Pennsylvania’s Top Court Unanimously Rejects Warrantless Searches of Private Land


An entrance to the Pitch Pine Hunting Club's land in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania | Institute for Justice

On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously ruled that warrantless searches of land marked as private violate that state’s constitution. The seven justices agreed that the “open fields” doctrine, a sweeping exception to the Fourth Amendment that the U.S. Supreme Court first announced in 1924, does not apply to the Pennsylvania Constitution’s privacy protections.

“The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed that private land is not public property,” says Joshua Windham, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which represented two hunting clubs that objected to warrantless surveillance of their land by the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC). “It’s yours, and that means you get to decide who enters it.”

The Punxsutawney Hunting Club and the Pitch Pine Hunting Club own land in Clearfield County: 4,400 acres and 1,100 acres, respectively. The properties include houses where members can stay overnight or longer. Although both clubs value their members’ privacy and have marked their land with signs, fences, purple paint, and locked entrance gates, PGC officers have never treated those indicators as legally significant.

Since 2013, Warden Mark Gritzer and other PGC officers “have entered the Hunting Clubs’ land without consent, a warrant, or probable cause at least 15 to 22 times to look for evidence of hunting offenses,” Justice Kevin Brobson notes in Punxsutawney Hunting Club v. Pennsylvania Game Commission. “Warden Gritzer even placed a trail camera on Punxsutawney’s property in an attempt to develop probable cause for charges of illegal elk feeding. That camera remained on Punxsutawney’s property for 78 days.”

Those intrusions were authorized by two provisions of the Pennsylvania Game and Wildlife Code. Section 303(c) allows PGC employees to “go upon or enter any property, posted or otherwise, outside of buildings” without consent, probable cause, or a warrant. Section 901(a)(2) similarly says a PGC officer has the power to “go upon any land or water outside of buildings, except curtilage, posted or otherwise, in the performance of [his] duty.”

Those provisions, the hunting clubs argued, violate Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which is similar to the Fourth Amendment but had previously been read as providing more protection for privacy. Like the Fourth Amendment, Article I, Section 8 prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But it differs from the Fourth Amendment in explicitly protecting “possessions” (as opposed to “effects”), and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court deemed that detail significant, concluding that the original understanding of “possessions” included land.

In reaching that conclusion, the court overturned its 2007 ruling in Commonwealth v. Russo, which held that the “open fields” doctrine limits the scope of Article I, Section 8. The U.S. Supreme Court established that doctrine in the 1924 case Hester v. United States, which involved a warrantless search that had resulted in a South Carolina moonshiner’s arrest and conviction.

“The special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their ‘persons, houses, papers and effects,’ is not extended to the open fields,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for a unanimous Court. “The distinction between the latter and the house is as old as the common law.”

Holmes was wrong about that. As Institute for Justice attorneys Robert Frommer and Anthony Sanders noted in a 2017 Supreme Court brief, Holmes misconstrued a discussion of burglary in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, erroneously thinking it justified the supposedly longstanding distinction he perceived. But despite the shaky basis for the “open fields” doctrine, the Court reaffirmed it in the 1984 case Oliver v. United States, which involved a marijuana farm discovered by Kentucky state police.

Seventeen years earlier in Katz v. United States, the Court had announced a new Fourth Amendment test, saying the ban on unreasonable searches applies when people have “a reasonable expectation of privacy.” But in Oliver, the Court deemed the “open fields” exception consistent with the Katz test.

“In the case of open fields, the general rights of property protected by the common law of trespass have little or no relevance to the applicability of the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote in the majority opinion. Although the marijuana growers “erected fences and ‘No Trespassing’ signs around the property,” the Court rejected “the suggestion that steps taken to protect privacy establish that expectations of privacy in an open field are legitimate.”

The implication was that “open fields” need not actually be open. Even when private property is fenced and marked with “No Trespassing” signs, the Court said, “no expectation of privacy legitimately attaches to open fields.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court applied the same logic in Russo, which involved a warrantless search of private land that turned up evidence of illegal bear hunting. That decision was mistaken, Brobson says, because it disregarded evidence that Article I, Section 8 extends beyond the “curtilage,” the area immediately surrounding a home.

Judging from contemporaneous dictionary definitions, Founding-era statutes, and early decisions by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Brobson explains, the “possessions” protected by that constitutional provision include land. That conclusion, he says, is reinforced by the definition of trespassing under English common law and Pennsylvania statutes.

Brobson also notes that Article I, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution describes “acquiring, possessing and protecting property” as an “inherent and indefeasible” right. “It is axiomatic that, by granting the people the right to possess property in Article I, Section 1, the framers intended for all forms of property, including land, to constitute a ‘possession’ for purposes of Article I, Section 8,” he writes.

Based on these considerations, Brobson concludes that “Russo was wrongly decided” and that Sections 303(c) and 901(a)(2) of the Pennsylvania Game and Wildlife Code “violate Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution,” which “provides Pennsylvania citizens with greater protection than the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution as it relates to the open fields of any landowner” who “has demonstrated a reasonable expectation of privacy by taking sufficient steps to exclude intruders therefrom.” That means PGC employees and other law enforcement officers “must obtain a warrant based upon probable cause or satisfy one of the recognized exceptions to the warrant requirement before entering such property.”

With this decision, Pennsylvania joins six other states where courts have rejected the distinction that Holmes invented in 1924. “Courts in both Vermont and Tennessee have rejected warrantless searches of land by game wardens,” Brobson notes. “The high courts from four other states—Washington, Oregon, New York, and Montana—all of which have adopted heightened privacy protections under their respective state constitutions, have similarly rejected the open fields doctrine.”

Windham underlines the implications of that rejection. “If government officials want to invade your posted land without your consent and spy on you, they need to get a warrant,” he says. “By restoring that foundational protection, the court bolstered the property and privacy rights of millions of Pennsylvanians—and sent a warning to officials across the country who still believe they can invade private land at will: Watch your step.”

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Chief Justice Roberts Broke The Fourth Wall in Cook

For years, Justice Kagan was overtly critical of the Supreme Court’s approach to emergency applications. In written dissents and public speeches, Kagan fed into the nefarious “shadow docket” narrative. She may as well have blurbed Steve Vladeck’s book. Yet, I’ve noticed over the past year or so that rhetoric from Justice Kagan has faded. Indeed, Kagan testified that she would rather “not now . . . call it the shadow docket . . . because we have done . . . a better job . . . where appropriate [of] explaining ourselves, at least to a moderate degree.” Kagan added, “we have gotten more experienced in these constant requests that are coming to us about requests for emergency relief . . . and we have issued opinions, and sometimes majority and dissenting opinions accordingly.”

Kagan was almost certainly referring to Trump v. Cook, which might be the slowest emergency docket case of all time. Remember, President Trump purported to remove Governor Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve on August 25, 2025. Twelve days later the District Court granted a preliminary injunction. Four days after that, the D.C. Circuit denied the government’s motion to stay. The case reached the Supreme Court on September 18, 2025. It would take the Court more than 280 days to decide the case in its “interim” posture, with more than 80 pages of majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions.

Justice Alito’s dissent laid out the glacial chronology.

The President then applied for a stay from this Court. When that application arrived here, this litigation was just 21 days old. There had been only two rounds of abbreviated briefing below and no meaningful development of a factual record. Indeed, the record does not even contain copies of Cook’s allegedly fraudulent mortgage applications. Of course, parties may appropriately seek (and courts may appropriately grant) stays early in a litigation. No court, including this Court, should sit on its hands when interim relief is appropriate. But this does not mean that the Court must reach out to opine on each issue that could conceivably arise in a case’s future. Here, the incipiency of this case and the complexity of the issues that it presents counseled in favor of a light touch by this Court, regardless of whether we granted or denied the application. To that end, the Court should have resolved the President’s application shortly after we received it. And in doing so, we should have focused on the few issues that the courts addressed below. If a majority had desired, we could have issued a statement explaining our decision. That is exactly how we have handled nearly all our stay applications in recent years.

Had the Court denied the stay in September or October of 2025, the lower courts could have proceeded to decide the case on the merits, and presented the Supreme Court with a regular appeal. But the Court (and by Court, I mean the Chief Justice) chose a different path. Alito explains further:

Although the panel performed admirably given the four days that it had to decide the President’s stay motion, nobody can doubt that the panel would have produced more comprehensive opinions if it had even a fraction of the 280-plus days that this Court has spent with the case. Either way, this Court could have reentered the fray when we inevitably granted certiorari. Instead, the Court departed from its normal practice and “deferred” ruling on this application, bringing proceedings in the lower courts to a 9-month standstill. 606 U. S. 1062 (2025). We then ordered the parties to submit more briefing than they had filed at any other point in this litigation. In January, we held oral argument, marking just the second in-court proceeding in this entire suit. The Court now issues a full-length opinion that purports to resolve many complicated and novel legal questions on an underdeveloped record while ignoring lurking jurisdictional issues.”Either out of humility or out of self-respect (one or the other), the Court should decline to answer” these “incredibly difficult” questions in this case’s current posture. PGA TOUR, Inc. v. Martin, 532 U. S. 661, 700 (2001) (Scalia, J., dissenting).

Moreover, the Court reached out to decide several significant constitutional questions that were not necessary to decide. Is the Federal Reserve’s so-called “independence” consistent with the separation of powers? Do the federal courts even have jurisdiction to review the President’s termination of a Governor? Did Cook even have a “cause of action” to challenge her removal? Justice Barrett raises these, and other questions in her concurrence. But the Supreme Court was content to decide a landmark case on its “emergency” docket, leapfrogging over all prudence. This unusual posture was sure to placate Justice Kagan and the Court’s critics, but is at odds with the Chief’s self-professed modus operandi.

Indeed, something seems to have happened behind-the-scenes in this case. In most cases, the Chief Justice barely acknowledges the dissent, and offers sparse responses, if that. In Barbara, the dissents were more than five times as long as the majority. Roberts didn’t care to respond because he had five votes.

Yet in Cook, Chief Justice Roberts responds nearly point-by-point to Justice Thomas. I think this was part of an effort to justify the Court’s decision to reach the constitutional question. One would expect Roberts to simply say in a footnote “We need not reach the status of the constitutionality of the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protections…” But no such luck. The Federal Reserve cannot be kept in “limbo” so let’s respond to the brash Justice Thomas.

Then there is this passage where Roberts which responds directly to his colleagues:

How much to say on our interim docket—and how much to say in response to a dissent—is not reducible to any mechanical formula; it is ultimately a matter of prudence, upon which reasonable minds can (and often do) disagree. See Mirabelli v. Bonta, 607 U. S. 492, 501 (2026) (BARRETT, J., concurring) (“Interim applications routinely require the Court to balance the lock-in risk of saying too much against the transparency cost of saying too little”); compare Trump v. Illinois, 607 U. S. ___ (2025), with id., at ___ (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 6), and id., at ___ (GORSUCH, J., dissenting) (slip op. at 2). In this extraordinary case, we have had the benefit of not only amici and oral argument but months of internal consultation and deliberation. We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our Nation’s (and theworld’s) most important financial institutions. Althoughwe appreciate that others may see matters differently, wewould not so quickly unsettle this “special arrangement sanctioned by history.” Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Assn. of America, Ltd., 601 U. S. 416, 467, n. 16 (2024) (ALITO, J., dissenting).

First, Roberts faults Barrett for inconsistency. In Mirabelli (decided in March 2026), Barrett favored deciding the merits, even at the risk of lock-in. Indeed, the Chief Justice joined that opinion. I was surprised Roberts joined that concurrence, as he usually says nothing at all on emergency docket cases. But now that join comes into focus. Roberts joined Barrett’s concurrence, even though Barrett chose not to join Roberts in Cook. Roberts may have even joined Barrett to nudge her into flipping in Cook. Roberts almost certainly wrote the narrow per curiam in Mirabelli. Why do more?

In Mirabelli, Barrett chose to reach the merits, but in Cook, she did not. Again, when Mirabelli was decided, Barrett had to have known what Roberts would say in Cook. I have this sinking feeling that Barrett’s vote flipped in Cook. Maybe she was troubled so much by the lack of a cause of action that she just couldn’t go along with the majority. Maybe she really liked Aditya Bamzai and Aaaron Nielson’s article, and did not think the Bank of the United States was a valid precedent. Something happened here.

Second, Roberts draws a contrast between Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Trump v. Illinois with Justice Gorsuch’s dissent. In that case, Justice Kavanaugh would have ordered additional briefing and oral argument–exactly what was done in Cook. By contrast, in Illinois, Justice Gorsuch would not have decide the merits question with limited briefing. Here, I think Roberts was giving credence to Kavanaugh’s concerns.

Third, the Chief Justice appears to break the fourth wall. He expressly references “months of internal consultation and deliberation.” What is going on here? It goes without saying that the Justices will always consult and deliberate. But “months”? Again, the application was filed in September, the following month the Court set the case for oral argument, the case was argued in January, and decided on the last day of June. I get this feeling that deliberations continued well after the case was argued, maybe through the end of the term. Justice Kavanaugh and the Chief were locked in from the outset. This sentence provides some more proof that Justice Barrett may have vacillated in Cook.

There is much more that I will say about Cook in another piece, contrast the case with Slaughter. But here I’ll close on a note about Roberts.

I appreciate Richard Re’s attempts to reconcile the Chief Justice’s votes in Cook and Barbara, and decisions over the course of two decades. But the levels of explanation are getting tough to follow. He is an “institutionalist”; he is an “institutionalist” who practices the doctrine of “one last chance”; he is an institutionalist who practices the doctrine of “one last chance” but still “moderates from the front”; he is an institutionalist who practices the doctrine of “one last chance” but still “moderates from the front” except when “extremism in defense of stability is no vice.”

The ancients who favored the geocentric model of the universe kept confronting evidence that didn’t conflicted with the model. So they started drawing “epicycles” to explain away the retrograde motion of certain planets. Over time, scientists recognized that the geocentric model was wrong, and the solar system revolved around the sun.

Our legal order has revolved around the Chief Justice for so long that it is tempting to offer a unifying theorem. But the most likely theory is the simplest. Robert is charge–not because he is the smartest judge or puts forward the most compelling theories. Rather, just like when he was an advocate, he found a way to count to five when it mattered. Or more precisely, to count to four–he has his own vote in hand.

The conclusion I reached some time ago is that Roberts is entirely situational. He decides each case on its own terms based on the political climate of the day. Roberts does as much as he thinks he can get away with, no more and no less. In one case, minimalism. In another case, maximalism. Rules of prudence are thrown to the wind when the cause is just. And the Chief Justice uses whatever magic is needed to get there.

Roberts is not an institutionalist. He is an illusionist. But like all other illusionists, once he is off the stage, he will be quickly forgotten. Chief Justice Marshall’s decisions are still revered. Will anyone even remember the sorts of political compromises the Roberts Court navigated? Why did he vote to save Obamacare? Why did he vote to save Roe? I can barely remember the situations from the first Trump administration. Roberts’s opinions may as well be written with disappearing ink.

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Socialist Influencer Hasan Piker Is Praising Mao. Here’s the Truth About Chinese Communism.


Robby Soave talks about the democratic socialists like Hasan Piker | Illustration: Adani Samat

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are having a moment: Candidates affiliated with this group are winning Democratic primaries all over the country—and that’s bad. Very, very bad. Why? Well, because their ideas for how to run the country are wrong, and dangerous, and in many cases authoritarian. We know that because we can read their plans and listen to their speeches.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Don’t Republicans call everybody who disagrees with President Donald Trump a socialist? Sure, that label as an insult has been overused before. But these people self-describe as socialists and communists—and they revere figures and governments from history that engaged in actual authoritarian communism.

Take Hasan Piker, a popular far-left commentator associated with the DSA. He recently spoke at a gathering of College Democrats and explained his plan to drive all the nonsocialists out of the Democratic Party:

You might have some questions about that, including, uh, what was he wearing? Well, it turns out he just so happened to dress in the uniform of one of his favorite great men of history: Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.

Mao did, in fact, change the world—by making it much worse. Under Mao’s communist economic policies known as the Great Leap Forward, tens of millions of people starved to death in China. He also implemented widespread political repression and censorship, and encouraged state violence against dissenters. Several million more people died as a result of his Cultural Revolution, which was Mao’s effort to maintain power despite the complete failure of his economic policies.

China’s situation only began to improve following Mao’s death in 1976, when his successors moved away from rigid central planning and allowed free markets to lift the people out of poverty.

Now, you might be thinking, Piker is just one random guy. Surely the DSA doesn’t want to implement Maoist authoritarianism. Well, read its program: It sounds pretty Maoist to me.

According to official DSA materials, it would collectivize food, education, medicine, energy, and transportation: These would all be things the government made available rather than the market. The problem with that is that governments are bad at providing such services cheaply and efficiently. When private, profit-seeking firms compete with one another to offer you stuff at the best price, it works a lot better.

The DSA goes on to say that in its socialist utopia, you’d be free to spend your day however you want, and you’d never have to work if you don’t feel like it. But that obviously doesn’t make any sense. Somebody has to work to provide all those supposedly free things: grow the food, drive the transportation, build the power plants, offer the medical services. Under capitalism, you perform those tasks in exchange for money that you use to buy what you need. But under every actually existing socialist government in history, including Soviet Russia and Maoist China, the government ends up having to force people to work, since they don’t have profits to motivate them, and you end up with both shortages and repression.

So let’s not ignore the unworkable, radical nature of the DSA’s agenda, which calls for scrapping the entire U.S. Constitution. It writes: “Our enemies are not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital.”

That’s right: It is declaring war on a system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty over the course of the last century.

But just because they’re wrong about everything doesn’t mean they’re going to be easy to beat. Democrats are clearly furious with the leadership of their party for failing to stop Trump, and Democratic primary voters are lashing out at incumbents and instead picking the most left-leaning person in the race—even someone like Darializa Avila Chevalier, who has tweeted in support of communismand yet is likely to be the next congresswoman from New York.

That has some more reasonable folks in the party worried. Van Jones recently sounded the alarm on CNN:

Saying some of these people evince support for literal terrorists is no slur. Kyle Kulinski, another far-left commentator like Piker, recently appeared on a livestream and expressed his fears that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis were going to lose the Iranian government as a source of funding.

Now, I’m mostly against the current U.S. war on Iran because I think it’s a waste of our tax dollars and unlikely to improve things in the Middle East, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be shedding any tears for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, which are terrorist groups that murder civilians. Kulinski feels differently, obviously. I wonder how many of his DSA friends agreed with him? Because you know who else appeared on that stream? Avila Chevalier, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, and possible 2028 presidential candidate Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.).

The bottom line is this: The DSA is about to take the entire Democratic Party on one wild ride. And while it’s tempting to simply point and laugh at the idiot in the Mao uniform, if Democrats want to keep this tide at bay, they’re going to have to do a little bit more than absolutely nothing about it.

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Pennsylvania’s Top Court Unanimously Rejects Warrantless Searches of Private Land


An entrance to the Pitch Pine Hunting Club's land in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania | Institute for Justice

On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously ruled that warrantless searches of land marked as private violate that state’s constitution. The seven justices agreed that the “open fields” doctrine, a sweeping exception to the Fourth Amendment that the U.S. Supreme Court first announced in 1924, does not apply to the Pennsylvania Constitution’s privacy protections.

“The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed that private land is not public property,” says Joshua Windham, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which represented two hunting clubs that objected to warrantless surveillance of their land by the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC). “It’s yours, and that means you get to decide who enters it.”

The Punxsutawney Hunting Club and the Pitch Pine Hunting Club own land in Clearfield County: 4,400 acres and 1,100 acres, respectively. The properties include houses where members can stay overnight or longer. Although both clubs value their members’ privacy and have marked their land with signs, fences, purple paint, and locked entrance gates, PGC officers have never treated those indicators as legally significant.

Since 2013, Warden Mark Gritzer and other PGC officers “have entered the Hunting Clubs’ land without consent, a warrant, or probable cause at least 15 to 22 times to look for evidence of hunting offenses,” Justice Kevin Brobson notes in Punxsutawney Hunting Club v. Pennsylvania Game Commission. “Warden Gritzer even placed a trail camera on Punxsutawney’s property in an attempt to develop probable cause for charges of illegal elk feeding. That camera remained on Punxsutawney’s property for 78 days.”

Those intrusions were authorized by two provisions of the Pennsylvania Game and Wildlife Code. Section 303(c) allows PGC employees to “go upon or enter any property, posted or otherwise, outside of buildings” without consent, probable cause, or a warrant. Section 901(a)(2) similarly says a PGC officer has the power to “go upon any land or water outside of buildings, except curtilage, posted or otherwise, in the performance of [his] duty.”

Those provisions, the hunting clubs argued, violate Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which is similar to the Fourth Amendment but had previously been read as providing more protection for privacy. Like the Fourth Amendment, Article I, Section 8 prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But it differs from the Fourth Amendment in explicitly protecting “possessions” (as opposed to “effects”), and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court deemed that detail significant, concluding that the original understanding of “possessions” included land.

In reaching that conclusion, the court overturned its 2007 ruling in Commonwealth v. Russo, which held that the “open fields” doctrine limits the scope of Article I, Section 8. The U.S. Supreme Court established that doctrine in the 1924 case Hester v. United States, which involved a warrantless search that had resulted in a South Carolina moonshiner’s arrest and conviction.

“The special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their ‘persons, houses, papers and effects,’ is not extended to the open fields,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for a unanimous Court. “The distinction between the latter and the house is as old as the common law.”

Holmes was wrong about that. As Institute for Justice attorneys Robert Frommer and Anthony Sanders noted in a 2017 Supreme Court brief, Holmes misconstrued a discussion of burglary in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, erroneously thinking it justified the supposedly longstanding distinction he perceived. But despite the shaky basis for the “open fields” doctrine, the Court reaffirmed it in the 1984 case Oliver v. United States, which involved a marijuana farm discovered by Kentucky state police.

Seventeen years earlier in Katz v. United States, the Court had announced a new Fourth Amendment test, saying the ban on unreasonable searches applies when people have “a reasonable expectation of privacy.” But in Oliver, the Court deemed the “open fields” exception consistent with the Katz test.

“In the case of open fields, the general rights of property protected by the common law of trespass have little or no relevance to the applicability of the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote in the majority opinion. Although the marijuana growers “erected fences and ‘No Trespassing’ signs around the property,” the Court rejected “the suggestion that steps taken to protect privacy establish that expectations of privacy in an open field are legitimate.”

The implication was that “open fields” need not actually be open. Even when private property is fenced and marked with “No Trespassing” signs, the Court said, “no expectation of privacy legitimately attaches to open fields.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court applied the same logic in Russo, which involved a warrantless search of private land that turned up evidence of illegal bear hunting. That decision was mistaken, Brobson says, because it disregarded evidence that Article I, Section 8 extends beyond the “curtilage,” the area immediately surrounding a home.

Judging from contemporaneous dictionary definitions, Founding-era statutes, and early decisions by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Brobson explains, the “possessions” protected by that constitutional provision include land. That conclusion, he says, is reinforced by the definition of trespassing under English common law and Pennsylvania statutes.

Brobson also notes that Article I, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution describes “acquiring, possessing and protecting property” as an “inherent and indefeasible” right. “It is axiomatic that, by granting the people the right to possess property in Article I, Section 1, the framers intended for all forms of property, including land, to constitute a ‘possession’ for purposes of Article I, Section 8,” he writes.

Based on these considerations, Brobson concludes that “Russo was wrongly decided” and that Sections 303(c) and 901(a)(2) of the Pennsylvania Game and Wildlife Code “violate Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution,” which “provides Pennsylvania citizens with greater protection than the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution as it relates to the open fields of any landowner” who “has demonstrated a reasonable expectation of privacy by taking sufficient steps to exclude intruders therefrom.” That means PGC employees and other law enforcement officers “must obtain a warrant based upon probable cause or satisfy one of the recognized exceptions to the warrant requirement before entering such property.”

With this decision, Pennsylvania joins six other states where courts have rejected the distinction that Holmes invented in 1924. “Courts in both Vermont and Tennessee have rejected warrantless searches of land by game wardens,” Brobson notes. “The high courts from four other states—Washington, Oregon, New York, and Montana—all of which have adopted heightened privacy protections under their respective state constitutions, have similarly rejected the open fields doctrine.”

Windham underlines the implications of that rejection. “If government officials want to invade your posted land without your consent and spy on you, they need to get a warrant,” he says. “By restoring that foundational protection, the court bolstered the property and privacy rights of millions of Pennsylvanians—and sent a warning to officials across the country who still believe they can invade private land at will: Watch your step.”

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The Conflicts Brewing In America’s Ten Classes

The Conflicts Brewing In America’s Ten Classes

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

What we do know is that things have internal structures with dynamics that operate whether we “like” them or not.

Correspondent Manoj S. recommended an essay from the always-insightful John Michael Greer on the dissolution of unproductive classes behind the smokescreen of AIA Game of Musical Chairs

“You can sell Americans on anything, no matter how wretchedly unsatisfactory it is, by labeling it as progress. That’s what’s being done now, with AI being used as a justification for firing useless workers, deleting unnecessary departments, cutting office staff down to scales that actually make sense, and shutting down the classroom-to-cubicle pipeline that once poured new graduates into salary class jobs. We can expect that process to accelerate dramatically in the years ahead.”

Greer begins by laying out a compelling taxonomy of class in America, four self-explanatory classes defined by this question: how do different groups in today’s America get their income?

1. investment class: income from investments (i.e. capital)

2. salary class: income from a monthly salary with benefits

3. wage class: income from an hourly wage with no benefits

4. welfare class: income from welfare programs

Greer argues that the salary class is now the gravitational center of power in the U.S., absorbing much of the national income in unproductive faux-problem-solving for fabricated problems explicitly devised to justify generous salaries and benefits.

The nation can no longer afford this staggeringly costly unproductive work force and so “replacing cognitive work with AI” is the cover story for the mass evisceration of this class, in a parallel to the previous gutting of the factory work force by automation and offshoring.

I’ve been addressing the class taxonomy of the US since 2012, and I’d like to add some commentary on the dynamics Greer so succinctly describes. In America’s Metastasizing Class Wars (August 27, 2020), I laid out ten classes, based not just on sources of income but on several additional criteria:

Systemic Power: political control of the state’s monopoly of force / coercion; financial control of the system’s taxation, incentives and optimizations; corporate control of essential technologies – platforms; corporate-state “soft power” control of cultural, social and intellectual belief structures and sources of influence: media, social media, think-tanks, foundations, the Higher Education Clerisy, etc.

The power to protect bureaucratic-institutional fortresses from budget cuts, transparency and accountability.

Agency: the power to leave employment or a locale and change one’s life; freedom from debt-servitude / employment bondage.

My ten classes: yes, this is more complicated that Greer’s four classes but since power has sources other than income, accuracy demands an accounting not just of income but of power and agency, which is an individual form of power with systemic consequences such as social mobility.

1. The Deep State. Unelected, unaccountable, they wield state power. Call them if you’re about to be renditioned. But you need either power or relationships to have their number. Relationships are a form of power.

2. The Oligarchs. Top bidders in the auction for political and financial influence. The top .001%. Able to rig the structures of power to serve their private interests.

3. New Nobility. The super-wealthy class just below the Oligarchs. The top .01%. They have the means to serve their private interests via lobbyists and campaign contributions. $10 million in campaign contributions nets $100 million in tax breaks / subsidies.

4. Upper Caste. The technocrat/professional class that manages the Status Quo for the upper classes. This includes wealthy entrepreneurs and owners of enterprises: rich but not rich enough to rig the structures of power to serve their private interests.

5. State Nomenklatura. Well-paid government administrators with ironclad job security and power.

Together, the Upper Caste and the Nomenklatura comprise the upper-middle class. Owners of enough capital (real estate and stocks) to cheer serial credit-asset bubbles. Since I’m doing well, the system is working great.

6. The Middle Class. Wage-earners and salaried employees, owners of traditional sources of financial security: family home, 401K retirement funds, etc. Due to high debt, many qualify as debt-serfs / wage-slaves with minimal agency despite their ownership of middle-class status signifiers.

7. The Working Poor. Households with earned income but it is not sufficient to secure the basics of middle class life. Many qualify for social welfare programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. Due to high debt, many qualify as debt-serfs / wage-slaves with minimal agency.

8. State Dependents. Though often labeled “poor,” those with cash / black-market income often live better than the working poor, due to generous social welfare benefits.

9. Mobile Creatives. Self-employed independents, entrepreneurial sole proprietors with adaptive skills. They may collaborate with other Creatives rather than have employees, and may have part-time conventional jobs. They have mobility between sectors and ways of earning income sufficient to acquire capital / assets. They “own their livelihoods.” Their credo is trust my network, not the corporation or the state.

10. Gig economy precariat. May supplement insecure employment (limited hours, no benefits, etc.) with gig work, may combine cash work with rideshare gigs, may juggle several delivery / eBay sales / rideshare gigs. The difference between precariats and Mobile Creatives is precariats are generally in survival mode (high debt, unreliable income, etc.) and are unable to acquire capital / assets. They “rent” their livelihoods rather than “own” them.

Here is a curated list of my essays on the taxonomy of class in the US:

The Three-and-a-Half Class Society (October 22, 2012)

America’s Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014)

What the Global Status Quo Optimizes: Protecting Elites and the Clerisy Class That Serves Them (September 26, 2014)
Explicitly describing what the system optimizes would trigger social instability.

The New Class: Mobile Creatives (May 1, 2014)
The key characteristic of the Mobile Creative class is that they live by this credo: trust your network, not the corporation or the state.

When Belief in the System Fades (March 12, 2008)

Let’s distill the key dynamics this structure reveals.

1. This is a neofeudal society passing itself off as a free-market democracy. Power is concentrated in the top state-private sector classes. No one below has any real power. Electing another leader or party changes nothing: life gets more difficult, insecure and expensive for commoners regardless of who’s in office. The Imperial project grinds on, regardless of the delusional hope that electing someone else will change anything. Everything else is an illusion of power, not real power.

Try switching the 37% tax rate on labor to capital gains and all income from capital, and see how far you get.

2. Debt and social engineering are the foundations of America’s neofeudalism. The essence of neofeudalism is debt penury and wage-slave bondage to the owners of the debt, which is capital that generates income. Commoners have no agency because they have to work for corporations or the state to service their debt. They can’t change jobs because they’ll lose healthcare insurance, and so on.

Social engineering: as Greer highlighted, Americans can be sold anything, no matter how destructive, unhealthy and exploitive, as long as it’s packaged as Progress, especially technological Progress and novelty-as-progress. This is the power of The Mythology of Progress.

3. Beneath the endless marketing of “free market capitalism,” few have any real agency. Stripped of PR gloss, the majority of workers have a false choice of servitude: they can serve their current oligarch / state agency / corporation, or they can toil in another noble’s domain. Six one way, half-dozen the other.

4. America’s neofeudalism now depends on inflating an endless series of credit-asset bubbles that generate phantom wealth, financial claims that are easily inflated without actually creating any real value via increasing income streams by means other than inflation and monopoly extortion.

This has worked so well for so long that recency bias has kicked in and we now believe this is a well-oiled permanent mechanism we can rely on. Alas, credit-asset bubbles are inherently unstable and the current system-wide bet on AI being something that will actually generate value / massive new income streams is an all-in last-ditch bet. When this bubble pops, the conditions enabling a future bubble will no longer exist.

But nobody says that, do they?

5. Here is a chart of the income distribution from owning capital. Note that it follows a power-law distribution: the few collect the lion’s share of the income generated by capital. The vast majority don’t own any income-generating capital, and the top 20% are delighted by the steady rise in their phantom wealth as the bubble-du-jour inflates the nominal price of the assets they own, setting up the inevitable crash when tulip bulbs revert from “investments” to flowers.

Meanwhile, those collecting 95% of the income from capital look down on the toiling peasantry from their Kafkaesque castles with amusement. Student loans, mortgages, 27.99% interest rate credit cards–it’s really quite marvelous, isn’t it?

6. Symbolic work versus productive work. Much of the work Greer describes as unproductive is considered highly productive because our exploitation of hydrocarbons and technology has generated such a vast surplus that we could spend it on symbolic work–meetings about meetings, compliance reports, marketing plans, projections, consulting, and so on, work that despite claims to the contrary has little to do with harvesting grain, connecting pipelines, replacing transformers, making beds, performing surgery or any other real-world work.

What If the Work We’re Busy Automating Is Needless? (June 19, 2026)

Try telling the priesthood of the temple gods that their work is symbolic. Ours is the most valuable labor, as we’re the ones keeping the whole thing glued together. If we stop, the gods will be angered and all will fail. Indeed.

As a result, we have no experience of a way of life stripped of symbolic work based on seeking positions of status, accumulating credentials, and so on.

7. The number of Mobile Creatives is modest. Some years ago I dug into IRS data on types of income and found that only a tiny sliver of the workforce is truly independent / self-employed, i.e. they earn a middle-class income from royalties, ownership of enterprises or professional services. Out of roughly 160 million employed people, around 16 million are self-employed, but only 6.9 million are professional-class with some form of incorporation, and around 3 million others make enough income to live well. So around 6% of the work force is truly independent.

We’re inundated with glowing accounts of individuals earning big bucks on “passive income” schemes, just as there are endless posts about how to make six figures using “can’t lose” techniques that just so happen to cost $200.

The reality is it’s extremely challenging to live outside the peasantry-Nobility arrangement. In my experience, it takes a willingness to constantly absorb risk and failure, and wear an absurd number of hats: accountant, manager, programmer, laborer, creative wizard, psychologist, consultant, student–and even after all that, success is not guaranteed. The difference between living in a shack and “success” is often some form of luck.

8. Something’s gotta give. Soaring debt, public and private, rampant corruption, extortion, exploitation, dynamic pricing, unaffordable shelter, utilities and food, tulip-bubble scale euphoria, moated bureaucracies, complexity thickets that stifle competition, neofeudal lords digging bunkers and hiring private armies as they sense the peasantry’s distemper–something’s gotta give, we just don’t know what will break first.

The usual explanations no longer explain anything. Their incoherence is obvious but lacking anything more coherent, we go back to insisting that all will be well if only everyone would wear their Silly Hats. What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing.

What we do know is that things have internal structures with dynamics that operate whether we “like” them or not. I put together this chart of the Lifecycle of Bureaucracies some years ago to illustrate how institutions decay as self-interest replaces the original purpose of the organization. This leads to implosion – collapse. Again, whether we “like” it or not.

Greer’s forecast of the end of white-collar symbolic work may well be prescient. Costs are funny things. We can play games with “money” and think we’ve solved the problem of costs, but costs are weirdly embedded in the real world, and so thinking that we can overcome all those costs by requiring everyone to wear Silly Hats doesn’t actually work.

As Peter Drucker observed, enterprises don’t have profits, they only have costs. This is also true of governments, households, institutions and, well, everything else. Calling tulip bulbs “wealth” works like magic for a time, and then reality intrudes.

*  *  *

My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.comSubscribe to my Substack for free

Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/21/2026 – 16:20

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Lockheed Unveils Move Towards Cheaper Patriot Missiles As Interceptor Stockpiles Dwindle

Lockheed Unveils Move Towards Cheaper Patriot Missiles As Interceptor Stockpiles Dwindle

With US-Iran tit-for-tat strikes on their ninth day and the Russia-Ukraine war grinding on in Eastern Europe, US inventories of certain air-delivered munitions are being depleted. This has made the rapid procurement of lower-cost missiles and bombs a top priority for the Trump administration.

The Wall Street Journal reports that defense giant Lockheed Martin is planning a low-cost version of the Patriot interceptor missile that will cost less than half as much as the current version.

The PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector will cost less than half the price of Lockheed’s PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptor, which currently costs $4 million per round.

The new missile is designed to counter cruise missiles and short-range ballistic threats while using existing Patriot launchers.

A separate report from the Financial Times states that Lockheed is exploring a European production line for the new low-cost interceptor missiles, which could drive the price down to between $1.5 million and $2 million per round.

Lockheed is already considering European suppliers for solid rocket motors, guidance electronics, and other critical components, potentially through a partnership with a leading defense contractor on the continent.

Lockheed’s decision to look toward Europe, rather than expand exclusively in the US, may signal limitations within the domestic defense-industrial base, just as the Trump administration’s war economy begins to accelerate.

So about lead time for these new missile? How many years?

Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/21/2026 – 15:40

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I’ve Seen Fake Cites on Both Sides Now (II)

From Evans v. Robertson, decided today by Judge Judith Levy (E.D. Mich.) (for the original on the Magistrate Judge’s September 2025 post decision in this case, see here):

Plaintiff and Defendant’s objections will be stricken because they contain factitious citations.

The litigants in this case have been repeatedly warned that factitious citations will not be tolerated by the Court. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth A. Stafford ordered Plaintiff and Defendant to “include a written representation that [they have] personally checked each legal citation and each citation is accurate and stands for its asserted proposition” and warned that a failure to do so may result in sanctions. Despite Judge Stafford’s order and this Court’s repeated warnings, both Plaintiff and Defendant have violated the Court’s express requirements numerous times.

On November 20, 2025, the Court imposed sanctions on both Plaintiff and Defendant for their repeated use of factitious citations and have stricken the parties’ filings when they contain factitious citations. The parties have been warned that additional sanctions may be imposed if future filings contain factitious citations….

Plaintiff’s objections contain factitious citations. Plaintiff declares in her objection that she “reviewed the citations and representations contained herein and that, to the best of [her] knowledge, information, and belief formed after reasonable inquiry, they are accurate and supported by the record.” However, in her objections, Plaintiff argues,

Michigan’s single-publication rule does not bar claims based on a new and discrete act of publication occurring within the statutory period. Where a defendant affirmatively reissues, relinks, re-amplifies, or otherwise causes renewed dissemination of allegedly defamatory material, that act may constitute a separate publication. Mitan v. Campbell, 474 Mich. 21[ ] (2005).

Plaintiff cites Mitan for a similar proposition later in her objection, stating, “Michigan law further provides that liability may attach where a defendant authorizes or affirmatively causes a republication. See Mitan v. Campbell, 474 Mich. 21 [ ] (2005).”

But Mitan does not remotely stand for Plaintiff’s asserted proposition. In fact, the Mitan court states the opposite. Mitan, 474 Mich. at 24–25 (stating that “a defamation claim must be filed within one year from the date the claim first accrued” and that accrual of a claim is not extended “on the basis of republication”)….

Defendant’s objections also contain factitious citations. Defendant declares in her objection that she “checked all citations in this filing and, to the best of [her] knowledge, they are accurate.” However, many of Defendant’s citations are factitious.

For example, Defendant cites Delay v. Rosenthal Collins Group, LLC, 585 F.3d 1003, 1005 (6th Cir. 2009), for the statement, “Plaintiff bears the burden of establishing diversity jurisdiction.” But at no point does the Delay opinion support that statement. Instead, the Sixth Circuit in Delay directed the defendants “to submit a jurisdictional statement identifying the citizenship of all its members” in its efforts to determine whether it had jurisdiction over the case. Delay, 585 F.3d at 1005.

Similarly, Defendant cites Everett v. Verizon Wireless, Inc., 460 F.3d 818 (6th Cir. 2006), for the contention that “Plaintiff bears the burden of establishing that the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000 under 28 U.S.C. § 1332.” At no point does the Everett opinion support this contention. Instead, the Everett decision states that “[a] defendant wishing to remove a case bears the burden of satisfying the amount-in-controversy requirement.” Everett, 460 F.3d at 822.

{Although the Court only describes two factitious citations here, numerous citations in Defendant’s objections appears to be factitious. But even a single factitious citation is a violation of the Court’s prior orders and is sanctionable.}

Despite the parties’ certifications and the Court’s numerous warnings, the parties’ objections contain factitious citations. The parties were warned in previous Court orders that sanctions may be imposed if future filings contain factitious citations.

Yet again, the parties have violated the Court’s express requirements, misrepresented the law to the Court, and wasted the Court’s time. Plaintiff and Defendant’s objections are stricken and will not be considered by the Court….

In response to the Order, Plaintiff sought to file an objection. She filed a motion for leave to file a late objection to the Order, as well as the late objection.

Plaintiff’s motion for leave to file a late objection is stricken for failure to include the certification ordered by Judge Stafford on September 25, 2025. Plaintiff’s late objection is also stricken for failure to include this certification.

On September 25, 2025, Judge Stafford set forth,

In each of their future filings, Evans and Robertson “must include a written representation that [they have] personally checked each legal citation and each citation is accurate and stands for its asserted proposition.” See [Everett J. Prescott, Inc. v. Beall, No. 1:25-cv-00071, 2025 WL 2084353, at (D. Me. July 24, 2025)].

Judge Stafford warned that failure to do so may result in sanctions.

Here, Plaintiff’s motion for leave to file a late objection and the objection to the Order do not include the required certification. As such, Plaintiff’s motion and objection are stricken….

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I’ve Seen Fake Cites on Both Sides Now (II)

From Evans v. Robertson, decided today by Judge Judith Levy (E.D. Mich.) (for the original on the Magistrate Judge’s September 2025 post decision in this case, see here):

Plaintiff and Defendant’s objections will be stricken because they contain factitious citations.

The litigants in this case have been repeatedly warned that factitious citations will not be tolerated by the Court. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth A. Stafford ordered Plaintiff and Defendant to “include a written representation that [they have] personally checked each legal citation and each citation is accurate and stands for its asserted proposition” and warned that a failure to do so may result in sanctions. Despite Judge Stafford’s order and this Court’s repeated warnings, both Plaintiff and Defendant have violated the Court’s express requirements numerous times.

On November 20, 2025, the Court imposed sanctions on both Plaintiff and Defendant for their repeated use of factitious citations and have stricken the parties’ filings when they contain factitious citations. The parties have been warned that additional sanctions may be imposed if future filings contain factitious citations….

Plaintiff’s objections contain factitious citations. Plaintiff declares in her objection that she “reviewed the citations and representations contained herein and that, to the best of [her] knowledge, information, and belief formed after reasonable inquiry, they are accurate and supported by the record.” However, in her objections, Plaintiff argues,

Michigan’s single-publication rule does not bar claims based on a new and discrete act of publication occurring within the statutory period. Where a defendant affirmatively reissues, relinks, re-amplifies, or otherwise causes renewed dissemination of allegedly defamatory material, that act may constitute a separate publication. Mitan v. Campbell, 474 Mich. 21[ ] (2005).

Plaintiff cites Mitan for a similar proposition later in her objection, stating, “Michigan law further provides that liability may attach where a defendant authorizes or affirmatively causes a republication. See Mitan v. Campbell, 474 Mich. 21 [ ] (2005).”

But Mitan does not remotely stand for Plaintiff’s asserted proposition. In fact, the Mitan court states the opposite. Mitan, 474 Mich. at 24–25 (stating that “a defamation claim must be filed within one year from the date the claim first accrued” and that accrual of a claim is not extended “on the basis of republication”)….

Defendant’s objections also contain factitious citations. Defendant declares in her objection that she “checked all citations in this filing and, to the best of [her] knowledge, they are accurate.” However, many of Defendant’s citations are factitious.

For example, Defendant cites Delay v. Rosenthal Collins Group, LLC, 585 F.3d 1003, 1005 (6th Cir. 2009), for the statement, “Plaintiff bears the burden of establishing diversity jurisdiction.” But at no point does the Delay opinion support that statement. Instead, the Sixth Circuit in Delay directed the defendants “to submit a jurisdictional statement identifying the citizenship of all its members” in its efforts to determine whether it had jurisdiction over the case. Delay, 585 F.3d at 1005.

Similarly, Defendant cites Everett v. Verizon Wireless, Inc., 460 F.3d 818 (6th Cir. 2006), for the contention that “Plaintiff bears the burden of establishing that the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000 under 28 U.S.C. § 1332.” At no point does the Everett opinion support this contention. Instead, the Everett decision states that “[a] defendant wishing to remove a case bears the burden of satisfying the amount-in-controversy requirement.” Everett, 460 F.3d at 822.

{Although the Court only describes two factitious citations here, numerous citations in Defendant’s objections appears to be factitious. But even a single factitious citation is a violation of the Court’s prior orders and is sanctionable.}

Despite the parties’ certifications and the Court’s numerous warnings, the parties’ objections contain factitious citations. The parties were warned in previous Court orders that sanctions may be imposed if future filings contain factitious citations.

Yet again, the parties have violated the Court’s express requirements, misrepresented the law to the Court, and wasted the Court’s time. Plaintiff and Defendant’s objections are stricken and will not be considered by the Court….

In response to the Order, Plaintiff sought to file an objection. She filed a motion for leave to file a late objection to the Order, as well as the late objection.

Plaintiff’s motion for leave to file a late objection is stricken for failure to include the certification ordered by Judge Stafford on September 25, 2025. Plaintiff’s late objection is also stricken for failure to include this certification.

On September 25, 2025, Judge Stafford set forth,

In each of their future filings, Evans and Robertson “must include a written representation that [they have] personally checked each legal citation and each citation is accurate and stands for its asserted proposition.” See [Everett J. Prescott, Inc. v. Beall, No. 1:25-cv-00071, 2025 WL 2084353, at (D. Me. July 24, 2025)].

Judge Stafford warned that failure to do so may result in sanctions.

Here, Plaintiff’s motion for leave to file a late objection and the objection to the Order do not include the required certification. As such, Plaintiff’s motion and objection are stricken….

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SpaceX Rebounds From Near-50% Rout As Starship Launch Catalyst Nears

SpaceX Rebounds From Near-50% Rout As Starship Launch Catalyst Nears

SpaceX has slipped below its heavily hyped $135 IPO price and has been nearly halved from its all-time high, which was reached during the June 15 gamma squeeze that briefly sent shares above $220 in overnight trading.

Last Thursday’s scrub of Starship’s 13th test flight added further downward pressure, with shares touching $119 on Monday. The stock rebounded on Tuesday ahead of Thursday’s next launch attempt, positioning Flight 13 as a near-term catalyst.

The last-second abort was triggered after four of the Super Heavy booster’s 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite, prompting an automatic shutdown. “To be confident of a good flight, two Raptors will be removed and replaced,” Elon Musk wrote on X.

Flight 13 will be the first Starship launch conducted with SpaceX trading as a public company, giving investors direct exposure to the mission’s outcome. A successful flight could help restore confidence in the company’s stock and bonds, while another failure would likely deepen the latest sell-off.

Credit markets are already flashing caution. SpaceX issued $25 billion of bonds across five maturities, including $3.5 billion of 6.65% notes due in 2056, which have moved steadily lower since entering secondary trading.

Quite a divergence today…

The question now is whether a successful Starship launch Thursday can put a floor under SpaceX shares, which have underperformed most other major Nasdaq IPOs during the opening days and weeks of trading.

Wall Street, however, remains broadly bullish on the stock, except for Morningstar’s Nicolas Owens with the only “Sell” rating. 

Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/21/2026 – 15:00

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Chaotic Bodycam Video Shows Trans Florida Student Confront Cop Over ‘Misgendering’ Before Arrest

Chaotic Bodycam Video Shows Trans Florida Student Confront Cop Over ‘Misgendering’ Before Arrest

Newly released police bodycam video shows a University of Central Florida student confronting a campus officer over pronouns before being pepper-sprayed, tased, and taken away in handcuffs.

The footage shows Jarrett Vick, a 27-year-old blue-haired UCF student from Treasure Island, Florida, shouting at an officer who had arrived at a campus building on an unrelated call. The video was recorded in February 2025 but released Friday by the YouTube channel Inside The Blue TV.

Why do you let those pigs get away with this? They are not supposed to be here,” Vick says at the start of the clip.

The officer tells him to lower his voice or be placed in handcuffs. Vick responds by cursing at him: “Fucking try it. Are you threatening me? You’re threatening me.”

The officer calls for backup on his radio. “He is having a breakdown,” he tells dispatch – at which point Vick screams, “She! She! Just say the right pronoun!”

The officer draws his pepper spray and orders Vick to calm down, deploying it when he does not. A university employee appears and attempts to defuse the situation.

“Get away! Fuck you! Fuck you, cop!” Vick shouts, and the employee walks off.

Later in the footage, Vick is seen stomping his foot and shouting “She!” at the officer, and asks the university employee to tell the officers to use the right pronouns, saying it is causing him a lot of distress.

“She, sheeee!!!!!” Vick shrieked. “Just say the right pronoun!”

He was taken into custody after being tased by a second officer, according to the video, which followed Vick attempting to kick and swing at the officers. He is then shown being placed in the back of a squad car. The incident is dated Feb. 5, 2025.

Approached by the Post, Vick said he had been “fucking harassed by the cops” and blamed them for what he described as harassment from the media.

Court records show Vick was charged that day with battery on law enforcement, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. He pleaded not guilty to all three counts. His most recent court appearance is dated Jan. 16, and Orange County records list the cases as closed. He is listed as male in his arrest records.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/21/2026 – 14:20

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