Becky Pepper-Jackson just wanted to be on the girls’ middle school cross country team. Now, five years later, she’s at the Supreme Court.

In 2021, West Virginia enacted a law banning transgender girls from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams, from middle school through college, from the top levels of athletics down through intramural sports. But Pepper-Jackson didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to identify as a girl so that she could be on the middle school cross country team—she transitioned in third grade, never went through male puberty, and has been undergoing hormone therapy. Her lawyers argue that means she wouldn’t have an unfair athletic advantage against other girls—the science on that front is mixed.

Her story is one of many complex examples that show the legal and scientific questions around transgender athletes are far from the black-and-white issues that activists on both sides portray them as. Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed to argue as much on Tuesday: “Given that half the states are allowing it, allowing transgender girls and women to participate, about half are not, why would we at this point…jump in and try to constitutionalize a rule for the whole country while there’s still…uncertainty and debate?” That argument came as the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of an Idaho law that is similar, but a little more broad, than West Virginia’s. In theory, the same argument applies to laws like California’s, which is the polar opposite in that it says schools must allow transgender athletes to play on the team for whatever gender they identify with. Blanket policies that either allow or disallow all transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports are not the way—they are better handled on a case-by-case basis closer to the ground, at the level of the individual school, league, or governing body for each sport that can look at the nuances of each athlete.

Including Idaho and West Virginia, 27 states have laws restricting transgender participation in female athletics. Each one raises difficult questions about who they apply to, where they apply, and what to do about unexpected edge cases—like, perhaps, Pepper-Jackson’s argument that she has no athletic advantage due to her prepubescent
transition.

In West Virginia, for example, athletic eligibility is determined by whatever sex was on the person’s birth certificate. That’s simple in most cases, but what about cases where a birth certificate is lost and can’t be verified, or where the government is at fault for putting the wrong information down?

In Idaho, the verification process is much more invasive. If an athlete’s gender is disputed, they would have to have a doctor establish their sex “based solely on: (a) The student’s internal and external reproductive anatomy; (b) The student’s normal endogenously produced levels of testosterone; and (c) An analysis of the student’s genetic makeup.” (“Normal” levels are not defined in the four-page law.)

All that can be triggered by anyone who raises a dispute—even by someone who just wants to abuse the process and subject a rival to embarrassment and invasive medical testing. It could also mean that a girl or woman who was born female, has always been biologically female, and happens to have higher than normal natural testosterone levels could get caught up in the ban even though she’s not transgender.

(Some might argue those higher than normal testosterone levels are easily dealt with by hormone suppression. South African Olympic runner Caster Semenya described her experience on such medications: “It makes you feel sick, nauseous. You have panic attacks. It starts creating a little bit of blood clots in your system. Your stomach is burning. You eat a lot. You can’t sleep.”)

The complexities of these laws aren’t just biological, but geographical. How are private schools implicated? In West Virginia, they still fall under the law’s restrictions if they want to participate in the West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission, the state’s main governing body for high school sports. What about private youth leagues, and does it matter if they are playing at public or private facilities? At least in Idaho and West Virginia, they seem to be allowed to set their own rules and are allowed to include transgender athletes in competition at public facilities if they so choose, as long as they are not school-affiliated teams.

The complexities are constitutional in nature, too. Kavanaugh and Justice Elena Kagan wondered aloud if, perhaps, all states should be forced to exclude transgender athletes from women’s sports. Multiple justices discussed whether Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) comes into play, a ruling that banned employer discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in that decision that “an employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.” Does that call into question the constitutionality of separate boys and girls sports leagues at public schools? The justices didn’t seem to want to get into that.

Opponents of these laws do not seem optimistic about getting them overturned. Pepper-Jackson’s lawyer is hoping the Supreme Court will send the case back to lower courts—presumably, he is either not confident considering the Supreme Court’s current makeup or trying to buy time. Plus, “the court’s three Democratic appointees appeared to recognize that the challengers faced an uphill battle,” as Amy Howe wrote on SCOTUSblog. “They seemed to devote much of their efforts to mitigating their losses—either by getting one case thrown out or by limiting the court’s decision to a narrow one.”

When Kavanaugh mentioned the “uncertainty and debate” in this issue, he seemed to be arguing against the judiciary striking down the state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports. Legislators should take that argument further and realize the complexities of this issue do not lend themselves well to heavy-handed regulation. Transgender people are a fraction of the population, transgender athletes an even smaller one, but each one deserves a flexible law that takes into account nuance and changes in science. It does not seem like the politicians in Idaho and West Virginia have taken many of these unique edge cases into account—and on the opposite side in California, it does not seem like politicians have taken the competitive implications of their law into account.

Perhaps a better standard would be one based on harm. Allowing an 11-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson to be on her middle school cross country team doesn’t really harm anyone. The stakes are low or nil. Letting her and other transgender athletes participate in varsity sports at the high school and collegiate level—where there are scholarships and name, image, and likeness money on the line—is a whole different question, and one that is better handled on by sporting administrators close to the situation than politicians who think everything is simpler than it really is.

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A few hours after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis last Wednesday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the 37-year-old activist was engaged in “domestic terrorism” at the time of her death. “This is classic terrorism,” Vice President J.D. Vance agreed the next day. Noem reiterated that description during a contentious interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, saying, “If you look at what the definition of domestic terrorism is, it completely fits the situation on the ground.”

FBI agents charged with investigating the shooting reportedly are now trying to support that characterization by examining Good’s ties to groups that oppose the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdown in Minneapolis. Federal investigators are also looking into protest activities by Good’s widow, who was with her when ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed her. That focus on anti-ICE activism, which on Tuesday prompted the resignation of six career prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota, raises new questions about a probe that is supposed to determine whether Ross’ use of deadly force was legally justified.

The reliability of that investigation was already in doubt for two reasons. First, Noem, Vance, and President Donald Trump have prejudged the outcome by declaring that Ross acted in self-defense. Second, Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, complained that the U.S. Attorney’s Office, after initially indicating that his agency would be included in the investigation, reversed course, saying the probe “would now be led solely by the FBI.”

The FBI’s interest in Good’s history of activism suggests an attempt to obscure the central legal issue raised by the shooting: Did Ross reasonably believe, given “the totality of the circumstances,” that shooting Good was necessary to protect himself, his colleagues, or the general public from the threat she allegedly posed when she began to drive away after she was confronted by ICE agents who ordered her to get out of her car? The FBI’s investigative tangent also raises the question of exactly what Noem and Vance mean by “domestic terrorism”—in particular, whether they define that term so broadly that it includes conduct protected by the First Amendment. Spoiler alert: They do.

On the day of the shooting, Noem said Good was a domestic terrorist because she “weaponize[d] her vehicle” by “attempt[ing] to run a law enforcement officer over,” which “appear[ed] to be an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to [ICE] agents.” She said Ross,”fearing for his life and the other officers around him and the safety of the public,” fired “defensive shots.” Vance concurred that Ross “fired in self defense” because “his life was endangered.” But he also tied Good to anti-ICE protesters who are “assaulting and inciting violence against our law enforcement officers,” declaring that “we’re not going to give in to terrorism.”

That terrorism, Vance averred, included “people trying to antagonize” ICE agents as well as people committing “acts of violence” such as “throw[ing] bricks” or firing guns. “Sometimes they dox them,” he added. “Sometimes they go to their place of residence and harass their families. This is classic terrorism.”

Is it? Under federal law, “domestic terrorism” involves criminal acts “dangerous to human life” that aim to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population,” “influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion,” or “affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”

Some of the actions that Vance described, such as lobbing bricks at ICE agents or shooting at them, fit that definition. But other tactics he mentioned, such as revealing the identities of ICE agents or “trying to antagonize” them in unspecified ways, sound like constitutionally protected speech.

As Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella notes, Noem likewise has sought to expand the definition of domestic terrorism. Speaking to reporters last July, she said “violence” against ICE agents is “anything that threatens them and their safety,” such as “doxing them” or “videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations.” Publicizing  ICE operations qualifies as “violence,” she suggested, because it “encourag[es] other people to come and to throw things” such as “rocks” and “bottles.”

That view is consistent with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s take. In a December 4 memo to federal prosecutors aimed at “countering domestic terrorism,” Bondi echoed Trump’s concern about the left-wing beliefs that he blames for inspiring political violence. She quoted the statutory definition of domestic terrorism but then stretched it to include “organized doxing of law enforcement,” “impeding” federal officers, and unspecified “targeting of public officials or other political actors.”

Noem’s department defines such “terrorism” broadly. Ciaramella notes that Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says “doxing” includes “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online.” McLaughlin added that “we will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.” Following or recording ICE agents as they perform their public duties, DHS told Ciaramella, “sure sounds like obstruction of justice.”

When Noem and Vance aver that Good was involved in “domestic terrorism,” in short, they are not referring merely to her alleged assault on Ross. They are talking about a broader pattern of anti-ICE activity that includes nonviolent, constitutionally protected conduct.

On the morning of the shooting, Good had positioned her Honda Pilot sideways on Portland Avenue, near several unmarked ICE vehicles. The SUV was there a few minutes before ICE agents approached it. Although Noem claimed Good “was blocking the officers in with her vehicle,” bystander video shows other cars passing the SUV, using the lane that was still open. Here is how Good’s widow described what she and her wife were doing in a statement to Minnesota Public Radio: “On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They [the ICE agents] had guns.”

Cell phone video that Ross recorded suggests Good and her wife were involved in ongoing protests against ICE operations in Minneapolis. Good’s wife, who is wearing an orange whistle around her neck, is recording Ross as he records her. “We don’t change our plates every morning, just so you know,” she tells Ross. “It’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.”

Online documents that Good shared with parents at her son’s school, where she served on the board, reinforce the impression that her activism predated her fatal encounter with Ross. “Thank you to families who have been on ICE watch, helping to protect their neighbors,” Good said in a December 16 message described by CNN. She linked to a training document that explains how to obtain those orange whistles, which protesters use to alert the neighborhood when they see ICE agents. “ICE are untrained bullies looking for easy targets,” it says. “Neighbors showing up have saved lives.”

That document linked to “another guide” that “stresses nonviolent responses to ICE agents, while also encouraging a refusal to ‘comply with demands, requests, and orders,'” CNN reports. “It suggests ‘creative tactics,’ noting that ‘crowds, props, traffic, and noise can make detentions difficult [and] sometimes ICE vehicles can’t move (“whoops!”).’ It does not specifically suggest blocking operations with a vehicle.”

If that is what Good was trying to do, the ICE agents had a legitimate beef with her, and so did the motorists who had to drive around her SUV that morning. But it would be quite a stretch to describe such nonviolent tactics as “domestic terrorism,” and it would be even more misleading to put perfectly legal conduct such as blowing the whistle on ICE, whether literally or figuratively, in that category.

Let’s assume the FBI’s investigation confirms what already seems pretty clear: that Good and her wife, who moved to Minneapolis in 2025, soon became involved in anti-ICE protests there. In what way does that illuminate the question of whether Ross was legally justified in shooting her?

Noem, Vance, and Trump say Good deliberately tried to run Ross down. That seems doubtful given her pleasant demeanor in Ross’ video and the fact that she was steering to the right, away from the ICE agents, when he shot her.

Noem, Vance, and Trump also say Good’s car actually struck Ross, who was standing near the left headlight when the SUV began moving forward after backing up a bit. It is hard to tell from the video evidence whether that is true, although it seems clear that any injury he suffered must have been pretty minor, since he is seen walking around without obvious difficulty after the shooting.

Neither point is crucial in determining whether this use of force was “objectively reasonable.” Even if Good was simply trying to leave rather than trying to assault Ross, and regardless of whether the car made contact with him, it would have been reasonable for him to worry about his safety when the SUV began moving, since he had positioned himself (contrary to standard police training) in front of the vehicle.

Ross quickly moved out of the way, the solution that the Justice Department recommends in situations like this. It’s not clear whether he was still in the vehicle’s path when he fired the first shot, which hit the lower left corner of the windshield. But he was clearly not in the car’s path when he fired the second and third shots, which entered the car through the front window on the driver’s side. When Tapper asked Noem about the justification for those shots, she noted that Ross was making a “split-second” decision, which might count in his favor even if that decision seems mistaken in retrospect.

That’s assuming it made sense to think shooting Good was an effective way to neutralize the threat her car allegedly posed. The actual result was that the SUV careened down the street without guidance, stopping only after it crashed into a car parked on the left side. If anything, Ross aggravated any danger the car may have posed by killing the person who was steering it.

However you weigh those factors, Good’s opinions about immigration enforcement, as reflected in her prior activism, seem irrelevant in assessing Ross’ conduct. Even if she was a committed anti-ICE activist (as the documents described by CNN suggest), that hardly means she was bent on killing an immigration agent with her car. And at the time, Ross knew nothing about Good’s background, so that information could not possibly have influenced his perception of the danger she posed.

“There’s nothing in there that suggests attacking ICE agents or engaging in any other form of physical harm or property damage,” William and Mary law professor Timothy Zick, the author of a book about the right to protest, told CNN. “This is Authoritarianism 101, where you blame the dissenters and the activists for causing their own death.”

Trump reinforced that impression on Sunday. “At a very minimum,” he told reporters, “that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.” Good’s decision to disregard an ICE agent’s order to “get out of the fucking car” certainly seems reckless, especially in retrospect, but it surely was not a capital offense. And more generally, her “disrespectful” attitude toward ICE, which the FBI seems bent on confirming, tells us nothing about the legal justification for killing her.

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An excerpt from Knight v. City of New York, decided yesterday by the Second Circuit, in an opinion by Judges Denny Chin, Richard Sullivan, and Maria Araújo Kahn:

Cavalier D. Knight, a would-be gun dealer residing in New York City [challenges a New York City regulation requiring] applicants for firearms dealer licenses to “maintain a place of business in the city,” which effectively requires the applicant to maintain a brick-and-mortar location.

The trial court concluded Knight lacked standing to bring the challenge, but the appellate court reversed, and sent the case back down for a substantive Second Amendment analysis:

To satisfy Article III’s standing requirement, “a plaintiff must demonstrate: (1) injury-in-fact, which means ‘an actual or imminent’ and ‘concrete and particularized’ harm to a ‘legally protected interest’; (2) causation of the injury, which means that the injury is ‘fairly traceable’ to the challenged action of the defendant; and (3) redressability, which means that it is ‘likely,’ not speculative, that a favorable decision by a court will redress the injury.” For an injury in fact to be concrete and particularized, it must “actually exist” and “affect the plaintiff in a personal and individual way.” …

As alleged, the City informed Knight that without a brick-and-mortar location, he would be ineligible for a dealer license. The district court, however, held that this aspect of Knight’s claim is not redressable because even with a dealer license, unchallenged New York City zoning provisions would prohibit Knight’s contemplated business.

As the magistrate judge observed, Knight plans to handle the administrative aspects of his business from his Manhattan apartment while storing his inventory at an off-site location. But under the City’s zoning laws, a residence may not be used to sell products manufactured elsewhere than in the home and offsite storage of inventory is prohibited. According to the district court and magistrate judge, any prospective relief with respect to the place-of-business requirement would therefore make no material difference to Knight’s ability to run his business.

We disagree, and conclude that the district court’s understanding of Knight’s alleged injuries, and thus of its ability to provide effective relief, was too narrow. It is well-established that a credible threat of criminal prosecution can give rise to a discrete, redressable injury under Article III…. Here, Knight alleges … [that h]e plans to run a commercial gun dealing business in New York and has taken several concrete steps toward that goal, including obtaining a federal firearms license and consulting with federal and local agencies regarding his contemplated business. Because the commercial availability of firearms is often “necessary to a citizen’s effective exercise of Second Amendment rights,” Knight’s proposed course of conduct is at least arguably affected with a constitutional interest. But without the dealer license Knight seeks—which he cannot obtain by virtue of the challenged place-of-business requirement—such conduct is specifically prohibited by state law. Knight therefore has plausibly alleged that if he starts running his business without a dealer license, he will face a credible threat of criminal prosecution. Indeed, Knight alleges that a City law-enforcement official personally threatened him with criminal prosecution for unlicensed gun dealing.

Because Knight’s vulnerability to criminal prosecution for running an unlicensed gun business gives rise to a cognizable Article III injury, we next consider whether that injury is plausibly redressable through his challenges to the place-of-business requirement. It is…. Knight’s requested injunction requiring Defendants to grant him a dealer license (or simply requiring them to evaluate his license application without requiring a brick-and-mortar location) is … likely to relieve him of the threat of felony prosecution for running an unlicensed gun dealership….

The possibility that Knight could still be subject to enforcement proceedings under the City’s zoning laws does not defeat redressability. To satisfy Article III, a plaintiff must show that his requested relief would provide meaningful redress for an injury, not that it would relieve him of every injury. And even when a plaintiff’s requested relief “cannot provide full redress” with respect to an injury, a federal court’s “ability to effectuate a partial remedy satisfies the redressability requirement.” We therefore agree with the well-reasoned view of the Seventh and Eighth Circuits that a district court’s ability to reduce the plaintiff’s aggregate criminal exposure can satisfy redressability…. “[R]emoving an additional layer of criminal liability [is] a form of redress sufficient to confer standing, even though the underlying behavior [is] still subject to prosecution.” …

Here, with a dealer license in hand, Knight could not be criminally prosecuted for unlicensed commercial gun dealing. Thus, his risk of prosecution “would be reduced to some extent,” even if not eliminated entirely, if he had a dealer license. And in the event that the City were to target Knight for separate violations of its zoning laws, the range of possible penalties would likely be lower than the penalties he would face for being an unlicensed gun dealer. Compare, e.g., N.Y. Penal Law § 265.13(2) (class B felony to sell a total of three or more firearms in any one-year period), with N.Y.C. Admin. Code § 28-203.1 (misdemeanor offense to commit an “immediately hazardous” zoning violation; even lower penalties for “major violation[s]” and “lesser violation[s]”).

We also observe that Knight has consistently taken the position in this litigation that the City’s zoning laws would not bar his contemplated gun business. Knight may be wrong about that, but it is the lack of a dealer license—and the attendant threat of criminal prosecution for running an unlicensed gun dealership—that matters for purposes of the redressability of his asserted injury, not a local zoning restriction….

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From the decision by Warren County (Ohio) Judge Robert Peeler in Goebel v. Hopkins; it was handed down Dec. 16 but the motion for a new trial was just denied yesterday:

Plaintiffs were the owners of two property lots …. Plaintiffs built a residence on one lot and, in 2007, sold the second lot to a developer (the “Lot”), who subsequently sold the Lot to Defendant. The Lot was allegedly conveyed subject to certain permanent restrictive covenants running with the land, including that no improvement could be constructed on the lot without Plaintiffs’ approval.

In May 2020, Defendant began the process of building a detached garage on the Lot without first obtaining approval from Plaintiffs. Based upon this conduct, Plaintiffs filed suit against Defendant on May 25, 2020 (the “2020 Lawsuit”) raising causes of action in an amended complaint for violations of the restrictive covenants, nuisance, defamation, assault, trespass, and tortious interference. Defendant counterclaimed in the 2020 Lawsuit for defamation, assault/menacing, trespass, and tortious interference with business relations. Plaintiffs subsequently filed for a civil stalking protection order against Defendant on October 6, 2020 (the “CPO Lawsuit”).

Both the 2020 Lawsuit and CPO Lawsuit were settled in January 2021, with a final settlement agreement executed on March 19, 2021. Plaintiffs moved to enforce the Settlement Agreement in the 2020 Lawsuit on August 2, 2021 and, the next day, filed another lawsuit (“2021 Lawsuit”). Within the 2021 Lawsuit, Plaintiffs raised causes of action for (1) declaratory judgment; (2) intentional infliction of emotional distress (“IIED”); (3) defamation; (4) breach of the Settlement Agreement; (5) nuisance; and (6) abuse of process. Id. Defendant counterclaimed for (A) abuse of process; (B) malicious prosecution; (C) fraud; (D) defamation; (E) civil conspiracy; (F) injury by criminal conduct; and (G) breach of contract.

On March 27, 2023, Plaintiffs filed the instant lawsuit—their fourth against Defendant (the “2023 Lawsuit”). In this suit, Plaintiffs raised identical IIED and defamation causes of action as were raised in the 2021 Lawsuit. Thus, on August 19, 2025, Plaintiffs dismissed their [IIED] and defamation claims in the 2021 Lawsuit to proceed on those matters solely in this 2023 Lawsuit. This matter proceeded to a five-day jury trial on October 6, 2025. At trial, Plaintiffs argued Defendant published defamatory statements about them on a website titled “freepurplelambo.com,” on a Facebook account under the name of Defendant’s son, and in an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Plaintiffs claimed Defendant’s statements painted Plaintiffs as criminal extortionists.

At the close of evidence at trial, the Court founds (1) Plaintiffs are private figures; (2) the controversy between the parties is a matter of public concern; (3) the allegations involve defamation per se; (4) no absolute or qualified privilege applies to the statements at issue in this case; and (5) the statements made by the Defendant on the freepurplelambo.com website and republished on Facebook are statements of fact and not opinion. However, pursuant to … American Chem. Soc. v. Leadscope, Inc. (Ohio 2012), the statements made by Defendant in the Cincinnati Enquirer article are not defamatory, as the article contained a “balanced report of both parties’ arguments and defenses.” Furthermore, the statements in the article were statements of opinion and not of fact. Accordingly, the Court directed a verdict on the statements made in the Cincinnati Enquirer article in favor of Defendant and that issue was not submitted to the jury.

The jury returned a verdict in favor of Plaintiffs on their causes of action for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, awarding compensatory damages in the amount of $1,500,000 [capped under Ohio law at $1M], punitive damages in the amount of $2,500,000, and reasonable attorney fees. The jury returned a verdict in favor of Defendant on Plaintiffs’ cause of action for loss of consortium…. [T]he Court [also] finds Plaintiffs are entitled to … attorney fees and costs totaling $148,454.43.

And a few more details about the factual allegations from Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Complaint (again, recall that these are just allegations):

Defendant has defamed Plaintiffs including by making false and malicious claims that they have engaged in criminal conduct against Defendant; violated Ohio law regarding Defendant; illegally rigged a deed intentionally to defraud Defendant; engaged in fraudulent conduct to harm Defendant; forced Defendant out of his home; illegally violated Heritage Club covenants or rules to harm Defendant; illegally conspired to frame Defendant of criminal conduct; defamed Defendant by claiming he was a “drug dealer”; tried to extort Defendant contrary to Ohio law; illegally conspired with Mason police, prosecutors, staff and/or other public officials to extort and/or to prosecute Defendant, get him arrested or incarcerated and/or to cause his house to be raided by law enforcement; were informants of false information to the police and/or the Warren County Drug Task Force against Defendant; conspired with Warren County Judges and/or Magistrates, or other public officials including their counsel, to frame, sue and/or falsely prosecute or to continue or pursue proceedings against Defendant.

Todd V. McMurtry, Robert H. Lyons, and Patrick N. Grote represent plaintiffs.

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Politicians proposing extra taxes on pornography purchases or proceeds is nothing new. But Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback’s porn tax proposal stands out for the extraordinary paternalism that comes along with it.

“As Florida Governor, I will not allow a generation of smart and capable young women to sell their bodies online,” Fishback posted to X on Monday. 

It’s standard these days for anti-porn warriors to wring their hands about how porn viewership is corrupting young men and driving up loneliness, or to proclaim to be protecting children, or to claim that all porn performers are victims of human trafficking. So it’s almost refreshing to someone crusading against porn on “no hussies allowed” grounds.

At least Fishback, intentionally or not, suggests that online porn creators can be “smart and capable” women who are acting out of their own agency.

He just wants to take that agency away.

Specifically, Fishback is calling for a 50 percent tax on whatever people make via OnlyFans—a platform that has become notorious for connecting sexually explicit content creators with those willing to pay directly for said content, but in fact, creators of all sorts can sell content directly to fans through the platform.

“As Florida governor in year one, I will push for the first of its kind Only Fans Sin Tax,” Fishback said in a recent video. “If you are a so-called OnlyFans creator in Florida, you are going to pay 50 percent to the state on whatever you so-called earn on that online degeneracy platform.” 

Fishback said the funds collected from his OnlyFans sin tax would be used to fund education, crisis pregnancy centers, and a “mental health czar for men in particular.”  

He went on to complain that “toxic masculinity” gets blamed for too many of society’s ills when, presumably, everything is the whores’ faults. How adorably retro!

“As Florida governor,” he continued, “I don’t want young women—who could otherwise be mothers raising families, rearing children—I don’t want them to be selling their bodies to sick men online.”

Well, now I’m confused—are men to blame here or not?

On one level, I don’t think we need to take any of this too seriously. Taxing profits from one’s legal speech on one platform and not similarly situated platforms is clearly unconstitutional. Florida doesn’t even have an income tax, which would at least complicate plans to tax OnlyFans income. And Fishback is a long-shot candidate with some serious baggage.

“A Florida school district ‘cut ties‘ with Fishback, who ran an organization called Incubate Debate, after he ‘initiated a romantic relationship’ with a 17-year-old student and faced allegations that he harassed her after they broke up, a charge that Fishback has denied,” The Spectator reports.

“The odds that Fishback will win the primary are not quite zero, as he’s running against Congressman Byron Donalds, who’s dogged by insider-trading and proxy-voting scandals,” points out the Spectator columnist who goes simply by Cockburn. “Yet Fishback seems to be doing everything he can to lose, generate outrage, or both, calling Donalds, who is black, ‘By’rone’ on X – as in ‘By’rone wants to turn Florida into a Section 8 ghetto.'”

So, schlock candidate makes schlock proposal, we all gawk, and that’s that, right?

Except I don’t think we should be totally dismissive of Fishback’s rhetoric, either. After all, there are countless boogey-people he could rail against: critical race theorists; transgender Floridians; proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion; single cat ladies; Planned Parenthood supporters, and so on. Culture warriors, especially in states like Florida, have no shortage of trumped-up villains available to them when they want to make their base salivate.

Fishback’s OnlyFans sin tax may never become a reality. But the fact that he’s singled out young women who sell sexual content on OnlyFans as a special target of ire—and that he’s framing them as the perpetrators of depravity, rather than victims of it—is indicative of a larger shift in the way some segments of the right (and perhaps beyond) have started to talk about sex work and pornography.

After a few decades of people framing sex work as synonymous with sex trafficking, and all sex workers as hapless “survivors,” we’re beginning to once again see more focus shift to sex workers as vectors of deviance rather than victimhood.

I think one could make a case that this is preferable, from a political standpoint. It is easy to get Democrats and progressives and even people who are broadly libertarian on board with anti-sex and anti-speech regulations or enforcement efforts aimed at saving victims and stopping “sex trafficking.” It’s easy to get all sorts of normies on board with protecting children from seeing pornography or being solicited for sex. It’s much harder to get a broad coalition motivated by the idea that sex workers are sinners and sluts who deserve to be singled out for special punishments until they choose to become trad wives instead.

But from a cultural standpoint, it’s not great. It hints at the mainstreaming of a certain sort of sexism, one in which women’s lifestyle choices should be public property. It’s tied up in the right’s increasing comfort with blaming women for falling birth rates and shaming women for failing to live up to vintage ideals of femininity and motherhood.

Fishback may be a fringe candidate, and his 50 percent OnlyFans tax a fringe idea, but the impulses underlying his proposal seem to be getting increasingly less fringe these days.

---

More Sex & Tech News

DEFIANCE Act passes Senate: The bill would let people sue over the nonconsensual creation of fake, sexually explicit images of themselves.

Can chatbots keep a secret? “The founder of Signal has been quietly working on a fully end-to-end encrypted, open-source AI chatbot designed to keep users’ conversations secret,” reports Gizmodo.

Over half a million Australians booted from Meta platforms. The Facebook and Instagram parent company said it had to block 550,000 accounts in advance of Australia’s ban on those under age 16 having social media accounts, which took effect December 11.

Some AI optimism, for a change: Emily Chamlee-Wright, president of the Institute for Humane Studies, makes the case that artificial intelligence will create new work, and not just for the most highly skilled or technical workers. “The danger is not that AI will make humans irrelevant. The danger is that we might build a political and economic order that expects us to be,” Chamlee-Wright writes.

Unconstitutional Arkansas social media law, take two: After a federal judge permanently declared Arkansas’ law requiring social media platforms to check user ages unconstitutional and permanently blocked it, the state is trying again. But the reworked law—Arkansas Act 900, passed in 2025—is merely a “‘cosmetic’ update” that “does not remedy the law’s continued constitutional defects,” said Paul Taske, co-director of litigation for the tech industry trade group NetChoice. The group is now suing over the revised law, which, among other things, requires platforms to offer dashboards that allow parents “to view and understand [their] child’s use habits.” It also requires platforms to enact special restrictions on accounts held by people under age, including blocking anything that could “evoke any addiction or compulsive behaviors.”

The financial cost of repealing Section 230: A new report from the Computer and Communications Industry Association suggests that repealing this important internet law would “cost investors at least $2.2 trillion,” lead to an estimated 1.1 million lawsuits per year against tech companies, and “cost digital services and their users more than $100k in legal fees per case totaling about $110 billion per year.”

The intersection of immigration and sex work: New York Mayor Zohran “Mamdani cannot meaningfully protect migrants while enforcing the criminalization of [sex] work that some rely on to survive,” writes Kali Coleman.

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In 2014, the United States Postal Service (USPS) began replacing its fleet of delivery vehicles. In the almost 12 years since, only about 6 percent of its 51,500 custom-built delivery vehicles have been delivered. The Postal Service says the rollout will last at least two more years.

The signature USPS delivery truck is the Grumman Life Long Vehicle (LLV), which first entered service in 1986. Designed to last over 20 years, some have now been in service for twice as long, and don’t include many modern amenities, like air conditioning and airbags. Maintaining the LLVs beyond their best-by date involved reverse-engineering the 130,000-strong fleet for discontinued parts, according to The Washington Post. In 2014, the USPS began its $9.6 billion fleet upgrade by announcing the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) program.

Oshkosh Defense, which produces rather mean-looking tactical vehicles for the American military (and has never before produced a delivery van), was awarded a multibillion-dollar contract in February 2021 to produce the NGDV for the Postal Service over 10 years. The Post details the production nightmare that ensued. After repeated delays, setbacks, and quadrupling the minimum number of electric NGDVs, thanks to a generous $3 billion subsidy from the Inflation Reduction Act, Oshkosh had only delivered 612 of 35,000 e-NGDVs by November 2025, and only 2,600 of the 16,500 internal combustion engine NGDVs.

The Postal Service agreed to pay Oshkosh $77,692 per e-NGDV and $54,584 per NGDV in March 2023. To put these numbers in context, FedEx’s fleet of Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans is considerably cheaper, costing $50,830 for the baseline 2026 Sprinter and $61,180 for the 2026 eSprinter. (The Sprinter debuted in 1995 and the eSprinter rolled out in 2019, two years before the USPS awarded its Next Generation Delivery Vehicle contract to Oshkosh.)

Paying almost $80,000 per vehicle should have rung alarm bells, but what makes this situation worse is that the USPS knows cheaper alternatives exist. 21,000 of the Postal Service’s new fleet are commercial off-the-shelf vans like the Ford E-Transit (whose 2026 model starts at $54,855). In 2023, there were nearly 40,000 Mercedes-Benz Metris vans (which start at $41,495) in its fleet. It’s unclear why the agency decided to get bogged down with Oshkosh at all. Whatever the reasons may be, price is not one of them.

What comes as no surprise is that a generously subsidized quasi-governmental agency is wasting money and time on a boondoggle.

The post The Postal Service's 'Next Generation' Electric Delivery Vehicles Cost $22,000 More Than Other Electric Vans appeared first on Reason.com.

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This week, guest host Eric Boehm is joined by Colleen Shogan, the former archivist of the United States and head of the National Archives, the federal agency responsible for preserving presidential records and stewarding the nation’s historical documents. Shogan explains what the archivist actually does, how the National Archives approaches custodianship of presidential records, and why those materials belong to the public rather than to individual presidents.

The conversation then turns to the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary and Shogan’s “In Pursuit” essay project, which aims to foster a shared civic memory at a time when history has become a battleground in the culture war. Shogan reflects on how a divided country can commemorate its past without collapsing into partisan narratives, and what it takes to present American history in a way that invites disagreement without descending into zero-sum politics.

Boehm and Shogan also discuss how the Archives became caught up in the Trump documents controversy, why Shogan believes she was fired without explanation, and how disputes over records and transparency have increasingly turned into political flashpoints.

The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by championing free minds and free markets.

0:00—Introduction

0:52—The role of the U.S. archivist

9:54—Celebrating 250 years of history with “In Pursuit”

17:17—The importance of keeping history nonpartisan

22:47—Celebrating the lesser-known U.S. presidents

28:13—Wall Street Journal‘s criticism of Shogan

37:27—Getting removed by President Donald Trump

40:11—The importance of presidential records

44:51—Politicizing nonpartisan institutions

50:43—President Joe Biden and the Equal Rights Amendment

56:16—Shogan’s Washington murder mystery novels

 

Upcoming Reason Events

• The Reason Roundtable: Live in Washington, D.C.! on February 4

• Producer: Paul Alexander
• Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

The post Can We Save American History From Partisan Politics? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Making an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) expressed his frustration that the Trump administration has failed to refer Anthony Fauci for criminal prosecution for lying to Congress.

Paul told Rogan that he believes Fauci’s blanket pardon—issued by former President Joe Biden during the waning hours of his presidency—should be challenged in court. Paul said he has provided Attorney General Pam Bondi with evidence that Fauci misled Congress about gain-of-function research and also instructed his deputies to destroy public records in order to stymie scrutiny.

“I’ve summarized it again in a criminal referral to Trump’s attorney general, and I still haven’t gotten action,” said Paul. “They ought to take it to court.”

Senator Rand Paul just revealed to Joe Rogan that the Trump DOJ won’t investigate Anthony Fauci.

“Under the Biden administration, I sent criminal referrals for Anthony Fauci to Merrick Garland twice, and I sent them evidence that he had lied to Congress, which is a felony.”… pic.twitter.com/7MBbYDI16F

— End Tribalism in Politics (@EndTribalism) January 13, 2026

Paul insisted that he couldn’t guarantee victory in court, given the sweeping nature of the pardon issued to Fauci. But he thought it was worth doing in order to see if the Supreme Court might narrow the pardon.

Reason‘s Christian Britschgi has argued that Fauci’s statements to Congress about whether the agency he oversaw funded high-risk gain-of-function research that could have caused the COVID-19 pandemic were certainly misleading. Moreover, the timeline of the Fauci pardon is quite suspicious, since it covers the period of time during which Fauci plausibly signed off on gain-of-function research despite a presidential executive order mandating a pause on such funding. The pardon window does not cover just his time as the nation’s top coronavirus adviser, nor does it extend to his entire career in government service: It dates to 2014, when President Barack Obama halted gain-of-function research.

Paul and Rogan also recapped many of the erroneous policies recommended by Fauci during the pandemic: made-up social distancing guidelines, mask mandate flip-flops, and vaccine requirements.

It’s always refreshing to see libertarian views being represented on such an important platform. And given President Donald Trump’s misguided zeal to enlist his Justice Department to investigate various political enemies for dubious reasons—James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell, and others—it’s disappointing that the DOJ isn’t contemplating action against Fauci, who is a much more deserving target.

Maybe Bondi just has her hands full drawing black lines all over the Epstein files.

The post Rand Paul to Joe Rogan: DOJ Won't Prosecute Anthony Fauci for Lying appeared first on Reason.com.

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Agents in the streets: In Minneapolis, where the death of 37-year-old citizen activist Renee Good at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents has galvanized considerable anger at the feds, raids just keep happening.

Today at 34 & Park in Minneapolis, a woman tried to drive down the street where a protest had broken out in front of a home ICE was raiding, saying she had a doctor apt to get to. ICE agents busted out her windows, cut off her seatbelt, and pulled her out before arresting her. pic.twitter.com/Y9bDF1xfKW

— amanda moore ???? (@noturtlesoup17) January 13, 2026

Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne was lawfully observing ICE on a public sidewalk last night when an agent shoved him for no reason (video from his instagram).

Get these assholes out of Minneapolis. pic.twitter.com/Ot5sQ4ODrN

— Mike Norton (@NortonMpls) January 13, 2026

“It feels like our community is under siege by our own federal government,” state Rep. Michael Howard (D–Richfield) told The New York Times. Video circulated online of ICE agents roughing up Target workers who resisted them; the workers said they were U.S. citizens and were reportedly later released. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson (ICE is under the DHS) claimed the workers were “assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers.”

There’s a showiness to all of it: It feels made for TV and not actually oriented toward finding and deporting the worst criminals who are here illegally. “ICE arrests dozens of criminal illegal aliens convicted of murder, child rape and more in sanctuary state Minnesota,” reads a recent press release from ICE’s website, substantiated by a few examples; but DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin says officials have made about 2,400 immigration-related arrests in Minnesota since the end of November. How many of them are the worst of the worst? To what degree are they milking the numbers? These are rather low numbers if you consider the sheer amount of federal resources deployed to do this task: Roughly 2,000 federal agents are currently circulating in Minneapolis.

“Most ICE officers and agents prefer to work in plain clothes, focus on finding immigrants who are known criminals, and keep a low profile, especially in major U.S. cities where they are loathed by many, and where some activists use crowdsourcing apps to report their whereabouts in real time,” wrote Nick Miroff for The Atlantic back in August. “Driving around in ‘wrapped’ vehicles not only blows their cover; it potentially makes them a target for protesters, vandals, and attackers, agency veterans told me. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her small cadre of loyal aides have been pushing the agency to do more showy operations in Democratic-run cities that can advance the president’s agenda—and supply clips for social media and the MAGA faithful. ‘They love this cowboy shit,’ one frustrated ICE official told me.”

This segment below is worth a watch, but not just for the difference in media tone; also for the marked difference — the "police not paramilitaries" normalcy — in the way that ICE dresses and behaves:https://t.co/4OflF1PCAK

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) January 14, 2026

Meanwhile, six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned from their posts yesterday over the Department of Justice’s push to investigate Becca Good, Renee Good’s wife, and the department’s refusal to investigate the ICE agent responsible for killing Renee. Unintended consequences: “The Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, said in an interview that [Joseph H.] Thompson’s resignation dealt a major blow to efforts to root out rampant theft from state agencies,” reports The New York Times. “The fraud cases, which involve schemes to cheat safety net programs, were the chief reason the Trump administration cited for its immigration crackdown in the state. The vast majority of defendants charged in the cases are American citizens of Somali origin.”

In response to fraud in Minneapolis that prosecutors had under control, Trump fueled hysteria about Somali-Americans and flooded the city with ICE agents, resulting in the killing of Renee Good.

Now, because the Trump administration pushed the local DOJ lawyers to investigate… pic.twitter.com/oR3qTYIqa0

— Daniel Marans (@danielmarans) January 13, 2026

Miroff again: “ICE aims to more than double the number of deportation officers on U.S. streets by the end of 2025. The slick cars and the bouncy rap tracks are recruitment tools, they say, along with a ‘Join ICE’ website and an ad blitz using 1940s-style Army posters, many with Uncle Sam, to depict Trump’s deportation campaign as a patriotic war effort, akin to fighting the Nazis. Many of the new hires will enter ICE with different motivations than the generations before them, seeing the position not as a federal-law-enforcement career but as a chance to serve as a foot soldier in Trump’s mission to bring sweeping social and demographic change.” This approach is inconsistent with what Americans—even those who supported Trump—say they want.

---

Scenes from New York: A new lawsuit filed in federal court claims the state of New York is using solitary confinement for incarcerated teenagers. The facilities in question “are for youth up to 21 years old who are convicted of a crime in family or the youth part of criminal court,” per The New York Times. “The system is intended to be rehabilitative, but youth are often held in solitary confinement as a form of punishment for ‘alleged rule infractions and, at times, minor misbehavior, including manifestations of youth’s disabilities,’ according to the suit.”

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QUICK HITS

• Rest in peace, Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert comics and a very kind guy in person. A lot of the obituaries for him have centered on various controversies to which he’s been connected, but I’ll just say: I thought Dilbert was awesome, Adams is a very original thinker, and I loved randomly chatting with him when I ran into him at an airport lounge in Athens, Greece, a few years back. God bless his family.
• “The notion that [Renee] Good would be able to drive away from this scene just as easily as she drove into it—and that the armed agents commanding her to exit her vehicle could be safely ignored—is as understandable as it is misguided, the product of a world in which activism and political conflict have become Disneyfied,” writes Kat Rosenfield for The Free Press. “What was once an organized, strategic movement with high stakes and concrete political aims has evolved today into a sort of intramural sport for all comers, from influencers to wine moms to aging Boomers who prefer protest marches to pickleball. And if the ease of participation has swelled the ranks of activists to include anyone with an Instagram account, it has also given the entire enterprise a distinct veneer of unreality, like a theme park populated by actors who spend their days LARPing as cops or cowboys and then retire at night to a dorm where they eat pizza and hook up with the guy who plays their nemesis. In 2026, political protest—and even political violence—might feel like a party, or a movie, but the one thing it rarely feels is serious, until it’s too late.”
• Relatedly, kind of insane for the Department of Homeland Security to be co-opting the Captain Phillips meme from 2013 as they push to deport more Somalians. Supports the Rosenfield point above.

I am the captain now. https://t.co/KpvugNXfGF pic.twitter.com/xJHmyecrux

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 13, 2026

• More Minneapolis:

minneapolis is to minnesota what paris is to france (derogatory)

like paris in the revolutionary era, it's basically a commune whose deranged sans-coulettes incubated in cordelier madrassas wage continuous war on a hinterland vendèe https://t.co/FJIVL9kjmR pic.twitter.com/oCwvnpO0q1

— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) January 9, 2026

• Did anyone ask for, um, autistic Barbie? New from Mattel.
• “More Americans are living with cancer as death rates continue to decline, thanks to improved detection methods and better treatment options,” reports Bloomberg. “Seven out of ten people survived for five years after a diagnosis during 2015-2021 across all cancers, a key goal of therapy, according to the American Cancer Society’s annual report released Tuesday. The improvement extended to more aggressive types, with higher survival rates for myeloma, liver and lung cancers compared with decades prior, the report found.”
• Wild scenes from the Supreme Court:

ALITO: To decide if there is discrimination on the basis of sex under Title IX, we need to define what sex is, right?

ACLU: Yes.

ALITO: What does it mean to be a man or woman, boy or girl?

ACLU: We do not have a definition for the Court.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) January 13, 2026

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Randa Abdel-Fattah is an Australian writer, attorney, and “antizionist” activist of Egyptian and Palestinian descent. This is what she posted on Oct. 8, 2023, while terrorists who entered Israel on hang gliders and proceeded to massacre, kidnap, and brutalize civilians were still at large:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In January 2024, she published an article dismissing (true) reports of sexual assault of Israeli women by Hamas terrorists as “atrocity propaganda.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here she is expressing her commitment to harassing “zionists:”

 

 

 

 

 

 

In February 2024, she was one of ten authors who signed a letter demanding the Adelaide Book Festival to disinvite Thomas Friedman because he’s a “zionist.”

Her reaction to the massacre of fifteen Jews celebrating Hanukkah in December was to decry those “quickly surrendering to the agenda of those who are using a horrific act of antisemitism to entrench anti-Palestinian racism,” and its exploitation “Zionists, white supremacists, the far right to advance their racist, violent, and oppressive agendas.”

The Adelaide Book Festival chose to disinvite her thereafter, on the vague grounds that it would not be “culturally sensitive” to have her after the Bondi atrocity.

In response, she accused the Festival of anti-Palestinian racism, which in turn led to widespread withdrawals of other authors from the Festival on either anti-censorship or anti-racism grounds, which in turn led to the cancellation of the Festival this year.

She has now posted the following statement:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can’t imagine that in a country where the loser pays the winner’s legal fees, she really wants a trial on whether calling her an extremist and terrorist sympathizer is false.

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