When Barret Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento, recently ended his weekly show, he had spent 55 years spinning weird, silly, or otherwise strange songs on the radio or online. No mere fringe figure, he was an influential figure in American comedy and one of the most important cultural libertarians of his era.

That might seem far-fetched to people who grew up in a post-SNL, post-Seinfeld world. But in the early 1970s, all that lay in the future. Television shows still had to pass strict censorial review to be aired, and the same code policed much of what could be heard on mainstream radio. Hansen's program pushed against those strictures.

Listeners never knew what Hansen might play. One moment might bring a sweet, old novelty song like the Playmates' "Beep Beep" about a "little Nash Rambler" that turned out to be more powerful than the Cadillac it was racing. The next moment you might hear a risqué song about sex, like Ruth Wallis' "Davy's Dinghy" (it's not about his boat) or the Lemon Sisters' lascivious "In My Country" ("The swamp is thick, but don't be a wussie/Come steer your canoe right through my pussy…willows"). There was drug humor, from the relatively tame "Friendly Neighborhood Narco Agent" to a mid-'90s parody of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" called "The Devil Went Down to Jamaica" ("Johnny roll a ball of hash, and make sure it's the bomb/'Cause the devil's got the kind of stuff they smoked in Vietnam"). "Cows With Guns," about bovines revolting against slaughter under the leadership of Cow Tse-tung, would compete with classic comic songs from Spike Jones and Tom Lehrer.

And sometimes the show could just get plain weird. Consider the program's two biggest hits, Barnes & Barnes' "Fish Heads" and Ogden Edsl's "Dead Puppies." The former informs us that fish heads "are never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women"; the latter laments, "Dead puppies aren't much fun/They don't come when you call/They don't chase squirrels at all." Other tunes in rotation found dark humor in everything from a school shooting (Julie Brown's "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun") to a pedophile (Ogden Edsl's "Kinko the Clown"). There were the college philosophy meanderings of Tom "T-Bone" Stankus' "Existential Blues," crude advice like Frank Zappa's "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow," and a song whose lyrics are mostly just the names of different Los Angeles streets, Felix Figueroa's "Pico and Sepulveda."

The program was periodically punctuated with cowbells and sound effects. The host was joined by funny friends with alliterative names, such as Captain Chaos and Laughing Linda. And each show ended with the "Funny Five," the most requested songs of the week—a tradition that put the listeners at the center of the experience: On this show, you could help shape the dementia.

How Barret Hansen Became Dr. Demento

Hansen grew up in Minneapolis, where he was a loner who listened to records and played them at his high school dances. He went on to get two degrees in music: a Bachelor of Arts from Reed College and a Master of Arts from UCLA. After graduating, he wrote liner notes for record companies, collected records by the bushel, and DJed at KPPC, a free-form FM radio station.

That's where he became Dr. Demento. One day he played Nervous Norvus' 1956 novelty hit "Transfusion," a song about a reckless driver who constantly crashes his car only to be revived by blood transfusions. Someone at the station said he had to be demented to play that record, and his persona was born.

The Dr. Demento Show started in 1971 as a rock show with some novelty hits thrown in, but Hansen quickly discovered that almost all the audience requests were for the funny stuff. By late 1971 he had hopped to KMET, where his four-hour showcase for what he called "loony laughing records" was the No. 1 Sunday night show in the Los Angeles market. He went into national syndication in early 1974 with a taped two-hour version of the show; it rapidly became a success. He was profiled in Newsweek and went on national TV. Some of the songs he played, such as "Junk Food Junkie" and "Shaving Cream," crossed over and became Top 40 hits. "I was very happy when something that I kind of started hit the charts," he said.

He had a short break from national syndication in 1977–1978, when his syndicator went bankrupt, but he kept broadcasting until his retirement—the third-longest run in American radio history for a single-hosted musical show. Listeners started sending him their own creations, giving Hansen a new role: Just as Johnny Carson or Lorne Michaels could make a comedian's career by giving new talent a showcase, Dr. Demento became America's arbiter of musical comedy.

He wasn't wedded to any particular type of humor or any single musical genre. If someone sent him a decent record or tape, he'd play it. Let the audience decide was his mantra.

Dr. Demento and Weird Al Yankovic

In that way, he gave a boost to such musical comics as Brad Stanfield, Damaskas, a UCLA co-ed known as Sulu, and the most famous and enduring of his discoveries: Alfred Yankovic, a shy young teenager who gave Hansen his first tape in 1973.

"Weird Al" Yankovic went on to become the most successful musical comedian in U.S. history. He has won five Grammys and an Emmy. His singles have charted for more than 30 years. And Hansen gave him more than his first showcase: The Dr. Demento Show exposed Yankovic to such legendary comic musicians as Stan Freberg, Jones, Lehrer, and Allan Sherman. It was Hansen's program that inspired Yankovic to become a musical comedian. There would be no Weird Al if there were no Dr. Demento.

When I compare their relationship to that of Col. Parker and Elvis, Hansen quickly notes an essential difference: "I never managed Weird Al." But in some ways he was even more important than a manager would have been.

Hansen says he"considered myself perhaps a bit of a father figure" to Yankovic, something their roughly 20-year age difference made natural. The lyrics to Yankovic's break-out song ("Another One Rides the Bus," a parody of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust") were written in a cabin where Yankovic was spending the weekend with Hansen and some of Hansen's friends. Hansen helped get Yankovic his first job after college, and he went on a joint tour with Weird Al when Dr. Demento was much the bigger name.

Yankovic has never resented or rejected this influence, and the two are still friends. Hansen remains friends with other protégés too, such as Sulu and Mike "Musical Mike" Kiefer. The DJ's fans, who range from the alternative rockers Courtney Love and Dave Grohl to the Fox News personalities Greg Gutfeld and Kennedy, still revere him too: A 1990s chat group about the show has evolved into the burgeoning Demented Music Database. The extremely active Dr. Demento Facebook group has more than 146,000 members, and if you search YouTube for one of the novelty songs that Hansen once featured, you'll almost always find someone in the comments recalling how they first heard it from good old Dr. Demento. Such displays of devotion are rare for a disc jockey years after his peak popularity.

But Hansen wasn't just a disc jockey. Listening to Dr. Demento was like entering a secret club, one that valued intelligence, nonconformity, and humor. One of my friends calls his discovery of the show in 1974 a "lifeline, a realization that there were other people like me." Former President Richard Nixon once said that as a boy, he would listen to the train whistle and dream of the "faraway places where he'd like to go." Each Sunday, Hansen's train would take us into a demented land and return us home safe and sound.

The Libertarianism of Dr. Demento

Hansen owned more than 200,000 records, one of the largest private collections in the world, and he was always happy to share his interests with his audience. That made him a teacher (some killjoys might say corrupter) of the young. What did he teach in his weekly forays into our homes?

Hansen never had a political agenda per se. He tended to shy away from overtly political humor, and he told Steve Martin in a 1977 interview that he didn't especially like political jokes. In one of his final episodes, he decried the bitterness of contemporary politics. He told his listeners that anger had made many of the political songs he received less funny and that he played fewer of them as a result.

Nor did he seek to remake comedy. Lots of entertainers were doing that in the 1970s, and his show featured many of them: Mel Brooks, National Lampoon, Monty Python, Steve Martin. Yet, "I didn't think of myself as being in the same boat" as those people, he says. He just "thought of myself as playing things on the radio that you would never otherwise hear on the radio."

But that doesn't mean he wasn't part of that zeitgeist. Hansen believes in tolerance and freedom, and he brought that view to his show. Anyone could be featured, regardless of race, gender, or age. Anything could be lampooned as long as the treatment wasn't cruel.

"Occasionally [it] would cross my mind," he says, that he was a gatekeeper, that if he could open a door, other people could walk through it. "I don't like barriers," he adds, and the show certainly proved that. Rusty Warren, Benny Bell, and other longtime musicians whose risqué records had never been played on commercial radio suddenly found fame. Lehrer praised the Doc for helping to "keep him alive" by playing the morbidly satiric songs he'd recorded in the 1950s and '60s, prompting record companies to reissue his discs. And then there's Harry "The Hipster" Gibson and his 1943 number "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?" When Hansen interviewed Gibson in 1976, the singer told the DJ that the record had been banned from airplay for years for being "subversive"—until he got a call that "some cat named Demento" had been playing the forbidden song.

"You probably didn't know it was labeled subversive," Gibson told Hansen. His host chuckled softly and said, "Well…"

Hansen darn well knew it was subversive. That was why he played it.

In the early 1990s, Hansen aired some songs making fun of political correctness and commented that colleges falling prey to P.C. were defeating their mission of teaching people how to think for themselves. He believes that barriers are bad whether they come from the right or the left, an attitude that may help explain why he joined the Libertarian Party in the 1980s and spoke at this magazine's 20th anniversary celebration. His show wasn't overtly political, but it exuded a kind of cultural libertarianism: Have a good time, be who you are, and don't worry. It was a message of genial toleration that reached into homes nationwide for two hours every Sunday night for almost 40 years.

What Is Dr. Demento Doing Now?

Just as radio killed vaudeville and television killed radio drama, the internet is killing old-fashioned, music-based radio stations. Those that remain tend to feature prepackaged formats that suppress the spontaneity and originality that the best disc jockeys brought to their programs. The easy accessibility of songs on YouTube and Spotify also means that unusual comedy acts no longer need airtime to get attention.

But Hansen's still around, even if he isn't hosting a weekly show anymore. He's still assembling collections of funny music and recently released his own single, Get Demented.  He also showed up recently on the hit CBS sitcom Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage. The show is set in the 1990s, when Demento's radio show was still nationally syndicated; Hansen has had two cameos in the past season, evaluating and then playing a fictional song sent to him by one of the characters.

And people are still making the material he loved to transmit over the FM airwaves. Comic musicians (the artists in the Funny Music Project, the Wolves of Glendale, Kira Coviello) tour, post songs on their websites, or just make videos for social media, much as their novelty-act forebears labored in nightclubs and for niche record labels. Coviello's stage act, Honest2Betsy and her Bawdy Broads, features singing, dancing, ventriloquism, and a segment where she touts herself as the world's only topless accordion player.

You can call that silly, strange, or funny. But only one word truly captures it: demented.

The post The DJ Who Brought America Weird Al, Tom Lehrer, and 'Cows With Guns' appeared first on Reason.com.

Since a Democratic trifecta took control of Virginia's government in the 2025 election, two longtime progressive labor policy priorities have been front and center: repealing the state's right-to-work law and mandating public sector collective bargaining. Now, less than six months into the Democratic reign in Richmond, pro-union forces have come away empty handed. While unions may be disappointed, Virginia taxpayers have new reason to celebrate.

They also have an unlikely person to thank, at least for the moment: Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who vetoed collective bargaining legislation last week.

The drama traces back to the campaign trail. Then-candidate Abigail Spanberger secured the Democratic nomination amid strong support for unions. She even managed to  secure the endorsement of the Virginia Police Benevolent Association—a police union that had largely supported GOP candidates in recent elections—over Republican candidate Winsome Sears, further underscoring Spanberger's pro-union appeal.

Despite her strong affiliation with organized labor, Spanberger said several times during her campaign that she did not support a "full" repeal of Virginia's right-to-work law, which has existed in the state for close to 80 years. This led many observers—including yours truly—to try to read the tea leaves behind her statements, including whether she might still support some version of a "partial" right-to-work repeal.

Yet there was much less ambiguity when it came to public sector collective bargaining. During the campaign, Spanberger answered "yes" on a candidate questionnaire that asked if she would "champion and sign legislation to ensure collective bargaining rights for all public employees."

Virginia is one of a handful of states that bans public sector collective bargaining, having done so since a 1977 state supreme court decision. In 2021, when former Gov. Ralph Northam was in office, Democrats changed the law to an opt-in system, whereby localities could pass ordinances to allow public sector collective bargaining. (Only a small fraction have opted in).

The goal of Virginia Democrats in 2026 was to turn collective bargaining into a statewide mandate, not a local choice. Earlier this year, Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill to make this mandate a reality. The bill cleared the state legislature and went to Spanberger's desk, where union interests were confident it would be signed by the governor.

But Spanberger surprised many by sending a revised version of the bill back to the Legislature. The governor's amended version made material changes to the bill, including changing "shall" language—as in, the scope of collective bargaining "shall include" bargaining over wages, hours, and benefits—to "may," thereby cutting back on the prescriptive text. It also delayed the law's implementation for localities from 2028 to 2030 and opted for advisory arbitration, rather than binding, to settle contract disputes.

Perhaps most significantly, Spanberger's version gave more power to a new government agency that would be created under the legislation, known as the Public Employee Relations Board. An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute noted that the original bill contained detailed rules about union elections and contract negotiation timelines, while Spanberger's version left these matters up to the body's discretion.

Unions argued that this amounted to a regulatory death sentence given that the board's five members are appointed by the governor, raising fears that a future Republican leader could stock the board with anti-union members. Spanberger's revised version also eliminated a requirement that two of the board's members must be union representatives, further watering down union influence over the process.

Faced with this revised bill, the state assembly bowed to union pressure and rejected Spanberger's amendments. This put the ball back in the governor's court, daring her to veto the original bill or acquiesce. Spanberger chose the veto.

Predictably, union interests cried foul, viewing it as a bait and switch and likening Spanberger to her Republican predecessor Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Despite her veto, Spanberger maintains that she supports public sector collective bargaining and that she will "continue to look forward to a place where we'll have a bill that I'll sign into law." Virginia Democrats will retain their trifecta through at least the 2027 state elections, perhaps providing enough time for them to iron out the dispute before the balance of power in Richmond potentially changes.

In the meantime, Virginians can enjoy the reprieve—because public sector collective bargaining continues to be a bad bet from a policy standpoint. Research has found that mandatory bargaining raises state and local government spending anywhere from $600 to $750 per person annually, which could amount to a substantially larger tax burden for a small family. It is estimated that the proposed Virginia legislation would have cost the state $50 million annually, while the costs for localities could have ranged anywhere from $50,000 to $403 million over a two-year period.

Virginia taxpayers, in other words, dodged a bullet with Spanberger's veto. They'll have to hope she continues holding the line.

The post Abigail Spanberger Vetoes Mandatory Collective Bargaining, Defying Virginia Unions appeared first on Reason.com.

On Thursday, an effort to eliminate gun-free zones on New Hampshire college campuses fizzled out in the state Legislature, when the Senate voted against a committee of conference to renegotiate the bill with House leaders. Despite the setback, proponents of the legislation say they're not done.

"We'll be pursuing this with a legal challenge," says state Rep. Sam Farrington (R–Rochester), who sponsored the bill, which would have also allowed students to carry nonlethal weapons such as pepper spray and mace. Farrington, who graduated from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) last Saturday, says the challenge will be under New Hampshire's "pre-emption statute," which prohibits any "political subdivision" other than the state Legislature from regulating firearms. He thinks that policies that ban guns from campus, imposed by "unelected administrators at public universities," fall into that category.

UNH says that its restrictions were "adopted under authority granted by the Legislature to the Board of Trustees and campus presidents to govern university property."

For now, New Hampshire is one of 37 states where college campuses are gun-free zones. This includes Rhode Island and Virginia, where Brown University and Old Dominion University, respectively, were each sites of deadly shootings this school year. Indeed, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, more than 80 percent of mass public shootings since 1998 "have occurred in places where guns are banned." (Other estimates, using different criteria for "gun-free zone" and "mass shooting," have arrived at lower figures: 48 percent, even 10 percent.)

So as much as Farrington wrote his bill to protect students' Second Amendment rights, "it's also a safety issue," he says. "At UNH, for example…doors are left wide open, buildings are wide open. Anybody can walk in at any point in time."

"Gun-free zones," Farrington tells Reason, "leave victims defenseless and vulnerable."

High-quality research on the question is sparse, but the only study on gun-free zones that met the RAND Corporation's inclusion criteria for its "Gun Policy Research Review" found "that campus carry laws are not significantly related to violent or property crime on campus" between 2005 and 2014, meaning they neither made students safer nor endangered them. However, it did show that "campuses located in states that allow unpermitted concealed carry"—like New Hampshire—had "lower property crime rates," suggesting that some positive relationship exists between firearm access and campus safety.

Though universities might point to their campus security teams or cooperations with local law enforcement as evidence of their commitment to student safety, Farrington is skeptical. "You can't trust the government police officers to defend you," he says, referencing the 2005 Castle Rock v. Gonzales decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement cannot be held liable for failing or refusing to protect citizens from threats they did not create. "You need to take it upon yourself, and that's why this right is so important," says Farrington.

In the wake of this year's campus shootings, more students around the country are beginning to share Farrington's skepticism. Notable is a spate of op-eds that appeared shortly after the Brown shooting in the Yale Daily News, decrying flaws in Yale's security approach.

One student pointed out that campus security officers—who outnumber Yale Police Department officers 140 to 93—are unarmed. In the case of an emergency, they're tasked with simply telling students to hide and then calling the police, who are actually equipped to deal with a threat. He recommended that Yale, which is a gun-free campus, provide its security officers with some kind of incapacitating weaponry, or at the very least, expand its armed police department.

Of course, mass shootings are a much rarer threat than everyday robberies and assaults. But even then, many campus security solutions are ill-equipped to protect students. In another op-ed, Yale student and active-duty U.S. Marine Timothy Riemann noted that Yale's campus-wide safety alerts—which report all muggings, robberies, or shots fired on campus—always omit the perpetrator's race, providing "deliberately incomplete information" to students who might be in danger.

"To me," Riemann wrote, "it signals that the University prioritizes the potential or theoretical harm caused by including race as an identifying characteristic over the very real safety of its own students, faculty and staff."

But in the months since these criticisms were levied, Yale has indicated no plans to change course, leaving its security approach stuck in the same rut as other universities nationwide. Pending the outcome of Farrington's legal action, things could change for students enrolled at public New Hampshire colleges. But for now, they—along with other students around the country—have no choice but to put their trust in a flawed campus security paradigm.

The post In New Hampshire, a Setback for Second Amendment Rights on Campus appeared first on Reason.com.

Political parties that lose major elections will often create an "autopsy report." Hoping not to make the same mistakes twice, an autopsy lets the party take stock of its failures, learn why its candidate failed to connect with voters, and get a sense of how to do better next time.

But 18 months after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election to then-former President Donald Trump, the Democratic Party only got around to releasing an autopsy this week. Even then, the party only did so as a result of public pressure, having previously sworn off the prospect of ever publicly releasing the report. Why is the party so dead set against learning from its own mistakes?

The 2024 election "was a punch to the gut, and people were pissed off," Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Ken Martin wrote Thursday in a statement accompanying the report's release. "How, we all asked, could Democrats have lost to Donald Trump again? How did we blow through billions of dollars? And where do we go from here?"

The resulting report paints a bleak picture for Democrats. "We must admit and accept some hard truths about our Party," it cautions. "Since the high point of the 2008 Obama landslide…the Democratic Party has vacillated between stagnation and retrogression. In doing so, we have lost the confidence we once received from everyday Americans—and election results show it. In the sixteen tumultuous years since that historic election, Democrats have lost ground at every level of government."

This is actually the first time in more than a decade that Democrats have publicly taken any such introspection.

When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, the party appointed then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D–N.Y.) to compile an autopsy, only to effectively bury it. Politico reported at the time that "members were not allowed to have copies of the report and may view it only under the watchful eyes of [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] staff."

One person who recognized the folly in this strategy was Ken Martin.

"The DNC spent a lot of time and money on [a 2016 autopsy], and it wasn't even released to the DNC members," Martin said in February 2025. "Was there any utility in doing that?"

As to whether the party would compile and release a report for the 2024 election, Martin added, "Of course it will be released, right? It will be released to our members, and we all have to learn from that. There has to be some lessons that we bring on so that we can operationalize it."

But when it was completed in December, Martin said he wouldn't release the report, which he called "a distraction from the core mission."

The decision was controversial. Last month, when Martin appeared on the progressive podcast Pod Save America, host Jon Favreau brought up his previous pledge to release the report and asked, "Why did you change your mind on that?"

Martin averred that the report itself was less important than the "lessons" it contained, "and we released those lessons."

This week, the DNC bowed to pressure and finally released the report, though not without immediately disavowing it; each page bears a disclaimer that it "reflects the views of the author, not the DNC," which did not receive "the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented."

Indeed, the document contains numerous highlights and notations of issues to be corrected.

"When I received the report late last year, it wasn't ready for primetime. Not even close," Martin explained this week. "I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won't meet your standards. I don't endorse what's in this report, or what's left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC's stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount."

Of course, Martin is only releasing the report because of public pressure. In fact, CNN released a draft of the report hours before Martin did.

Martin added that he saw no reason to release the report in December because Democrats had done well in state and local elections the previous month. But the report had some caution on that front.

"Our candidates have proven incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and voters have drifted away," it warned. "Indeed, many of our critical Democratic wins can be attributed to negative partisanship—where Republicans have nominated deeply flawed candidates, and we have been able to convince some Republicans and most Independents to support Democrats in those contests."

"This remains true even in the face of the 'Blue Wave' in the most recent elections," it added. "2025 gubernatorial and mayoral wins in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, Detroit, and elsewhere may lead to a false sense of security and a belief the Democratic Party has again found ways to bring the voters back to the booth with their messaging."

Flawed though the report may be, it still provided useful information and advice to be cautious about its recent electoral successes.

But ignoring the evidence of its own unelectability has become something of a trend among Democrats. Even examining the 2020 election, when Joe Biden defeated Trump, would have been useful. "Instead, Democrats apparently took Trump's unfitness as so manifestly self-evident that it was not worth interrogating why 74 million people voted for him in 2020, and whether they would do so again," I wrote after Harris' loss in 2024.

In fact, the 2024 autopsy mentions another Democratic Party postmortem conducted after the 2022 midterms, which laid out a number of recommendations for future campaigns. "Unfortunately, none of these recommendations were implemented on the proposed timeline, if at all," it notes. ("No evidence or sourcing provided for this claim," the DNC retorts.)

Democrats often talk about Trump as an existential threat to the country and the rule of law—and the argument is compelling. Just this week, Trump settled his own lawsuit against the government, steering an arbitrary multi-billion dollar sum into an account he controlled while exempting himself from future investigatory scrutiny, as he and his children repeatedly benefit financially from various government actions.

And yet while Trump is deeply unpopular, the Democratic Party fares little better in polls of voters. Why is that? Perhaps a report dedicated to its most recent major loss, compiled and distributed to party officials, could shed some light.

The post Democrats Tried To Bury 2024 Election Autopsy appeared first on Reason.com.

As Republicans and Democrats continue their mid-decade redistricting grudge match that could determine which party controls Congress after November, Americans may learn a truism about legislative elections. That is, voters don't really select the politicians who represent them. Politicians choose their voters, resulting in "skewed, unrepresentative maps where electoral outcomes are virtually guaranteed," as the Brennan Center explains.

The process has long been known as gerrymandering, named in 1812 after Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry. Per Smithsonian magazine, Gerry signed a state Senate redistricting map drawn up by his fellow Democratic-Republicans that shifted from a county-based model to one filled with "carvings and manglings" designed to strip power from the competing Federalists. Critics noted the district looked a lot like a salamander.

It worked, and states with one-party dominance have long had a field day designing districts that guaranteed their dominance. I once lived in a Los Angeles County supervisorial district that meandered from the eastern edges of the San Gabriel Valley to Marina del Rey, with the obvious purpose of consolidating every scarce Republican vote to bolster Democratic chances in the other districts. Both parties do it, but the latest battles are particularly noxious.

The problem with gerrymandering is obvious. It magnifies the political extremes, as candidates are incentivized to appeal solely to a pre-selected group of partisan voters. We can see that in any number of current congressional races after the Proposition 50 redistricting changes. As a result, we elect representatives who have no incentive whatsoever to reach across party lines—but solely to satisfy their political base. It quashes the representation of many voters and undermines the faith people might have in the democratic process.

Recently, Republicans have cheered after the Virginia Supreme Court tossed out heavily gerrymandered, voter-approved maps that would have obliterated Republican representation. Fair enough, but I've yet to hear more than a few Republicans criticize Texas and other GOP states that gerrymandered to eliminate Democratic seats. They did that at the behest of Donald Trump, who didn't hide his raw partisan goals. "Texas will be the biggest one. And that will be five (GOP pickups)," Trump said.

This is more obscene than usual because redistricting typically is handled once a decade. But Republicans triggered this mid-decade war to stop a likely Democratic tsunami in November, which means that states will now constantly redistrict whenever they can secure an advantage. The U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in a Louisiana case that tossed aside a majority-black district was ostensibly done to stop one form of gerrymandering. But the court has given red states more latitude to dissolve Democratic seats.

California's Prop. 50 was defensive and is temporary, so it was understandable. But it still means that voters in conservative, remote Siskiyou County will be lumped in with liberal voters in more populous Marin County outside San Francisco. That assures that their rural concerns will get no more attention in Congress than Black Louisianans will receive in a state dominated by conservative white voters. The whole process is downright un-American.

In this recent round, Republicans are entirely to blame. In the new MAGA-fied GOP, winning is everything, and there's no quarter given for concepts such as fairness. Frankly, Trump has tapped into Americans' most divisive instincts, as he puts his short-term zeal for vengeance above the long-term good of the country.

It's sad, and the success of the GOP's efforts will cause both parties to continue toward what Rep. Blake Moore (R–Utah) rightly calls a race to the bottom. A few other representatives have likewise called for a ceasefire, but whatever party is on the winning side of this race will never back down, given the current scorched-earth culture. Even more depressing, this scenario essentially puts an end to the good-government experiment in nonpartisan redistricting reform. Democratic states have typically done this, but now that's a sucker's game.

I've long called for measures that improve representation in ways that don't attempt to change the partisan balance—but simply better reflect the views of voters and make elected officials more responsive to their needs. One long-dead proposal in California would have expanded the number of Assembly seats given that our current lower house has one representative for every 483,000 Californians. Good luck getting a meeting with your Assembly member in that set up, but I fear that such ideas are nonstarters in the current political climate.

"The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy," wrote Benjamin Franklin. He feared that poor representation would "create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed." Yet here we are—until Americans place their national identity above their partisan loyalties. As the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary, it's a good time to consider a truce.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post In Gerrymandering Fight, Democracy Is Losing appeared first on Reason.com.

Who's failing at frugality? Though it's sort of lame to bring online discourse into newsletter format, this made the rounds earlier this week and is worth pushing back on:

This is bc they do not have the time or capacity to create home cooked meals. It's an issue countless ppl have tried to raise w leftists but big leftists online continue to shame/abuse poor ppl for being forced to rely on these services for meals, which act as a tax on the poor https://t.co/F3azUiucBJ

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 20, 2026

It's wrong on a few levels. Poor people are not "forced" to rely on food delivery. Something voluntarily chosen should not be described as "a tax on the poor." If poorer people are routinely choosing more expensive food delivery vs. cooking at home, then it is possible that they are partially to blame for their plight. But the actual truth of the chart matters, and it's suspect at best:

Ok, let's settle down folks, and let's care about sourcing, yeah? Turns out this is from credit card data from one British Columbia credit union that markets itself as championing progressive values.
You'll be much more informed in the era of AI if you use it to check stuff. https://t.co/IS1js7sqlh

— Scott Winship (@swinshi) May 20, 2026

Many people have used this discourse cycle to argue that Gen Zers don't know how to scrimp and save and budget and grocery shop and cook and instead rot their brains watching three hours of TikTok a day. Others have argued that inability to cook for oneself is possibly more related to psychological problems than anything else (which is something I buy):

But if you regularly feel unable to cope enough to obtain basic foods and eat them, that's a psychiatric problem, not an economic one. You needn't even cook: open a can of tuna, add mayonnaise, microwave frozen peas; add extra veggies and deli chicken to pot noodles, etc. 2/

— Iona Italia, PhD (@IonaItalia) May 21, 2026

A few months ago, Milan Singh and Josh Kalla from The Argument did crunch a bunch of data "on food delivery spending from an anonymized dataset derived from a major debit and credit card-network panel that captures billions of transactions annually from 39 million individuals across hundreds of merchants," which they then merged "with population estimates from the American Community Survey's five-year microdata (from 2019 through 2023), which allowed us to calculate per-capita spending rates." They found that those who earn less than $50,000 tend to spend the most on food delivery and that these trends—when broken out by age, per their dataset—are actually more of a millennial phenomenon than a Zoomer one.

It shouldn't be shocking that relatively low-income people in their 30s and 40s are often bad at delayed gratification. But some of them probably also perceive that scrimping and saving can be rather futile when the economy looks the way it does. Put differently:

In general I think there's something fairly corrosive about living in a world where all material goods are extremely cheap compared to housing and healthcare, because it feels completely futile to be frugal on the small stuff. https://t.co/3RFAeGTF5o

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) May 19, 2026

This too:

There are four major costs that are killing the American middle class, *regardless* of how well or poorly the economy is doing generally: healthcare, education, childcare, and housing.

When utilities and food spike, or unemployment goes up, that just takes people from barely… https://t.co/E11Pj6sFuj

— Inez Stepman (@InezFeltscher) May 20, 2026

The decline in cooking at home might have to do with the fact that food prices have risen with inflation over the last few years, such that grocery shopping is no longer as much of a deal compared to pre-made food. And it might also have to do with choices surrounding family formation: Millennials have chosen to get married and start families way later in life than preceding generations, so the median 30-year-old might not have a family to cook for.

I don't think aggressively relying on food delivery if you're making under $50,000 a year is a correct choice, but it is a cultural phenomenon worth understanding for the ways it might galvanize political support for more handouts down the road.

Scenes from New York: A deep dive into Jalen Brunson's beautiful ball-sharing that helped the Knicks absolutely destroy the Cavaliers last night.

Where you watching the Knicks games? pic.twitter.com/i5lNzYn6aq

— Nancy Rommelmann (@NancyRomm) May 22, 2026

QUICK HITS

• "More than 65 years after the confiscation by Cuba's communist government of assets owned by U.S. businesses there, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of a U.S. business that is seeking to recover for its losses under a 1996 law that targets the Cuban regime," reports SCOTUSblog. "By a vote of 8-1, the justices ruled in Havana Docks Corporation v. Royal Caribbean Cruises that Havana Docks, a U.S. company that before 1960 had owned a right to use and operate the docks in the port of Havana, is potentially entitled to receive hundreds of millions of dollars for the use of the port by cruise lines between 2016 and 2019, even if the company's control of the docks would have expired in 2004."
• This week, Republicans in the House decided to cancel a vote on a resolution introduced by Democrats that would have ended the war in Iran, because they did not have enough votes to defeat it.
• Oura, the company that makes the Oura Ring, prepares to go public. Oura Rings measure your steps, body temperature, and heart rate. I, for one, am watching the "fitness wearables" category and am very curious to see how this IPO goes.
• NASCAR driver Kyle Busch just died at 41.
• Stephen Colbert's show finally ended. I'll shed no tears when boring late-night "comedy" TV fully dies.
• Why have hotel rooms across price points all started to look the same? A quiz from Bloomberg.

The post Who Abuses Food Delivery? appeared first on Reason.com.

When Missouri legalized recreational marijuana in 2022, it put laws on the books to prevent monopolization of its weed market. Now, one cannabis provider is allegedly skirting these regulations to take over the state's market and establish a monopoly, according to two recent lawsuits filed within weeks of each other. 

The first suit was filed in April by Local Cannabis and VIBE, two Missouri cannabis wholesalers, accusing Arkansas-based marijuana company Good Day Farm of using its employees and 48 different LLCs to circumvent Missouri's marijuana licensing cap. The second case, filed in May by Damon Frost Jr., a Missouri resident and recreational cannabis user, alleges Good Day Farm engaged in "anticompetitive and unlawful conduct" to gain its market share.

Both suits accuse Good Day Farm of owning and operating 61 of Missouri's 229 dispensaries, about 27 percent of the state's total. This would violate Missouri law, which prohibits any single entity from owning "more than ten percent" of the total number of dispensary, cultivation, and manufacturing licenses. Moreover, Local Cannabis and VIBE allege that Good Day Farm also controls "upwards of 40%" of wholesale cannabis purchases in Missouri.

Both have petitioned the court for an injunction that would void any agreements made by Good Day Farm, as well as monetary damages, "including restitution" and "disgorgement" of the company's alleged illegal holdings. 

But it's unclear whether Good Day is, in fact, violating the state's law. 

In the 2018 constitutional provision that legalized medical marijuana, the state prohibited any entity under "substantially common control, ownership, or management," defined as having "the power to direct or cause the direction of the management or policies of a facility," from owning more than five dispensary licenses. Following the 2022 amendment legalizing recreational use, Missouri dropped the "common control" language and instead said that no single entity can own 10 percent of the state's licenses, reports the Missouri Independent.

This change, while largely unnoticed by the public, "helped create an opening for Good Day Farm" to expand in the Show-Me State, says the Independent. Indeed, in documents included in the court records, the company touts the "limited license nature" of Missouri's marijuana laws as "one of the foundational reasons" for its heavy investments in the state. 

As a vertically integrated company that owns or controls multiple stages of the legal marijuana supply chain, including cultivation, manufacturing, and retail, Good Day Farm navigated the language change by establishing several LLCs as separate legal entities. They did so by filing each vertical with the Missouri secretary of state. 

While each LLC has its own investors and board of directors, they're all tied to Good Day Farm or one of its verticals and share the same address as the company's corporate headquarters. For instance, Alex Gray, Good Day Farm's chief strategy officer and president of sales, holds 19 dispensary licenses operating under the Good Day Farm brand and another 14 dispensary licenses operating a Good Day Farm vertical called CODES. That would give Gray 14 percent ownership of the total dispensary licenses issued in Missouri. 

Angela Irby, the former head of investor relations at Good Day Farm, registered the fictitious name CODES CANNABIS. She is also listed as the organizer of two other LLCs, Bon Vert Ventures and 3 Leaf Health, that control nine dispensary licenses.

This wasn't a veiled strategy; in its presentations to potential investors, Good Day Farm acknowledged that it couldn't assure regulators wouldn't "take issue with the number of marijuana dispensaries [it] operated or supervised," Lisa Cox, communications director at the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (which regulates cannabis in the state) tells Reason. 

Additionally, Cox confirms that the Division of Cannabis Regulation within the Health Department reviewed each application under question by the plaintiffs for a license and the accompanying documentation. The agency has "no upcoming legal action" planned against the company, says Cox. 

Irby, Gray, Good Day Farm, and attorneys for both class action suits did not respond to Reason's request for comment at the time of publication.

Owning 27 percent of the dispensary market may seem like a lot to Good Day's competitors, but it hardly means that the company is a monopoly. Instead, it seems to indicate that Good Day has tapped into something and is offering a superior product that more consumers enjoy. 

Taking into account the potential for market growth (the state saw over $1.5 billion in cumulative sales in 2025 and $506 million already so far in 2026) the lawsuits by local cannabis providers read as sour grapes at losing their hometown market to an out-of-state company. In Frost's case, with 168 recreational marijuana retailers in Missouri unaffiliated with Good Day Farm, he could simply shop at a different store.

The post Lawsuits Accuse Corporate 'Cartel' of Monopolizing Missouri's Weed Market appeared first on Reason.com.

The Supreme Court issued a resounding victory for donor privacy and free speech last month in First Choice Women's Resource Centers v. Davenport, but it is cold comfort to the hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations around the country that must continue handing over similar information to the IRS every year.

First Choice reaffirmed that the First Amendment strongly protects the privacy of nonprofit supporters. The case arose after New Jersey's attorney general issued a sweeping subpoena to First Choice, a Christian, pro-life medical nonprofit serving pregnant women, new mothers, and fathers. The subpoena demanded the names and addresses of nearly all of First Choice's donors. The Supreme Court unanimously held that such demands inflict real and immediate harm because they deter people from associating with disfavored groups—even if the government promises to keep the information confidential.

This outcome should not be surprising. Nearly 70 years ago, in NAACP v. Alabama, the Supreme Court recognized the "vital relationship" between the First Amendment and privacy. Few people might be willing to donate to a controversial or dissident group if that information might fall into the wrong hands. And NAACP v. Alabama was a perfect example: the Alabama attorney general tried to obtain a list of the NAACP's members in a blatant move to discourage people living in the Jim Crow South from supporting the civil rights organization. The Supreme Court blocked the effort because the attorney general failed to show that Alabama had an important need for such sensitive information.

Drawing on this precedent, First Choice once again explained that demands for donor information inevitably chill First Amendment freedoms. And that's true, the Supreme Court held, the moment the demand is made. Organizations can therefore go straight to federal court to protect their privacy without waiting for a state court to order them to comply.

First Choice will have implications far beyond one New Jersey subpoena. To its credit, the federal government recognized as much, filing an amicus brief urging the Court to rule in the nonprofit's favor.

But it's a much different story for the federal government in Buckeye Institute v. Internal Revenue Service, a case that our organization, the Institute for Free Speech, is litigating in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

In Buckeye, the IRS is defending a broad disclosure regime that requires hundreds of thousands of nonprofits to disclose donor information to the federal government every year. Five years ago, in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the Supreme Court held that disclosing this information—which appears on a tax form called a Schedule B—creates a "real and pervasive" chilling effect on the First Amendment. But the IRS claims that because donors to Buckeye can receive a tax deduction for their charitable contribution, Bonta doesn't apply.

On the same day the Supreme Court announced its decision in First Choice, the IRS was in the 6th Circuit arguing that courts should not second guess the government's claimed need to stockpile a treasure trove of sensitive donor data.

The central question in Buckeye is what standard courts must apply to evaluate the law. The Supreme Court's decision in First Choice reaffirmed that "any demand" for donor information requires the government to satisfy "exacting scrutiny." That means the government cannot compel organizations to reveal their donors without first proving that collecting this information is necessary to further an important government interest.

But in Buckeye, the federal government has urged the court to adopt a far more deferential approach on the theory that nonprofit organizations can avoid the disclosure requirement simply by forgoing tax-exempt status. This interpretation would allow the government to condition valuable tax benefits on a willingness to surrender one's fundamental rights.

Buckeye is far more than a technical dispute about tax forms. At stake is whether the federal government can systematically collect the identities of tens of thousands of nonprofit donors—year after year, across the entire country—despite no suspicion of wrongdoing, and without even a second glance from the courts.

First Choice recognizes how critical associational privacy is to the freedoms we all cherish. But those freedoms mean nothing if the courts do not apply the scrutiny to government overreach that the Constitution demands.

The post The Supreme Court Protected Donor Privacy. The IRS Didn't Get the Memo. appeared first on Reason.com.