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The civil war in Sudan is one of the most brutal conflicts in the world today. In October 2025, a group of mutineers known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur province. RSF fighters were videoed (or videoed themselves) shooting captives and brutalizing civilians. The corpses and blood in the streets were visible from space, and estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 150,000. The U.S. State Department and U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan have both accused the RSF of genocide.

A contractor tied to U.S. special operations may have helped the RSF during the siege, Reuters and a United Nations body recently reported. Reuters reported last month that companies owned by U.S. Army Special Forces veteran Steven Shaulis were flying jets between several RSF logistics hubs throughout 2025, including one airport that was “critical” to the siege of el-Fasher. Last week, the U.N. Panel of Experts ⁠on the Sudan wrote that it had “reliable information from four sources that the aircraft had transported RSF fighters and mercenaries, as well as ‌military equipment, including drones and weapons.”

The Reuters report was clear that it was not accusing Shaulis of any wrongdoing. He did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters or a follow-up from Reason. His business partner Craig Munro told Reuters last month that reports about the flights—some of which were caught on camera or satellite imagery—were false, that they had no ties to the RSF, and that their air fleet was “carrying medical equipment for a client, in the ordinary course of our business.”

The flights came to light because of an air raid on May 2, 2025. The Sudanese military blew up a Boeing 737 just after its flight from the military section of N’Djamena International Airport in Chad to an airfield in Nyala, a town in Darfur controlled by the RSF. The plane was operated by a crew from Occidental Support Services, a company in the United Arab Emirates fully owned by Shaulis. Reuters followed up and found other flights through RSF hubs by planes from Contractor Airways, a South African company co-owned by Shaulis and Munro.

Shaulis has extensive ties in Washington, receiving at least $419 million in U.S. military and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts over the past few decades. Jack Murphy, a journalist who covers special operations, wrote in response to the Reuters report that one of Shaulis’ companies, CADG, “has been a commercial cover platform for [U.S. Joint Special Operations Command] for decades, almost exclusively by Delta [Force] these days.” U.S. Special Operations Command and CADG did not respond to a request for comment. 

The U.S. State Department and U.S. Treasury have imposed economic sanctions on both sides of Sudan’s conflict for war crimes. But U.S. partners and allies have jumped into the fray. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Ukraine support the Sudanese central government. The UAE supports the RSF, reportedly sending in supplies and laundering gold stolen by the RSF. Crossing the Red Line, a forthcoming book about the Biden administration’s foreign policy by journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed, quotes a U.S. official suggesting that the administration decided to overlook the UAE’s role in Sudan as a reward for helping counter Iran in April 2024.

The civil war started in 2023 due to a split within Sudan’s military junta, which had taken power in a 2021 coup d’etat against a pro-democracy revolution. RSF Gen. Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa mutinied against the Sudanese regular army, splitting the country in half. (He had previously been involved in the 2004 massacres in Darfur on behalf of the Sudanese government he is now fighting.) Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, and millions have been forced to flee.

Publicly, the U.S. government has rightfully stayed out of the conflict, which has only villains and worse villains. But the latest reporting raises questions about whether some people in Washington or their helpers may be discreetly throwing their weight behind one side.

The post The American Fingerprints on the Genocide in Sudan appeared first on Reason.com.

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For years, a major threat to America’s national security has marched its way through halftime shows, band camps, and concert halls—undermining the nation’s strategic ska supply and jeopardizing the domestic reserve of polka.

Finally, the Trump administration is taking action.

Brass instruments and their parts could soon be subject to additional tariffs as part of a proposal published this week by the Department of Commerce. Those new 25 percent import taxes would be an extension of the tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper that the Trump administration has imposed under the guise of protecting American national security.

The Commerce Department is seeking to extend those tariffs to a variety of products made from those three materials. The six-page document published this week invokes “national security” nine times as it explains why higher tariffs should be charged on imported construction equipment, safes, fire extinguishers, and several other items.

Obviously, all those products are serious threats to American security, and deserve to be treated as such. But none present the sort of blaring, resonant risk posed by “brass-wind musical instruments and parts and accessories thereof,” which are also included in the tariff plan.

The only people who could possibly object to this idea are just shilling for Big Tuba, right?

“It’s not immediately clear why trumpets threaten to impair U.S. security,” Bryan Riley, director of the free trade initiative at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, told Reason. “Is the Pentagon concerned that our adversaries plan to drop them on us from planes? And how exactly are trombones a security threat, but not saxophones?”

OK, Riley might have a point. Tariffs on musical instruments don’t actually make sense—and the Trump administration should know that, because it has already hiked tariffs on most instruments, with negative consequences.

The effective tariff rate on all musical instruments hit 16.6 percent during the first quarter of 2026, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). That’s three times higher than the effective rate in 2024.

Those higher taxes have caused Americans to buy fewer instruments. Musical instrument imports are down 20 percent since 2024, according to PIIE’s analysis of federal trade data.

But, hey, fewer imports ought to be good news for American makers of musical instruments, right? That’s the whole theory behind using tariffs: make imported goods more expensive to protect domestic suppliers.

Unfortunately, that promise seems to be falling flat. Conn Selmer, the Indiana-based company that has long been one of the world’s leading producers of marching band instruments, announced in January that it would be closing its French horn factory in Ohio and offshoring those production lines.

The bottom line: “Higher tariffs have raised prices and suppressed imports—particularly of instruments for beginners—without boosting domestic production,” explained Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow for PIIE, in May.

Higher tariffs on copper, which is a major component of making brass, have made it more costly for American instrument manufacturers to build everything from flugelhorns to sousaphones. The same is true across the rest of the economy because more than half of all American imports are raw materials or intermediate parts.

If the Trump administration wants to push the economy into a higher tempo, it should eliminate those tariffs—as it has done for farm equipment, food, and other items. Instead, the White House is putting more tariffs on finished instruments and asking American schools, parents, and musicians to pick up the tab.

That’s an idea that’s seriously out of tune at a time when Americans are trumpeting their worries about affordability.

And doing all this under the guise of “national security” is just nonsense. A trumpet is not a semiconductor, and there is no indication that the military is running low on bugles. If the White House is going to use its national security tariff powers in such broad and bizarre ways, Congress ought to take those powers away.

The post Trump's Newest Tariffs Could Protect America From the National Security Risk of Brass Instruments appeared first on Reason.com.

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Abdul El-Sayed has won the Michigan Democratic Senate race, and socialists really think they are surging—but they’re still lying when they say their supporters are working class.

This week, El-Sayed, a progressive, defeated the more moderate Rep. Haley Stevens (D–Mich.) even after campaigning alongside Hasan Piker, a far-left Twitch streamer who thinks America deserved 9/11 and that authoritarian China is the ideal.

That tells you everything you need to know about where the Democratic Party is headed: its primary voters absolutely hate the party establishment, and especially their leadership, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.).

They also increasingly view Israel/Gaza as a litmus test issue—and they will not stomach a candidate who is backed by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) money. There is a real case to be made that this is the main thing going on here: Democrats don’t think it’s acceptable to have a moderate position on Israel.

General election voters may feel differently. Michigan is a swing state that President Donald Trump won twice, and the Democrats might have nominated a candidate who is simply too extreme to win.

Though that’s not how El-Sayed sees it. Like so many other progressives, El-Sayed thinks his economic policies—which align with the Democratic Socialists of America—are both popular and inevitable. He thinks they’ll be embraced by the working class and he’ll be swept to victory in November.

But as the other leftist candidates are discovering, it’s not the working class falling in love with socialism: it’s affluent professionals. According to available data, Stevens actually performed better with working-class people. She cleaned up among lower-income black voters. Meanwhile, El-Sayed’s base of support is Ann Arbor. That’s my old college town, where I attended the University of Michigan. It’s full of young professionals succumbing to socialism’s influences, not working-class folks.

Make no mistake: If elected to the Senate, Abdul El-Sayed will pursue socialist policies. He was celebrating his victory, first lamenting that the government is turning us against each other before pivoting to a call for Medicare for All, a policy that would give the federal government vastly more power over our lives.

Abdul El-Sayed: "It turns out that the reason so many of is ain't got is because of the system that has corrupted our politics to take it away from us. And that is the thing that we are taking on now." pic.twitter.com/ONKgsp4NbF

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 5, 2026

To the extent I could follow what he was saying, El-Sayed is pushing a mendacious claim: that people would be wealthier and more prosperous if they endured yet another massive transfer of money and power to a vast federal health bureaucracy. Most people want more options and better prices. But this will not be accomplished by further disguising the price of medical services via an expanding system of government controls, and rationing, and subsidies.

With left-progressives like El-Sayed, and even explicit socialist candidates prevailing in Democratic primaries, the party’s identity is increasingly revealed: not a working-class party, but a party of discredited big-government ideas.

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The post Abdul El-Sayed Says He's Not a Socialist. His Policy Agenda Says Otherwise. appeared first on Reason.com.

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This morning I posted a new draft article, The Fourth Amendment After Chatrie, on SSRN.  It’s about the Supreme Court’s late June ruling, Chatrie v. United States.  The article abstract:

 At the end of the Supreme Court’s recent Term, the Court handed down a Fourth Amendment ruling in Chatrie v. United States about what is a Fourth Amendment “search.” Although the case has received little attention so far, it is a blockbuster. Chatrie presents itself as an application of precedent, but a close read shows that it repeatedly recasts old cases and adopts new principles for the Fourth Amendment. Chatrie is now the most important Fourth Amendment case on new technology, and it throws into question a wide range of existing surveillance practices.

This Article explains how Chatrie adopts a new course for the Fourth Amendment, and it explains three different readings of the case that lower courts will have to consider.  The case can be read as a decision on special rules for location privacy, raising complex questions about what counts as a location record. It can alternatively be read as a decision on cell phone privacy, prompting difficult questions about how far it extends and how cell phone records are different from other records. And it can be read as a universal ruling on privacy in corporate-held records, which would require courts to confront challenging questions of what makes information private and what the ultimate goal of Fourth Amendment protection should be. We cannot know now which reading courts will adopt, but we can already see the three choices and the questions they each raise.

Comments very welcome!

The new article is just an early draft, written rather quickly to try to make the summer/fall law review submission season, so some of the footnotes are incomplete. (No need to comment on those, or typos and the like.)  Also, I wrote this draft without reading other scholarly reactions that have come out in the five weeks since Chatrie was decided, as I wanted my first reaction to be my own, so I’ll be adding more on that score soon.   I’ll plan to post an updated version when I do.

The post New Draft Article: "The Fourth Amendment After <i>Chatrie</i>" appeared first on Reason.com.

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