President Donald Trump has called on foreign countries that rely on oil from the Middle East to help reopen the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz. Iranian forces have closed the strait to most ship travel, which has fallen by about 90 percent in recent days. Due to the threat of Iranian attacks, international shipping companies have ceased using the all-important passage, causing global oil prices to spike. Iranian authorities have declared that the strait is closed only to enemies of the regime.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump asked China, France, Japan, South Korea, and the U.K. to deploy ships to reopen the strait.

“In the meantime, the United States will be bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian Boats and Ships out of the water,” wrote Trump. “One way or the other, we will soon get the Hormuz Strait OPEN, SAFE, and FREE!”

China did not specifically respond to this request, according to The New York Times. The French governments indicated it would be unlikely to intervene until the situation in the region was less precarious. Trump spoke with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer about the matter on Sunday, but no concrete plan has emerged from that conversation. In other words, nobody seems particularly inclined to help.

American public opinion regarding the war with Iran is decidedly mixed, and it is likely to atrophy as casualties and costs mount. Higher gas prices will certainly not help the GOP as it heads toward midterms.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration is prepared to continue a major bombing campaign against the Iranian regime. The administration reportedly believes that Mojtaba Khamenei, the new leader of the country, is alive but wounded following the strikes that killed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson claims that the CIA is out to get him. In a video posted on X, Carlson said he has learned that the CIA is preparing a criminal referral for the Justice Department on the basis that he is “acting as an agent of a foreign power.” Carlson denies that is doing anything of a sort. The feds have not confirmed whether Carlson is the target of such an investigation.

When you discover the CIA has been reading your texts in order to frame you for a crime. pic.twitter.com/XgoluHw8EG

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 14, 2026

Carlson, an outspoken opponent of the Trump administration’s bombing campaign against Iran, tried and failed to talk Trump out of the war. More broadly, he is a prominent leader of the noninterventionist faction of MAGA, which extracted the (now broken) “no new wars” promise from Trump when he ran for president in 2024.

According to Carlson, the CIA has read his text messages and monitored his conversations with Iranian officials, and on that basis is claiming that he is violating the Foreign Agent Registration ACT (FARA). FARA requires lobbyists who work on behalf of foreign governments to publicly register that they do so. The requirement is selectively enforced: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not registered under FARA, even though the group engages in political activity designed to defeat officials who, for instance, oppose giving military aid to Israel.

Weaponizing FARA against dissenters in the name of cracking down on foreign influence is a serious First Amendment concern. Reason‘s Matthew Petti has noted the ways such crackdowns can censor legitimate political speech. “Practically, the question is how to separate Americans being ordered or tricked by a foreign government from Americans doing things of their own accord,” wrote Petti last year. “Philosophically, the question is whether stamping out ‘foreign influence’ is possible or desirable in a free society—especially one that is so heavily involved in the rest of the world.”

It’s hard to say what exactly is happening with Carlson, given that we don’t even know for sure whether this CIA inquiry is real. But we should be very worried at the idea of the government reading American citizens’ texts, disagreeing with their foreign policy views, and then branding them puppets of foreign adversaries. Washington cannot require public commentators to register themselves: The First Amendment precludes such a thing.

Moreover, it would be a huge double standard if the Israeli government’s lobbyists within the U.S. were somehow exempt from declaring themselves as such but opponents of Israeli government lobbyists had to first ask the feds for permission to speak up.

Brian Doherty, an esteemed chronicler of the libertarian political movement who has worked for this magazine for more than three decades, died unexpectedly over the weekend. He was 57.

Doherty will be fondly remembered and sorely missed. I was part of the wave of college students who came upon libertarianism in the ’00s, during Ron Paul’s rise; Doherty was a vital source of information about the campaign and the broader movement it birthed. His writings helped connect me with the libertarian professional network: the Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Reason. He knew our movement’s lore better than anybody else.

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie have both published reminiscences at Reason about Brian’s life and work. This is from Matt’s piece:

“Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility. Brian embodied both,” Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward recalls. “His weird, colorful life—filled with comics and festivals and music and books—was a model of life lived freely and openly. And in his thinking, reporting, and editing, he was one of the most conscientious and responsible people I have ever met. A libertarian hero in every sense.”

Spelunking in subcultures both libertarian and whimsical led to a lot of early discoveries that the normies only sussed out later. Doherty profiled New Hampshire’s Free State Project way back in 2004, caught Seasteaders on their then-rise in 2009, and started covering Bitcoin in 2013. Though, as he ruefully admitted later, he knew about the groundbreaking crypto currency as early as July 2010 yet somehow neglected to cash in.

“Had I shelled out, say, $2,000 on this innovative, anti-inflationary currency even a lazy six weeks after I was introduced to it,” he wrote, “today I would be sitting on 28,571 bitcoins, the equivalent at press time of over $212 million in cash.” More like $2 billion now, but who’s counting?

After news of his death broke, Doherty’s work colleagues filled up a long Slack thread with fond memories of his deep-seated sense of tolerance, his garrulous laugh, his fury at personal technology, his sometimes elliptical prose style. A staffer once made a T-shirt from a typically verbose Dohertian Slack message: “I try not to assume that because crazy people with crazy beliefs believe or used to believe the things I believe for what I think are right and sane reasons, that that is a sign that I am crazy. But it’s getting harder and harder I confess.”

Last June, I had the pleasure of interviewing Doherty at FreedomFest about his views on libertarianism in the age of Trump. He was sharp and insightful as ever; I remember him sparring with an audience participant who demanded that he commit himself to the Trump agenda. Rest in peace.

---

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: It’s been just warm enough to commence non-winter activities: grilling on the rooftop, jogging by river, and, of course, riding my e-scooter.

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QUICK HITS

• One Battle After Another won the Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards last night.
• Paul Ehrlich, author of the false prophecy The Population Bomb, has died.
• Gen Z voters are turning on Trump over the Iran War.
• Meanwhile, Trump is demanding that certain journalists who cast doubt on his war be “brought up on Charges for TREASON.”
• Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin have escalated their war of words; the words now include “micropenis.”

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From State v. Andrade, decided Dec. 1, 2025 by Cumberland County (Maine) Superior Court Judge Darcie McElwee, but only recently posted on Westlaw:

Defendant is a Christian who feels it is his religious duty to share his beliefs with others. Defendant regularly prays, preaches, displays signs, plays religious music, and engages with members of the public at the corner of Elm and Congress Streets in Portland. Defendant’s signs and prayers frequently convey messages against medical procedures involving abortion. From 2023 through 2025, Defendant has engaged in this conduct at the same location on a roughly weekly basis, typically for three or four hours at a time. Often, but not always, Defendant loudly plays music through a mobile speaker and/or uses a microphone and speakers to amplify his voice. He is sometimes accompanied by other individuals also seeking to share their personal beliefs….

Lindsey Stevens, the Clime’s Health Center Manager, credibly testified that when Defendant uses amplifiers, his voice and/or music can be heard inside the examination and counseling rooms of the Clinic. On occasion, Stevens can hear Defendant’s music from her office in the back right corner of the Clinic—one of the farthest locations within the Clinic from Defendant’s typical location.

When amplification is used, Defendant’s conduct disrupts the provision of patient care at the Clinic. His amplified voice and music make it difficult for patients and care providers, including Stevens, to hear and understand each other. Patients are often distracted by the noise and exhibit physical signs of distress. On occasions when Defendant uses amplifiers, the Clinic moves patients to other rooms when possible. This can cause delays in patients receiving counseling and/or treatment. [The court also recounted police officers’ testimony that defendant used sound amplification, and was quite loud. -EV] …

Defendant testified that he does not intend for his preaching to be disruptive of medical services by using an amplifier to make his voice and music heard. Defendant also testified that he does not consider abortion to be a medical service. Defendant further testified that the fact that he could be heard from inside the Clinic was “incidental” to his intent and purpose.

Defendant acknowledged on cross examination that he refused to turn down his volume when repeatedly warned that his volume was disruptive to the Clinic: “Jesus told me to keep preaching.” Defendant testified that he frequently hears ambient city sounds which create noises louder than his preaching and music on the streets below the Clinic, such as fire engines and duck boats and, on one occasion, another protest with roughly three hundred people moving down Congress Street. As to his intent, the court does not find Defendant’s testimony credible….

Section 4864-B provides that it is a violation of the Maine Civil Rights Act for any person to

intentionally interfere or attempt to intentionally interfere with the exercise or enjoyment by any other person of rights secured by the United States Constitution or the laws of the United States or of rights secured by the Constitution of Maine or laws of the State by …

[d]uring the posted hours of operating after having been ordered by a law enforcement officer to cease such noise, at any time after the order, intentionally making noise that can be heard within a building and with the further intent…

[t]o interfere with the safe and effective delivery of those services within the building.

The court finds that the State has demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence that Defendant has repeatedly violated section 4684-B(2). On multiple occasions between 2023 and 2025 described in more detail above, Defendant used devices to amplify his speech and music while standing near the corner of Elm and Congress Streets, directly below the second-floor examination and counseling rooms of Planned Parenthood’s clinic.

The court finds that Defendant intended for his music and amplified voice to be heard inside patient rooms in the Clinic and that he did so with the further intent to interfere with the safe and effective delivery of services within the Clinic. The court makes this finding based on Defendant’s statement in State’s Exhibit 7 that “I wouldn’t be here doing this if they’re not here,” and the fact that Defendant repeatedly used amplifiers outside of 443 Congress Street, below examination rooms, after being repeatedly informed that the volume was disrupting the delivery of medical services….

Finally, the court rejects Defendant’s argument that section 4584-B is being discriminatorily enforced against only pro-life groups. Each of the other examples of protests and groups referenced by Defendant were mobile or transitory protests which would have generated temporary noise outside the Clinic and which occurred outside of business hours, thereby reasonably not leading to complaints by Planned Parenthood.

No witness offered any testimony regarding any individual or group other than Defendant who made noise that would have interfered with the safe and effective delivery of medical services in the Clinic during business hours. Nor is there evidence that any Portland officer disfavored Defendant’s particular message. Officers consistently informed Defendant that the volume was the only concern and that he was free to preach at that location if he did so at a volume that could not be heard inside the Clinic….

The state asked for a preliminary injunction barring defendant from:

1. intentionally making any noise that can be heard within the building at 443 Congress Street in Portland, Maine, or any other Planned Parenthood facility;
2. engaging in any physical obstruction of 443 Congress Street, Portland, Maine or any other Planned Parenthood facility; and
3. knowingly coming within 500 feet of 443 Congress Street, Portland, Maine or any other Planned Parenthood facility.

But the court issued an injunction limited to item (a):

The court concludes that the order requested by the State is overbroad based on the evidence admitted at hearing, which did not demonstrate that Defendant has either obstructed access to the Clinic or engaged in any conduct violative of section 4684-B at any other Planned Parenthood facility. The court also finds that the 500-foot “buffer” requested by the State is not appropriate. The State failed to prove that Defendant’s mere proximity to the Clinic caused injury; as Lyndsey Stevens testified, Defendant could not be heard within the Clinic unless he used an amplifier. The court finds that the injunction proposed by the State would overburden Defendant’s First Amendment rights.

The court must issue a preliminary injunction tailored to the proven violations of section 4684-B and the significant governmental interest in the effective delivery of medical services. Accordingly, the court enjoins Defendant from using any device to amplify any noise or otherwise making any noise that can be heard within the Clinic. See McCullen v. Coakley (2014) (noting “the First Amendment virtues of targeted injunctions”)….

Seems correct to me, given the analysis from Madsen v. Women’s Health Center (1994):

In response to high noise levels outside the clinic, the state court restrained the petitioners from “singing, chanting, whistling, shouting, yelling, use of bullhorns, auto horns, sound amplification equipment or other sounds or images observable to or within earshot of the patients inside the [c]linic” during the hours of 7:30 a.m. through noon on Mondays through Saturdays. We must, of course, take account of the place to which the regulations apply in determining whether these restrictions burden more speech than necessary. We have upheld similar noise restrictions in the past, and as we noted in upholding a local noise ordinance around public schools, “the nature of a place, ‘the pattern of its normal activities, dictate the kinds of regulations … that are reasonable.'” Grayned v. City of Rockford (1972). Noise control is particularly important around hospitals and medical facilities during surgery and recovery periods, and in evaluating another injunction involving a medical facility, we stated:

“‘Hospitals, after all, are not factories or mines or assembly plants. They are hospitals, where human ailments are treated, where patients and relatives alike often are under emotional strain and worry, where pleasing and comforting patients are principal facets of the day’s activity, and where the patient and his family… need a restful, uncluttered, relaxing, and helpful atmosphere.'” NLRB v. Baptist Hospital, Inc. (1979).

We hold that the limited noise restrictions imposed by the state court order burden no more speech than necessary to ensure the health and well-being of the patients at the clinic. The First Amendment does not demand that patients at a medical facility undertake Herculean efforts to escape the cacophony of political protests. “If overamplified loudspeakers assault the citizenry, government may turn them down.”  That is what the state court did here, and we hold that its action was proper.

 

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The quotes below are from Kimberlin v. Metropolitan School Dist., decided Friday by Judge Tanya Walton Pratt (S.D. Ind.); you can see some of Kimberlin’s past filings here, my posts on some of his past lawsuits here and here, and more on his past criminal convictions here. First, the plaintiff’s allegations (of course at this point they are just allegations):

In 1968, when he was a fourteen-year-old student at Westlane Junior High School, teacher Tharrell Davis (“Davis”) “took an unusual interest” in Kimberlin. Over the next several months, Davis repeatedly sexually assaulted Kimberlin in Davis’s home and elsewhere. The abuse caused Kimberlin physical injuries at the time and has caused many other problems in the decades since.

Another boy named “Tommy” was often present during the assaults and was also assaulted by Davis. Kimberlin offered to have his parents help Tommy get away from Davis. Tommy told Davis about this offer, which led Davis to admit the abuse to Kimberlin’s mother and agree not to have further contact with Kimberlin. Kimberlin’s mother asked a friend to report Davis to the School District and Indiana State Police; the Complaint does not allege whether those reports were made. The next year, Davis left the School District. “Plaintiff believes that he was quietly forced out of his job because of his sexual abuse of Plaintiff and others.”

In December 2023, shortly before her death, Kimberlin’s mother told him that Davis had admitted to the sexual assaults. This caused “a flood of repressed memories, nightmares, anxiety, and post traumatic stresses.” In June 2024, Kimberlin wrote a letter to [then-Superintendent Nikki Woodson] about the abuse, “demand[ing] accountability and compensation.” At the time, Kimberlin did not know Davis’s first name, but he told Dr. Woodson that Davis was a science teacher in 1968 at Westlane and had been in the military. Kimberlin “urged [Dr. Woodson] and [the School District] to review its records and conduct their own investigation.”

A few weeks later, in July 2024, outside counsel for the School District (and defense counsel in this case), Jonathan Mayes (“Mayes”), responded, stating that the School District “had turned the matter over to law enforcement for investigation, and [the School District] would respond after law enforcement responded. Law enforcement never responded to the School District, so the School District never responded to Kimberlin.

In January 2025, Kimberlin sent another letter to Mayes “stating that there was no reason to wait for any investigation by law enforcement” and reiterating his request for an investigation by the School District. In February 2025, Mayes sent a respond letter. It was curt, insensitive, and dismissive. It avoided confirming or denying that Davis was employed by the School District and stated that the School District would not investigate Kimberlin’s reports of abuse. Kimberlin’s reply stated, among other things, that Mayes was engaging in “a coverup” of Davis’s misconduct. Kimberlin then found his Westlane yearbooks, which contained Davis’s photo and full name and confirmed that Davis was a teacher at Westlane in 1968. Kimberlin sent a photo of the relevant yearbook pages, along with another letter, to Mayes.

Kimberlin sued, alleging violations of Title IX and the Fourteenth Amendment, claiming defendants violated his rights “by failing to investigate his 2024 and 2025 reports of sexual assault.” The court dismissed Kimberlin’s Title IX claims:

Title IX provides that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” … [W]hen Kimberlin made [his 2024 and 2025] reports and requested those investigations, he was not participating in or attempting to participate in any School programs. The School District’s actions or inactions therefore could not have interfered with Kimberlin’s participation in those programs.

In his response, Kimberlin focuses on the fact that he was participating in School programs at the time of the assault, and argues that the statute of limitations does not bar his Title IX claims. Kimberlin relies on Snyder-Hill v. Ohio State University (6th Cir. 2022), in which the Sixth Circuit held that former students’ Title IX claims were not time-barred despite being brought several years after their sexual abuse by university medical staff under the guise of performing medical examinations. Snyder-Hill is not applicable here.

In Snyder-Hill, the plaintiffs sued their alma mater for failing to prevent ongoing abuse by staff, despite having knowledge of the abuse at the time it was happening. The Sixth Circuit explained that even though the abuse happened years before the lawsuit, the plaintiffs did not know that the staff member’s conduct was abuse or that the university had knowledge of the abuse until the abuse allegations were made public many years later. The court therefore applied the “discovery rule” in finding that plaintiffs’ Title IX claims did not accrue until the plaintiffs first learned about the university’s knowledge and failure to act on that knowledge.

In contrast, Kimberlin does not allege that the School District knew about or failed to investigate Davis’s abuse while Kimberlin was a student. Instead, Kimberlin expressly claims that the School District violated Title IX by failing to investigate in 2024 and 2025, when Kimberlin was no longer a student….

And it dismissed his Fourteenth Amendment claims:

Defendants argue these claims must be dismissed against the School District and School Board for several reasons, including that Kimberlin has no cognizable constitutional right to an investigation into Davis’s prior conduct. The Court again agrees with Defendants…. Cf. Bolden v. City of Chi. (N.D. Ill. 2017) (dismissing due process claim based on police officers’ failure to investigate plaintiff’s alibi; “[T]he Seventh Circuit … has not held that a failure [by police] to investigate, in and of itself, constitutes a due process violation.”); McCray v. Alejandro R. (S.D. Ind. 2021) (“As we previously explained, the Defendants’ inaction, that is, their failure to investigate, is not enough to establish their liability for any constitutional violations.”)….

Woodson, as I understand it, made a limited appearance to dismiss on grounds of inadequate service, and hasn’t yet moved to dismiss on substantive grounds. The court rejected her motion, but I expect she will then move to dismiss for the same reasons as given by the School District and School Board, and will likewise prevail.

Jonathan Lamont Mayes (Bose McKinney & Evans, LLP) represents defendants.

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Jesus, how do you write an obit of someone you hired? It is with a heavy heart but many, many fond memories and intense gratitude that I write about my colleague Brian Doherty, found dead unexpectedly on Friday at the age of 57. I joined Reason in the fall of 1993. He was hired later in 1994 and then left the staff for a while around the end of the decade. When I became editor in chief of the magazine and website in 2000, he was the first person I called. Come back, I said, Reason needs you.

What I liked most about Brian was his abiding interest in things happening on the margins of American culture, politics, and thought, and his deep appreciation for the prodigious bounty that markets deliver reliably and without moralizing. I remember attending some sort of conservative gathering in Los Angeles with him in the mid-1990s. The speaker talked endlessly and in glowing terms about the ruthless efficiency of capitalism, how it rooted out unproductive workers and businesses with impunity and “punished them with the market!” On the way out of the talk, as valets pulled up our old, beat-up cars (mine a Toyota Tercel with 200,000 miles on it and a padlock on the trunk, his a decrepit Ford LTD station wagon he’d bought from Jacob Sullum), Brian mentioned to me that what he really liked about capitalism wasn’t the way it punished anyone but just how many free riders it enabled. He would marvel often at just how much stuff was available to so many of us, usually for historically lower and lower levels of actual work.

He delighted in the contradictions of right-wingers who were secretly socialist and lefties who were secretly capitalist. As he wrote in “Rage On: The Strange Politics of Millionaire Rock Stars” (2000):

Comrades in the struggle to overthrow “late capitalism” include Chumbawamba, a collective of British anarchists who hit major pop stardom with their rousing 1997 sing-along drinking anthem “Tubthumping.” Chumba (as their fans call the group) declares on its Web site that it wants “to destroy the moral code that says you can only have what you can afford to pay for.” And it wants a social order where nothing happens without everyone—everyone!—agreeing to it. Folk-rocker Ani DiFranco is best known for refusing to be part of a “corporate” machine, saying that the record business is “dehumanizing and exploitative, not much different from any other big business.” Thus, refusing to work on Maggie’s Farm no more, she operates her own corporate machine, Righteous Babe Records (and pockets far more per record as a result).

Then there’s Patti Smith, the over-the-hill punk poetess who once wowed Madison Square Garden audiences with songs about adolescent alienation and all-night sex. Smith includes a 10-minute-plus tribute to Ho Chi Minh and a snappy pop tune against the World Trade Organization on her latest album, Gung Ho.

The point wasn’t (simply) to mock hypocrisy, it was to underscore how a world of free minds and free markets pretty much made everybody better off, even those who were sworn to its destruction. Nobody loved the great god of Rock Music more than Brian, even as he realized some of his favorite performers would be among the first to call for people like him to lined up against a wall when the revolution finally came.

Despite having been a professional libertarian (before Reason, he worked at the Cato Institute), he spent much of his time hanging with creative types like the folks at the Cacophony Society, for whom anything resembling partisan politics was just not that interesting. It’s not an accident that he wrote one of first serious book-length treatments of Burning Man, which he started attending soon after moving to California in 1994. He rightly saw Burning Man as a delirious and beautiful experiment in living that could have sprung almost fully formed from the brow of Robert Nozick, who philosophized about a “utopia of utopias.”

Except, of course, that utopias are never fully formed; they are constantly works in progress. Published in 2004, This Is Burning Man began life as a Reason cover story commissioned by my predecessor, Virginia Postrel. In “Burning Man Grows Up,” Brian explained that as the annual festival got bigger and bigger, it had to develop the sort of rules and regulations and restrictions that many of its participants hated in the 9-to-5 world. And it had to do so while simultaneously dealing with more and more hassles from local, state, and federal governments. Some attendees worried that growth might come at the expense of the radical freedom of Burning Man’s early days, turning the ultimate escape from everyday working life into a temporary borough of San Francisco’s burgeoning tech sector. Silicon Valley was going through its own transformation, from a conscious repudiation of IBM and Xerox and older, more buttoned-down workplaces into a new form of corporate hierarchy and conformity.

Brian’s taste for the ragged and extreme edges of the known universe also shaped his interest in the libertarian movement, including its odd and dark corners. It powered his history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, and his coverage of the Ron Paul Revolution too. For my tastes, he was too forgiving at times of the racists and reactionaries adjacent to the libertarian world, but he felt his job was to catalog and map that whole part of the world, not to judge its inhabitants. Alone among chroniclers of Ron Paul’s amazingly successful run in the 2008 election cycle, Brian distilled what made the former Texas congressman so popular, especially among newcomers to politics:

One of his biggest applause lines, to my astonishment, involves getting rid of the Federal Reserve. Kids have gathered, not just from Iowa but from Wisconsin and Nebraska, in classic hop-in-the-van college road trips, to hear a 72-year-old gynecologist talk about monetary policy.

He wraps up the speech with three things he doesn’t want to do that sum up the Ron Paul message. First: “I don’t want to run your life. We all have different values. I wouldn’t know how to do it, I don’t have the authority under the Constitution, and I don’t have the moral right.” Second: “I don’t want to run the economy. People run the economy in a free society.” And third: “I don’t want to run the world….We don’t need to be imposing ourselves around the world.”

It seemed as if such a libertarian sensibility was about to sweep the Republican Party, if not the country at large, and it remains dizzying that just six years later, Donald Trump not only won the GOP nomination but the White House promising almost the exact opposite of what Ron Paul used to pack college auditoriums.

Trump’s win in 2016, then Biden’s in 2020, then Trump’s return weighed heavily on Brian, as did the rise of populism across the political spectrum. One of the ways he dealt with it was by writing what I would argue is his most fun book, Dirty Pictures, a history of the underground comics world that yielded characters such as Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman. The subtitle, which he complained was too long, was a litany of various types of contributors to that industry: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix. It is too long, yes, but it also got to the sort of people around whom Brian was most comfortable. That is, people busy making the sort of crazy world in which they wanted to live, whether they are Burners, alt-culture creators, crypto entrepreneurs, or goldbugs who want to smash the Federal Reserve.

The last time I saw Brian in the flesh was last June, in the Southern California desert where he ended up buying a house. He had developed a number of health problems over the years, his once-black hair had turned mostly gray, and he walked with a cane. FreedomFest was in Palm Springs, and a friend bought some tickets for a place nearby called The Integratron, which kind of looks like a planetarium—a bizarre, beautiful, and totally random structure in the middle of nowhere. Built in the late 1950s by a guy named George Van Tassel, who claimed to have been contacted by visitors from Venus who gave him detailed instructions, the structure’s purpose is not fully understood but it’s now a spot where sound baths and yoga classes are held. To get to the space for the sound bath, we had to climb a steep ladder that presented some difficulties for Brian. But once we made it up, we stretched out on our backs in the large wood-paneled dome room and looked up at the sky through a round skylight.

The sound bath started, with weird ohms and ahs echoing all around us, calling out to the Venusians floating up there far above the 100-degree heat of the desert. At one point, I peeked over at Brian, whose eyes were closed. He had a half-smile on his face and he let out a long, slow breath, a sigh that somehow became a laugh at some private joke.

He was at home at the Integratron and I hope his last sigh ended in a laugh at the absurdity of the way his life ended. And I hope he is at home somewhere in the universe, knowing that his words and life will reverberate for a long to come among all of us lucky enough to have known him and read his work.

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My son spent last week training in defensive pistol use at Gunsite Academy, in Arizona. The scheduling couldn’t have been timelier given the double terrorist attacks on Thursday. Both incidents were stopped by people at the scene who were willing and able to end the threat without waiting for police to arrive.

It’s not something most of us want to think about. But if somebody decides to take out their grievances on innocents, any of us could become default defensive details for ourselves and the people around us.

Synagogue Guards ‘Engage in a Gunfight’ With Attacker

The attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, is an especially disturbing case since more than 100 children were attending school at the facility. The terrorist, a Lebanese immigrant named Ayman Ghazali, drove his incendiaries-laden truck into the synagogue and down the hallway where he was confronted by security.

“At approximately 12:20, Ghazali’s vehicle gets jammed between hallway walls and he begins firing through the windshield of his vehicle,” according to FBI Special Agent Jennifer Runyan, who described events during a press conference. “Ghazali and the first security officer engage in a gunfight through the rear window of Ghazali’s vehicle. And at this point, Ghazali is unable to extract himself due to the vehicle being jammed in the hallway. At approximately 12:22 p.m., a second security officer engages Ghazali in a gunfight from the front of the vehicle. And soon thereafter, Ghazali’s vehicle, his engine compartment catches on fire.”

Under fire from defending synagogue guards, stuck in a burning truck, and undoubtedly aware he’d loaded the bed of his vehicle with commercial fireworks and gasoline, Ghazali ended the incident by shooting himself in the head.

Besides light injuries to the synagogue’s director of security, Danny Phillips, and fire damage, Temple Israel got off relatively easily for the target of a terrorist attack. The same can’t be said of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where U.S. Army Lt. Col. Brandon A. Shah was killed by an attacker while teaching a Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) class. Two others were sent to the hospital with wounds. Fortunately, those on the scene prevented the situation from becoming worse.

A Terrorist Came Calling and Students ‘Rendered Him No Longer Alive’

“There were students that were in that room that subdued him and rendered him no longer alive,” FBI Special Agent Dominique Evans responded to a question about the incident. “I don’t know how else to say it, but they basically were able to terminate the threat.”

According to some reports, one ROTC student stabbed to death terrorist Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, presumably with a pocketknife, though pens and pencils will do in a pinch. Apparently, though it’s not the recommended course of action, you can prevail with a knife in a gun fight.

Like synagogues across the United States, Temple Israel was prepared for an attack amidst a rising tide of antisemitism. Its staff conducted a training session with the FBI just weeks prior to the attack. The ROTC students probably were less worried about being targeted, but when targeted anyway, their mindset and preparedness were up to the challenge.

A Wave of Political Violence

Both Ghazali and Jalloh appear to have been Islamists. Ghazali’s brother was reportedly a Hezbollah commander killed by an Israeli airstrike, so terrorism was something of a family trade. Jalloh was released from prison in December 2024 after serving time for attempting to provide material support to ISIS. He yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he launched the Old Dominion attack.

While violent crime overall has resumed its decades-long decline, political violence of various flavors is up across the country. On Friday, the Justice Department announced nine convictions in the prosecutions of Antifa members who shot up an ICE center last summer and wounded a police officer. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September. Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman (D–Brooklyn Park) and her husband, Mark, were murdered in an attack in which state Sen. John Hoffman (D–Champlin) and his wife, Yvette, were wounded. Luigi Mangione is currently being tried for, allegedly, the ideologically motivated murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Short of lethal consequences, a large number of mostly conservative figures have been targeted for harassment and swatting attacks. That’s a very incomplete list of this country’s ongoing problems with political violence.

Which is to say, it’s a good time to take your own safety seriously. If something happens, police will no doubt show up, as they did in West Bloomfield and Norfolk, to investigate the crime. But dealing with the immediate threat is left to those who are there when it occurs.

‘Armed Citizens to Defend and Protect Them’

“If my family were being attacked by bloodthirsty terrorists like those in Kenya or Paris, then I would want armed citizens to defend and protect them,” former Interpol Secretary General Ron Noble, an American who previously worked in the U.S. Treasury and Justice Departments, concluded in 2016. He raised similar concerns during his term in office following the 2013 Westgate mall attack in Nairobi.

Unfortunately, not all authorities are open to people possessing the means to defend themselves. Old Dominion University bans weapons, including knives with blades over three inches long. That policy didn’t stop Jalloh, who also illegally purchased the gun he used from another criminal. Despite the abject failure of policy and law, Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi called on lawmakers to pass tighter gun restrictions. He must be furious that ROTC students found the means to resist a terrorist.

But the students at Old Dominion University did successfully halt the attack on their class, as did the guards at Temple Israel. Likewise, parishioners and staff at Crosspointe Community Church in Wayne, Michigan, engaged and killed an armed attacker last June. And Elisjsha Dicken shot and killed a would-be mass murderer at Indiana’s Greenwood Park Mall in 2022.

Hopefully, nobody else will ever again have to shoulder such responsibilities. But hope isn’t a plan. Being ready and able to take on unpleasant situations should they arise offers a better chance for good outcomes.

My son is now better prepared for threats after his defensive pistol class, which follows over a decade of martial arts training. My wife and I graduated last year from that same pistol class, practice frequently, and we have another session scheduled through her synagogue with a private trainer.

They might mean us well, like the officers who responded to Temple Israel and Old Dominion University, or they could resent empowered members of the public, like the Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney, but government officials can’t always be in place to defend us when malicious people attack. Whether we want it or not, we all must shoulder the responsibility for protecting ourselves and our loved ones.

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3/16/25: Pierce v. Society of Sisters argued.

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Regulations have made it harder and more expensive to deploy nuclear power in the United States. But in January, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rolled back more than a dozen regulations, including the “aircraft impact assessment.” The rule, which was finalized in 2009, required developers of new power plants to demonstrate to the NRC that their reactor core would remain intact in the event of an improbable 9/11-style plane crash.

The rule did nothing to make nuclear power plants safer, since these facilities are already engineered and regulated to withstand natural disasters such as earthquakes, large fires, floods, and hurricanes. The NRC itself acknowledged this at the time, saying that “compliance” with the rule “is not needed for adequate protection to public health and safety or common defense and security.” Nor did it do anything to improve disaster preparedness; the agency admitted when it finalized the rule that it’s up to the federal government, not nuclear power plant operators, to “prevent the impact of large commercial aircraft.”

The rule was successful, though, in making it harder to build nuclear energy projects.

In late 2008, Georgia Power asked state regulators to approve an expansion project at the Vogtle power plant involving two advanced nuclear reactors. After six months of review, regulators signed off on the project. Despite the state’s approval and the fact that the reactor design was greenlit by federal regulators in 2006, the NRC decided not to permit the project until the reactor complied with the agency’s aircraft assessment rule.

It took three new design iterations, numerous changes to the reactor’s structure, and over two years of work before the NRC allowed the project to move forward, wrote Rod Adams, managing partner at venture capital firm Nucleation Capital, in a 2023 article in Atomic Insights. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to put an exact price tag on these delays, Adams says. But it is fair to say that the aircraft impact rule played a major role in delaying the buildout, and thus increasing the cost, of Vogtle’s two new nuclear reactors, which ran more than $15 billion over budget and were completed seven years behind schedule.

Like so many other regulations for nuclear power, the aircraft impact rule was more of a P.R. gimmick designed to ease concern over the energy source than it was a sound rule. Other edicts are still in place that make it unnecessarily hard to build nuclear power. But for now, we can celebrate that the government finally acknowledged that the cost of this regulation (less clean energy) far outweighed its benefits (none).

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City officials in Bakersfield, California, agreed to a record $22 million settlement after a police officer caused a deadly crash in 2023. Ricardo Robles, an officer at the time, drove at least 80 miles per hour through a stop sign without turning on his sirens and crashed into another car, killing driver Mario Lares and seriously injuring passenger Ana Hernandez. Lares’ family and Hernandez sued the city, arguing that the officer ignored safety rules while on duty. In 2024, Robles pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter, but the court sentenced him to just one day in jail and two years of probation, along with community service and restitution.

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FCC Chair Brendan Carr has taken lots of actions to designed to punish broadcasters that have behaved inappropriately by his lights: he has opened an investigation into a broadcaster reporting on the location of Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions; responded to Comcast, which allegedly “impl[ied] that [Kilmar] Abrego Garcia was merely a law abiding U.S. citizen” and ignored facts about Garcia, by suggesting that Comcast had engaged in news distortion; suggested narrowing the category of bona fide news programs that are exempt from the equal time requirement; suggested that the splicing together of two different portions of Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech at the Ellipse may constitute news distortion and/or a broadcast hoax; and opened other news distortion investigations. And most famously, he threatened broadcasters who carry Jimmy Kimmel’s show. But his post yesterday responding to a Trump post is notable for its brazenness.

The Fog of War and War Reporting

On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to U.S. officials, an Iranian missile struck and damaged five Air Force refueling planes that were on the ground at an airbase in Saudi Arabia. Yesterday Trump claimed on Truth Social that the Wall Street Journal’s reporting was inaccurate, as “Four of the five [planes] had virtually no damage” and “One had slightly more damage.” And then in language that somehow no longer seems shocking, he said that the reporters involved “are truly sick and demented people.”

Less than three hours later, Carr posted Trump’s statement on Twitter/X and said in response:

Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.

Note that the factual differences between the WSJ and Trump are fairly small (all agree that the planes were hit) and that the WSJ’s reporting relied on U.S. officials. More importantly, it is difficult for anyone (soldiers, journalists, and Presidents) to determine the facts in any war. So if a journalist cannot safely publish unless he/she is certain that every significant fact is absolutely correct, there will be precious little war reporting. I always assumed that decisionmakers wouldn’t try to so restrict war reporting, but Trump and Carr indicate otherwise.

Newspapers, Broadcasters, and Threats

As to Carr’s invocation of news distortions and broadcast hoaxes: As I discuss in a forthcoming article I just posted (and in less detail about news distortion in this post), it would be an unprecedented extension of the new distortion policy and the broadcast hoax rule to apply either of them to mistaken war reporting. With the exception of a couple of bursts of indecency regulation, the FCC narrowly interpreted its public interest authority from the Reagan Administration through the first Trump Administration and the Biden Administration, but Carr has rejected that longstanding consensus.

Carr’s post illustrates the vast difference between the Supreme Court’s treatment of broadcasting and all other media. Trump focused only on newspapers, but the First Amendment would prohibit government action against them for their reporting. Carr pivoted to broadcasters, who have much less protection under Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC and FCC v. Pacifica Foundation.

That’s not to say that those cases would protect Carr’s threats. Red Lion applies to speech that the government deems valuable, and Pacifica focused on indecency, so there is a reasonable argument that neither would give the government any greater ability to publish false broadcast speech than false speech on any other medium. And I think the current Court would probably overrule both cases if the issue were squarely presented (flowing from the FCC’s longstanding restraint, the Court hasn’t had occasion to reconsider either case).

When the Reagan FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, it articulated its preferred First Amendment approach, stating:

We believe that the role of the electronic press in our society is the same as that of the printed press. Both are sources of information and viewpoint. Accordingly, the reasons for proscribing government intrusion into the editorial discretion of print journalists provide the same basis for proscribing such interference into the editorial discretion of broadcast journalists. The First Amendment was adopted to protect the people not from journalists, but from government. It gives the people the right to receive ideas that are unfettered by government interference. We fail to see how that right changes when individuals choose to receive ideas from the electronic media instead of the print media. There is no doubt that the electronic media is powerful and that broadcasters can abuse their freedom of speech. But the framers of the Constitution believed that the potential for abuse of private freedoms posed far less a threat to democracy than the potential for abuse by a government given the power to control the press. We concur. We therefore believe that full First Amendment protections against content regulation should apply equally to the electronic and the printed press.

Carr’s threats make that language seem quaint.

In some ways, Carr has done us all a service by being clear about his desire to cow broadcasters. To quote Justice Scalia from a different context, issues frequently “come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep’s clothing…. But this wolf comes as a wolf.”

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