This week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed expanding a ban on drones from other countries—including products it had previously approved and that are currently being sold in stores.

Two FCC agencies “propose to prohibit the continued importation and marketing of certain previously authorized equipment that has been determined to ‘pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons,'” according to a notice published July 17. “In particular, we propose to apply such prohibitions to certain previously-authorized foreign-produced uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and UAS critical components, and certain communications and video surveillance equipment.”

The ban would apply not just to drones and drone parts but also components like cameras. The notice mentions nine manufacturers by name, which the FCC seems to suspect are just front companies repackaging and selling products by DJI, a Chinese company that accounts for over 90 percent of the consumer drone market worldwide. Earlier this month, after eight of the named companies did not respond to requests for information, the FCC proposed instituting a fine of $25,000 to each one.

Federal law directs the FCC to keep a list of “communications equipment or services that pose a national security risk.” The agency then prohibits any equipment on the “covered” list from being sold, imported, or advertised in the U.S. by refusing to authorize its transmitters.

In December, the FCC banned all drones and drone components produced outside the U.S. “Ensuring a strong and resilient drone industrial base is an economic and national security priority. Relying on foreign-made UAS threatens national security,” the notice read, though it gave no specifics.

But the new proposal goes a step further. The December ban clarified it “does not impact a consumer’s ability to continue using drones they previously purchased or acquired,” nor would it prevent “retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market” previously approved models. Now, the agency is explicitly proposing to ban devices it had already approved for sale, which in many cases are currently on store shelves.

The agency granted itself this authority in October 2025, voting to “revise” its rules “by adopting a mechanism to limit the continued importation and marketing of such previously authorized covered equipment.” The new rule directed regulators to conduct a “public interest analysis” on each item, “giv[ing] particular weight to the fact that the relevant equipment was determined to pose ‘an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety and security of United States persons.'”

“If the FCC’s retroactive ban goes into effect, [covered products] should disappear from all major online retailers,” Sean Hollister writes at The Verge, “and the company may even need to write off however many cameras are still sitting in US warehouses like Amazon’s.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has long supported banning DJI, calling for adding the company to the covered list in 2021. A 2017 Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin warned DJI was “likely providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to [the] Chinese government.”

But for all its talk about DJI and other drone manufacturers posing a grave risk to Americans, the government has not been forthcoming with proof.

“The US government has never provided specific public evidence that foreign drones pose a national security threat to begin with, or why other products like cameras should be caught up in that ban,” Hollister adds.

For its part, DJI claims that an independent security audit of its products found “no evidence of data transmission outside the United States,” “no backdoors or unauthorized remote access mechanisms,” and “no unexplained radio frequency emissions.”

It’s certainly possible for Chinese-made drones to pose a threat to national security. “Beijing’s national security laws give the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) the ability to access any data collected by Chinese companies, including drone imagery,” Chris Wingate of the Heritage Foundation wrote last year. “That means every flight over a power plant, a military facility, or a U.S. city risks feeding information back to an adversary.”

But if the government decides on a whim that a consumer good it previously approved must be pulled from shelves and banned for sale, it should at least go to the trouble of proving its case.

The post FCC Wants To Ban Drones It Already Approved for Sale appeared first on Reason.com.

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During a discussion of data centers’ environmental and public health impacts at yesterday’s meeting of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) asked what one would assume she thought was a devastating rhetorical question. 

“Ask Peter Thiel, ask Elon Musk, ask Mark Zuckerberg if they want one of these data centers in their own backyard,” she said. “Ask any one of us here on this committee. If anyone wants to live right next to one of these data centers here on this committee, please raise your hand.”

This is pretty standard populist demagoguery. The billionaires investing in data centers don’t want to live next to them, so why should you have to? 

The congresswoman is probably not wrong that few billionaires would want to live next to a data center. If you can afford the scenic ocean view, why choose a boxy warehouse building full of computers as your neighbor? 

Ocasio-Cortez’s latest anti-data center grandstanding does raise one question, though. Where exactly does she think data centers can go? 

In her committee remarks, she references two specific data centers: xAI’s massive new facility in southwest Memphis and Meta’s site in Stanton Springs industrial park in rural Georgia. 

The former has provoked local opposition because of power-generating gas turbines the company installed on-site that produce nitrogen oxide emissions. 

Community groups and environmental organizations have sued xAI, alleging Clean Air Act violations. 

For their part, the company and local officials say that many of the gas turbines have been turned off following the construction of a new substation to provide power to the site and that they were adding scrubbing technology to cut their emissions. 

Meta’s Stanton Springs site has been a steady staple of Ocasio-Cortez’s committee hearing attacks on data centers. In May, she held up a jar of dirty water, which she claimed had been contaminated during the site’s construction. 

Meta itself strongly denies that its data center project has caused any pollution of local water sources. Local officials told the Environmental Protection Agency they hadn’t seen any increased requests for well water testing. For context, the water pollution some have attributed to Meta’s project is limited to a handful of private wells. 

Meanwhile, xAI’s Memphis data center is in an industrial area of the city that has long been host to pretty dirty industries, including “fossil fuel burning, steel, refining, and food processing industries.” 

One can understand why locals who’ve long contended with nearby polluting industries would want to limit any additional sources of harmful emissions. 

Even so, if every industrial use in South Memphis were replaced by a data center, the air would almost certainly get a lot cleaner. 

Compare South Memphis to a place like Loudon County, Virginia, which hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centers. According to the American Lung Association, the county’s air has continued to get a lot cleaner, even as data center construction has grown exponentially in the area. 

All things considered, data centers are pretty innocuous land uses. They consume water and power and produce heat. 

They can be dirtier if they, like xAI’s Memphis facility, burn fuel to produce their own power on-site.

Their construction can also cause negative environmental impacts, although that’s more attributable to the fact that these facilities are big than to the idea that data center operations are inherently dirty.

Regulation has a role to play in mitigating the pollution they do cause. But markets already do a lot to reduce data centers’ local impacts. 

These are big, land-hungry facilities. That’s why most data centers are built in existing industrial zones and/or rural areas where land is cheap. 

Land is cheap in those areas because there isn’t a lot of competition for acreage from people and businesses that also want to locate there. 

In other words, the economics of data centers encourage these facilities to be built in areas where there aren’t a lot of people who’ll be affected by their (usually minimal) local impacts.  

Ocasio-Cortez is seizing on, at best, an outlier of a relatively dirty data center, in the case of xAI’s Memphis site, and a likely made-up panic, in the case of Meta’s Georgia facility, to argue that even rural and industrial areas are too pristine to host data centers. 

It’s worth noting that even when data centers are planned for the literal middle of nowhere, as is the case with the massive Stratos data center in rural Box Elder County, Utah, people still find reasons to oppose it.

But if one has any optimism about the prospects of AI, or even just likes streaming Spotify and using Google Docs, data centers have to go somewhere. 

The post Where Can the Data Centers Go? appeared first on Reason.com.

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New York City government isn’t known for cutting red tape. But this week, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (yes, the democratic socialist) announced more than 50 reforms that would eliminate unnecessary regulations and high permitting and licensing fees for small businesses. 

The reforms, unveiled on Monday, cover a variety of small business issues, from outdoor dining rules to pawnbroker licenses. During a speech in the Bronx, Mamdani announced that the city would work with the state to eliminate the frozen dessert permit, which requires restaurants that already have food permits to “seek out a superfluous second permit for what they’re already doing.”

He also said the current state of regulatory affairs for barbershops is “anti-fade,” as shop owners must obtain three different permits to operate their business. Mamdani announced the city would work with the state to streamline those permits as well. Among dozens of other reforms, the Mamdani administration will also reduce street fair vendor permit fees, speed up restaurant inspections, and cut equipment registration fees from $110 to $0 for 12 months. 

Not all reforms will be implemented immediately, and those that can’t be carried out by city agencies will “require rule changes, City Council legislation, or cooperation from Albany before business owners see the effects,” reported amNY.

In addition to these proposed regulatory changes, Mamdani signed an executive order on Monday creating a task force of city agencies that will continue to identify opportunities for reform. The executive order also expands the city’s Business Express Service Team, which will assign new businesses a client manager to guide them through permitting, inspections, and licensing processes. 

Mamdani’s small business reform announcement is not surprising to those who have followed his rise. In January 2025, before he was a national figure, he released a video called “NYC is Suffering from Halalflation,” in which he explained how licensing fees and regulatory hurdles made the street food more expensive. A few months later, he promised to cut fines and fees for small businesses by 50 percent in another campaign video. Then, two weeks after he took office, he signed an executive order that stated, “the City must ensure that it is not contributing to the affordability crisis through fees, civil penalties, or regulations that are outdated, unnecessary, or otherwise creating undue hardship for honest small businesses.” The executive order directed city agencies to recommend ways to eliminate barriers facing small businesses. Monday’s proposed reforms, outlined in the Overhauling Procedures and Expanding Navigation (OPEN) plan, are the “result of those conversations.” 

He has also attempted to improve government efficiency by creating the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE). As Reason has noted before, COGE (a nod to Elon Musk’s DOGE) is gathering input from New Yorkers about ways to streamline government processes, but it’s unlikely the commission will meaningfully cut the size and scope of city government. 

Mamdani is clearly no libertarian icon. He has proposed opening government-run grocery stores, pushed for freezing the rent, and has called for higher taxes on the city’s top contributors. Mamdani’s free-market critics are well justified in opposing these policies. But if Mamdani’s critics are principled, they will welcome these pro-small business reforms. 

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Just when I thought that Biden-era antitrust antagonism against tech companies was starting to fade, President Donald Trump has nominated Adam Candeub to lead antitrust enforcement at the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Currently serving as general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, Candeub recently penned a report about how we need to criminalize pornography in order to protect marriage and promote human flourishing. Earlier generations, which he calls on us to emulate, took “measures to curb access to [sexual material] so that sexual desire could be channeled more easily into marriage,” he wrote.

Lest there’s any doubt that Candeub doesn’t simply want to target hardcore porn, he scoffs at 20th century judges who “imagined they had a moral duty to protect James Joyce’s Ulysses.”

That escalated quickly, no?

Candeub also appears to take an expansive view of antitrust enforcement, at least when it comes to Big Tech companies. In a chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025, Candeub suggests taking social media’s effect on our happiness into account when considering whether these platforms are violating antitrust laws.

Bringing Back Comstock

In “Restoring Obscenity Regulation in an Internet Age,” put out by the Heritage Foundation, Candeub applauds the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which allowed for mandatory ID checks on websites with content that lawmakers deem “harmful to minors.”

He also wants to take things further: “This decision opens the door both to a reconsideration of the current legal structure governing obscenity and, perhaps, to a return to the regulatory approach of the past,” he wrote.

In the past, “speech restrictions that [furthered] public morality” were cool and “common law courts could sanction as libel ‘any writings, pictures, or the like, of an immoral or illegal tendency,” noted Candeub. In New York, the 1866 Obscene Literature Act “made it a crime for any person to sell or give away any ‘obscene and indecent’ book, pamphlet, drawing, painting, or photograph.” Courts honored what was known as the Hicklin standard, under which determining whether material counted as criminal obscenity turned on whether it would “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences” and “states brought legal actions against Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen, James Joyce’s Ulysses—and even books like Cupid’s Yoke, a polemical critique of marriage that recommended sex outside of conjugal bonds.”

Are these the regulatory approaches of the past that Candeub wants to emulate? He doesn’t explicitly endorse prosecuting people for literature. But he does go on to call our current approach to enforcing anti-obscenity laws “a social suicide pact.”

Candeub might not want to start arresting sellers of Ulysses again today, but he does propose increasing online surveillance to enforce blocks on minors viewing sexual content (“age estimations can be made simply by analyzing publicly available online information such as your email address or even pictures of your hand movements”). And he advocates for using state and federal laws to prosecute porn websites and other online entities through which people might find porn.

“The most optimistic result under current law would be…obscenity actions for internet-distributed pornography in state courts; the existing federal laws, specifically the modern version of the Comstock Act, prohibit obscene material from interstate transmission,” he wrote. “Motivated state and local prosecutors could still get convictions in conservative communities, and national prosecutors could go against the big platforms like Google, which do not enjoy immunity from federal laws, for distributing obscenity.”

A Broader Agenda

Lest anyone think that Candeub’s animosity toward internet entities only involves the sexual, Michael McGrady notes that “he also was a key player in the first Trump administration’s effort to get rid of Section 230.”

“Candeub’s arguments are about far more than pornography,” suggests McGrady. “He is contributing, from his position as a top government legal official, to a much broader effort to revive long-discredited obscenity and vice legal doctrines and expand government authority over lawful expression and activity.”

As we’ve seen all too often over the past couple of decades, efforts to regulate the internet on the grounds of stopping porn, sex work, or sexual exploitation are all too often test cases for going after online speech and privacy more broadly.

But, you might ask, what does antitrust enforcement have to do with free speech?

Perhaps plenty, if Candeub-style antitrust maximalism starts taking off.

In his Project 2025 chapter on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Candeub signaled that he’s open to the kind of perversion of longstanding antitrust theory that we saw from Biden-administration appointees like former FTC head Lina Khan and White House policy adviser Tim Wu.

Candeub Sounds Like Lina Khan

“Despite their enormous size, [large internet platforms] have avoided significant antitrust liability or prosecution,” Candeub wrote in Project 2025. “The reasons for this are not entirely clear.”

He admitted that Big Tech companies “have been incredibly innovative and have generated tremendous efficiencies for our society, with little to no evidence of traditional consumer harm in the form of higher prices, reduced output, or a lack of innovation.” He further pointed out that “Americans report a high level of satisfaction in and trust regarding these companies.”

But in deciding whether to go after Big Tech platforms with antitrust law, perhaps “traditional economic thinking” is inadequate, Candeau suggested.

After all, “social media makes Americans less happy,” he wrote. “The FTC should be open to behavioral explanations, such as habit and small hedonic differences, as keys to
how platforms create and keep market power.”

That sure sounds like a suggestion that the U.S. use antitrust law to investigate and possibly prosecute Big Tech companies for making their platforms too likable. And whatever you think about Big Tech companies, that would be an absurd expansion of government antitrust enforcement power—and set a precedent that could be used to go after all sorts of industries.

Candeub’s chapter isn’t all bad. He decries “regulatory capture” and the “‘de-banking’ of industries and individuals.” He says that the FTC “must consider…the role of government itself in maintaining market concentration.”

But he also derides concentrated economic power for “undermining small businesses and reducing their salubrious moral effect on American civil society”—again, shades of Kahn and Wu, who both argued that large size alone could be reason to regard a company as suspect.

That’s not a great sign for Google or Apple. As DOJ antitrust head, Candeub would “take over DoJ’s ongoing antitrust matters involving Big Tech, including Google’s appeal of the landmark ruling deeming it an online search monopoly and the department’s 2024 lawsuit accusing Apple of illegally monopolising smartphone markets,” notes the Financial Times.

Using Antitrust to Accomplish Conservative Social Goals

The Times points out that “in Trump’s first administration, Candeub helped execute the president’s executive order cracking down on Big Tech over allegations that it muzzles conservative speech.” And, in his Project 2025 chapter, he alludes to “collusion” between the Biden administration and Big Tech companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The pressure put on large internet platforms by that administration—around the laptop story and other things—was certainly not good. But neither was the Trump administration’s response. And saying sites lose Section 230 protection if they’re not politically neutral would only lead to more government meddling in online content.

In Project 2025, Candeub suggested the FTC should investigate whether businesses are using “fashionable moral beliefs” like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or environment, social, and governance (ESG) for nefarious purposes. Additionally, “Congress should investigate ESG practices as a cover for anticompetitive activity and possible unfair trade practices,” he wrote.

One need not like or support every harebrained corporate social responsibility scheme to understand how the federal government attacking companies over those policies is worse.

Ditto for government going after companies that refuse “to service a lawful activity, i.e., fossil fuel extraction or gun manufacturing.” It’s one thing to suggest that such policies are bad for business, unethical to shareholders, needlessly political, or so on. It’s quite another to say we need the federal government investigating whether companies are engaging in a “political or social agenda that is unrelated to any conceivable branding” and punishing them if so.

Overall, Candeub appears comfortable wielding antitrust enforcement to accomplish government social goals, just as Kahn and other Biden-era officials did. Their goals may differ, but it’s the same expansive enforcement vision.

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In the News

Online “duty of care” bill to move forward again. A new version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), from Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, will get a markup in the Senate soon, and possibly this month. Blackburn has been opposing the heavy-handed House web-safety bill—but only because, in her opinion, it doesn’t go far enough.

Blackburn wants to impose a “duty of care” on tech platforms that would effectively be an unprecedented online censorship machine, legally requiring tech platforms to shield minors—and, by extension, the rest of us—from exposure to all sorts of content.

It’s at least heartening to hear Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) dismiss the new KOSA’s chances of passing. “It’s not clear to me at all that there are 60 votes for it,” Cruz said Tuesday, “but I am happy to have a markup and see where the votes are.”

“Blackburn’s package also could include the NO FAKES Act—which would create new restrictions on AI deepfakes—and the Apps Store Accountability Act—which would require minors to obtain parental consent before downloading apps—according to a person granted anonymity to share private negotiations,” reports Politico.

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Read This Thread

Let's clear something up: the Long Island serial killer case is not evidence that the Nordic Model works. And yet it was presented like a smoking gun – as if a man capable of stalking, torturing, and killing multiple women was one solicitation charge away from a moral awakening.

— SWOP Behind Bars (@swopbehindbars.bsky.social) 2026-07-21T22:15:06.400Z

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Follow-Up

More data that challenges “the end of reading” narrative. New York Times opinion writer David Wallace-Wells writes that he finds himself “growing more skeptical of the simplistic story that reading is going extinct,” along with other simplistic tech stories:

We tell ourselves that the smartphone has brought about fertility decline, for instance, though those declines have been going on for three-quarters of a century. We tell ourselves phones have produced a teen mental health crisis, though in global surveys there is no obvious pattern to observe. We tell ourselves social media is the reason we have such intensely polarized politics, while failing to look at the historical patterns around the arrival of cable TV. That’s not to say that smartphones aren’t affecting any of these things. It’s to say that no matter how ubiquitous, phones are just one piece of a very messy social landscape, which rarely shifts uniformly in one direction thanks to one discrete variable, let alone inevitably toward disarray and decline.

Wallace-Wells points out three key problems with the end-of-reading narrative recently promulgated by The Atlantic (which I also covered last week under the main section of this newsletter):

• Average time spent reading daily was brief even before smartphones.
• It hasn’t declined that much (16.2 minutes per day in 2025, down from 21.9 minutes in 2003).
• Older Americans are the ones driving the decline, while the amount of time spent reading has actually increased for Americans ages 15 to 24 and those aged 25 to 34.

So while reading comprehension may indeed be falling, “when you zoom out to take in decades of data, some recent declines are almost invisibly modest and others are higher than they were 50 years ago,” notes Wallace-Wells:

Periodically, you’ll hear lamentations that Americans don’t spend enough time reading to their children, though the amount of time spent doing so hasn’t declined over decades but actually crept up in recent years instead. And if you are imagining an idyllic earlier period in which parents devoted hours reading books to their children each day, you might want to know that in 1968 Nielsen reported that children under 6 were watching, on average, 54 hours of television each week.

Fifty-four hours?! I’m with Wallace-Wells that that seems “improbably high.” But, as he points out, time with television on doesn’t necessarily mean it was being watched exclusively or closely. In any event, that and other historical data on TV watching—U.S households had the TV on for an average of seven hours per day in the 1980s, for instance—suggest that some imagined utopia wherein we were eschewing screen time for more cerebral pursuits is, at the very least, long passed.

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On Substack

Intelligence isn’t everything. Ruxandra Teslo argues that AI-enabled medical breakthroughs are not enough—we need to get rid of “regulatory bottlenecks to medical progress,” too. “No matter how ‘intelligent’ AI becomes, intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world,” Teslo points out:

One of the promises most often invoked to justify AI’s risks is that it will “cure disease.” Every major AI lab CEO says it, and investors seems to agree: any biotech startup with an AI story attached commands an impressive valuation, even as more conventional biotechs struggle for funding and die. But this whole enterprise, as I have long argued, is bottlenecked by many things that have little to do with “intelligence” as such, and the degree to which that often goes unacknowledged is strange to watch.
The evidence is everywhere, if you treat scientific advancement as a rough proxy for intelligence and ask whether it alone unblocks progress. Take Eroom’s Law: the number of new drugs approved per dollar of R&D has fallen for decades, even as our scientific tools have grown vastly more powerful, the exact opposite of what the existence of more raw capability would predict. Or take a company like Adaptimmune, which has brought two transformative therapies to market in rare cancers and is nonetheless fighting to stay alive, due to the cost of developing them. Or one can listen to the scientists behind “baby KJ,” the infant saved by a bespoke gene-editing therapy: they have everything they need scientifically and still cannot easily repeat it for the next child, because manufacturing costs, driven in part by regulatory requirements, stand in the way.

Clinical trials are a huge bottleneck, and “even here the binding constraint is not entirely intelligence,” writes Teslo:

Quite often, it is governance. I keep talking to companies trying to build exactly these biomarkers, and what they run into, again and again, is how hard it is to access the underlying data. Some have been waiting for a year for the NIH to release imaging datasets they can use to produce better biomarkers. If one needs to interact with the FDA to get their endpoint validated, it is even worse: I have previously written about how the validation of Bone Mineral Density (BMD) for use as a surrogate endpoint in osteoporosis trials took 12 years (!), despite the fact that the data to support it already existed in full and the analyses done were basically regressions.

More here.

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More Sex & Tech News

Americans of all ages are having less sex than they used (per @ryanburge). What are the main reasons? Watch this great @OpentoDebateOrg discussion I (a Boomer) led with a Gen Xer, Millennial, and Zoomer: https://t.co/WAVdLcUje8 pic.twitter.com/kx0nGnLxpH

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) July 20, 2026

• “France has become the first country in the European Union to ban children under 15 from using social media after lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the measure on Tuesday,” Daily Beast reports. French President Emmanuel Macron “hailed the vote on X, declaring that ‘social media will be banned for children under 15 starting this school year.'”

• Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) is calling on the Department of Justice to criminally investigate an abortion pill manufacturer and Plan C, a group that informs people about how to get abortion pills in the mail. He suggests they may be guilty of criminal conspiracy, despite the fact that abortion pills are legal at the federal level and so is shipping them.

• Government-owned AI is a terrible idea, suggests Michael Bloomberg. “When the government becomes a shareholder in a private-sector entity, the positive effects of market competition can break down. Politics trump profits, favoritism and cronyism take root, innovation suffers, competitiveness erodes, and regulation is corrupted.”

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From a Report and Recommendations today by Magistrate Judge Jill McCook (E.D. Tenn.) in Ross v. Lambert:

According to the allegations in the Complaint, Plaintiff is a former collegiate track and field champion, 2004 Olympian, and the current Head Coach and Director of Track & Field at the University of Tennessee.” In August 2022, Plaintiff hired Defendant “to serve as the track and field Recruiting Coordinator—which was a non-coaching, administrative position.” Plaintiff alleges that less than a year later, in May 2023, he “advised [Defendant] that he was being terminated from his position as Recruiting Coordinator at the University of Tennessee.” He claims that he “gave [Defendant] the option of ‘voluntarily resigning’ from his position in lieu of being fired for cause[,]” which Defendant accepted.

Plaintiff contends that on May 30, 2024, Defendant sent the Office of General Counsel at the University of Tennessee (“University”) a demand letter (“May 30 Letter”), “threatening to sue the University and [Plaintiff] for ‘wrongful termination and discrimination’ if he did not receive payment of $150,000 from the University.” According to Plaintiff, “Defendant … made a series of patently false and inflammatory allegations against [Plaintiff] in the [May 30] Letter and warned that he would go to the media with his allegations if the University did not settle.” Specifically, the Complaint asserts that “[Defendant] made … knowingly false and derogatory statements[,]” including:

1. “Past Misconduct: Duane Ross has a documented history of questionable behavior. He received a two-year suspension from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for using performance-enhancing drugs, disqualifying all his results since November 2, 2001. His involvement in the BALCO steroid case further underscores his troubled past.”
2. “Family Issues: His son, Randolph Ross Jr., has also been suspended for doping violations. Randolph Ross Jr.’s suspension through June 30, 2025, for whereabouts failures and tampering with an email raises questions about the environment and influence under Duane Ross’s watch. Where do you think he learned that from?“
3. “Athlete Violations. Under His Watch: Under Duane Ross’s leadership, North Carolina A&T faced multiple suspensions of top athletes for doping violations. Grace Nwokocha was suspended right before the World Championships for doping. Additionally, Ross used an athlete who was not cleared by the NCAA, resulting in the forfeiture of team titles and performances. These incidents, though they occurred before his tenure at Tennessee, are closely tied to him and paint a picture of ongoing integrity issues.”
4. “Mr. Ross is not representing your brand appropriately, nor did he follow your procedures or policies, and I’m sure you provided him with all the tools to succeed and comply with your standards. This lack of competence raises serious questions about his ability to lead a program as esteemed as the University of Tennessee. At this point, he has proven to be a liability rather than an asset to the University.”

The University rejected Defendant’s demand.

Plaintiff claims that “[o]n or about March 3, 2025, less than two weeks before [Plaintiff’s] team began competing at the 2025 NCAA Indoor National Championships, Defendant Lambert, under the pseudonym ‘G. Fury,’ released two songs on Apple Music and Spotify—titled ‘Vault Talk’ and ‘Recruiter to Parent.'” “Both songs[,]” Plaintiff alleges, “contain defamatory lyrics impugning [Plaintiff’s] character, including but not limited to allegations of drug use by [Plaintiff] and his athletes.” Plaintiff states that Defendant also “published ‘Vault Talk’ and ‘Recruiter to Parent’ in a public Facebook group titled[,] The Real Deal Track & Field Group.” “In early-to-mid March 2025,” Plaintiff avers that “Defendant Lambert a/k/a G. Fury released three additional songs on Apple Music and Spotify.” He asserts that one of those songs, “Laws of Attraction,” “targeted [Plaintiff] with false and disparaging allegations of scandal and fraud.” And later, Defendant sent “Laws of Attraction” to Plaintiff via text message.

“On March 13, 2025, Plaintiff submits that “Defendant … a/k/a G. Fury published another nine-track album titled, ‘To C.A.P’ on Apple Music and Spotify.” Plaintiff claims that “[a] majority of the songs on the album are directed at [Plaintiff] and most, if not all of these songs, contain untruthful, derogatory and offensive statements about [him]” [Id.]. For instance, Plaintiff states that Defendant: “(i) alleges that [Plaintiff] and his son—who is an Olympic gold medalist and famous track and field star in his own right—of using [performance enhancing drugs]; (ii) claims that [Plaintiff] runs a dirty program at Tennessee; and (iii) accuses [Plaintiff] of infidelity.” According to Plaintiff, Defendant’s “album caught the attention of various social media personalities, who published stories about [Defendant’s] music on various mediums.”

“At or around this same time,” Plaintiff represents that Defendant “began spreading rumors that [Plaintiff]—who is married with three children—had an affair with one of his female assistant coaches and fathered a daughter with that coach.” He claims that Defendant, “in an intentional attempt to harass and embarrass [Plaintiff], posted on his Instagram and Facebook accounts multiple AI generated/doctored photographs of [Plaintiff’s] three children along with the assistant coach’s daughter … but digitally modified the girl’s face to make it appear to be [Plaintiff’s] face.” Later, in June 2025, Plaintiff states that Defendant “released yet another song on Apple Music and Spotify titled ‘S.L.A.P.,’ which clearly and unmistakenly insinuates that a paternity test is needed to determine if [Plaintiff] fathered the assistant coach’s daughter.”

Plaintiff contends that Defendant “remained silent over the next several months until resurfacing on November 12, 2025, when he directly texted [Plaintiff] criticizing [his] recent signing of a new track and field recruit.” But on December 5, 2025, Plaintiff states that Defendant “dramatically ramped up his malicious campaign of harassment and disparagement against [him].” According to Plaintiff, Defendant:

1. sent a defamatory and wildly inappropriate email to hundreds of individuals in the collegiate track and field community, including members of the University of Tennessee’s athletic department as well as members of the athletic departments of various rival schools such as Vanderbilt University, the University of Florida, the University of South Carolina, the University of Alabama, and the University of Texas … The six-page email includes a bizarre fictional script ridiculing [Plaintiff] as well as links to over 50 songs (including each of the defamatory songs detailed above) recorded by [Defendant] and released on Apple Music and Spotify. An overwhelming majority of these songs target [Plaintiff] and are intended to defame, demean, and humiliate him[;]
2. posted a video on Instagram and Facebook of a fake newscast about the BALCO steroid doping scandal from the early 2000s (which [Defendant] has repeatedly tried to link to [Plaintiff]) and its purported connection to the University of Tennessee Track and Field program under [Plaintiff; and]
3. between December 12 and December 25, 2025, Defendant Lambert posted more than 20 videos on Instagram and Facebook attacking [Plaintiff’s] character with blatantly false allegations of wrongdoing and/or creating highly offensive and demeaning fake videos using AI.

With respect to the AI generated videos, these include “video clips depicting [Plaintiff] … with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.” Plaintiff alleges that Defendant continued making videos targeting him, which included accusations “of infidelity and impregnating (and then firing) his former assistant coach at the University.”

Plaintiff contends that “on January 6, 2026, a few days before Tennessee’s initial track and field meet of the 2026 season, Defendant … sent [Plaintiff] a text message in which he boasts that his campaign of defamation and cyber-harassment likely prevented [Plaintiff] from signing the top high school track recruit in the country to Tennessee’s 2026 recruiting class.” Plaintiff states that Defendant included in the text message “audio copies of two newly published songs by [Defendant] a/k/a/ ‘G. Fury’— titled ‘3-years-left’ and ‘kinda-nice’—both of which defame [Plaintiff] and various athletes in the Tennessee program.” According to Plaintiff, “[His] reputation—both professionally and personally—has been greatly damaged as a result of Defendant[‘s] … improper and wrongful conduct[,] and that [Defendant’s] defamatory and offensive social media posts, music, and videos have been disseminated throughout the track and field community in the United States.”

Plaintiff sought a TRO and preliminary injunction “enjoining Defendant from (1) contacting Plaintiff, (2) sending communications to various individuals, (3) publishing defamatory, disparaging, or offensive material that relate to Plaintiff or his family, and (4) making any public statements about certain topics {[i.e.,] about this litigation or about Plaintiff’s conduct as a publicly employed coach at a state university}.” But the Magistrate Judge recommended that no such injunction be issued; an excerpt:

“The First Amendment prohibits ‘abridging the freedom of speech,’ and the United States Supreme Court has interpreted this prohibition to forbid, among other things, ‘prior restraints.'” “[P]ermanent injunctions—i.e., court orders that actually forbid speech activities—are classic examples of prior restraints.” … “[I]n the case of a prior restraint on pure speech, the hurdle is substantially higher: publication must threaten an interest more fundamental than the First Amendment itself.” The plaintiff’s burden to establish that a prior restraint is warranted is heavy but “not impossible to overcome.” Even so, “[P]rior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and least tolerable infringement on the First Amendment rights.” …

[Plaintiff] asks the Court to enjoin Defendant from communicating with Plaintiff and others about Plaintiff, publishing statements about Plaintiff, and making any public statements about certain topics. In other words, he asks the Court to regulate Defendant’s speech….

Plaintiff does not argue that the injunction is warranted to prevent an interest more fundamental than the First Amendment itself. Instead, Plaintiff claims that “the relief sought is narrowly tailored to protect [him] from serious and consequential harm while placing only minimal limitations on Defendant Lambert’s First Amendment right to free speech.” That is not sufficient to restrict Defendant’s First Amendment rights at this juncture.

Moreover, although Plaintiff characterizes his proposed injunction as “narrow in scope,” the Court finds otherwise. Plaintiff seeks to enjoin Defendant from sending “defamatory or disparaging statements” to various individuals and entities. “An injunction against defamatory statements, if permissible at all, must not through careless drafting forbid statements not yet determined to be defamatory, for by doing so it could restrict lawful expression.”

He also seeks to enjoin Defendant from “[m]aking any public statements” about certain topics. This is overly broad….

“[I]t would be extraordinary for a federal court to enter a preliminary injunction on a defamation claim.” … “It appears wholly unprecedented, however, for a federal court to enter a preliminary injunction in a defamation case. In those defamation cases upholding the constitutionality of restraints on future speech, the injunctions were entered after the claims were adjudicated on the merits, and the injunctions were limited to the speech that was actually found to be defamatory by the fact-finder.”

{Plaintiff relies on Lothschuetz v. Carpenter (6th Cir. 1990) and In re Conservatorship of Turner (Tenn. Ct. App. 2014), stating that they recognize or adopted the “modern rule” that permits injunctions restricting defamation. But the modern rule to which Plaintiff refers relates to courts entering injunctions after a determination on the merits…. “Six federal circuit courts of appeal have held that injunctions are permissible to prevent libel, but only after a finding on the merits that the speech is unprotected.” … “… [A]lthough the usual rule provides that defamation may be remedied only by an action for damages, even application of the modern rule bars plaintiffs’ requested injunction” because “there has been no final determination that defendant’s statements are false and libelous.”

I think that’s right; for more, see the analysis in Anti-Libel Injunctions.

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Since 2019, public school enrollment has fallen by 2.84 percent nationwide, an exodus of roughly 1.4 million. K-12 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Yet the amount spent on public schools nationwide grew by 34 percent from 2019 to 2024, according to NCES data.

Much of that is thanks to the nearly $190 billion Congress provided to state and local governments through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER), in three separate batches from March 2020 to March 2021. Now that the ESSER funds are largely spent, school districts are grappling with staffing decisions made during a spending boom that seems unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.

In its 2026 American School District Panel (ASDP) survey of public school officials across the country, research organization RAND found that “54 percent of district leaders” were worried about a budget shortfall, even though educational spending has increased across all levels of government, even after adjusting for inflation. On average, the U.S. spends about $17,644 per student, according to NCES. It’s an increase of 34 percent from the NCES’ 2019 estimate of $13,187.

Still, more money hasn’t led to better student outcomes. At each grade level and across subject areas, there’s a decline in current achievement when compared to student benchmarks from 2019. In 2024, the most recent data available, only 60 percent of fourth graders and 67 percent of eighth graders were reading at or above a basic level, the lowest performance tier used by the National Center for Education Statistics. 

It doesn’t get better as students age, with just 68 percent of high school seniors reading at or above a basic level. 

The middling level of achievement isn’t new, so why does spending continue to climb? The answer lies in state and local budgets, which provide over 80 percent of funding for public schools.

During COVID, several school districts nationwide implemented “hold harmless” budget provisions that guaranteed schools would receive as much funding as the previous year, regardless of enrollment rates. Post-pandemic, about 60 percent of states use some version of a hold-harmless provision for school funding, according to the education nonprofit EdChoice.

In turn, this has led to an imbalance between where students learn and where taxpayer money is spent.

Thanks to its hold-harmless provision, New York City will spend $290 million in 2027 to prevent budget cuts at public schools with declining enrollment, more than double what the city spent “prior to the beginning” of the 2025–26 school year, according to Chalkbeat. In Pennsylvania, student enrollment at public schools is down 1.8 percent since 2019, yet the state has increased the number of support staff hired by 2.7 percent over the same period. Spending on public education in the commonwealth is up year over year, and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s latest budget represents a “nearly 35 percent increase” compared to previous years.

These budgeting stopgaps might be good for politicians, but they’ve done nothing to assuage parents, who continue to enroll their children elsewhere. Charter schools, meanwhile, have seen enrollment increase by about 15 percent, while enrollment at independent schools has remained relatively steady over the same period.

It also hasn’t quelled administrators’ concern about cuts, with some deciding to trim salaries, wages, and employee benefit accounts, which account for 76.8 percent of elementary and secondary school budgets. Last week, Chicago public schools announced it would have to lay off “760 teachers, 801 teacher aides and 162 central office and citywide staff” to deal with its $732 million budget deficit, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

With little link between funding and student achievement, it’s fair to ask why taxpayers are footing the bill for public education systems that are more of a burden than a boon.

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The U.S. Capitol Police anticipated a drone attack on the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Freedom 250 event at the White House before the FBI broke up a plot to do exactly that, documents obtained by Reason show. An intelligence assessment on May 20 mentioned the possibility of “nefarious actors plotting to use weaponized drones” or to fire from “high vantage points” against UFC spectators. A month later, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd announced the first arrest in “a plot to murder members of the federal government” with a combined drone and sniper assault.

The Trump administration has used the alleged attack plot as an argument for a $600 million expansion to the White House. (Despite the administration’s claims, about half the cost will come from American taxpayers.) “This Project will support a highly sophisticated Drone Port and Sniper Nests atop the Ballroom that would destroy any effort to launch such an attack,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate wrote in a June 16 letter to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which is hearing a lawsuit by the National Trust for Historic Preservation against the project. But the FBI announcement and the newly disclosed Capitol Police document show that old-fashioned police work—not expensive defensive works or mass surveillance—was enough to protect the White House.

Like Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, the suspected drone attackers were caught because a family member proactively went to the authorities. In its indictment, the government says it caught wind of the drone plot on June 10, when an Ohio woman called the police over her 19-year-old son’s “firearms purchases and communicating with certain individuals online.” The FBI searched the house and interrogated the son, who admitted to plotting a mass assassination of politicians with friends from a TikTok group. Authorities have arrested a total of eight suspects across the country, some of whom allegedly bought weapons and made travel plans. Two have pleaded not guilty so far, and others haven’t had time to enter a plea.

The Capitol Police intelligence assessment wasn’t based on any special foreknowledge of the plot. (Reason obtained it from a fusion center, a liaison office between the Department of Homeland Security and local police, under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act.) The intelligence bureau simply deduced something that was obvious: “High-ranking government officials attending [250th anniversary] events present attractive targets for violent extremist attacks and ideologically-motivated disruptions.” Noting that “drone incursions during such special events are most likely to come from unwitting operators,” the assessment cited several failed “nefarious actors plotting to use weaponized drones” in the past.

During the soccer World Cup, which happened in different cities across America in the month after Freedom 250, the FBI seized at least 700 civilian drones for violating flight restrictions. Federal authorities impose an automatic three-nautical-mile no-fly zone around major sports games for both manned and remote-controlled aircraft. With 326 events associated with the World Cup, there were a lot of opportunities for hobbyists to accidentally stray into restricted airspace. Although critics in the drone industry have been calling the sporting-related restrictions overly broad for years, the SAFER Skies Act of 2026 only tightened them, and the plot against UFC Freedom 250 makes it less likely that the government will show leniency.

Much of the Capitol Plot intelligence assessment about Freedom 250 focuses on the threat from Iran and Al Qaeda—which didn’t manifest at all. Instead, the alleged drone plotters were motivated by a mix of left-wing and right-wing grievances. The indictment claims that suspects talked about their “ultra-religious [Christian] and anti-government sentiments,” their support for Adolf Hitler and hatred of Jews, their desire to restore the “old republic,” their belief that sex predator Jeffrey Epstein’s associates run the government, stopping “data centers taking up all the water in communities,” and fighting Israeli influence in politics.

Freedom 250 was also controversial for much more mundane reasons. UFC President Dana White is a close personal friend of President Donald Trump, and in addition to hosting a UFC event at the White House, the Trump administration has been trying to integrate the UFC into the State Department and FBI. An unsuccessful lawsuit to stop Freedom 250 called it a “deeply corrupt” use of government property. That might be the biggest irony of them all: The administration is using the security vulnerabilities created by a big, taxpayer-subsidized boondoggle to push for another vanity project at the taxpayer’s expense.

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Zion Lights is a former spokesperson for the radical environmental group Extinction Rebellion, whose members are known for causing mass transportation stoppages and gluing themselves to planes to call attention to what they say is a “climate and ecological emergency.” She has gone from protesting nuclear power plants to aggressively campaigning for their expansion as a way of helping the global poor raise their living standards.

Raised in Great Britain by working-class immigrants from rural Punjab, her new book is Energy Is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear. She talks with Nick Gillespie about how she came to reject the ubiquitous arguments against nuclear energy she encountered as a child, how guilt-ridden countries such as Germany are increasing pollution by shutting down nuclear power, and why oil-rich Gulf States are betting on renewable and clean energy sources.

 

0:00—The significance of a saucepan

5:15—Thesis of Energy is Life

9:07—Prosperity and guilt

17:38—Extinction Rebellion

21:36—Hostility toward nuclear energy

27:35—The safety of nuclear energy

31:10—France and Germany

36:56—Zion’s revelation on nuclear energy

43:57—The nuclear energy industry

50:50—China and the United Arab Emirates

53:16—Energy policy

56:42—Taking technology for granted

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