the process by which: (1) an image or video is altered or generated to depict an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual" when the image is "realistic" enough that "a reasonable person" might not know it was a fake. Intimate parts include "the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being."

Violating the law can lead to a $500,000 fine per "access, download, or use," in addition to serving as grounds for a lawsuit by any person depicted in a nudified photo or video.

And it doesn't matter if an app or AI service has made good-faith efforts to stop people from using it to nonconsensually generate nude images of others. If someone uses the service for that purpose—even in violation of a program's terms of service and even despite technical blocks intended to prevent it—the company or individual behind the service could still be liable.

Criminalizing the mere provision of any service that could nudify an image runs afoul of the First Amendment, argued xAI in a complaint filed July 27. It's "an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression," it says.

While xAI "prohibits its users from generating nude or sexualized images of people without their consent and has indeed filed suit against users who evade its extensive technological blockers to generate such images," the fact remains that users could evade this prohibition. And the way the law is written, xAI would still be in trouble if that happens, no matter "how many mitigations" it had in place to try and stop this.

And xAI could be in trouble even if no one is nonconsensually generating nude or sexual images of a real person. Letting male users generate an image of themselves shirtless, or female users generate images of themselves in a bikini, or someone stick J.D. Vance in a ballet leotard or Gavin Newsom in cutoff shorts could suffice.

The law goes "far beyond what an ordinary person would consider 'nudification," notes xAI.

On July 29, it asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota to issue a temporary restraining order stopping enforcement of the law before it took effect—a request that Judge Donovan W. Frank rejected. xAI's emergency motion seeking the injunction was filed "nearly three months after the law was signed, and only three days before the law is set to take effect," suggesting to the judge that "harm is not immediate," he wrote.

The Court is now scheduled to hold a hearing on xAI's motion for a preliminary injunction on August 19.

Hopefully, Judge Frank will agree that this law as written is unconstitutional.

One need not champion nudify programs or all uses of them to see that Minnesota's law takes things too far, or that a more narrowly written law could still target undesirable behavior. At minimum, any such law should include exceptions for satire, political commentary, and art; for people using services to nudify themselves; and for people using them on images which the subject has consented to be nudified. Such a law should also include an exception from liability for companies that make good faith efforts to stop their services from being used in nefarious ways.

Personally, I'm skeptical of any law that targets the mere existence or use of "nudifying" technology—a category which can include general-use AI image generation programs—rather than specific actions around these images.

Existing torts and criminal laws could probably cover a lot of this territory. We already have criminal laws against blackmail, extortion, harassment, and child pornography. We already have torts against intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation, and invasion of privacy. These existing laws seem ripe for use against people who share faked nudes with nefarious intent.

If existing laws prove insufficient, a law narrowly targeting the intentional sharing of nonconsensual deepfake nudes—with exceptions for legitimate purposes, like parody involving public figures—might be warranted. But it would have to be very carefully crafted to avoid roping in those legitimate uses and to avoid punishing those who merely serve as conduits for images they're unaware were faked. And even then, I would worry about overreach and the ways enforcement could go wrong.

Neither this sort of narrowly crafted new law nor existing laws and torts would cover the private creation of such images, but that's OK. I know it icks people out—and understandably so—to think of someone "nudifying" someone else for their own private purposes. But people are free to fantasize about someone else nude without the "nude" person's consent, and they're free to use older tools—like Photoshop—to "nudify" someone the old-fashioned way. There's nothing special about using AI to create a fake nude, except that it's likely going to look more realistic. And that realism only really matters if the image is being used publicly and deceptively.

I've heard people compare creating fake nudes of someone without their consent to a form of sexual assault, and I wholeheartedly reject that premise. If someone fakes a nude of you, it's not actually your body they're viewing. It's really not far off from someone fantasizing about you without asking permission first.

None of this means we need to condone people pornifying others without permission. Apps that strip "people of their clothes are…bad. They should be socially shunned," and we should develop norms that shun this behavior, suggests Masnick. "But passing a badly drafted, obviously unconstitutional law does not help form those norms."

Today in Congress

The Senate Commerce Committee is formally considering a national age-verification scheme for adult websites (the SCREEN Act) and the latest version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), along with several other bills purportedly about protecting kids from technology. These include a bill to study and develop an "action plan" on AI toys, a host of regulations around AI chatbots and minors, and a bill that would require AI chatbots to determine whether users are adults and, if not, require them to get parental consent.

The version of KOSA under consideration would require social media companies to somehow protect minors from developing eating disorders, drug habits, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and compulsive social media use habits, from suffering from sexual exploitation or financial harm, and from exposure to tobacco or cannabis products, online harassment, and physical violence. The bill's text says this is only about companies "exercis[ing] reasonable care in the creation and implementation of any design feature," but clearly, it is about content—a.k.a. speech—and amounts to a requirement that social media companies censor whole categories of content.

This is why KOSA is so sneaky—it doesn't outright say that these companies need to take drastic action, but it would effectively require it.

It might not explicitly require age verification, but unless social platforms are going to massively curtail everyone's ability to speak freely and access perfectly legal content, they're going to have to check IDs to determine who is underage.

It might not say that encryption is illegal, but designing apps to prevent exposure to various harms could be interpreted to mean monitoring all private messages, which would of course mean the end of encrypted messaging features.

Meanwhile, the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act would require that people show ID to access online porn and any other content that lawmakers deem "harmful to minors" by virtue of "appeal[ing] to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion."

In the News

AI hackers—who's responsible? Recent instances of hacking by OpenAI and Anthropic AI systems highlight some murky legal territory, notes Wired:

Who is legally responsible when agentic AI goes rogue, and what recourse do victims have when they've been breached by joyriding models? Great question.

In the wake of disclosures from both OpenAI and Anthropic that versions of their models escaped containment during internal cybersecurity experiments and hacked real-world organizations, calls for government regulation of AI have been mounting. But as more and more incidents emerge, questions about legal liability and repercussions have also come to the fore.

Researchers and lawyers WIRED spoke to emphasize that these questions have not been answered in practice in the United States legal system. In other words, there haven't been decisions in enough relevant cases for the picture to start to form. But the recent high-profile incidents from OpenAI and Anthropic suggest that answers will need to come soon.

Follow-Up

Candeub confirmation hearing: A few weeks ago, I wrote about Adam Candeub, the lawyer who wants to revive the Comstock laws to attack online porn (and maybe racy books, too) and to use antitrust provisions to punish social media companies for "mak[ing] Americans less happy." If President Donald Trump gets his way, Candeub will start heading up antitrust enforcement at the Department of Justice, which sounds…fun, if you're into Victorian morality and making antitrust definitions completely meaningless. The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on Candeub's nomination today.

More Sex & Tech News

• Police body camera company Axon is now "pitching products (Draft One and Form One) that use AI to automate report writing for police officers," notes Techdirt. What could go wrong?

• A new study links increased suicidal ideation by teen girls with states enacting abortion bans, and The 19th suggests that abortion bans are causing suicidal ideation. That seems like a leap, considering there are a lot of differences between the kinds of states that ban abortion and those that don't.

• A federal appeals court ruled last week "that Arkansas' 2023 law restricting access to library materials can go into effect, three years after a judge blocked two sections of the law on First Amendment grounds," reports the Arkansas Advocate. Judges said the plaintiffs don't have standing to challenge the law, which criminalizes librarians "furnishing a harmful item to a minor" and allows anyone to "challenge the appropriateness of material available in the county or municipal library."

The post Minnesota's Nudification Ban Could Punish People Over Parodies and Stripped-Down Selfies. Elon Musk's xAI Is Suing. appeared first on Reason.com.

How a Top Democratic Operative Lost Faith in Her Party

2026-08-05T20:00:51Z

Before Evan Barker split with the Democratic Party in 2024, she says she raised $50 million for its candidates, especially those on the progressive fringe. In her new memoir Nothing Left, the 35-year-old political operative who was raised working-class in the Midwest says she got so tired of the classism and identity politics of party elites that she ended up voting for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.

Barker, who suffers from serious congenital medical conditions, talks about being activated into politics by Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act, staging the first event where Bernie Sanders met Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and walking out of the 2024 Democratic National Convention feeling politically homeless. She tells Nick Gillespie about the insatiable, bipartisan grind for more and more money at every level of politics, the lack of interest in and understanding of working-class people, and where she thinks left- and right-wing populism is headed next.

0:00—What was the appeal of Bernie Sanders?

4:14—What's wrong with the Democratic establishment?

8:39—The realities of political fundraising

13:40—Campaign finance reform

18:36—Did Bernie Sanders fold to the Democratic establishment?

22:06—Elizabeth Warren

23:37—Why did Democrats lose the working-class voter?

28:42—Trump's 2024 campaign messaging

31:01—Has Trump delivered?

35:17—How much of today's political battles are generational?

36:43—Will populism vs. libertarianism become the next political battle?

The post How a Top Democratic Operative Lost Faith in Her Party appeared first on Reason.com.

Harmeet Dhillon on Distinguishing Between Protected Speech and Actionable Discriminatory Conduct

2026-08-05T14:30:54Z

Jewish Insider:

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, urged pro-Israel college students to distinguish between protected speech and actionable discriminatory conduct — "people literally interfering with your ability to get an education" — when facing antisemitism on campus.

"[With] a lot of young people these days, there's kind of a snowflake culture with 'I feel unsafe.' I feel unsafe everyday when I go to work and get a mean email from a colleague. Life is full of challenges," Dhillon said on Tuesday at the conclusion of the Israel on Campus Coalition's National Leadership Summit in Washington.

"Someone wearing a keffiyeh or shouting 'from the river to the sea,' it's protected by the First Amendment," Dhillon said. "Holding a red triangle over a student's head in a mob setting and saying 'Jews not welcome' is much closer to not protected speech."

"You have to sort out people being mean or rude to you versus people literally interfering with your ability to get an education," she said.

It so happens I've written two articles on exactly that theme, i.e., distinguishing between protected speech and unprotected conduct.

Unfortunately, the Jewish Insider article does not give much more detail about Dhillon's speech; I don't know if that's because the speech did not go into further detail, or because of the limitations of a short article.

That said, while I agree with Dhillon's general point and understand why she made it to this specific audience, there is a related issue percolating through the courts: can otherwise protected speech be used as contextual evidence to explain why unprotected conduct contributed to an unlawful hostile environment for Jewish students.

The law firm Consovoy, McCarthy recently filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on my behalf, asking the Court to grant cert. in Stand With Us Center for Legal Justice v. MIT. In that case, the First Circuit, correctly, held that illicit actions by anti-Israel protestors cannot turn unprotected speech into a civil rights violation. The court then, incorrectly, suggested that the illicit conduct itself became part of the protected speech so long as MIT chose not to enforce its rules (and the law).

But the amicus brief focuses on the narrower issue of whether constitutionally protected speech endorsing violence can be used as contextual evidence explaining why unprotected conduct contributed to a hostile environment. Given that the court mistakenly ruled that unprotected conduct was protected speech, it neglected to meaningfully address this issue, but it's crucial to hostile environment cases:

An act that appears innocent in isolation may take on a different meaning when viewed in context. Posting a completed game of hangman in a dormitory common area may seem innocuous. But if students had publicly declared the week before that lynching was a good way to keep Black people "in their place," the same image could reasonably be understood as threatening and racially targeted. The surrounding expression thus bears directly on how a reasonable person would understand the act.

As always, a cert. grant is a longshot, but mine is one of several amicus briefs filed in the MIT case.

If followed by other courts, the opinion would not only make it nearly impossible for Jewish students to win hostile environment cases, could also spell the end of hostile environment litigation more generally.

In addition to the issue raised above, the MIT court held that holding a defendant liable for deliberate indifference to a hostile environment requires evidence that the actors who created the hostile environment acted with discriminatory animus. So, first, the court held that proof of discriminatory animus is required, but also held that contextual evidence that would show that discriminatory animus is barred.

And, second, the notion that discriminatory animus is required for hostile environment claims to begin with seems clearly wrong. On the most basic level, it's not the students who created the hostile environment who are being held liable in a hostile environment case, it's the university that exhibited deliberate indifference to the hostile environment.

Imagine the university implemented an AI communications system, which started sending out violent threats to women students. The university became aware of these threats, and the impact it was having on women students who were unable to concentrate on their studies after receiving vile, threatening messages to their phones and emails. The university chooses to do nothing.

AI, not being a sentiment being, can't have an "intent." Does that mean that a subsequent hostile environment case should fail, because there was no discriminatory intent or animus in the underlying behavior? That seems absurd.

The post Harmeet Dhillon on Distinguishing Between Protected Speech and Actionable Discriminatory Conduct appeared first on Reason.com.

Socialists Are Trying To Take Hold of the Democratic Party—and They're Winning

2026-08-05T22:33:13Z

It's the "democratic" socialist moment.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) engineered the primary victories of three winning candidates in New York's recent congressional races. A week later, DSA-backed Melat Kiros toppled a 30-year incumbent in Colorado's 1st congressional district, sailing to victory. "You are the proof that the power of organized people beats the power of organized money," Kiros told supporters. When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) appeared onscreen at a Zohran Mamdani victory party in New York, the crowd chanted, "You're next, you're next, you're next."

The socialists aim to take over the Democratic Party, and some members of the old guard are making nice.

"I can disagree with some of the positions or statements of some of the incoming members of Congress but still welcome them. We are a big tent party," Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D–Md.) told CNN. Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) agrees: "I'm not a democratic socialist. But I do believe the Democratic Party has been, historically, way too timid in taking on corporate power. I think our party should have bigger ideas."

Others are wary of these "bigger ideas" and see a hard leftward turn as a losing strategy.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) argues that "socialists aren't Democrats. They're socialists." Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.) warns of a "dangerous" agenda that amounts to "expressing support for communism…for open borders, defunding the police." Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) is blunter still: "Our party's becoming an orgy of socialism." And veteran Democratic strategist James Carville says it's time to talk "the S-word, schism."

But so far, the rise of the DSA is looking less like a schism and more like a hostile takeover. Some DSA members have been honest about their radical ambitions.

DSA National Political Committee member David Jenkins declares that "our goal is communism"; National Political Committee member Hazel Williams argues that "U.S. imperialism is not a thing that can be reformed away. It has to be overthrown through revolutionary struggle."

Socialism never took hold in America. But those who believe the DSA can't win outside of progressive cities may be underestimating its reach.

Socialism, Coast to Coast

In Colorado, Kiros sailed to victory promising that "the only way we get Medicare for All passed is by getting rid of the Democrats that are actively standing in that way." In Los Angeles, socialist Nithya Raman may unseat the incumbent Democratic mayor; she credits the DSA as "the only place where people were really talking about tenants' rights and renters' rights in the context of a political movement." Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib is also a DSA member. The DSA recruited Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, who once posted on Reddit that he became a "communist" as he got older. Platner has since dropped out of his race amid rape allegations against him.

As mayor, Mamdani hasn't had time to transform New York into either a workers' paradise or a communist hellhole. But he has begun to transform the political landscape by skillfully leveraging his platform to promote the ideals of socialism at every turn. After signing the largest budget in New York City history—one that, among other things, delayed pension contributions so he could avoid making substantive cuts—Mamdani proclaimed that socialism had triumphed over capitalism.

"If these past months have shown us anything, it is that socialists not only understand economics just as well as the capitalists who came before, but that we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles," he said.

Mamdani is fulfilling a promise he made early in his political career: to remain an uncompromising promoter of doctrinaire socialism.

"We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism," he told a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2021. His new role as kingmaker has put Jeffries in a bind. Asked whether Mamdani was making enemies on Capitol Hill by endorsing against incumbents, Jeffries demurred: "The mayor and I agreed to strongly disagree about some of his endorsements, and he's got work to do in terms of the conversations that he's going to have with members of Congress moving forward."

How Socialists Infiltrate

In the early 1980s, the left-wing British Labour Party was infiltrated by a socialist group called the Militant tendency. The group organized around the Trotskyist newspaper Militant and pursued a strategy known as "entryism," with the goal of, as one study of the group put it, "finding a pool of new members to recruit" to radical Marxism.

A disillusioned former Militant member described it plainly at the time: "They're gradually infiltrating, you know, hedge-hopping from ward to ward, taking over wards," he told the British program TV Eye in 1981.

"We have a majority support, probably, [among] the Labour Party's young socialists," Militant organizers told TV Eye.

The aim, the historian Kenneth O. Morgan later observed, was "capturing the Labour Party for the cause of revolutionary socialism." Labour leaders worried Militant was anticipating a revolutionary moment in which it could abolish parliamentary procedure and overthrow Britain's constitutional monarchy—as one Militant organizer put it on camera, "on the basis of that majority, abolishing the monarchy, abolishing the House of Lords." After Militant captured the Liverpool City Council and three parliamentary seats, Labour expelled the group for violating its charter by creating a "party within a party."

One member of the DSA has suggested that Mamdani's team should "study the Marxist-led Liverpool City Council" with the goal of transforming "the mayor's office into an organizing center to build a mass movement," ultimately "with international repercussions."

That seems to be exactly what they're planning.

Today's Marxist revolutionaries can be found not in the newsroom of The Daily Worker or gathered in the City College of New York cafeteria, but in the Twitch streams of socialist influencers such as Hasan Piker.

Like many socialists, Piker tactically downplays his radicalism by claiming all he's really after is affordable healthcare.

"I wish they'd stop calling me a radical. None of these people are radical. They just want healthcare," he said at a DSA victory party. In other contexts, though, he's fantasized about killing landlords—"let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude"—and praised China's former dictator Mao Zedong, whose policies like the Great Leap Forward caused tens of millions to starve to death, as "one of the great leaders of this world."

Before she won her New York primary, socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier was tweeting about "seiz[ing] the means of production." Asked how she'd respond to Republican ads branding her a communist, she said only that it's a framing she's "very proud" not to respond to.

In the public eye, democratic socialists tend to avoid Marxist rhetoric, especially when running for office, but they won't criticize a comrade for being too far left. Before he was mayor, Mamdani explicitly outlined for young DSA members a strategy of emphasizing less radical policies while never losing sight of the ultimate goal, to paraphrase Marx, of expropriating the expropriators.

"If we're talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we're talking about Medicare, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country," he said. "But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in…[like] the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment….It is critical that we do not leave any one issue for the other."

What seems to be happening is that DSA members are pushing the Democratic Party toward democratic socialism at the same time that committed Marxists are pushing the democratic socialists toward full-blown communism.

The Road From 'Democratic' Socialism to Communism

The Red Star caucus is the DSA's communist caucus, and one of its members is now a national co-chair. Red Star members published an argument for including communists in the DSA in 2024, noting that "for decades, DSA was an anti-communist…organization." The DSA's founders had explained in a labor journal that they'd inserted language into the founding charter banning members "under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization."

"Democratic centralism" is the concept that lets communists say they permit democracy even as they impose a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Vladimir Lenin explained that democratic centralism "rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party."

That's freedom of speech, in other words, as long as it doesn't contradict the party line.

Perhaps that's why the DSA's Red Star caucus supports democracy only "in our present conditions," where "democratic struggle outweighs the benefits of ideological homogeneity." Lenin himself once advised that until revolutionaries have the "strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments…you must work within them." The DSA recently lifted its ban on members affiliated with democratic centralist groups.

How much does it matter if a single caucus within a marginal political party wants to bring communism to America? Republicans see it as a political opportunity. During a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore, President Donald Trump declared, "We're not going to lose an election for 100 years. The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn't want to work."

But the entire Democratic Party isn't on the verge of Maoism.

American exceptionalism includes an exceptional resistance to the kind of socialism that swept Europe from the 19th century onward. In their book It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks identified "Americanism," a culturally unique ideology of "antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism," as the animating ideology in the late 19th and early 20th century United States.

The socialist scholar Leon Samson believed "Americanism has thus served as a substitute for socialism." Samson and other socialist scholars of the 1920s and '30s believed their movement struggled in America, even during the Great Depression, because the working class already believed it lived in a society with a high degree of social mobility. In Europe, by contrast, guilds and rigid class structures meant men were far more likely to follow their fathers into the same profession and social station. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky believed American workers were simply too prosperous to fully embrace Marxist class conflict; New York's material conveniences, he observed, "completely won" over his own two young sons when his family lived there in exile during the winter of 1917.

Socialism With American Characteristics

Life in America's preeminent capitalist city is a lot more opulent today, and the country isn't in a depression. So why are there still so many socialists?

For one thing, in the mayoral election, most New Yorkers weren't voting for socialism. They were voting against a washed-up former governor with a checkered personal history, and for a charismatic young candidate who vowed to stand up to Trump. Support for democratic socialist candidates also skews heavily toward the young and college-educated, not the lower-income laborers who are supposed to constitute the revolutionary "proletariat." That's because the democratic socialists are promising to deliver these young, credentialed urban professionals what they really crave: upward mobility, the American Dream.

Is America no longer upwardly mobile? It is. In most parts of the country, young people are still on track to end up wealthier than their parents were. But there are troubling trends in cities where socialists such as Mamdani are getting elected.

Under-40 city dwellers voting for socialists have accumulated record amounts of student loan debt and feel boxed out of the real estate market. Left-wing views are correlated with high education paired with relatively low income; the statistician Nate Silver has found that the Americans most likely to identify as "very liberal" are postgraduates making less than $60,000 a year.

Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, no fan of socialism, predicted something like this: "There's a generational problem where it's difficult for young people to acquire capital….If you start your life in debt that's impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, it'll be harder to accumulate capital, and you might be less friendly to capitalism."

But there are ways to make city life more affordable that don't involve creating expensive and inefficient government programs, looting wealth, or fomenting revolutionary struggle. Thiel suggests internalizing the costs onto the universities themselves and rewriting bankruptcy law so student debt can be discharged: "It's the college that gives you the bad education that gets stuck with the bill."

Centrist Democrats have floated an "abundance" agenda focused on rolling back zoning and other land-use regulations that make housing so expensive in the first place. But that would require more Democrats to stand up against their own coalition of special-interest groups, and to combat false narratives coming from the socialist left within their own party. Contrary to the leftist narrative, the middle class isn't shrinking because Americans are getting poorer on average; it's shrinking because more Americans are getting richer and moving into higher income brackets.

If the Democrats seem unable to combat democratic socialism, the democratic socialists seem just as feckless in opposing those pulling them toward outright communism.

Where the Socialist Road Leads

When Mamdani praised socialism in his city budget speech, he name-checked Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who critiqued the kind of centralized economic planning that destroyed national economies. "I have been reminded of the words of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek: 'If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists,'" Mamdani said before pivoting to declare that his administration had proven Hayek wrong.

But Hayek was right. Central planning has led to economic ruin and starvation over and over, from the USSR to Mao's China, North Korea, Cuba, and now Venezuela. The socialist hero Hugo Chávez boasted that his social housing project, Hugo Chávez City, would usher in a "new Venezuela, no longer built from scrap." But at the very moment Mamdani declared socialism victorious in New York, Hugo Chávez City sits in ruins, as does much of Chávez's "new Venezuela" following a devastating earthquake. International rescue teams say the incompetent Venezuelan state has impeded their access to the hardest-hit areas.

Economic disaster wasn't Hayek's only warning. Left unchecked, he argued, socialism—even of the "democratic" variety—leads to tyranny. Hayek's best-selling book was called The Road to Serfdom. Socialism leads down this road, he argued, because in a planned economy, individual preferences don't determine what's produced and sold; instead, a political committee, and ultimately a single leader at its head, must assume the authority to decide "what men should believe and strive for."

The economic plan outlined in the DSA's most recent political program is troubling enough on its own: universal rent control, government-owned housing, and nationalizing the food, education, energy, medical, and transportation sectors, all funded by aggressive wealth taxes and a government takeover of America's largest corporations. Just as Hayek warned, that economic program is paired with an agenda for dismantling America's constitutional system: The platform calls for a new political system that would abolish the Electoral College, make the president and the Supreme Court subordinate to Congress, and abolish the Senate. Asked directly on C-Span whether the DSA really wants to abolish the Senate, one co-chair didn't flinch: "That's part of our platform, and we don't think that's extreme."

Socialists claim the mantle of democracy but somehow always end up with one-party states.

Hayek warned that, despite their democratic pretensions, socialists must eventually abolish democracy too, since it's the final "obstacle to [the] suppression of freedom" their grand vision requires.

The socialists don't want a policy debate about healthcare or the optimal size of the welfare state. Their movement aims to restructure the entire American political system, to replace free markets with socialist planning, and to transform a constitutional republic designed to protect individual rights into a so-called democratic collective that can wage permanent class warfare.

The democratic socialists are quite open about all of this. Yet for some establishment Democrats, none of it amounts to a red line. "I'm not afraid of new members or new ideas in the party," says Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.). Rep. Robert Garcia (D–Calif.) agrees: "It's important that we welcome them….We have to have a big tent."

You do need a big tent to survive in a two-party system. But if there's one thing history has taught us about Marxists, it's that they're not good at sharing their tents. If they can't take them over, they'll tear them down.

Democratic socialism is concentrated in progressive, coastal cities, for now.

But New York's DSA co-chair is probably right to be optimistic that by 2028 the movement will widen its reach: "We will be trying to influence the next presidential primary….Many in the organization would be very thrilled if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ended up running."

America's immunity to socialism may be waning as the cultural memory of its 20th century failures fades. K-12 schools have largely failed to teach these lessons of history to millennials and Generation Z. Higher-ed liberal arts departments are steeped in Marxist theory. Greedy capitalists remain favorite Hollywood villains. And millennials who watched the 2008 financial collapse as young adults were more likely to hear from the news that it was capitalism run amok than that federal housing policy, Federal Reserve manipulation, or the moral hazard created by quasi-governmental guarantors like Fannie Mae were the root causes.

So confidence in capitalism is falling, and Americans under 35 now view socialism more favorably than capitalism. The "antistatism, laissez-faire," and "individualism" that Lipset and Marks identified as fundamental to "Americanism" have become less central to American identity.

We're also in an era when charismatic entertainers can harness the energy of digital crowds to propel themselves to surprising political victories. Trump's complete takeover and transformation of the Republican Party is proof of that. Democrats must now decide, and quickly, whether they'll stand up for the liberal order they claim to defend, or whether they'll succumb to a populist uprising that aims to overturn it.

The post Socialists Are Trying To Take Hold of the Democratic Party—and They're Winning appeared first on Reason.com.

The Justices Should Hold Regular Press Conferences

2026-08-05T14:30:00Z

My second essay for SCOTUSBlog calls on the Justices to hold regular press conferences. Here is a snippet:

My proposal for holding press conferences is unconventional, but I think it would be a net positive. At regular intervals, different members of the Supreme Court would hold a televised press conference before the Supreme Court press corps, as well as members of alternative media outlets, such as podcasters.

Certain topics would of course be off limits. The justices could not opine on any pending cases. They also could not offer any opinions that could trigger a recusal on some matter. But there are a range of topics the justices could discuss. The justices should be pressed on leaks. Indeed, Kagan and Barrett were expressly asked about the Dobbs leak by members of Congress. I suspect if more information is given publicly, there would be fewer leaks. Moreover, I have been critical of Chief Justice John Roberts for selectively speaking out on some issues (such as judicial impeachment), but saying nothing about a series of critical leaks that predated Dobbs. If there are regular press conferences, these statements would become more common, rebutting the charge of selective outrage.

Indeed, I think the justices are ready for primetime. There has been a longstanding annual practice in which two justices would testify before the House Judiciary Committee. They will primarily discuss the court's budget but also answer some questions about how the court operates. This practice took a hiatus during the pandemic, but resumed with the recent showing from Kagan and Barrett. In 2011, Justices Scalia and Stephen Breyer gave a remarkable joint testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Constitution. We need to hear more from the court, and not just before the appropriations committees.

I wrote this piece before Justices Kagan and Barrett testified. Their performance, in my view, makes the case for press conferences far stronger.

The post The Justices Should Hold Regular Press Conferences appeared first on Reason.com.

Progressive Michigan

2026-08-05T13:35:40Z

Medicare for Whatever: Will progressives eke out a big victory in Michigan?

The state held Democratic primary elections yesterday, and progressives pinned their biggest hopes on epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed, who has campaigned to be a Senate nominee for the party. Nate Silver says that El-Sayed, who is ahead by a small margin, will probably win. El-Sayed's campaign is claiming victory.

El-Sayed's campaign has been cast as a test for whether the party's insurgent left flank has real national reach. It's also a test for how far leftist healthcare nonsense will go.

El-Sayed, a former public health official, holds many of the usual positions associated with the Democratic Party's young left flank: He talks a lot about big money in politics, sharply criticizes U.S. aid to Israel, and wants to raise taxes on the rich. He's been endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and campaigned with Mao-fanboy Hasan Piker.

El-Sayed's stance on U.S. aid to Israel has dominated conversations about his campaign. But El-Sayed's campaign has also focused aggressively on his support for government-run healthcare: His oft-repeated slogan is "Money out of politics. Money in your pockets. Medicare for All."

El-Sayed recently told The Bulwark's Jonathan Cohn that he was moved to focus on healthcare after witnessing disparities in the system while working at a hospital in New York City. He later became a public health director in Detroit and Wayne County.

Now, as a candidate in a high-profile race, healthcare is part of his rallying cry.

In 2021, El-Sayed co-wrote a book, Medicare for All: A Citizen's Guide. But despite having written a book and made Medicare for All a key part of his campaign slogan, he has not exactly campaigned on the details of how a massive healthcare overhaul would be implemented. As Cohn put it: "The pitch El-Sayed makes in his speeches and appearances doesn't get into the policy weeds; it is more like a general pitch for the idea of universal coverage."

This sounds to me like El-Sayed, as with so many progressives, supports a policy he either doesn't understand or won't elucidate, because the specifics would be unpopular and unworkable.

This is a problem that has bedeviled Democrats and Medicare for All supporters for years. As a senator, Kamala Harris co-sponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I–Vt.) Medicare for All bill. When she started running for president, she was asked about some of the proposal's policy specifics, including the little fact that it would outlaw nearly all existing private health insurance in the United States. As it turns out, "if you like your health care plan, you absolutely cannot keep your health care plan," is not a very popular slogan. So Harris quickly backed off the idea, and then struggled to articulate what, exactly, she was for. (This is a recurring problem for Harris.)

Beyond the near-total elimination of existing health insurance arrangements, there's the cost. Medicare for All plans are all astronomically expensive, with multiple estimates finding that a Sanders-style law would cost over $30 trillion over a decade, and as much as $100 trillion over a longer time horizon.

Even in a world where government spending sometimes seems to not matter, where laws and budgets with eye-popping spending and deficit figures attached pass as a matter of routine, those are the sort of figures that give lawmakers actual pause. They would require essentially upending the federal budget, and much of the economy, as we know it.

Indeed, rather tellingly, when Sanders' own home state of Vermont tried to implement its own Medicare for All–style plan, the effort collapsed. It was simply too expensive. Even sympathetic lawmakers couldn't make it work.

The progressive faction now seeking to take over the Democratic Party appears to have learned none of these lessons. They are choosing to avoid hard questions and policy specifics and embrace vague, unworkable nonsense because they have no answers, just slogans.

Evening redness: Elsewhere in Michigan, leftists won a clear victory in a House primary.

William Lawrence, a progressive candidate, defeated two more moderate Democrats in a hotly contested House district. Lawrence represents the not-officially-socialist (but still pretty socialist) left flank of the Democratic Party: He told The New York Times that he does not currently identify as a democratic socialist, but his campaign admits that he used to be a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. His primary victory means he will take on Republican Rep. Tom Barrett in the general election.

Notably, Lawrence, 35, is a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, a left-leaning activist organization that bills itself as representing young people. Sunrise began with a focus on youth climate activism but morphed into an all-purpose progressive agitprop shop, embracing a kind of apocalyptic omnicrisis/everything bagel theory of politics and pushing the Democratic Party to do so too.

It's not surprising, then, that Lawrence focused his campaign energies on attacking data center development, according to Politico. Data center opposition is the lefty issue of the moment, and Lawrence, as is often the case with the Sunrise crew, seemed ready to hop on board.

Scenes from the Greater Boston area: Boston looks to be moving forward with automated speed cameras; the Massachusetts Senate has allocated $575 million for the tech, per Axios.

QUICK HITS

Remember the "Squad"? One of its members, Cori Bush, lost to a moderate Democrat by 22 points yesterday. As Nate Silver points out, "It's clear that progressives are rising in the Democratic Party overall. But it's also clear that there's a fair amount of race-by-race variance."
Ann Arbor will have a DSA mayor:

Also looks like the DSA will FLIP the Ann Arbor Mayor's office, with former DSA State Representative Yousef Rabhi destroying Democratic incumbent Christopher Taylor:

Rabhi- 63.5%
Taylor (Inc)- 36.5%

— Uncrewed (@Uncrewed) August 5, 2026

New York continues to be a demonstration of what happens when DSA-friendly candidates are elected to office: Mayor Zohran Mamdani is cutting ties with the city's business community, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Sen. Susan Collins won't vote to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.

I have carefully reviewed Todd Blanche's qualifications to be Attorney General. This includes his record and responses to questions from Senators at the Department of Justice Appropriations hearing, his confirmation hearing, and in the weeks that followed.

While I believe Mr.…

— Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) August 4, 2026

DSA for…free trade????!?!

DSA-aligned Democrats are now the most pro-free-trade voting bloc in the United States, in an incredible turn of events pic.twitter.com/BhfaCorZdy

— Joey Politano (@JosephPolitano) August 4, 2026
Steak. Sauerkraut. That's basically it. What it's like to eat the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. diet for a week. There are more descriptions of bowel movements than you might expect.
Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has apparently been having some health troubles, which have caused him to fall further behind on finishing his epic fantasy novel series.

The post Progressive Michigan appeared first on Reason.com.

"This Direct Monetization of Prior Government Service Is Beyond the Pale"

2026-08-05T20:59:54Z

From Third Circuit Judge Emil Bove's dissent last week from the one-line denial of mandamus in In re Mylan, Inc. (the majority consisted of Judge Brooks Smith, joined by Judge Patty Shwartz):

The Attorney who survived Defendants' disqualification motion is representing private parties in the very same litigation he led on behalf of Connecticut for more than a decade. This direct monetization of prior government service is beyond the pale. It is also a violation of Rule 1.11(c) of Pennsylvania's Rules of Professional Conduct. The Rule violation undermines the integrity of the proceedings, including an upcoming complex bellwether trial that will have a ripple effect in other multi-district litigation. Ripple effects in the MDL [Multi-District Litigation] multiply the taint risk that the District Court has authorized.

So I would grant mandamus relief. The decisions of the Attorney, the Firm, and Plaintiffs require disqualification….

From a commercial standpoint, there is no mystery about the Firm's hiring of the Attorney and Plaintiffs' desire to pay for the Attorney's services. Plaintiffs are seeking billions in damages relating to pharmaceutical price fixing.

Beginning around 2016, the Attorney led an investigation on behalf of Connecticut's Attorney General that overlapped with Plaintiffs' claims almost 100%. During the Attorney's public service, he joined forces with 53 other States and Territories. He gleaned strategic and investigative information during that process. While working for Connecticut, the Attorney spoke privately and confidentially with those regulators, targets of the investigation (including certain Defendants) and their counsel, and witnesses and their counsel. The Attorney's government work also involved coordination with the DOJ and FTC, which conducted parallel federal investigations. There have already been federal deferred prosecution agreements and coordinated state-level civil settlements. Those dispositions all but confirm that sensitive information circulated between the government actors—including the Attorney—for quite some time.

Plaintiffs piggybacked on these government efforts with their own claims against Defendants. The relevant MDL commenced in 2016. The Firm represented Plaintiffs since at least 2019 without the Attorney in their camp. On behalf of Connecticut, however, the Attorney worked closely with Plaintiffs' team.

On July 1, 2025, the Attorney withdrew his appearance for Connecticut. He left government service on July 3. He joined the Firm's partnership on July 7. The Firm touted the Attorney's work on the price-fixing investigation. A press release announced that the Attorney would "continue" to work on the case for his "new private clients." The Attorney entered an appearance on behalf of Plaintiffs on July 9. Not surprisingly, Defendants moved to disqualify the Attorney and the Firm. The District Court denied the motion and refused to certify an interlocutory appeal….

[Pa. R. Prof. Conduct] 1.11(c) prohibits the Attorney from representing Plaintiffs because he obtained "confidential government information" relating to Defendants while he worked for Connecticut. The Attorney "may not" represent Plaintiffs because his confidential government information "could be used" against Defendants. It is that simple.

[Here's the full text of Rule 1.11(c): "Except as law may otherwise expressly permit, a lawyer having information that the lawyer knows is confidential government information about a person acquired when the lawyer was a public officer or employee may not represent a private client whose interests are adverse to that person in a matter in which the information could be used to the material disadvantage of that person. As used in this Rule, the term 'confidential government information' means information that has been obtained under governmental authority and which, at the time this Rule is applied, the government is prohibited by law from disclosing to the public or has a legal privilege not to disclose and which is not otherwise available to the public. A firm with which that lawyer is associated may undertake or continue representation in the matter only if the disqualified lawyer is screened from any participation in the matter and is apportioned no part of the fee therefrom." -EV]

The imputation of the Attorney's Rule 1.11(c) conflict to the Firm is mandatory. Despite the fact that the Firm's representation of Plaintiffs long predated the Firm's hiring of the Attorney, the Firm apparently made no effort to screen the Attorney while the disqualification issue was addressed. And there is no reason to doubt that the decision to proceed in this fashion was the result of an eyes-wide-open decision by sophisticated actors.

Defendants should not have to wait until a direct appeal to correct these errors because "an appeal that comes too late can almost never unscramble the egg." IPlaintiffs, the Firm's personnel, and other MDL participants cannot unlearn confidential government information passed to them by the Attorney.

The Attorney and the Firm seek to defend their conduct by pointing to extensive sharing of documentary evidence with Plaintiffs by Connecticut and other States. There is no textual basis for the argument that this sharing cured the violation of Rule 1.11(c). The District Court seems to have been persuaded by the Attorney's "promise" that, "if he has such [confidential] information, he will not share it with his clients or other MDL parties aligned with them." Like the document sharing, the Attorney's CYA promise has no relevance to the application of the Rule.

There was also no basis for the District Court's suggestion that Defendants were required to identify potential "prejudice" under Rule 1.11(c). Because the appearances problem is so significant in this setting, the Rule does not require such a showing. See City of Philadelphia v. Dist. Council 33 (Pa. 1983) ("[T]his Court has never required a showing of potential or actual damage for disqualification."). Accordingly, the District Court committed a clear legal error in the application of Rule 1.11(c), which cannot be fully redressed later in a direct appeal….

I am mindful that this type of ethical violation does not always mandate disqualification. See In re Boy Scouts of Am. (3d Cir. 2022). There should not be too many cases, however, where a lawyer is permitted to proceed with a representation while violating applicable ethical rules in a way that creates appearances of impropriety. The five factors set forth in Boy Scouts and other cases make clear that this is not such a case.

First, to the extent the disqualification motion raised any choice-of-counsel issues, Plaintiffs and the Firm created them. Before the Attorney joined the firm in July 2025, Plaintiffs had benefited from the Firm's representation for at least six years. During that period, other lawyers capably represented Plaintiffs' interests. When the Attorney recently joined Plaintiffs' team, they named him as their lead counsel instead of waiting to address the obvious ethical issues. In this context, Plaintiffs' interest in the Attorney's services does not outweigh the attendant ethical violations.

Second, it would not be an "undue" or excessive restriction on the Attorney's private-practice prospects to insist that he not draw fees in the same litigation that Connecticut taxpayers previously paid him to steward on their behalf. Based on the Attorney's expertise and experience, he has plenty of viable options for new clients and different matters. Prohibiting the type of ethical violation that the District Court has blessed would not deter reasonable attorneys from entering public service.

Third, Plaintiffs and the Firm deployed the only questionable "litigation strategy" at issue. The Special Master whose report the District Court adopted was wrong to suggest otherwise. Disqualification may have been "disruptive," and it could "adversely affect" the schedule of the bellwether trial, as the Special Master put it. But that is a problem of Plaintiffs' creation. Defendants should not have to sit on their rights to keep a trial schedule on track in response to this brazen move by Plaintiffs, the Firm, and the Attorney. It will be equally disruptive, if not more so, for judges to address all the issues that will arise at the trial and in the other cases as a result of the Attorney's changed roles. Thus, Defendants' handling of this litigation was not strategic in a problematic sense.

Fourth, the negative appearances arising from this situation obviously favor Defendants. The naked and problematic profit-seeking that is manifest in the record is being swept under the rug. At least for now, unless and until there is a direct appeal. In the meantime, no one could fault an observer for wondering if the Attorney was more inclined to exercise his judgment in a manner that pleased Plaintiffs when he started to job hunt while still working for Connecticut. Worse still, in my view, the Firm's press release essentially confirmed that the Attorney's move was timed so that he could use his "deep knowledge" of the case to "serve his new private clients as their cases head to trial." In other words, the Firm hired the Attorney to work for Plaintiffs at the most financially significant moment of the case. The existence of these harsh but unavoidable inferences should have been enough to forbid the Attorney's current role.

Fifth, the risk of unfair prejudice to Defendants in this case and related ones is substantial. The suggestion that Plaintiffs' interests are completely aligned with Connecticut's because of previous discovery sharing is misleading at best. The Attorney was careful to avoid suggesting that he had previously shared everything. In response to the disqualification motion, he contended that he had shared information "extensively" but not completely. He emphasized documentary disclosures, but he used amorphous limiters like "important and material information"—as opposed to all information—to describe what he disclosed. As one indicator among many of the types of information not shared, the Attorney felt it necessary to assure the District Court that he had not "discussed" with new colleagues at the Firm "any information I may have learned during settlement negotiations that I participated in" on behalf of Connecticut.

Only by suspending common sense can one ignore the extensive non-documentary mental impressions and information that the Attorney obtained during his public service, which are now available to Plaintiffs and the Firm as they prepare for trial. The Attorney's "deep knowledge" of the case, which is the phrase the Firm used in the press release, includes confidential governmental information that no one should be in a position to sell….

Profit seeking by the Attorney, the Firm, and Plaintiffs risk diluting the public benefit of investigations and litigation that the Attorney led during his old job. The taint risk arising from the violation is substantial, which risks wasting the extensive judicial resources necessary to adjudicate these matters. Mandamus is the "only avenue with the remedial force to address the District Court's error." …

I can't say who's right and who's wrong on this—Judge Bove's two colleagues obviously weren't persuaded by his analysis—but it struck me as worth noting.

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VDARE's Libel Case Against N.Y. Times Thrown Out

2026-08-05T16:56:20Z

From N.Y. trial court judge Lisa Headley in VDARE Found., Inc. v. N.Y. Times Co., decided July 20:

In this action, the plaintiff asserts claims for defamation arising from four articles. The plaintiff is seeking $700,000 in actual damages with punitive damages and costs.

First, in August 2019, the plaintiff alleges, inter alia, that the defendant, in a Times article "quoted the associate director of the Anti-Defamation League opining that while the term 'kritarch' has historically been used in a non-pejorative way to describe 'rule by judges,' more recently it has been 'co-opted' by extremists and taken on a different meaning." The plaintiff argues that it was false and defamatory to report that the term, "kritarchy" had "suddenly been transformed into an anti-Semitic code word."

Second, in September 2019, plaintiff alleges, inter alia, that the defendant published a story that referenced and included an underlined text hyperlink to the August 2019 article, and that it was defamatory to say that "a post on the plaintiff's website used an anti-Semitic reference."

Thirdly, in November 2019, plaintiff alleges, inter alia, that the defendant published an article about Stephen Miller, who cited "Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE, [who] believes that diversity has weakened the United States[.]" Further, the November article 2019 reported that "the SPLC 'has labeled VDARE a 'hate website' for its ties to white nationalists[.]" The plaintiffs asserts that such statements about VDARE were false and defamed it.

Lastly, in May 2020, the plaintiff alleges that the defendant published a wire article from Reuters, and defamed the plaintiff when it reported, inter alia, that VDARE is accused of "race hatred," "manipulating on-line readers by utilizing a 'bot-farm' of fake accounts," and violating VDARE's "501(c) status."

The court granted the Times' anti-SLAPP motion and dismissed the case; note that New York law requires "actual malice" (i.e., knowing or reckless falsehood) as to all statements on matters of public concern, whether brought by public figures or not:

This court finds that the plaintiff has not alleged actual malice, and fails to prove that terms such as "racist," and "white supremacist" are not "non-actionable opinion." This court further finds that such terms are considered to be non-actionable opinion, and cannot be shown as evidence of actual malice. Plaintiff sets forth no evidence to contradict the legal notion that such terms are non-actionable opinion, but merely states a public policy argument and cites to ambiguous case law, neither of which can defeat defendant's motion to dismiss.

Specifically, the court finds that the plaintiff failed to submit persuasive evidence that defendant has acted with actual malice, and any evidence set forth by plaintiff merely illustrates, at most, journalistic negligence. Plaintiff argues that there is evidence that defendant had doubts about the truth of its statements regarding the articles about plaintiff, but sets forth no evidence to prove that allegation. Plaintiff's arguments are conclusory in nature, and fail to provide factual evidence that defendant was "purposefully" avoiding the truth or had "ill will" towards plaintiff, or had "reckless disregard" in publishing articles about plaintiff….

This court further finds that the plaintiff failed to meet the heightened pleading standard required pursuant to the amended Anti-SLAPP law…. A plaintiff is … required to establish by "clear and convincing evidence" that there is a substantial basis in fact and law for its claim…. [P]laintiff has not met the heightened pleading standard required by law because plaintiff failed to establish by "clear and convincing evidence" that a claim for defamation exists….

Under the anti-SLAPP law, the Times "is entitled to recover its reasonable attorneys' fees."

UPDATE 8/5/2026, 12:54 pm: Though this opinion was handed down just two weeks ago, it turns out to be a slightly revised version of an opinion from July 2022; my apologies for not noticing this at the outset. The revisions relate solely to allowing the attorney fees.

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"After the Hallucination: What 100 Recent Cases Reveal About Candor, AI Errors, and Sanctions"

2026-08-05T12:51:02Z

From Adam Feldman (Legalytics) yesterday—unsurprising, but it's helpful that this can be shown concretely:

This article examines what courts have done after lawyers learned, or should have learned, that AI-related inaccuracies had entered the record. The study began with Damien Charlotin's publicly available AI Hallucination Cases Database and independently reviewed 100 of the most recent cases in the dataset that were resolved U.S. matters involving lawyers. A stricter analytical sample included cases with a meaningful AI connection, a final judicial outcome, and enough information to evaluate counsel's response after discovery.

The results point to a coherent and practical distinction. The seriousness of the original error remains central: nearly every high-materiality incident produced a serious consequence. But post-discovery conduct also mattered. Serious consequences were substantially more common when lawyers offered misleading explanations, shifted blame, repeated the misconduct, or introduced additional inaccuracies after receiving notice. Prompt admission, by contrast, was associated with a markedly lower rate of serious consequences.

Candor cannot erase significant harm to a client or the judicial process. It can, however, prevent an already serious mistake from becoming a separate problem of professional responsibility….

And some more (read Feldman's whole post for still more):

The data suggests that the first response should be investigative rather than defensive. Counsel should preserve the prompts, outputs, research histories, drafts, and communications connected to the filing; identify who drafted, reviewed, and signed it; and examine every authority, quotation, and factual assertion produced through the same workflow.

The correction should address the full problem rather than only the error identified by opposing counsel. That may require withdrawing or replacing the filing, notifying the court and opposing counsel, and explaining accurately how the material entered the record. Describing fabricated authorities as typographical errors, or assigning responsibility primarily to a subordinate, client, vendor, or software product, creates additional risk.

Remedial measures are most persuasive when they are concrete and voluntary. Courts credited steps such as mandatory review of primary sources, supervisory approval, AI-use policies, training, audits of related filings, and reimbursement of unnecessary expenses. Once counsel receives credible notice, every later filing, explanation, and omission becomes part of the court's assessment of professional judgment and candor….

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My New Dispatch Article on Trump's Section 301 "Forced Labor" Tariffs

2026-08-05T12:47:25Z

President Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on "Liberation Day" (Michael Brochstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)

Today, The Dispatch published my new article on Donald Trump's massive new Section 301 tariffs. Here is an excerpt:

President Donald Trump recently used Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose massive new tariffs on 60 U.S. trading partners, including the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and more. Imports from 41 trading partners will now face 12.5 percent tariffs, and the others will be subject to 10 percent levies.

In February, the Supreme Court invalidated Trump's International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) tariffs, which imposed tariffs of 10 percent or more on almost all U.S. trading partners… In a case I helped develop and litigate, the court's 6-3 decision held that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs and that the president could not legally claim unlimited tariff authority. With the new Section 301 tariffs, Trump seeks to circumvent the Learning Resources v. Trump decision and once again enact a broad trade war without congressional authorization.

Unlike IEEPA, Section 301 does authorize tariffs. But it sets limits that Trump's policy blatantly transgresses. Section 301(b), the provision Trump is relying on, allows the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to impose tariffs if it finds, after an investigation, that "an act, policy, or practice of a foreign country is unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts United States commerce." In this case, the USTR claims the offending policies relate to the importation of goods supposedly made by forced labor.

In a recent Dispatch article, my Cato Institute colleague Scott Lincicome explained why the forced-labor "investigations" the administration claims justified the Section 301 tariffs are a sham. As he noted, the conclusion of the investigations was clearly predetermined, the tariffs imposed have no real connection to any genuine forced-labor issues, and many of the countries subject to the new tariffs actually have tighter restrictions on goods produced by forced labor than the U.S. itself does….

The new Section 301 tariffs also run afoul of the major questions doctrine, which requires Congress to "speak clearly" when authorizing the executive to make decisions of "vast economic and political significance." At the very least, Section 301 does not clearly authorize the president to start a trade war against almost all our major trading partners on the basis of a sham investigation and dubious pretexts.

The Section 301 tariffs undoubtedly implicate the major questions doctrine. The Tax Foundation estimates the Section 301 tariffs will impose some $629 billion in new taxes on Americans over the next decade. Like the IEEPA tariffs, they are likely to significantly reduce income and economic growth. These potential effects are larger than those of any of the previous policies the Supreme Court has determined to be major questions, with the exception of the IEEPA tariffs themselves. (In that case, three of the six justices in the majority relied on the major questions doctrine.) The new tariffs outstrip even President Joe Biden's sweeping student loan forgiveness program, which involved some $400 billion in unauthorized expenditures and was invalidated by the Supreme Court in 2023 in large part because it ran afoul of the doctrine….

Even if the courts conclude that Section 301 authorizes these new tariffs, they should also rule that their imposition violates the constitutional nondelegation doctrine, which limits the delegation of legislative power to the executive. Tariffs are a specifically enumerated congressional power. The Supreme Court's nondelegation precedent is far from completely clear, but last year's decision in FCC v. Consumers' Research held that delegations of the power to impose taxes and other financial levies must have a clear floor and ceiling and that "[t]he guidance needed is greater when an agency action will affect the entire national economy than when it addresses a narrow, technical issue." There is, pretty obviously, no meaningful floor or ceiling under the administration's approach to Section 301. And the authority claimed by Trump is certainly one that affects the "entire national economy…."

If Trump can use IEEPA, Section 301, or some other statute to impose unlimited tariffs on any import from any nation whenever he wants, that makes this enormously important power subject to the whims of one person. Such unconstrained authority is inimical to the rule of law, which requires that major laws and regulations be set in advance by legislation and not subject to any one person's total control. It thereby destroys the stable expectations businesses, investors, and consumers need to make their plans, imperiling the economy.

Relatedly, if the president can impose massive new tariffs at will, including by making utterly bogus accusations related to "forced labor," the nation's credibility with trading partners is damaged. Any trade agreement with the U.S. becomes essentially worthless, as the president can violate it at will. And businesses and governments would be foolish to commit to trade and investment in America, knowing those commitments could be imperiled any time the president becomes peeved about some issue. Over the last year, Trump has either threatened or actually imposed tariffs on major trading partners for ridiculous reasons: wildfires in Canada, the supposed threat of foreign-made movies, and the prosecution of Brazil's former president for launching a coup to stay in power after he lost an election. In addition to the economic damage, such actions poison U.S. relations with key allies and make it more difficult to work together to counter adversaries like Russia and China….

Three lawsuits challenging the tariffs have already been filed: one brought on behalf of two small businesses by the Liberty Justice Center (the public interest law firm I worked with on the IEEPA case); one filed by several firms, including Learning Resources Inc., the toy manufacturer whose IEEPA challenge ended up before the Supreme Court; and—most recently—one brought by 25 state governments led by Oregon…

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Stop-Talking-to-Me Order Against Ex-Landlord Who Kept Texting Ex-Tenant About COVID Vaccines

2026-08-03T16:16:22Z

From Gonda v. Duering, decided Friday by the Hawaii intermediate appellate court (Justices Katherine G. Leonard, Keith K. Hiraoka, and Daniel M. Gluck):

[O]n December 11, 2024, Petitioner-Appellee Anaya Gonda filed a Petition for an Ex Parte Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and for Injunction Against Harassment (Petition). Gonda alleged that Duering, her former landlord, had harassed her both before and after she vacated the apartment on September 11, 2023. She alleged that Duering sent her "over 25 disturbing text messages with no legitimate purpose and a concerning focus on [her] health," reflecting Duering's belief that COVID vaccines had caused Gonda's health problems. She alleged that Duering continued to send her text messages in October 2023, January 2024, April 2024, July 2024, and November 2024….

Gonda's boyfriend, Gustavo D'Amico, was the first witness [at trial]. He testified that he and Gonda arrived at the apartment on September 11, 2023 to find Duering there with a painter—even though Gonda had paid rent through the end of September—and that Duering began "screaming at" D'Amico. D'Amico called the police, and the police "helped handle the situation."

Gonda then testified that, on September 11, 2023, she told Duering not to contact her …. She similarly testified that "after my tenancy ended on September 11th and I, uh—told Mr. Duering to never contact me again, except via my lawyer …." Gonda testified that this exchange took place in person …. Duering, for his part, denied that Gonda told him not to communicate with her….

Gonda testified that Duering's text messages were "always about [her] health" and contained "COVID vaccine … conspiracy theories." She testified that there was no reason for Duering to communicate with her. In cross-examination by Duering, Gonda further testified that she was "concerned and disturbed by the obsessive nature of [his] continued messages towards [her] when there's absolutely no reason for [him] to contact [her]."

Hawai'i Revised Statutes (HRS) § 604-10.5(a) defines "Harassment" as including:

An intentional or knowing course of conduct directed at an individual that seriously alarms or disturbs consistently or continually bothers the individual and serves no legitimate purpose; provided that the course of conduct would cause a reasonable person to suffer emotional distress….

Duering … argues that the District Court violated his right to free speech, freedom of religion, and/or to petition the government for redress of grievances—as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution—by prohibiting Duering from communicating with Gonda….

As the United States Supreme Court has made clear, "no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient." Rowan v. U.S. Post Off. Dep't (1970). Duering has a constitutional right to hold, and publicly express, whatever views he likes regarding the COVID vaccine; here, however, Duering is not being restrained because of his viewpoints on COVID, nor is he being restricted in communicating with any other member of the public regarding his views. Instead, he is restrained from very specific conduct—contacting Gonda—for a limited time….

[T]he Injunction imposes no restrictions on Duering's ability to express his views to any other member of the public (or the government), and its prohibitions with respect to Gonda expire after three years. The District Court found that Duering harassed Gonda, and did not err in restraining him from harassing her further….

[Duering also argues] that the District Court was improperly biased against Duering because of Duering's views on COVID vaccines. He points to the District Court's statement that Duering "was not—is not [Gonda's] doctor" as evidence of the District Court's bias against him. He explains:

Duering's personal and religious views that the Covid vaccines were (and are) dangerous to human health; which if contrary to Judge's belief, is an issue that has divided families and friends to disassociate with one another, which was caused since the massive Covid vaccination rollout in 2021, which was in addition to the big divide, which media propagated mind control, to influence otherwise sound-minded intelligent people, to ridicule and berate people like Duering, who merely seeks to educate those who are uneducated on the subject and dangers of inviting foreign unidentified substances, to be voluntarily injected into their sacred body.

The District Court made its statement that Duering was not Gonda's doctor while explaining its finding that Duering had no legitimate purpose for contacting Gonda; indeed, the District Court made clear that Duering's views on COVID vaccines were not relevant to its determination:

The point is not that your views are legitimate or substantiated or worthy of—or worthy of Ms. Gonda to consider them. That's really not relevant.

What is relevant is somebody who did not want to have communication from you, and that being the case, it—it almost doesn't matter what you were saying to her in that regard, and it's—and so that's why the court is ruling that the injunction order will be issued.

Duering and Gonda no longer had a landlord-tenant relationship, and Gonda made clear that she did not want his unsolicited medical advice. The District Court did not err in concluding that Duering had no legitimate purpose in contacting Gonda. Nothing in the record suggests any improper bias by the District Court….

For more on anti-harassment orders generally, see Overbroad Injunctions Against Speech (Especially in Libel and Harassment Cases); that article argues that broad injunctions banning speech about the plaintiff are generally unconstitutional, but that injunctions banning continued unwanted speech to the plaintiff are generally valid.

The post Stop-Talking-to-Me Order Against Ex-Landlord Who Kept Texting Ex-Tenant About COVID Vaccines appeared first on Reason.com.

Eleventh Circuit En Banc Upholds Florida Ban on Knowingly Admitting Minors to Obscene-as-to-Minors Performances

2026-08-04T23:07:35Z

An excerpt from the long majority opinion (by Judge Andrew Brasher, signed by eight judges) yesterday in HM Florida-ORL, LLC v. Governor:

This appeal is about the constitutionality of Florida's Protection of Children Act. The Act makes it a misdemeanor to "knowingly admit a child to an adult live performance."

The Act defines an "adult live performance" as a live performance that depicts "nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or specific sexual activities [as defined], lewd conduct, or the lewd exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts" and meets three additional criteria. The three additional criteria are that the performance "[p]redominantly appeals to a prurient, shameful, or morbid interest," "[i]s patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community of [Florida] as a whole with respect to what is suitable material or conduct for the age of the child present," and "[t]aken as a whole, is without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for the age of the child present."

The court held, among other things, that the law isn't unconstitutionally overbroad, because it basically tracked the "obscenity-as-to-minors" standard that the Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit had validated:

Under Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton's "Miller-for-minors" test [set forth by the Supreme Court], a state may prevent minors from accessing works that "(a) taken as a whole, and under contemporary community standards, appeal to the prurient interest of minors; (b) depict or describe specifically defined sexual conduct in a way that is patently offensive for minors; and (c) taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors." These restrictions "trigger no heightened First Amendment scrutiny and are subject only to rational-basis review, even though they encompass speech that is not obscene for adults." … Applying these precedents, the Act is a straightforward regulation of obscenity….

Of course, not every depiction of sexual conduct is obscene. But here, enumerated sexual activities are proscribed by the Act only if they predominately appeal to the prurient interest, are patently offensive to prevailing adult standards with respect to what is suitable for that child's age, and lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for that child's age. So, under a straightforward reading of the Act, nudity will count as obscenity only if it satisfies the three elements of the Miller-for-minors test. Under Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution requires no more.

Hamburger Mary's complains that the Act, unlike the law upheld in Ginsberg v. N.Y. (1968) [a predecessor to Paxton -EV], does not allow an exception for parental consent. But neither the Supreme Court nor our Circuit has ever held that a regulation of materials obscene for minors must contain a parental consent exception. Neither Miller nor Paxton referenced such an exception…. [And] whether material is obscene—and therefore proscribable under the Constitution—has nothing to do with whether an adult wants a child to view the material. Moreover, because we are addressing only Hamburger Mary's free speech rights, we need not and do not decide whether parents have a right under state or federal law to expose their children to obscene material. Cf. Fla. Stat. § 1014 (2021) (Parents' Bill of Rights)….

And it held the law wasn't unconstitutionally vague, either, including in its reference to the "age of the child present":

Hamburger Mary's also argues that the Act's age-variable standard renders the law vague and overbroad. In two places, the Act refers to the "age of the child present." Hamburger Mary's says that the Act requires it to draw "a different line for every child in every audience." We conclude that the age-variable standard is neither vague nor overbroad for four reasons.

First, as a matter of vagueness, nothing requires Hamburger Mary's to tailor its performances for children of different ages. The Act bans admitting a child of any age to a performance that depicts nudity, sex, or lewd conduct when the performance satisfies Miller's three-part obscenity test. The "age of the child" standard could theoretically matter to whether a performance meets the last two elements of the Act. But it is difficult to imagine any sex-based performance that predominantly appeals to a prurient interest being suitable for a child of any age. Nor has Hamburger Mary's identified any such hypothetical performance. We therefore cannot see how vagueness "permeates" the text of the Act.

Second, as a matter of overbreadth, the primary effect of the age-variable standard is to permit more speech than the State could otherwise prohibit…. By tailoring the standard to the age of the minor, as opposed to creating a blanket ban, the primary effect of this part of the Act is to allow older minors to attend performances that would be obscene for younger minors. We cannot say that a law that is more tailored than the law we upheld as constitutional in American Booksellers, Inc. v. Webb (11th Cir. 1990) is overbroad in a pre-enforcement facial challenge.

Third, age-variability is an established part of obscenity law. It is settled that states may "broaden" Miller's definition of obscenity to cover material obscene from a child's perspective…. The Act's age-variable standard, to the extent it matters at all, fits comfortably with our precedents.

Hamburger Mary's argues that the statutes approved in Ginsberg and Webb were different because they drew a "single line" between 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds. But this line is no less vague than the difference between 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds. And Hamburger Mary's does not deny that line-drawing is obvious as between, for example, 5-year-olds and 17-year-olds. Hamburger Mary's focus on granular distinctions between different hypothetical ages does not render the Act void for vagueness.

Fourth, Miller counsels that the answer to limited indeterminacy is not to void statutes for vagueness. We have never required legislatures to craft obscenity statutes with "god-like precision." "That there may be marginal cases in which it is difficult to determine the side of the line on which a particular fact situation falls is no sufficient reason to hold the language too ambiguous to define a criminal offense." "In resolving the inevitably sensitive questions of fact and law, we must continue to rely on the jury system, accompanied by the safeguards that judges, rules of evidence, presumption of innocence, and other protective features provide." …

And the court also rejected the argument that the law was unconstitutional "because the Legislature's supposed purpose was to disincentivize non-obscene drag shows, even though the law does not apply to non-obscene performances":

It is a "familiar principle of constitutional law that this Court will not strike down an otherwise constitutional statute on the basis of an alleged illicit legislative motive." Nor can the statements of individual legislators "muddy clear statutory language." …

In any event, the Act is consistent with a legislative intent to target drag shows that are obscene for children, not drag shows writ large…. Nothing in the Act targets performances because they feature drag or "challenge conventional gender norms." …

Judge Robin Rosenbaum dissented, on behalf of five judges:

Today our Court embraces mess-around-and-find-out ("MAFO") First Amendment jurisprudence. Under this form of jurisprudence, a citizen can learn whether a law prohibits their speech only by taking a wild guess, presenting their speech, and then seeing if they get arrested and face imprisonment, thousands of dollars in fines, and loss of their business license.

But of course, the Constitution is supposed to prevent citizens from bearing the burden of unclear (and here, undefinable) limitations on speech. Our Constitution ensures that citizens need not risk imprisonment or business-ending fines to engage in protected speech. And it doesn't tolerate statutes that create prosecutorial skeleton keys allowing "policemen, judges, and juries" to unlock penalties and punish speech on "an ad hoc and subjective basis." In other words, MAFO statutes, by definition, flunk the Constitution.

Yet today we endorse Fla. Stat. § 827.11 ("Act"), even though it's a MAFO statute that does all these unconstitutional things. Section 827.11 requires businesses, concerts, and even backyard shindigs to tailor any "live performance" "for the age of the child present." As far as I can tell, the Act is unique. No other law requires tailoring based on the specific child's age, as opposed to tailoring for minors in general.

And Florida offers no assistance to individuals and businesses in determining what is appropriate "for the age of the child present." … With no guidance from the state, Hamburger Mary's faces strict liability to the tune of jail time, thousands of dollars in fines, and the loss of its business license for guessing the Act's standards incorrectly. So it's not surprising that Hamburger Mary's has censored itself and disallowed anyone under the age of 18 into any of its drag-show performances. After all, the Act sets the stakes too high for anyone to find out they were wrong about their interpretation of it—especially given Florida's history of arbitrary enforcement of similar statutes.

As it turns out, chilling all drag performances when those under the age of eighteen are present appears to be the point. Though the text of the Act is itself unconstitutionally vague, it's blinking reality not to at least acknowledge that, upon adopting the Act, Governor Ron DeSantis described it as "being about adult performances … like those drag shows." And one of the Act's sponsors declared that the Act would criminalize "the gateway propaganda to … evil—Drag Queen Story Time." In other words, Florida purposely created a mess-around-and-find-out statute to chill drag. And the Act is unconstitutionally vague by design. Yet today we uphold it, anyway. The Constitution does not countenance our determination….

The Act's dual sliding scales "for the age of the child present," by their terms, create at least seventeen (for each year of age under eighteen, the age of majority)—and perhaps many more—age thresholds that a live performance must satisfy. As far as I can tell, this multiple-age restriction (without guidance or definition) is unique in First Amendment law….

To be sure, the Supreme Court has held that "a state may deny minors access to materials acceptable for adults but obscene for minors." And we have upheld a state law that regulated the display of material deemed "harmful to minors."

But these cases (and according to my research, all others imposing substantive limitations on minors' access to certain materials in the past) involved only one age cut-off: between adults and minors. Not only that, but we construed the general category of materials "harmful to minors" at the level of what a reasonable seventeen-year-old would find has "serious value." The line between adults and seventeen-year-olds may raise a few questions about what the law prohibits close to the line. But a law that divides all minors from all adults with a single line provides relatively clear notice to citizens and guidance to law enforcement about what it prohibits.

That's not the case for a law like the Act, which has seventeen—or more—lines a citizen must comply with. Of course, a law that requires citizens and law enforcement to identify the contents that fall between at least seventeen lines dividing minors' ages by a single year at a time raises many, many more questions about what it permits and what it doesn't. Indeed, a law like that offers nothing but margins. Put simply, the Act is basically an invitation (or more accurately, a threat) to any would-be speaker and venue to mess around and find out what the Act means. It's also a blank check to law enforcement to decide for itself what violates the Act.

The Majority Opinion baldly asserts that it's no harder to discern what a single cut-off between adults and minors … allows than to understand what the Act's seventeen one-year-distinction lines permit. But that's illogical.

To show the folly of the Majority Opinion's position, consider an extreme example. Assume "for the age of the child present" imposes a day-by-day inquiry into the appropriate age for viewing the material. If that were the case, a performance could be appropriate for someone who is sixteen years and 100 days old but not sixteen and 99 days. That would mean the Act would create more than 6,000 substantive categories (365 days per year X seventeen years). I doubt even the Majority Opinion would have trouble concluding that a requirement like that would fail to provide sufficient notice and guidance about what the law prohibits.

I'm not suggesting the Act imposes more than 6,000 cut-offs (although I can't rule that out, either). But here's the point: the mere fact … that citizens and law enforcement can discern what's permissible for an adult versus a seventeen-year-old doesn't somehow show, as the Majority Opinion suggests, that citizens and law enforcement can understand what's permissible for any number of age categories—whether that's seventeen or 6,000….

Here's the bottom line: the Act is a hammer. And under its vague language, law enforcement can treat lots of protected speech as nails. Its vague language purporting to address obscenity serves as an especially pernicious club to silence political speech….

There's a lot more in the opinions (including a concurrence and a second dissent), as to universal injunctions and legislative history as well as the First Amendment.

The post Eleventh Circuit En Banc Upholds Florida Ban on Knowingly Admitting Minors to Obscene-as-to-Minors Performances appeared first on Reason.com.

Roanoke Removes Gunshot Detectors Months After Approving Them

2026-08-04T19:44:20Z

Last week, the city of Roanoke, Virginia, ended its brief and fumbled experiment with Flock Safety's Raven acoustic gunshot detectors (AGD) after 41 of the 75 approved devices had been installed—30 of them in the wrong locations. Roanoke isn't alone. Numerous other cities have canceled contracts with Flock or with SoundThinking Inc, a competing provider of ShotSpotter, a similar technology, over cost, effectiveness, and privacy concerns related to scattering microphones across a city.

Botched Installation Joins Privacy Concerns Over Microphones in Public Places

According to The Roanoke Star's Stephanie Harper, "an internal review traced the misplacements to data-entry errors: sensor addresses were mistyped, including 'Orange Ave.' rendered as 'Grange Ave.' more than once, and installation crews worked from a location list that council had never approved. The city first reported 16 misplaced sensors in late June, then corrected the figure to 30 a day later."

As a result of the botched installations, the Flock Safety AGD program, which was approved in April and paid for with $54,675 in federal grant money, ended just months later. The messy implementation was a major factor, but the program had been dogged with concerns about invasions of privacy that have swirled around AGD technology since its introduction.

"Some have raised the concern that ShotSpotter might be used as a voice surveillance tool—that is, that it could be used to listen to and record conversations occurring near ShotSpotter sensors," a 2019 privacy assessment of the AGD system by the New York University School of Law's Policing Project acknowledged. "This concern has been bolstered by a handful of occasions in the past that human voice has been captured by sensors and used in a criminal prosecution."

Ultimately, that report concluded that "the risk of voice surveillance is extremely low in practice."

In fact, though, Bloomberg reported in 2022 that New York City police may have been using ShotSpotter sensors to eavesdrop on public places, noting, "Its technology is always listening and can capture not only gunfire, but conversations held at a normal tone within 30 to 45 feet (14 meters) of a sensor."

Perhaps as important as eavesdropping abuse of AGD sensors is evidence that they don't work very well at their primary tasks.

80 Percent False-Positive Rates

"While vendors claim AGD offers high detection accuracy and meaningful results, independent research and city reports indicate otherwise," finds a new report by Jonathan Hofer of the Independent Institute. "The largest quasi-experimental study, analyzing sixty-eight metropolitan counties, found AGD had 'no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes.'"

Among other problems, the report found, "false-positive rates for AGD systems consistently exceed 80 percent in major cities. In Chicago, over forty thousand unproductive deployments occurred in less than two years, consuming more than twenty thousand patrol hours and diverting officers from genuine emergencies."

Confirming that take, a 2021 City of Chicago Inspector General assessment concluded that "ShotSpotter alerts rarely produce evidence of a gun-related crime, rarely give rise to investigatory stops, and even less frequently lead to the recovery of gun crime-related evidence during an investigatory stop."

The Chicago assessment emphasized the steep costs associated with what its authors saw as a minimally beneficial technology. Hofer's report details those costs.

High Cost for Little Return

"Beyond the sticker price listed in city contracts, other costs, such as maintenance, add to the total outlays required to employ the technology. In 2022, the City of Oakland was paying nearly $800,000 per year for ongoing AGD services and maintenance," Hofer found. "Chicago was spending $9 million per year."

That might be a worthwhile investment if it produced results (and avoided invading people's privacy). But the data suggests that the industry's high claimed accuracy rate just doesn't correspond with reality when the sensors are installed along busy city streets where trucks rumble, dumpsters slam, firecrackers pop, and life and commerce generally produce noise.

"Sources that purport a 90-percent-or-more success metric are often counting false positives—if and when there is a documented investigation that demonstrates no gunfire occurred," adds Hofer. He points to research by the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern School of Law which found 89 percent of the alerts "turned up no gun-related crime and 86 percent led to no report of any crime at all."

Hofer adds that "in St. Louis, for every 100 alerts, police found evidence of a crime in less than one incident." By contrast, evidence of crime was found in 7.6 incidents for every 100 calls generated by members of the community.

A 2024 audit of AGD in New York City found "alerts only resulted in confirmed shootings between 8% and 20% of the time." The audit added: "During the month of June 2023, for example, out of the 940 ShotSpotter alerts that NYPD responded to 771 could not be confirmed as shootings upon arrival at the scene (82%), 47 were determined to be unfounded (5%), and 122 were confirmed as shootings (13%)."

Yes, some actual gunshots are detected. But that comes at high cost for purchasing and maintaining the AGD system as well as in terms of investigatory resources expended on wild goose chases.

Hold Off on Detectors in Favor of 'Proven Policing Strategies'

In recent years many cities, including Cambridge, Chicago, San Antonio, San Diego, Tacoma, and Roanoke have dropped AGD contracts. Politicians and members of the public called to pull the plug on the systems over cost, effectiveness, and privacy worries.

Hofer recommends that cities hold off on AGD "until independent validation demonstrates effectiveness." He also recommends transparency, so the public can assess the systems' failure and success rates. He calls for cost-benefit analyses and asks that municipalities "invest in proven policing strategies: adequate homicide detective staffing, modern case-management systems, and intelligence-led approaches that have more substantiated promise in crime reduction."

That is, terminating AGD contracts and emphasizing established techniques can both lower costs and improve effectiveness when it comes to fighting crime.

Although the gunshot detectors are gone, Roanoke citizens concerned about privacy can't rest quite yet. According to news reports, the city still has a fleet of license plate readers and surveillance cameras watching the streets.

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Today in Supreme Court History: August 5, 1974

2026-01-26T16:29:25Z

8/5/1974: Shortly after the Supreme Court decided United States v. Nixon, President Nixon released the "smoking gun" tape recorded in the Oval office.

President Richard Nixon

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Brickbat: Banned T-Shirt

2026-08-04T14:21:07Z

In Australia, Ian Minus was fined $1,500 dollars (U.S. $1,050) after being convicted of knowingly displaying a Nazi symbol in public without reasonable excuse. Minus wore a T-shirt with a banned Nazi swastika outside a royal commission investigating antisemitism in Sydney. The judge said the protest was insensitive and especially offensive because it took place near hearings where Jewish people were sharing their experiences with antisemitism. Minus claimed he was protesting restrictions on free speech and the war in Gaza.

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Open Thread

2026-08-05T07:00:00Z

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Dropped Cases Against Alleged Reflecting Pool Vandals Followed a Rush to Judgment

2026-08-04T21:04:36Z

At a press conference on July 2, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said she had "tremendous evidence" proving that David Hearn had deliberately caused more than $1,000 in damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, making him guilty of a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. That was not true, Pirro admitted last Friday, when she withdrew the charge against Hearn, a 67-year-old former competitive canoeist.

Pirro's embarrassing reversal, which enraged President Donald Trump, could be seen as evidence of her courage in contradicting her boss's claim that damage to the reflecting pool's newly installed liner was caused by vandals, as opposed to the "rushed and botched installation" she described in her motion to dismiss the indictment against Hearn. But it also raises questions about Pirro's decision to charge Hearn given what she knew at the time, which suggests she was keen to make an example of him even though there was already reason to doubt his guilt.

By the time Pirro obtained the indictment, news outlets had reported that parts of the reflecting pool's blue liner, which was installed under an unusual no-bid contract by a company that had never done work for the federal government before, were coming loose. The earliest reports appeared on June 18, the day before Hearn was arrested and two weeks before his indictment.

By Hearn's account, he paused during a bike ride and reached into the pool to touch a floating piece of liner because he was curious what it felt like. "I didn't vandalize anything," he told The Washington Post. "I didn't destroy or break or peel anything."

Interior Department employees told a different story. The initial U.S. Park Police report, which Pirro quotes in her motion, said Hearn saw "a big piece of material flapping in the water and began to grab at it," citing "a witness" who said Hearn "began to rip and pull at a chunk of liner material."

Two National Park Service (NPS) employees said Hearn was yanking at the flap and "further damaging this compromised area." In other words, everyone conceded that the liner was already coming loose, and the only dispute concerned whether and to what extent Hearn had "maliciously" compounded the damage.

At her press conference the day of the indictment, Pirro embraced the Interior Department's account, saying NPS employees "observed Hearn actually forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands." Now she says she was too quick to believe that story, blaming the Interior Department for concealing relevant information about recognized problems with the liner installation.

According to the information provided by the Interior Department, Pirro says, "the damage was entirely caused by vandals." But judging from internal documents that her office subsequently obtained, the damage "was the result of flawed installation by the contractor."

While those documents may have illuminated the extent of the problem, it should not have been news to Pirro, since it had been discussed in press reports (including stories based on Interior Department records) weeks before she stood in front of a podium and accused Hearn of a felony. But Pirro disregarded that alternative explanation, apparently because she was eager to punish "unchecked vandalism" of "our sacred monuments," which she said was "a priority not only for the president, but for myself as well."

That priority overrode the question of whether Hearn was provably guilty of vandalism, which should have been the only consideration in the decision to charge him. "The government's approach was ready, fire, aim," Hearn's lawyers said. Something similar seems to have happened with three other cases against alleged reflecting-pool vandals, which Pirro's office also dropped.

"I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro," Trump said on Saturday. "I guess she choked," he added on Monday, saying he was "really disappointed" in her because "she folded like an umbrella." For the president, the question of individual guilt or innocence remains irrelevant.

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The En Banc 11th Circuit Granted Relief In Drag Show Case Where Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett Did Not

2026-08-05T03:02:34Z

Justice Kavanaugh has used the phrase "interim docket" to refer to the Supreme Court's emergency rulings, as they often set the interim rule while the issue percolates in the lower courts. Sometimes that "interim" can last years.

Such is the case with Griffin v. HM Florida-ORL. A Florida law prohibited restaurants from showing "adult live performances." A federal district court judge issued a universal injunction against the law that applied to the plaintiff, Hamburger Mary's, as well as non-parties. Back in October 2023, Florida asked the Supreme Court to limit the injunction to Hamburger Mary's.

Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch would have granted that relief, b ut they were in the minority. Justice Kavanaugh, joined almost entirely by Justice Barrett, concurred in the denial of the stay. Kavanaugh explained that the question of the universal injunction was complicated by the overbreadth doctrine. He wrote, "This case is therefore an imperfect vehicle for considering the general question of whether a district court may enjoin a government from enforcing a law against non-parties to the litigation." (I'm sure the parents of children in Florida exposed to drag were comforted by this vehicle problem.) Kavanaugh went further to explain that this issue was "distinct" from the set aside function under APA 706. Remember, this ruling came nearly seven months before CASA. Justice Barrett did not join the footnote about the APA. I discussed the concurrence at some length here. Ultimately, Kavanaugh said "this Court is not likely to grant certiorari on the only issue presented in Florida's stay application." I suppose that finely-parsed statement about cert-worthiness was true, but the issue remained alive.

Over the next three years, Florida's law remained in interim docket purgatory. Today, at long last, the en banc the en banc Eleventh Circuit declared the Florida law as constitutional. Judge Brasher's majority opinion explains:

After additional briefing and with the benefit of oral argument, we are convinced the district court erred in preliminarily en-joining the enforcement of the Act. This is so for two reasons. First, the district court lacked authority to impose a universal injunction that prevented the enforcement of the Act against everyone in Florida. The Supreme Court has held that a so-called "universal injunction" "falls outside the bounds of a federal court's equitable authority under the Judiciary Act," id. at 847, and we see no exception that would apply in this case. Second, Hamburger Mary's was not entitled to even a more limited preliminary injunction to prevent the enforcement of the Act because its claims do not have a substantial likelihood of success on the merits. The Supreme Court of Florida's definition of "lewd" eliminates any overbreadth, and the use of the phrase "age of the child present" does not render the Act unconstitutionally vague. Accordingly, we vacate the district court's preliminary injunction in its entirety.

Judge Grant (who clerked for Justice Kavanaugh), joined by Judge Newsom, would only have decided the First Amendment issue, and not settled the scope of the injunction.

Still, no matter how certain we may be that the district court erred in the scope of its injunction, we should not say so. Because we conclude that the statute is constitutional, any follow-on decision about the district court's earlier injunction is simply advisory.

As a result, only six members of the fourteen-member en banc court decided the question concerning the universal injunction. So the universal injunction issue remains alive.

Now this case liekly goes back to the Supreme Court. Given the sharp split of the en banc court, one would think Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett now see this issue as cert-worthy. As I noted in my recent National Review essay, the clearest indication of change at the Court will be fewer cert denials accompanied by three dissentals.

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Alex Nowrasteh on "Ten Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Arguments for Socialism and Why They're Wrong"

2026-08-05T02:51:43Z

"Democratic Socialism" is a growing movement on the US political left. Thus, it's important to pay attention to its ideas, and outline where they go wrong. My Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh recently posted a succinct, but thorough and insightful critique of ten ideas in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform. DSA is probably the best-known currently active socialist organization in the US. Here's an excerpt:

1. "Under socialism, 'You have no debt. You don't need health insurance. You don't pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right.'"

There are prices on housing, medicine, food, and energy because these goods are scarce and have alternative uses. "Scarce" means that there are not enough of them to satisfy all demand at a price of zero. Those goods must be produced by people who must be fed, trained, equipped, and persuaded to show up to work. In a free-market economy, workers produce those goods because they are paid to do so, the owners of firms organize production efficiently because their profits depend on it, and the owners of capital sell it to the most profitable firms. All that activity is guided by the incentives and information provided by prices.

Similarly, there are many different uses for these goods. Prices provide a signal and an incentive to producers to decide what to build and to consumers to decide what to buy. Abolishing prices abolishes neither the costs of production nor the choices of consumption. It destroys the information and incentives that tell producers what to make, in what quantity, where, and at what sacrifice of alternatives. No socialist economy has ever solved the problem of efficiently allocating those resources without prices set by market exchange…..

3. "As free market economies fail, they turn to right-wing authoritarianism, but 'if we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty.'"

Economic freedom and political freedom are correlated. The Economic Freedom of the World report finds that the freest quartile of economies enjoys average incomes 6.2 times higher than the least free. Incomes for the poorest tenth are 7.8 times higher, and life expectancy is 17 years longer. Denmark, the democratic socialists' favorite exhibit, is nothing of the sort. It ranks ninth in the world for economic freedom, and its prime minister traveled to Harvard to say, "Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy." The regimes that actually abolished private ownership ran the authoritarian experiment themselves. More than two dozen socialist trials ran over the past century, and every one that collectivized its economy ended in one-party rule. Socialists will often deny that those countries were really socialist because they are selecting on outcomes, but there is a long history of Western socialists celebrating each new socialist government at the beginning of its reign, only to sour on it when the disaster strikes….

The classless society fared no better on its other promises of peace and social harmony. Each trial produced a new ruling class of party officials with better apartments and worse manners than the bourgeoisie they replaced; peace among nations tracks commerce rather than collective ownership,…. Authoritarianism follows the concentration of economic power in the state. That concentration is the DSA's core proposal….

4. "Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals."

"At no cost to individuals" doesn't include the individuals who will pay for it. The Mercatus Center's Charles Blahous estimated that Medicare for All would add $32.6 trillion in federal costs over 10 years under assumptions favorable to the plan, and the left-leaning Urban Institute put the figure at $34 trillion. That mostly shifts spending from premiums to higher taxes, but the new expanded tax bill would start near a tenth of GDP, grow from there, and exceed what doubling all projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections could cover. And presumably the entire point is to expand health care consumption, which randomized experiments show does little to improve health, so these estimates understate the additional resources such a scheme would require. Single-payer systems also pay with longer wait times, because a monopoly provider whose patients cannot take their business elsewhere doesn't have an incentive to change. England's National Health Service carried 7.3 million waiting cases as of this spring, and the median Canadian patient now waits 28.6 weeks between referral and treatment, triple the wait in 1993.

America's own health care problems cannot be blamed on free markets because the United States does not have a free market health care system. The US government controls 84 percent of health spending through a complex system of tax rules, expenditures, and other mechanisms. That's higher than in 27 out of 38 OECD countries. The share of the US health care sector under government control "is closer to communist Cuba (89%) than the average OECD nation (75%)," according to Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute. The specific portions of national health care systems under direct government control, and the ways they are controlled, vary across countries. American health care is a largely government-run system.

As they say, read the whole thing!

For those interested, Alex is just as tough on right-wing versions of economic statism. See our coauthored article, "The Case Against Nationalism." Nationalist and socialist central planning have much in common.

I previously wrote about "The Perils of Democratic Socialism" (a 2019 post that remains relevant to today's DSA agenda), and more recently about "The Contradictions of Socialist Prison Abolitionism" (which highlights the clash between socialists' coercive economic agenda and the desire of many of them to abolish prisons). In 2024, I wrote about how Venezuela - a nation until recently held up as a model by many Western socialists - exemplifes the dangers of democratic socialism.

Socialism - in the DSA-endorsed sense of government control over all or most of the economy - has led to disaster wherever tried. We are unlikely to make it work much better than the Russians, Chinese, Cubans, North Koreans, and others who came before.

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The Fifth Circuit Websites Gets A Glow-Up!

2026-08-04T20:25:31Z

The Fifth Circuit has launched a new design for its website. I love the glow-up!

Here is the before design (courtesy the Internet Archives):

And here is the after design.

The home page now indicates which cases are currently being argued, as well as links to the latest opinions.

The Opinions page also has a full text search, which seems to work quite well. I also like the calendar feature, which neatly displays which cases are being argued in which courtrooms at which times.

Congratulations to everyone involved with the renovation, especially Clerk extraordinary Lyle W. Cayce who will soon be retiring after a distinguished career.

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