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Brickbat: Duck and Cover

2026-09-02T03:19:52Z

A member of the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang from Port Willunga, South Australia, has been arrested and charged with breaching a firearms prohibition order and being unlawfully present at a shooting gallery. Police allege the man attended the Willunga Festival and took part in a carnival game where players shoot ducks for prizes. Because he is banned from handling or using any type of firearm-related equipment, police say even participating in the duck-shooting game violated his order.

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Open Thread

2026-09-04T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

This U.S. Citizen Is Suing ICE for Arresting Him 3 Times. His Lawsuit Is Moving Forward.

2026-09-03T21:27:27Z

Leo Garcia Venegas, an American citizen and construction worker, has been arrested and detained by federal immigration officers, not once, not twice, but three times since the spring of 2025, despite carrying and presenting an Alabama REAL ID each time. A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that his lawsuit against the Trump administration for violating his Fourth Amendment rights can move forward.

Venegas was working early on May 21, 2025, laying the foundation for a new home in Foley, Alabama, southeast of Mobile, when he saw "five armed men in camouflage" jump the property line fence and run toward the construction workers, according to his complaint filed in the Southern District of Alabama. Venegas quickly began recording on his phone after one of the officers physically assaulted his brother, another worker at the construction site.

Video of the incident shows another officer approach Venegas. "Yes, immigration," the masked officer says. Venegas sidesteps the man, trying to get clear footage of his brother's ongoing arrest. "You're making this more complicated than you want to," the officer says while following Venegas. "Don't touch me! I'm a citizen!" Venegas exclaims as the officer grabs him by the arm and tries to force him to the ground.

"I'll show you my papers now! I'm a citizen!" pleads Venegas. Additional officers run over to assist in the tackle. "Get on the fucking ground now!" one yells, and Venegas falls to the ground.

While pinned to the ground by three officers, one of the men grabbed Venegas' wallet out of his back pocket, according to the lawsuit. But despite carrying his valid REAL ID–compliant driver's license—which requires proof of citizenship or lawful presence to be issued—the officers refused to accept the ID as proof that he was in the country legally. Instead, the officers accused Venegas of having a fake ID and placed him in handcuffs.

After pleading with officers to check his Social Security number for over an hour in the hot Alabama sun, "one of the officers finally relented, made a phone call, and confirmed that [Venegas'] Social Security Number was valid," writes the complaint. Venegas was released with no charges.

But just three weeks later, it happened again. While working alone inside a "partially constructed home," armed, masked federal officers entered the private property without permission and detained Venegas. And for the second time, according to the complaint, the officers told Venegas that his REAL ID could be fake and therefore was not enough to prove his citizenship or legal status.

Venegas was eventually released after officers confirmed, again, that he was a citizen.

Represented by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm, Venegas filed suit in September 2025, arguing the two warrantless detentions lacked probable cause and were instead based only on his ethnicity. In response, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has defended the immigration officers' actions, arguing that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy while working on privately owned construction sites and that REAL IDs can't be trusted to prove U.S. citizenship.

But as his case works its way through the courts, Venegas has been forced to live with the reality of the Trump administration's immigration policies. And on May 2, almost one year after his initial immigration arrest, he was detained for a third time. Without asking any questions or issuing any lawful commands, the agents confronted Venegas after parking in front of his own home, pulled him from his car, tackled him to the ground, and placed him in handcuffs, according to his declaration following the incident. And, once again, officers refused to let Venegas go after he presented his REAL ID.

However, Venegas' luck may be turning. According to an IJ press release on September 3, a federal judge rejected the Trump administration's attempt to dismiss the case. In what IJ senior attorney Jared McClain called "an important first step," Venegas' case is moving forward. "We know the [DHS] thinks it can raid construction sites without a warrant, round up all the workers, and refuse to credit their government-issued IDs," McClain continued. "Now we'll have the chance to prove these violations of the Fourth Amendment."

The post This U.S. Citizen Is Suing ICE for Arresting Him 3 Times. His Lawsuit Is Moving Forward. appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump's Beef Tariff Cut Accidentally Makes the Case for Free Trade

2026-09-04T01:24:12Z

I will never understand why President Donald Trump, brought back to office partly in response to a sharp rise in prices during former President Joe Biden's interlude, would pursue the expensive tariff policy we've been subjected to since the beginning of 2025. And yet here we are, with another reason to be unhappy about inflation and the cost of living.

Sadly, the administration's response to the pressure is as erratic as its tariff policy.

On one hand, Trump lowered tariffs to bring down the price of beef, effective this week. The White House acknowledged the link between tariffs and higher prices by explaining that the cost of beef has risen "unreasonably" and that the remedy is to temporarily import more of it at a lower tariff rate. Experts expect the 300,000 metric tons of relief to come largely from South America.

Apparently, though, this economic lesson has not traveled very far. As Trump liberalized the market for beef, he also imposed new 50 percent tariffs on some $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, once again behaving as though buying from our closest neighbor is a detriment to U.S. consumers. Canada is retaliating in kind against American exports beginning September 8. Products caught in the escalating trade war include steel, aluminum, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, plastics, and electronics.

Economic war with Canada not only reminds the American people of a policy they hate but runs counter to an affordability agenda. Research on the effects of Trump's tariffs continues to surface and offer clarity.

Take the most recent paper by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Columbia University. Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David Weinstein looked at who shoulders the cost of the tariffs, examining which part of the tariff reaches consumers through higher prices versus which share of the price hike is due to other factors. The group estimates that a 10 percent tariff on all imports will raise U.S. consumer prices by about 2.6 percent. Roughly two-thirds of the increase comes quickly and directly from the tariff being passed on to customers at the border. The remaining third of the price hike shows up more slowly in American-made goods.

Let me repeat that: Raising tariffs on foreign goods also raises the prices of American-made goods. This happens partly because domestic producers pay more for imported parts and materials. But it also occurs because domestic producers, facing less competition, often raise their prices simply because they can.

This is only the latest study to knock out protectionists' three main claims at once.

The first claim is that "foreigners pay the tariff." It's hard to deny that the pass-through of costs collected at the border to U.S. consumers amounts to anything less than a tax.

Some intellectually honest protectionists concede as much. In fact, it's what they want. They prefer a second claim: that higher import prices will push American consumers to switch from foreign goods to American goods. That may be. However, we can't actually avoid an import tax that shows up in domestic prices and fatter markups. Buying American doesn't actually shelter us from higher prices.

The third claim is that tariffs help American manufacturing as a whole. But for the average firm facing higher costs for both foreign and domestic inputs, tariffs do little.

What's left is a tariff working exactly as designed: a hidden, unavoidable import tax that makes everything imported more expensive, hands government-favored firms pricing power at the expense of consumers, and taxes the domestic production it claims to defend. Citing Yale University's Budget Lab, The Washington Post's Ramesh Ponnuru points out that "Trump's tariffs are costing American households an average of $1,100 a year."

Unfortunately, because the prices of domestic goods take months to rise, the affordability crisis is still developing.

It's not as if we don't know what would help. The administration's beef policy inadvertently acknowledges the argument for free trade. Now, apply that insight consistently.

If you want cheaper houses, do not make Canadian lumber more expensive. If you want more affordable cars and appliances, do not tax steel and aluminum inputs. If you want American manufacturers to compete, do not make them pay more for intermediate goods. And if you want American exporters to prosper, do not repeatedly provoke America's trading partners into retaliating against them. In short, remove the tariffs.

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Congress Is Trying (Again) To Ban Boycotting Israel

2026-09-03T21:34:50Z

Congress keeps coming up with creative end-runs around the constitutional right to boycott. In 2017 and 2018, members of Congress from both parties unsuccessfully pushed a bill that would use export control laws to make encouraging boycotts of Israel punishable by 20 years in prison. Last year, a bipartisan coalition tried to ban "furnishing information" to an international boycott movement against Israel, only to postpone the vote due to opposition from the libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) and other Republicans.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act, sponsored by Reps. Virginia Foxx (R–N.C.) and Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.). The bill would require federally funded universities to certify that they "will not engage in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of a major strategic partner of the United States." It cites only one definition of "major strategic partner," Section 4 of Public Law 113–296, which states: "It is the sense of Congress that Israel is a major strategic partner of the United States."

The bill still has to pass the Senate to reach the president's desk.

Foxx stated that the bill "severs any possible taxpayer support of these concrete campaigns of antisemitism in the form of BDS and academic boycotts of Israel," using the acronym for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement. But Lara Friedman, president of the nonprofit Foundation for Middle East Peace, points out that the bill goes far beyond controlling taxpayer funds.

The bill would create a cause for lawsuits under the False Claims Act against universities accused of boycotting U.S. partners, Friedman writes. By making universities "prove a negative" to avoid getting sued, the bill will force them into "prioritizing maximal engagement" with those partners, she adds. In other words, the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act would create a kind of affirmative action for foreign nations.

And the congressional report attached to the bill is an all-out attack on Americans' constitutional right to withhold their money. It argues that the First Amendment "protected the expressive activities accompanying a boycott, not the commercial decision itself to refuse to do business with a particular entity." Friedman calls it "an alarming and novel interpretation of the Supreme Court's prior decisions," which "renders the whole notion of a 'right to boycott' meaningless, with alarming implications going far beyond Israel-Palestine issues."

Several supporters of Israel who otherwise oppose BDS came out against the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act, including Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.) and the lobby group J Street, which stated that it "believes the most effective way to counter antisemitism on college campuses is through open debate, education, and renewed efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—not through punitive legislation aimed to curb the freedom to boycott."

Friedman, Nadler, and J Street also pointed out that the bill's definition of "Israel" would seem to include Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories, making selective boycotts of a specific Israeli policy illegal. And that isn't a theoretical concern. When the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's announced in 2021 that it would pull out of the settlements while continuing to do business inside Israel proper, several states punished Ben & Jerry's under their own state-level anti-boycott laws.

A decade ago, the Israeli government began an all-out campaign to counter the BDS movement in America, especially on college campuses. In 2015, the Israeli parliament held a hearing on the international threat of BDS, and future Foreign Minister Yair Lapid warned that a foreign boycott of settlements could "de-facto create a boycott on Israel in all kinds of places." The newly created Ministry of Strategic Affairs was given a $36 million budget to combat BDS, and the 2019 documentary The Lobby USA found the ministry coordinating with campus-focused activist groups in America.

Several American student councils have voted to cut ties with Israel in response to the war in Gaza—including at Yale University and several University of California campuses—although none of those schools followed through. The Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act would specifically forbid universities from pulling out of "conferences, teaching exchanges, cultural exchanges, study abroad programs, joint research, and other collaborative educational activities" with U.S. partners.

After the 2024 wave of campus protests, Foxx and Gottheimer took up the mantle of fighting anti-Israel student activism. Foxx has been investigating whether the protesters "have financial ties to designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations," her office told Reason in May 2024. Meanwhile, Gottheimer pushed the Department of Education to investigate high schoolers for antisemitism and tried to force social media companies to stamp out "terrorist" content.

The Trump administration also used executive powers against the BDS movement. Most notably, it imposed economic sanctions on Italian academic Francesca Albanese, who wrote a report for the United Nations advocating boycotts and legal actions against companies that do business with the Israeli military. Albanese, who is suing the U.S. government over the sanctions, was banned from visiting her American children and had her husband's apartment in Washington seized by the U.S. Treasury.

While these measures have been focused on Israel's opponents, they've opened the door to force Americans to do business with all kinds of entities. States have built on their anti-BDS laws to ban boycotts of the fossil fuels, mining, agriculture, timber or firearms industries, or even companies with anti-LGBT and anti-abortion policies.

"The road to erasing [the] US right to free speech/protest of ANYTHING in the US is quite literally being paved with laws to protect/promote Greater Israel/Israeli impunity," Friedman writes.

The post Congress Is Trying (Again) To Ban Boycotting Israel appeared first on Reason.com.

Lindsay Clancy, Heehaw the Donkey, and New Magneto Origins

2026-09-03T20:46:05Z

This week on Freed Up, Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi kick things off with the latest in the Lindsay Clancy trial and where the jury stands. Then we dig into a Virginia case involving a mom who received a six-month suspended jail sentence after letting her 5-year-old walk to a nearby pond.

We also say goodbye to Heehaw the donkey, talk about President Donald Trump's rallying cry to "let data reign," and come up with some better origin stories for Magneto. Later, we talk about Milo Yiannopoulos getting deported and wrap up with a bigger question facing schools and families: Should students be allowed to use AI?

0:00—Lindsay Clancy jury can't decide.

11:01—Virginia mom's suspended jail sentence

19:38—RIP Heehaw the donkey.

27:10—"Let data reign."

34:42—Better origin stories for Magneto

43:12—Milo got deported.

52:06—Tom Hardy rap album

1:01:41—Should students be able to use AI?

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If You Replace the 13 Arrows on the U.S. Great Seal with a Modern Rifle, Make Sure You Depict a 50-Round Magazine

2026-09-03T20:24:15Z

As KY3 (Paul Adler) notes, "[a] graphic on [Rep.] Eric Burlison's website resembles the Great Seal but replaces the quiver of arrows with an AR-15 style weapon." The question is: Is that legal?

I say yes, for various reasons, but most importantly the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects the right to fly the American flag—that is to say, your own copy of the flag—with a peace symbol attached, see Spence v. Washington (1974). Of course, it famously protects even the right to burn the flag. It likewise protects your right to display a copy of the great seal with some technological updating (unless, of course you're doing so to knowingly impersonate government officials or to otherwise defraud people in various ways).

Here's the video of the KY3 segment on the matter:

And, as a special bonus, with thanks to Wikipedia, the flag of Mozambique:

The post If You Replace the 13 Arrows on the U.S. Great Seal with a Modern Rifle, Make Sure You Depict a 50-Round Magazine appeared first on Reason.com.

This Wired Article About AI Detection Software Was Really Mean

2026-09-03T19:45:51Z

Tech CEOs and the mainstream journalists who cover them are famously hostile toward one another. For many in the tech world, their default perspective is that reporters who write for places like The New York Times are inclined to be excessively negative and to highlight relatively trivial problems with the tech. And they have a point: There's a certain kind of pessimism, even excessive doomsaying, in mainstream coverage of social media.

On the other hand, it's also true that people in the tech industry can be a bit comms-averse—even struggling to sound like normal human beings when they talk to journalists—and to also expect relentlessly positive press: They want articles to emphasize the awesomeness of their product and are sometimes miffed if it's more nuanced than that.

So both sides have a point. That said, a recent article from Wired really had me solidly on the side of the tech folks.

The article is not the worst of its kind, but it does adopt an aggressively negative tone toward Pangram, an AI detection software, and its founder Max Spero. The reporter, Lexi Pandell, includes plenty of unnecessary anecdotes about Spero's behavior during her virtual interview with him. She's put off by his decision to microwave his lunch while he talks to her and the fact that he takes time to consider his answers before responding. She concludes her article like this:

As our conversation wraps, I reflect on the fact that Spero has come across as less than 100 percent engaged. Cagey, even. He roamed around his apartment throughout the interview. He took his laptop to sit near his living room, then to a window with a clutter of houseplants, then a different corner of his kitchen. At several points, his face floated halfway out of frame. He slipped on his headphones, then took them off again. At one point, while discussing model training, he gently burped.

The problem is that the inclusion of these details seems fairly mean-spirited, given that Pandell doesn't find much fault with the actual product. Pangram has been involved in several controversies in the literary world and was used to uncover AI-generated material that led to canceled book deals and significant scolding. As vexing or stressful as it is for some writers to feel policed in this way, it certainly appears to be the case that Pangram gets it right and is genuinely useful. Spero emphasizes that his software isn't perfect, but he asserts that using Pangram and your own subjective judgment is fairly guaranteed to reach the correct verdict. The article does not uncover any reason to dispute this.

Many people will have good reason to make use of AI-detection tools to catch cheaters in the realm of publishing, academia, and so on. By most accounts, Pangram is doing a pretty good job. Given that, this article is extremely negative in tone, which prompted quite a deal of backlash on social media.

Some interesting reporting here on Pangram and I don't think the reporter deserves to be piled on. That said, I kept waiting for actual concrete evidence of Pangram getting stuff wrong and it just… never really got there? https://t.co/b8rIXTGNJj

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) September 3, 2026

idk, the tone is so needlessly hostile and the claims are so under-analyzed that it does amount to a pretty bad piece.

and it's well known among users that pangram false negatives are quite common (esp if you heavily tinker with the LLM output) and false positives are quite…

— Nat Purser (@NatPurser) September 3, 2026

Spero himself griped about being depicted as "the most awkward person alive" because he dared to think about his answer for 15 seconds. But he's being a good sport about the whole thing and urged critics not to bash the reporter:

Hi guys. Please don't dogpile any journalists over the recent Pangram piece. It's all in good fun on Twitter but in reality I'm not upset and everything written about in the piece actually happened https://t.co/pG82TLtNCO

— Max Spero (@max_spero_) September 3, 2026

That's a healthy attitude, so good on him. In the meantime, while tech CEO complaints about unfair coverage are sometimes overblown, it would be a good idea for some tech journalists to rein in their contempt ever so slightly.

This Week on Free Media

I am joined by Amber Duke to discuss President Donald Trump's remarks on data centers and the state of the Iran war.

Worth Watching

Next week, I'll be debating the popular YouTube streamer Destiny on the likelihood that COVID-19 originated in a lab leak or as animal spillover. Tune in!

The post This Wired Article About AI Detection Software Was Really Mean appeared first on Reason.com.

State Film Subsidies Lose Money. Trump Wants To Try the Idea Nationally.

2026-09-03T19:43:58Z

President Donald Trump wants taxpayers to pay Hollywood to make movies in America.

The crux of the president's idea, announced in a Truth Social post on Monday, is to create a "Federal Production Incentive to create Entertainment Jobs in America." Trump claims the tax break for Hollywood would "benefit ALL of America," and that any money "spent on Tax Incentives will be made up tenfold by the money pouring into the Treasury's coffers."

Subsidizing movie production is not a new idea. In 2024, The New York Times reported that states had doled out $25 billion in taxpayer money to the film industry in the past two decades. These tax incentives for the film and television industry have not been a wise use of public money, and in several states they have been a net negative. In 2025, a review by the Maryland Department of Legislative Services found that, over a decade, tax credits provided to the film and TV industry in eight states returned between 3 cents and 31 cents for every dollar. In Georgia, Reason's Joe Lancaster found that the tax incentives offered to the film and TV industry created just 19 cents for each dollar spent. The few jobs that were created through the program cost the state $160,000 each.

There's "no reason to think a federal incentive would work any differently from state incentives, meaning that it would cost a lot of money and generate very little tax revenue in return," Michael Thom, a professor at the University of Southern California, tells Reason. Thom adds that countless studies show that "tax incentives for film and television production don't create many new jobs."

Trump's call to further subsidize the industry not only ignores economics, but also misdiagnoses why producers are increasingly choosing to film overseas: labor costs. In 2024, 29 percent fewer movies and TV series with budgets above $40 million were shot in the U.S. than were in 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal. In the U.K., 16 percent more movies and TV series with budgets above $40 million were shot. Even though Georgia offers a similar tax credit, more studios are choosing to film in the U.K. because "workers there are generally paid less, and studios don't have to cover their health insurance," per the Journal.

Expensive union deals are also part of the calculus. In 2023, members of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the largest Hollywood union, went on strike for four months before agreeing to a new contract that included $1 billion in new compensation and benefit funding for union members, and restrictions on the use of AI in production.

Two years after the strike, an NPR report showed "production never returned to pre-strike levels when streamers were ordering lots of content." In July, a report by FilmLA Research found that "tax incentives for film and television productions have not been enough to counter a still-sluggish environment for filming in the greater Los Angeles region." According to Thom, the recent nationwide decline in employment in the industry "dates back to the SAG-AFTRA strike and the new contract that followed."

If shooting in America requires an extravagant production budget—largely driven by labor costs—studios will opt for other locations that improve their margins.

With the advent of streaming channels and user-generated content, it's difficult to see a bounceback on the horizon. "Americans are increasingly spending their time streaming already produced content or watching user-generated videos on YouTube and TikTok instead of watching films on network or cable television," Thom wrote in a policy brief for the Mackinac Center earlier this year.

Americans aren't suffering from a dearth of available content, and studios don't need taxpayer money to make good movies. Trump's proposal to further subsidize the film and TV industry is a solution in search of a problem. Viewers don't care if what they're watching was made in the U.S. or the U.K.; they just want to be entertained.

The post State Film Subsidies Lose Money. Trump Wants To Try the Idea Nationally. appeared first on Reason.com.

A New Bill Reflects the Bipartisan Backlash Against Flock-Enabled Mass Surveillance

2026-09-03T19:03:37Z

Reps. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) and Eric Burlison (R–Mo.) this week introduced the Flock-Off Act, a bill that would bar federal funding of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) except at the border or for toll enforcement. "The federal government shouldn't provide 'security' grants to cities and police departments that have gone beyond the pale and turned their communities into a version of 1984," Massie said on Wednesday. "Federal taxpayers should not be forced to fund the surveillance state."

The bill—the name of which calls out Flock Safety, the leading ALPR vendor—is cosponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) along with four Republicans: Reps. Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Chip Roy (Texas), and Victoria Spartz (Ind.). It illustrates the bipartisan, trans-ideological nature of the backlash against AI-assisted ALPRs, which cities across the country installed without giving much thought to privacy concerns or the potential for abuse. During the last year or so, Americans across the political spectrum, including national politicians, local legislators, and police officials, have belatedly recognized the implications of a nationwide surveillance network that operates without judicial oversight and often without meaningful supervision of any sort.

"On the right, critics typically attack the cameras as government overreach," Vox writer Caitlin Dewey noted last week. "On the left, critics frequently link the cameras to corporate surveillance, racist policing, the erosion of abortion rights, and immigration enforcement."

Civil liberties groups such as the Institute for Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been sounding the alarm about ALPR surveillance for years. But thanks partly to revelations about blatant police abuse of ALPR databases, including cops who have used them to stalk ex-girlfriends, possibly unfaithful spouses, objects of romantic interest, or personal nemeses, public opinion is starting to reflect those organizations' concerns.

In a national YouGov survey conducted last week, 46 percent of respondents said they would oppose the use of ALPRs "for law enforcement purposes" in their communities, including 31 percent who were "strongly" opposed. Just 38 percent favored ALPRs, while 17 percent were unsure. A year ago, by contrast, YouGov found that 45 percent of Americans supported ALPRs, while 33 percent opposed them, including 20 percent who were "strongly" opposed, and the rest were undecided.

In both surveys, Democrats and independents were more likely than Republicans to oppose ALPRs. But last week's survey suggested growing qualms among Republicans, 33 percent of whom were against police use of the technology, up from 29 percent last year, including 20 percent who had strong views on the subject, up from 18 percent in 2025.

A few weeks ago, a NextGen survey in Arizona, a state that President Donald Trump won in 2016 and 2024, found even stronger opposition to Flock cameras: 63 percent of registered voters opposed police use of ALPRs, while 82 percent were "concerned" about "misuse." Even more striking: Around the same time, a Spry Strategies survey of likely voters in decidedly Republican and conservative Knox County, Tennessee, found that 58 percent opposed Flock cameras, including 42 percent who were "strongly" opposed.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of the most prominent Republicans to express sympathy for that view, seems to know which way the wind is blowing. ALPR cameras are "out of control," he told reporters last week. "I'm all about law enforcement having tools to hold criminals accountable….No one's been stronger on law enforcement than me. But I don't want to have this become a surveillance state."

Notably, DeSantis alluded to outrageous examples of what can happen when police officers across the country have easy, essentially unsupervised access to ALPR databases they can use to track drivers, predict their itineraries, identify other vehicles near them, and, with the help of other records, assemble detailed information about their lives. The Institute for Justice has identified "well over 100 incidents of ALPR abuse," which it notes "may be just the tip of the iceberg" given the reality of lax oversight and widespread, often informal sharing of ALPR data. "When I see, like, a police officer using this to track, like, an ex-girlfriend," DeSantis said, "I'm like, you know, what the hell's going on?"

Local officials are beginning to ask the same question. The Institute for Justice counts "157 local governments" that have canceled or declined to renew ALPR contracts since the beginning of 2025. While that represents a tiny share of the 7,000 or so U.S. law enforcement agencies that use Flock cameras, the trend is not positive for a company whose CEO until recently dismissed privacy concerns about his equipment and software, condemning "terroristic organizations like DeFlock," which has used crowdsourcing to map more than 138,000 ALPR cameras in the United States.

In contrast with the political breakdown in the YouGov surveys, the congressional reaction to those cameras has been driven almost entirely by Republicans. The Surveillance Accountability Act, which Massie introduced in April, would generally require that police obtain a warrant to search ALPR data, which is similar to the policy that the Institute for Justice favors. That medicine evidently is too strong for Massie's colleagues, only one of whom, Boebert, has cosponsored the bill so far.

The PRIVACY Act, which Rep. Keith Self (R–Texas) introduced on July 15, has attracted a bit more support. That bill would bar federal law enforcement agencies from using state or local ALPR information to "circumvent warrant requirements." It has attracted half a dozen cosponsors, all Republicans, including Burlison.

The Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which Rep. Tim Burchett (R–Tenn.) introduced on July 21, would prohibit federal agencies from "purchasing or accessing automated surveillance systems that identify, track, or record individuals." It has seven cosponsors, including Burlison and six other Republicans.

Although that is not exactly a groundswell of congressional concern, the reaction from conservative Republicans shows that objections to ALPRs are not limited to libertarian or left-leaning critics. The right-wing, Trump-supporting Epoch Times, for instance, recently gave sympathetic coverage to the anti-Flock backlash, noting concerns about misuse of ALPR data for personal purposes, mistaken identification of suspects, and violation of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches.

Last week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), no one's idea of a libertarian, announced that he was launching an investigation of Flock's "collection, retention, and dissemination of the data generated by its artificial intelligence surveillance cameras." He noted that "the overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong," adding that "Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church." The Supreme Court, he emphasized, has recognized that "a comprehensive, retrospective record of a person's movements is different in kind from ordinary observation in public."

Along similar lines, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a conservative Republican, last week urged Gov. Greg Abbott to freeze state funding of ALPR systems until legislators have "studied their risks and enacted firm constitutional protections." Miller emphasized the cumulative impact of ALPR deployments: "Enough cameras can reveal a person's routines, associations and private activities. That is the foundation of a mass-surveillance network."

Miller may have been taking a cue from David Dunmoyer, associate vice president of campaigns at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. "Flock has struck a nerve and given rise to a national conversation that our privacy and freedom demand," Dunmoyer wrote in a July 29 Daily Wire essay, describing the company's cameras as "an assault on your constitutional freedoms."

Dunmoyer proposed several legislative reforms: "Require a warrant. Put a hard clock on retention measured in days, not years. Bar sharing with out-of-state and federal agencies without a Texas judge's signature. Publish the audit logs. Give Texans standing to ensure our privacy is not violated."

Although a bunch of Trump's political allies have expressed similar concerns, their criticism does not seem to have made much of an impression on him. This year's National Drug Control Strategy describes ALPRs as "a critical technological tool for domestic drug interdiction, acting as a significant force multiplier for law enforcement on our nation's highways." The Trump administration also has made extensive use of ALPRs for immigration enforcement—an application resisted by blue states that have tried, without much success, to stop the feds from using ALPR data to nab unauthorized residents.

"You have pros and cons," Trump told a reporter who asked for his take on the Flock controversy a couple of weeks ago. "It's being studied right now. We'll have an answer sort of as to our views on it over the next couple of weeks."

The post A New Bill Reflects the Bipartisan Backlash Against Flock-Enabled Mass Surveillance appeared first on Reason.com.

Brief Update on the Entergy / Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Matter

2026-09-03T18:24:47Z

From the docket this morning; for more on the case, see here and here (the latter item notes the sealing, and expresses the now-realized hope that "the motion will be unsealed at some point soon"):

Via email, Plaintiff has informed the Court that it will not be pursuing preliminary injunctive relief…. Plaintiff has also indicated an intent to amend its Complaint…. Finally, it appears that the Clerk sealed the documents filed by Entergy in error …. Docs. 2, 3, and 4 should be unsealed. Plaintiff has confirmed that it never intended for these documents to be sealed in the first place.

The unsealing reveals that the plaintiff's brief in support of the TRO motion didn't even discuss the First Amendment elephant in the room, even though it was pretty obvious that the judge would recognize that a lawsuit seeking to restrain a newspaper's publication would raise such an issue.

The post Brief Update on the Entergy / Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Matter appeared first on Reason.com.

An Essay on How to Get Top Grades On Law School Exams

2026-09-03T18:22:35Z

Back in 2007, here at the Volokh Conspiracy, I had a post on how to excel on law school exams. I have heard that the post is still read among law students, so I decided to expand on that post and turn it into a more helpful essay for today's students to read.

I finally finished the draft, and I posted it on SSRN yesterday. You can read it here: How to Excel on Law School Essay Exams: A Guide for Students. It begins:

This Essay offers guidance on how law students can earn high grades on law school essay exams. It starts with the goals law professors have when writing exams, which then frames what counts as a poor or strong performance. The essay then presents a hypothetical exam question with four answers, and it grades the answers to help explain what makes the different answers better or worse.

This is just a first draft, and I plan to improve it over the semester, so please send specific suggestions for improvement to me at okerr at law dot standord dot edu. I'm particularly interested in feedback from other law professors, as I'm trying to capture how grading looks from the faculty perspective, all to help students do their best.

I see this essay as a companion piece to my 2007 essay, How to Read a Legal Opinion: A Guide for New Law Students, and also last year's video, So You're About to Start Law School: A Guide to the First Month. The goal of all three has been to share the insider knowledge that connected people have with everyone else, so that students without connections start off on more equal footing and law school on the whole is more fair.

The post An Essay on How to Get Top Grades On Law School Exams appeared first on Reason.com.

ICE Reportedly Lowered Its Standards To Meet Trump's Hiring Goal

2026-09-03T18:19:07Z

When President Donald Trump ran for reelection, one of his consistent campaign promises involved illegal immigration. "On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out," he pledged.

One of the efforts made to accomplish this goal was staffing up. With a big boost in funding, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made a big hiring pitch, spending millions of dollars on fancy new trucks and SUVs and offering potential recruits high starting salaries and signing bonuses up to $50,000. In January of this year, ICE bragged that in just a few months, it had more than doubled its ranks, from 10,000 to 22,000 officers and agents.

Of course, this raises questions about the hiring process: Did the government cut corners, either in vetting or training these new recruits? It appears that a whistleblower within ICE raised concerns even at the time.

"In the wake of a hiring surge last summer, an official in charge of evaluating new recruits to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a dire warning," Alexandra Berzon, Katie Benner, and Hamed Aleaziz reported this week at The New York Times. "The Trump administration, he wrote in a memo, was cutting corners, violating the law and fast-tracking unqualified, 'improperly vetted' candidates into ICE's ranks, part of a dangerous move that exposed the agency—and its law enforcement operations—to 'grave national security risks.'"

In his memo, per the Times authors, the unnamed official noted "shortcuts in the agency's preliminary vetting process. No credit checks. Fingerprints unconfirmed. Final job offers absent preliminary vetting." Officials reportedly pushed assessors to make hiring decisions before background checks had been completed, while shortening ICE's training program from 10 weeks to six—meaning candidates were sent to training and even to work before their background checks were even complete.

The Times authors describe the official as "a 17-year ICE veteran," "a longtime Republican who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 and 2024," and "a unit chief who directly oversaw more than 100 employees who evaluated thousands of ICE applicants" before retiring in July. He was apparently so concerned that he bypassed the chain of command and submitted the memo directly to the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General (OIG) as a whistleblower complaint. He did this, the Times authors note, "because ICE leadership had created these issues and he thought an outside, independent investigation was necessary."

In August 2025, the same month as the whistleblower complaints, ICE then-Acting Director Todd Lyons announced an "audit" of the agency's "processes for hiring and training agents," though so far no results have been made public.

Otherwise, it appears that the government paid little attention to the problem. Six months after submitting his complaint, the whistleblower says he was contacted by an OIG attorney, but instead of asking about his allegations, the attorney seized his laptop and asked if he had spoken to the media. He was then placed on leave for unspecified "allegations of serious misconduct," before he was unceremoniously reinstated after 10 months.

Of course, none of this should be a surprise. Testifying before Congress in February, former ICE instructor Ryan Schwank called the agency's new training program "deficient, defective, and broken," warning that it "can and will get people killed."

Sen. Gary Peters (D–Mich.), the ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, "has serious concerns about how ICE was able to appropriately determine suitability, train and onboard 12,000 new front-line personnel in less than a year, especially given recruitment challenges the agency has faced in recent years," a Peters aide told Military.com in January. Peters, the aide added, "remains concerned" about the possibility of "lowered standards and inadequate preparation."

The consequences of inadequate training and vetting are plain to see: In January alone, federal agents (one with ICE, the other with Customs and Border Protection) killed two bystanders in Minneapolis. ICE officers have arrested numerous American citizens—in some cases multiple times—using excessive force.

It all also contradicts steps the Trump administration has taken elsewhere.

From the beginning of his second term, Trump has targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which encourage hiring people in minority communities. In a January 2025 executive order, Trump directed all federal agencies to end DEI practices, which he said "threaten the safety of American men, women, and children across the Nation by diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society."

The following month, his administration dismissed four lawsuits against local police and fire departments alleging racially discriminatory hiring practices. Trump, meanwhile, said the hiring processes were "race-neutral," and replacing them with something more race-conscious "lowered standards and endangered public safety."

"Americans deserve the best of the best keeping them safe," he continued, "and in the Trump Administration, anything less is unacceptable." Unfortunately, the same doesn't apply for ICE officers.

The post ICE Reportedly Lowered Its Standards To Meet Trump's Hiring Goal appeared first on Reason.com.

A California County Used Drones To Spy on Homes. A Settlement Will Now Require Warrants.

2026-09-03T17:26:24Z

A California county has agreed to effectively end a controversial warrantless drone surveillance operation that was launched to monitor unpermitted cannabis grows but secretly morphed into a wider search for innocuous building code violations.

The program in Sonoma County, about an hour north of San Francisco, ultimately saddled homeowners with enormous fines for ordinary—and often disputed—code violations which residents said were punitive and aggressively levied.

Over several years, dozens of residents were issued swiftly increasing fines, sometimes reaching six figures, and some had their properties foreclosed and were left homeless. The county issued at least $3 million in civil cannabis fines in cases involving warrantless surveillance.

In June 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California and law firm O'Melveny & Myers accused Sonoma County of an illegal "runaway spying operation" and of violating the state constitution in a lawsuit on behalf of three affected residents.

In a settlement announced Wednesday, Sonoma said it would use drones to fly over or monitor a home only after obtaining a warrant, except in certain limited situations such as emergencies.

Sonoma's drone surveillance frequently found no unpermitted cannabis grows at all. Instead, drone imagery became a tool for ordinary code enforcement: unpermitted decks, trailers, fences, grading, outbuildings, and old cars. By 2023, 70 percent of drone flights ostensibly searching for cannabis found no cannabis violation. Records showed the county had amassed 5,600 photographs from 700 flights since 2019.

The county's original funding application said drones would focus on "remote cultivation sites," but officials subsequently authorised "discretionary proactive investigations."

"They effectively shut down cannabis [industry] growth in the county," said Nick Hidalgo, a senior attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. "It dropped dramatically. They had no other reason to fly these drones, and so they expanded into all of these other purposes."

Hidalgo said the settlement would protect residents' privacy after what he described as an "unlawful" campaign that county officials attempted to conceal from residents and the media. Code enforcement officers flew drones "of their own volition without cause trying to find code violations," he said.

The county agreed to pay $50,000 to each of the plaintiffs, including Nichola Schmitz, who is deaf and learned only from a neighbor in 2023 that a warrantless drone flight over her rural farm had gathered evidence of alleged code violations.

"No one should have to be afraid to open their blinds or step into their own backyard because a government drone might be watching," Schmitz said in a press release issued by the ACLU of Northern California. She was fined thousands of dollars by the county, which put a lien on her property that caused significant personal stress.

Residents who lost their homes after the county used evidence obtained through warrantless drone flights hope the settlement could strengthen their own legal challenges.

"I think that this is going to open them up to other lawsuits," said Keni Meyer, a dog trainer who lost her home near Sebastopol after the county claimed a bevy of minor code violations. "I've got a court date on October 27, and I could possibly get my house back. We're going to keep fighting for it."

For more than a year, she has been living in a trailer park following a chaotic forced eviction in June 2025 from her foreclosed home after she was hit with more than $375,000 in fines. "I never would have imagined in Sonoma County that this could have happened," she added. "It would have been the last county in the world that I thought people would be so cruel and so cold."

The three cases that the ACLU took up were just "the tip of the iceberg," with one elderly resident in Cazadero recently losing his home, Meyer said. "There are so many more complicated cases with much more vulnerable people."

Residents described drones hovering over pools, hot tubs, children's play areas, and backyard gatherings. Some complained that drones could see through windows or capture them while naked. The county had already paused its warrantless drone campaign last year, according to the ACLU of Northern California, amid negotiations regarding the lawsuit.

"There's something even creepier about surveilling kids just having a fun time swimming in their home pool," said Hidalgo. "That kind of expression of personal autonomy is incredibly chilled if the government can be watching you at any time."

Now, in addition to requiring a warrant in most circumstances, the county must inform residents if their home has been surveilled with a drone. Sonoma also agreed to stop stockpiling images of people's homes and to delete drone footage 30 days after collection unless it forms part of an investigation. To help ensure compliance, the county must provide drone flight logs to the ACLU of Northern California every six months for two years.

"Forty years ago, the California supreme court prohibited the government from conducting aerial surveillance of people's homes and the surrounding areas without a warrant," reads the ACLU of Northern California press release. "Today's settlement reaffirms that constitutional protection, which is more critical now than ever before as high-powered drones make it so much easier for government agencies to pry into people's lives."

Sonoma County Board of Supervisors Chair Rebecca Hermosillo told The Press Democrat: "We need guardrails for this. It was implemented a little bit under the radar, so it's important that we establish a drone policy…. I understand the intent but we shouldn't use it, in essence, to spy on our constituents."

Three of the county officials—Tennis Wick, director of Permit Sonoma; Tyra Harrington, code enforcement manager at Permit Sonoma; and Todd Hoffman, a senior code enforcement inspector at Permit Sonoma—who oversaw the drone program have already left their posts after scrutiny and litigation mounted over the past two years. In August 2025, Sonoma County's counsel Robert Pittman also announced his retirement.

Permit Sonoma was funded by collected fees and fines until July, but following reforms it is now bankrolled through general county coffers, The Press Democrat reported, with less focus on penalties and more on helping residents comply.

"The county disagrees with the ACLU's characterization of the case," a Sonoma County spokesperson said. "The county continues to dispute the plaintiffs' allegations, and the settlement expressly states that it is not an admission of fact, liability or responsibility …. The settlement preserves Permit Sonoma code enforcement's ability to use drones, while establishing standards for drone use involving private homes and surrounding areas. Those standards will be incorporated into a revised policy through a public process before the board of supervisors."

The post A California County Used Drones To Spy on Homes. A Settlement Will Now Require Warrants. appeared first on Reason.com.

Judge's Opinion Denying TRO Against Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as to Publishing of Data Center Plans

2026-09-03T17:59:17Z

This is Entergy Arkansas LLC v. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc., a case I blogged about yesterday, where a data center construction company sought a temporary restraining order barring the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from publishing certain alleged trade secrets that were allegedly improperly released by the Arkansas Public Service Commission to a citizen (Jessica Kivell) and were then sent by her to the Democrat-Gazette. I now have a copy of the transcript of Judge Lee Rudofsky's oral opinion that he delivered in court yesterday. The opinion is long, but here's a slightly edited excerpt of the First Amendment discussion, which focuses on the TRO request against the press defendants. As usual, I use curly braces ({ and }) to indicate moved text, clean up some of the citations, and add or remove some paragraph breaks.

The court concluded that, even "assuming arguendo that there's a fair chance that the press defendants have violated the federal and state trade secrets provisions," the First Amendment would preclude the TRO:

What Entergy is asking for with regard to the press defendants is actually or is the equivalent of a prior restraint. Entergy is asking that the Court prevent the press defendants from publishing news articles that include information Entergy believes to be trade secrets….

[S]ome of [what follows] are quotes, some of these are slight paraphrases…. The Supreme Court has held that "prior restraints of expression come to courts bearing a heavy presumption against constitutional validity." … Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963). "Prohibiting the publication of a news story is the essence of censorship." … Matter of Providence J. (1st Cir. 1986)…. "A plaintiff must make an extraordinary showing of harm in order to obtain a court order that stops the news media from publishing information on a matter of public concern." New York Times v. U.S. (1971)….

The prior restraint doctrine has been applied in the context of trade secrets cases as well, and although the Court acknowledges that in this context, just as in some other contexts, courts continuously note that not all prior restraints are per se unconstitutional…. [T]here is an absence of cases where a court has actually prevented the press from publishing trade secrets. Indeed, as I understand it from yesterday, plaintiff has only pointed to one case from the California Supreme Court. And, quite frankly, that case is both unpersuasive and very far afield from the facts of our case.

Overall, … courts in trade secrets cases have noted that "To justify a prior restraint on pure speech, publication must threaten an interest more fundamental than the First Amendment itself." Procter & Gamble Co. v. Bankers Trust Co. (6th Cir. 1996)…. This exception to the prior restraint rule, a very, very small exception for when publications threaten an interest more fundamental than the First Amendment itself, has turned out to be extremely, extremely narrow, which, again, is really no surprise given the language of the Supreme Court and other cases used to describe that narrow exception. The Supreme Court has held that, "Even where questions of allegedly urgent national security or competing constitutional interests are concerned," it has imposed this most extraordinary remedy, meaning prior restraint, "only where the evil that would result from the reporting is both great and certain and cannot be militated by less intrusive measures." CBS v. Davis (1994) (Blackmun, J., in chambers)….

[But t]roop movements, obviously, things of that nature, military secrets are not what is at issue here…. If threats to national security are only sometimes sufficient to warrant a prior restraint, the threat to plaintiff's trade secrets are woefully inadequate…. Religious Technology Center v. Lerma (E.D. Va. 1995). There is no case the Court or Entergy itself appears to be aware of in the entire federal system that holds otherwise…. I want to emphasize, this is a TRO [temporary restraining order] ruling. For a PI [preliminary injunction] ruling, I will have more time to do additional research, and maybe I will find that that's not the case. But so far, that's where we are.

In any event, Entergy's stated harms are in my view also much too vague to overcome the vital First Amendment interest here. As … Justice Brennan said in a concurring opinion in [New York Times v. U.S.], "The First Amendment tolerates absolutely no prior judicial restraints of the press predicated upon surmise or conjecture that untoward consequences may result." In my view, Entergy's contentions that the publication of pricing information and contract terms will actually harm its ability to negotiate with similar entities in the future is at best and on this record speculation.

Whether there will be such harm and how great or little the harm would be with respect to Entergy's negotiating positions in the future is unclear to me at this point. It's certainly not clear enough to overcome the First Amendment prior restraint doctrine.

I'll also note here that to the extent we had any conversations yesterday about interests that were sort of not Entergy's, meaning interests that were Entergy's negotiating partner's interests, that negotiating partner is not here. They are not a plaintiff in this suit, and so I am not considering those interests….

[Entergy also] argued that the prior restraint doctrine only applies to matters of significant public concern …. [But t]he information that Entergy alleges to be trade secrets in my view does constitute a matter of public concern, and that's true for a few reasons.

First, from what the Court heard yesterday, it appears that the pricing information and other terms of the contract have, at the very least, an indirect effect on ordinary ratepayers throughout Arkansas…. Arkansans certainly have an interest in why their electric bills are whatever they are.

Relatedly, while Entergy is a private company, it is also properly thought of as a public utility, and as the Court understands it, Entergy essentially or close to essentially has a monopoly—again, maybe something close to it; the record needs to be more developed on that point—over Arkansans' electric services. Given this monopoly or something close to a monopoly and the public nature of Entergy's business, including the need for PSC [Public Service Commission] approval generally and specifically related to this deal, Entergy's workings, its dealings, and the details of its business arrangements, especially with large users of power, for example, Altitude or Google, are matters that an ordinary Arkansan citizen may very well want to be aware of. {And I do want to, again, emphasize here I am making these determinations on a completely undeveloped record; nobody's fault again, but just given that this case is a day old.} …

Nothing that I'm saying should suggest in one way or the other, you know, whether this stuff can be discoverable under FOIA [Arkansas's Freedom of Information Act], whether the PSC should release this information, whether or not the PSC should have a protective order in place to cover this information; that is not my point here. My point is that taking as a baseline that this information has somehow gotten its way to the press, I have to decide whether or not it's of public interest with respect to the First Amendment.

I will also add here, there is nothing that I heard yesterday that suggests the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette or the other press defendants sort of, you know, nefariously got this information, or, you know, sort of were using Ms. Kivell or anyone else as a stooge to get this information. What I understand is through no sort of, you know, attempt of its own in these particular narrow circumstances, the information was given to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette freely after the PSC provided it to Ms. Kivell….

A public utility company's [one-off] arrangement with a large datacenter may very well have repercussions across the state presumably, or at least potentially, in both very positive and potentially or presumably very negative ways, too. That is precisely why these sorts of service agreements must be filed in the first place with the Public Service Commission and the Public Service Commission gets to review them. The point being here, the Public Service Commission doesn't get to just review any private business's information. Part of the reason they get to review Entergy's dealings is because Entergy is not just any old private corporation. It has a significant public sweep and public import.

Certainly, and I want to be clear about this, not all trade secrets of all businesses, or even all trade secrets of Entergy, will be matters of significant public concern. {[For instance, in] Purdy v. Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad Company (D. Minn. 2000),] … the Court enjoined the publication of Social Security numbers and salary information in connection with names of employees, and the Court concluded that doing that did not run afoul of the First Amendment, and that would be, I think, a fairly good example … of things that are truly just a matter of private concern and very clearly a matter of private concern.} But the ones at issue here, the ones that I've been pointed to that were in the paper and the ones I've been pointed to in the closed session yesterday that haven't been in the paper yet seem to be issues of significant public concern, at least on the Court's read of this very young and underdeveloped or undeveloped record….

I have used a fairly low, some might even say very low, threshold of what constitutes a matter of significant public concern. I think that's appropriate based on what the case law is on this issue, and I also think it's appropriate considering the fact that it's a very concerning thing for a judge, who is an official member of the government …[,] to be the one to get to decide whether something is or isn't a matter of public concern and to say … whether it falls on just the purely private side or the purely public side…. I'm required to do it, and so I have to give it my best shot. But … if I'm going to make an error here, I'm going to make an error leaning towards it being a matter of public concern as opposed to a matter of private concern. I think that's consistent with the [Supreme] Court's both explicit and implicit approach….

[I]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it's the idea that the government cannot censor the press except in the rarest of circumstances not at issue here. In my view, that is a quintessentially American commitment, and it is enshrined in the First Amendment to our constitution. Granting Entergy's request for a TRO would flout that commitment.

And the court concluded that its analysis applied equally to the request that the court "order that the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette remove from its website stories that it published earlier this week" and that it destroy its copies of the documents:

[T]hese two requested actions would affect the press's ability to report and maintain public access to its reporting in a way that makes the actions prior restraints in everything but the most technical sense. So I think the prior restraint rules and doctrine apply even to those parts of the request….

[Moreover,] the information in the articles that have already been published is actually already out in the world. We can't put that particular genie back in the bottle, especially given modern technology like the Wayback Machine. The Court is not saying there would be absolutely no benefit to Entergy from removing these articles, but … the benefit would be exceedingly small.

Similarly, even if the Court ordered the press defendants to destroy the documents, they have already seen the information claimed to be trade secrets. Accordingly—and, again, the Court is not saying that there would be no benefit to Entergy from removing the documents and removing the documents from the press defendants, making them destroy them and also removing the articles, but the Court is saying that the benefit would be exceedingly small because the press defendants already have that information and could publish articles on it.

On the other hand, as the Court has explained above, the public and the press have significant interest in this information, even if the information should never have gotten out in the first place. Forcing a newspaper to take down articles or wrestling information out of a newspaper's hands is a serious harm … [that] significantly … cut[s] against a TRO …, even if we could sort of bypass the First Amendment prior restraint doctrine….

The court stressed, however, that this decision didn't imply anything "one way or the other whether the press defendants could face damages liability here"; that question wasn't before the court at this point. The judge added,

I guess I will say to you so you all sort of know where my head is at, it does seem like Entergy has a fairly good argument that some of the things it pointed to yesterday are actually trade secrets. So, you know, I guess the point here is, for the press, you're sort of proceeding …. at your own risk, right? It may turn out that there is a viable and constitutional damages claim against you. It may turn out that there is not a viable or constitutional damages claim against you. I just want to be very clear with everybody that I am not deciding that issue.

John T. Adams (James & Carter PLLC) represents defendants.

The post Judge's Opinion Denying TRO Against Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as to Publishing of Data Center Plans appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Is Taking a Stake in Venezuela's Oil Industry and This Crony Is Cashing In

2026-09-03T15:09:16Z

After the ouster of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump promised to make the South American nation "prosperous again." Eight months later, we're getting a clear picture of how the Trump administration hopes to achieve this objective: by becoming a shareholder in a Venezuelan oil company.

Under an extraordinary agreement first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, the U.S. government is taking a 35 percent passive stake in North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), the company led by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt. Under the terms of the agreement, NABEP will have the opportunity to develop 17 oil fields said to hold 65 billion barrels—about one-fifth of Venezuela's total reserves—while the U.S. government would gain preferential rights to buy 20 percent of its output at cost. The State Department would also have the right of first refusal to purchase the remaining 80 percent, per the White House. The Pentagon would ultimately hold those interests, according to the Journal, although a Pentagon spokesman told Reuters that the office structuring the deal lacks authority to take equity.

The arrangement emerged like a bunny out of a hat after major American oil companies proved reluctant to invest billions in a country still burdened by political risk, weak institutions, and, consequently, an uncertain legal order. (Trump had predicted otherwise in January, saying American oil companies would spend billions to "fix the badly broken infrastructure" and "start making money for the country.") Regardless, the deal is sure to be a boon for Betancourt, one of the largest beneficiaries of Trump's involvement in Venezuela.

Betancourt belongs to the generation Venezuelans have nicknamed the bolichicos: young men from wealthy old Caracas families who became fabulously rich under Hugo Chávez's supposedly anti-oligarchic revolution. When Chávez officially declared an electricity emergency in 2010, the government spent billions of dollars while bypassing ordinary procurement. Betancourt and his cousin, Pedro Trebbau, allegedly decided to cash in on this lapse of oversight. Their new company, Derwick Associates, had no record of building power plants. Within roughly 14 months, however, it won billions of dollars in contracts and relied heavily on a U.S. company for engineering and equipment. In 2018, Transparencia Venezuela—the national chapter of the watchdog Transparency International—estimated that 11 Derwick projects billed at about $5 billion should have cost $2.1 billion.

Betancourt and Derwick Associates disputed those figures and have denied wrongdoing. Betancourt would go on to buy a nearly $12 million Fifth Avenue penthouse and later a sprawling estate outside Madrid, where his lavish wedding appeared in ¡Hola! magazine. In 2013, former U.S. Ambassador Otto Reich brought racketeering charges against Betancourt and others, alleging corrupt contracting and retaliation. Betancourt denied the allegations, and the federal charges were later dismissed because Reich had not adequately alleged a pattern of racketeering.

Electricity was only the beginning. Betancourt moved into oil through a venture connected to the Russian bank Gazprombank and Petrozamora, a producer partnered with Venezuela's state oil company, PDVSA, according to internal records from the Swiss private bank CBH, obtained by the Venezuela Leaks investigative collaboration. Betancourt denied that the companies had formed a joint venture.

In 2019, while reportedly a target of a federal money-laundering investigation involving PDVSA, Betancourt hired Rudy Giuliani, who was then Trump's personal lawyer. Betancourt was not charged. Giuliani urged Justice Department officials to consider Betancourt's claim that he had secretly supported Juan Guaidó's U.S.-backed opposition, a claim that Reuters could not verify and Guaidó denied.

In 2020, the relationship between Betancourt—who was living abroad at the time—and the Maduro regime ruptured after the businessman supported the U.S.-backed effort to install Guaidó, reportedly acting as an intermediary between Venezuelan military officers and Russia and helping finance the opposition. Maduro's government subsequently ordered his arrest, froze his domestic assets and displaced him from effective control of his Petrozamora interests. The government also "dispatched security forces to his Venezuelan properties," The Washington Post reports.

In 2023, a corruption scandal fractured Maduro's inner circle and brought down Oil Minister Tareck El Aissami, whose faction had pushed Betancourt out of Petrozamora. The purge cleared the way for Betancourt's return to Caracas in 2023 and he was reportedly offered security guarantees and a role rebuilding Petrozamora—which was only producing about 20,000 barrels a day after years of underinvestment and repeated changes in operational control—if he stayed out of politics. Operations later passed to NABEP, the company he now controls.

Then came January 3, 2026. In the hours after Maduro's capture, Betancourt consoled Venezuela's new dictator, Delcy Rodríguez, and convinced her to speak with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reports El País. During Rodríguez's initial calls with the United States, U.S. officials "made clear…that Betancourt would be a key intermediary in restarting the country's oil business," per The Washington Post. He helped arrange early oil contracts and coordinated between Washington, Rodríguez, PDVSA, and American firms. One early deal allowed oil-trading companies Vitol and Trafigura to buy Venezuelan crude at a prepaid discount of $15 per barrel, according to the Post, which described the arrangement as "opaque." Trafigura told the outlet that no outside party held a financial interest in its negotiations or contract; Vitol declined to comment.

The connection between Betancourt and the Trump administration doesn't end at oil contracts. As the Post reported last week, several high-ranking members of the administration—including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, and then–Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—have either spoken with Swiss officials since January about their investigation into Betancourt, or negotiated with them to drop an extradition request against the Venezuelan businessman. Swiss prosecutors have been investigating Betancourt on suspicion of laundering proceeds from alleged PDVSA and Venezuelan Treasury corruption schemes through Swiss accounts. He has not been formally charged and denies wrongdoing. U.S. officials sought a resolution without criminal penalties and later arranged a one-year, multiple-entry visa to the United States.

In May, Switzerland withdrew its British extradition request but extended an international warrant and asked the Justice Department to arrest him if he entered the United States. The department did not act. Swiss proceedings remain active; Betancourt has not been charged in Switzerland, the United States, or Venezuela, and he denies wrongdoing. Betancourt did not respond to Reason's request for comment.

Betancourt's success and access are a representation of what Venezuela's economy has become under Rodríguez. While the state is loosening ownership rules—and private firms are being invited back into industries such as oil and mining—it maintains its power to decide who gets access.

For instance, while Rodríguez's January oil reform ended PDVSA's formal monopoly, allowed private producers more control over operations and sales, and authorized international arbitration, it removed parliamentary oversight, preserved broad executive discretion over contracts, taxes, and royalties, and left PDVSA as the industry's dominant administrator without an independent regulator. Competitive bidding is not the organizing principle. In February, Venezuelan officials suspended 19 production-sharing contracts signed under Maduro and then began reviewing them with U.S. officials, many involving little-known companies, even as PDVSA continued selling the oil they produced. U.S. Treasury licenses became another gate through which prospective operators had to pass.

A new mining law opened gold and strategic minerals to private and foreign companies. Before that, those were reserved to the state, forcing investors to operate through state-controlled joint ventures or specially approved alliances. But this happened before Venezuela's mining sector had institutions capable of supervising its implementation. This could legalize existing criminal supply chains: Much of the gold in the Venezuelan states of Bolívar and Amazonas comes from informal mines controlled by armed groups, military-linked networks, and politically connected intermediaries. Meanwhile, the state retains broad discretion, concessions can last up to 50 years, international arbitration creates contingent liabilities, and the law protects earlier opaque agreements.

Eight months after the United States captured Maduro, Venezuela has made some improvements, even if many of the scandals of the former regime remain. But Trump's scheme to take an equity stake in the nation's oil production—a tactic he's applied elsewhere—threatens what little progress has been made and entrenches a system that rewards the politically connected instead of market winners. For Venezuela, dictators may change, but the Betancourts remain.

The post Trump Is Taking a Stake in Venezuela's Oil Industry and This Crony Is Cashing In appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Can't Deport Legal Immigrants for Protected Speech, Judge Rules

2026-09-03T16:45:49Z

Since President Donald Trump's return to the White House, the federal government has repeatedly used immigration law to stifle speech. Legal noncitizens have been threatened with deportation for criticizing Israel and American foreign policy, but a federal judge says this is unconstitutional.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise of the Northern District of California held that Secretary of State Marco Rubio's use of two provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952 to target legal noncitizens violates the First and Fifth Amendments.

Under the first provision of the law invoked by Rubio, the secretary of state may begin deportation proceedings against a noncitizen for protected speech if the secretary "personally determines" that the speech "compromises a compelling foreign policy interest." The second provision allows the secretary to "at any time, in his discretion, revoke such visa or other documentation." It was under these two provisions that the administration went after noncitizens it deemed to be radical, including Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder who was arrested by U.S. immigration agents in 2025 after engaging in pro-Palestine protests on campus.

In 2025, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) challenged Rubio's use of the two INA provisions to deport lawful noncitizens. The lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of The Stanford Daily, an independent, student-run newspaper at Stanford University, and Jane Doe, a legal noncitizen who engaged in pro-Palestine speech, argued that Rubio and the Trump administration are "trying to turn the inalienable human right of free speech into a privilege contingent upon the whims of a federal bureaucrat, triggering deportation proceedings against noncitizens residing lawfully in this country for their protected political speech regarding American and Israeli foreign policy."

As the lawsuit details, the threat of visa revocation silenced students at The Stanford Daily. Contributors self-censored by declining to cover Stanford's pro-Palestine protests, avoiding topics related to the conflict in the Middle East, and seeking to remove their articles on the topic for fear of repercussions by the government. One Stanford Daily editorial board member, fearing "adverse immigration consequences," asked for an article about the Israeli Defense Forces to be removed from the website. Another staff writer, who had written about Israeli and Palestinian officials, asked the outlet to remove her articles from the website for the same reason. Had it not been for the "threat of visa revocation…and deportation…Stanford Daily noncitizen contributors would resume contributing articles to Stanford Daily," reads FIRE's complaint.

Wise sided with the plaintiffs, writing, "Stated plainly, in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people. It is not the government's to take."

"The government has offered a chilling message regarding protected speech," she continued. "Speak out against Israel or in support of Palestinians and we will revoke your visa and deport you. Behave. Noncitizen students heard the warning and heeded."

The ruling reaffirms that First Amendment rights are not conditional on a person's immigration status, and the government cannot use the immigration system to silence protected speech it does not like.

This is not the first time the courts have ruled in favor of immigrants' free speech rights. In Bridges v. Wixon (1945), the Supreme Court overturned the deportation of an Australian labor leader, Harry Bridges, who was first accused of having communist affiliations by the Roosevelt administration. "Freedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country," the Court ruled.

Crucially, in a concurring opinion to Bridges, Justice Frank Murphy emphasized that the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments do not distinguish "between citizens and resident aliens." It states that "once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country, he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders," and that these "inalienable privileges" are extended to all "persons" and "guard against any encroachment on those rights by federal or state authority."

The rising threat to freedom of expression is worrying. While the Trump administration's deportation campaign is unlikely to be halted, Friday's decision certainly brings a sense of comfort to legal noncitizens. The Constitution is clear. Freedom of speech is a right afforded to everyone on American soil, regardless of immigration status.

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My New USA Today Article On Dangerous Similarities Between "Democratic Socialists" and MAGA Nationalists

2026-09-04T05:57:13Z

USA Today just published my op ed entitled ""Democratic Socialists and MAGA Share a Dangerous Flaw." Here's an excerpt:

Beginning with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's election victory in 2025, democratic socialist candidates have won a string of major Democratic primaries – most recently Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon's upset U.S. Senate nomination win – and come close in several others. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has long been the most prominent self-proclaimed democratic socialist in national politics, and was the runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination in both 2016 and 2020.

Democratic socialism is a terrible ideology. If implemented, its agenda would cause grave harm and imperil democracy itself. And in seeking massive state control of the economy, today's socialists ironically have much in common with the MAGA nationalists they claim to oppose.

Both promote government control over the economy, and both paths undermine liberty, prosperity and democracy. Socialists do not control the Democratic Party in the way MAGA largely dominates the Republicans. But their influence is growing.

The democratic socialist agenda goes far beyond a marginal increase in economic regulation or welfare spending. It amounts to sweeping government control of the economy and society, on a scale that invites comparison to Cuba, North Korea and the old Soviet Union….

Ironically, democratic socialists have more in common with MAGA nationalists than either likely wants to admit. President Donald Trump has pursued his own version of economic central planning: ruinous tariffs, severely restrictive immigration policy and government equity stakes in Intel, U.S. Steel and roughly 30 other companies.

Tariffs and immigration restrictions are both major forms of government control over the economy. Immigration restrictions, in particular, curtail economic freedom more than any other current U.S. policy….

The rest of the article explains how both socialist and nationalist forms of government control of the economy run into problems of knowledge and incentives, and why both threaten liberty and democracy. I also explain why adherents of these ideologies cannot paper over their flaws by claiming they favor democratic versions of them, rather than authoritarian ones:

Today's socialists say they will avoid this fate because they champion "democratic" socialism, not the authoritarian kind. But near-total state control of the economy has never coexisted with democracy for long. A government that controls the economy can starve opposition parties of resources and weaponize control of basic goods to crush dissent.

That's exactly what happened in Venezuela, where a democratically elected socialist government became a dictatorship.

Right-wing nationalist regimes have followed a similar path, in Germany, Italy, Spain and many Latin American nations.

Many of today's socialists even admire authoritarian socialist regimes and hope to emulate them:

The DSA praises Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro, who turned that country into a totalitarian state.

Prominent socialist "influencer" Hasan Piker praised Mao – the biggest mass murderer of all time – as "one of the great leaders of this world."

Sen. Sanders has a long history of praising communist despots.

"Postliberal" MAGA nationalists similarly often admire right-wing despots, like Spain's Francisco Franco, Portugal's Antonio Salazar and others.

Progressives and others should consider whether they trust someone like Trump to have the kind of sweeping control over the economy socialists advocate for. There is no guarantee such a person – or worse – would not come to power under socialism….

I end with this point:

If nothing else, we should heed the powerful evidence of people "voting with their feet." Almost every socialist regime in history has produced a mass exodus toward market economies, never the reverse. Venezuela's exodus is the largest refugee crisis ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere, and Cuba has had multiple waves of refugees over six decades….

If socialism worked as advertised, people would be fleeing market economies to live under it, not the other way around. Right-wing nationalist regimes have produced their own refugee outflows. Refugees from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, for instance, helped build American science, including the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.

I addressed some of the issues covered in the article more fully in previous writings, such as "The Case Against Nationalism" (coauthored with Alex Nowrasteh), and "Perils of Democratic Socialism." See also my recent piece on the contradictions of socialist prison abolitionism.

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Judge Rejects Trump Administration's Plan To Break Up Google's Ad Business

2026-09-03T14:00:29Z

After ruling in 2025 that Google was guilty of "willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power" in the digital ad market, Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia on Wednesday rejected a Justice Department proposal that would have forced Google to sell off parts of its advertising business as punishment.

Brinkema's opinion is sealed for 14 days, so it's unclear why she chose to reject the Justice Department's proposal. However, The Wall Street Journal reports that Brinkema had previously "questioned the practicality of a breakup," and "expressed uneasiness with not knowing who would buy Google's ad exchange and operate it in the future." Brinkema instead suggested the court could order Google to stop the anticompetitive conduct it deemed illegal, per the Journal.

Brinkema's apprehension about forcing a sale makes sense.

Google's substantial market share in the ad industry results from offering the best product. With no guarantee that the company that takes over Google's ad tech would be a better steward, it's hard to see how divestiture serves users or businesses—the two groups ostensibly harmed by Google's so-called monopoly.

An involuntary sale to a company less equipped to invest and innovate in its tech stack could lead to higher costs for businesses and reduce the quality of service provided. A sale of its ad tech business would also mean the loss of nearly $42 billion a year in revenue for Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., according to Max Gulker, senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine.

A giant in the online search engine and ad market, Google has been an opportune target for antitrust enforcers over the past decade. Last September, the company avoided the enforcement of a similar Justice Department proposal that would have forced it to sell its Chrome web browser and Android mobile operating system. The federal judge in that case also rejected a proposal to ban Google from entering agreements to be the default search engine in consumer products.

Google is not the only company the Trump administration has in its crosshairs. In January, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced it would continue to pursue its antitrust case against Meta, even after a federal judge rejected the agency's claims that the company's purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp made it a social media monopoly. The FTC is also pursuing an antitrust case against Amazon, while the Justice Department has a pending case against Apple. Neither has gone to trial yet.

While it avoids the most punitive measures proposed by the Justice Department, Brinkema's order is a small consolation for Google. The company must still comply with "most" of the "behavioral remedies" it and the agency proposed, including data sharing with publishers and giving competitors equal access to its ad tech.

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Mamdani Bans the Robot Teachers

2026-09-03T13:26:30Z

Dare I say it? Is it possible that New York City's public schools are actually being changed for…the better these days? Not what I expected with Mayor Zohran Mamdani in charge!

Most students will now be prohibited from using generative AI until high school, with a moratorium put in place on all digital devices until third grade. Teachers for all levels will not be able to use AI in their grading of assignments. "The department is also recommending caps on screen time, such as limiting middle schoolers to no more than 45 minutes a day," reports The New York Times. "So-called companion chatbots, which offer emotional and mental support, will be banned in all grades."

"The Education Department is 'disabling' AI features in 38 existing citywide ed tech contracts," reports Chalkbeat. "Officials haven't provided a list of those companies. But Mamdani's education adviser Ailish Brady said that the widely used digital tutor Amira and the digital version of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reading curriculum—the most popular of the three mandated NYC Reads literacy programs—will both 'turn off' their AI components."

In New Mexico, reports Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown, public schools were required to use Amira "for mandatory literacy assessments, dyslexia screenings, and weekly tutoring sessions in kindergarten through second grade." This came with a whole host of privacy and efficacy worries. "'Our families are asking questions we cannot fully answer: Where are these voice recordings stored, and for how long? Who can access them? Are they used to train or refine the vendor's AI models? What safeguards protect them from breach or misuse?' wrote Jennifer Guy, superintendent of Los Alamos Public Schools," according to Brown.

I'm personally rather worried about Amira being both bad for child development and unhelpful at teaching kids how to read. "Teachers and parents are reporting that Amira can't understand little-kid voices well, or kids with lisps or accents, and is inaccurately scoring kids on literacy and dyslexia assessments that are used to determine future school interventions," notes Brown on X. "And that having to repeat themselves a lot, or being constantly misunderstood by the robo-teacher, is giving kids more anxiety around learning to read."

AI is, of course, not inherently bad, nor is screen time necessarily a problem. Claude, ChatGPT, and all the rest are very useful research tools. I use them in my own research for Roundup sometimes. But learning how to be a critical consumer and verifier of information, as well as how to frame ideas and compelling arguments in your own words, is one of the main functions of K-12 education. These are standards we ought to uphold. Tools that provide shortcuts, like calculators, are not held up as substitutes for learning addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Tools that help with research, such as large language models (LLMs), should be worked into a student's workflow once the student has already developed an understanding of how to craft good writing and conduct good research. And when we're teaching reading or math to younger kids, the human touch really matters: Teachers should develop relationships with their young students and tailor their approaches. It frustrates me that young children are required to attend public schools (unless you opt out and teach them elsewhere, to the state's satisfaction), only for those schools to deprive them of social interaction and put them in front of screens. Mamdani's no-screens policy for pre-school through second grade seems appropriate to me.

Funny split reaction to this I'm seeing that's SF ppl fretting that kids won't "learn how to use ai" and NYC actual parents thrilled to be getting rid of crummy edtech programs that try to teach 1st graders reading via chatbot https://t.co/0bIXgszihM

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) September 3, 2026

I would imagine many Roundup readers are not New York City parents, or parents of young kids at all. But the coming educational-system transformation should interest us all: How and what we're teaching plays a big role in shaping our society's competencies and pieties. (Just look at the era of wokeness, which arguably started on college campuses and found its way to a boardroom near you in record time.)

For what it's worth, it's possible I'm wrong, or that I have some pedagogical blind spots. We need more detail about how these policies will be rolled out. AI will change our world in ways too numerous too count, and some of those applications will be life- and productivity-enhancing while other applications will be destructive. (And even within the category of "destructive" maybe some things ought to be destroyed; destruction isn't necessarily bad.) One question I keep asking myself, when it comes to reading instruction, is: Were the public schools doing a good job at this in the first place? In many places—New York City included—the answer is a firm no.

I cynically look forward to the future in which AI is deployed in all kinds of school districts, yet teachers there still ask for raises, claiming they're underpaid even as they do less and less. Surely the unions will find a way to spin this.

Scenes from New York: Several days ago, a mentally ill 49-year-old woman, identified as Pamela Cisneros, wielded two knives and stabbed two victims in Times Square. One of the victims was a mother and Bank of America employee, Erin Piacenti, who had just returned to work from maternity leave. Cisneros was shot and killed by cops at the scene, and Piacenti also succumbed to her wounds.

Cisneros had a long history of mental illness, including several encounters with the cops in 2018 and 2019.

QUICK HITS

"The world is awash in debt," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters Monday at the G-20 summit. "The only way for us to get out of this is to grow our way out of it."
"A mom of five was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor," writes Lenore Skenazy for Reason. "Her offense: allowing her 5-year-old son to walk about a half-mile by himself in their gated community."
Gloria Steinem, the feminist activist, just died at 92. Steinem was a champion of abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (famously going up against Phyllis Schlafly), and an opponent of apartheid and multiple wars. She famously went undercover as a bunny at one of New York's Playboy Clubs, writing about her experience, and she never regretted her decision not to have kids ("not for a millisecond").
"U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked his new CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] director to remove a reference to two Pennsylvania deaths from the agency's online measles tally after he questioned whether the disease contributed to the fatalities, three sources familiar with the situation said," reports Reuters. "Kennedy's request came after CDC staffers had already accepted the state's characterization of the deaths as linked to measles, a Pennsylvania official ‌said."

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Florida Revenge Porn Law Doesn't Cover Simulated Sexual Conduct That's Implied Rather Than Shown

2026-09-03T00:15:08Z

From the Report and Recommendation by Magistrate Judge Zachary C. Bolitho (N.D. Fla.) yesterday in Hales v. Luthmann (the same Luthmann from the Staten Island trial by combat case):

Plaintiff Jeremy Hales operates an online business that generates revenue by posting content on social media websites …. Plaintiff has over 730,000 subscribers for his "What the Hale$" channel on YouTube and over 327,000 followers for his "What the Hale$" page on Facebook.

Defendant Richard Luthmann also maintains an online presence by, among other things, posting content on a blog. In early 2025, Defendant Luthmann allegedly sent emails about Plaintiff to the Anti-Defamation League and to people who post content on YouTube. Around the same time, Defendant Luthmann also posted a video to a blog allegedly depicting Plaintiff "as Adolf Hitler by adding a Hitler mustache to Plaintiff's photograph and engaging in oral sex with a journalist." …

[Plaintiff] alleges that Defendant Luthmann violated Florida's sexual cyberharassment statute, Fla. Stat. § 784.049…. To state a violation of § 784.049, a plaintiff must plausibly allege

Defendant published a sexually explicit image of Plaintiff on an internet website;

The image contained or conveyed Plaintiff's personal identification information;

Defendant acted willfully and maliciously, for no legitimate purpose, and with the intent of causing substantial emotional distress to Plaintiff;

Plaintiff did not consent to the publication….

The dispute was about whether the video showed a "sexually explicit image," and the court said no:

[T]he statute defines {"sexually explicit image"} as any photograph or video that depicts "nudity" or depicts "any person engaging in sexual conduct." … [Plaintiff does not] plausibly allege[] that the video posted by Defendant Luthmann depicts "nudity" by Plaintiff…. Instead, the video shows Plaintiff's face superimposed on somebody else's body. The video only shows the body from the shoulders up, and the body is clothed….

An image can also be "sexually explicit" if it depicts a person engaged in "sexual conduct" [defined in relevant part to] … include[] "actual or simulated … deviate sexual intercourse." … "[D]eviate sexual intercourse" is "sexual conduct between persons not married to each other consisting of contact between the penis and the anus, the mouth and the penis, or the mouth and the vulva." …

[Plaintiff] does not plausibly allege that the video posted by Defendant Luthmann depicted a person engaged in "sexual conduct." The video shows an image of Plaintiff Hales's face—with an added fake Hitler mustache—superimposed on another person's body. The video also shows an image of a woman with her mouth open.

The image of the woman then rotates before moving to the bottom of the screen such that only a portion of the woman's hair is visible. The woman's head then appears to go up and down, as the image of Plaintiff Hales bears an expression of excitement or shock.

Although the video is intended to mockingly suggest that Plaintiff Hales is receiving oral sex from the woman, the video does not show "contact between the penis and the anus, the mouth and the penis, or the mouth and the vulva." Indeed, the video shows neither male nor female genitalia. The video, therefore, does not depict "actual" "deviate sexual intercourse."

The video also does not depict "simulated" "deviate sexual intercourse." … [T]he statutory definition of "simulated" requires two things: "[1] the explicit depiction of [sexual conduct] … which creates the appearance of such conduct and [2] which exhibits any uncovered portion of the breasts, genitals, or buttocks." The Court assumes arguendo that the video creates "the appearance" of "contact between … the mouth and the penis" … [but] the video does not "exhibit[] any uncovered portion of the breasts, genitals, or buttocks." …

Although the video Defendant Luthmann published is vulgar, offensive, and juvenile, it does not constitute sexual cyberharassment under Florida law. {This result is consistent with the idea that statutes prohibiting the depiction of "simulated" sexual conduct are typically intended to address situations where "[t]he portrayal" would "cause a reasonable viewer to believe that the actors actually engaged in" the depicted conduct. Here, the video—containing superimposed faces and clearly satirical elements—would not lead any reasonable viewer to believe that Plaintiff and the woman were actually engaging in sexual conduct in the video.}

The video itself appears to be the one at the very top of this page (which is linked to from the Third Amended Complaint, which in turn is referred to by the opinion). I've looked at it and my evaluation of it is the same as the Magistrate Judge's (including the "vulgar, offensive, and juvenile" part).

The post Florida Revenge Porn Law Doesn't Cover Simulated Sexual Conduct That's Implied Rather Than Shown appeared first on Reason.com.

Puerto Rico Has Rational Basis for Allowing Only Two Genders for Birth Certificate Gender Changes

2026-09-02T22:27:53Z

From Tuesday's decision by Judge Lara Montecalvo, joined by Chief Judge David Barron and Judge Sandra Lynch, in Díaz v. Colón:

In its summary judgment order, the district court held that Plaintiffs were entitled to relief under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. {[T]he district court only reached Plaintiffs' claim under the Equal Protection Clause; it did not reach Plaintiffs' claims under the Due Process Clause or the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Puerto Rico Constitution.}

Explaining that the Application for Gender Change gives "an option for binary applicants to choose a gender marker which aligns with their true gender, but does not provide [such] an option" for "nonbinary individuals," the district court concluded that Puerto Rico's "Birth Certificate Policy" creates a classification on its face between "people with a binary gender identity" and "nonbinary people." The district court also concluded that it did not need to decide which level of scrutiny applied to Puerto Rico's Birth Certificate Policy because it held that the Policy did not survive the lowest level of scrutiny—rational scrutiny….

Under [the]"forgiving" standard [set forth by past cases], we conclude that Puerto Rico's Birth Certificate Policy is supported by a rational basis….

Plaintiffs' argument is founded on current Puerto Rico law, which permits transgender binary people to update the gender on their birth certificates. But Puerto Rico law allows this update because it responded to the Arroyo González v. Nevares (D.P.R. 2018) holding that the policy in effect at the time violated transgender binary individuals' privacy rights.

Unlike the transgender binary plaintiffs in Arroyo González, … Plaintiffs conceded that the Birth Certificate Policy does not violate the informational privacy right that Arroyo González contemplated, recognizing that a nonbinary gender marker inherently discloses a person's nonbinary status. Plaintiffs also fail to develop a separate argument that Puerto Rico's interest in protecting privacy rights is not furthered by the Birth Certificate Policy and its challenged classification between transgender binary people and transgender nonbinary people.

Puerto Rico has a legitimate interest in protecting the privacy rights of people born in Puerto Rico, and as Plaintiffs have neither argued nor demonstrated that the Birth Certificate Policy infringes on their privacy rights or that privacy rights are not furthered by the Policy, there is a rational relationship between the challenged classification and this legitimate interest. It is thus conceivably rational for Puerto Rico to not update transgender nonbinary people's birth certificates while updating transgender binary people's birth certificates.

For the foregoing reasons, we vacate the district court's order and remand to the district court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Here's more from the opinion about just how forgiving the rational basis test is:

Under the rational basis standard, government conduct "is presumed to be valid and will be sustained if the classification drawn by the statute is rationally related to a legitimate state interest." The Supreme Court has recently, in U.S. v. Skrmetti (2025), established the binding standards for rational basis review in an equal protection challenge:

We have reconciled the principle of equal protection with the reality of legislative classification by holding that, "if a law neither burdens a fundamental right nor targets a suspect class, we will uphold the legislative classification so long as it bears a rational relation to some legitimate end." We generally afford such laws "wide latitude" under this rational basis review, acknowledging that "the Constitution presumes that even improvident decisions will eventually be rectified by the democratic processes."

It went on to hold:

The rational basis inquiry "employs a relatively relaxed standard reflecting the Court's awareness that the drawing of lines that create distinctions is peculiarly a legislative task and an unavoidable one." Under this standard, we will uphold a statutory classification so long as there is "any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the classification." Where there exist "plausible reasons" for the relevant government action, "our inquiry is at an end."

And it explained that:

"[T]he fact the line might have been drawn differently at some points is a matter for legislative, rather than judicial, consideration."

As we have explained, "[t]he question is not what went on in the mind of the [government] actor but whether anyone, including the judge, can conceive of a rational reason for such a classification." …

Puerto Rico Solicitor General Omar Andino-Figueroa and Deputy Solicitor General Frank A. Rosado Méndez represent Puerto Rico.

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Today in Supreme Court History: September 3, 2005

2026-05-25T18:49:07Z

9/3/2005: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist dies.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist

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John Roberts Overruled Trump's Tariffs. But He Can't Seem To Stop Trump's Ballroom.

2026-09-02T17:43:06Z

One of John Roberts' responsibilities as chief justice of the United States is to write an annual "Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary." The 2025 edition of that report, which came out at the very end of last year, makes for interesting reading in light of what has happened at the U.S. Supreme Court so far this year.

"The Declaration [of Independence] charged that George III 'has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries,'" Roberts observed in his 2025 report. "The Constitution corrected this flaw, granting life tenure and salary protection to safeguard the independence of federal judges and ensure their ability to serve as a counter-majoritarian check on the political branches. This arrangement, now in place for 236 years, has served the country well."

To "serve as a counter-majoritarian check on the political branches" is another way of saying that it is the role of the courts to stop the other branches of government from exceeding the scope of their proper authority. Or, as James Madison once put it, it is the job of the courts to stand as "an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive."

Congress doesn't need much bulwarking against nowadays because the legislative branch is effectively AWOL. But the president has certainly given the courts plenty of work to do. And the chief justice has, at least sometimes, followed through on the lofty words of his 2025 report. Roberts has labored, though not always successfully, to provide the judicial check on a rogue executive that the founders both wanted and expected to see.

Roberts' successes on this front in the past year include leading the Supreme Court in overruling President Donald Trump's illegal tariff scheme and rejecting Trump's unconstitutional executive order on birthright citizenship.

A notable defeat for Roberts occurred earlier this week, however, in the case about Trump's White House ballroom.

The Constitution assigns to Congress the sole authority "To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever" over Washington, D.C. And Congress, acting on that constitutional authority, has outlawed the construction of any "building or structure…on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress." Yet none of that has stopped Trump from demolishing a large part of the White House without any congressional approval in order to build his much-desired ballroom.

Sounds like a clear-cut case of executive overreach, right?

Roberts thought so. But this time the chief justice found himself in dissent. Five members of the Court cohered around an unsigned per curiam opinion this week that allowed the construction on the White House to proceed for now because, in their view, the legal challengers who had sued to stop the ballroom likely lacked the requisite standing needed to sue in the first place.

Roberts, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, thought the challengers did satisfy the necessary standing requirements and therefore faulted his colleagues for effectively giving the green light to Trump's "likely unlawful" ballroom building spree.

Legal standing is one of those handy doctrines that judges can selectively employ when they want to avoid ruling on the merits of a particular case, or when they want to defer to the government without coming right out and deferring openly. It's hard to tell in this case which one of those two reasons might account for the majority's actions.

Roberts' dissent is much easier to parse. He simply tried and failed to convince the Supreme Court to provide the judicial check on executive lawlessness that the Constitution demands.

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Brickbat: School of Hard Knocks

2026-09-02T20:47:36Z

A former school administrator and two others received federal prison sentences after pleading guilty to wire fraud. Brian Metcalf, a Chicago school principal, and Kimberly Maddox falsely claimed that Maddox or her husband provided services to two school systems and a nonprofit corporation, for work that was not performed. This fraud netted them nearly $700,000 over a decade. Then, while Metcalf was working as a school superintendent in Indianapolis, James Campbell joined the scheme, and Metcalf caused his new school district to pay Campbell nearly $400,000 through fake invoices for consulting work he did not perform. Metcalf and Campbell were sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison, while Maddox received two years, and they must pay restitution collectively totaling nearly $1.1 million.

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Open Thread

2026-09-03T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

Federal Court Issues First Ruling Against Trump's New Birthright Citizenship Executive Order

2026-09-03T03:24:53Z

Milla74/Dreamstime

Last month, I wrote about Trump's new executive order seeking to deny birthright citizenship to various classes of children born on US soil, and noted the first legal challenges to it. As I pointed out then, almost every part of the new order is at odds with the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Trump v. Barbara, which struck down Trump's executive order denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States, and those born to non-citizen parents here on temporary visas. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees grants citizenship to all children "born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." In Barbara, the Supreme Court majority made clear that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" includes children of all persons who are subject to and required to obey US law.

Today, in Casa, Inc. v. Trump, federal district court Judge Deborah Boardman of the District of Maryland issued a decision imposing a preliminary injunction blocking the new order. It is the first judicial ruling on Trump's new birthright citizenship executive order. As Judge Boardman put it, "[t]he 2026 Executive Order is almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class for the simple reason that the Supreme Court in Barbara already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth." She goes on to explain why:

When the Supreme Court explained the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, it distinguished between people over whom the United States has the power to govern (and who are thus subject to the jurisdiction of the United States) and people over whom the United States does not have the power to govern (and who are thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States). See Barbara, 146 S. Ct. at 2449– 50… . The latter category of people falls into the "narrow exceptions" to the rule of citizenship by birth that are implicated when the United States does not have the "full and complete power" to govern over people born on its land. Id. at 2450. Those "narrow exceptions" include "children of foreign ministers" and "members of 19th-century Indian tribes over whom the United States had ceded a part of its territorial jurisdiction to preserve its relationship with a foreign sovereign (or quasi-sovereign)." Id.

This is pretty obviously correct. As explained in my earlier post on the new executive order, that order covers four groups almost all of whose members are clearly subject to US law:

Children of "alien enemies," defined as those where at least one of two non-citizen parents is a "designated Foreign Terrorist Organization under 8 U.S.C. 1189 or Specially Designated Global Terrorist, consistent with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq., and Executive Order 13224 of September 23, 2001 (Blocking Property and Prohibiting Transactions With Persons Who Commit, Threaten to Commit, or Support Terrorism)."
Children born to at least one non-citizen parent who is a "foreign government employee" or employed by an "international organization that possess[es] international-organization immunity."
Children where "either parent" has engaged in "birth tourist" transactions of various kinds (deliberately seeking to give birth in the US so the child would get birthright citizenship).
Children "born in a territory or territorial waters of the United States where citizenship is not conferred by Federal statute." …[T]his only applies to children born in American Samoa, the one populated overseas US territory to whose residents Congress has not conferred citizenship by statute….

As I explained more fully in the earlier post, all of the children in these four categories are obviously subject to US law, with the exception of those born to foreign diplomats who have diplomatic immunity. This latter group is already excluded from birthright citizenship. In that post, I also explained why the analogy between "alien enemies" (as defined in the order) and children of members of an invading army occupying US territory fails.

Judge Boardman's ruling also covers a number of procedural issues I will not attempt to go over here. But the bottom line is she has imposed a preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the order with respect to a previously certified class of all children born on US territory and subject to the 2025 executive order, to parents who are unlawfully present in the US or here on temporary visas (the class was certified as part of the litigation challenging Trump's earlier birthright citizenship order).

This covers pretty much all the people potentially affected by the new birthright citizenship order and born after February 19, 2025 (when the earlier executive order took effect), except those born to legal residents of American Samoa, in category 4 above. It is not clear whether the administration will try to implement the order against children born before February 2025. As noted in Judge Boardman's opinion, "[n]owhere in the order does it indicate it does not apply to children already born." The government's lawyers claimed it would only apply to children born in the future, but these assurances may not be credible. If the administration does try to enforce the order against children born before February 2025, further litigation will be needed to stop that.

Today's ruling is probably only the beginning of the litigation over the new order. The administration is likely to appeal. But I hope and tentatively expect that appellate courts - including, potentially, the Supreme Court - will rule much the same way. The new order is pretty obviously at odds with Trump v. Barbara - and also with the text and original meaning of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The post Federal Court Issues First Ruling Against Trump's New Birthright Citizenship Executive Order appeared first on Reason.com.

How St. Paul's Rent Control Experiment Backfired Spectacularly

2026-09-02T22:10:22Z

In 2022, politicians in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, voted for rent control.

I said that would lead to bigger problems.

Was I right?

My update video reveals what happened.

St. Paul politicians pushed rent control, saying rent caps would stop "unfair profiteering."

But what the heck is "profiteering," and how is it different from "profit"? Who decides what is "unfair"?

The opportunity for profit is what persuades people to invest in things. And build things. If enough people invest in new housing, rents will stop shooting up.

That's just how markets work.

It's why studies show that rent control reduces the supply of housing and gradually raises prices.

But activists don't pay attention to those.

"We don't need more studies," says one in my video. "We need action."

St. Paul's actions were strict—its rent control law made no allowance for inflation.

"It's just going to shut down construction," said Mercatus Center economist Salim Furth. "Why would you enter a market where it seems like the government is actively trying to hurt you?"

At least St. Paul has a "twin city," Minneapolis, so frustrated builders could move just a few blocks and build something there. They did just that. Construction increased there.

Minneapolis politicians had also voted for rent control, but they were wary about imposing it. That was smart, since new housing collapsed in St. Paul.

But Minneapolis City Council Member Aisha Chughtai was unconvinced. She wants more rent control, telling me, "You don't have a city" if people "can't afford to live there."

I pushed back: "The way you have a city is if people build apartments and houses. That's what eventually brings the price down.…Builders still build in Minneapolis—building permits were up.…But in St. Paul, they're down 60 percent because of rent control. You're not going to get more apartments by pushing this."

Her response was something new for me after 50 years interviewing people: 17 seconds of silence. Finally, she said: "Guaranteeing housing for people and making sure that they can stay in their homes matters more than anything else."

Chughtai calls herself a socialist. I ask her, where has that ever worked?

After another long, awkward pause, she says, "I'm doing a fine job of representing my community."

I wish socialists would just spend a little time reading economics or history.

Rent control once destroyed much of New York City.

Because they made it hard for landlords to profit, many landlords just stopped doing maintenance.

"They don't take care of their properties," says Furth. "They don't send a plumber promptly when water starts leaking."

Or worse: The documentaries The Bronx Is Burning and Decade of Fire document how landlords, unable to profit, set fire to their own buildings.

So what's happening now in St. Paul, four years after its clueless politicians imposed strict rent control?

There was so little new construction that the politicians rolled most rent control back.

In sister city Minneapolis, socialist Chughtai has been promoted to majority leader. But the Minneapolis council never did impose rent control, and the mayor pledges never to impose it.

I'd think politicians would learn from St. Paul's failures. But no, not my new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who just froze rent on a million NYC apartments.

Give me a break.

Already, 57,000 NYC apartments sit vacant because existing rent stabilization laws make it unprofitable for landlords to repair them.

The late economist Walter Williams was right to say: "Short of aerial bombardment, the best way to destroy a city is through rent controls."

The post How St. Paul's Rent Control Experiment Backfired Spectacularly appeared first on Reason.com.

No TRO Against Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as to Publishing of Data Center Plans

2026-09-02T21:38:18Z

From KARK (Alex Kienlen) today, reporting on a decision by Judge Lee Rudofsky (E.D. Ark.) in Entergy Arkansas LLC v. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc.:

A federal judge issued a decision on Wednesday denying a request by lawyers for Entergy Arkansas to stop the use of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to a Little Rock woman….

The Democrat-Gazette reported on Monday that the Entergy documents, including some marked "confidential," were released after Jessica Kivell filed her FOIA request with the Public Service Commission and shared them with the newspaper….

The filing asked that the defendants be immediately prohibited from using or disclosing the documents, since it would do "irreparable harm" by disclosing Entergy Arkansas' trade secrets.

There is no written opinion from Judge Rudofsky; but besides the general First Amendment rules against temporary restraining orders barring speech, the matter also seems to me to be governed by Florida Star v. B.J.F. (1989).

Florida Star basically says (to oversimplify slightly) that people have a First Amendment right to publish information that was disclosed by the government, even if the government erred in disclosing it. That case involved publishing the name of a rape victim that was erroneously disclosed by a police department; even though state law barred newspapers from publishing rape victims' names, the Court held that the newspaper had a First Amendment right to do so. Likewise, even if trade secret law bars newspapers from publishing information that they indirectly obtain (and I'm not sure that it does), they have the right to do so when it is obtained from the Public Service Commission, even if the Commission erred in disclosing it (again, far from clear).

Unfortunately, the motion for a temporary restraining order is sealed, so it's hard to be sure of the arguments plaintiff made. I hope the motion will be unsealed at some point soon, though.

For more on the underlying controversy, see the Monday story in the Democrat-Gazette (Sydney Sasser):

Google will pay Entergy Arkansas $526 million to build Cypress Solar, about one-third of the $1.6 billion price tag of the solar and battery facility.

That plant—a 600-megawatt solar field and 350-megawatt battery solar facility—will feed the grid from which Google's West Memphis data center will draw massive power.

Google will pay an additional $190 million to Entergy for transmission system upgrades needed to serve the project….

In an Oct. 2 news release, Entergy Arkansas said the West Memphis data center "will be bolstered by a new 600-megawatt solar project, backed by a 350-megawatt battery storage system that will be located in Jefferson County, Arkansas. Google will pay rates that cover the cost of this resource."

As I understand it, one of the questions was whether Google had promised to pay for all the costs or just the $526M (or $526M+$190M). The KARK story quotes a Google spokesperson as saying that,

"Google is fully committed to covering 100% of the power and infrastructure costs for our West Memphis data center. While upfront payments total $526 million, our ongoing monthly rates over the 20-year agreement will completely fund our operational footprint. Entergy's regulatory filings demonstrate that this project will actually lower overall system costs, providing more than $1.1 billion in net benefits to Arkansas residents."

John T. Adams (James & Carter PLLC) represents defendants.

The post No TRO Against Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as to Publishing of Data Center Plans appeared first on Reason.com.

Mamdani Wants To Block a Law Giving Teachers' Aides $10,000 Bonuses. The Teachers Union Is Not Happy.

2026-09-02T21:06:40Z

The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) is facing an unlikely opponent: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

On August 19, Mamdani sued New York City Council over a UFT-backed law that would give teachers' aides (also called paraprofessionals) a one-time $10,000 bonus. The bonus would be a substantial jump in pay for the city's paraprofessionals, who earn as little as $33,000 a year.

The New York City Council unanimously passed the legislation, called the RESPECT Check Act, in July, and it became law on August 19 without a signature or veto from Mamdani, reported Chalkbeat. That same day, New York City Hall filed a lawsuit attempting to block the law. Then, on August 25, the UFT filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit.

Mamdani's lawsuit against the City Council largely details procedural concerns. In its complaint, the city argues that "the bill ignores nearly sixty years of well-established collective bargaining process under the Taylor Law—which requires that public employers and unions negotiate in good faith on mandatory subjects of bargaining."

The lawsuit also warns that "by circumventing that process and attempting to increase pay for school paraprofessionals by legislative fiat (at a cost, by its own conservative estimate, of $324.9 million), the Council has set a perilous and unlawful precedent with huge fiscal consequences for the DOE [Department of Education of the City School District of the City of New York] and the City—and, by extension, the tax-paying public."

A spokesperson for the mayor, Matt Rauschenbach, echoed these collective bargaining concerns. He said the administration would "not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table."

"The City is filing a lawsuit to protect the right of every union to negotiate on behalf of its members, to fight for the workplace they deserve and ensure that workers – not politicians – determine their own futures," he added in his statement.

The mayor, hardly the poster child for fiscal responsibility, is right to highlight the bill's serious fiscal consequences. In July, the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a nonpartisan civic watchdog group, released a statement opposing the bill, estimating "it would add $325 million in spending just two weeks after the budget was adopted."

"If this bill becomes law, other unions may also seek legislation to increase compensation beyond what they collectively bargained," the CBC added. "That would weaken the bargaining process, increase pressure for additional off-cycle compensation, and expose the City to substantial future costs."

The bill's lead sponsor, City Council member Carmen De La Rosa (who estimated the costs would be $250 million) argued that the costs would be justified, reported News 12 Brooklyn. In a joint statement with City Council Speaker Julie Menin, De La Rosa said the city has a paraprofessional job shortage, which has caused it to pay out $1.5 billion in settlements for failing to meet special education needs.

As the New York Post editorial board suggested, Mamdani could raise paraprofessional pay "by finding the cash somewhere in the city's bloated $39 billion schools budget and negotiating it in the next contract." This would be ideal. But given his budget increases for the education department (even as New York City public school enrollment declines), he may cover the costs in the future by asking more of taxpayers without eliminating waste.

The post Mamdani Wants To Block a Law Giving Teachers' Aides $10,000 Bonuses. The Teachers Union Is Not Happy. appeared first on Reason.com.

Prosecutors Say a North Carolina Teenager Committed Murder by Livestreaming a California Mosque Shooting

2026-09-02T20:54:17Z

A grand jury in Forsyth County, North Carolina, this week indicted a Winston-Salem teenager, Sarah Lindsey Santiago, on three charges of murder in connection with the May 18 shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego. The perpetrators of that attack, 17-year-old Cain Clark and 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez, killed themselves shortly afterward. Santiago was not present during their crimes, and her alleged participation consisted mainly of helping to livestream the attack and posting the killers' manifesto.

Because Santiago aided and abetted Clark and Vazquez, Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O'Neill said at a press conference on Monday, she is guilty of first-degree murder, which in North Carolina is punishable by a mandatory penalty of life in prison without parole when the defendant is 18 or older. Since Santiago is 17, she could, if convicted, receive a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years based on a claim of "mitigating circumstances."

Assuming the allegations against Santiago are true, her conduct was morally reprehensible and potentially criminal. But the decision to charge her with first-degree murder smacks of a desire for retribution that in this case cannot be satisfied by prosecuting the actual killers. Worse, O'Neill's explanation of that decision mixes the elements of aiding and abetting with concerns about the promotion of bigotry and glorification of violence, even by people with no advance knowledge of any actual crimes.

"My client is innocent of all these charges," said Santiago's lawyer, Alan Doorasamy. The case "touches on major issues in the U.S., including youth and social media and mental health," he added. "The world will soon know the facts that caused this major tragedy."

According to O'Neill, Santiago never met Clark or Vazquez in person but communicated with them online. He said she was aware of their plan to attack the San Diego mosque and knew that they also planned to attack a synagogue and "a predominantly African-American high school." Far from reporting or discouraging those plans, the indictment says, she endorsed them, to the point that she sent Vazquez a Nazi patch that he wore during the mosque attack. She also allegedly agreed to "live stream the attacks planned that day, disseminate the recording publicly and then release the manifesto authored by the attackers purporting to justify the attack."

O'Neill said the livestream, which was transmitted via GoPro cameras attached to the helmets that Clark and Vazquez wore, was viewed by Santiago and two other people, which explains how investigators were able to zero in on her. Last week, he said, he conferred with Forsyth County Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough, other local law enforcement officials, the FBI, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Anand Ramaswamy about how to proceed with the case.

One question was whether to arrest Santiago right away or wait for an indictment.
O'Neill and the other officials decided an immediate arrest made sense because Santiago might pose an ongoing threat. "With the weekend approaching, holy days approaching," O'Neill said, "we didn't know what she was capable of."

Another question was whether to prosecute Santiago in state or federal court. If she were charged under federal law, O'Neill explained, "the time that she was looking at was only about three or four years." He may have been referring to the statute criminalizing "misprision of felony," which is punishable by up to three years in prison and consists of concealing and failing to report a federal felony. If Santiago were charged under state law with aiding and abetting the three murders in San Diego, by contrast, she would face a life sentence. O'Neill thought the latter option was more appropriate in light of "her part in this carnage."

If a defendant aids and abets a crime, North Carolina's model jury instruction explains, he "is guilty of the crime, just as if the defendant had personally done all the acts necessary to constitute that crime." Aiding and abetting requires three elements: 1) the crime was committed by another person, 2) the defendant knowingly "advised," "instigated," "encouraged," "procured," or "aided" the other person "to commit that crime," and 3) "the defendant's actions or statements caused or contributed to the commission of the crime."

To convict Santiago, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Santiago's role in livestreaming and recording the mosque attack, publishing the killers' manifesto, and supplying Vazquez with a Sonnenrad patch satisfies those three elements. That seems like a tall order, especially regarding the third element, which hinges on what might have happened if Clark and Vazquez had never communicated with Santiago. If they would have carried out their plan anyway, it is hard to see how Santiago's conduct "caused or contributed to" the murders they committed.

"When someone has credible knowledge of that a crime is gonna be planned or be committed, particularly any act of violence," FBI Special Agent in Charge Reid Davis said during the press conference, "the law requires them to come forward and report it. Failure to do so is not only irresponsible, but it can also be a crime." But that crime is a far cry from first-degree murder, and Santiago's alleged conduct, appalling as it is, does not seem to justify treating her as if she had personally shot and killed the victims of the mosque attack.

In defending that decision, O'Neill suggested that Santiago's real crime was participating in an online culture that radicalizes potentially violent young people. "There exists in our world an underground subculture," he said. "It's an echo chamber of intense hate against different cultures and religions." Participants in "this underground subculture of hate," he explained, "listen to each other" and "talk to each other" on "encoded platforms" like Signal, and "it radicalizes" them "to the point where they carry out these horrific crimes of violence and murder."

O'Neill urged parental awareness as one solution to that problem. But he also said "it is imperative" that "lawmakers prevent these sites" from "being accessible to young people." In response to a reporter's question, he reiterated that legislation was necessary, saying "we have the ability to stop people from glorifying their terroristic carnage for other people to watch." When asked whether there were plans to prosecute the two other people who watched the livestream of the mosque shooting, he declined to comment, saying "it's a continuing investigation."

O'Neill portrayed the charges against Santiago as part of a crackdown on "this subculture of hate," saying "maybe this is the precedent that we need moving forward." And in elaborating on that theme, he conflated the allegations of aiding and abetting murder with the expression of odious views.

Even people who had no foreknowledge of the mosque attack, O'Neill suggested, might face criminal charges simply for watching the livestream. He went further, arguing that the government should block access not only to such footage but also to websites that foment religious, racial, or ethnic animus, which are clearly protected by the First Amendment regardless of how hateful their content might be.

"Today we send a message, a strong message," Winston-Salem Police Chief William Penn said at the press conference. "If you commit a crime, especially a heinous crime, you will not be protected by a distance, you will not be protected by your computer monitor, and you will not be protected in your basement. You will be brought to justice."

Given O'Neill's broad description of the problem he is targeting, that "strong message" is rather alarming. Reasonable people can disagree about the appropriate charge or penalty for a 17-year-old who does what Santiago allegedly did. But her criminal culpability should hinge on the extent to which she encouraged or facilitated the crimes that Clark and Vazquez committed, as opposed to her opinions about Muslims, Jews, or black people. By presenting the case against her as part of a fight against "this subculture of hate," O'Neill blurs the distinction between crime and constitutionally protected speech.

The post Prosecutors Say a North Carolina Teenager Committed Murder by Livestreaming a California Mosque Shooting appeared first on Reason.com.

USDA Approves Bioengineered American Chestnut Tree That Could Bring Them Back From Near-Extinction

2026-09-02T19:28:13Z

The United States Department of Agriculture deregulated Darling 54, a genetically modified variety of American chestnut designed to resist the tree-killing chestnut blight. Does this mean that the restoration of this iconic tree to America's forests can soon begin? Maybe, but some researchers have their doubts.

The chestnut blight fungus was identified at the Bronx Zoo in 1904, likely introduced by chestnut trees imported from East Asia. Numbering around 4 billion trees, American chestnuts once dominated North American forests from Ontario to Mississippi. The rapid spread of the blight killed all of the native trees by the 1950s.

Developed by researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), the Darling 54 has been modified by adding a gene from wheat that confers blight resistance by expressing oxalate oxidase, an enzyme that degrades the tree-killing oxalate produced by the fungus.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) determined last week that the Darling 54 variety is "unlikely to pose a greater plant pest risk than the nonmodified comparator and therefore is no longer subject to our regulations." In other words, Darling 54 trees are ecologically as safe as native trees except that they are better able to resist the blight.

Andrew Newhouse, director of ESF's American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project, said in a statement, "Our 'Darling' chestnuts are an important step in the big picture of chestnut reintroduction. They tolerate blight better than any other fully American chestnuts we've tested, so they can help restore some of the ecological relationships that were lost to this disease." The next step before the trees can be released to the public is approval by the Environmental Protection Agency.

"The disease resistant American Chestnut is the first genetically engineered organism with the goal of ecological restoration to be deregulated by USDA," explains Dr. Emma Kovak, senior analyst at the Breakthrough Institute in a press release. "This decision sets a precedent for other genetically engineered organisms developed for release into the wild rather than agricultural use."

That's really good news.

However, other researchers who are also been seeking to return chestnuts to America's forests have some reservations about the Darling 54. For example, in 2023 the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), which had initially applauded ESF's genetic engineering efforts, withdrew its support of the project. In its comments to APHIS, TACF notes that the introduced wheat gene disrupted another gene that has apparently resulted in reduced growth and survival rates of the modified trees. TACF also suggests that the Darling 54 trees have not been tested long enough to determine whether their bioengineered blight resistance is sufficient for long-term survival. "The growth and survival penalties are likely to negatively impact the long-term forest competitiveness of Darling 54 progeny," note TACF researchers.

Asked about the Darling 54 deregulation, TACF's Director of Science Jared Westbrook said, "We support the use of any genetic technologies that will be effective at restoring blight resistance." Still, Westbrook worries that the failure of ESF's chestnuts to thrive in the wild would bolster anti-biotech activist campaigns against future bioengineered trees.

In the meantime, TACF continues its decades-long project of chestnut restoration via cross breeding American with blight resistant Chinese chestnuts. The process of breeding increasingly blight-resistant trees is sped up using recurrent genomic selection. TACF researchers thus identify genetic markers of disease resistance conferred by genes from the Chinese varieties while retaining high American chestnut ancestry in the hybrids.

Since TACF chestnuts are being created via traditional breeding methods, they will not need federal regulatory approval prior to release. When pressed, Westbrook reluctantly offered that TACF trees could be available for restoration planting in seven to 10 years.

Here's hoping that ESF's trees are a rousing success in the wild. In the meantime, let a thousand efforts to restore chestnuts to America's forests bloom.

Disclosure: I am a long-time small donor to the American Chestnut Foundation.

The post USDA Approves Bioengineered American Chestnut Tree That Could Bring Them Back From Near-Extinction appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Is Back To Seeking Regime Change in Iran

2026-09-02T18:56:26Z

President Donald Trump's attack on Iran was clearly designed as a regime-change war. In his opening speech of the war, on February 28, he told "the great proud people of Iran" that "the hour of your freedom is at hand" and that everyone associated with the Iranian government was marked for "certain death," from generals to traffic cops. Trump told other leaders (and later admitted publicly) that he expected the Islamic Republic to collapse in a few days.

A little over a month into the war, with no signs of Iranian collapse, Trump changed his goals to securing a favorable deal with Iran, and eventually signed a U.S.-Iranian peace memorandum in June 2026. But after a few more months of inconclusive conflict—including a round of U.S.-Iranian fighting this week and the U.S. bombing of an Iranian wedding on Tuesday night—Trump is back to calling for regime change.

"I'm not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table, as ABC Fake News reported. I couldn't care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement. I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing. They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?" the President posted to Truth Social on Tuesday night.

The answer is that they already did. In the first weekend of January 2026, buoyed by Trump's promises that "help is on its way," Iranians launched the largest uprising and suffered the most violent crackdown in the history of the Islamic Republic. (The Human Rights Activists News Agency in Virginia, one of the few groups gathering precise information from inside Iran, has documented 6,800 protesters and bystanders killed.) Despite U.S.-Israeli attempts to re-ignite the uprising a few weeks later, the demoralized Iranian opposition mostly sat out the war.

"We try to convey that our move cannot lead to a massacre of our own people," Kurdish rebel commander Ehwen Chiako, who had been asked by the U.S. to lead an uprising, later told New Lines Magazine.

The U.S.-Israeli war has led to plenty of massacres of the Iranian people who were supposed to rise up. In the first few hours of the war, the U.S. military bombed an elementary school in Minab and a high school girls' volleyball practice in Lamerd, two towns on the Iranian coast, killing over 150 children. On Tuesday night, the Iranian Red Crescent reported that "shrapnel" from a U.S. airstrike hit a wedding party in Kuhestak, an hour's drive from Minab, killing a child and at least three other civilians.

Navy spokesman Capt. Tim Hawkins told reporters that he was "aware" of the reports and that the "U.S. military never targets civilians." But footage from the scene shows pieces of a SLAM-ER, a U.S.-made missile, the Australian consultancy Armament Research Services told the BBC. The U.S. government also initially denied attacking Minab and Lamerd before hard evidence of U.S. involvement emerged.

The wedding massacre was part of a broader U.S.-Iranian clash over the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the oil-rich Persian Gulf. After a month lull in fighting, the U.S. military bombed Iranian forces on the island preparing to mine the strait on Sunday, killing two people. The next day, the Iranian military bombed two Saudi tankers transiting the strait, killing two sailors. The day after that, on Tuesday, both sides were firing heavily at each other's bases. The U.S. military also began a new "tanker for tanker" policy, blowing up two Iranian tankers in retaliation for the two Saudi tankers, U.S. officials told Axios.

As of Wednesday afternoon, calm has returned to the region, at least for now. But the Iranian escalation seems to have accomplished its goals of putting direct pressure on Americans. The price of crude oil futures rose back up to wartime levels—Brent crude was over $96 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate was $92 per barrel on Tuesday night—translating to a national average of $4.12 per gallon of gasoline.

Despite its chest beating, the administration seems pretty keen to end this situation as quickly as possible. (So is the American public; polling from the summer clearly showed that Americans prefer an unfavorable peace deal to more war.) Trump's call for regime change was provoked by an ABC News report that he wanted to tighten the U.S. blockade on Iran. The report included a quote from Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent about trying to "economically asphyxiate Iran and force them to the bargaining table."

Bessent himself hinted to reporters that the threat of another uprising—and all the bloodshed it entailed—was really another bargaining chip with Iran. "Either the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are going to turn on each other, the people are going to turn on them, or they are going to come to the table and want to do a deal that they can stick with," Bessent told reporters on Tuesday.

The post Trump Is Back To Seeking Regime Change in Iran appeared first on Reason.com.

My New Liberalism.Org Article on the Centrality of Private Property Rights to Liberalism

2026-09-02T18:51:52Z

Today, the Institute for Humane Studies Liberalism.Org website published my article on why private property rights deserve a central place in the liberal political tradition. It explains how property rights are essential to liberty, and why strengthening protection for them particularly benefits the poor and disadvantaged. Here is an excerpt:

Property rights were central to the origins of the liberal political tradition. And, in our time especially, they should be central once again. In addition to their inherent value as a vital element of liberty and autonomy, bolstering them is essential to uplifting the poor and disadvantaged and boosting prosperity and innovation. The right to private property can also help protect a variety of other important rights.

Property rights were a central focus of the early liberal tradition. John Locke famously wrote that the purpose of government was the protection of "life, liberty, and property." Many of the American Founders made similar statements. At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton avowed that "one great obj[ect] of Gov[ernment] is the personal protection and security of property." James Madison—Hamilton's great adversary on many issues—agreed, writing in his famous 1792 essay on "Property," that "Government is instituted to protect property of every sort… This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own."

In more recent times, many—including many left-liberals—have downgraded property rights, and advocated that they be severely limited, often supposedly to protect the interests of the poor and disadvantaged. Yet the poor and disadvantaged have the most to gain from strengthening protection for property rights. Stronger protections would raise living standards for them, and for society as a whole….

As early liberals understood, property is essential to liberty. Almost every important human activity requires the use of property…

Property is also essential to the exercise of almost every type of liberty and autonomy. There is no meaningful freedom of speech without property rights in books, computers, newspapers, printing presses, internet connections, and other facilities necessary to disseminate our words. There is little, if any, freedom of religion without property rights in locations needed to hold religious services, propagate religious doctrines, and operate other religious institutions. The right to contraception protected by the Supreme Court's famous decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, though usually thought of as a "privacy" right, depends on the right to acquire and possess property rights in contraceptives.

We can make similar points about almost any other form of liberty. If exercising it requires the use of land or material goods, that exercise depends on property rights. Without such rights, the government could at any time negate the liberty simply by denying the ability to use property needed to exercise it.

Moreover, liberty depends not just on the mere legal ownership of property, but on the right to use that property for the purposes the owner decides….

The rest of the article goes into detail on the importance of specific property rights issues, such as exclusionary zoning, protection against eminent domain, and others.

I am a regular contributor to Liberalism.Org. My previous articles for the site are "Liberalism's Uneasy Relationshp with Democracy" and "Immigration Restrictions Restrict Americans' Liberties."

Liberalism.Org is a new initiative of the Institute for Humane Studies, led by Jason Kuznicki. Its purpose is to promote and revitalize liberal political thought in an era where illiberal of various types are on the rise. Jason provides an overview of the project and its purposes here.

The other regular contributors are prominent libertarian or libertarian-leaning thinkers (though some may prefer terms like "classical liberal"). They include Radley Balko (leading expert on criminal law and law enforcement issues), Janet Bufton (prominent Canadian classical liberal thinker and political commentator), Prof. Michael Munger (Duke University), Sarah Skwire (Liberty Fund), and Prof. Matt Zwolinski (University of San Diego, coauthor of The Individualists: Radical, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism). I look forward to continuing to work with them!

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Georgia Cop Claimed Petting Zoo Donkey Was Charging at His Team When He Shot It

2026-09-02T18:28:36Z

A Georgia police officer wrote in a report that he was forced to fatally shoot a petting zoo donkey named HeeHaw to save himself, a fellow officer, and a team of bloodhounds from the charging animal.

The Sunday shooting in Polk County, Georgia, made national headlines after the anguished owner of the small donkey posted on Facebook vowing to pursue legal action for the killing. The chief of the Cedartown Police Department announced that the officer involved has been put on leave, and an investigation into the shooting has been handed off to the Georgia Department of Agriculture's law enforcement division.

In an incident report obtained by Reason through a public records request, Cedartown Police Department officer Trenton Garner says he was dispatched on the night of August 30 to assist a bloodhound team searching for a missing 12-year-old girl.

The dogs followed a trail to a gate leading to pasture owned by Elsberry Riding and Farm, a business that offers trail rides, pony rides, and petting zoos. "Due to the exigency of locating this missing juvenile," Garner wrote, the officers and dogs entered the pasture.

The incident report continues:

As we were tacking down the fence line, the horses in the pasture spooked and ran back away from us across the pasture. At this time, K-9 Handler Thomasson stated that there was a donkey on the side of the hill. The donkey then began to charge at us. Haralson County's K-9 team retreated, and K-9 Handler Thomasson removed his Taser-7 from it's holster and began to arch it to attempt to deter the donkey from attacking us. This in fact did not deter the donkey, so I removed my department issued Glock 17 from it's holster and pointed it at the donkey. I then fired a single round striking the donkey, at which point the donkey turned away from K-9 Handler Thomasson, retreating up the hill before falling over. We then informed Polk County 911 that I had to use my firearm to dispatch the donkey and prevent injury to K-9 Handler Thomasson and the Haralson County K-9 team.

Garner then spoke with the donkey's owner, Hannah Israel, who told him that it had been bottle-fed since infancy and "would never act aggressive towards anyone, nor would it try to bite anyone."

Israel later posted on Facebook that "HeeHaw was raised in the house and did petting zoos he never knew a stranger. And was shot and killed in his OWN pasture for doing what donkeys do. Alerting to a stranger."

According to the incident report, the missing girl "was later located further along down Grady Road, in the direction that we were tracking with the bloodhound before the donkey attacked the tracking team."

The Cedartown and Polk County police departments denied requests for additional footage and reports, citing an ongoing investigation.

Reason has covered stories of police officers needlessly shooting family pets for years, an unfortunately common phenomenon that has led to huge lawsuit payouts and viral news stories like HeeHaw's.

See the incident report below:

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Trump's Venezuela Oil Deal Sells Out Democracy and Free Markets

2026-09-02T18:18:09Z

Just days after the U.S. military captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in early January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined the Trump administration's plans for the future of the South American country.

Rubio described a three-stage process. First would be "stabilization of the country," which would include President Donald Trump's biggest priority: seizing oil reserves. "We are going to take between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil," Rubio said in January.

Then would come the latter stages of the plan, which Rubio described as "recovery" (opening up Venezuelan markets) and, lastly, a political "transition" toward new leaders.

Those remarks—and the order of Rubio's priorities—are worth revisiting in light of last week's announcement that the U.S. would be, in President Trump's terms, taking "control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela."

According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal includes a 100-year lease of some Venezuelan oil fields. The oil will be extracted by what is technically a new private company—but the U.S. government will be a major shareholder in the entity.

Under the terms of the deal announced by the White House on Monday, the government will hold a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, previously the second-largest private oil producer in Venezuela. The federal government will also hold "veto power over the appointment of any member of" the company's board of directors, the White House announced.

This is a rather shocking expansion of the state corporatism that the Trump administration has mainstreamed into American politics. Now, in addition to owning stakes in more than two dozen American companies, the Trump administration is giving the federal government direct control over an oil company that will operate in a foreign country while competing with other American and international firms.

It is effectively the "American nationalization of Venezuelan oil," as National Review termed it. The Trump administration has apparently decided it can solve socialism in Venezuela by…doing socialism in Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the deal also seems likely to create additional hurdles to the democratic transition in Venezuela—a country that is still officially governed by socialist Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro's second-in-command, who was appointed as interim president by the Trump administration in January.

Indeed, inking this oil deal with the Trump administration is likely to strengthen the Venezuelan regime. "Both the Trump administration and the Rodríguez regime might now share an incentive to prevent any elected government from taking office," concludes The Economist.

Then again, Rubio made the Trump administration's priorities clear all the way back in January, didn't he? Bringing democracy to Venezuela was always a distant third.

No wonder Rodríguez seems thrilled. "The benefits are endless," she said during a brief television broadcast announcing the deal.

Many other Venezuelans seem to disagree.

Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan official who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School, called the deal "shameful" and told Rubio that "it will come to haunt you."

"You opted to use US power, not to free Venezuelans, but to go to bed with our oppressors," Haussman posted on X. "You opted to push an asset grab, an unconstitutional deal with an illegitimate oppressive government, instead of using US leadership to re-establish constitutional rule and democracy first, and then deal with a legitimate government that could have made credible long-term commitments, in due course."

Juan Pablo Guanipa, a prominent figure in the Venezuelan opposition movement, characterized the oil deal as "a skyscraper [built] on pillars of clay," in a post on X.

"The only way to truly reactivate the Venezuelan economy in the long term and make this agreement benefit both parties is through a free election that leads to a representative government, clear rules of the game, rule of law, and institutions that allow our resources to be managed transparently and for the benefit of the nation," Guanipa wrote.

The oil deal makes those goals more difficult to achieve. It suggests that the Trump administration prefers a Venezuela ruled by a deeply unpopular and unlawful leader who acquiesces to bizarre forms of neo-colonialism, rather than a democratic country with a legitimate government and free markets.

And the consequences of this deal could be felt well beyond Venezuela. The Trump-Rodríguez oil deal is "a gift to socialists all over the world who can now point to it with some credibility as an example of an imperial resource grab," writes Ian Vásquez, vice president for international studies at the Cato Institute.

"The deal flies in the face of economic freedom and the principle of voluntary exchange that made the United States prosperous," writes Vásquez, "and it makes little strategic or economic sense."

A more stable, democratic Venezuela would be the kind of place where American oil companies would be able and willing to invest resources. Prioritizing "taking the oil" undermines both the interests of Venezuelans and the principles for which America supposedly stands.

The post Trump's Venezuela Oil Deal Sells Out Democracy and Free Markets appeared first on Reason.com.

Invasion of the Robot Teachers

2026-09-02T16:08:35Z

In New Mexico, Facebook and Instagram are considered a "public nuisance," but letting artificial intelligence systems record and store young kids' voices and score their reading prowess is state policy.

Starting last school year, the state required all public schools to use Amira—a personified AI system designed to assess and instruct elementary school students—for mandatory literacy assessments, dyslexia screenings, and weekly tutoring sessions in kindergarten through second grade.

As the 2026–27 school year drew to a start, some parents and school districts began pushing back, concerned about how Amira Learning retained and used student voice recordings and whether it was actually effective at assessing student reading skills.

The state's Public Education Department (PED) responded by granting school districts the right to opt out of Amira this year if they obtain PED approval.

Nonetheless, robo-teachers and testers were rolled out with seemingly little oversight or notice last year and are still being used in most New Mexico school districts this year, despite the fact that evidence on the efficacy of AI tutoring is thin.

And New Mexico isn't alone in allowing or requiring AI tutors and testers. "Amira is required for assessments in two states—New Mexico and Idaho—and is authorized for state use in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Texas though some New Mexico policymakers have admitted its rollout was hasty," reports the Albuquerque Journal.

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I'm far from an AI skeptic or unilaterally averse to childhood technology use and screen time. But I instinctively balk—perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly—at using AI to monitor or teach very young students. And from what I've learned looking into Amira and New Mexico's hasty rollout of it, I think parents are right to be concerned.

Recording Children's Voice

One of the biggest concerns expressed by New Mexico parents and educators concerns the student-reading sessions that Amira records.

"Our families are asking questions we cannot fully answer: Where are these voice recordings stored, and for how long? Who can access them? Are they used to train or refine the vendor's AI models? What safeguards protect them from breach or misuse?" wrote Jennifer Guy, superintendent of Los Alamos Public Schools, in a July 31 letter to the New Mexico PED. "A child's voice is effectively biometric data, and parents are rightly uneasy about it being collected and retained by a third-party system as a condition of a state-mandated assessment."

"We do not believe the state should require children to submit their voices to the platform," Guy added.

Some of these concerns have since been addressed by Amira or New Mexico education authorities. Amira "does not and will not ever sell student data, or use recordings of New Mexico students to build products for anyone else," said Amira CEO Mark Angel in an August 28 letter to concerned New Mexico lawmakers.

And "PED made an agreement with Amira so recordings wouldn't be stored long-term," according to KOB 4. "Last year's recordings were deleted, and going forward, the data will be deleted every month unless a district requests otherwise." What's more, individual school districts can now set stricter limits on retention of these recordings, and some have.

But this is all being hashed out after schools were already deploying Amira systems in K-2 classrooms for a full school year. And under the state's new policy, longer data-retention periods are still possible, and schools are still not truly in charge of the data. "We aren't in control of their server," as Maxwell Municipal Schools Superintendent Amy Roble said at an August 17 school board meeting during which she voiced concern about student data security.

Hasty Rollout and Little Accountability

"Deploy AI teachers first, ask questions later" seems to be characteristic of New Mexico's Amira rollout, which happened after its previous student-assessment company, Istation, merged with the AI company Amira Learning.

Beginning in the 2025–26 school year (and continuing this year unless school districts individually opt out), Amira was required for literacy assessments of kindergarten through second-grade students that happen three times per school year and also required for monthly assessments of students identified as having below-adequate reading skills. It's also used in some schools for first-grade dyslexia screenings and for weekly, individual literacy tutoring sessions.

The results of these required assessments can dictate what further "interventions" are implemented by teachers and schools. And "New Mexico spends $2.7 million on Amira yearly for software use, professional development, data analysis and other additional tutoring and support programs," according to GovTech.

But "it is unclear what vetting processes and stakeholder input PED used to implement" Amira, a May 2026 report from the state's Legislative Education Study Committee says. "The state appears to lack a formal mechanism for PED to assess whether a tool like Amira is producing its intended outcomes, to standardize how student reading data are collected and shared across districts, or to provide the Legislature with reliable, timely information about the tool's impact statewide." And "New Mexico does not currently have statewide procurement standards for AI tools, student data privacy requirements specific to AI, and a formal evaluation process for AI education tools."

So, in New Mexico—a state allegedly so worried about minors' screen time that it took Meta to court and won millions of dollars—schools are taking kids away from time with human classmates and teachers in order to force them to sit down in front of a screen and interact with an AI avatar, and this was apparently implemented without any real proper rules or accountability measures put in place.

But Does It Work?

This is especially concerning given reports from teachers and parents about the ways Amira is incorrectly scoring student reading or causing anxiety in young learners.

"Speech-recognition technology remains imperfect with young voices, developing articulation," noted Guy in her letter. This has led to Amira scoring some students at levels very different than what parents and teachers would expect based on their own observations, she wrote. "Because teachers are not administering or scoring Amira sessions, and because the ability to correct scoring errors has been removed at the state level, our staff and families may be presented with results that may be wrong and teachers have no means to fix."

In addition, Amira assessments may be causing—and registering—student anxiety, Guy adds. "Our early-grade teachers and reading interventionists report that the assessment experience itself is a barrier for beginning readers. Children become anxious or restless when the software fails to register their responses or asks them to repeat themselves, and for students already struggling with reading, the technology layer compounds the difficulty….Often, the test results reflected a child's comfort with a device and a speech engine or the technology failures rather than the student's actual reading skill."

"Data shows that Amira is a positive tool that supports improved academic outcomes for students," said Janelle Taylor García of the New Mexico Public Education Department in an early-August statement.

But Guy and Los Alamos teachers aren't the only ones who have noticed issues.

"The reason families are outraged is because we were never notified this was happening," wrote Sally DeRadke, mother of three Albuquerque public schools students, in a Santa Fe New Mexican op-ed. "We had to find out from our 5-, 6-, and 7-year olds who came home and said, 'Amira is like a new teacher but they don't actually understand me,' and 'I don't like reading anymore.'"

In Maxwell, "Roble said staff members believed some student scores appeared to reflect speech patterns rather than actual reading ability," according to the World Journal. "Students with speech delays or other speech disabilities, in particular, sometimes received scores teachers did not believe accurately represented their reading skills."

There are numerous Reddit posts, purportedly from parents whose kids have had to use Amira or teachers who have had to use it in the classroom, expressing dismay over its use.

According to a poll posted by the state education department, only 8 percent of teachers and administrators surveyed at a training last year said they had "no major concerns" with using Amira.

Fools Rush In

Most of the data on Amira's efficacy seem to come from Amira, though I did find one doctoral dissertation on the subject that suggests Amira could improve oral reading fluency scores for first graders.

But I think the issue isn't so much whether Amira in particular or AI tools more broadly can be effective teachers. It's the sense that schools are using small children as guinea pigs, implementing these tools without any real consideration of data privacy or child development concerns, solid data backing their efficacy, input from parents, or plans to measure their effectiveness.

AI certainly has some place in education. And maybe in time we'll come to realize that tools like Amira are great for individualized learning, tailoring lessons to each child's abilities in ways that outperform dedicated human tutoring or, at least, serving as a balm in overcrowded schools where teachers may not have the time to put in individualized work with every student.

But, right now, schools seem to be leaping before looking. There's just still a lot we don't know about AI's effectiveness at teaching young children or the effects of young children interacting with AI systems more broadly, and this feels like an area where public schools should be proceeding with extreme caution rather than rushing in.

We could end up with a great new venue for student learning. But we could also end up with another "iPad for every child" scenario—a costly experiment that doesn't pay off. Or we could end up with something a lot worse. And until we have more data, public schools should probably chill on the robo-teachers.

More Sex & Tech News

• The Safer GAMING Act, passed last month by the House of Representatives as part of the KIDS Act, would effectively prohibit kids from naming their Pokémon—and a lot more. TechFreedom lawyer Andy Jung explains how this bill ignores the First Amendment by "attempting to silence minors in online video games."

• There are major First Amendment issues with the Meta settlement, suggests First Amendment lawyer Jeff Kosseff. "Defenders of the settlement would argue that the content restrictions and age assurance requirements are not direct government mandates but, rather, provisions to which Meta voluntarily agreed. But the Supreme Court has repeatedly questioned the purportedly voluntary nature of such restrictions when the government applies pressure."

• The Anthropic win against the Trump administration reaffirms the idea that private companies can put conditions on their dealings with the government, writes J.D. Tuccille.

• "Many sites are now blocking AI crawlers," note Australian academics Dana McKay and Damiano Spina. This makes AI summaries less likely to cite their content—which could create problems. "Sites containing misinformation are far less likely to ban AI crawlers, so the AI answers won't be informed by high-quality sources."

• "While states' pro-growth instincts have let data centers down as of late, national security concerns about winning the AI race still afford data centers some support from federal policymakers," notes Reason's Christian Britschgi.

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Wisconsin Cops Used Flock Over 100 Times To Track a Navy Veteran After He Lawfully Recorded a Traffic Stop

2026-09-02T14:49:31Z

While standing in a private parking lot in Sussex, Wisconsin, on May 4, 2025, Napoleon Jones witnessed a traffic stop made by an out-of-county police officer. "It just didn't sit right with me," Jones told TMJ4 News, a local NBC News affiliate. "So I did what I legally could do, and I walked over and recorded it."

Jones, a United States Navy veteran, was well within his rights to record the police stop. But even though he recorded from a safe distance without interfering, that didn't stop the Waukesha County Sheriff's deputy, Brandon Shayhorn, from later unlawfully stopping and arresting Jones.

After Shayhorn completed the traffic stop, Jones returned to his vehicle. But before Jones could exit the parking lot, Shayhorn turned on his lights and initiated a second stop, claiming Jones' temporary license plate, displayed in the rearview window, was unreadable, reports TMJ4 News. Shayhorn demanded to see Jones' driver's license, but Jones refused, arguing that he'd been unlawfully pulled over on private property. Video clips of the encounter show the deputy opening Jones' door and pulling him from his vehicle.

Flock being used against a citizen in retaliation for exercising his first amendment right
-----

Jones was in a private parking lot across the street from a police officer he was recording on his phone. The officer saw him recording and came over and harassed him, pulled him… pic.twitter.com/bYAbmAeqwS

— Orwell Day (@OrwellDay) August 30, 2026

Jones was subsequently arrested "for resisting and obstructing," according to a federal lawsuit he filed against the arresting officers and police department. But after being held in custody for five hours, he was released with no citations or criminal charges. An internal post-arrest memorandum reviewed by Reason revealed that Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification.

The next day, Jones filed a citizen's complaint against Shayhorn for the illegal stop and said he believed Shayhorn retaliated against him for exercising his First Amendment right to record. Jones then sought legal counsel to pursue claims against the arresting officers and the police department for his unlawful stop, detention, and arrest.

While litigating those claims, Jones' attorney, Nate Cade, found something odd: A single photograph of his client's vehicle, provided by Flock Safety, dated May 30, 2025. Provided in the sheriff's office's response to Jones' complaint "was a single photograph of [Jones'] white vehicle, a white BMW," Cade told TMJ4 News. "The incident occurred on May 4, so that starts me thinking, what's going on? Why do you have a photograph of his vehicle 25 days later?" Cade continued.

Further investigation revealed over 100 Flock searches for a white BMW in the weeks following Jones' unlawful arrest. Some of the searches were made by Shayhorn himself, a clear conflict of interest. When asked about the searches during a deposition hearing, Shayhorn and others replied they'd been ordered to conduct the searches by their lieutenant in connection with Jones' citizen complaint, according to TMJ4 News.

"I was extremely shocked," Jones told TMJ4 News, "I couldn't understand why or how that would even be a possibility from what happened at the beginning of May would lead me to be searched in the Flock system because from my understanding, it's for criminal stuff."

In July 2026, Jones amended his complaint to include the additional officers who searched for his vehicle without "a legitimate law enforcement purpose" as required by the county's user agreement. There was no Flock camera in the parking lot where the unlawful arrest took place, and Jones was not accused nor suspected of any wrongdoing when the investigative searches took place. Indeed, Jones alleges that the officers instead used Flock to track Jones "in retaliation for exercising his First Amendment right of recording a traffic stop" and as a "means to attempt to find a potential crime against Jones."

At a time when police use of automated license plate readers is facing fierce public backlash for invading Americans' privacy, Jones' case serves as a reminder of just how easily government power can be abused without proper oversight. While the officers involved aren't being accused of attention-grabbing misuses of Flock Safety—like, say, using the tech to outlandishly stalk their romantic interests—their alleged abuses are still concerning. If lawfully filming a police officer can set off a weekslong surveillance campaign against the videographer, how can Americans expect other constitutionally protected speech and actions to not be met with similar retaliation?

The post Wisconsin Cops Used Flock Over 100 Times To Track a Navy Veteran After He Lawfully Recorded a Traffic Stop appeared first on Reason.com.

Why the Right Is Embracing State Power

2026-09-01T16:09:29Z

Reason Senior Editor Stephanie Slade joins Nick Gillespie to discuss the future of the American right after Donald Trump, and whether libertarians will have a place in it.

In Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, Slade argues that the political philosophy espoused by National Review co-founder Frank Meyer remains a vibrant synthesis of the liberty prized by libertarians and the virtue that is central to conservatives and traditionalists. Slade and Gillespie discuss the development of fusionism in post-war America, the often-unacknowledged common ground between libertarian thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and conservatives like Russell Kirk, and the rise of "post-liberal" figures such as J.D. Vance and Patrick Deneen, who argue that the state should severely curtail economic and lifestyle freedom. Slade explains why she thinks young people are increasingly finding authoritarian politics appealing and why a true renewal of civil society can only come from voluntary institutions.

0:00—What is fusionism?

2:56—Defining Judeo-Christian virtue

8:12—Can you have limited government without virtue?

11:11—Frank Meyer

19:34—Pluralism and rationalism

22:42—Russell Kirk and Friedrich Hayek

35:58—Brent Bozell Jr.

42:34—Conservatism and Catholicism

46:29—The right's embrace of state power

54:46—Are we in a period of societal decline?

1:00:48—How fusionism can revive the culture

The post Why the Right Is Embracing State Power appeared first on Reason.com.

Automatic Selective Service Registration Keeps the Threat of Conscription Alive

2026-09-02T13:27:52Z

This December, selective service registration for eligible young men becomes automatic nationwide. This might not seem like a big deal, as it merely automates an already mandatory process that many states had in place. Rather than requiring men to register online or by mail, the government will use existing databases, such as Social Security records, to add men ages 18 to 26 to a pool of candidates if conscription becomes necessary.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D–Pa.) said the move will save "taxpayer dollars" and described it as a bureaucratic improvement. But this is not simply paperwork. It's a remnant of the military draft and a reminder that the government reserves the option to dispose of young men's lives.

America hasn't had a military draft since 1973. But selective service registration has survived, on and off, throughout history. It keeps the threat of conscription alive—even though most Americans have long opposed the military draft. A May 2026 Overton Insights poll found that 66 percent would oppose a military draft under President Donald Trump. Many young men have historically expressed their opposition by refusing to register for the selective service, despite the penalties.

Automatic registration takes away that choice. As Reason's C.J. Ciaramella wrote in 2024, automatic registration "remov[es] young men's choice to engage in civil disobedience"— in effect, preventing young men from rebelling against potential conscription. And they have reasons to rebel.

Even leaving aside the constitutional arguments against conscription, the military draft is a profoundly immoral institution. It's anathema to America's founding promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The draft effectively tells young men that their lives belong to the state. During their conscription, young men must perform whatever the government requires while the state treats their lives as expendable. Our forefathers broke with the tradition of subordinating individuals to the state so they could live as they saw fit, free from government interference. Conscription is a direct affront to that principle. If sent to the battlefield, they may die or suffer severe physical and psychological harm.

They would endure all of this only to fight for a cause they may not share or even understand—one chosen by politicians in response to whatever they may deem an "emergency." If we had a military draft today, conscripted Americans could be forced to fight in the widely unpopular Iran war—a war that even its proponents have struggled to explain or justify.

Beyond the risk of death, draftees are forced to put their happiness on hold during their service. Career plans, education, romantic relationships, friendships, and other commitments are forcibly interrupted when men are drafted during some of their most formative years.

When discussing the draft in a 1967 lecture, the philosopher Ayn Rand laid out the reasons why this is particularly egregious at this point in a person's life. She explained that, when a draft is in place, young men are forced to live in fear and terror of being conscripted: "the terror of knowing that he can plan nothing and count on nothing, that any road he takes can be blocked at any moment by an unpredictable power, that, barring his vision of the future, there stands the gray shape of the barracks, and, perhaps, beyond it, death for some unknown reason in some alien jungle."

We haven't had a draft in over 50 years, and there aren't any known official plans to bring it back. But that threat still looms. There have been renewed calls for conscription, and it's an issue that has historically found some support across the aisle. Maintaining the selective service as an "emergency contingency" is a choice those in power continue to make.

And this choice preserves the possibility of the terror Rand described. Automatic registration removes all remaining friction between young men and the state's power to take control of their lives. If you oppose the draft, you should oppose the measures that would make it easier to implement, too.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post Automatic Selective Service Registration Keeps the Threat of Conscription Alive appeared first on Reason.com.

Third Circuit Rejects Facial Challenge to Ban on Nonimmigrant Aliens' Gun Possession

2026-09-02T04:12:21Z

Some excerpts from U.S. v. Aleman-Lozano, decided yesterday by Third Circuit Judge Patty Shwartz, joined by Judges Theodore McKee:

Aleman-Lozano is a native and citizen of El Salvador. He entered the United States unlawfully but, in 2017, was granted a nonimmigrant temporary visa with work authorization. Since entering the United States, he has resided with his family, attended school, and worked in Washington, D.C.

In September 2021, a Pennsylvania state trooper pulled Aleman-Lozano over for a traffic violation …. During the stop, the trooper saw a rifle cartridge on the passenger seat. As a result, the trooper obtained a search warrant and found a pistol containing a loaded sixteen-round magazine, which Aleman-Lozano told police he had purchased from an unidentified individual in Maryland. The pistol did not have a serial number….

Aleman-Lozano was prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5)(B), which generally makes it illegal for aliens present under a nonimmigrant visa (with some exceptions) to possess guns, and brought a facial challenge to the constitutionality of the provision. Judges Shwartz and McKee assumed without deciding that "the people" in the Second Amendment included noncitizens who were lawfully present, but concluded that "there is historical support for the challenged restriction" based on "analogues from before and at the time of the Second Amendment's ratification":

English common law distinguished between "aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the … allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it." Under the common law, "natural-born subjects [had] a great variety of rights, which they acquire[d] by being born within the king's ligeance," while the rights of "aliens … [were] much more circumscribed, being acquired only by residence here, and lost whenever they remove[d]." For example, "aliens" could not hold land, and "land and gun ownership were historically linked." "[T]he right to own guns in eighteenth-century England was statutorily restricted to the landed gentry." An alien could own land if he became naturalized by swearing allegiance to the sovereign before Parliament, which "placed [him] in almost 'exactly the same state as if he had been born in the' dominions of the Crown." The English Bill of Rights also limited gun ownership to those loyal to the Crown. It "guarantee[d] that 'Protestants … may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions, and as allowed by Law.'"

Before the American Revolution, some "colonial governments prohibited any white person unwilling to affirm his allegiance to the British Crown from collecting firearms." For example, Georgia disarmed indentured Acadians, a "group of French settlers and ancestors to the Cajuns, [who] 'refused to be loyal subjects of the British government' during the French and Indian War." The disarmament of Acadians "was based solely on loyalty concerns."

After the American Revolution began, the states disarmed British loyalists because of their allegiance to the English monarch and not to the American cause. The Continental Congress called upon the States "immediately to cause all persons to be disarmed … who are notoriously disaffected to the cause of America, or who have not associated, and shall refuse to associate, to defend, by arms, these United Colonies, against the hostile attempts of the British fleets and armies." The states answered the call and disarmed those who refused to swear allegiance to the state and/or to the American cause. Thus, from English common law through the Revolutionary period around the time of ratification, there was a historical tradition of disarming those considered disloyal to the sovereign….

With this history in mind, we conclude that why and how § 922(g)(5)(B) restricts firearms possession is "consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition" because it addresses the same allegiance concern as the historical laws and does so in the same way.

As to why the restriction exists, "[a]llegiance serves as a mark of trustworthiness," and it "shows one's willingness to accede to the terms of social order in exchange for the full benefits of citizenship. [Noncitizens], as a matter of their status, have not yet affirmed their allegiance to the sovereign. That has uniformly served as the basis for disarming them." Section 922(g)(5)(B) disarms noncitizens who bear a "presumptive allegiance to a foreign state," and not to the United States, and thus addresses the same problem as the historical laws.

As to the "how" inquiry, the historical laws and § 922(g)(5)(B) burden the right in the same way. Historically, governments disarmed individuals "unless and until they swore an oath of allegiance to the sovereign." An individual could obtain the right to bear arms after swearing an oath of allegiance. Today § 922(g)(5)(B) "disarms persons unwilling or unable to swear the oath of allegiance and loyalty to the United States." Noncitizens disarmed under § 922(g)(5)(B) who follow the path prescribed by Congress and undergo the naturalization process, which culminates in taking the oath of renunciation and allegiance "as a demonstration of trustworthiness," gain the right to bear arms. Section 922(g)(5)(B) addresses the same loyalty concern as the historical laws and does so in the same way.

Judge Peter Phipps concurred in the judgment:

The Majority Opinion makes a needless assumption, the breadth of which is staggering, viz., that all nonimmigrant visa holders are part of "the people" and therefore have full Second Amendment rights. A nonimmigrant is a foreign national with a permanent residence abroad who comes to the United States on a temporary basis, such as for tourism, study, business, medical treatment, or transient travel. Whatever are the precise contours of 'the people,' that term certainly does not include every such visitor….

The term 'the people' as used in the Constitution is "a term of art" with consistent meaning. As defined by the Supreme Court, 'the people' refers to "a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community," with the understanding that the relevant national community is the national "political community." {[T]he Founding generation, influenced by Locke and Montesquieu, "spoke of 'the people,'" to mean "the sovereign community that consented to a legitimate government" ….} While not every contour of the national political community has been identified, adult citizens are part of the people, and excludable aliens are not. It may also be that nonimmigrants are, as a class, not part of the national political community as they are citizens of another country with permanent residences abroad, and they cannot vote in federal elections or serve on federal juries. But it is not necessary in this case to determine whether nonimmigrants, as a class, are not part of 'the people.'

Rather, Aleman-Lozano's facial challenge to § 922(g)(5)(B) will fail if one nonimmigrant visa holder is outside of the national political community. And if nothing else, receipt of one type of nonimmigrant visa—the C-1 transit visa—does not induct foreign nationals into 'the people.' A C-1 transit visa allows foreign nationals to pass through this country to reach another foreign country and has a maximum duration of stay of 29 days. The limitations on the visa—it is given to foreign nationals with permanent residence abroad who are travelling through this country transiently—prevent C-1 transit visa holders from developing a "sufficient connection" with this country to be considered part of the national political community. Consequently, C-1 transit visa holders are not part of 'the people,' and the Second Amendment does not protect their ability to keep and bear arms.

That conclusion is fatal to Aleman-Lozano's facial challenge. It is therefore unnecessary for the resolution of this case to broadly assume that each and every nonimmigrant visa holder is part of 'the people.'

Patrick J. Bannon and Carlo D. Marchioli represent the government.

The post Third Circuit Rejects Facial Challenge to Ban on Nonimmigrant Aliens' Gun Possession appeared first on Reason.com.

Strikes Without End

2026-09-02T13:23:37Z

The U.S. and Iran are back at it: Both countries have resumed trading airstrikes this week after mostly pausing for the month of August, when they were attempting to agree to a deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Then, on August 30, "US forces struck Iranian rocket launchers on its Larak Island" claiming "that the attack on Larak was launched to prevent Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz," per Breakthrough News.

Last night, U.S. Central Command reported that it had struck its adversary's military targets in retaliation for attacks on U.S. troops and ships in the region. The U.S. military allegedly killed four members of the IRGC and 12 people across the south of Iran, per Iranian state outlets. The New York Times is reporting that U.S. forces hit a wedding in the port town of Kuhestak, killing four people (including a child). The "U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC," said CENTCOM spokesperson Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins.

The IRGC responded, saying it had targeted U.S. bases in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan; it characterized its strikes as retaliatory, saying the U.S. bombing was a "flagrant violation of human rights" turning an "engagement" event into a "mourning ceremony."

"American evil ⁠in the region will be met with heavier, more widespread, and devastating responses, and any country that cooperates with the aggressive American army must accept its dangerous consequences," said Iran's military command in a statement.

"Asian and European stocks tumbled after the renewed U.S. airstrikes, which pushed oil prices back up to levels unseen since July," reports Reuters, "compounding the economic impact of a global sell-off in bonds as disrupted energy supplies fuel inflation worldwide."

It's not clear what exactly the Trump administration hopes to accomplish at this stage of the war; his negotiations haven't resulted in the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran and other allied groups still routinely fire on ships if they do attempt passage at all; the whole corridor remains destabilized.

Scenes from New York: "Since May, several New Yorkers have reported seeing people venturing in and out of the 7,500-mile network of pipes that make up the city's sewer system," reports The New York Times. "And while these explorations have fueled rumors of an underground society, the Police Department has not established a motive."

QUICK HITS

HUGE NEWS: Stephanie Slade's new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, is out! Read an excerpt here and BUY THE DAMN THING if you know what's good for you.
"For the first time in recent history, Danish conscripts have been deployed to Greenland, as Denmark moves to bolster its presence in the Arctic after U.S. demands to acquire the territory," reports Reuters. "U.S. President Donald Trump has ‌repeatedly sought to acquire the semi-autonomous Danish island, citing national security concerns and accusing Copenhagen of neglecting Arctic defence. Denmark and Greenland have firmly rejected the idea." I'm not sure Trump is intimidated by Danish soldiers, but good for them, I guess.
"The 32-year-old Cuban who traveled between Tampa and Miami for work had already spent more than a year in immigration detention centers across the United States. Officers moved him from one jail to another before putting him on a plane in Texas on the morning of July 30," writes Juan Carlos Chavez for the Tampa Bay Times. "No one told Moreno, who originally came to the United States on a temporarily protected basis, where he was going until five hours into the flight, when an immigration officer told him they were going to Africa. 'I honestly thought it was a bad joke because the officer laughed, like he was making fun of me,' Moreno said. A month after arriving in the Central African Republic, Moreno and 35 other immigrants deported on a 21-hour flight remain in Bangui, the country's capital, without passports and no information about what will happen next."
"Rhonda Lynn Orr was written out of her aunt's estate in 2013. By the time the pandemic rolled around, she had turned up again in her aunt's life and taken charge of her care," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Soon after, authorities say Orr drained at least $690,000 from her aunt's accounts. Now, Orr is in jail facing charges of theft from a vulnerable adult. Her aunt is under the care of a court-appointed guardian. In an interview from jail, Orr disputed the charges."
"The percentage of parents and caregivers in the United States refusing a standard vitamin K shot for infants at birth has accelerated sharply this year, an exclusive data analysis for Reuters found, putting more newborns at risk of life-threatening bleeding episodes….In the first half of 2026, the rate of non-receipt was 2.5 times higher than the average rate from 2019 to 2024. It was 1.4 times higher than in 2025."
Pretty nasty, from Michigan's Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed:

So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no… https://t.co/JApcsCW4kU

— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) August 22, 2026

The post Strikes Without End appeared first on Reason.com.

"[A]n Unopposed Grant" of Sealing "Carries Little Weight in a Contested Posture"

2026-09-01T22:57:34Z

From Townsend v. The Gardens at Aldersgate LLC, decided Monday by Magistrate Judge Rachel Schwartz (D. Kan.):

This is a skilled-nursing-home negligence case proceeding in federal court based on diversity jurisdiction …. In diversity cases proceeding under § 1332(a), Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 7.1(a)(2) requires every "party or intervenor [to]…file a disclosure statement[ ] [that] must name—and identify the citizenship of—every individual or entity whose citizenship is attributed to that party or intervenor[.]" On August 3, 2026, Defendants filed their unredacted Rule 7.1 disclosure statements provisionally under seal. In the present Motion, Defendants seek to maintain under seal the unredacted Rule 7.1 disclosure statements, which reveal various layers of the respective limited liability companies' ("LLC") memberships and the identities of those layers of members. Defendants request permission to file publicly only redacted versions of these documents, redacting "the names of non-party individuals, trusts, and limited liability companies whose disclosure would reveal the private ownership and financial associations of non-parties." Plaintiffs oppose the Motion on multiple grounds, including that granting the Motion "would convert a transparency rule into a sealing regime for any LLC that prefers anonymity."

The court noted the general right of access to court records, and concludes that there's no exception to it for the LLC disclosures; here's part of the analysis:

[F]ederal district courts have overwhelmingly rejected these types of generic confidentiality and privacy concerns as insufficient to justify sealing or otherwise restricting Rule 7.1 disclosure statements. [Long string citation omitted. -EV] Simply put, "[c]orporations and limited partnerships may offer individuals protection from liability, but they do not entitle individuals to anonymity in court proceedings." Here, all the individuals and entities listed in Defendants' Rule 7.1 disclosure statements elected to have an ownership interest in a skilled nursing facility and the company that manages the skilled nursing facility. It is not unusual or unforeseeable that these types of parties would be sued in diversity cases in federal court, triggering the requirement that these Defendants file Rule 7.1 disclosure statements. While there may be specific cases in which sealing would be appropriate, they would involve a far more specific set of facts pertaining to specific entities or individuals than what this Court has before it….

[R]ather than address these cases, which represent the overwhelming majority view, Defendants' Motion relies on a different case from this District that also involved Defendant MRC. In that case, the judge granted defendants' unopposed motion seeking leave to file redacted copies of Rule 7.1 disclosures. This is the only case Defendants cite in which a court allowed Rule 7.1 disclosures to be sealed in whole or in part. But as Plaintiffs persuasively argue, "[a]n unopposed grant carries little weight in a contested posture," such as here. The undersigned agrees with the majority view that Rule 7.1 disclosures should not be sealed in whole or in part based on generic privacy arguments that could apply to nearly any business that wishes to keep private those with an ownership interest….

The court also noted that

Rule 7.1 disclosure statements serve an important purpose. Rule 7.1 disclosures allow the judge to ascertain whether the judge has a financial interest in the party or associated parties that would require recusal. And in diversity cases like this one, "Rule 7.1 statements enable a federal court to assess its jurisdiction—jurisdiction that has been carefully delimited by Article III of the Constitution and by Congress." These are matters of public interest.

The analysis seems quite sound to me; the most valuable part for the future, though, may be the sentence that I used as the title of the post: "[A]n unopposed grant carries little weight in a contested posture." It's a corollary of the broader point that (see, e.g., Webster v. Fall (1925); Cooper Industries, Inc. v. Aviall Services, Inc.(2004)):

Questions which merely lurk in the record, neither brought to the attention of the court nor ruled upon, are not to be considered as having been so decided as to constitute precedents.

But it's useful to have a case to quote on the more specific point as well.

Jonathan T. Steele (The Steele Law Firm) represents plaintiff.

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Lion King Composer vs. Comedian Dispute Leads to ~$40K Attorney Fee Award Against Composer

2026-09-02T14:44:11Z

From Morake v. Mwanyenyeka, decided Friday by Judge Josephine Staton (C.D. Cal.):

Plaintiff Lebohang Morake is the creator and original performer of "Nants'ingonyama bagithi Baba," the opening chant from Disney's The Lion King. Defendant Learnmore Mwanyenyeka is a comedian and content creator.

Defendant appeared on a podcast, where he asserted that "Nants'ingonyama bagithi Baba" means "Look, there's a lion. Oh my god" in the Zulu language. The podcast was posted on YouTube and went viral. Defendant has been repeating this assertion at various comedy clubs. Plaintiff maintains that Defendant's assertion is false, and that the true translation of "Nants'ingonyama bagithi Baba" is "All hail the king, we all bow in the presence of the king."

On March 16, 2026, Plaintiff filed the instant action, bringing claims for (1) misleading representation in violation of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125; (2) defamation per se; (3) trade libel; and (4) tortious interference with prospective economic advantage against Defendant, for Defendant's "mischaracterization of the true meaning of 'Nants'ingonyama bagithi Baba.'"

Defendant filed an anti-SLAPP motion to strike the state law claims, arguing that the case should be promptly dismissed because it's meritless and because it's based on speech on matters of public interest. (State anti-SLAPP motions can't apply to federal claims, such as the Lanham Act claim.) Plaintiff then dropped the state claims, and refiled a First Amended Complaint (FAC):

The FAC no longer contained allegations regarding Defendant's purported mischaracterization of Plaintiff's work. Rather, the FAC focused on Defendant's enterprise and its relation to Plaintiff, including Defendant's "online storefront marketing an 'It's a Lion' line of apparel and goods derived from Plaintiff's composition." Plaintiff alleged that "Defendant's commercial use of the association between Plaintiff and his signature work is likely to cause, and has caused consumers to be confused as to whether Plaintiff is affiliated with … Defendant's merchandise, performances, and content." Plaintiff brought claims for (1) false association/false endorsement in violation of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125, and (2) false advertising in violation of the Lanham Act.

The court concluded that defendant had prevailed on the anti-SLAPP motion, though no hearing took place:

Here, Defendant's Anti-SLAPP Motion targeted the state law claims in Plaintiff's complaint, arguing that they are barred by the First Amendment. Rather than opposing the Anti-SLAPP Motion, Plaintiff filed a FAC, which dropped all Plaintiff's state law claims and asserted only two federal law claims. Plaintiff's FAC no longer focused on Defendant's "false statements of fact," but instead alleged that Defendant uses "public association with Plaintiff to attract consumers and drive sales."

It thus appears to the Court that Defendant's Anti-SLAPP Motion successfully prompted Plaintiff to drop his state law claims and related allegations. Although Plaintiff could contest the success of the Anti-SLAPP Motion by "show[ing] [he] actually dismissed [the state law claims] because [he] had substantially achieved [his] goals through a settlement or other means, because the defendant was insolvent, or for other reasons unrelated to the probability of success on the merits," he does not provide any such alternative explanations here.

Because of this, defendant was entitled to have plaintiff pay for the reasonable attorney fees incurred in filing the anti-SLAPP motion, which here amounted to $39,560.

Bryan M. Sullivan and Zachary Hansen (Early Sullivan Wright Gizer and McRae LLP) represent defendant.

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Second Amendment Doesn't Protect Machineguns, Doesn't Preclude Registration Requirement for Silencers

2026-09-03T01:28:33Z

From Third Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, joined by Judges Felipe Restrepo and Cindy Chung, in yesterday's U.S. v. Berger:

Gun bans are strong medicine. But occasionally, they are just what the doctor ordered. History teaches that governments may ban weapons when they are commonly used principally for crime. Machine guns fit that mold….

The Second Amendment is not boundless…. The Second Amendment protects weapons commonly used for self-defense and other legal purposes. Conversely, "the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes." This traditional principle "accords with the historical understanding of the scope of the right." To support the common-use principle, Heller relied on "the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of 'dangerous and unusual weapons.'" …

Machine guns are not in common use for lawful purposes. That means they are dangerous and unusual. They are indiscriminate weapons of war and crime, not self-defense ones. And because they can cause unusual amounts of damage, they are used mostly for criminal purposes….

Machine guns are not well-suited for lawful purposes. To be sure, they are excellent weapons of war…. Modern machine guns can fire more than 1,000 rounds in one minute, killing dozens of enemies in seconds.

But the very trait that makes machine guns excellent combat weapons also makes them unsuited to self-defense. Their high rate of fire makes them inaccurate, risking collateral damage. The U.S. Army thus trains soldiers to use them only when "the need for precise fires, although desired, is not as important. Automatic or burst fires drastically decrease the probability of hit due to the rapid succession of recoil impulses and the inability of the Soldier to maintain proper sight alignment and sight picture on the target." …

To recap, at Bruen's second step, the government must prove that machine-gun restrictions fit with our Nation's regulatory tradition. It does not need a "historical twin," but only a "well-established and representative historical analogue." This means that a modern gun regulation must be "'relevantly similar' to [Founding-era gun regulations] in both why and how it burdens the Second Amendment right." So we look to "the principles underlying the Second Amendment" and "our regulatory tradition."

But we do not write on a blank slate. The Supreme Court has already done the work of distilling the key principle from history, noting "the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of 'dangerous and unusual weapons.'" Thus, rather than overruling its precedent in U.S. v. Miller (1939), Heller confirmed it "to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes."

Machine guns are commonly used for crime or war, not for lawful civilian purposes. As noted, criminals loved the Tommygun. But law-abiding citizens hated it. Regulators took note. Between 1925 and 1934, at least twenty-nine states, plus Congress (for the District of Columbia), banned possession of machine guns. (We note these laws not as evidence of a tradition of banning automatic weapons, since "the primary time period for the analogical inquiry is the Founding era," but rather to show the rapid consensus that these new weapons were, and are, dangerous.)

In short, weapons that were particularly dangerous to others and commonly associated only with crime could be outlawed. The machine gun fits into that small category. Plus, the Supreme Court has treated owning machine guns as more suspect than owning semi-automatic weapons….

The court also upheld the requirement that silencers be registered:

In Bruen [as in Heller], the Supreme Court … distinguished infringements from making gun buyers or sellers jump through minimal, generally applicable, objective hoops. "To be clear, nothing in our analysis should be interpreted to suggest the unconstitutionality of … 'shall-issue' licensing regimes," including required "background check[s] or … firearms safety course[s]," which "do not necessarily prevent 'law-abiding, responsible citizens' from exercising their Second Amendment right." Such licensing regimes, which contain only "narrow, objective, and definite standards," are presumptively constitutional, though they may be challenged if "lengthy wait times … or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry." In short, the Court has repeatedly endorsed shall-issue permitting rules.

The best way to understand the Court's presumptive endorsement of these rules is at Bruen's step one, as a reading of the Second Amendment's text…. A regulation "infringe[s]" the Second Amendment right only if it destroys or illegitimately restricts the right. See Daniel D. Slate, Infringed, 3 J. Am. Const. Hist. 381, 396–441 (2025) (canvassing legal and political usage from the Magna Carta through the early nineteenth century). One can infringe a right by "violat[ing]," "break[ing]," "destroy[ing]," "hinder[ing]," "intrud[ing], or invad[ing]" it. 1 Samuel Johnson, Infringe, in A Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed. 1773); Daniel Bellamy, Infringe, in A New, Complete, and Universal English Dictionary (4th ed. 1764)….

Early American case law tracks this distinction between infringements and incidental burdens. For instance, Kentucky's highest court explained that even though citizens retain their natural "right of defence" under the social contract, "society may curtail this right, and no doubt does restrain its exercise in many important particulars." And the Arkansas Supreme Court held that "the right to keep and bear arms" is not infringed by some "legal control or regulation" for "the general interests of the community." True, one state court did at first "void" all laws "which diminish or impair" the right to keep and bear arms, but that "outlier decision" "was universally condemned."

In short, minimal, objective regulations that are part of the process of buying and selling guns do not infringe. They comport with the "normal … rule" allowing "incidental burden[s]" on constitutional rights. Because minimal, objective buying-and-selling regulations are not infringements, they are outside the scope of the Second Amendment.

The silencer-registration requirement imposes only an incidental burden. Registering a silencer under the National Firearms Act is an "objective and definite" process "designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, law-abiding, responsible citizens." Berger made some of the silencers at home and bought others. So he had to submit an application with his personal information, fingerprints, photograph, and description of the silencer. He had to notify the chief law enforcement officer in his area and pay a (then) $200 tax for each silencer. Berger also had to register his silencers and mark them with serial numbers.

These clear, narrow standards ensure that only law-abiding citizens own silencers. The applications "shall be denied if the making or possession of the firearm would place the person making the firearm in violation of law." They do not give the government discretion or erect real barriers to owning silencers. In sum, the Act sets up a "shall-issue" regime just like the ones Bruen blessed….

Heller's presumption of constitutionality can be overcome, but Berger has not overcome it. He offers no evidence that the Act imposes anything other than "narrow, objective, and definite standards" in a "shall-issue licensing regime[ ]." We see no evidence of "lengthy wait times" or subjective "proper-cause standards." Nor has Berger argued that the $200 tax was "exorbitant" or functionally denied him the right to buy and keep silencers. So the silencer-registration requirement is constitutional as applied….

The Second Amendment—like every other constitutional right—has limits. Machine guns are commonly used for crime, not self-defense. So they can be banned. And reasonable registration requirements are not infringements. We will thus affirm Berger's conviction and sentence.

Judge Chung took a different approach to the silencer registration requirement:

Judge Chung does not join Part III, as the government did not argue that the regulation does not "infringe" the Second Amendment, but instead argued that the regulation is consistent with history and tradition at Bruen's step-two inquiry. Before concluding that a de minimis burden on an "arm" does not suffice to satisfy Bruen's step one, Judge Chung would consider the parties' and amici's views, as she perceives some tension between this approach and the Supreme Court's rejection of means-end scrutiny and interest balancing.

Judge Chung joins in the judgment because the requirement that an owner register a silencer, an accessory, does not place "any restrictions on either the keeping (i.e., possession) or the bearing (i.e., carrying) of arms." An instrument falls within the Second Amendment's text and protection only if it "is necessary for … a gun to function as intended."

Note that Judge Bibas has written important opinions reading the Second Amendment broadly, see Frein v. Pennsylvania State Police (3d Cir. 2022), and Ass'n of N.J. Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Att'y Gen. (3d Cir. 2018) (dissenting), and he's joined other such opinions. But indeed the precedent (and American history and tradition more broadly) takes the view that the Second Amendment right is not unlimited, as does Judge Bibas's opinion here.

Robert A. Zauzmer and Anthony J. Carissimi represent the government.

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COVID-19 Origins: Lab Leak or Natural Spillover?

2026-09-01T19:37:03Z

Watch this debate live on YouTube on September 9 at 2 p.m. Eastern time. This debate was organized by Logosive.

How the COVID-19 pandemic began remains one of the most consequential unanswered questions of the 21st century. The answer has direct implications for biosecurity policy, international relations with China, the credibility of scientific institutions, and how the world prepares for the next pandemic. Years after the initial outbreak, the debate between a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a natural animal-to-human spillover is far from settled, and the stakes of getting it wrong are enormous.

Destiny is a political commentator and streamer known for his rigorous evidence-based approach to contested empirical claims. He engages seriously with scientific literature and has challenged both establishment consensus and contrarian narratives when he believed the data warranted it.

Robby Soave is a senior editor at Reason and a prominent voice in heterodox media circles. He has covered the COVID origins story extensively, giving sustained attention to the lab leak hypothesis at a time when much of mainstream journalism dismissed it outright.

Viewers can expect a sharp exchange that takes the underlying science seriously while also examining why the media and government institutions handled this question the way they did. This is a debate about evidence, institutional trust, and what honest inquiry actually looks like.

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Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond

2026-09-04T05:06:29Z

A mom of five was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Her offense: allowing her 5-year-old son to walk about a half-mile by himself in their gated community.

Until very recently, Karyann Parkinson lived in leafy Williamsburg, Virginia. She and her husband, Dallin, moved there from Utah so Parkinson could attend William and Mary Law School.

In June, when Parkinson was preparing for the bar—and also happened to be eight months pregnant with her fifth child—she and her then-youngest, Sam, went for a bike ride, as they often do. They stopped for her son's favorite activity: collecting goose feathers from the path near their community pond. When they got home, he asked if he could walk back and get some more.

Parkinson said yes. It's a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she'd seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning, she says. Off he went while she made lunch.

A passerby saw Sam and alerted security. One of the community's security guards escorted the boy back and gave Parkinson an earful. Pretty soon there were three cop cars, just as many cops, a security vehicle, and two Child Protective Services (CPS) workers at Parkinson's door.

CPS ended up investigating her for abuse and neglect.

The cops, meanwhile, charged her with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. CPS found the allegations substantiated and placed Parkinson on the state's child abuse and neglect registry. She will remain there for seven years.

The ordeal reached its nadir last week when a judge convicted Parkinson of the delinquency of a minor charge, a first-degree misdemeanor. This comes with a six-month jail sentence.

While the judge immediately suspended the sentence, pending good behavior and compliance with CPS' conditions, the conviction remains. Parkinson assumes this means she will not be able to volunteer in her kids' schools. She fears it could also mean she will not get her law license.

So let's look at how the events unfolded.

Parkinson is no newbie to parenting. She graduated Brigham Young University in 2012 with a degree in family science. She then became a family life educator and spent three years as a live-in behavioral specialist at a residential treatment center. There, she and her husband, a marriage and family therapist, oversaw the care of 35 girls.

In Virginia, Parkinson spent one summer interning at the Institute for Justice and another working in the law office of former Virginia state Sen. Jill Vogel (R–Winchester). Vogel was actually co-sponsor of the reasonable childhood independence law that passed in Virginia, unanimously, in 2023.

The bill says that neglect is only when you put your child in serious, obvious danger. So what happened?

When the security guard brought Sam back to Parkinson's house, he told the boy that his mom had done something she wasn't supposed to, and that bad people would want to take him if he was out alone. "This scared the crap out of him," Parkinson says now.

She admits she was upset with the guard and asked him where in the homeowners-association rules it says that a child can't walk by himself. The guard said it was against the law anyway and called the police.

When the first cop arrived, Parkinson told him, "I don't have any interest in talking to you." This did not make things go smoother. The cop called for backup and summoned CPS.

At that point, Parkinson asked her husband, who was having lunch with their daughter, to come home. "I told [the authorities] that kids need to be able to take reasonable risks," he says, "in order to grow up non-anxious." CPS responded, he recounts, that "a 5-year-old child can never be unsupervised."

Parkinson admits now that she is embarrassed by her confrontational demeanor. But of course, that was not the primary issue. The issue was whether her son could handle a walk in this community with 24-hour security, a 25-mph speed limit, and three golf courses.

CPS opened an investigation and found Parkinson guilty of a "Level 2 finding" for lack of supervision. That's what put her on the child abuse and neglect registry. The family immediately appealed.

As for the criminal charges: Parkinson believes the "delinquency of a minor" charge was an attempt to bypass Virginia's reasonable childhood independence law.

David DeLugas, founder and executive director of ParentsUSA, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal help to parents wrongly accused of neglect, scoffed at the charge. "Delinquency?" he asks. "Is the kid going to rob banks at 14 because he collected feathers at age 5?"

At the trial, the security guard, his boss, and the police testified against Parkinson. The CPS worker testified that Sam seemed happy and healthy when she saw him that day. Parkinson's friend testified to Sam's maturity, and that he could be trusted to walk to the pond without going rogue.

The James City County family services specialist assigned to Parkinson's case declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements. The prosecutor in the Commonwealth Attorney's Office for James City County said the same.

Parkinson's attorney, Andrew Gordon, took the case pro bono and argued that the only real "evidence" against the mom was that Sam was 5, and that, hypothetically, a host of horrible things could have happened.

But of course, a host of horrible things can happen at home or in a car or anywhere. We don't arrest moms for driving their kids to the store, even though they could be hit by someone running a stop sign. Hypothetical dangers are not reason enough to condemn a person. And neither is hypothetical immaturity. No one proved that the boy was incapable of walking a few blocks safely by himself. After all, that would have been difficult to do, seeing as he had already done it without issue.

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Study: Even Well-Intentioned Regulators Do More Harm Than Good

2026-09-01T19:21:25Z

It's both common and accurate to point out that many people who go into government are control freaks motivated by the desire to exercise power over others, or else driven by self-interest to profit from control of the reins of government. But a new study points out that even when government officials are sincere and intend to make the world a better place, they often cause more harm than good.

Regulations Designed To Protect the Public Can End Up Restricting Opportunity

The Protection Paradox: Good Intentions, Bad Market Outcomes, published August 20 by Soriya Chhe and Marin Murdock of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), emphasizes that as government goes about the business of providing services and exercising authority, any given American should expect that "the government will respect (and ideally protect) her rights to life, liberty, and property. And if the government falls short of fully protecting those rights, it should at least refrain from undermining them."

That's reasonable to expect. But it's not what government often delivers. As Chhe and Murdock write, in theory, "regulatory bodies exist to reinforce a system in which individuals are free to work, innovate, and build businesses within a fair and stable framework. But in practice, a paradox often emerges. Regulations designed to protect the public can end up restricting opportunity, suppressing innovation, and hindering the very individuals they are meant to serve."

The authors call this the "Protection Paradox: well-intentioned government interventions create structural barriers that entrench incumbents and hurt the public by squeezing out smaller competitors."

For those of us who spend a lot of time scrutinizing government rules and the people who make and administer them, good intentions can become increasingly difficult to assume. Politicians and bureaucrats more often seem motivated by personal interest, whether that's lust for power, career advancement, or accumulating wealth by leveraging their positions in government. Behavior seems best explained by the Public Choice school of economics, which assumes that political participants are as driven by self-interest as anybody else.

But many people want to give so-called public servants the benefit of the doubt and assume that government actions are intended to benefit the country. Chhe and Murdock underline the fact that good intentions aren't enough, and that even sincere regulatory efforts can do enormous harm. They note that "regulatory frameworks can unintentionally operate as barriers to competition rather than guardians of public health and safety" and even serve to "coerce outcomes and suppress dissent."

Red Tape Limits Competition and Muzzles Dissent

The authors highlight Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rules that are supposed to govern innovations in mobile elevating work platforms (MEWPs), which include scissor lifts, boom lifts, and similar equipment. In the name of safety, OSHA so heavily regulates proposed modifications, requiring that they be certified through designated pathways, that many small companies are effectively excluded from the market. "Certification costs often reach thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per model," they write. "For an invention intended to be used across different lift models, these costs multiply quickly." That hurts the excluded firms, and it kills innovations that could improve safety.

Chhe and Murdock also call out the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the lack of due process in investigations: "Unlike criminal proceedings, there is no right to appointed counsel in SEC enforcement actions. Defendants must either retain private legal representation (often at significant cost) or attempt to navigate a highly technical regulatory system on their own." When individuals and businesses come under attack from SEC regulators, defense "costs accrue rapidly, often at the precise moment when the defendant's assets or business operations may already be under stress from the investigation itself."

Defendants often settle with the SEC just to escape the burden of battling a federal bureaucracy with essentially unlimited resources. But until this year, the SEC "required settling defendants to agree not to publicly deny the allegations against them or suggest that the SEC's claims lack a factual basis." That rule was rescinded in May—in part because of free-speech concerns—but could be reinstated at any time.

The High Cost of Red Tape

Chhe and Murdock don't try to quantify what these regulatory barriers and intrusions mean for Americans beyond those directly strangled by red tape, but the costs can be high. In 2024, addressing the rising housing costs and constrained supply of recent years, Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, observed: "Before the rise of stricter regulation in the 1970s, the textbook model worked well: When demand pushed prices above the cost of production, more construction drove prices back down." But as government rules grew more intrusive, it has grown more difficult for supply to meet demand. "Strictly regulated urban areas like New York City and the Bay Area have high prices and low construction, while more lightly regulated areas like Houston and Dallas have much lower prices and much more construction," he added.

How much do those regulations cost us when we go looking for a place to live? "Regulations at all levels of government are hindering the production of housing," according to the National Association of Home Builders. "Regulations account for nearly 25% of the cost of a single-family home" and "more than 40% of the cost of a typical apartment development."

That's quite the Protection Paradox. Even if we assume the sincerity of the regulatory sales pitch, rules touted as making homes safer instead choke the market, delivering fewer homes at higher prices.

Free Markets Are Better Than Even Well-Intentioned Bureaucrats

As the CEI authors note, even well-intentioned rules can "generate tensions involving constitutional rights, institutional accountability, and the concentration of governmental authority." They emphasize that this is typical of government intervention in markets. Regulation "centralizes accountability into formal processes that require navigation, compliance infrastructure, and legal expertise." That limits competition and favors established businesses because "large incumbents are better positioned to shoulder these costs, while small innovators are unlikely to have comparable resources."

The Protection Paradox, they add, "does not require corruption or explicit capture and is oftentimes driven by a noble purpose." But the result continues to be reduced competition, higher prices, lost innovation, and suppressed liberty.

The solution is to allow free people to work things out among themselves. The free market, write Chhe and Murdock, is "grounded in competition, transparency, and the dispersed judgment of countless individuals rather than the centralized judgment of a regulatory body." Even good intentions among government bureaucrats with coercive power are no substitute for cooperation and competition.

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