Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.

In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald’s. Witnesses said an adult man allegedly tried to get the child, identified as a girl under 12 years old, to leave the restaurant with him. According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon.

In August 2024, Deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away, at the opposite end of the state. “Are you shitting me, man?” Dillon asked the arresting deputy. “I haven’t been out of Fort Myers in two years.” Further, he also said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach.

Dillon posted bail and pleaded not guilty to enticing or luring a child—a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. More than two months later, prosecutors dropped the charges after his attorney provided evidence that he was at work on the day in question.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he was only arrested in the first place, and threatened with prosecution for a particularly heinous offense, because of shoddy police work.

The ACLU is now suing the city of Jacksonville Beach, as well as the individual police officers and officials involved in the case. According to the lawsuit, the responding officer viewed security camera footage of the suspect but didn’t take a copy; instead, he took pictures of the screen with his cell phone. “In the photos, the suspect image is low resolution, and the suspect’s face is partially shadowed and off-axis,” the lawsuit claims.

When an investigator queried the facial recognition system, it was with the officer’s grainy secondhand cell phone photos.

But there were other leads that police could have followed, to either bolster their case or point in another direction. For example, when he approached the girl, the suspect was picking up food that had been ordered ahead; this implies he had an online account, with contact information and a form of payment attached.

“These records could have been used to identify the actual person who placed the suspect’s order,” the lawsuit notes. “Upon information and belief, Jacksonville Beach PD personnel never requested or obtained mobile ordering records, payment data, or online account information from McDonald’s.”

Further, the McDonald’s manager recognized the assailant as a “regular customer”—likely precluding Dillon, who lived and worked on the other side of the state and did not frequently travel. Besides, at no point did investigators search footage for the suspect’s previous visits, either for higher quality images or transaction records. And once they settled on Dillon as a suspect, investigators could have gotten a warrant for his cell phone’s GPS data, showing whether or not he was at a fast food restaurant 300 miles away from his home on the night in question.

The lawsuit notes that when Dillon’s name came up, investigating officer Scott O’Connell queried the police database of license plate readers, which did not detect Dillon’s vehicles in Jacksonville Beach within the 48 hours surrounding the attempted abduction.

Otherwise, the investigation seems to have consisted entirely of the grainy cell phone photos of surveillance footage. According to the lawsuit, O’Connell checked them against photos from inmate booking records and the sex offender registry but found no potential matches. Weeks later, with no leads, he sent the photos to other law enforcement agencies, asking for help. It was at this point that an investigator ran them through facial recognition, which flagged Dillon.

But as the ACLU notes, facial recognition’s accuracy “depends significantly on the quality of the probe image. Lower-quality images contain less interpretable facial data, degrading the system’s ability to produce a reliable template.”

At the very least, it requires a much better source image. Besides, no such investigative tool should form the sole basis for an arrest warrant. “If you came to me with a facial recognition hit and that was your probable cause, I would probably kick you out of my office because that’s not how it works,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters told local news. (Waters is among those being sued in the ACLU lawsuit, because it was an investigator from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office who ran the grainy photo through facial recognition and advised O’Connell it was a “93% match” to Dillon.)

While he was ultimately released, Dillon still had to suffer the indignity of not just being arrested, but being tarred as a possible child abuser. When deputies placed him in a group holding cell after his arrest, the lawsuit says Dillon “sat in silence, too frightened by the gravity of the charge to speak with or interact with anyone.” Even after the charges were dropped, it took an entire year for authorities to take down his mug shot and expunge the arrest from his record.

Unfortunately, Dillon is hardly the first person in this position: The ACLU estimates he is one of at least 14 people arrested since 2019 after being erroneously identified by facial recognition.

Dillon’s lawsuit, filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, seeks both compensatory and punitive damages, as well as a requirement that the police departments in question will adopt new safeguards against the misuse of facial recognition technology in the future.

“The night I spent in jail after they arrested me for a crime I did not commit still haunts me to this day. I will never get over how terrified and worried I was, wondering if I’d ever go home to my wife and daughter again,” Dillon said in a statement. “Florida police must implement safeguards and ensure this never happens to anyone else, because until they do, nobody is safe.”

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Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was often accused of inventing cartoonish villains. Rogues like Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead would scheme to seize the global economy’s commanding heights in pursuit of a distorted sense of justice. But the people who hold such ideas don’t just appear in cartoons or in Rand’s novels.

Enter Thomas Piketty and company.

In early June, Piketty—the French economist whose work on inequality has made him something of a rock star even while being serially challenged for methodological errors, data imputations, and cherry-picked baselines—and his large team unveiled what can only be described as a villainous plan. It’s a comprehensive program for global managed decline dressed up in the language of climate justice and equality.

The plan is far too ambitious for most nations to accept. But given the influence of Piketty and his circle of economists on U.S. wealth taxes and prominent global policy proposals, we should take its underlying ideas seriously.

Piketty’s plan would cap gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in wealthy countries at roughly $69,000, far less than America’s current $94,430. The plan would also limit annual global economic growth to between 0 percent and 0.5 percent. Monsieur Piketty would allot only 0.115 percent annual growth to the U.S, whose GDP has expanded by more than 3 percent on average since 1930. This would hurt not just the billionaires but every American.

The plan would mandate an international three-day work week and reduce construction activity by 70 percent, manufacturing by 87 percent, and even leisure-sector activity by 58 percent. There would be massive and punishing trade actions against noncompliant countries.

It envisions a “Global Justice Fund” financed not by taxing carbon but by global wealth and income taxes. This fund would be 20 times the size of current development aid and would be administered by a new international bureaucracy answerable to heaven knows who.

Don’t be fooled by Piketty’s training as an economist. This is not economic thinking. Consider the utter inconsistency of relying on a vast stock of wealth (mostly from the U.S.) for redistribution while suffocating long-term growth to near zero. Much of the value of the assets needed to finance this scheme would be destroyed. It is also disqualifying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 4 percent if we crush the economies that provide the capital for its investments and buy its exports.

Let’s ask the uncomfortable question: What would it require to enforce Piketty’s plan? About this matter, he is conveniently vague. Confiscating something on the order of 10 percent of world GDP and redirecting it through a newly created supranational body does not happen by asking nicely. You cannot restructure the global economy at that scale without a coercive apparatus that dwarfs anything in human history.

The mechanism must be authoritarian. It would require a world government with the power to tell billions of people which jobs they may and may not hold, what they may build, what they may eat, and how many hours they are permitted to work.

And to what end? “Climate change” is an insufficient answer when Piketty’s entire edifice is built on a discredited foundation. The report relies on a baseline from the “RCP8.5” climate scenario that projects Earth warming by as much as 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. But last month, the United Nations’ own climate panel officially retired RCP8.5 (always a high-end estimate) as “implausible.” A more central projection is around 2.7 degrees Celsius. Replies to Piketty’s X feed pointed this out immediately. His response, as far as anyone can tell, has been silence.

That leaves the inequality argument. Worldwide income inequality is nearing a 150-year low, but Piketty insists that radical redistribution of wealth is essential for the Global South. And where have billionaires and wealth been popping up fastest in recent decades? Embarrassingly, data from Piketty’s World Inequality Database confirms that it’s in South and Southeast Asia and East Asia. These are the exact Global South regions that have spent recent decades rescuing hundreds of millions of people from poverty through market-directed economic growth.

A core confusion of the degrowth ideology is its conflation of inequality and poverty, in fact two very different things. Reducing inequality by making everyone poorer is not a victory for the poor. The billions of people still lagging in the global income distribution have one realistic path out: growth. Dynamic, market-driven, property-rights-protected growth is the only proven path to prosperity. It’s also the path to environmental improvement, which costs money.

Degrowth is the ultimate luxury belief. It’s dreamed up by tenured professors in Paris and progressive think-tank pundits in Brussels. These are people who already have high incomes, comfortable apartments, generous health care, and pensions, and whose ideas would pull up the ladder on billions of poor people.

Rand’s villains always insisted they were acting for the greater good. They always had elaborate plans. They always needed just a little more power to make it work. And they thought little about the terrible burdens their plans would impose on ordinary people.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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It’s hard to think of a better illustration of the dramatic changes that our President has wrought in the world of law and lawyering than the (still-very-much-unfinished) Todd Blanche story.  Blanche’s actions since being named Acting A.G. – the risible Comey indictment (“SeashellGate”?)[1], the “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund for Trump’s cronies and January 6 insurrectionists that even Trump’s long-time supporters couldn’t stomach,[2] the waiver of claims against the President of the United States (his boss) that he forgot to include in the Settlement Agreement the DOJ had negotiated[3](!) – would surely, in earlier times, have gotten him fired, and possibly sanctioned or worse for having perpetrated a fraud on the court.[4]

Instead, it earned him a promotion.  To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, loyalty isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

But the good news is that the nomination will allow the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Blanche some questions at his confirmation hearings.  Here are some questions that I’d like Blanche to answer:

1. Were you involved in the negotiations leading up to the May 18 “Settlement Agreement” between the President and the I.R.S.?  And/or the drafting of the Settlement Agreement itself?
   1. If you were not involved, were you briefed beforehand on the deal that was being struck?
   2. If you were involved, in what capacity were you acting – as counsel to the I.R.S.?
      1. Were you concerned about potential conflicts of interest in such a scenario, given that (a) before you became Acting AG you were the President’s personal lawyer, and (b) as Acting A.G. the President – your adversary in the action – is your direct superior and can fire you at will?
   3. Before the Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their claims in the Florida case, the Court had ordered special briefing on the question of whether there was a “case or controversy” in the action. Briefs were due in less than a week after Plaintiffs’ motion to have the claim dismissed was filed.  Presumably, the DOJ was hard at work preparing its briefs on the question.  What position was the DOJ going to take on behalf of its client (the IRS) on the matter? Was there, or was there not, a justiciable “case or controversy”?
   4. You didn’t sign the Settlement Agreement (although it was signed on behalf of the United States by your deputy, Assistant A.G. Woodward). Why not?
   5. When did you become aware that the parties had negotiated a provision pursuant to which the IRS would waive all of its claims against Mr. Trump that may have accrued up to that point in time?
   6. Do you know why the Settlement Agreement did not include any waiver of IRS claims? Was that just an oversight?  On whose part?  Is your order of May 19 an attempt to correct that oversight?
   7. The Settlement Agreement states that Mr. Trump and the other Plaintiffs will receive “a formal apology from the United States,”and that this was their “sole and complete relief” in the case. [Sec. III(A)]  But that would suggest that the IRS’ waiver was not part of the settlement between the parties. Is that correct?
   8. But if the waiver was not part of the settlement between the IRS and Mr. Trump, then what authorizes you to include it in your May 19 Order?
      1. If I promise to stop asking you uncomfortable questions about your behavior as Acting Attorney General, will you give me a waiver of all claims the IRS might have against me? And putting aside whether you’d like to do that – do you seriously believe that you are authorized to grant me such a waiver on behalf of the United States?   Please explain.
   9. The Settlement Agreement states that “the corpus of the Anti-Weaponization Fund’s funding does not represent the value of any current claim by Plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected value of future claimaints’ claims.” On May 18, the DOJ announced that the fund would receive $1.776 billion. Although you have backtracked on this point and declared that the DOJ is not moving forward with the Anti-Weaponization Fund, I am just curious – was this actually “the projected value of future claimants’ claims”?  You must have some worksheets and/or calculations to back that up, yes?  May we see them?

---

[1] See Eugene’s takedown of the charges against Comey here.

[2]  See my earlier postings here, here, and here.

[3] Seriously. You can see for yourself that the IRS did not waive any claims against Trump in the Settlement Agreement. That waiver was granted in the special “Order” Blanche issued on the following day.

Why wasn’t it included in the Settlement Agreement?  The only explanation I can come up with is that the lawyers simply forgot to include it.  Maybe they got confused; the Settlement Agreement does have a “waiver of claims” clause (see Sec III(B)) – but that one goes in the opposite direction! Plaintiffs are waiving their claims against the IRS!

You can imagine the scene:

Blanche: “Did you put that waiver into the Settlement Agreement?”

Lawyer in Charge of Drafting Settlement Agreement:  “We sure did!”

That kind of thing would get a first-year associate fired.  But Mr. Blanche has turned it into nomination to be our next Attorney General.

[4] We will learn, I hope, a great deal more on this score shortly.  Judge Williams, in the SD FL case, has asked for briefing, due this Friday, on possible collusive conduct by the two parties in this case, and I suspect she will hold at least one public hearing on the matter as well.  The long and the short of the allegation is that the two sides – Trump on one side, the IRS on the other – agreed that Trump would file a phony lawsuit against the IRS, that he would voluntarily dismiss his claims before the IRS had to answer the claims, and the parties would announce that they had “settled” the case.  This would enable them to get their hands on the DOJ’s “settlement fund,” without any of that nasty Congressional oversight or approval.

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For several weeks now, I have been surprised that the major newspapers have not covered the Judge Ross scandal. In particular, I was shocked to see nothing from the New York Times and the Washington Post. I even noted how Bloomberg Law was winning the coverage.

Well, it seems the Times was working on something big. Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Mattathias Schwartz published a story this morning about Judge Ross. And we learn a lot. They got three law clerks to speak, plus they got a copy of the “apology” letter.

The New York Times confirmed it was Judge Ross through interviews with three of her former clerks and two people familiar with the matter, and obtained a signed apology letter that she wrote as part of a judicial reprimand.

First, this “secret” was passed down from year-to-year among law clerks:

For years, Judge Eleanor Ross’s secret was passed down from law clerk to law clerk.

They whispered about the sultry jazz music that emanated from her chambers when a uniformed police commander, a man they called her “visitor,” disappeared into her private office. The clerks could sometimes hear the unmistakable sounds of sex from behind the door.

They chalked it up as one of the burdens of working for Judge Ross, who routinely rubber stamped their draft orders and added little else before issuing them as rulings. But the clerks in the Atlanta courthouse felt helpless: Do you report your married boss, a federal judge no less, for having a clandestine in-office affair with a law enforcement officer?

One day last year, a clerk did exactly that.

Second, Judge Fogel–unlike Judge Wood-stated the obvious. The punishment handed down was woefully inadequate.

Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge who consults with judges on ethics questions, said some in the judiciary disagreed with how Judge Ross’s case had been resolved. “Many of the sitting judges with whom I’ve spoken believe the findings as a whole warranted a more significant sanction,” he said.

Another judge who shall remained unnamed wrote to me, saying that my post Judge Wood was out of line, and demanding and I should apologize. I added an update to my post, but my criticism stands even stronger in light of the correction.

Third, we get more details about her chambers:

She soon settled on the 17th floor of the federal courthouse, in an office with two couches, a meeting table and windows that overlooked the Atlanta Falcons’ stadium.

Among the décor in her chambers was a picture of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a quote from a Beyoncé and Drake song overlaid: “All them fives need to listen when a ten is talking.” Elsewhere, she hung an apology letter from a lawyer she had chastised for being underdressed and underprepared in court.

In their first year of the prestigious two-year clerkship, Judge Ross’s clerks would sit at a desk just feet away from the door to her office. In addition to their legal work, they were tasked with greeting visitors, and they kept a small CCTV screen nearby to see who was outside.

And details about the sex:

So it was odd when they would see a uniformed police officer walk down the hallway toward the back door of Judge Ross’s office.

The walls were thin, and the clerks could sometimes hear music and the judge and officer chatting. Then the music would continue, and the talking would stop. Other times, what they heard was more explicit.

The three clerks told The Times that their stomachs churned when they realized what was taking place. But, coupled with her other actions, it also represented something fundamentally painful to them: that a person with a role they revered, a person whose job it was to decide America’s laws, seemed not to care the way they cared.

Fourth, the clerks were even more troubled about her utter disregard for the civil docket. They insist barely 5% of the civil orders were reviewed, and only then for typos and gramma.

One clerk said it felt like their belief in the legal system had been yanked out from underneath their feet, and that they wondered whether to continue working in law.

While the clerks said they might have been willing to overlook isolated personal foibles, they were more broadly disturbed by the lack of attention Judge Ross paid to the civil disputes that came before her.

While Judge Ross was engaged on her criminal cases, the clerks — often fresh out of law school — told investigators that she largely let them decide how to rule on key motions in lawsuits. It was not unusual to go weeks without hearing much from her except for a brief email — “Please docket.” — a few minutes after they sent her a draft order, three clerks told The Times.

They estimated that she provided edits on roughly 5 percent of the civil orders that they drafted in her name, and even then mostly just for grammar or typos.

Judge Ross later disputed the clerks’ account to the judicial committee, saying that she made edits to 30 to 40 percent of drafts.

The Eleventh Circuit could have compared her draft orders and published orders, but decided not to investigate this ground.

Fifth, the Times obtained a copy of the “apology” note. I put “apology” in quotes because this is woefully inadequate. It’s like saying, “I’m sorry you were offended.”

Ultimately, the committee required the judge to send apology letters to the six law clerks who spoke to investigators.

The committee said the letters “should be sufficiently specific so as to make clear to the recipient the sexual misconduct for which the judge is apologizing.”

The letters she sent, dated May 27, were three sentences long and identical.

“Thank you for your contributions to our court during your clerkship,” Judge Ross wrote, according to a copy obtained by The Times. “I convey my deepest apology for not taking steps to ensure that it was a more positive experience. I wish you all the best in your future legal endeavors and in life.”

I wonder if ChatGPT wrote this?

Sixth, the clerks found the letter “offensively vague.”

The three former clerks who spoke to The Times said that they viewed the letter as offensively vague. One decided to share it with the chief judge of the 11th Circuit, believing it didn’t comply with the committee’s order.

I agree. The whistleblower clerk should appeal this matter to the Judicial Conference of the United States. The Chief Justice needs to confront this mess.

Seventh, the Times actually got members of the Atlanta bar to go on record.

Judge Timothy C. Batten, Judge Ross’s former colleague in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, worried that her misconduct would affect how courts and judges were viewed by the public.

“I’m really sorry this happened and reflects poorly on the court,” he said in an interview. Judge Batten retired last year as chief judge of the district court and said he had never gotten wind of Judge Ross’s misconduct.

Now, some in the Atlanta legal world wonder if Judge Ross’s career will survive.

“I don’t know where you go from here,” said Don Samuel, a criminal defense lawyer in Atlanta who has long known, and respected, Judge Ross.

“There’s so much snickering going on by everybody that I can’t imagine what it will be like to be on the bench and wonder what everybody’s thinking,” he said.

I hope this reporting jumpstarts impeachment talk.

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Last week, Texas’ 15th Court of Appeals dismissed a case brought by two women who’ve been denied social workers licenses in the state. Despite their master’s degrees and what the court described as “many strong…letters of recommendation,” the women’s decades-old criminal offenses, committed in the throes of addictions they have since overcome, made them categorically ineligible for licensure under state law.

The plaintiffs, Katherin Youniacutt and Tammy Thompson, plan to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Texas. “We’re confident, under the existing precedent, that we’re entitled to proceed with our case,” Arif Panju, an attorney at the Institute for Justice (I.J.), who is representing the women, tells Reason.

Youniacutt and Thompson, who struggled with substance abuse earlier in their lives, say in their petition before the court that they’ve reformed themselves. Youniacutt, “a victim of clerical abuse” as a child, turned to alcohol to cope, and in 2007, pled guilty to assaulting an off-duty police officer with her car while under the influence.

Thompson began using methamphetamine in the wake of an ugly divorce. When she was threatened in 2006 by a man with a baseball bat, she was protected by friends and onlookers and left the scene before police arrived. Two years later, Thompson learned that the man had accused her of assaulting him with the bat, and “though she does not recall ever picking up the bat or striking him,” she pled guilty to the charges and received two years’ probation, eventually resulting (because of her drug use) in a 4-year prison sentence in 2010.

After earning their master’s degrees in social work, Youniacutt and Thompson, who are both sober, were eager to become “licensed master social workers” and begin treating others who struggle with trauma and substance abuse. 

The Texas State Board of Social Worker Examiners even assured both of them in 2019 that although their histories “may present a barrier to licensure,” they would not be disqualified, and the Board would consider extenuating circumstances before making a decision.

However, later that year, Texas passed a law banning from every healthcare profession anyone who was ever “previously convicted of…the commission of a felony offense involving the use or threat of force.” The Board of Examiners did not contact either woman to notify them of the change.

When, after paying hundreds of dollars in exam and application fees, the women finally completed all the licensing requirements—Thompson in 2021 and Younicacutt in 2023—their applications were denied.

Now the two women have challenged the lifetime ban’s legality under the Texas Constitution, arguing that it amounts to an “unreasonable” imposition on their “right to earn an honest living in the occupation of [their] choice.” After a district court allowed the case to proceed—agreeing that the ban was “irrational”—the state district attorney filed an appeal, which proved successful last week.

The Court of Appeals decided that, in fact, “requiring licensed social workers not to have committed violent felonies is still arguably rationally related to the State’s interest.”

Panju tells Reason that the Court of Appeals essentially “deferred blindly to the Legislature.” He says it merely pointed to a legislative study noting that “concerns have been raised regarding the prevalence of licensed healthcare professionals using their privilege and position of authority to commit crimes against vulnerable patients.” And then it concluded that on those grounds alone, the lifetime ban—as applied to two grandmothers who’d utterly turned their lives around—was entirely rational.

“That’s not how economic freedom works in the United States,” says Panju. “And certainly not in Texas.” After the ruling handed down by the Texas Supreme Court in Patel v. Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (2015), he says a restriction on economic liberty must do a lot more work to justify itself.

“Under the test laid out by the Supreme Court,” he says, the court has to “actually look at the people bringing the challenge—Ms. Thompson and Ms. Youniacutt—and look at the real-world effect of the law on them, as part of the analysis.” The Court of Appeals didn’t do that: “It just…pulled out the ‘Government Always Wins’ rubber stamp,” and dismissed their complaint “at the level of abstraction.”

Asked about their Supreme Court prospects, Panju says he’s “confident, under the existing precedent, that we’re entitled to proceed with our case.”

Once the motion to dismiss is defeated, he says, all the details of “the real-world effects of the law on…Ms. Youniacutt and Ms. Thompson” will be considered, and “we’ll have this declared unconstitutional.”

Until then, these two Texas grandmothers will be banned from guiding others through the same challenges they faced.

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Phones and young people and baby making: Online interaction is “lacking in some essential emotional nutrient that human beings evolved to harvest from the physical proximity of other human beings,” writes Noah Smith at his Substack. “Perhaps it’s something cognitive—the richness of context that tells you that no, your friend’s life isn’t perfect just because they posted a cool video of their trip to Europe, and thus you don’t need to feel constantly envious and inadequate and left-out. Or perhaps it’s something physical—the tiny touch of a high-five or a hug, the simple feeling of the proximity of other human bodies.”

“Whatever this emotional nutrient is, our young people are starving for it, while they binge on the cheap sugar-alcohol of emoji reactions and story views,” Smith continues. Meanwhile, “the global fertility decline is a long-standing trend. Every country that escapes poverty, urbanizes, and teaches its people to read is going to transition from a high fertility rate (5-7 children per woman) to a much lower rate. Long before the smartphone burst on the scene, most of Europe and the richer parts of East Asia had fallen below replacement-level fertility.” Now it’s hit the U.S. as well, with a new record low of 1.57 per April’s report. (About one-quarter of the fertility rate drop is due to falling rates of teen pregnancy since about 2007, which is an undeniable victory.)

But “why is fertility falling everywhere across the globe, to such low levels, all at once?” asks Smith. “Whatever the cause is, it can’t be something local and parochial. It can’t be the effect of America’s Great Recession, or Confucian culture, or whatever. It has to be something that has been affecting the entire world at the same time, and that narrows it down to a pretty short list.” This brings us to the new paper that’s been making the rounds: “Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly,” which has been robustly critiqued (as well as, more broadly, the theory that phones are massively responsible for falling fertility).

However, “the old fertility drop was due to parents having fewer children, while the recent drop is due to fewer people becoming parents at all”—a critical distinction. Less marriage, less coupling. Also, possibly, the expectation of love as a precursor to marriage:

You're going to read a thousand takes on why there are less kids being born. But you won't hear the obvious one. There are less couples, less marriages.

The threshold for coupling up is love. Women would rather be single than not be in love. But love is rare. Always has been pic.twitter.com/s9KM99pXg9

— LindyMan (@PaulSkallas) May 11, 2026

Smith and others point to the rise of sexlessness and social isolation—time spent alone—coinciding with the rise of smartphones as a major contributor:

Smartphones appear to have accelerated the global fertility crisis — by making social isolation and singledom more comfortable and entertaining.

Chatbots could nudge humanity even further in this direction. Today, digital technology doesn't just provide loners with perpetual… pic.twitter.com/eMXSZg8kt1

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) June 8, 2026

It’s fascinating that these anti-social trends—part of “the anti-social century,” as Derek Thompson put it at The Atlantic—have happened basically everywhere, all at once; that there appears to be no obvious corrective; and that people can’t even necessarily agree on what type of impact the phones (specifically: smartphones that can access social media) have had. Of course, the pandemic almost certainly functioned as an accelerant to preexisting social-withdrawal trends, and government-mandated lockdowns should be partially blamed. But there’s something larger happening here, where synthetic socialization delivering cheaper, easier-to-come-by dopamine hits seems to satiate some part of our social longing, but with plenty of unintended consequences along the way.

I’m persuaded by the Smith argument, for what it’s worth. But Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown pushed back on all of this, which is also worth your time. I’m just hoping we get a Knicks-related birth rate spike nine months from now, which brings me to…

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Scenes from New York: WE LOVE A COMEBACK!!! MIRACLE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN! After being down 29 points in the second half, the Knicks managed to pull through. In the last few seconds, Jalen Brunson went for a game-winning 3-point shot that bounced off the rim and needed just a little boost from OG Anunoby to help it in. It was extraordinary. My whole neighborhood was erupting with cheers. I am shocked the noise level of my own little watch party didn’t wake up my 3-year-old (who spent much of yesterday decorating cupcakes in Knicks colors).

The only good thing Mayor Zohran Mamdami has ever done:

When James Dolan cancels the watch party outside MSG, we bring the watch party to you.

Thanks to the @NBA, Knicks Game 4 is now playing on dozens of @LinkNYC screens across our city.

LGK. pic.twitter.com/gRcYjobzSV

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) June 11, 2026

Incredible scenes all around the city:

JFK TERMINAL 8 TONIGHT WHEN THE KNICKS TOOK THE LEAD pic.twitter.com/YvQujrsplV

— Renny Gong (@rennyxgong) June 11, 2026

yes!!! i risked the no fly list screaming pic.twitter.com/XuwShzUfiU

— kyle (@kyle4prezident) June 11, 2026

Someone from their second floor apartment projects the Knicks game against the 4th Avenue-9th Street station pic.twitter.com/oUJQ34XnPM

— Steven Vago (@Vagoish) June 11, 2026

NY Post backpage pic.twitter.com/vm1D5eUmsY

— Stefan Bondy (@SbondyNBA) June 11, 2026

LOOKIN’ AT YOU, WEMBY:

visiting the shaolin monks then losing the wu tang game in historical fashion is crazy storytelling

— alex (@steven_lebron) June 11, 2026

I LOVE NEW YORK SO MUCH!!!

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QUICK HITS

• “We’re going to be attacking them, attacking them very hard,” President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House yesterday, referring to Iran. “We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them hard again today.” Trump also threatened to seize Kharg Island, “which handles roughly 90% of Iran’s crude exports,” per CNN. Iran’s military is now targeting U.S. bases for the second day in a row.
• “The Food and Drug Administration approved a new sunscreen ingredient this week for U.S. markets,” writes the editorial board of The Washington Post, referring to bemotrizinol, which was approved for use in Europe 27 years ago. “That shouldn’t be remarkable. Yet this is the first time the agency has done so since 1999…The reason for this disconnect is a 1938 law that classified sunscreen products as drugs to be regulated by the FDA. That has required time-consuming animal testing and clinical trials to prove that they every new variety is safe to be sold over the counter.”
• “Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has introduced legislation that would ban social media for youth under 16 unless companies such as Meta Platforms Inc. and X Corp. meet a set of safety standards,” reports Bloomberg.
• Worth your time: “How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi” over at The Atlantic.
• Agreed:

"Remote work is the biggest innovation for ambitious women with children since the dishwasher."

Citing @FamStudies research: Mothers of young children who worked full-time from home spent 2.4 additional hours with their children

Excellent @katebachwsj @WSJFreeEx pic.twitter.com/5jv3sl4a9v

— Carter Skeel (@CarterSkeel) June 10, 2026

The post Is It the Phones? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Massachusetts has a long and storied history of prohibition. The Puritans banned dice, cards, and gaming tables. The state was one of the first to ban alcohol and marijuana. Missing from this murderer’s row of vices is tobacco—for now.

Local boards of health are banning nicotine in their towns and cities by imposing “Nicotine-Free Generation” (NFG) policies. These forbid anyone born after a specific date from buying any kind of tobacco in their lifetime, ever. In Massachusetts, the specific date is typically either January 1, 2004, or January 1, 2005. The bans usually cover not just cigarettes but all nicotine products, regardless of their level of health risk, including cigars, nicotine pouches, vapes, hookah, and pipe tobacco.

The boards of health responsible for these rules are municipal bodies. They’re empowered to adopt and enforce “reasonable health regulations.” Their work typically focuses on sanitary code enforcement, restaurant inspections, housing conditions, and communicable disease control.

Board members are elected in some towns and appointed in others. The elections typically have a low profile and a low turnout, and they’re often uncontested. Most residents are unaware that a tobacco regulation is being considered until it has already been adopted.

Public records from 13 Massachusetts municipalities reveal that the adoption of NFG policies is not the result of popular demand. It is the result of a coordinated, state-funded campaign of a dedicated network of activists, collaborating with health board members and a melange of tobacco control programs, pursuing predetermined outcomes with little regard for public opinion.

The Massachusetts Tobacco Cessation and Prevention Program (MTCP), for example, is a taxpayer-funded public health program whose goal is to prevent young people from using nicotine, help current users quit, protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke, and eliminate tobacco-related disparities. Nowhere in its legal mandate is there a duty to lobby localities to ensure adults never have the choice to use nicotine.

But local tobacco control programs, funded through MTCP, use tobacco control program managers and coordinators to scout potential cities to target for a generational ban. MTCP tracks each new effort and includes NFG adoption among its tracked goals.

The dual role of government employee and prohibition activist is evident in an email chain from March 2025. Maureen Buzby, a tobacco inspection coordinator employed by the city of Melrose, wrote to the town of Hopkinton’s health director, Shaun McAuliffe, after learning of the town’s interest in a generational ban at an MTCP meeting. Using her government email account, Buzby offered to deploy “an amazing group of volunteers” who would “answer questions, attend a meeting, testify at a hearing, whatever.”

McAuliffe described the arrangement in an email to the town’s Select Board chair: “The Commonwealth has assigned NFG staff and reps from the [Massachusetts Municipal Association] to insulate us through the remainder of the process.”

Buzby was explicit about MTCP’s interest in NFG, writing to the town of Mansfield’s health director: “MTCP has asked all of us Tobacco Program Managers to let them know when new tobacco policies get passed.”

The grant report for the Six City Tobacco Initiative, which is entirely funded by the Massachusetts Department of Health, recorded Somerville’s adoption of NFG in March 2025 as “another win.” The use of such language in a grant report to a state health department suggests that this is an active policy being pursued with no public mandate.

In These Towns, the Board Decided Before Anyone Testified

On April 14, 2025, McAuliffe wrote to Lisa Stevens-Goodnight of the Massachusetts Municipal Association: “We intend to hold the hearing mid-May. I intend to rally the parents of the kids that are addicted to Zins [sic], etc. My Board is committed to passing this.”

In Milton, the health director urged the board to adopt the ban before a single resident had spoken. The hearing was gavelled in and out in 14 minutes. Three witnesses who testified were pro-NFG campaigners who had appeared at hearings in other towns. No opposition testimony was recorded. The board voted unanimously.

Somerville’s board passed a ban a month before the public hearing. A pre-written hearing script used in Amherst said: “Board members only need to listen to the public testimony. No [Board of Health] member will comment or ask any questions.”

In Belchertown, Public Health Director Andrea Crete initiated contact with advocacy organizations, solicited template letters of support, and coordinated external experts. Letters sent to the board were drafted by outside parties, vetted by Crete, and then put before the board as if they were spontaneous expressions of local support. One federally funded Drug-Free Communities program director asked Crete to review her draft letter: “Let me know if there is anything specific you would like me to add.”

There were about 1,000 emails in opposition. Yet the Belchertown Board voted 4-0-1 in favor of NFG.

One member who voted in favor, Ken Elstein, had spent the preceding weeks helping the outside advocates shape the regulation he would approve. In an email chain that October and November, under the subject line “Belchertown TFG comments,” Elstein traded edits on the draft language with the Public Health Advocacy Institute‘s Mark Gottlieb, Kate Silbaugh of Boston University’s law school, and Anthony Ishak of Massachusetts General Hospital, with Gottlieb supplying a detailed legal analysis in return. Elstein relayed another member’s private doubts about the measure to the same advocates, and he took in the Public Health Advocacy Institute’s legal read on it before a single resident had the chance to see it, let alone object.

Six weeks later, Elstein made each of the three motions to adopt the regulation. By 1:40 a.m., not seven hours after the gavel, a finished press release was already going around to Elstein and his collaborators, with instructions to “get ahead of the story.”

‘Find Some Kids’

The emails reveal how officials understood their own role. When an opponent emailed the Hopkinton Board of Health, McAuliffe forwarded the message not to the board members he is supposed to serve but to Buzby. His response: “I’m going to line up as many parents that have addicted kids that I can. Game on.” Buzby coached him on credibility: “Youth are the most important voices. As well as local residents. We get chastised regularly for being ‘outsiders.'”

Town employee Erin Bartolini, a Drug-Free Communities coalition coordinator who used her government email, maintained a catalog of template testimony for different audiences and distributed it to young people, encouraging them to recruit friends and parents. After Hopkinton adopted a generational tobacco ban, the apparatus was redeployed to the neighboring town of Ashland. McAuliffe emailed Buzby: “I can speak to Rajit and find some kids.” He then contacted other town departments: “Do we still have a joint program with Ashland where we could recruit from?” A colleague asked: “For what?” McAuliffe replied: “Support NFG for Ashland.”

The director of Hopkinton Youth & Family Services suggested sending “Emily our young intern” who “wanted to speak at Hopkinton and lost out on time.”

To be clear, it is already illegal for children to buy any kind of tobacco product in Massachusetts. And if they don’t want to use nicotine after they turn 21, they do, in fact, have the option not to use it. Instead, they are dragooned into supporting legislation to ban their future selves and peers from having the choice in the first place.

Residents Voted Against the Ban. Officials Kept It Anyway.

In Manchester-by-the-Sea, after the health board adopted a generational tobacco ban by a 3–1 vote in October 2024, residents successfully petitioned for a nonbinding warrant article to be placed before a town meeting. Opponents of the tobacco ban won the vote, 81–76, at the April 2025 town meeting. The board’s response was to keep their NFG policy anyway. Health Director Wendy Hansbury reframed the loss, arguing the vote was “so close” that the board was “justified saying that you side with the ½ that want to protect youth.”

In Ashland, the Health Board resisted. Chair Ed Burman said, “the Board discussed at length and felt 5 Board Members shouldn’t make this decision for the whole Town.” According to the minutes of a November 2025 meeting, board member David Kinsman said, “He would like to live in a world where nobody uses tobacco products. However, there are a lot of things in the world that he wishes didn’t exist and believes that NFG goes too far…mentioned Covid and the public belief that government went too far during the pandemic. Doesn’t want to erode that trust any further and tell adults what they can and can’t do.”

These responses appear to have baffled NFG campaigners. Stephanie Patton, a prevention coordinator in Stoughton, emailed Buzby: “Do you have any intel into why the [Board of Health] in Ashland went the way that they did?”

Who’s Funding the Push for Lifetime Tobacco Bans in Massachusetts?

The Public Health Advocacy Institute is the leading pressure group pushing generational tobacco bans. The institute reported total revenue of $741,000 in fiscal year 2022; the following year, that figure soared to $21.2 million. Whatever the source of that sudden increase, public or private, it’s an eye-popping amount of money for a small policy shop offering free legal defense to municipalities that adopt NFG.

The Massachusetts Health Officers Association and the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards together reported millions more in government grants, with the latter group’s senior staff attorney supplying draft NFG regulations to towns. These taxpayer-funded associations turned into distribution channels for a campaign nobody voted for.

The Strategy Behind Going Local First—and Then Using It to Push a Statewide Ban

Why do NFG advocates target boards of health rather than the state legislature or Congress? It’s because local health boards have a low profile and are rarely scrutinized. They consist of three to five members who, by self-selection and the very nature of the office they hold, are more likely to prize longevity above all other values. More strategically, littering the state with localities that have NFG policies gives advocates ammunition to demand that the legislature adopt tobacco bans statewide.

Elstein, the same Belchertown board member, said as much at a Northampton presentation: “The more localities that pass this policy, the pressure it puts on the state to pass a statewide NFG bill.”

This reveals an irony. For decades, tobacco control organizations have opposed measures that would give state legislatures exclusive power to regulate tobacco, arguing that local action serves as a laboratory for policy innovation. But the FOIA record shows the commitment to local democracy is threadbare. When enough municipalities adopt the same regulation, the advocates pivot to the state legislature and argue for statewide adoption, citing regulatory coherence. This is precisely the argument for preemption that the tobacco control movement has spent decades opposing.

The process is already in motion. Emily Reynolds, at the time a staffer in Massachusetts state Sen. Jason Lewis’s office, kept Buzby and the Public Health Advocacy Institute abreast of developments regarding state-level NFG legislative hearings. “I am forwarding the public hearing notice for the tobacco free generation legislation….Please forward this on to any advocates that you think would be interested,” Reynolds wrote in an email in July 2025.

Youth nicotine use is at a 25-year low, and fewer than 2 percent of kids smoke cigarettes. The war on youth nicotine use has been fought and won. Nicotine-free generation bans are about restricting tomorrow’s adults, not today’s kids. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that if NFG advocates get their way, age-graded prohibition could be applied to a host of other products and activities that adults enjoy but run afoul of the preferences of public health officials.

The post 'Find Some Kids': How Health Officials Drummed Up Fake Support for Tobacco Bans in Massachusetts Towns appeared first on Reason.com.

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6/11/1993: Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah decided.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: June 11, 1993 appeared first on Reason.com.

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In 1775, the great British essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson entered the political fray over the American Revolution with a scorching pamphlet that attacked the wayward colonials for their disloyalty to the crown and hypocritical talk of freedom. “How is it,” Johnson demanded, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

That sort of question still looms large over many contemporary debates about the American Revolution. “Why should anyone take seriously the founders’ odes to liberty,” the argument may go, “when many of those same founders participated in the vile institution of slavery?”

I got to thinking about Johnson’s pamphlet the other day after I learned about the tragic death of the towering American historian Gordon Wood. The connection came to mind because Wood had offered his own response to such Johnsonian questioning in what was, to my mind, his best book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Here is what Wood had to say:

To focus, as we are today apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish—highlighting and lamenting its failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women—is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery movement and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.

The example of John C. Calhoun, the famous South Carolina statesman and inveterate defender of slavery, may help to buttress Wood’s point. In 1848, Calhoun denounced both the Declaration of Independence and its author, Thomas Jefferson, for promulgating the idea that “all men are created equal,” which Calhoun described as “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” Calhoun was no fool. He well understood that if the Declaration of Independence was ever followed to its logical conclusion, it would spell doom for American slavery.

The great abolitionist hero Frederick Douglass knew that, too. The only difference was that while Calhoun disparaged Jefferson’s words, Douglass celebrated them. By the middle of the 19th century, it was Douglass, and the antislavery movement to which he devoted his life, that truly embodied the radical principles of the American Revolution.

“It was no accident,” Wood wrote, “that Americans in Philadelphia in 1775 formed the first anti-slavery society in the world.” For them, just like for Douglass several decades later, the principles underlying the American Revolution could point nowhere else.

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In Other Legal News

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue opinions today in one or more argued cases. As of this writing, we’re still waiting on huge opinions dealing with executive power, birthright citizenship, immigration, and more.

As we wait for those big SCOTUS decisions to drop, I wanted to highlight a fascinating copyright case that’s been bouncing around in the lower courts. If you’re familiar with the tattoo-based reality TV shows Miami Ink or LA Ink, you may also be familiar with the tattoo artist who goes by the name Kat Von D. Well, a few years ago, Von D tattooed an image of Miles Davis on one of her friends. That image was based on a picture of Davis taken by a photographer named Jeff Sedlik. After Sedlik learned about the tattoo, he demanded to be paid a licensing fee. A federal copyright suit eventually followed.

Writing at Courthouse News, Edvard Pettersson lays out the legal and artistic differences between the parties:

Von D testified that no one in the tattoo world gets licenses to use photographs as references for their creations. She maintained her use of the Miles Davis image was “fair use” because it was her interpretation of the image and served an entirely different purpose than Sedlik’s work….

Sedlik, however, turned out to be a stickler when it comes to unlicensed use of his work; he regularly scans the internet to find infringers. He testified how in 2014 he tracked down another tattoo artist who had posted on social media a tattoo he had done based on the same Miles Davis photo.

I am sympathetic to Von D’s fair use argument in this case. And while it’s not exactly pertinent to this particular dispute, I might add that I am sympathetic to the legal plights of tattoo artists in general, as this venerable profession has long suffered under bogus regulations and other unjustifiable government interference. Indeed, it was not until 2010 that a federal judge finally held that “the tattoo itself, the process of tattooing, and the business of tattooing are forms of pure expression fully protected by the First Amendment.”

In any event, Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg looks to be a copyright case to watch, as its final outcome may have costly implications for many tattooists at work today.

The post Gordon Wood's Enduring Defense of the American Revolution appeared first on Reason.com.

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This is part of 1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason’s favorite American Founders. Read more here.

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1819. This accords well with the Cato Institute’s definition of libertarianism: “the belief that each person has the right to live his life as he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.”

Immediately following his definition of rightful liberty, Jefferson properly cautioned, “I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”

Nearly half a century earlier, as a 27-year-old lawyer in 1770, Jefferson sought freedom for Samuel Howell, who was being held in indentured servitude because his grandmother was white and his grandfather was black. In his legal brief, Jefferson declared, “Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.” Jefferson was asserting the libertarian moral claim that every individual has full self-ownership. Alas, he lost the case.

Six years later, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson famously wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Historian Walter Isaacson calls that phrase “the greatest sentence ever written.” And the claim that sentence made has reverberated across the world for the last two and a half centuries.

Despite declaring that “all men are created equal,” Jefferson benefited from the labor of more than 600 enslaved people at Monticello and other properties over the course of his lifetime. Jefferson was conscious of this hypocrisy. In his first draft of the Declaration, he indicted King George III for having “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” Jefferson further accused the king of “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.” Jefferson later explained that this passage “was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it.”

In his 1783 draft of a new constitution for the Commonwealth of Virginia, Jefferson proposed that the new General Assembly not have the power “to permit the introduction of any more slaves to reside in this state, or the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the 31st. day of December 1800; all persons born after that day being hereby declared free.” Jefferson recognized the evil of slavery but could not politically bring about its end or bring himself to give it up.

Jefferson was a fierce supporter of the liberty of conscience. “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god,” he observed in 1782. “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” While Rhode Island was the only colony without an established state church, the 1786 adoption of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom made Virginia the first state to end the use of taxes to support state-sanctioned churches.

Jefferson was ambassador to France as the new Constitution was being hammered out in 1787. But in his correspondence with chief writer James Madison, Jefferson decried the “omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal & unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land & not by the law of Nations.” Persuaded, Madison drafted a Bill of Rights that largely incorporated Jefferson’s concerns; it was ratified as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.

Jefferson’s hypocrisy with respect to slavery is a blot on his legacy. But he still deserves our praise for expressing the principles and framing the institutions that enabled the eventual extension of civil and political rights to all American men and women. On the anniversary of Jefferson’s Declaration, it is up to us to sustain and extend that document’s ideals.

1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason‘s favorite American Founders:

• Benjamin Franklin
• Samuel Adams
• Thomas Jefferson
• George Mason
• A Farmer
• George Washington
• Patrick Henry

The post 1776 All-Stars: Why Thomas Jefferson Is the Most Fascinating Founder appeared first on Reason.com.

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