Seth Ferranti was driving his Ford pickup on a southeastern Nebraska stretch of the interstate in November 2024 when law enforcement pulled him over, claiming that he had wobbled onto the hard shoulder.

As the Seward County sheriff’s deputies questioned Ferranti, a filmmaker who had spent 21 years in prison for distributing LSD, they allegedly smelled cannabis. Declaring this probable cause for a search, they searched the vehicle and discovered more than 400 pounds of marijuana.

But were those the actual reasons for the stop and search? When Ferranti went on trial, his attorneys presented a license plate reader report produced by the security communications company Motorola Solutions. It revealed Ferranti had been consistently monitored prior to his arrest, including by the local sheriff on the day he was apprehended. (Neither the sheriff’s office nor Motorola responded to Reason‘s requests for comment.)

Ferranti’s legal team argued that it was unconstitutional to surveil somebody based on his previous crimes. The argument did not carry the day: Last month their client was sentenced to up to two and a half years for possession of cannabis with intent to distribute. But the case still raises substantial moral and constitutional questions about both the scale of these public-private surveillance partnerships and the ways they’re being used.

Ferranti had long been a celebrity in the drug-reform world, going back to that LSD arrest in the early ’90s. After that first bust, he jumped bail, went on the lam, landed on the U.S. Marshals’ 15 Most Wanted Fugitives list, and even staged his own drowning to evade the authorities. After he started serving his sentence in 1993, he became a prolific prison journalist, writing the “I’m Busted” column for Vice. The New Jersey native always insisted that his crimes were nonviolent and that the drugs he sold, LSD and cannabis, had medicinal or therapeutic benefits.

After Ferranti came out of prison, his 2017 documentary White Boy—the true story of a teenage FBI informant who became a major cocaine trafficker—was a success on Netflix. He produced a number of further films, including 2023’s Secret History of the LSD Trade. And apparently, the government kept watching him.

It’s been watching a lot of people—and Motorola isn’t the only company helping it. Flock Safety was founded in 2017, and within five years it had tens of thousands of cameras operational. As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has warned, Flock’s AI-assisted automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system has been undergoing an “insidious expansion” beyond its supposed purposes of identifying vehicles of interest, such as stolen cars and hit-and-run suspects. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used it to locate illegal migrants, and law enforcement in Texas used it to investigate a self-administered abortion, foreshadowing its potential use as a predictive policing tool for all Americans. Lee Schmidt, a veteran in Virginia, recently learned that the system logged him more than 500 times in four months. 

“I don’t know whether law enforcement officers are using [ALPRs] to do predictive policing,” says Joshua Windham of the Institute of Justice, a public interest law firm that is campaigning to stop the warrantless use of license plate reader cameras. “We know that [Customs and Border Patrol] is using ALPRs generally to stop cars with what they deem ‘suspicious’ travel patterns.”

After reviewing the document cataloguing the Ferranti’s vehicle monitoring, Windham adds: “The records are consistent with an officer either looking up a car in his system to see where else that car was captured by ALPRs, or that car showing up as a ‘hot list’ alert in the Motorola system. But it’s hard to tell, from the records alone, whether the stop was a ‘predictive policing’ stop.”

Ferranti is convinced it was. “There were no warrants, investigations, informants, state police, DEA, or FBI involvement, just Seward County Sheriff’s office [and an] AI-assisted license plate tracking service to perpetuate their outdated War on Drugs mission,” he said in an Instagram post published by his family following his sentencing. “Traveling the highways as a person with a record is now considered [suspicious] activity by the AI.”

What is clear is that Seward County sheriff’s department has a history of pulling people over and forcing them into “civil forfeitures,” seizing money from drivers on the interstate where Ferranti was arrested—racking up $7.5 million from 2018 to 2023 according to one local report.

Meanwhile, medical cannabis has been legal in Nebraska since November 2024, the month Ferranti was arrested. “Why can all these legal corporations transport money and marijuana wherever the fuck they want, but individual citizens can’t?” Ferranti asked Vice shortly after his 2024 bust.

Sarah Hamid of the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls ALPRs “a massive, warrantless digital dragnet that track everyone everywhere they go, regardless of whether they’re suspected of any crime. They can be used to target drivers who visit sensitive places such as health centers, immigration clinics, gun shops, union halls, protests, or centers of religious worship, painting an intimate portrait of a driver’s life.”

However, it is not the first time state or federal courts at both trial and appellate levels have concluded that using fixed-location ALPRs without a warrant does not violate the Fourth Amendment, with the latest such decision coming late last month in Virginia.

A Flock spokesperson says: “We do not engage in predictive policing. LPRs send alerts on vehicles known to be associated with crimes and missing persons reports, and are used for investigations when a crime has been reported. All searches conducted in the system require an ‘Offense Type’ and are fully logged in audit reports.”

The surveillance network, Nathan Wessler of the ACLU says, is “a tremendously dangerous system. It is potentially a tool for politically motivated investigations, for harassment, or delving into people’s privacy of life with no good reason. That’s not a tool that should be in police hands.”

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Can a building be a sex trafficker? Some lawyers seem to be hoping so. Apartment buildings, nightclubs, and hotels have been coming under fire for facilitating interactions that some say should have been tip-offs to sex trafficking or sexual violence taking place.

Victims in these lawsuits describe some heinous actions by their alleged abusers. I’m not trying to minimize any such harm or suggest actual perpetrators of violence shouldn’t be punished. But in the push to hold more entities legally accountable for alleged sex crimes against women, these suits are setting up a system in which women are increasingly watched and their sex lives increasingly subject to questioning.

The end result here isn’t likely to be a world in which women are safer but one in which they’re more surveilled.

Suit Blames Luxury Apartments for Sex Trafficking

One recent example of this comes from California, where a woman is suing two high-end apartment buildings for failing to stop prostitution that allegedly took place in their units.

In a federal lawsuit, a woman going by A.V. alleges that she was coerced into prostitution in San Francisco by a man identified in her complaint as Tom Roe. He “and his associates trafficked Plaintiff, starting as a minor, in October 2018 through 2019,” the complaint states. When A.V. “failed to make enough money or disobeyed Tom Roe, he would withhold drugs from [her]” and “threaten [her] with violence.”

Roe rented an expensive apartment at the Avalon at Mission Bay apartment building and, later, at the South Beach Marina Apartments, according to the complaint. And these apartment companies “were instrumental, if not necessary, participants in a sex-trafficking venture” led by Roe, A.V. alleges, in a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in January.

It asks the court to find the apartment companies guilty of sex trafficking and negligence.

There’s one concrete allegation of collusion with Roe in the complaint: that “Roe would…pay the front doormen and security personnel to keep his trafficking venture running.”

If true, that’s perhaps grounds for charges or civil claims against these staffers, depending on what they knew. But it does not follow that building management had any idea what was going on. If staff were taking bribes to overlook illegal activity, it’s unlikely that they shared this fact with their bosses.

The rest of the allegations suffer from a similar defect—creating a conspiracy out of the actions of lower-level staffers—while offering damning interpretations of activity that’s highly open to interpretation.

For instance, A.V. alleges that “occasionally, the maintenance staff … would witness the commercial sex acts or exchange of payments while working inside the unit.” But someone in a unit to fix a dishwasher isn’t generally expected report back to management about tenants’ sex lives. And occasionally seeing evidence of sexual activity, or even of men giving money to women, wouldn’t necessarily suggest sex trafficking with any certainty. Even if maintenance staff saw this, they may not have seen it as anything worth reporting.

A.V. ‘s complaint also states that “men would walk into the apartment building without being stopped by the doormen or security, despite these men not living in the apartment building,” and “Roe would later come by every couple of days to collect the cash payments….Therefore, the Apartment Defendants had knowledge of sex trafficking at their respective locations.”

But there’s no reason why Roe visiting would be suspicious—he seems to be the one who rented the apartments (though this part isn’t entirely clear)—and there’s no way for building staff to know he was there to collect sex fees. As for staff not scrutinizing visitors intensely, perhaps that’s simply building policy. I’ve been to many buildings with doormen and security where all you have to do is say whom you’re visiting.

And male customers would, by A.V.’s own account, often use a side door. The complaint says these side-door visitors would have been visible through the security camera, and therefore, staff should have known something. But if they were let in by a resident, why would security staff have any reason to be suspicious? And even if they were, what were they supposed to do—confront residents of this $5,000- to $10,000-a-month building about how they were having over too many friends?

Wishing a World of Constant Surveillance 

Other reasons A.V. says the apartment should have been suspicious: She was very thin, “she was dressed provocatively,” and she was on drugs. She was only 17-years-old for a few months of her time there. And the maintenance team may have seen “drug and sex paraphernalia, condoms, and lube throughout the apartment” that she shared with two other women.

But think about all this from the point of view of the apartment staff. Are they supposed to intervene whenever they see a resident appear intoxicated, or perhaps just acting unusual? Are they supposed to intervene whenever they see a woman dressed provocatively? Are they supposed to somehow know if someone is 17 and three-quarters vs. 18 or 20? Should they check the IDs of any female who looks young? And then what? There’s no law against teen girls visiting apartment buildings on their own.

We should not expect maintenance staff to report people for having too much lube. We should not want apartment buildings to keep close tabs on their residents’ relationships, visitors, and clothing choices. We should not look to front desk employees to decide when too many men have visited a woman’s apartment.

A world in which all of that happens is not a world without sexual exploitation or violence, but it is a world in which all sorts of people get harassed and questioned over benign activity.

It’s a world that will wind up especially harming sex workers, immigrants, people with mental health issues, transgender or gender nonconforming people, and members of other marginalized groups. But it’s also a world that will lead to increased surveillance and badgering of all sorts of people, including all sorts of women. (Remember when Marriott said it was monitoring single women in its hotels? I do.)

Nightclub Targeted Too

A.V.’s case is the first I’ve seen targeting an apartment complex over sex trafficking allegations. And I recently came across another novel (to me, at least) lawsuit, this one targeting a nightclub along with Marriott International and a Miami Beach hotel it operates.

That nightclub case involves Oren and Alon Alexander, who—along with their brother Tal—are currently on trial in New York, facing federal charges that include sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking.

In a separate, civil case—filed in federal court in Florida in late January—Tiffany Marina Rodriguez accuses Oren and Alon of sexual assault and sex trafficking and the businesses of participating in this alleged sex trafficking venture.

The details of this alleged attack are horrible, and, if true, the brothers should be held accountable. So should any club promoters if they knowingly facilitated attacks. But the idea that the hotel and/or the nightclub are to blame here seems to be on very shaky ground.

Rodriguez accuses the businesses of helping “cultivate the Alexander Brothers’ image of lavishness, wealth, and exclusivity, hosting events that facilitated access to victims, [and] supplying women with alcohol and/or drugs.” But there’s no evidence provided that the businesses provided any drugs. And the rest is just standard hospitality business stuff. What were they supposed to do—not serve women alcohol? Have subpar events?

The suit suggests club staff should have kept women away from the Alexander brothers, since several women had allegedly alerted a nightclub manager in the past that the brothers had assaulted them. But can you imagine if nightclub staff had started flinging around allegations of rape based on unproven allegations? That would be asking for a defamation lawsuit.

As for the hotel or its parent company, it’s unclear what they could have done outside of demanding that women be denied alcohol in their buildings or that women be closely scrutinized if they leave the club with men.

Casting Suspicion on Single Women

There have been myriad sex trafficking suits filed against hotels in recent years. And when you follow suits like these to their logical conclusions, things always start to get confusing.

In the hotel cases, people who say they were coerced into prostitution or that they suffered violence at the hands of their pimps blame the hotels where this allegedly took place. The particulars vary, but the gist is generally the same: Hotel staff should have seen women who were skimpily dressed, had many male visitors, had a lot of condoms in their rooms, etc., and somehow intervened—called the police, stopped renting rooms to those involved, and so on.

That might sound reasonable at first blush, but imagine if hotels were expected to call the cops, or refuse service, every time a woman dressed provocatively or seemed to be having a lot of sex. Not only would this screw over women choosing to do sex work—leading to arrests, or forcing them to work in less public and more risky places—but potentially any woman who doesn’t dress modestly, or entertains a lover, or doesn’t speak English, or has condoms in her room’s trash can.

It would likely result in increased surveillance, harassment, and discrimination for a lot of women, and for what? Sexual abusers and “traffickers” can simply move to more underground or more private locales.

In many sex trafficking cases, what prevents victims from getting help isn’t literally being trapped and unable to access the outside world. They could theoretically go to the police, or tell someone else to contact the police. But they don’t for myriad reasons—the threat of harm when the perpetrator is released, the threat of other sorts of retaliation (like harm to their families or reputational harm), drug dependence, fear they will wind up arrested on prostitution or drug charges, complex feelings about their abuser, etc.

We need more and better services for people looking to leave the sex trade or looking to leave abusive partners, not a surveillance network of hotel maids and apartment-building doormen ready to call the cops on women in short skirts.

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In the News

Colorado and Washington are considering very different approaches to prostitution. A Colorado measure introduced this month (Senate Bill 26-097) would repeal state laws against prostitution, soliciting for prostitution, keeping a place of prostitution, and patronizing a prostitute, along with some forms of pandering. It would also strike language banning sex acts from statutes related to escort services and massage businesses.

“Although the sixteen-page bill is a little light on regulatory details right now, there would also be restrictions on locations where sex work solicitation could occur,” reports Westword. “If lawmakers approve SB 097, people charged or convicted of prostitution before its implementation in July 2026 could apply to have their records sealed.”

Meanwhile, Washington is considering ramping up prostitution penalties. Washington state legislation that “would have made it a Class C felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000, to pay another person for sex” was changed before it passed out of a House committee, PubliCola reports. “First, it raises the crime of patronizing a sex worker to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, rather than a felony; the third time, it becomes a felony, as in the original version.” A proposal to simultaneously decriminalize selling sex—a.k.a. the Nordic Model of prostitution regulation—was also rejected.

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On Substack

“According to many politicians and pundits, the human race is doing reproduction wrong,” notes Anders Ingemarson of the Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right newsletter. “The proposed solutions vary—tax credits, subsidies, penalties (for example, the disastrous and immoral Chinese one child policy)—but the premise never changes: your reproductive choices are now a matter of public concern.” Ingemarson rejects this premise:

Under capitalism—properly defined as the social system that protects individual rights—birthrates are not a problem to solve, a target to hit, or a lever for policymakers to pull. They are irrelevant. The idea that a country can have the “wrong” number of children is not an economic insight—it’s a notion put forth by collectivists that put the nation, “society,” “the common good,” or some other grouping above the individual.

Having a child is not a civic duty or a patriotic act. It is a personal decision with lifelong consequences for the people directly involved. If you want kids and are willing to take on the responsibility, great. If you don’t, also great. No one else gets a vote.

The moment someone asks “But what does society need?”, the conversation has already gone off the rails. Societies do not reproduce. Individuals do. “The economy” does not have children. People do. Framing reproduction as a national concern treats human beings as cogs in a societal wheel—future workers, taxpayers, or caregivers—rather than as individuals with lives of their own. That framing is not neutral. It implicitly assumes that people exist to serve collectivist goals.

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Read This Thread 

The Discord age verification discourse focuses on adults losing access to communities they have a right to access. That's important. I'm also worried, though, about the kids. They seem to be an afterthought in these conversations. They have much to lose too. ???? https://ift.tt/iGTNZJP…

— Jess Miers ???????? (@jmiers230.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T15:38:41.814Z

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More Sex & Tech 

• The Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) has launched a sex worker gun club in Minneapolis. “In the middle of the ICE surge in Minneapolis, we kept coming back to one question through our work at SWOP: what does real community safety look like for sex workers?” SWOP Minneapolis posted on Instagram. “Instead of waiting to be included in conversations about protection, we built something ourselves.”

• Workers at Sheri’s Ranch brothel in Nevada “submitted a petition to unionize with the National Labor Relations Board last week under the name United Brothel Workers, represented by the Communications Workers of America,” the Associated Press reports.

• Can “a 200-year-old insight from a French economist” change the way we think about AI disruption?

• “If the strong claims that are sometimes made about the harms of social media are true, it is remarkable how difficult it is to find consistent evidence to support them,” Sam Bowman, editor of Works in Progress magazine, writes in a Washington Post piece about efforts to ban teenagers from social media. More:

Advocates of bans compare social media to alcohol or tobacco, where the harms are indisputable and the benefits are minimal. But the internet, including social media, is more analogous to books, magazines or television. I may not want my sons watching “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or reading “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but it would be crazy to ban books and films for kids altogether.

• In King County, Washington, sex worker rights activists have been speaking out against the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office’s “dehumanizing language and comments about women who engage in the sex trade” and presentation to Seattle City Council members “that featured unredacted, identifiable images of brutalized, bloodied, and tortured women.”

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Today, the NYU Democracy Project published my article “Strengthen Democracy by Empowering People to Vote with their Feet.” It is part of their “100 Ideas in 100 Days” series presenting a wide range of viewpoints on how to address challenges facing American democracy. Here are some excerpts:

A specter is haunting American democracy: widespread voter ignorance. The specter is not a new one, by any means. But it is exacerbated by growing political polarization, which has accentuated the tendency of many voters to be highly biased in evaluating the information they do know. The problem of political ignorance is closely linked to another shortcoming of the ballot box: the near-powerlessness of the individual voter, who has only an infinitesimally small chance of affecting policy. There is no easy solution to these interlinked challenges. But they can be mitigated by empowering people to make more decisions by “voting with their feet,” instead of at the ballot box.

Decades of survey data…. show that most voters often don’t know even basic facts about government and public policy, such as the names of the three branches of government (most polls find less than half of adults can name all three), which officials are responsible for which issues, or the biggest expenditure items in the federal budget. Many studies also show that most voters often do a poor job of evaluating the political information they do learn…. This terrible state of affairs is not the result of stupidity or lack of information, but of generally rational behavior on the part of most voters: a combination of “rational ignorance” (lack of incentive to seek out political information) and “rational irrationality” (lack of incentive to engage in unbiased evaluation)….

While ignorance and bias have been a particularly severe problem on the right in recent years, they are not limited to any one side of the political spectrum. There is plenty of ignorance and bias among left-wing voters, as well…

There is no simple solution to the twin problems of political ignorance and the powerlessness of individual voters. But one that has great potential is empowering people to “vote with their feet.” People can vote with their feet between jurisdictions in a federal system, choosing which government policies they wish to live under. They can also do so through international migration….. Foot voting can also occur in the private sector, when people use it to provide services traditionally associated with state and local governments. When people vote with their feet, they make individually decisive choices, not ones that have almost no chance of making a difference. For that very reason, foot voters generally seek out more information and do a better job of evaluating it than ballot box voters. If you are like most people, you probably spent more time seeking out evidence the last time you decided what television set to buy than the last time you decided who to vote for in any election. That’s because the decision about the TV set is one that has a high chance of being decisive, while that at the ballot box has almost no chance…..

There is much that can be done to enhance foot voting opportunities. Decentralizing more functions of government to the state and local level would create more space for policy diversity on a variety of issues and open up more opportunities for foot voting. In recent years, mobility has decreased due to widespread exclusionary zoning, which has made it difficult or impossible to build new housing in response to demand in many places where Americans would like to move – especially the poor and disadvantaged. We can break down that barrier by ending exclusionary zoning, or at least curtailing it through a combination of litigation and political action.

We can also enhance foot voting by leaving more issues to the private sector. Foot voting between private sector organizations – such as private planned communities – can enhance choice and lower moving costs, even as compared to foot voting between jurisdictions in a federal system. Limiting the scope of government can also mitigate political ignorance by reducing the range of issues rationally ignorant voters have to pay attention to, thereby ensuring that their limited knowledge is not so overstressed.

Finally, we can expand foot voting and political freedom by breaking down barriers to international migration, thereby enabling millions more people to escape poverty and oppression…..

I develop many of these ideas in greater detail in my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

The other essays in the 100 ideas series can be found at the Democracy Project website. Contributors include a wide range of experts in various disciplines, and a with a wide range of viewpoints.

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New York City is already one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, but residents should brace themselves to pay even more for housing if the city’s budget deficit persists.

On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that the city was facing a budget deficit of $5.4 billion over the next two years. If the state or city does not raise income taxes to balance the budget, as is required by the city’s charter, Mamdani says he will raise property taxes on over 3 million residential units and 100,000 commercial buildings by 9.5 percent. 

The city’s impending fiscal crisis became impossible to ignore when New York City Comptroller Brad Lander released the city’s annual financial report in December. In the report, Lander predicted budget gaps of $2.18 billion and $10.41 billion for FY 2026 and FY 2027, respectively. A month later, Mamdani blamed former Mayor Eric Adams’ “staggering fiscal mismanagement [for leaving] a $12 billion hole in NYC budget for the next two fiscal years.”

Lander, Adams’ comptroller, noted “a recurring pattern of decisions that defer difficult budget choices rather than address them” and identified “the expiration of Federal pandemic aid and the surge in asylum seekers seeking shelter from the City,” the latter of which cost the city over $8 billion from 2023 to 2025 and is projected to cost another $3.6 billion through 2029, according to the New York State Comptroller’s asylum seeker spending report.

New York City’s total expenditures increased from $106 billion in FY 2022 to over $117.5 billion in FY 2025 under Adams. While the budget will increase by $4.5 billion in FY 2026 and $9.5 billion in FY 2027 compared to 2025 levels, 96 percent of this $14 billion in new spending is to cover underfunded programs implemented by Adams, not Mamdani. 

Mamdani reduced the two-year, $12 billion deficit to $7 billion “by deploying in-year reserves, committing to an agency savings plan and incorporating higher-than-expected revenues,” according to a Monday press release. (Mamdani’s savings plan requires the Chief Savings Officers, which he instituted at every city agency in late January, to identify savings through “program consolidation and insourcing, and by eliminating/sunsetting programs” by March 20.)  

To further reduce the deficit, Mamdani wants more state tax revenue to go to the city.

At a late January press conference, Mamdani lamented how “New Yorkers contribute 54.5 percent of state revenue and receive only 40.5 percent back.” The irony here, City Journal’s Adam Lehodey notes, is that Mamdani is essentially objecting to progressive taxation—giving out less in benefits to those who contribute more in revenue—between the city and state, while advocating for such taxation within the city. 

Luckily for New Yorkers, Mamdani’s inconsistency did not compromise his appeal to Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul. 

On Monday, one day before the city’s budget deadline, the governor agreed to allocate $1.5 billion from state coffers to help address the city’s funding. Still, a roughly $5.4 billion deficit remains. To eliminate this remainder, Mamdani called on Albany to raise income tax rates on the 33,000 New Yorkers making over $1 million a year and to raise “corporate taxes on the most profitable corporations.”

New York State already taxes corporate income at a base rate of 6.5 percent, which rises to 7.25 percent on income over $5 million. Meanwhile, New York’s top marginal individual income tax rate—10.9 percent on earnings over $25 million—is the third highest in the nation. 

Compounding this tax burden, New York City has its own corporate income tax of up to 9 percent for businesses that make over $1.1 million in revenue. The city also taxes individual incomes at a rate of around 3.1 percent, which increases to about 3.9 percent on income over $50,000 for single filers. 

If revenues can’t be raised by increasing these rates, Mamdani will take nearly $1 billion out of the city’s Rainy Day Fund, over $200 million from the Retiree Health Benefits Trust, and jack up property taxes as “a last resort.” These taxes already stand at around 20 percent for family homes, 12 percent for apartment buildings, and 11 percent for commercial properties. 

Before realizing his multibillion-dollar promises of new spending, Mamdani is going to have to address the profligacy of his predecessor, most likely through “a tax on working- and middle-class New Yorkers.” So much for “the warmth of collectivism.”

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Do you remember Judge Robert Pratt from the Southern District of Ohio? Probably not. In December 2020, he made headlines by giving an interview with the Associated Press about President Trump’s pardons:

“It’s not surprising that a criminal like Trump pardons other criminals,” senior U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt of the Southern District of Iowa told The Associated Press in a brief phone interview Monday. In a bit of humor, he said: “But apparently to get a pardon, one has to be either a Republican, a convicted child murderer or a turkey.”

As I noted at the time, Pratt also made a gratuitous comment about the Emoluments Clauses–an issue that was then-pending before the Supreme Court:

He noted that the framers of the U.S. constitution sought to stop U.S. officials from “enriching themselves” while in office by banning gifts and payments from foreign powers. Ongoing lawsuits have accused Trump of illegally profiting off the presidency through his luxury Washington hotel. A White House spokesman declined comment on Pratt’s remarks.

I observed:

What is wrong with federal judges? Trump derangement syndrome has permeated Article III. Judge Pratt should follow the lead of Judge Adelman, and apologize before he is sanctioned.

I suppose the one plus side of this incident is that only one judge–so far–was willing to talk to the press. I hope there are not more. Judges should never, ever, talk to reporters.

Well, he would not apologize on his own. Chief Judge Lavenski Smith found there was “cognizable misconduct.” Pratt accepted that finding, and apologized for his “inappropriate partisan statements.”

I largely forgot about Judge Pratt, until I noticed this story about his obituary.

An obituary for Pratt, who was born May 3, 1947, described him as a man who “championed the underdog and the uncelebrated” throughout his career in public service.

Obituaries are usually written by family and friends who might not be tuned into the nuances of judicial ethics. Then again, Judge Pratt demonstrated through his own comments such a lack of discretion.

Should we celebrate judges for championing underdogs and uncelebrated? Is that their job? I am not a fan of the phrase “equal justice under law,” but it at least gets the point across that lady justice wears a blindfold. Everyone should get a fair shake before the court. Still, much of the caselaw from the Warren Court requires putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the “underdog.” The entire point of the Footnote 4 dictum from Carolene Products is that courts can reinforce the representation of groups that lack access to the political channels. Yet another reason to get rid of Footnote 4 altogether. I hope the Court does not reaffirm it any further in Hecox, the transgender cases.

I recently re-watched Justice Thurgood Marshall’s farewell press conference after he announced his retirement. I included this excerpt in my Civitas column on the SCOTUS NDA:

 In 1991, Justice Thurgood Marshall held an infamous press conference after he announced his retirement. At the time, the conservative Judge Clarence Thomas was viewed as a potential replacement for the liberal Marshall. A reporter asked Marshall if President George H.W. Bush had an obligation to name a minority justice. Marshall replied that “I don’t think that should be used as an excuse” for “picking the wrong negro.”

Well, that part was a bit cringey. But other parts were light-hearted, and even refrehsing. Another reporter asked if Marshall worried that his replacement would undermine the Justice’s civil rights legacy. Marshall’s answer (I am paraphrasing) was that when he became a federal judge, he was no longer an advocate, and no longer represented any clients or cause. He simply decided the cases. Therefore, Marshall said, it wasn’t his concern what would happen to his legacy. I was touched by Marshall’s comments, which I thought were exactly right. Justice Ginsburg took a very different approach with her final words. She said, “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

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This week, guest host Zach Weissmueller is joined by Fardad Farahzad, a prominent Iranian journalist and the primetime anchor of 24 with Fardad Farahzad, a nightly news program on Iran International, a Persian-language channel based in London that broadcasts into Iran via satellite. Farahzad discusses what it’s like working for a media outlet that the Islamic Republic has labeled a terrorist organization, and the personal risks that come with reporting on Iran from exile.

Farahzad and Weissmueller talk about how Iranians access uncensored news despite the regime’s efforts to block satellite television, jam signals, and restrict the internet. They also discuss the state of Iran’s protest movement, how the regime has responded to dissent, and why Farahzad believes the Islamic Republic is facing deeper internal challenges than in past cycles of unrest.

The conversation explores the prospects for regime change, the declining appeal of Islamist ideology among younger Iranians, and the growing prominence of Reza Pahlavi as a unifying opposition figure. Farahzad also weighs in on U.S. policy toward Iran, including President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about military pressure, and whether the legacy of the Iraq War should caution against American intervention in Iran.

 

0:00—Intro

1:07—How Iranians watch censored newscasts

9:49—Government accusations against Iran International

14:39—Covering Iran from exile

16:51—Failings in U.S. media coverage of Iran

20:05—Protester casualties in Iran

27:53—Reza Pahlavi

34:09—Trump’s threats of military action

41:12—Was it a mistake to abandon the Iran nuclear deal?

43:49—Difference in U.S. reaction to Gaza vs. Iran

50:33—Islam as a political force in Iran

53:09—What options does the Islamic Republic have left?

• Producer: Paul Alexander
• Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

The post Can Iran's Protest Movement Topple the Regime? appeared first on Reason.com.

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This week, Stephen Colbert—host of CBS’ The Late Show—interviewed Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a candidate in the state’s Democratic Senate primary on March 3.

But it didn’t air. As Colbert explained, CBS declined to broadcast the interview as a result of recent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) guidelines relating to the equal-time rule. If anything, the incident just provided further proof that the rule should be abolished.

“[Talarico] was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert told his audience, who booed in reply.

According to Colbert, the network cited the equal opportunities requirement, better known as the equal-time rule. Stemming from the era when the limited broadcast spectrum was the only way to transmit radio or television, the equal-time rule says if a “legally qualified” candidate for public office appears on broadcast TV in the weeks before their election, the network must “afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office.”

In a statement posted to X by CNN’s Brian Stelter, CBS said it did not keep Colbert from airing the Talarico interview, but it “provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule…and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled.“

Talarico is one of three candidates running in the state’s Democratic Senate primary, plus eight Republican candidates; under the equal-time rule, if CBS aired Colbert’s interview with Talarico, it could be required to offer equivalent airtime to each of the other 10 candidates. CBS would only be required to make the offer, though any candidates that accepted would then mean the network must coordinate long-form interviews to air in the two weeks before the primary. (In its statement, CBS noted only that airing Talarico’s interview could include equal-time considerations for his two fellow Democratic candidates, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett and businessman Ahmad Hassan.)

The equal-time rule allows exceptions for “bona fide” news coverage, and for decades, this was understood to include interviews. Richard Nixon appeared on The Jack Paar Show in 1960 and on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In in 1968, each time just weeks before an election in which he was competing. During the 1992 presidential primaries, Bill Clinton endeared himself to younger voters by playing the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show.

But in a January directive, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr sought to upend that interpretation.

Carr advised that going forward, “a program that is motivated by partisan purposes” would not qualify as “bona fide” news coverage exempt from the equal-time rule.

What qualifies as “partisan” motivation, as opposed to just catering to your overwhelmingly liberal audience? That’s apparently in the eye of the beholder. As a result, networks are less likely to book liberal guests and risk running afoul of an FCC chair who apparently relishes his reputation as President Donald Trump’s “media pit bull.”

But even in the face of the equal-time rule, Colbert still did the interview. The full 14-minute video is available on the show’s YouTube page, as well as on Paramount+, the streaming service of CBS’ parent company. YouTube and streamers are both beyond the reach of the FCC’s equal-time rule.

So, for that matter, is cable news: After he leaves CBS in May, Colbert could host a show on the left-of-center cable news channel MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), on which he only interviews Democrats, and the FCC would have no purview to complain.

That, ultimately, is the takeaway from this bit of jawboning—not that Carr is protecting the public’s precious airwaves, but that there is little reason for them to be protected in the first place.

Last week, Colbert’s broadcast averaged 2.45 million viewers; his interview with Talarico eclipsed that total within 24 hours of hitting YouTube. That’s not to mention the number of people who watch it on streaming, or on social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok.

The equal-time rule originated in the era when radio was the only form of broadcast; it later expanded to include television, but for decades, that only included the major broadcast networks. Now, most Americans get their information online, either eschewing broadcast TV altogether or just catching it on streaming services or YouTube.

The equal-time rule even makes little sense in practice. On Wednesday, Colbert is set to interview Sen. Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.), a declared candidate in the 2026 midterm elections. But since Georgia’s candidate qualification period does not begin until March 2, and the primary itself is not until May 19, Ossoff is not yet a “legally qualified” candidate as defined under federal law, putting him outside the equal-time rule’s qualifications.

Clearly, for whatever merit the equal-time rule had when Congress first drafted it nearly a century ago, it has only become more unnecessary and onerous with time. Even when applied with some level of logic and fairness, it still constitutes a top-down federal mandate that a broadcast network air certain content, at a time when it has never been easier for consumers to find any content they want.

“Brendan Carr’s FCC is continuing its streak of naked partisanship by wielding the agency’s power in new and laughable ways,” Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in a statement. “Candidate interviews have long been exempt from ‘equal time’ rules for good reason. It would be wrong if a Democratic administration demanded conservative talk radio hosts give equal airtime when they interview candidates, and it’s wrong for the Trump administration to demand the same of late night talk show hosts.” In fact, as Colbert noted during his broadcast, Carr said last month that he would not be targeting conservative talk radio with his new directive.

“By putting pressure on late night talk shows critical of the Trump administration while openly admitting that conservative talk radio is immune from the FCC’s ire,” Corn-Revere added, “[Carr is] making himself the poster boy for big government putting its thumb on the scale of political debate.”

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