Category: reason

Life imitates art. The famous 1983 hit song “99 Red Balloons” by Nena is about a cluster of party balloons being mistaken for enemy aircraft and provoking a nuclear war. Earlier this week, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy declared that the authorities had confronted a “cartel drone incursion” over El Paso, Texas, only for the threat to turn out to be a party balloon.

The consequences were fortunately short of a world war. But the government deployed experimental laser weapons and shut down the airspace over El Paso on Wednesday, disrupting flights for the thousands of passengers scheduled to fly through the city that day.

And it hasn’t even been very long since the last drone scare disrupted society. In December 2024, the FBI asked residents of New Jersey to be on the lookout for suspicious drones, leading to a flood of false reports and even citizens harassing pilots with lasers.

Just like the UFO sightings of the 1950s were a product of Cold War paranoia, the new wave of drone sightings is a product of today’s national security paranoia. American politics is having a hawkish moment, with politicians from both parties sounding the alarm about enemies foreign and domestic. Drones are the perfect object of fixation for paranoiacs; they’re both a symbol of modern warfare and a really common tool used by millions of Americans.

It’s also worth noting that the laser weapon used over El Paso was on loan from the U.S. Army to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Immigration enforcement is increasingly dominating the national security apparatus, bringing together the parts of government aimed at foreign and domestic enemies. CBP, which has been deployed to war zones abroad for years, is increasingly behaving like an occupying army in American cities.

Looming over everything is the Chinese balloon incident of 2023. The Biden administration raised the alarm about a hostile surveillance balloon from China, then let it float over North America for ten days before finally shooting it down over the Atlantic Ocean. That incursion led to justifiable fears about U.S. airspace, but also led to overreactions. Shortly after the Chinese balloon incident, the Air Force used a $400,000 missile to shoot down what was likely a hobby balloon launched by the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade.

Tellingly, the recent drone panics have not focused on China. During the New Jersey drone scare, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (D–N.J.) claimed that the hostile intrusions were coming from an Iranian “mothership” off the Eastern Seaboard. And again, the panic in El Paso was focused on aerial incursions by Mexican gangsters. The Trump administration seems to have given up on trying to win a peer conflict with China and fallen back on the familiar, emotionally satisfying pattern of small wars in Latin America and the Middle East. The phantom enemies in the sky reflect that shift.

A permanent war footing has many costs. American society seems to be discovering a new one: Every few months, a jumpy official seeing something in the sky will disrupt daily life and endanger air traffic over a major city. “99 Red Balloons” warns exactly about that attitude. “This is what we’ve waited for / This is it, boys, this is war,” Nena sings. “Everybody’s a superhero.”

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The new Wuthering Heights is technically a literary adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 gothic romance about class and society, but it plays more like the hot-and-heavy fever dream of an avid reader of lusty contemporary romance fiction. It’s not a story so much as a series of storm-like adolescent moods that our heroine, young Catherine, is weathering. Her father is a sad old drunk, a once-noble man whose health and fortunes have declined. His vitality is faded and shriveled; in every way, he’s withering. His decline has manifested in the craggy and desolate estate at which he, his daughter, and a moody but smoldering young man named Heathcliff reside; it’s named after local rocky heights that are windy and raging, which is to say they are, well, wuthering.

If nothing else, we finally have a movie that will help viewers understand the difference between withering, weathering, and wuthering.

Sadly, there isn’t much wordplay in Wuthering Heights; this is a mood piece about how people feel rather than what they think or say. But with its music-video compositions and ironically melodramatic soundtrack, it captures the tumultuous and rampaging drama of youthful lust and desire. Directed by Emerald Fennell, who previously helmed Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, this take on Wuthering Heights is designed to cater to the same crowd that puts romantasy fiction on the bestseller list and buys tens of thousands of kink-specific AI-written novels in microgenres that, according to The New York Times, now include, “dark mafia romance.” 

What subgenre would Fennell’s Wuthering Heights belong to? It’s a love triangle with one woman and two men; I’m told the current parlance is “reverse harem.” But I might describe it as something like “decision angst romance,” a subgenre it shares with last year’s contemporary romance Materialists. Like that film, it is fundamentally about a woman caught between two suitors, one shaggy and poor, the other wealthy and wise to the world. Come to think of it, this is essentially the plot of the Twilight films, too. 

There are no vampires or werewolves in Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. But there is a monster, in the form of Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi, last seen delivering a lithe and sinuous take on Frankenstein’s misbegotten creation.

Here, he is a fully carnal creature; in the movie’s first hour, he appears as a long-haired, lower-caste ruffian, a man of no stature who has been taken in by Catherine’s father. Even as children, they share a special bond, and they long for each other. Yet Heathcliff is poor and without status, so she accepts an offer of marriage from Linton, the ostentatiously wealthy man down the road. 

With Linton, her life is stable and more than comfortable, a fantasy of wealth and ease. But it lacks romantic passion. And when Healthcliff returns, cleaned up and newly wealthy after years abroad, her youthful emotions are reignited. She wants the bad boy she cannot have. And this modern Heathcliff, a smoldering kink shaman who would be at home in 50 Shades of Grey‘s red room of pain, is very, very bad. 

Part of what makes Fennell’s adaptation so tricky and unnerving is the way it is simultaneously designed to appeal to and titillate female viewers while following a script right out of manosphere propaganda. I apologize in advance for phrasing it this way, but it’s hard not to see this movie in that community’s nonsense lingo: Heathcliff is a low-status beta who, as he comes of age, locks in, looksmaxxes, and wealthmaxxes, increases his, er, sexual market value, and returns a triumphant Chad. There’s no mention of cortisol, but still; I’m surprised Clavicular wasn’t involved.

Heathcliff drives Catherine mad with lust by treating her badly, by ignoring her and refusing to explain himself, and eventually by taking another woman who he treats like a literal leashed dog. Catherine, in her marriage to the rich, safe, and stable Linton, has all the comforts she could ever imagine. But she wants what is high status, dangerous, and forbidden—and she wants it so much that she feels like she might die. Uh, happy Valentine’s Day? 

Fennell captures the movie’s emotional turbulence with vivid, riotous imagery that matches Catherine’s erotic intensity. Every shot is designed for maximum memeability; even if you don’t see the movie, you’ll see its frames on social media. High-energy pop star Charli XCX contributes to the soundtrack, which seems right: Her manic musical subgenre has been dubbed hyperpop, and this is the hyperpop version of Wuthering Heights. 

Like so many teenagers, I was assigned to read Wuthering Heights in school. I haven’t looked at it since. I didn’t care for it then; I was a boy, and more into brontosauruses than Brontë. Decades later, this movie version is still not for me. But I admire its gumption, its fervor, its willingness to be both bizarre and ridiculous in service of passion. It carries an intensity that I had to weather, for the frantic strength of Fennell’s erotic, romantic vision can be withering. 

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When the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown began last year, several entrepreneurs and concerned citizens established support groups and apps to track the movement of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. These efforts were quickly squelched by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who are now facing a lawsuit as a result.

The federal lawsuit, filed this week by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression (FIRE), argues that both Noem and Bondi have “repeatedly threatened to prosecute individuals and entities for disseminating information…about ICE operations,” a violation of Americans’ right to freedom of expression.

Such threats began last July, when the Trump administration condemned CNN for reporting about an app called ICEBlock, which used crowdsourcing to track ICE activity, and accused such platforms of endangering the lives of immigration officers. After officials called for CNN to be investigated, Noem told a reporter, “We’re working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute [CNN] for that, because what they’re doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement.…We’re going to actually go after them and prosecute them.” Bondi also threatened prosecution when she told Fox News that the creator of ICEBlock “better watch out.”

By early October, tech companies began removing apps like ICEBlock and Eyes Up—which was founded by Kreisau Group LLC, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit—from their app stores. With Eyes Up, users were able to document and preserve evidence of government abuses of power by uploading and archiving pre-existing videos, live recording and uploading new content, and viewing videos uploaded by others. 

Even though Americans have the right to record public law enforcement activity and to share those recordings, Apple yielded to Bondi and Noem’s demands by removing Eyes Up from the Apple App Store last year. The company cited guideline violations for the removal, but according to the complaint, such violations had not been previously mentioned. FIRE argues that “Apple reasonably understood Bondi and Noem’s course of conduct to convey a threat of adverse government action against Apple in order to suppress Kreisau Group’s speech,” in violation of the First Amendment. 

After coercing Apple, Bondi and Noem moved on to Meta, Facebook’s parent company. In mid-October, Bondi took credit for the removal of a popular Facebook group called “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland,” which was started by Kassandra Rosado, the second plaintiff in the case. Even though Meta cited guideline violations for the removal, Bondi openly bragged in an X post that “outreach” from the Justice Department is what truly led to the removal of the social media group, according to the lawsuit. She also accused the group of doxing and targeting ICE agents, and vowed she would “continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.”

But Rosado didn’t create the social media group to incite violence, but to keep her community safe and informed, according to FIRE. As a small business owner and U.S. citizen of Mexican descent living in the Chicago area, Rosado launched the group to share information, including photos and videos, of nearby ICE operations. 

Rosado’s group grew rapidly after reports circulated about ICE’s use of excessive force—including two ICE-involved shootings—and arrests of citizens and legal immigrants alike amid “Operation Midway Blitz,” the federal immigration crackdown in Chicago, last fall. By October 2025, the group had nearly 100,000 members, many of whom used the page’s shared information to safely avoid areas where ICE was active. Others used the group to voice their opinions about ICE’s tactics. 

Although both Apple and Meta cited guideline violations for the removals of Eyes Up and “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland,” neither company, according to FIRE, signaled that these platforms were in danger of being shut down before the Justice Department made its “outreach.” Both instances involve government officials unconstitutionally using their position of power to coerce private companies to do what the federal government cannot: suppress the protected speech of Americans. 

More unsettlingly, these actions target political opinions that disagree with the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Although officials have denounced the existence of ICE-sighting groups for posting operation details and endangering the lives of officers, neither Bondi nor Noem has threatened to prosecute social media accounts that share videos and photos of operations in a pro-ICE way—including ICE’s own social media accounts. 

The First Amendment protects Americans from government actions that abridge free speech, which includes the right to report and share information about law enforcement. By taking credit for successfully jawboning Apple and Meta into complying with its unconstitutional demands, the government has, by extension, taken credit for violating the constitutional rights of Americans.

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Gail Slater announced her resignation as Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division on Thursday morning. Slater’s sudden departure follows disagreements over merger enforcement with Attorney General Pam Bondi, and corruption allegations about senior DOJ officials.

Slater’s “America First Antitrust Policy,” inspired by big-is-bad New Right intellectuals Oren Cass and Sohrab Ahmari, put her at odds with “the business-friendly stance of the administration,” according to The Guardian. 

The philosophical differences between Slater and the administration came to a head last year when the DOJ sued to block the $14 billion merger of Hewlett Packard (H.P.) and Juniper Networks, “the second- and third- largest providers, respectively, of enterprise-grade WLAN [wireless networking] solutions in the United States” in January 2025. Although Slater was not officially in charge of the agency’s antitrust division at the time (she wasn’t confirmed by the Senate until March 12) she largely influenced the decision. Acting Assistant Attorney General Omeed Assefi warned that the merger would result in Americans “paying more for less from wireless technology providers.” Slater reportedly told Bondi that intelligence agencies did not raise national security concerns about blocking the merger.

It turns out CIA Director John Ratcliffe did have such concerns and wondered why he was not consulted by Slater. Slater’s assurances to the contrary caused Bondi to feel as if “Slater had lied to her to continue with the suit,” per The Guardian. Ultimately, the Justice Department dropped the suit in June and fired Roger Alford, Slater’s top deputy, and William Rinner, the head of merger enforcement. 

Even though he was fired, Alford remained in the spotlight and began a campaign against lobbyists who he said were influencing DOJ officials and pitting them against Slater. In August, Alford delivered a speech at the Tech Policy Institute Aspen Forum, provocatively entitled, “The Rule of Law Versus the Rule of Lobbyists.” In his speech, Alford referred to a battle between “MAGA-In-Name-Only lobbyists and DOJ officials enabling them” and “genuine MAGA reformers…like my boss Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater.” Alford did not indict Bondi for corruption, but alleged that Chad Mizelle, her chief of staff, and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward have “perverted justice and acted inconsistent with the rule of law” in the H.P.-Juniper case. Moreover, Alford accused Mizelle of generally “accept[ing] party meetings and mak[ing] key decisions depending on whether the request or information comes from a MAGA friend.” 

Alford’s crusade against the rule of lobbyists did not stop at the Aspen Forum; in December, he testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust at a hearing on how foreign governments use antitrust to target American companies. Instead of focusing on the topic of the hearing, Alford used his time to testify that MAGA lobbyists are “attempting to corruptly influence antitrust law enforcement.” 

As evidence of the Trump administration’s interference with antitrust investigations, Alford cited lobbyist Trey Gowdy’s November golf outing with President Donald Trump. Following their meeting, Trump preemptively pardoned Tim Leiweke, former CEO of Oak View Group, who hired Gowdy as a lobbyist after he was indicted in July by the DOJ’s Antitrust Division for rigging bids to build a stadium at a public university. 

Lobbyists appealing directly to Trump comes as no surprise. In December, Trump said he would be “involved in [the] decision” to block Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), following an aggressive campaign against the deal by rival bidder Paramount Skydance, which is majority-owned by Trump supporter Larry Ellison. (Last Wednesday, Trump reversed course, telling NBC’s Tom Llamas that he hasn’t been involved in the WBD deal.) 

But, as the H.P.-Juniper and Leiweke examples show, Slater remained steadfastly committed to her idiosyncratic antitrust agenda. Slater’s intransigence caused lobbyists to “seek to have [her] removed from her Senate-confirmed position,” according to Alford, but she refused to “abandon the ship in a storm.” But Slater finally walked the plank after being “given the option to resign rather than be fired at the end of the week,” according to The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell. 

Shortly after Slater’s announcement, Bondi thanked her “for her service to the Antitrust Division” on behalf of the Justice Department. Mizelle, Bondi’s chief of staff, had a less conciliatory tone, saying people “must be willing to put aside personal agendas and vendettas to advance the President’s priorities and serve the American people” to work at the Justice Department. 

Mike Davis, founder and managing partner of MRDLaw, who advertises his “extensive network in Washington, D.C. across the three branches of government” and was accused by Alford of peddling his influence of Mizelle in the H.P.-Juniper case, said “good riddance” to his once “good friend” Gail Slater. 

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Today is the ten year anniversary of Justice Scalia’s passing. At the time, I could not have fathomed what the ensuing ten years would bring. To commemorate that day, I quote at length from my 2016 book, Unraveled. There are some good nuggets here, a few that I had forgotten!

The news of Scalia’s passing broke on Saturday, February 13, 2016, at about 4:30 PM. Within minutes, through what Adam Smith would call the invisible hand , a Republican strategy spontaneously organized on social media: no confirmation until after the election, regardless of who the nominee is. At 4:56 PM, Conn Carroll, a spokesman for Senator Mike Lee (R- UT), tweeted, “What is less than zero? The chances of Obama successfully appointing a Supreme Court Justice to replace Scalia.” Conservative pundits quickly reinforced the message. Sean Davis, who writes at The Federalist , posted at 4:52, “If Scalia has actually passed away, the Senate must refuse to confirm any justices in 2016 and leave the nomination to the next president.”

One hour later, before consulting his caucus, Majority Leader McConnell released a statement: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” Senator John Cornyn (R- TX) warned that whoever the President nominated had no chance of confirmation, and would “bear some resemblance to a piñata.”

Almost immediately all eyes turned to an octogenarian from Iowa. Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, held almost unfettered discretion over whether Obama’s nominee would even be considered by the Senate. The New York Times reported that Grassley “arguably” has “more power than any other individual senator in deciding if the process will move forward.”

Before a nominee was even named, pressure mounted on the folksy Iowan to hold a hearing. The Des Moines Register called on Grassley to proceed with Obama’s nominee. “This could have been a ‘profile in courage’ moment for Senator Grassley. This was an opportunity for our senior senator to be less of a politician and more of a statesman. It was a chance for him to be principled rather than partisan.” In the immediate aftermath of Scalia’s passing, Grassley was somewhat noncommittal. He told Radio Iowa , “I would wait until the nominee is made before I would make any decisions.”

He called for patience. “One step at a time.” The Times observed that early on the Iowan “has given off conflicting signals about his intentions.” Republicans defended their opposition to a hearing, citing Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s nominees a decade earlier. Democrats countered that they filibustered lower- court nominees, who were at least afforded a hearing, even if they did not receive a vote. Further, the Supreme Court, they argued, was different. Denying a nominee a hearing was the next level up from blocking a nominee’s floor vote. Michael Barone’s observation is still evergreen: “In politics . . . all procedural arguments are insincere.”

In 2010, the Chief Justice lamented the politicization of the confirmation process. “Each political party has found it easy to turn on a dime,” Roberts observed, “from decrying to defending the blocking of judicial nominations, depending on their changing political fortunes.” Senator Grassley charged that Roberts had it “exactly backwards.” The “confirmation process doesn’t make the Justices appear political,” the Iowan said. Rather, “the confirmation process has gotten political precisely because the court has drifted from the constitutional text, and rendered decisions based instead on policy preferences.” Grassley specifically targeted Roberts’s Obamacare decisions. “In fact, many of my constituents believe, with all due respect, that the Chief Justice is part of this problem. They believe that a number of his votes have reflected political considerations, not legal ones.” To the extent that the Chief’s ACA opinions were designed to keep the Court out of the political arena, the plan backfired in ways that were impossible to anticipate.

After some vacillation, the Republican leadership solidified its position. McConnell and Grassley coauthored an editorial in the Washington Post expressing their shared strategy. “Given that we are in the midst of the presidential election process,” the Kentuckian and Iowan wrote, “we believe that the American people should seize the opportunity to weigh in on whom they trust to nominate the next person for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.” As for a question of duty, they wrote that the “Constitution grants the Senate the power to provide, or as the case may be, withhold its consent.” The Senate leadership held firm and refused to schedule a hearing for Garland. Many declined to even meet with the nominee.

At the University of Chicago Law School, where Obama had lectured on constitutional law, President Obama ridiculed the Republican strategy. The GOP “simply will not consider the nomination itself,” he said, and they are “going to shut down the process,” leaving a short- handed Court “for at least two” terms. “That is unprecedented.” The President, slipping back into professor mode, warned the law students in attendance that if the “process of appointing judges is so broken . . . then we are going to see the kinds of sharp, partisan polarization that has come to characterize our electoral politics seeping entirely into the judicial system.” Obama predicted that “the courts will be just an extension of our legislatures and our elections and our politics,” and “that erodes the institutional integrity of the judicial branch.”

With the Senate Republicans holding firm that the nomination would be filled by the next president, the stakes of the 2016 election grew even higher. And the candidates did not have much time to prepare. Justice Scalia’s passing was announced barely four hours before the GOP debate in South Carolina. In politics, virtually every important decision is scripted well in advance after thorough consideration. On February 13, 2016, the candidates had to improvise.

At the time, I was advising Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign on legal issues. Within minutes of the announcement, Cruz’s policy team kicked into action with a series of rapid-fire e-mails. First, the campaign decided to follow the nascent strategy of opposing a hearing, whoever the nominee may be. At 5:27 PM, @TedCruz tweeted, “Justice Scalia was an American hero. We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next President names his replacement.” Moments later, I texted a line for Cruz to use during the debate: “What Reagan was to the Presidency, Scalia was to the Supreme Court.” Cruz did not say it that night, but it became part of his stump speech, and he used it during several interviews.

The second major decision was whether Cruz should announce potential candidates to replace Scalia. One of his advisers suggested Mike Luttig, a former judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Luttig, who served as a law clerk for Scalia and had hired Cruz as a law clerk, was a finalist to replace Chief Justice Rehnquist in 2005. However, George W. Bush chose John Roberts instead. Ultimately, the Cruz campaign decided not to name a nominee, as it was too soon, and there was not sufficient time to vet nominees.

Donald Trump, as usual, would take a different tack. The first question of the debate went to the New York real estate magnate. “You’ve said that the President shouldn’t nominate anyone in the rest of his term to replace Justice Scalia,” moderator John Dickerson said. “If you were President, and had a chance with 11 months left to go in your term, wouldn’t it be an abdication to conservatives in particular, not to name a conservative justice with the rest of your term?” Without hesitation, Trump answered, “If I were President now I would certainly want to try and nominate a justice.” But he hoped that “Mitch [McConnell], and the entire group, [are] going to be able to do something about” President Obama’s nominee.

Then Trump dropped the bombshell of the evening. If he was elected, “we could have a Diane Sykes, or you could have a Bill Pryor, we have some fantastic people.” Within seconds, my phone lit up from the Cruz campaign. “What do we have on these two? Sykes and Pryor? Are they solid?” Sykes was a Bush appointee to the Seventh Circuit in Wisconsin. Pryor, a Bush appointee to the Eleventh Circuit Court in Alabama, was confirmed after the Gang of Fourteen’s compromise broke up the Democratic filibuster.

Both had ruled against Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. Sykes found that the mandate violated the free exercise of a religious for-profit corporation, and Pryor ruled the accommodation to the mandate infringed the religious liberty of a nonprofit. I texted back that they were both solid. “OK just had to check – DT got good advice then.” The move was shrewd. Trump became the first presidential candidate to name the individuals he might appoint to the Supreme Court, and shifted the entire tenor of the debate after Scalia’s passing

We miss you Justice Scalia.

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