If the Supreme Court upholds President Donald Trump’s sweeping emergency tariff powers, a future president could slap huge tariffs on gas-powered cars and other goods that emit carbon.
That’s not speculation. It’s the conclusion of the Trump administration’s own attorney during Wednesday’s oral argument at the Supreme Court.
Trump has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on nearly all imports into the United States—even though the law has never been used for tariffs before. The “emergency” that underpins the tariffs is twofold. Some of the tariffs (those on goods from Canada, Mexico, and China) have been imposed as part of an attempt to counter the flow of fentanyl into the United States, while other tariffs are the White House’s response to trade deficits, which it calls an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”
Reasonable people might disagree with the notion that any of that should be considered an emergency. It’s particularly weird, for example, that some of the tariffs supposedly meant to combat the threat of trade deficits have been applied to imports from countries with which America runs a trade surplus.
As a legal matter, however, that is largely besides the point. The president has broad authority under IEEPA to declare any “emergency” that he sees fit. The key question before the court is whether the law allows tariffs to be imposed once an emergency has been declared.
So what would happen if a future president decided “climate change” was a unique and extraordinary threat?
“Could the president impose a 50 percent tariff on gas-powered cars and auto parts to deal with the ‘unusual and extraordinary’ threat…of climate change?” asked Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“It’s very likely that could be done,” admitted Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argued the case for the Trump administration.
“I think that has to be the logic of your view,” responded Gorsuch.
Here’s the exchange in full:
Gorsuch: Could the president impose a 50% tariff on gas powered cars and auto parts to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad of climate change?
Sauer goes on to say that, in the hypothetical, those tariffs would be “a question for Congress.”
That’s exactly what he has to say, because that’s the line the Trump administration is taking here: Congress has the authority to upend the IEEPA tariffs if it chooses (so far it has not done so), but the courts cannot rule the actions unconstitutional or unlawful.
Yes, this is just a hypothetical, but it’s not a very far-fetched one. Recall that the Biden administration reportedly considered declaring a so-called climate emergency that could have involved halting crude oil exports and blocking new fossil fuel projects. Could tariffs imposed under IEEPA have been part of the mix? That’s unclear, and thankfully, we never had to find out.
The better question is whether you would trust a future President Gavin Newsom or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to avoid deploying this power, once Trump fully unlocks it.
Lots of Republicans will be upset if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, because partisanship is seemingly all that matters these days. If that happens, they should remember that limits on executive power are good for America—and good for the conservative vision of America. If Trump gets what he wants when it comes to tariffs, it will open the door for a whole lot worse.
On Tuesday, November 4, Zohran Mamdani clinched the election for mayor of New York City, capturing just over 50 percent of the vote in a four-way race. Mamdani, a member of the New York State Assembly, defeated candidates with considerably more name recognition, including incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo—each of whom he also previously defeated in the Democratic Party primary.
Unfortunately, Mamdani’s win seems to vindicate the progressive theory—despite all recent evidence to the contrary—that the only solution to America’s problems is more government.
To be clear, there are certainly things to like about the mayor-elect. At 34 years old, he is not only the city’s first millennial mayor, but he was the only candidate in the race not currently eligible for Social Security. (Adams and Cuomo are 65 and 67, while Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa is 71.) In an era of increasing gerontocratic rule, a mayor in his mid-30s seems like a breath of fresh air.
For that matter, there’s something innately positive about voters rebuking both an incumbent with damning allegations of corruption as well as an entitled political scion who was drummed out of higher office in recent memory as a consequence of both his personal behavior and his official actions.
And to be honest, it’s rather inspiring for Mamdani, a Ugandan-born man of Indian descent, to be elected the first immigrant mayor of New York City, whose population is nearly 40 percent foreign-born.
Then again, it should come as no surprise that a Mamdani win could vex libertarians. For one, he is an unabashed democratic socialist—while a member of the New York State Assembly, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) claimed him as one of its nine “New York state socialists in office.” (Mamdani did distance himself from the DSA’s national platform after winning the Democratic Party’s nomination.)
Mamdani left no room for misunderstanding in his victory speech. In its first full sentence, he quoted Eugene Debs, founding member of the Socialist Party of America and a five-time candidate for president under its banner.
“New York, tonight you have delivered,” Mamdani continued. “A mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.”
Later in the speech, he doubled down: “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about. For years, those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January 1st, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.”
Mamdani’s message was, to quote a former president, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
It’s perhaps an unsurprising result, but given where both the country and the Democratic Party are right now, it’s nonetheless dispiriting. After all, the day after the election, President Donald Trump’s administration argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that no matter what the Constitution says, the president should be able to set tariff rates with other countries at his whim. The court may also weigh in on birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed in the Constitution but that Trump declared null and void in a January 2025 executive order, throwing state agencies into disarray.
And that’s just scratching the surface of the president’s many overreaches. On the same day New Yorkers elected Mamdani, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the Trump administration had bombed a boat in the Pacific Ocean, killing two people onboard—the latest in a campaign that has now killed over 50 people the administration deems “narcoterrorists,” without evidence or due process.
Many people, including those on the left, have opposed Trump’s actions, which have expanded the role of government past any sensible point. Last month, millions took to the streets in “No Kings” protests, comparing Trump’s actions to the exact sort of monarchical rule the Founding Fathers formed this country in order to escape.
And yet Mamdani’s win, and his overt pro-government rhetoric, suggests this was not a purely nonpartisan desire. To progressives like Mamdani, government overreach is a problem only to the extent that it’s overreaching in the wrong direction.
Dale Davenport owned Jim’s Car Wash. But five years ago, after a shooting at the property, the city ordered him to shut it down.
Why did they target his car wash?
When I first investigated this story, Davenport told me he was a “model citizen,” doing everything local politicians asked of him:
“They said build a 6-foot fence. I built an 8-foot fence. Then they said, put up signs. I already had signs up, so I put up more signs. Then they told me to put up lights. I already had lights up, so I put up more lights.”
That didn’t stop the city from closing him down.
“Murdered my business, is what the city of Dallas has done,” says Davenport.
Many cities have policies that allow them to close a business if the owner conceals crime. But Davenport didn’t conceal anything. He did the opposite—when he saw crime, he called 911.
The politicians then used his 911 calls as evidence against him.
“They said [I’m] a public nuisance….This is absolutely crazy.”
It is. By closing his car wash, the community lost a neighborhood hub. Local residents called it a “good place for the community.”
People would visit local businesses while waiting for their cars to be washed.
“Businesses next to my car wash, their business is down 40-50 percent,” says Davenport.
Why, in a high-crime neighborhood, did politicians go after just one business where the owner did everything politicians requested?
Probably because some Dallas politicians are corrupt.
After they told Davenport to hire security guards, “they told me, you’ve hired the wrong guard company,” says Davenport.
“A city councilman had an armed guard company that they wanted me to tender my business to.”
That councilman was James Fantroy. He was later convicted of stealing $20,000 from a college.
“Look at the corruption,” says Davenport. “Look how many city councilmen have gone to jail.”
My video replays local news reports: “Former Dallas city council and Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway is just the latest now in a long list of public officials who have been jailed over the years….Paul Fielding…Dallas councilman convicted for conspiracy and fraud….There’s Don Hill. His payments from a housing developer…sent both of them to prison.”
If Dallas politicians want to reduce crime, it seems like they should shut down the city council.
Instead, they shut Davenport’s business. Did it work? Has crime gone down?
No.
Today, five years later, the neighborhood has the highest violent crime rate in the city.
Davenport showed us what his old neighborhood looks like now.
There’s a homeless camp just across from where his car wash once was.
Surprisingly, just a couple miles away, a new car wash is opening.
Why do they get to open, but Jim’s can’t?
Because Dallas politicians don’t like him.
“I know right from wrong,” says Davenport. “This is wrong.”
Texas has now passed a law that says if cities do shut a business, they must pay the owner a sum equal to his losses.
That would be good. Compensating owners is only fair.
But here’s a better idea: Stop electing corrupt politicians, and don’t let them shut businesses in the first place.
The results are in, and Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City, after winning a raw majority of the vote and easily besting former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.
Over at Cuomo’s election night party, independent journalist Michael Tracey captured one of the former governor’s supporters engaging in some blunt analysis of the results.
“Hey Curtis [Sliwa], you’re a fucking scumbag like I said all along,” he says in the video. “You split the fucking vote.”
To be sure, neither are official campaign spokesmen. But both the level of their rage and their target for it says a lot about the purely negative pitch of the Cuomo’s mayoral campaign and why that proved so completely unconvincing for voters.
In both the primary and the general election, Cuomo never seemed to be able to get beyond the idea that all he had to do to win was point at the other candidates and say, “you’re really going to vote for them?”
On election night, that proved woefully insufficient.
To start with some pure arithmetic, contrary to our video subject, it couldn’t matter less that Sliwa “split the vote.” Mamdani is walking away from this election with a raw majority, meaning that if even every single Sliwa voter lined up behind Cuomo, he’d still have lost.
More substantively, Cuomo was never able to articulate why people should line up behind him besides the fact that he wasn’t Mamdani.
The obvious strategy for an experienced politician running against a young, inexperienced ideologue is to emphasize one’s own record of achievement and administrative acumen.
But Cuomo couldn’t convincingly do this, given that he spent the last year or so of his governorship stumbling from one incompetence scandal after another, before eventually resigning in response to sexual harassment allegations.
It was Cuomo’s administration that forced nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, and then tried to cover up the deaths that resulted from this deeply mistaken policy.
It’s hard to argue that you are a steady, capable alternative to the starry-eyed socialist when your administration can’t do something as simple as not recklessly endanger senior citizens or cut checks to people.
Even less helpful was that Cuomo had seemingly no positive agenda for New York City to counter Mamdani’s simple, catchy (and to be sure, ill-conceived) plans to make New York affordable with free buses and free childcare.
Mamdani was, famously, the candidate of “freeze the rent.” Cuomo rightly argued this was an irresponsible policy that would push more landlords into insolvency. And yet the governor had no plan to improve the sorry state of New York’s rent-stabilized housing stock either.
His campaign’s housing policy platform was a bunch of AI-generated pablum. In an effort to score a cheap hit on Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized unit, Cuomo proposed “Zohran’s law” that would, if anything, make life harder for the owners of rent-stabilized housing.
It bears repeating that Cuomo also signed the 2019 rent law that has done so much to damage the financial position of New York City housing.
With no decent record to run on and no positive visions to pitch, Cuomo fell back on aristocratic entitlement. If you didn’t like Mamdani, you had to vote for him as the only realistic alternative. Sliwa voters weren’t worth convincing; they simply owed loyalty to Cuomo.
This was hardly a winning attitude. Now that’s failed, his supporters are directing their rage at Sliwa for not simply giving up, instead of Mamdani for actually winning.
Cuomo’s faults obviously don’t mitigate any of Mamdani’s own flaws, to be sure. The mayor-elect’s remarks during his victory speech about how there’s no problem too large or small for the government to solve are alarming, to say the least.
"No problem too large for government to solve, and [none] too small for government to care about."
While fiscal realities will do a lot of work to check Mamdani’s ideas, one shouldn’t expect city policy to improve during his tenure.
It’s not good to see Mamdani win. But, as a consolation prize, it is good to see Cuomo lose.
Whatever else one wants to say about them and their choices, New York voters were right to decide that they don’t want a disgraced politician with a bad record, a worse attitude, and no vision running their city government.
The fate of President Donald Trump’s tariffs may hinge on whether a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court is willing to accept that the words written in federal statutes might not mean what they plainly say.
As you’d expect, there were a lot of different arguments thrown around during Wednesday’s critical oral arguments, where the Trump administration claimed sweeping powers to impose tariffs on nearly all imports while attorneys for a variety of plaintiffs said Trump had overstepped the authority granted by Congress. Overwhelmingly, however, the debate seemed to center on perhaps the most basic of questions when it comes to interpreting the law: Did Congress mean what it said when it wrote the law?
The law in question is the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which the Trump administration has used as the legal justification for the vast majority of new tariffs imposed this year. The text of that law grants a variety of powers to the president to “regulate,” “block,” “nullify,” “restrict,” “modify,” and so on.
As the justices pointed out over and over again on Wednesday, however, the law does not say “tariff.” Nor does it give the president the power to impose taxes.
“There are a lot of verbs, but none of them include generating revenue, either directly or as a side effect,” noted Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at one point.
The administration’s argument hinges on the word “regulate,” which Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued should be understood as allowing tariffs.
“There is a lot in ‘regulate’ that is not spelled out there,” Sauer said. Earlier, during a similar exchange with Justice Neil Gorsuch, Sauer fell back on a similar claim: “Tariffing is the quintessential way of regulating importation.”
Several of the justices seemed skeptical of that idea. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in particular, pressed Sauer to offer any other statute where the word “regulate” was assumed to grant the power of raising taxes. Sauer struggled to respond.
This gets to the core of the tariff case, which goes beyond a normal dispute over policy and asks a serious question about the separation of powers in the constitutional system. If the chief executive can read new meanings into the words that Congress has written in the laws it passed, then there are effectively no limitations on what the president can do.
There are other reasons—maybe even better ones—why the Supreme Court ought to be skeptical of the Trump administration’s emergency tariff powers. Trump’s use of IEEPA seems to run afoul of the so-called “major questions” doctrine, which says the executive branch can only exercise powers that Congress has explicitly granted. The U.S. Supreme Court invoked that doctrine in other recent high-profile cases, including the 2023 ruling that struck down then-President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness scheme. The tariffs would also have to pass the similar “non-delegation” test, which says Congress cannot delegate core responsibilities to the executive branch.
Before even getting to those larger questions, however, the justices should think deeply about how far the Trump administration is trying to stretch the meaning of words.
“The president is seeking to set aside all of our trade treaties, unilaterally, under the word ‘regulate,'” said Neal Katyal, the attorney representing a group of businesses challenging the tariffs. “I just don’t think it can bear that weight.”
In an exchange between Sauer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the justice suggested that the administration would be on more solid legal ground if it weren’t seeking to tariff imports but restrict them outright—after all, she noted, the IEEPA statute plainly allows a president to block or restrict imports.
“It has a lot of verbs,” she concluded, referring to IEEPA. “It just doesn’t have the one you want.”
Congress is quietly drifting toward an ID-verified internet. The Children Harmed by AI Technology (CHAT) Act of 2025 is Washington’s newest attempt to regulate speech through mandatory age checks. Rather than protecting kids, it would normalize showing a government ID for basic online speech.
The CHAT Act tries to target fictional role-play bots you’ve likely heard horror stories about. The problem is that the bill defines a chatbot so broadly that anything that “simulates emotional interaction” could be restricted. By the CHAT Act’s standards, ChatGPT, some video game characters, or even a customer service bot could all require users to upload a government ID just to log in.
Large language models (LLMs) learn to write by training on billions of real conversations and stories. That makes their output naturally resemble human dialogue—including emotional tone. Forcing AIs to remove random “interpersonal” behaviors and eliminating all traces of emotional tone or dialogue could mean deleting much of the training data itself.
If the CHAT Act were to pass, developers would face two terrible choices. They could impose ID verification across their platforms or censor outputs so aggressively that American AI products could become unusable. Just as China’s DeepSeek censors references to Tiananmen Square, the CHAT Act could force U.S. developers toward a similar censorious model of compliance. The result could be an industry-wide unforced error that would hobble innovation relative to foreign competitors.
And it wouldn’t stop with chatbots. AI is now built into nearly every digital product. AI now runs through everyday products: Duolingo’s language tutor, Alexa’s music suggestions, and video game NPCs offering advice. Under the CHAT Act, any of them could require a government ID. Lawyers and developers, unsure where Congress’s ill-defined lines will fall, could slow or suspend AI integrations altogether.
On the internet, the danger extends even deeper. As Google search increasingly leverages its AI chatbot Gemini, as OpenAI builds its new browser “Atlas,” and as queries increasingly take place through LLMs instead of search engines, the CHAT Act brings us closer to an ID verification layer across tomorrow’s internet.
What’s more, the bill wouldn’t protect vulnerable users. Age-verification laws are prone to backfire.
Requiring users to upload government IDs may sound simple, but it creates a massive honeypot for hackers. Once those databases are inevitably breached, millions of Americans—including minors—could have their most sensitive personal data stolen in the name of “safety.” Other obstacles such as ID portals or geoblocking become an incentive for tech-savvy generations to download VPNs that allow users to spoof their location to different countries with fewer restrictions. When the UK implemented similar age-verification laws, VPN usage spiked by up to 1,400 percent as users flocked to unregulated platforms abroad. Without our guardrails or basic consumer protections, these foreign platforms could expose children to more dangerous and explicit content.
U.S. lawmakers should avoid driving young Americans toward foreign platforms with weaker protections and lower accountability.
The United States has a long history of consumer protection laws rooted in evidence and precedent, rather than preemptive panic over emerging technologies. Consumer protection frameworks evolved through tested case law rather than reactionary moral legislation.
With the earliest cases still ongoing or only just filed, it is too early to know how courts will treat AI-related harms and whether existing laws can address them. But those cases are likely to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the shortcomings in our current legislation. Congress needs to stop legislating out of fear and start learning how the technology works.
The panic around “AI harm” has pushed Congress into reactionary policymaking that risks rewriting the rules of online speech without meaningfully protecting kids. By copying the censorious and restrictive internet frameworks of China and the UK, lawmakers could end up creating more danger by forcing children into darker corners of the web.
With Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor, can we expect a change in the city’s policies related to sex work? There are some reasons to suspect that the answer to this question is yes.
Losing NYC mayoral candidate and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo certainly wanted people to think so. Back in August, Cuomo’s team put out a press release calling out “Mamdani’s dangerous support for decriminalizing prostitution.”
It’s true that during his time in the New York State Assembly, Mamdani cosponsored legislation to decriminalize prostitution. Running for reelection in 2022, he pledged that he would reject legislation to implement the Nordic model of sex work regulation, in which some selling of sex is decriminalized but paying for it is not. And back in 2021, he supported the repeal of a statute—referred to by opponents as the “walking while trans” law—that criminalized loitering for purposes of prostitution, saying it is his “fundamental belief that sex work is work.”
But Mamdani did not make prostitution an issue in his mayoral campaign, and even dodged some direct questions about decriminalization, including whether he still opposed criminalizing the purchase of sex.
What we can make of that is anyone’s guess. I suspect Mamdani does support decriminalization, but was smart enough to realize that making a big deal of it wouldn’t do him any favors in his bid to become New York City’s next mayor.
The key question is, now that he has won, will Mamdani move to make a difference in the way the city handles prostitution?
And, as New York City mayor, what can he realistically do? After all, prostitution is a state-level criminal offense.
While New York City leaders can’t change the state laws, they can affect the way they’re enforced within city limits. And the city’s mayor can play a big role in setting the agenda on this.
Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who served from 2014 through 2021, became an advocate for decriminalization, pushed for state lawmakers to pass a decriminalization bill, and heralded a social services approach to helping sex workers, rather than a criminal justice approach. It’s not clear exactly how de Blasio put these beliefs into practice, but during de Blasio’s tenure, the city did cut down on prostitution arrests. Manhattan, for instance, went from around 600 prostitution arrests in 2014 to just a handful in 2021, per data from the Urban Justice Center. The city overall went from 1,790 arrests in 2014 to 376 arrests in 2019, according to a 2021 report from the city. And, in 2021, Manhattan and Brooklyn district attorneys dismissed hundreds of prostitution cases and announced that they would stop prosecuting people for selling sex. (Under Mayor Eric Adams, prostitution-related arrests have ticked back up again, according toThe New York Times.)
Mamdani’s campaign has said that he supports de Blasio’s approach to handling sex work. “Zohran will return to the decriminalization approach taken by the de Blasio administration, which means he’ll end raids on sex workers and work with District Attorneys to reduce unnecessary prosecutions,” Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a September statement.
Mamdani himself has implied as much, too. “What I want to do is look at the ways in which the previous administration addressed this issue,” Mamdani told reporters in August. “What we’ve seen from the previous administration is an understanding that the responses that have to be taken into account have much more to do with things beyond the question of an individual sex worker and through the larger system around that,” he said in September. Mamdani also stressed then that he has never supported the legalization of prostitution.
Some—including Cuomo—have tried to portray Mamdani as flip-flopping on the issue of sex work, pointing to his statements supporting decriminalization and rejecting legalization. But there is nothing contradictory in these statements, because decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing.
Legalization refers to a highly regulated system in which prostitution is sanctioned by the state under certain circumstances (and still criminalized outside of those circumstances). It may be permitted, but only in certain districts, or in a brothel, or with a permit. Decriminalization, on the other hand, simply means removing all criminal penalties surrounding the (consensual, adult) selling and purchase of sexual services. There is no enforcement of sanctions against sex workers or their clients, but neither is there a state-regulated brothel system or anything else like that. (Sex worker activists and their allies tend to support decriminalization over legalization.)
“I don’t get the impression that Mamdani’s stance on sex work has shifted one bit,” writes Lux Alptraum in Dame magazine. “I think he is deftly navigating an obviously bad faith attempt to misrepresent his past and present stances, all while avoiding getting sucked into a conversation that’s far too complex to be appropriately addressed in brief sound bites or during a debate.”
As mayor, Mamdani couldn’t technically decriminalize prostitution in New York City, but he could encourage local police to halt prostitution stings and deprioritize prostitution arrests and raids, and support prosecutors declining to bring prostitution cases.
A system where sex workers and their customers face uncertainty about whether they’ll be arrested or charged isn’t ideal, even if they ultimately escape these fates. It still keeps prostitution operating in the black market, where it’s easier for violence and exploitation to thrive and harder for sex workers to take steps to operate safely. That said, cutting down on sex workers’ encounters with police (which can beharmfulin theirown ways) and helping them avoid criminal records, fines, jail time, and other life-disrupting consequences is still a net positive for sex worker well-being and safety.
Hopefully, Mamdani won’t shy away from supporting decriminalization now that he has won, and will do whatever is within his power as mayor to lessen the negative effects of sex-work criminalization within New York City.
Do you know who has purchased your travel data? “Most people probably have no idea that when you book a flight through major travel websites, a data broker owned by U.S. airlines then sells details about your flight, including your name, credit card used, and where you’re flying to the government,” writes Joseph Cox at 404 Media. Here’s how he opted out.
Meta moves to dismiss porn copyright lawsuit: Meta is being sued for copyright infringement by Strike 3 Holdings, which “discovered illegal downloads of some of its adult films on Meta corporate IP addresses” and alleges that they’re being used to train AI, notesArs Technica. But in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, “Meta argued that there was no evidence that the tech giant directed any of the downloads of about 2,400 adult movies owned by Strike 3—or was even aware of the illegal activity” and claimed the videos had been downloaded by employees for “private personal use.”
Appeals court judges seem skeptical of Idaho book law: “An Idaho law restricting what materials students can access in schools and libraries drew scrutiny at the Ninth Circuit on Monday as a group of schools urged the court to block the law,” reportsCourthouse News Service. The law has a “pretty serious impact on the First Amendment rights of [librarians],” said U.S. Circuit Judge Milan Smith, while Judge Jacqueline Nguyen noted that “a lot of young adult novels that may actually have sexual themes or may have nudity and fall strictly within the definition of harmful to minors would then be swept up, despite the fact that it has serious value.”
The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and visionaries who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by challenging worn-out ideas and orthodoxies.
Today’s guests are Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jon Shenk and former Navy SEAL Marcus Capone. Shenk is co-director, with Bonni Cohen, of the new Netflix documentary In Waves and War, which follows three former Navy SEALs as they use psychedelic-assisted therapy to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries related to their service.
Capone is one of the three main figures in the film. He first used the ultra-powerful substances ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT in 2017 and is the co-founder with his wife Amber of VETS, a nonprofit that helps veterans access psychedelic therapies. He’s also CEO of TARA Mind, a company seeking to expand the use of psychedelic-assisted mental health therapies for all Americans. He is featured in the 2023 Reason documentary Welcome to the Psychedelic Renaissance.
They talk with Gillespie about why so many veterans and everyday Americans could benefit from psychedelic therapy and discuss the challenges of depicting both the grim realities of war and the otherworldly experiences of tripping on ibogaine, which some call the “Mount Everest of psychedelics.” They also discuss why the Trump administration and an unlikely bipartisan group of legislators may well help usher in an era of legalized psychedelics.
0:00—Introduction
1:40—The reality of war
10:34—Documenting war for film
21:05—The psychological toll of the Afghanistan War
31:23—Health care for veterans and ibogaine treatment
36:14—Amber Capone and the importance of veteran spouses
40:15—The psychedelic experience of ibogaine
44:16—Stanford University study on ibogaine
51:49—Visualizing the psychedelic experience
55:37—Legislative progress for psychedelic-assisted therapy
Residents of Olympia, Washington, rejectedProposition 1 on Tuesday, with 4,857 votes against and 3,821 for. The proposition would have codified the Workers’ Bill of Rights Initiative, which sought to increase the minimum wage and require employers to offer current employees extra hours before hiring additional ones.
Yes For Olympia Workers, a campaign that backed the measure, said that the Workers’ Bill of Rights “is built on a foundation of key values that reflect the everyday challenges and aspirations of working people.” Ostensibly to this end, Proposition 1 would have increased Olympia’s minimum wage for large employers (those with more than 500 employees) from $16.66 per hour to $20 per hour on January 1, 2026. The minimum wage for medium employers—firms with more than 15 and up to 500 employees—would have increased to $18 on January 1, 2026, and by $1 every year until their minimum wage equals that of large employers.
Yes For Olympia Workers, whose top five donors are all unions, described the longer phase-in for medium employers as minimizing “the risk and costs to…small businesses.” Olympians didn’t buy it—and with good reason: Setting phase-in schedules based on headcount would have discouraged smaller businesses from hiring more workers. If the proposition had passed, a medium-sized firm with 500 employees could only justify hiring another employee if he were worth more than $2 million to the company—the combined yearly cost of his $20 per hour wage and the additional $2 per hour paid to the other 500 employees.
Washingtonians are not unfamiliar with such staggered minimum wage hikes. In June 2014, Seattle adopted a similar scheme, distinguishing between businesses with 500 or fewer employees and those with more than 500 workers. Although wage inequality was “reduced modestly” for workers making less than the city’s median hourly wage ($26.42) who remained employed, the overall earning inequality “substantially widened” from 2014 to 2017, according to a University of Washington study published in 2021.
Regardless of whether they are phased in gradually or imposed immediately, increasing the minimum wage means existing and prospective workers who generate less value than the mandatory wage floor are fired or not hired in the first place. A case in point: California’s April 2024 fast-food minimum wage hike from $16 to $20 per hour cost the state 18,000 jobs.
Yes For Olympia Workers said it’s a “myth” that “raising the minimum wage will cause massive job losses.” On Tuesday, Olympians rightly rejected the real myth—that a higher minimum wage benefits all workers.
Silver linings: At least now there’s one more rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria that could be made available to an actual poor person!
Zohran Mamdani, who proudly calls himself a socialist and ran as a Democrat, solidly clinched the win and will be sworn in as mayor of New York City on January 1. Turnout was enormous: More than 2 million voted this election day, the highest participation in a citywide election since 1969.
Full vote results aren’t in—just 91 percent currently reporting, per Associated Press tallies—but ex-gov Andrew Cuomo came in at 41.6 percent of the vote, with Republican Curtis Sliwa garnering merely 7.1 percent. Mamdani cleared the 50 percent threshold.
The 34-year-old Mamdani has no management experience, and very little work experience. (But “this new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another,” he assures us in his victory speech.) He worked briefly at a nonprofit in Queens before launching a bid for state Assembly. He was mostly absent as an assemblyman, barely voting in Albany at all. Maybe it’s better that way. He’s spent a fair bit of time speaking on Democratic Socialists of America panels and at meetings, including one where he suggested, in 2023, that when the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) “boot” is “on your neck” it’s been “laced by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces].” This soundbite summarizes him perfectly: It’s not really clear what he’s talking about, except that there’s a vaguely anti-colonialist, anti-Israel sentiment that plays really well with his Frantz Fanon-reading liberal-arts-school base. (To take him more seriously, as we now must, it’s possible he’s referring to the NYPD’s international liaison program, which maintains offices—for training and counterterrorism purposes—in more than a dozen different countries; so why single out Israel?)
Other than his little speaking gigs, Mamdani’s experience is sparse. No matter. He’s now in charge of a workforce of 300,000. Whatever could go wrong?
I know a lot of people disagree with Zohran’s policies, but I think it’s distasteful to ruin the excitement by saying so. He’s a 34-year-old who just got his first real job, and we should let him (and his parents!) feel good about that.
At least he’s highly educated: Mamdani went to the Bronx High School of Science, the elite public school where one must take an admissions test to get into, at which he “personally witnessed just how segregated New York City public schools are.” He called for the specialized admissions test to be abolished, before mysteriously reversing course later in his campaign. He’s called for gifted programs for young kids to be abolished. He seeks to pull the ladder up after him now that he’s climbed it—and this is one area he’ll have a lot of control over.
After Bronx Science, Mamdani went to hoity-toity liberal arts school Bowdoin, in Maine, where he majored in Africana studies, graduating in 2014 right before peak “wokeness” took hold. Mamdani has been steeped in the language of postcolonial theory, of the oppression olympics, of third-worldism. He’s focused on class. He’s been marinading in these ideas for years.
“I know that many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation,” Mamdani told his followers in his victory speech. “Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour.”
“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about,” he adds, tacking on a mission statement that will surely strike fear in the hearts of libertarians. (There’s a reason why President Donald Trump calls the Marx-quoting Mamdani “my little communist mayor.”)
Don’t let anyone tell you this was a post-wokeness campaign; it wasn’t exactly, but democratic socialist campaigns should be thought of maybe as a fusion of identity politics/colonial struggle themes and sleeker branding. “When you look at peak woke progressivism, one thing about it is that…it had an austere Calvinist element to it,” says Reihan Salam. “The genius, you could say, of this democratic socialist moment around Mamdani is that it’s all about offering you free stuff. And it is also saying that the bad guys are simple.” (“Wokeness was almost anti-charismatic,” theorizes Salam. This brand of democratic socialism, on the other hand, is “packaged as a consumer brand.”)
Nor was it a kitchen-table issues campaign. Mamdani had solid marketing chops: He targeted ethnic enclaves in their own languages, at scale, something other candidates haven’t really thought to do to nearly the same degree. He deployed massive teams of canvassers. He kinda sorta ripped off the Zabar’s logo, and he pissed off the Knicks by more blatantly ripping off theirs. But mostly, he had the good fortune to run against a historically unpopular disgraced ex-governor who groped a few too many women to stay in office.
Mamdani’s success should be attributed to his tactics and to the circumstances he inherited, but also his ability to serve as an avatar for a specific class of people found mostly in New York: the highly educated creative class that perceives itself to be more working-class-adjacent than rich, with bougie tastes yet enough student debt to feel tethered to reality.
Zohran doing autocrat numbers at the park slope food coop
Democrats shouldn’t be tempted to extrapolate too much from this one win. Democrats have pretended, for years, to be excited about milquetoast candidates they don’t actually care for: Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Josh Shapiro, Eric Swalwell, Tim Walz, and Joe Biden. They’re trying to get pumped about California Gov. Gavin Newsom. They’re trying to rally behind Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. But it’s just been so hard, and Mamdani’s right there. He’s someone they can get excited about (ewwww), for the first time in a while. He’s fresh and new and a touch exotic and he feels like someone you could’ve maybe found at Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue pad a few decades ago. It’s the “dawn of a better day” for the long-suffering tote bag class. Finally.
Meanwhile, in saner places: More conventional Democrats won last night in New Jersey (Mikie Sherrill) and Virginia (Abigail Spanberger).
Spanberger, in particular, has always seemed to have her head screwed on straight. If Democrats don’t move toward more centrist positions, “we will get fucking torn apart,” she warned in an internal call. “And we need to not ever use the words socialist or socialism ever again.”
Alas, I wish this were the formula for winning New York. One struggle Democrats might have is succumbing to the belief that there’s one clear formula for racking up wins nationally, when the actual approaches might need to vary: In these two states, at least, both women are highly pragmatic, eschewing big think campaigns in favor of highlighting a return to normalcy and bringing down the cost of living. (Biden was elected “to be normal and stop the chaos,” said Spanberger, who has lots of criticism to direct at her own party, back in 2021.) Sherrill focused on high energy prices and housing costs, and appears to have decent instincts with regard to how to bring those down, even if she still does a bit of gratuitous corporation-bashing.
So “run down-to-earth candidates focused on cost issues” will remain in tension with the other possible takeaway: “Run 34-year-old ideologues who’ve turned their brains to mush with the Fanon they mainlined at Bowdoin.” Which way, Democratic Party?
Scenes from New York: Naturally.
Keith McNally says all customers and staff at Balthazar will get free champagne tonight if socialist Zohran Mamdani wins
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