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When high school sophomore Miguel Lozano started selling elotes—Mexican street corn—he hoped to use the money he made to buy clothes for school. The Yamhill County, Oregon, teenager will have to put that goal aside, though, because last week the local government shuttered his makeshift cart.

Though Lozano already has a food service card, he will need to come up with $1,415 for a permit should he want to continue his small operation. The stratospheric cost would deter many would-be entrepreneurs, much less a teenager who just wants to sell corn on the cob for a few extra bucks.

Enforcing health standards “is their duty,” Lozano told a local NBC affiliate. “The problem with that is that they’re not going to stop a kid from selling lemonade.”

Lozano might be surprised to know that in many places, health inspectors would do just that. Jurisdictions across the country have cracked down on kids’ lemonade stands for operating sans permit. Just last year, Colorado and Texas both legalized lemonade stands run by children, which is a sentence no one should have to write.

A woman who set up a free food pantry in Asotin County, Washington, has not been as fortunate as entrepreneurial children in Texas and Colorado. Kathy Hay’s makeshift charity was squashed after the county caught wind of it. If she continued to collect food for the needy without the proper licensing, they said, they would press criminal charges.

“The ideal outcome would be for the county to let me and anybody else who would like to have a little free pantry to be able to open one up without being afraid that they’re going to be charged with criminal behavior,” Hay told me in April.

Lozano offered a similar sentiment in a Facebook post. “I just wanted to help out my community and family,” he wrote. “But we all know how this world is.”

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It’s Thursday in Nashville. Libertarian presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen has parked her blue campaign bus in Centennial Park for her “Real Change For Real People” tour. There are tables with masks and hand sanitizer. Supporters gather early, their excitement seemingly unaffected by the pandemic precautions. A few cars slow down to observe the gathering in the park. After a mic check, Jorgensen is introduced and begins to speak.

Almost immediately, her speech covers the two most pressing topics of the summer: criminal justice reform and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back in June, Jorgensen attended a Black Lives Matter vigil for victims of police brutality. Her presence there received mixed reviews, with libertarians who distrust the official Black Lives Matter organization for some of its political and economic views facing off those who believe libertarians should be present in the Black Lives Matter movement protests. (The differences between Black Lives Matter the organization and the movement are explained here.) Regardless of the potential backlash, Jorgensen doubled down on her stance.

“We need change, and I’m glad [the protests] are getting the attention,” Jorgensen tells me on the bus after the speech.

Jorgensen says that the Libertarian Party agrees with the national Black Lives Matter organization on several issues, such as the drug war, no-knock raids, and qualified immunity.

“But their answer is more government,” she says, and “big government is what got us here to begin with.”

Jorgensen mentions a meeting she had with a Black Lives Matter activist in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (The activist was not affiliated with the official Black Lives Matter organization.) They discussed the government’s role in discrimination, with Jorgensen pointing out that the buses in the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott were publicly run and that segregation laws were enforced even though black residents made up the majority of the ridership. “Now imagine today, if Uber decided to discriminate against the majority of their customers. What if they treated their best customers that way? They would go out of business,” she argued. Jorgensen says the activist told her that the experience was “opening his eyes.”

“Libertarians have been talking about these issues for 40 years,” she says. “I think we should support the protesters, but, at the same time, get rid of the opportunistic people hijacking the movement.” Jorgensen points to the people who have used the protests to loot and commit violence: “They are going around basically inserting themselves into peaceful protest. And I’ve seen many clips of the protesters saying, ‘Stop it. Go away. You’re not helping us. We don’t want you here.'”

When the demonstrations first began in May, black organizers and protesters across the nation desperately attempted to keep the violence in check. In one video, D.C. protesters hand-deliver a young man to nearby police after seeing him destroy a sidewalk. In her firsthand account of the Nashville protests, author Nancy French tweeted a video of a black protester arguing with white protesters over property destruction. 

“We need to do what we can to keep the protests on target,” Jorgensen adds.

The conversation then shifts to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re all adults, and it shouldn’t be against the law to be stupid,” Jorgensen says. 

Jorgensen notes that with personal freedom comes responsibility. While she doesn’t support mask mandates (“unless we’re talking about a government building”) or even a forced vaccine in the event that one is developed, Jorgensen sees private companies enacting mask policies as a sign that most Americans are taking the pandemic seriously.

“That just shows what libertarians have been saying for decades, which is just because the government doesn’t tell you to do it doesn’t mean it won’t get done,” she says. “We still have entities who are requiring us to wear masks. We don’t have to wait until the government tells us to. But this way, we have choice.”

Jorgensen adds that private companies wouldn’t enact mask policies if they thought doing so would harm their profits: “I don’t think they’d be requiring a mask if they thought that people would stop shopping in their store and they’d go out of business. So ultimately this is coming from the individual.”

What does Jorgensen think the executive branch should be doing in the pandemic? “I think the president has the obligation to lead the country and to get information out there to warn people,” she says. She is upset at President Donald Trump for saying, “If you don’t have [COVID-19] symptoms…don’t get the test.” Given the disease’s asymptomatic spread and long incubation period, she says, this was irresponsible advice.

Jorgensen also notes the variety of ways the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other federal agencies have restricted access to mass testing. Such testing, she notes, contributed greatly to South Korea’s flattening of the outbreak curve.

“We lost tens of millions of jobs,” she says. “If we had the testing out there, if we didn’t have the FDA obstacles, if we didn’t have so many other government obstacles, we could’ve had widespread testing. And then we could have known which people should have stayed home and which could go out.”

Our conversation concludes with a question about the current debate over voting by mail.

“It’s fine with me if we have mail-in votes,” she says. “As long as we do it through FedEx.”

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After President Donald Trump put out a pair of executive orders banning transactions with the Chinese companies that own the popular communication apps TikTok and WeChat, people familiar with Tencent, the Chinese company that owns WeChat, started pointing out that Tencent outright owns or has major stakes in many high-profile U.S.-based video game companies. Did this mean, they asked, that some of the most popular games in the world are going to get banned in the United States?

Tencent owns the U.S.-based Riot Games, publisher of League of Legends, one of the most popular online competitive games. It owns 40 percent of Epic Games, publisher of the online gaming juggernaut Fortnite. It holds significant stakes in game companies that are probably less well-known to non-gamers, but suffice it to say that if you play video games online, it’s extremely likely that you’ve at some point been playing a game that Tencent has a stake in.

Here’s the vague and weird wording of the executive order as it pertains to Tencent:

The following actions shall be prohibited beginning 45 days after the date of this order, to the extent permitted under applicable law: any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. (a.k.a. Téngxùn Kònggǔ Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), Shenzhen, China, or any subsidiary of that entity, as identified by the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary) under section 1(c) of this order.

It looks at first that it only bans WeChat—which is bad enough. We absolutely should not accept the idea that the White House has the authority for a blanket order banning citizens from using media platforms. If it thinks these tools are a national security risk, it can stop (and apparently has stopped) the government’s own employees and contractors from using them.

But the paragraph also ropes in “any subsidiary of that entity,” which naturally made people start asking whether that covers the games that Tencent either owns outright or has major stakes in.

The White House says the answer is no: An official has told the Los Angeles Times that this order only bans WeChat. What the executive order actually says is that the secretary of commerce will decide which transactions will be subject to these rules. So as far as it’s possible to determine from the wording of the document, the WeChat order won’t ban these video game companies…as long as the secretary of commerce doesn’t include them.

We can be fairly confident that he won’t. Riot Games was formed in Los Angeles before it was sold to Tencent, and it employs more than 1,000 people here in the United States. Banning video games would cost thousands of American jobs. It would have devastating effects for the U.S. economy (especially during this pandemic) and would face extremely high public resistance.

Nevertheless, this confusion shows both how little the Trump administration grasps any number of issues around technology, communications, and the global economy and why executive orders are just a terrible tool for managing them.

After all: If data mining, surveillance, and censorship are reasons to justify the TikTok and WeChat bans, why wouldn’t games with Chinese connections be excluded? Video game companies also collect lots of data about their users, data that can be used to surveil people’s behavior. They are also communication platforms, and they can get tangled up in censorship. Just last year, the video game company Activision Blizzard (of which Tencent owns 5 percent) landed in controversy when it suspended a professional Hearthstone gamer for showing support for Hong Kong protesters. The relationship between game companies and the Chinese government has, in fact, become a big topic for debate among gamers, much in the same way that movies being edited or altered for Chinese distribution is a discussion among film folks.

These are complex matters that can’t be addressed by a simple executive order. Especially this mess of an executive order.

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If you were jolted awake at 5 a.m. by an angry clamor in front of your house, followed by a ring of the doorbell, you probably would be alarmed. You might even grab a gun. That’s what David Lacey, husband of Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, did on March 2, when Black Lives Matter activists came to the couple’s home for a predawn protest. But what he did next resulted in three misdemeanor assault charges that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office announced this week: Lacey pointed the gun at three protesters, told them to get off his porch, and threatened to shoot them if they didn’t.

The incident is broadly similar to the June 28 encounter that led to felony charges against Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who brandished guns in response to Black Lives Matter protesters passing by their house in a private neighborhood of St. Louis. In both cases, the gun wielders claim to have acted in self-defense based on fears that were reasonable in the circumstances. But since the Laceys are black, the Los Angeles incident does not fit the easy narrative of privileged white people who are irrationally fearful of dark-skinned demonstrators. It is therefore a useful opportunity to consider the legal principles that distinguish between assault and self-defense, uncolored by charges of racial prejudice.

Unlike the McCloskeys, who happened to live along the shortcut that protesters took on the way to St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson’s house, Jackie Lacey was the intended target of the demonstrators in Los Angeles, who say they were at her home to demand a meeting about her handling of excessive force allegations against police officers. But unlike the St. Louis protesters, who were trespassing on a private street, the vast majority of the 30 or so drum-banging, bullhorn-amplified L.A. protesters stayed on public property as three of them approached the front door of the Laceys’ house and rang the bell. Such an unsolicited visit, while obnoxious given the hour, is not inherently illegal.

Once David Lacey opened the door, he had every right to demand that the activists leave, just as any homeowner would have the right to turn away an unwanted salesman, missionary, or propagandist. The question is whether he had a right to point his gun at the people on his porch and threaten to shoot them. “Get off of my porch,” he says in the cellphone video of the incident while pointing a handgun at the protesters. “Are you gonna shoot me?” asks Melina Abdullah, co-founder the local Black Lives Matter chapter. “I will shoot you,” Lacey replies. “Get off of my porch.”

According to California’s jury instructions regarding assault with a deadly weapon, a defendant cannot be convicted if he acted “in self-defense” or “in defense of another.” That exception applies when the defendant used or threatened force because he “reasonably believed” he or someone else was “in imminent danger of suffering bodily injury”; “reasonably believed that the immediate use of force was necessary to defend against that danger”; and “used no more force than was reasonably necessary.” California does not require someone who faces such a threat to retreat from the confrontation, and deadly force is presumptively legitimate when used against someone who “unlawfully and forcibly” entered one’s home (which, assuming the protesters did nothing more than ring the bell and ask to speak with the D.A., does not describe this case).

Jackie Lacey, who is in the midst of a heated re-election race against former San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and has been the target of weekly demonstrations at her office by protesters demanding her resignation, says her husband’s reaction was understandable in light of the “harassment” the couple had suffered prior to the incident. “My husband acted in fear for my safety after we were subjected to months of harassment that included a death threat no less than a week earlier,” she said on Tuesday in a statement from her re-election campaign. “Protesters arrived at my house shortly after 5 a.m. while I was upstairs. My husband felt that we were in danger and acted out of genuine concern for our well-being.”

Carl Douglas, an attorney representing Abdullah, says that explanation is “laughable” because the Laceys could see via their doorbell camera that the protesters were unarmed. Abdullah, who chairs the Department of Pan-African Studies at Cal State L.A., adds that Jackie Lacey knew her and the two other protesters, although it’s not clear whether her husband recognized them. “I would think that if you’re afraid you would stay in the house and call the police because you were in fear,” Abdullah told the Los Angeles Times. “They weren’t in fear. They were agitated.”

While the case does hinge partly on the distinction between anger and fear, the Laceys, assuming they were reasonably afraid, were under no obligation to cower in their house and wait for the police. David Lacey might have thought that pointing his gun at the uninvited guests was necessary to eliminate the threat he perceived. The question is whether a jury will agree that his perception was not only sincere but reasonable.

Abdullah notes that state prosecutors, who are handling the case to avoid a conflict of interest, could have charged David Lacey with felonies rather than misdemeanors. Assault with a firearm is a “wobbler” offense that can be charged as a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail or as a felony punishable by up to four years in prison. Abdullah says the choice of misdemeanor charges suggests that Lacey is receiving preferential treatment because his wife is the D.A.

Loyola law professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor, disagrees. Although she does not condone Lacey’s behavior, she thinks felony charges would be excessive in this case.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Levenson noted several mitigating factors—including the earlier threats against Lacey’s wife, the fact that he was confronted at his home, and his clean criminal record—that might have influenced the decision to file misdemeanor charges. “I don’t know whether he is thinking particularly clearly at 5 a.m. when people are on his doorstep and there has been increasing harassment of his wife,” she said. “It’s easy to say he shouldn’t have been so afraid, he should have called the police, he made an unwise decision. But making an unwise decision doesn’t always end up with a felony or even a criminal charge.”

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