The Protect College Sports Act Trades NCAA Chaos for Federal Overreach


Against a blue background with the NCAA logo, a collage image with photographs of Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Maria Cantwell, a hockey player, and a basketball player. | Illustration: National Collegiate Athletic Association/Yuri Gripas - via CNP/Polaris/Gent Shkullaku/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom/Jiawangkun/Aspenphoto/Dreamstime

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Watch where you’re driving this week, and keep an eye out for innocent bystanders, please.

Today’s newsletter is a beast, covering the Protect College Sports Act—a 101-page bill just introduced in the Senate that has huge implications for college sports. We’ve got everything you need to know, everything right and wrong with the bill, and whether it can pass and become law.

But first, if you want to fill out our survey on the NBA and NHL finals, let me know who you’re rooting for here.

Locker Room Links

  • Steph Curry signed a new decade-long shoe deal—with Li-Ning, a Chinese company that also has a deal with Curry’s teammate, Jimmy Butler.
  • MLB owners formally proposed a salary cap to the players union. The proposal includes a salary floor, which would have forced 12 teams to spend more if it were in place this season (and 10 teams to spend less). The union obviously said no, especially because the union’s executive subcommittee includes high-end players like Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes who want no cap whatsoever.
  • Speaking of MLB, some owners are questioning whether league expansion makes sense right now (good, in my opinion!).
  • Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s attorney sent a cease and desist demand to fantasy sports company Underdog, which made a board game poking fun at SGA. Underdog refused to comply, and the whole thing screams of the Streisand effect.
  • The South African soccer team’s travel to the U.S. for the World Cup was delayed due to visa issues—they eventually left without their assistant coach.
  • Elsewhere in Reason: It was a sportsy week, with coverage of the Chicago Bears stadium debacle (which might now be over) and Nick Gillespie sounding off on private equity and youth sports.
  • Do you like or dislike how different the NBA is every year?

Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell Look To ‘Protect’ College Sports

After the failure of the SCORE Act in the House of Representatives, there’s a new bill on the Senate side to “protect” college sports. Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.) introduced the Protect College Sports Act on Wednesday. The bill is the NCAA’s best chance yet (if only because every other effort has failed) to get its long-awaited help from Congress in wresting back control of college sports.

It’s a wide-ranging bill that covers a lot of things you’d expect (name, image, and likeness [NIL] payments and transfer rules) and touches more aspects you probably wouldn’t have thought Congress would weigh in on (conference realignment, coach movement, and scheduling of both college football and NFL games).

On transfers, the bill would only allow student-athletes to transfer schools once (additional transfers would require a season off, unless the athlete is transferring because their coach left or the school eliminated the team). Athletes would have a maximum of five years of eligibility for college sports, with exceptions for pregnancies, missionary work, military service, and any other reason approved en masse by the NCAA. Any athlete who’s played professionally would have no eligibility (to oversimplify: prize money is allowed, salaries are not, and the NCAA would have discretion to decide what’s allowed).

The NCAA and the College Sports Commission (formed in 2025) would have legal backing to enforce their NIL rules. That includes a “salary” cap, where schools would have $21.3 million to spend on their student-athletes across all sports. The College Sports Commission would basically be able to determine what payments are under-the-table NIL payments designed to go around the compensation cap. As Cruz described it: “If it’s fake NIL, if it is a booster just handing an athlete a bag of cash under the table, that is breaking the rules.”

The bill also stops conference realignment in its tracks—at least for the Big Ten and SEC. Conferences with $1 billion in revenue in 2025 would not be allowed to merge or add members. (That restriction only applies to 2025 revenue, so even if revenue changes, it still only applies to those two conferences in perpetuity.)

It also includes the infamous “Lane Kiffin rule,” where coaches and key staff are not allowed to leave for another team in the same season—not just for gameday coaching functions, but also for recruiting and other off-the-field purposes.

Conferences would be given an antitrust exemption to pool their media rights—if they want to. The smaller conferences would have to placate the Big Ten and SEC to get them involved, though. One thing that would probably stand in the way of a deal big enough to entice the Big Ten and SEC: If a certain basketball or football game is going to be shown exclusively on a streaming platform, the broadcaster would still have to make that game available in a university’s market area “without charge” (i.e. on network TV or cable, even though people pay for cable—free content on a streaming platform would be allowed too). The Federal Communications Commission would oversee which local markets each school’s games must be shown in. That’s going to diminish the financial value of any deal offered by broadcasters to the conferences. Furthermore, any school in a conference that pools its media rights would fall under new rules over “traditional rivalry”—its football team could be required to play a certain team every four years or every year if the teams have played each other often enough in the past.

By law, student-athletes would be allowed to have an agent and wouldn’t lose eligibility for hiring one. Agents for student-athletes would have to register with a state government and would have their fees capped at 5 percent.

It’s not getting much media coverage, but the bill also requires various safety standards relating to concussions, heat injuries, asthma, and other ailments (by outsourcing these standards to various nongovernmental bodies, usually the NCAA). Medical personnel get “autonomous, unchallengeable authority to determine medical management and return to play decisions” in the bill’s text, and “No coach or other nonmedical personnel of an institution may attempt to influence or disregard” those decisions.

If it passed, you could also say goodbye to a few more quirks in the NFL schedule: the NFL would not be allowed to broadcast on the first Friday in September (as of now, it’s the second) or the third Saturday in December (as of now, it’s the second). The college football season would also be legally required to end by January 8 every year, “to the extent practicable.”

One thing the bill doesn’t touch on, because movement in either direction would be a poison pill for either side of the aisle, is whether student-athletes are employees. Democrats generally want to see them designated as employees so that the athletes have collective bargaining rights and could form a union, while Republicans (and the NCAA) generally want the law to prevent that. Cantwell insists the collective bargaining debate is not over.

The Consequences

If you read all of that and thought, “Wow, it’s kind of crazy that Congress is going to set the governing rules for a major sports entity,” I’m with you. A lot of this feels like overreach that people would find crazy in other industries, even if you agree with the aims (like transfer rules—restricting athletes to one transfer is inevitably going to end up challenged in court, or with as many loopholes as Swiss cheese).

Consider, for example, the health and safety standards. Obviously we want healthy athletes (even at your rival college). But giving “autonomous, unchallengeable” power to medical personnel seems like a reach. Perhaps your star running back takes a knock and is only feeling 95 percent ready to play in the national championship game, and there’s a minuscule chance of a career-ending injury. If he wants to take the risk, and the coach wants to take the risk, the medical staff can still keep the player out—the coach is not even allowed to appeal and try to “influence” that decision.

The bill is wise to not directly set the safety standards on concussions and other ailments into law. But outsourcing those standards to the NCAA and other organizations doesn’t mean we can trust them to stay up-to-date with the latest scientific findings.

Perhaps you hate conference realignment and are sick of the Big Ten and SEC expanding. Consider two possible loopholes to the bill. First, every other conference would still be allowed to merge and expand. In theory, every other conference could join together and start their own superleague without the Big Ten and SEC. Second, the bill doesn’t actually stop the current schools of the Big Ten and SEC from forming a superleague—those schools could still leave the NCAA altogether for a newly formed entity.

What about the proposed salary cap? That’s just asking for under-the-table deals, like the paper bags full of cash that were rumored to run recruitment in the days of college sports yore. As Ross Dellenger wrote in great coverage of the bill for Yahoo Sports, “Next year, each school has $21.3 million to spend on all of their athletes, but many programs, in order to achieve an advantage in a competitive recruiting environment, have redirected corporate sponsor cash to their rosters disguised as third-party NIL — compensation that doesn’t count against the cap.” You might think it’s wise for a cap to slow down the arms race on NIL payments, but market value always prevails—the cap is just going to move the payments into the darkness.

Likewise, the “Lane Kiffin rule” is obviously unworkable. Coaches will reach under-the-table deals to upgrade to bigger schools that will just get finalized on the first day allowed. They’ll zone out of their current job and start backchannel communications with recruits and their agents for their new . The rule is possibly unconstitutional anyway under other employment laws. The NCAA has failed to enforce its own rules for decades. Why do we think it would successfully enforce this one?

There’s also the rule that keeps athletes who have played professionally from returning to college sports. This made a lot more sense when the NCAA had strict amateurism rules—now it’s a bit rich considering the payments players are getting to be good at sports. It’s essentially saying: “Yes, you got paid to be good at sports. But you weren’t paid by us, you were paid by some Italians, so you’re banned.”

The bill has some good reforms, to be fair, but they’re mostly codifying certain things that are already happening anyway (like NIL payments and the right to hire an agent). One major improvement is the antitrust exemption, which allows conferences to pool their media rights together—but even that comes with a ton of restrictions.

Congress should not be managing the NCAA just because the organization failed to manage itself for decades. Imagine if Congress got involved in MLB in the 1960s and said the league couldn’t let the American League and National League merge for business purposes, or that they couldn’t expand or let teams relocate. What if the NBA said “Our tanking problem is out of control, Congress can you please fix the draft lottery for us?” Congress is trying to micromanage football schedules when it should be trying to assert its authority over trade and military actions. Instead of the economy or life-and-death issues, they’re spending their time on what is basically an entertainment industry that exists to promote colleges to prospective students.

Will the Bill Pass?

I’m not saying you should disregard all of this, but the bill probably won’t pass, at least not as it currently stands. Even if it fails, another effort to reform college sports will come up in the future that will include many of these ideas.

Sportswriter Jesse Dougherty talked to sources on Capitol Hill for insights on whether the bill can pass. Many were waiting to see how Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) weighed in, since he often sets the tone for progressives in the Senate. Murphy eventually released a statement that said: “We are all still reading this bill…but this seems like a great deal for the NCAA and the rich guys who run college sports, and a bad deal for athletes.” It seems like a safe bet the Congressional Black Caucus will agree with him, since gerrymandering is still a thing.

Combine progressive opposition with the fact that most of the powerful schools don’t want it. The SEC came out strong against the bill (at least on the pooling of media rights), and only a few people affiliated with Big Ten and SEC schools have come out in support. If the athletic departments, administrators, alumni, and boosters for the biggest, most powerful schools in the South and Midwest are all yelling at their members of Congress to oppose the bill, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

If you were looking at this issue from a purely left-right perspective, though, Republicans might want to take this deal. It accomplishes much of what they want, and it seems unlikely that congressional Republicans will have more power after the 2026 midterm elections, and probably not after the 2028 elections either. (I shudder to think of what a Democratic trifecta under President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would do to college sports.)

On Wednesday morning, Cruz and the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing about the bill featuring testimony by Nick Saban, Notre Dame’s athletic director, former president of Ohio State and other universities Gordon Gee, the Pac-12 commissioner (yes, it still exists!), and a Utah football player. It will be interesting to see what each senator says about the bill and to parse the questions they ask witnesses.

Who You Got?

Now for the fun part: Who are you rooting for in the NBA and Stanley Cup finals? Fill out this survey here and let me know. I’ll share the results next week.

I, for one, am extremely begrudgingly rooting for the San Antonio Spurs. I hate draft lotteries, as I’ve said before, and I hated them even before the 2023 lottery balls fell in favor of the Spurs and sent Victor Wembanyama to Texas when he should have been drafted by my Detroit Pistons, who just sucked (Detroit was founded by the French, after all!). But I find the celebrity and mass support for the Knicks too cloying, and it remains very funny to me that the Knicks haven’t won a title since 1973 and the city hasn’t won an MLB, NBA, NFL, or NHL title since 2012 (and that team, the Giants, play in New Jersey). Funny enough, I remember a young Jason avidly rooting for the Knicks over the Spurs in 1999, and being very sad when Latrell Sprewell missed a last-second shot that clinched it for the Spurs.

As for the Stanley Cup Finals, I am much more pleased to root for the Carolina Hurricanes. Coach Rod Brind’Amour played at Michigan State, who I root for. They’ve won the Stanley Cup once, but it was 20 years ago. Lately they’ve made the playoffs eight years in a row but have no Cup to show for it, so I feel like they’ve earned it thanks to consistency. Vegas, meanwhile, I hold a grudge against for doing so well in their inaugural season, has a coach I don’t like (plus I’d rather not set a good example for other teams thinking about firing their coach in the closing weeks of the regular season), and in the past has taken advantage of some sketchy injured reserve usage and salary cap tactics.

Whoever you’re rooting for, take 2 seconds to vote in the survey, and feel free to explain why.

Replay of the Week

I won’t have many opportunities to brag about Detroit sports for a while, so please indulge me for some back-to-back-to-back home runs.

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real event of the weekend—who needs college sports when you’ve got the American Cornhole League’s Fort Worth Signature Open?

The post The Protect College Sports Act Trades NCAA Chaos for Federal Overreach appeared first on Reason.com.

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Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy


A mother holding the hand of her child | Princeton University Press

Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America, by Kira Ganga Kieffer, Princeton University Press, 304 pages, $29.95

In Unvaccinated Under God, Kira Ganga Kieffer unpacks the recent history of vaccine hesitancy in America. Kieffer, a religious studies scholar at Fairfield University, offers a way to understand hesitancy itself as a form of religious expression, even when it arises among people not bound by particular spiritual traditions.

Unlike many people who tackle this topic, Kieffer treats the vaccine-hesitant with respect and curiosity, not contempt. As a result, the book leaves you not seething in rage but a little sad, the same way you might feel if your grandmother’s vase shattered into a million pieces: wistful for what was before and resigned to the fact that it may never be that way yet again.

Kieffer opens in the 1980s, when worries about the safety of the DPT vaccine prompted parents to lobby for a safer vaccine and informed consent. They had reasonable concerns: As she notes, data in medical journals from the 1940s through the ’80s showed that the pertussis portion of the DPT shot “increased a vaccine recipient’s risk of developing encephalitis, or brain inflammation.” To show how vaccine hesitancy can be understood as religious expression, Kieffer unpacks what she calls “vaccine-injury conversion narratives”: personal testimonials from families whose children suffered brain damage after the shot. These narratives echo the sort of I-once-was-lost-but-now-I’m-found stories that show up on testimony night after a Wednesday-night church potluck.

The next section, on the fear of a vaccine-autism link, traces how the “implicit religiosity” of three cultural trends of the early 2000s—natural health, alternative spirituality, and intensive mothering—collided with other shifts in American culture, including rising individualism and growing distrust for authority. Like two weather systems meeting over Kansas, this collision produced a cultural tornado: a movement of mothers who valued their own intuition and moral certainty over mainstream views of the MMR vaccine. The doctors believed they’d provided more than ample scientific evidence demonstrating that the mercury in the shot couldn’t possibly cause autism. The mothers disagreed, and their belief got mixed with a fear that injecting foreign substances into their children’s pure bodies could cause “biological, psychological or spiritual disruption.” It didn’t help that at this stage, most experts didn’t try very hard to thoughtfully engage with the mothers’ sincere questions. The schism grew.

Kieffer also devotes a chapter to the Gardasil vaccine, where the religiously based objections were fairly straightforward, given that the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted disease. Another chapter explores how a history of medical racism fostered vaccine hesitancy in minority communities. One of the most interesting chapters compares and contrasts the public health and media response to measles outbreaks among four distinct communities.

The four case studies involve a white, conservative evangelical megachurch in Dallas; a Somali-American Muslim community in Minneapolis; an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York; and New York’s Green Meadow Waldorf School, a well-educated enclave of holistic, progressive families who didn’t subscribe to traditional religious beliefs but articulated their vaccine objections in the language of religious exemption. Though the measles saw no difference among its victims and the outbreaks began within a span of nine years (2011–2019), the experts tasked with managing outbreaks and the media telling their stories “regarded some groups as legitimate and others as illegitimate in their vaccine hesitancy.” The press treated the Somalis, for example, as “helpless victims of misinformation and manipulation” who therefore “deserved empathy and education,” while the evangelicals and Jews were hit with “moral shaming for displaying ‘willful ignorance.'” Even the experts use extra-scientific values, some held with religious-like ardor, when navigating the complexities of life.

Throughout those chapters, Kieffer avoids the easy tropes that often replace meaningful understanding, a lesson I wish more in the medical establishment would learn. Rather than framing vaccine hesitancy as “simply oppositional to science,” Kieffer recognizes that it stems from “critical perspectives on authority” and on “where knowledge derives, who is most in charge, and what really matters.” But she has trouble sticking to this objective position when she gets to COVID: She attributes vaccine opposition then to “conservative identity politics, in which primarily White conservative Christians questioned the validity of public health and biomedical authority.”

Kieffer looks at not just vaccines but masking, social distancing, and quarantining through this narrow lens, not recognizing that dissenters came from diverse ideological camps—and that sometimes they were right. Shutting down schools really did harm students, for example, and the virus may well have originated in a Chinese lab after all. The “dystopic vision,” as she calls it, of a world dictated by authoritarians who control supply chains and restrict freedom of movement wasn’t just the stuff of right-wing conspiracy theories; people watched what happened in China and Canada and worried about similar controls coming to the U.S.

Kieffer isn’t wrong that “MAGA media outlets framed lockdowns as assaults on personal liberties,” but that isn’t the whole story, and her COVID chapter would have been stronger if she’d spent more time taking dissenters seriously. For example, many conservatives’ objections weren’t just about personal liberty but were rooted in communal concerns as well: the well-being of schoolchildren, of people whose work was deemed “nonessential,” and of elderly people in nursing homes turned solitary confinement units. She deep-dives into various fringe conspiracy theories, such as the notion that COVID vaccines turn people queer—an idea I’d never heard before, and I thought I’d heard every coronavirus conspiracy theory under the sun—without spending even a paragraph addressing, say, objections to vaccine mandates for young men at an increased risk for myocarditis, or the ways reasonable COVID dissenters were belittled, ostracized, and professionally discredited. These failures of discourse make it even more clear why society needs to make space for conscientious objectors and dissenters, no matter how outlandish their ideas might seem to people more comfortable with the status quo.

Kieffer’s book also suffers from a perennial problem in modern religion reporting: It allows the rather capacious and nebulous category of MAGA-populist-Christian-nationalist to stand in as a synonym for evangelicals. There are millions of faithful American Protestants—politically conservative evangelicals, even—who vaccinate their children and do not elevate “oppositional positions toward the government” as a marker of spiritual fidelity. Indeed, many of the Americans she is describing have a penchant for individual spirituality rather than submitting to the strictures of organized religion. People often take religious exemptions from vaccine requirements because that is the only pathway of personal liberty available to them, not because their pastor told them to. Deeply held religious beliefs about the collective good, formed and taught in traditional faith communities, are not what discipled them to disregard expert instructions to vaccinate their children. They arrived at that decision because of deeply held beliefs that elevate personal autonomy and self-determination and intuitive decision-making above all.

The book reads at times like an autopsy following the death of our shared sense of the collective good. But it does not offer a bridge back together, even amid signs that the chasm is growing ever more devastatingly wide. (For example, some parents are now refusing the long-established Vitamin K shot, out of what ProPublica calls a “well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution.” The refusal can result in a newborn’s death due to being unable to clot if they experience sudden brain bleeding.) Shining a light on the beliefs driving the vaccine-hesitant movement is helpful to build understanding; but to bridge the divide, we need to do the same for the deeply held beliefs animating the other end of the spectrum as well.

Instead in those powerful places, where public health decisions are made, the loudest and most ardent experts often claim they just believe the science, though they frequently lack scientific curiosity about people who disagree with them. As Kieffer demonstrates, even the experts are making their own moral judgements. Admitting that, along with practicing some intellectual humility, would do more to help rebuild trust and recover vaccination rates than obstinately doubling down on strong-arm tactics. But that would be difficult indeed. As my own faith tradition teaches, you cannot force someone to love you. Genuine expressions of self-sacrifice and other-centered love are born only out of free will.

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New in Civitas: “The Roberts Court Needs To Reboot The Machinery Of Death”

The Roberts Court seems to be methodically scaling back the excesses of the Burger Courts. But one area that has not yet been revisited is the death penalty. Despite the Court imposing “history and tradition” tests for other aspects of the Bill of Rights, the Eighth Amendment still follows the “evolving standards of decency” standard. This sort of living constitutionalism is an anathema to the notion of a written Constitution. One of the most egregious manifestations of this standard was Atkins v. Virginia. This standard was egregiously wrong and has proven impossible to implement. And murderers with purported intellectual disabilities cannot plausibly rely on this or any other Supreme Court precedent. Yet Atkins remains. Just last month the Court DIG’d Hamm v. Smith, I suspect, because Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett didn’t want to decide it. I suspect there will be leaks from the Court to make sense of this flip.

The Court needs to start over on the Eighth Amendment. Or in today’s lingo, they need a reboot. My new essay in Civitas Outlook is titled, “The Roberts Court Needs To Reboot The Machinery Of Death.”

Here is the introduction:

In the span of one year, the Burger Court created a constitutional contradiction. Furman v. Georgia (1972) proclaimed that the Eighth Amendment prohibits states from terminating the life of murderers. One year later, Roe v. Wade (1973) ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits states from protecting the life of the unborn. Both rulings represented the heights of judicial hubris. The Justices, and not the elected branches, would decide who could live and who could die. Neither ruling was even remotely plausible as an originalist matter. Both rulings led to chaos and uncertainty in the law.

While the Supreme Court would not revisit Roe for nearly two decades, the Court returned to the death penalty four years later. In the face of a popular backlash, the Court in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) allowed the states to resume executions. But this decision still allowed the judiciary to superintend capital punishment based on “evolving standards of decency.” This sort of living constitutionalism is an anathema to the notion of a written Constitution. But worse still, this standard gives liberal elites who define “decency” the power to define our justice system. This regrettable standard persists to the present. Just last week, the Supreme Court declined to resolve a capital case where mental health professionals insisted that a cold-blooded killer could not be executed because one of his five IQ scores may have been too low. The Court owes the victims of brutal murders and the Constitution far better. The machinery of death needs a reboot.

And the conclusion:

Given the ham-handed dismissal in Hamm, state Attorneys should go on offense. They should ask the Court to reverse Gregg, Atkins, and all related cases in every petition and cross-petition. The states need a power saw to remove this doctrine root and branch. The Court should once and for all eliminate the evolving standards test. The Eighth Amendment should be interpreted in an originalist fashion like the rest of the Bill of Rights. IQ tests did not exist in 1787, yet our framers somehow managed to execute people. States are free to impose greater restrictions on capital punishment or ban it altogether. But this issue is not for the judiciary to decide. Gregg v. Georgia should meet the same fate as other discarded Burger Court precedents like Roe, Bakke, Chevron, Lemon, and the list goes on.

Two decades after Gregg, Justice Harry Blackmun concluded that all forms of capital punishment were unconstitutional. Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, may have been President Nixon’s greatest mistake. Watergate was over in a few years, but Blackmun’s judicial impact stretched two decades. In Callins v. Collins (1994), Blackmun declared, “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” Blackmun got it exactly backwards. Judicial abolition of the death penalty was the problem, not the solution. The way for judges to stop tinkering with the machinery of death is to stop tinkering with the machinery of death. The Roberts Court should reboot the machinery of death, and get the judiciary out of this interminable quagmire.

The entire Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has been an abject failure at every level. In my mind, the most perverse aspect of the abolition movement is that so much effort is aimed at helping the most gruesome murderers, even as defendants who committed far less serious offenses with a greater chance of success are severely underrepresented. States are free to abolish capital punishment, and the federal courts should exit this thicket.

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Suggestion That Rabbi Endorses Jews for Jesus May Be Defamatory

From Amitay v. Jews for Jesus, decided Thursday by the California Court of Appeal (Justice Marla Miller, joined by Justices James Richman and Tara Desautels):

In December 2023, JFJ posted on its social media pages, including on Facebook and Instagram, a blurred photograph of an Israeli soldier wearing a yarmulke. Above the photograph was the following text attributed to “Nachman”: “‘Thank you for leaving at my home a copy of the New Testament. I look forward to reading it when I return home from the war’—Nachman, a young Haredi soldier.” {Haredim are sometimes referred to as ‘ultra-Orthodox,’ although this term may be considered objectionable.”} {Some of the posts went on to state: “One of the ways that God provides for His people is through the generosity of other people around the World, like you. Because of your support, we were able to give a copy of the New Testament to Nachman and more than 1,000 Israelis in 2023!”}

Amitay filed a complaint against JFJ, attaching screenshots of JFJ’s posts. He alleged that the photographs posted by JFJ were photographs of him, that they had been posted without his consent, and that defendant had defamed him …. Amitay alleged that he was a Jewish Orthodox rabbi who had “dedicated his life to the study of the Jewish Orthodox faith and committed many years studying to become a rabbi,” recounting about a dozen years of study.

He had finally gotten a job teaching at an institution in Israel where he had worked for two years, a position he described as his “dream job.” His job “suddenly came to an end as he was terminated … due to an egregious act by JFJ,” namely, “upload[ing] photos of Amitay on [its] social media pages.” He alleged: “JFJ posted a picture of [him] on their website giving the appearance that he supports JFJ’s cause. Not only was a photo uploaded, but the post included a caption also falsely expressing that [he] supported JFJ’s religious views.” Amitay alleged that he is “an Orthodox Jew, a more traditional branch of Judaism, which [has] starkly different views from JFJ.” He “never before associated with JFJ and disagrees with their religious views.” …

Amitay alleged that when his employer “saw the pictures posted online,” they “expressly stated that his termination was due to the posts online of him supporting JFJ, and that they could not condone or be associated with someone involved with JFJ or their views.” Amitay alleged that the posts were false because Amitay “has no affiliation with [JFJ] … and disagrees with [JFJ’s] religious views.” …

Amitay also submitted third party declarations. Chaim Chadad, who described himself as “a friend and acquaintance,” declared: “I saw the picture and it seems that [Amitay] writes there in favor of Christianity for a non-profit organization named Jews for Jesus.” Another friend of Amitay, David Menachem Mundel Shaher, declared: “When I saw the picture of [Amitay] with a caption to the effect that he believed in a false god, I was shocked, and it is impossible to express the extent of my shock.” A rabbi in the Israeli army declared: “I saw a picture of Ariel Amitay in the [social] media, and I was shocked that an observant Jew would write in support of Christianity for all to see…. This is contrary to his role as a religious Jew ….” …

The appellate court held that the case could go forward. Some excerpts:

JFJ’s second argument is that the posts “do not reference Amitay … by clear implication” because JFJ “blurred [his] face;” in other words, Amitay fails to sufficiently allege that the posts are of and concerning him. We disagree. In order to satisfy the “of and concerning” requirement, “the plaintiff must effectively plead that the statement at issue either expressly mentions him or refers to him by reasonable implication.” Here, as pleaded, the quote in the posts can be reasonably understood to refer to the person in the juxtaposed photograph, and Amitay has sufficiently alleged that he is the person in the photograph….

JFJ contends that “libel per quod requires plaintiff to plead and prove that the publisher intended the words to impute wrongdoing to plaintiff[,]” citing Palm Springs Tennis Club v. Rangel (Cal. App. 1999). However, we decline to impose an intent requirement, which is contrary to “the great weight of authority” including our own prior decision. (See White v. Valenta (Cal. App. 1965) [requiring the plaintiff to prove the defendant intended the defamatory meaning “is contrary to other cases [citations] and the great weight of authority”]; Carl v. McDougall (Cal. 1919) [“If the words were slanderous, the intention with which they were used is immaterial …”].) …

Amitay has presented admissible evidence that JFJ made statements to third persons who reasonably understood the statements to be about Amitay. [T]he reasonable inference from [witnesses’] statements is that each of these individuals saw the picture of Amitay in one of JFJ’s posts, recognized Amitay in the picture, and attributed to Amitay the words quoted ….

Second, Amitay has presented admissible evidence that others understood the posts to have a defamatory meaning, namely, that Amitay was supporting JFJ or its faith. (See Taus v. Loftus (Cal. 2007) [“The tort of defamation ‘involves (a) a publication that is … (c) defamatory ….’ [Citation.]”]; Civ. Code, § 45 [“Libel is a … publication … which exposes any person to hatred, contempt, ridicule, or obloquy, or which causes him to be shunned or avoided, or which has a tendency to injure him in his occupation”].)

Chadad declared: “[I]t seems that [Amitay] writes there in favor of Christianity for a non-profit organization named Jews for Jesus. I … was surprised that an educator would speak against Judaism …. This is unacceptable …. This caused me to distance myself from him for a period ….” Rabbi Eichel stated: “I saw a picture of Ariel Amitay in the [social] media, and I was shocked that an observant Jew would write in support of Christianity for all to see…. This is contrary to his role as a religious Jew, and it is testimony to his mental instability.” Shaher declared that he “saw the picture of Ariel with a caption to the effect that he believed in a false god” and “there is no place in the community for such a person or for his children.” A reasonable inference is that Shaher understood the posts to mean that Amitay had expressed support for the evangelistic views of JFJ….

JFJ contends for the first time on appeal that “deciding whether Jews for Jesus harmed Amitay’s reputation and standing would require the factfinder to improperly entangle itself in the tenets of Orthodox Judaism.” … We conclude that JFJ waived this contention for purposes of its anti-SLAPP motion. Even if we considered JFJ’s untimely argument, the argument is not persuasive….

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The Protect College Sports Act Trades NCAA Chaos for Federal Overreach


Against a blue background with the NCAA logo, a collage image with photographs of Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Maria Cantwell, a hockey player, and a basketball player. | Illustration: National Collegiate Athletic Association/Yuri Gripas - via CNP/Polaris/Gent Shkullaku/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom/Jiawangkun/Aspenphoto/Dreamstime

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Watch where you’re driving this week, and keep an eye out for innocent bystanders, please.

Today’s newsletter is a beast, covering the Protect College Sports Act—a 101-page bill just introduced in the Senate that has huge implications for college sports. We’ve got everything you need to know, everything right and wrong with the bill, and whether it can pass and become law.

But first, if you want to fill out our survey on the NBA and NHL finals, let me know who you’re rooting for here.

Locker Room Links

  • Steph Curry signed a new decade-long shoe deal—with Li-Ning, a Chinese company that also has a deal with Curry’s teammate, Jimmy Butler.
  • MLB owners formally proposed a salary cap to the players union. The proposal includes a salary floor, which would have forced 12 teams to spend more if it were in place this season (and 10 teams to spend less). The union obviously said no, especially because the union’s executive subcommittee includes high-end players like Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes who want no cap whatsoever.
  • Speaking of MLB, some owners are questioning whether league expansion makes sense right now (good, in my opinion!).
  • Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s attorney sent a cease and desist demand to fantasy sports company Underdog, which made a board game poking fun at SGA. Underdog refused to comply, and the whole thing screams of the Streisand effect.
  • The South African soccer team’s travel to the U.S. for the World Cup was delayed due to visa issues—they eventually left without their assistant coach.
  • Elsewhere in Reason: It was a sportsy week, with coverage of the Chicago Bears stadium debacle (which might now be over) and Nick Gillespie sounding off on private equity and youth sports.
  • Do you like or dislike how different the NBA is every year?

Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell Look To ‘Protect’ College Sports

After the failure of the SCORE Act in the House of Representatives, there’s a new bill on the Senate side to “protect” college sports. Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.) introduced the Protect College Sports Act on Wednesday. The bill is the NCAA’s best chance yet (if only because every other effort has failed) to get its long-awaited help from Congress in wresting back control of college sports.

It’s a wide-ranging bill that covers a lot of things you’d expect (name, image, and likeness [NIL] payments and transfer rules) and touches more aspects you probably wouldn’t have thought Congress would weigh in on (conference realignment, coach movement, and scheduling of both college football and NFL games).

On transfers, the bill would only allow student-athletes to transfer schools once (additional transfers would require a season off, unless the athlete is transferring because their coach left or the school eliminated the team). Athletes would have a maximum of five years of eligibility for college sports, with exceptions for pregnancies, missionary work, military service, and any other reason approved en masse by the NCAA. Any athlete who’s played professionally would have no eligibility (to oversimplify: prize money is allowed, salaries are not, and the NCAA would have discretion to decide what’s allowed).

The NCAA and the College Sports Commission (formed in 2025) would have legal backing to enforce their NIL rules. That includes a “salary” cap, where schools would have $21.3 million to spend on their student-athletes across all sports. The College Sports Commission would basically be able to determine what payments are under-the-table NIL payments designed to go around the compensation cap. As Cruz described it: “If it’s fake NIL, if it is a booster just handing an athlete a bag of cash under the table, that is breaking the rules.”

The bill also stops conference realignment in its tracks—at least for the Big Ten and SEC. Conferences with $1 billion in revenue in 2025 would not be allowed to merge or add members. (That restriction only applies to 2025 revenue, so even if revenue changes, it still only applies to those two conferences in perpetuity.)

It also includes the infamous “Lane Kiffin rule,” where coaches and key staff are not allowed to leave for another team in the same season—not just for gameday coaching functions, but also for recruiting and other off-the-field purposes.

Conferences would be given an antitrust exemption to pool their media rights—if they want to. The smaller conferences would have to placate the Big Ten and SEC to get them involved, though. One thing that would probably stand in the way of a deal big enough to entice the Big Ten and SEC: If a certain basketball or football game is going to be shown exclusively on a streaming platform, the broadcaster would still have to make that game available in a university’s market area “without charge” (i.e. on network TV or cable, even though people pay for cable—free content on a streaming platform would be allowed too). The Federal Communications Commission would oversee which local markets each school’s games must be shown in. That’s going to diminish the financial value of any deal offered by broadcasters to the conferences. Furthermore, any school in a conference that pools its media rights would fall under new rules over “traditional rivalry”—its football team could be required to play a certain team every four years or every year if the teams have played each other often enough in the past.

By law, student-athletes would be allowed to have an agent and wouldn’t lose eligibility for hiring one. Agents for student-athletes would have to register with a state government and would have their fees capped at 5 percent.

It’s not getting much media coverage, but the bill also requires various safety standards relating to concussions, heat injuries, asthma, and other ailments (by outsourcing these standards to various nongovernmental bodies, usually the NCAA). Medical personnel get “autonomous, unchallengeable authority to determine medical management and return to play decisions” in the bill’s text, and “No coach or other nonmedical personnel of an institution may attempt to influence or disregard” those decisions.

If it passed, you could also say goodbye to a few more quirks in the NFL schedule: the NFL would not be allowed to broadcast on the first Friday in September (as of now, it’s the second) or the third Saturday in December (as of now, it’s the second). The college football season would also be legally required to end by January 8 every year, “to the extent practicable.”

One thing the bill doesn’t touch on, because movement in either direction would be a poison pill for either side of the aisle, is whether student-athletes are employees. Democrats generally want to see them designated as employees so that the athletes have collective bargaining rights and could form a union, while Republicans (and the NCAA) generally want the law to prevent that. Cantwell insists the collective bargaining debate is not over.

The Consequences

If you read all of that and thought, “Wow, it’s kind of crazy that Congress is going to set the governing rules for a major sports entity,” I’m with you. A lot of this feels like overreach that people would find crazy in other industries, even if you agree with the aims (like transfer rules—restricting athletes to one transfer is inevitably going to end up challenged in court, or with as many loopholes as Swiss cheese).

Consider, for example, the health and safety standards. Obviously we want healthy athletes (even at your rival college). But giving “autonomous, unchallengeable” power to medical personnel seems like a reach. Perhaps your star running back takes a knock and is only feeling 95 percent ready to play in the national championship game, and there’s a minuscule chance of a career-ending injury. If he wants to take the risk, and the coach wants to take the risk, the medical staff can still keep the player out—the coach is not even allowed to appeal and try to “influence” that decision.

The bill is wise to not directly set the safety standards on concussions and other ailments into law. But outsourcing those standards to the NCAA and other organizations doesn’t mean we can trust them to stay up-to-date with the latest scientific findings.

Perhaps you hate conference realignment and are sick of the Big Ten and SEC expanding. Consider two possible loopholes to the bill. First, every other conference would still be allowed to merge and expand. In theory, every other conference could join together and start their own superleague without the Big Ten and SEC. Second, the bill doesn’t actually stop the current schools of the Big Ten and SEC from forming a superleague—those schools could still leave the NCAA altogether for a newly formed entity.

What about the proposed salary cap? That’s just asking for under-the-table deals, like the paper bags full of cash that were rumored to run recruitment in the days of college sports yore. As Ross Dellenger wrote in great coverage of the bill for Yahoo Sports, “Next year, each school has $21.3 million to spend on all of their athletes, but many programs, in order to achieve an advantage in a competitive recruiting environment, have redirected corporate sponsor cash to their rosters disguised as third-party NIL — compensation that doesn’t count against the cap.” You might think it’s wise for a cap to slow down the arms race on NIL payments, but market value always prevails—the cap is just going to move the payments into the darkness.

Likewise, the “Lane Kiffin rule” is obviously unworkable. Coaches will reach under-the-table deals to upgrade to bigger schools that will just get finalized on the first day allowed. They’ll zone out of their current job and start backchannel communications with recruits and their agents for their new . The rule is possibly unconstitutional anyway under other employment laws. The NCAA has failed to enforce its own rules for decades. Why do we think it would successfully enforce this one?

There’s also the rule that keeps athletes who have played professionally from returning to college sports. This made a lot more sense when the NCAA had strict amateurism rules—now it’s a bit rich considering the payments players are getting to be good at sports. It’s essentially saying: “Yes, you got paid to be good at sports. But you weren’t paid by us, you were paid by some Italians, so you’re banned.”

The bill has some good reforms, to be fair, but they’re mostly codifying certain things that are already happening anyway (like NIL payments and the right to hire an agent). One major improvement is the antitrust exemption, which allows conferences to pool their media rights together—but even that comes with a ton of restrictions.

Congress should not be managing the NCAA just because the organization failed to manage itself for decades. Imagine if Congress got involved in MLB in the 1960s and said the league couldn’t let the American League and National League merge for business purposes, or that they couldn’t expand or let teams relocate. What if the NBA said “Our tanking problem is out of control, Congress can you please fix the draft lottery for us?” Congress is trying to micromanage football schedules when it should be trying to assert its authority over trade and military actions. Instead of the economy or life-and-death issues, they’re spending their time on what is basically an entertainment industry that exists to promote colleges to prospective students.

Will the Bill Pass?

I’m not saying you should disregard all of this, but the bill probably won’t pass, at least not as it currently stands. Even if it fails, another effort to reform college sports will come up in the future that will include many of these ideas.

Sportswriter Jesse Dougherty talked to sources on Capitol Hill for insights on whether the bill can pass. Many were waiting to see how Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) weighed in, since he often sets the tone for progressives in the Senate. Murphy eventually released a statement that said: “We are all still reading this bill…but this seems like a great deal for the NCAA and the rich guys who run college sports, and a bad deal for athletes.” It seems like a safe bet the Congressional Black Caucus will agree with him, since gerrymandering is still a thing.

Combine progressive opposition with the fact that most of the powerful schools don’t want it. The SEC came out strong against the bill (at least on the pooling of media rights), and only a few people affiliated with Big Ten and SEC schools have come out in support. If the athletic departments, administrators, alumni, and boosters for the biggest, most powerful schools in the South and Midwest are all yelling at their members of Congress to oppose the bill, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

If you were looking at this issue from a purely left-right perspective, though, Republicans might want to take this deal. It accomplishes much of what they want, and it seems unlikely that congressional Republicans will have more power after the 2026 midterm elections, and probably not after the 2028 elections either. (I shudder to think of what a Democratic trifecta under President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would do to college sports.)

On Wednesday morning, Cruz and the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing about the bill featuring testimony by Nick Saban, Notre Dame’s athletic director, former president of Ohio State and other universities Gordon Gee, the Pac-12 commissioner (yes, it still exists!), and a Utah football player. It will be interesting to see what each senator says about the bill and to parse the questions they ask witnesses.

Who You Got?

Now for the fun part: Who are you rooting for in the NBA and Stanley Cup finals? Fill out this survey here and let me know. I’ll share the results next week.

I, for one, am extremely begrudgingly rooting for the San Antonio Spurs. I hate draft lotteries, as I’ve said before, and I hated them even before the 2023 lottery balls fell in favor of the Spurs and sent Victor Wembanyama to Texas when he should have been drafted by my Detroit Pistons, who just sucked (Detroit was founded by the French, after all!). But I find the celebrity and mass support for the Knicks too cloying, and it remains very funny to me that the Knicks haven’t won a title since 1973 and the city hasn’t won an MLB, NBA, NFL, or NHL title since 2012 (and that team, the Giants, play in New Jersey). Funny enough, I remember a young Jason avidly rooting for the Knicks over the Spurs in 1999, and being very sad when Latrell Sprewell missed a last-second shot that clinched it for the Spurs.

As for the Stanley Cup Finals, I am much more pleased to root for the Carolina Hurricanes. Coach Rod Brind’Amour played at Michigan State, who I root for. They’ve won the Stanley Cup once, but it was 20 years ago. Lately they’ve made the playoffs eight years in a row but have no Cup to show for it, so I feel like they’ve earned it thanks to consistency. Vegas, meanwhile, I hold a grudge against for doing so well in their inaugural season, has a coach I don’t like (plus I’d rather not set a good example for other teams thinking about firing their coach in the closing weeks of the regular season), and in the past has taken advantage of some sketchy injured reserve usage and salary cap tactics.

Whoever you’re rooting for, take 2 seconds to vote in the survey, and feel free to explain why.

Replay of the Week

I won’t have many opportunities to brag about Detroit sports for a while, so please indulge me for some back-to-back-to-back home runs.

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real event of the weekend—who needs college sports when you’ve got the American Cornhole League’s Fort Worth Signature Open?

The post The Protect College Sports Act Trades NCAA Chaos for Federal Overreach appeared first on Reason.com.

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Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy


A mother holding the hand of her child | Princeton University Press

Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America, by Kira Ganga Kieffer, Princeton University Press, 304 pages, $29.95

In Unvaccinated Under God, Kira Ganga Kieffer unpacks the recent history of vaccine hesitancy in America. Kieffer, a religious studies scholar at Fairfield University, offers a way to understand hesitancy itself as a form of religious expression, even when it arises among people not bound by particular spiritual traditions.

Unlike many people who tackle this topic, Kieffer treats the vaccine-hesitant with respect and curiosity, not contempt. As a result, the book leaves you not seething in rage but a little sad, the same way you might feel if your grandmother’s vase shattered into a million pieces: wistful for what was before and resigned to the fact that it may never be that way yet again.

Kieffer opens in the 1980s, when worries about the safety of the DPT vaccine prompted parents to lobby for a safer vaccine and informed consent. They had reasonable concerns: As she notes, data in medical journals from the 1940s through the ’80s showed that the pertussis portion of the DPT shot “increased a vaccine recipient’s risk of developing encephalitis, or brain inflammation.” To show how vaccine hesitancy can be understood as religious expression, Kieffer unpacks what she calls “vaccine-injury conversion narratives”: personal testimonials from families whose children suffered brain damage after the shot. These narratives echo the sort of I-once-was-lost-but-now-I’m-found stories that show up on testimony night after a Wednesday-night church potluck.

The next section, on the fear of a vaccine-autism link, traces how the “implicit religiosity” of three cultural trends of the early 2000s—natural health, alternative spirituality, and intensive mothering—collided with other shifts in American culture, including rising individualism and growing distrust for authority. Like two weather systems meeting over Kansas, this collision produced a cultural tornado: a movement of mothers who valued their own intuition and moral certainty over mainstream views of the MMR vaccine. The doctors believed they’d provided more than ample scientific evidence demonstrating that the mercury in the shot couldn’t possibly cause autism. The mothers disagreed, and their belief got mixed with a fear that injecting foreign substances into their children’s pure bodies could cause “biological, psychological or spiritual disruption.” It didn’t help that at this stage, most experts didn’t try very hard to thoughtfully engage with the mothers’ sincere questions. The schism grew.

Kieffer also devotes a chapter to the Gardasil vaccine, where the religiously based objections were fairly straightforward, given that the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted disease. Another chapter explores how a history of medical racism fostered vaccine hesitancy in minority communities. One of the most interesting chapters compares and contrasts the public health and media response to measles outbreaks among four distinct communities.

The four case studies involve a white, conservative evangelical megachurch in Dallas; a Somali-American Muslim community in Minneapolis; an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York; and New York’s Green Meadow Waldorf School, a well-educated enclave of holistic, progressive families who didn’t subscribe to traditional religious beliefs but articulated their vaccine objections in the language of religious exemption. Though the measles saw no difference among its victims and the outbreaks began within a span of nine years (2011–2019), the experts tasked with managing outbreaks and the media telling their stories “regarded some groups as legitimate and others as illegitimate in their vaccine hesitancy.” The press treated the Somalis, for example, as “helpless victims of misinformation and manipulation” who therefore “deserved empathy and education,” while the evangelicals and Jews were hit with “moral shaming for displaying ‘willful ignorance.'” Even the experts use extra-scientific values, some held with religious-like ardor, when navigating the complexities of life.

Throughout those chapters, Kieffer avoids the easy tropes that often replace meaningful understanding, a lesson I wish more in the medical establishment would learn. Rather than framing vaccine hesitancy as “simply oppositional to science,” Kieffer recognizes that it stems from “critical perspectives on authority” and on “where knowledge derives, who is most in charge, and what really matters.” But she has trouble sticking to this objective position when she gets to COVID: She attributes vaccine opposition then to “conservative identity politics, in which primarily White conservative Christians questioned the validity of public health and biomedical authority.”

Kieffer looks at not just vaccines but masking, social distancing, and quarantining through this narrow lens, not recognizing that dissenters came from diverse ideological camps—and that sometimes they were right. Shutting down schools really did harm students, for example, and the virus may well have originated in a Chinese lab after all. The “dystopic vision,” as she calls it, of a world dictated by authoritarians who control supply chains and restrict freedom of movement wasn’t just the stuff of right-wing conspiracy theories; people watched what happened in China and Canada and worried about similar controls coming to the U.S.

Kieffer isn’t wrong that “MAGA media outlets framed lockdowns as assaults on personal liberties,” but that isn’t the whole story, and her COVID chapter would have been stronger if she’d spent more time taking dissenters seriously. For example, many conservatives’ objections weren’t just about personal liberty but were rooted in communal concerns as well: the well-being of schoolchildren, of people whose work was deemed “nonessential,” and of elderly people in nursing homes turned solitary confinement units. She deep-dives into various fringe conspiracy theories, such as the notion that COVID vaccines turn people queer—an idea I’d never heard before, and I thought I’d heard every coronavirus conspiracy theory under the sun—without spending even a paragraph addressing, say, objections to vaccine mandates for young men at an increased risk for myocarditis, or the ways reasonable COVID dissenters were belittled, ostracized, and professionally discredited. These failures of discourse make it even more clear why society needs to make space for conscientious objectors and dissenters, no matter how outlandish their ideas might seem to people more comfortable with the status quo.

Kieffer’s book also suffers from a perennial problem in modern religion reporting: It allows the rather capacious and nebulous category of MAGA-populist-Christian-nationalist to stand in as a synonym for evangelicals. There are millions of faithful American Protestants—politically conservative evangelicals, even—who vaccinate their children and do not elevate “oppositional positions toward the government” as a marker of spiritual fidelity. Indeed, many of the Americans she is describing have a penchant for individual spirituality rather than submitting to the strictures of organized religion. People often take religious exemptions from vaccine requirements because that is the only pathway of personal liberty available to them, not because their pastor told them to. Deeply held religious beliefs about the collective good, formed and taught in traditional faith communities, are not what discipled them to disregard expert instructions to vaccinate their children. They arrived at that decision because of deeply held beliefs that elevate personal autonomy and self-determination and intuitive decision-making above all.

The book reads at times like an autopsy following the death of our shared sense of the collective good. But it does not offer a bridge back together, even amid signs that the chasm is growing ever more devastatingly wide. (For example, some parents are now refusing the long-established Vitamin K shot, out of what ProPublica calls a “well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution.” The refusal can result in a newborn’s death due to being unable to clot if they experience sudden brain bleeding.) Shining a light on the beliefs driving the vaccine-hesitant movement is helpful to build understanding; but to bridge the divide, we need to do the same for the deeply held beliefs animating the other end of the spectrum as well.

Instead in those powerful places, where public health decisions are made, the loudest and most ardent experts often claim they just believe the science, though they frequently lack scientific curiosity about people who disagree with them. As Kieffer demonstrates, even the experts are making their own moral judgements. Admitting that, along with practicing some intellectual humility, would do more to help rebuild trust and recover vaccination rates than obstinately doubling down on strong-arm tactics. But that would be difficult indeed. As my own faith tradition teaches, you cannot force someone to love you. Genuine expressions of self-sacrifice and other-centered love are born only out of free will.

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New in Civitas: “The Roberts Court Needs To Reboot The Machinery Of Death”

The Roberts Court seems to be methodically scaling back the excesses of the Burger Courts. But one area that has not yet been revisited is the death penalty. Despite the Court imposing “history and tradition” tests for other aspects of the Bill of Rights, the Eighth Amendment still follows the “evolving standards of decency” standard. This sort of living constitutionalism is an anathema to the notion of a written Constitution. One of the most egregious manifestations of this standard was Atkins v. Virginia. This standard was egregiously wrong and has proven impossible to implement. And murderers with purported intellectual disabilities cannot plausibly rely on this or any other Supreme Court precedent. Yet Atkins remains. Just last month the Court DIG’d Hamm v. Smith, I suspect, because Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett didn’t want to decide it. I suspect there will be leaks from the Court to make sense of this flip.

The Court needs to start over on the Eighth Amendment. Or in today’s lingo, they need a reboot. My new essay in Civitas Outlook is titled, “The Roberts Court Needs To Reboot The Machinery Of Death.”

Here is the introduction:

In the span of one year, the Burger Court created a constitutional contradiction. Furman v. Georgia (1972) proclaimed that the Eighth Amendment prohibits states from terminating the life of murderers. One year later, Roe v. Wade (1973) ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits states from protecting the life of the unborn. Both rulings represented the heights of judicial hubris. The Justices, and not the elected branches, would decide who could live and who could die. Neither ruling was even remotely plausible as an originalist matter. Both rulings led to chaos and uncertainty in the law.

While the Supreme Court would not revisit Roe for nearly two decades, the Court returned to the death penalty four years later. In the face of a popular backlash, the Court in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) allowed the states to resume executions. But this decision still allowed the judiciary to superintend capital punishment based on “evolving standards of decency.” This sort of living constitutionalism is an anathema to the notion of a written Constitution. But worse still, this standard gives liberal elites who define “decency” the power to define our justice system. This regrettable standard persists to the present. Just last week, the Supreme Court declined to resolve a capital case where mental health professionals insisted that a cold-blooded killer could not be executed because one of his five IQ scores may have been too low. The Court owes the victims of brutal murders and the Constitution far better. The machinery of death needs a reboot.

And the conclusion:

Given the ham-handed dismissal in Hamm, state Attorneys should go on offense. They should ask the Court to reverse Gregg, Atkins, and all related cases in every petition and cross-petition. The states need a power saw to remove this doctrine root and branch. The Court should once and for all eliminate the evolving standards test. The Eighth Amendment should be interpreted in an originalist fashion like the rest of the Bill of Rights. IQ tests did not exist in 1787, yet our framers somehow managed to execute people. States are free to impose greater restrictions on capital punishment or ban it altogether. But this issue is not for the judiciary to decide. Gregg v. Georgia should meet the same fate as other discarded Burger Court precedents like Roe, Bakke, Chevron, Lemon, and the list goes on.

Two decades after Gregg, Justice Harry Blackmun concluded that all forms of capital punishment were unconstitutional. Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, may have been President Nixon’s greatest mistake. Watergate was over in a few years, but Blackmun’s judicial impact stretched two decades. In Callins v. Collins (1994), Blackmun declared, “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” Blackmun got it exactly backwards. Judicial abolition of the death penalty was the problem, not the solution. The way for judges to stop tinkering with the machinery of death is to stop tinkering with the machinery of death. The Roberts Court should reboot the machinery of death, and get the judiciary out of this interminable quagmire.

The entire Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has been an abject failure at every level. In my mind, the most perverse aspect of the abolition movement is that so much effort is aimed at helping the most gruesome murderers, even as defendants who committed far less serious offenses with a greater chance of success are severely underrepresented. States are free to abolish capital punishment, and the federal courts should exit this thicket.

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Shocking JOLTS: Job Openings Soar By 731K, 9-Sigma Beat, As Quits Bizarrely Plunge To 6 Year Low

Shocking JOLTS: Job Openings Soar By 731K, 9-Sigma Beat, As Quits Bizarrely Plunge To 6 Year Low

We had to do a double take when the BLS reported today’s JOLTS job openings: with consensus expecting no change from last month’s print of 6.866MM, and near the lowest in two years, moments ago a flashing red headline revealed that in April the US added a stunning 731K jobs to 7.618 million, up from an upward revised 6.887 million, and up 520K from a year ago.

For context, this was a 9 sigma beat to expectations, the biggest beat in history.

WTF!?…  and how is this possible at a time when companies are mass laying off thanks to AI? Well, according to the BLS,the number of job openings increased in professional and business services (+668,000), and also rose in manufacturing, manufacturing, and – alas – government. Jobs stumbled in finance and insurance (-135,000). 

This was the biggest monthly increase in professional and business services by a huge margin. It wasn’t clear what exactly job category prompted this surge.

Meanwhile, the draining of the swamp appears to be officially over with government jobs jumping by 47K to 777K, the biggest monthly increase this year.

The historic surge in April job openings, coupled with the modest increase in unemployed workers means that after 9 months of labor surplus, there were 245K more job openings than unemployed workers in April, a reversal to the “deficit” regime observed since last July.

The surge in openings also means that after falling back to 0.9x in March, in April the ratio of job openings rose back to 1.0x and was the highest since January 2025.

But while the job openings number was a shock, this month we saw a reversal of last month’s surge in hires and quits, and in April both the number of Quits and Hires, tumbled once more. Specifically, hires plunged by 419K to 4.899 million, while quits – or the “take his job and shove it” indicator – plunged by 183K, or 5.8%, to 2.977 million, the lowest since 2020 and the biggest percentage drop since April 2025, as Americans are suddenly allergic to leaving their jobs on their own.

It goes without saying that a surge in job openings even as nobody is leaving their jobs, leads one to scratch their head just what is going on here, besides data massaging of course.

In any case, since this hires number feeds directly into the payrolls calculations (after netting out separations) this explains why the April payrolls report slumped to 115K from 185K in March. 

Overall, this was a shockingly strong JOLTS report – so strong in fact one wonders who at the BLS had a fat finger incident when calculating the professional and business services job openings, and shows that after some significant weakness in late 2025, US labor market has continued to stabilize in early 2026. Of course, the report also lags the payrolls report by a month, which is why it gives us little insight into what Friday’s jobs report will be. 

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/02/2026 – 10:44

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Russia Unleashes Its Threatened Mass Bombardment: At Least 18 Killed, Over 100 Wounded Across Ukraine

Russia Unleashes Its Threatened Mass Bombardment: At Least 18 Killed, Over 100 Wounded Across Ukraine

The Kremlin spent much of the last week warning foreign diplomats and bystanders to evacuate Ukraine’s capital, warning that an escalation in airstrikes is imminent, in response to Ukraine’s own drone swarms sent against Moscow and other Russian sites last month – especially the Starobelsk dormitory attack.

“In response to terrorist attacks by the Kyiv regime, the Russian Armed Forces launched a large-scale strike using long-range, high-precision air, land and sea-based weapons — including hypersonic aero-ballistic missiles and attack drones,” the Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) said in a statement. “The objectives of the strike were achieved. All designated targets were hit,” it added.

In the wake of these devastating overnight attacks, Ukraine is reporting that at least 18 people were killed and over 100 more wounded. The hours-long assault was clearly one of the biggest and deadliest of the last year or more.

Tuesday attack on Ukraine’s capital, via Reuters

Ukraine’s air force tallied that over 640 drones were sent and 73 missiles were fired on various cities, including Kyiv, and Dnipro, as well as several eastern cities, including Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine claims it intercepted the majority of these, but still dozens of projectiles made it through to impact.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko later confirmed that six people were killed in the Ukrainian capital and that at least 66 others, including two children, were wounded.

There was mayhem as people fled to shelters during the nighttime “mass enemy attack”. The mayor had warned while it unfolded: “Explosions in the city. Air defense forces are working! Stay in shelters!”

Central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region also saw high casualties, with at least 12 people killed and 36 others wounded. The regional governor reported that children were among the injured.

Moscow has not owned up to inflicting civilian casualties in the fresh overnight assault, but has instead framed this as part of its previewed “systematic and consistent strikes” on Ukraine’s military infrastructure.

President Putin and top military brass had last month said strikes would be initiated against “decision-making centers” in response to the dorm attack in the Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic on May 22, which killed 21 people – mostly teenage girls – and injured 70 others.

Kremlin officials now say that Russian forces have “a right to dismantle any infrastructure that supports terrorism.”

Despite this clear escalation, peace talks are nowhere on the horizon, also as the White House’s attention is currently fixated on the Iran war and Hormuz Strait crisis. Russia has in the meantime benefited from the Iran crisis, with sanctions relief on its oil exports from Washington, and elevated crude prices. 

President Trump is on a daily basis dealing with now largely stalemated back-and-forth diplomatic messaging with Tehran, and so the persistent Ukraine war seems to have taken a far back seat in terms of administration priorities.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/02/2026 – 10:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/9XTOK0r Tyler Durden

Tencent Soars Most Since 2022 On Report It’s Set To Launch AI Agent For China’s Most Used App

Tencent Soars Most Since 2022 On Report It’s Set To Launch AI Agent For China’s Most Used App

Tencent shares jumped the most since late 2022 after an FT report that the Chinese company was testing a prototype AI agent for WeChat, China’s most widely used app for everything from messaging and social media to ride-hailing and payments, fueled optimism about the company’s artificial intelligence efforts. 

The Chinese internet giant plans to begin a compliance process for a public launch of the agent as soon as this month, the Financial Times reported, citing sources. After that, Tencent plans to test the agent on a small group of outside users before initiating a phased rollout, the newspaper said.

Shares of Tencent closed up 10.5%, its biggest jump since November 2022, with turnover at the highest in more than a year. The stock gave a boost to the Hang Seng Tech Index, which rose 4.7%.

Users will be able to access the chat box for the AI agent by swiping right on the main WeChat screen, according to a person who has seen an early demonstration. They can then enter instructions for the agent to automatically tap into WeChat’s millions of mini-apps, the bedrock of the app’s broad functionality, and complete tasks such as finding a café and ordering a drink based on certain flavor and price requirements.

A successful introduction of an AI agent for the popular WeChat service would mark a step forward for Tencent’s bid to catch up to rivals in the rapidly emerging technology. While Tencent has vowed to at least double investments in the field to more than 36 billion yuan ($5.3 billion) this year, it trails peers like ByteDance and Alibaba in both user adoption and advances in developing state-of-the-art large language models.

“Tencent has been a huge underperformer this year because market perceives it as an AI laggard,” said Vey-Sern Ling, managing director at Union Bancaire Privee. “The AI agent, if successful, could change such a perception. Even though there’s very little detail right now, we know Tencent has a huge ecosystem to make it work.”

According to Citigroup, while the adoption of an AI agent in WeChat had been anticipated by the market, its earlier-than-expected timing likely prompted the positive share price reaction. 

Goldman’s Graham Ambrose cautions that it’s still not clear how this will evolve and the market is so far unconvinced on Tencent management’s explanation of their strategy to confront the challenge. 

  • The infrastructure was upgraded in March
  • The Hunyuan 3.0 foundation model powering the agent was launched in April
  • A Developer Beta recently started
  • The pilot launch is planned for June for Weixin users
  • The broad roll-out is expected to be in Q3 (not confirmed by management yet) with full integration across the domestic Weixin app, including deep “AI Search” and “Agentic Pay” features.

The news sparked a major move higher in Chinese stocks: in addition to Tencent developments, a slew of positive drivers including Meituan’s earnings and upbeat delivery figures by electric vehicle makers supported the Hang Seng Tech Index. Other internet and e-commerce heavyweights such as Alibaba  and JD.com Inc. rose more than 6% as sentiment improved.

The rebound comes after the gauge, with its reliance on Chinese internet giants, has trailed the blistering surge in tech hardware-heavy benchmarks such as South Korea’s Kospi and Taiwan’s Taiex this year. 

Prosus NV, Tencent’s biggest shareholder, jumped as much as 11% on Tuesday in Amsterdam. Its parent company Naspers rose at a similar pace in Johannesburg trading. 

“Tencent’s move potentially shifts the China AI story from model development to real consumer distribution,” said Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Markets in Singapore. “It’s still too early to say, but if WeChat can integrate an AI agent into a platform with around 1.4 billion users, that gives investors a clearer path to usage, engagement and eventually monetization.” 

Bloomberg notes that even with Tuesday’s rebound, Tencent remains down about 20% for the year. Options suggest some investors are making bets on a further recovery after Tuesday’s rally, as China is about to get its own gamma squeeze. Trading of bullish options on Tencent surged to a record high, with more than 430,000 calls changing hands against 177,000 puts.

The four most-active contracts in Hong Kong were Tencent calls, and those with an exercise price 10% above Tuesday’s closing price led the pack. Meanwhile, the cost of hedging against declines in the next three months plunged to its lowest level in almost a year.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/02/2026 – 09:50

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/hQJOvY6 Tyler Durden