When Vivek Ramaswamy ran for president in 2024, he liked to describe himself as a "national libertarian" whose worldview included skepticism of new Middle Eastern wars and support for free trade (provided it wasn't with China). 

In a midterm election season in which voters are increasingly angry about higher prices born of protectionist tariffs and high gas prices caused by a new Middle Eastern war, that would seemingly give Ramaswamy, now running for governor of Ohio, a straightforward story to tell about how he'd bring costs down. 

Unfortunately for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, the person responsible for the tariffs and the war is President Donald Trump, whose support he's counting on to get him over the finish line in a surprisingly close race against Democrat Amy Acton. 

The latest polls show Ramaswamy slightly ahead of Acton, with many voters still undecided. 

Other Republican midterm candidates, most prominently Mike Rogers in Michigan, are escaping this bind by criticizing the tariffs and the war without explicitly naming the president who's responsible for both. 

Ramaswamy has chosen a different tactic: Shift the conversation to other sources of voters' cost-of-living anxiety that can't be directly laid at Trump's feet. 

In the last weeks of this election campaign, Ramaswamy has focused like a laser on two proposals he says will deliver cost relief to Ohio voters. The first is his proposed rollback of homeowners' property taxes. The second is a moratorium on new data center construction. 

Like many Midwestern and Western states, Ohioans' property tax bills have shot up in recent years, driven by a pandemic-era spike in home values. 

That's in turn sparked a full-blown property tax revolt in the state. The Republican-controlled Legislature passed a raft of property tax relief measures in 2025. Activists are also collecting signatures to place a full abolition of taxes on real property on the statewide ballot next year. 

Ramaswamy hasn't endorsed full property tax abolition, but he is promising voters that he will roll back property tax assessments for homeowners to pre-pandemic levels. 

On the data centers, he has staked out a very restrictionist position. 

Ohio is currently one of the leading states for data center development. Pew Research counts 57 projects currently in the pipeline there, attracted by cheap land and a robust power grid. 

The state's data center boom has caused a backlash in rural communities, where voters have objected to data centers' consumption of land and electricity and the special tax incentives some projects have received. 

On the ballot in 10 Ohio localities this November are initiatives that would impose additional restrictions on data center development. 

Ramaswamy has proposed to go further with a statewide moratorium that will remain in effect until the Legislature passes laws that not only require data centers to cover the full costs of the power infrastructure they need, but also provide property tax rebates and free electricity to nearby homeowners. 

Local property tax cuts paired with local reductions in spending would, of course, be well in line with a small government worldview. 

But the residential property tax rollback Ramaswamy has proposed doesn't directly do that. 

Instead, it would reduce property tax revenues and then leave it up to localities to make up for the lost revenue somehow. That could result in spending cuts. 

It could also result in localities shifting tax burdens onto commercial properties, raising non-property taxes (like sales taxes), or relying on the state government for more of their revenues. 

In the former two scenarios, local tax regimes would become more hostile to growth, given that property taxes are considered one of the most "efficient" taxes. In the latter scenario, the link between people who pay taxes and the people who consume taxpayer-funded local services would become more distant.  

Neither is ideal. 

While some data centers in Ohio have received tax subsidies, Ramaswamy's proposed solution is to block new data centers until they're legally required to subsidize their neighbors with free electricity and other community benefits. 

All of that is to say that it's a shame to see Ramaswamy adopt increasingly non-libertarian positions to avoid making critiques of Trump's cost-increasing tariffs and Iran war that would align with his erstwhile "national libertarian" worldview. 

It's ironic, too, that, in trying to avoid making those critiques, Ramaswamy has wound up being more restrictionist on data centers than Trump himself. 

In an August Truth Social post, the president famously urged local communities to "let Data Reign" and welcome data center development. Those that did would become "rich and successful," he predicted. Those that didn't would remain "poor and backward." 

At a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, over the weekend for Ramaswamy and Republican Senate candidate John Husted, Trump reiterated his support for data centers, saying, "We want them. Look, there's so much money to be made for Ohio. You can't just turn them off. They'll go to China."

Rather than criticize the president's statist interventions, Ramaswamy is talking up his own instead. Ohio will be poorer as a result.

The post To Avoid Criticizing Trump's Tariffs and War, Vivek Ramaswamy Takes on Data Centers appeared first on Reason Magazine.

At a rally, he spoke highly of the backside of John Husted, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio. He has posted one video after another of big cats attacking real people before sharing one — created with artificial intelligence — in which he is seen fending off a fearsome lion, dressed in a suit and with his bare hands. And he has repeated tired memes disrespecting Greenland, as well as an endless stream of clips and videos flattering himself.

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© Evan Vucci (REUTERS)

No longer so red: Long a swing state, Ohio went for President Donald Trump back in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024. Now, with midterms approaching, it looks likely to vote blue again, and there are early indicators that Republicans have failed to win over Ohio's working-class voters in particular.

"After the first days of early voting in Ohio, a state that could help determine control of the Senate, there are clear signs Democrats are more enthusiastic to vote," reports CNN. "So far, affiliated Democrats make up larger shares of pre-election voters than they did two years ago, even in the most Republican parts of the state. At this point in 2024, Republicans had a 30-percentage point lead over Democrats in counties that voted for President Donald Trump by 20 points or more, according to data from the Ohio Secretary of State. This year, that's shrunk to just five points."

Take this data with a grain of salt: It is just early-voter data.

But this is all rather high-stakes because Republicans are defending a Senate seat, as well as the governor's office. Two races for House seats are considered toss-ups. The conventional wisdom has been that Ohio is now solidly red, with three cycles of presidential election data to support that. But it's possible Trump has pissed off the voters who supported him to such a degree that Ohio will be sent back into swing-state territory.

"God knows we didn't vote for this," one voter—a pastor who went for Trump, then Biden, then Trump—told Reuters, referring to inflation. Other voters wonder about the decline in manufacturing jobs and the fact that the president has paid lip service to these problems but done very little to actually improve people's circumstances.

On Monday, Trump rallied in support of Sen. Jon Husted, who hopes to retain his seat. In the Mahoning Valley, the president announced a few new, uh, incentives to voters: a Defense Department facility based in Cleveland, and promises that a heat provider for Youngstown remained open. "The Youngstown area for decades used to vote Democrat, and then you ran for office in 2016 and flipped it red forever," said Husted in his speech. "Is that right, folks?"

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OpenAI arrest: The FBI arrested a Saudi national who worked at OpenAI "and charged him with installing a hidden audio recording ‌device in an executive conference room," per the Department of Justice. Abdulrahman Alfozan had worked as an engineer at OpenAI since July 2025, in the San Francisco office. The company found the recording device "plugged into a USB port on the ⁠back of a television in an executive conference room," per Reuters. The device had a microphone and allegedly connected to a camera; the data it stored was encrypted.

"At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating ​model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated," said OpenAI. It's not clear who Alfozan may have been working for or with; he has been a permanent resident of the U.S. since 2020, with stints at Meta and Microsoft.

"If convicted, Alfozan faces up to ⁠five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release," notes Reuters.

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Scenes from New York: Mayor Zohran Mamdani has reportedly reached a deal with the City Council to ban horse carriages in the city, per Politico. I'll admit, I don't really care, but I'm intrigued by the fact that the reason this has taken so long to get through has been because the union representing the carriage-drivers has been so successful at advocating for its members' interests.

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QUICK HITS

• Pope Leo XIV was diagnosed with lung cancer, said the Vatican yesterday. He underwent a successful surgery, and there's no additional information about prognosis at this time.
• Daniel Cox's new book, Generation Uncoupled, makes the case "that problems with dating and romantic partnership are downstream from the decades-long deterioration of American social and civic life." Cox tells Derek Thompson (in a wonderful interview worth checking out): "There's a cultural dimension to all of this, as well. It's not entirely that young people have fewer social opportunities, but that they are encouraged to prioritize their own personal experiences and expression. On social media, self-optimization culture teaches young people that the most coveted rewards in life are secured through individual effort and ambition alone. There is a fear that our relational obligations can work against these goals by restricting our autonomy. It explains why more young people worry about what marriage and parenthood will require of them, rather than the benefits they offer. Not surprisingly, rates of family estrangement are at record highs, prenuptial agreements are more popular than ever, and most young people now feel that obtaining a divorce should be made easier." This obsession with self-actualization, or controlling one's circumstances, as well as risk-aversion, is something I'll be covering a bit in my book, City Without Children. This culture is shaping not only our decision to (not) couple up and get married, but also our decision to delay having kids, and how we parent them once they're here.
• "The bond-market turbulence last month seeped into results as the banks each posted weaker-than-expected revenue from their businesses trading bonds on behalf of clients, and dealmaking slowed more than they had anticipated," reports The Wall Street Journal. "In a somewhat rare occurrence, JPMorgan missed analysts' expectations."
• "The White House has asked Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ambassador to Greece, to resign, new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia told reporters on Tuesday, a day after President Donald Trump said he was considering firing her after allegations she asked a political donor for $100,000 to pay her personal American Express bill," reports The Washington Post.
• The FIRE ("financial independence, retire early") people are now saying the quiet part out loud: that living on canned lentils well into your 40s is practically the same as being imprisoned.

This is the greatest post in the history of FIRE Reddit. Perfection. pic.twitter.com/dh1tesicfi

— Conservative Dividend Investing (@CDInewsletter) October 13, 2026

• Not wrong:

"Blessed" is a useful religious concept that has no adequate secular equivalent

"I was lucky" almost wholly fails to convey the weight and sentiment of providence that comes when things go better than you had any right to hope

— Jack (@tracewoodgrains) October 13, 2026

The post Ohio's Democrat Momentum appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company worth more than $8 billion, manufactures automated license plate readers (ALPRs), cameras that capture images of license plates and store them in a database that police can search.

Recently, the company has been under intense scrutiny over concerns about privacy and the cameras' capacity for misuse, leading some cities to cancel their Flock contracts. But it turns out that getting rid of Flock is easier said than done.

"When Elgin Community College hired Flock Safety to install six surveillance cameras in April 2025, President Peggy Heinrich thought they would 'enhance the safety and security of students,'" Lisa Kurian Philip reported last week at the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Chicago-area school signed up for a one-year contract with the company. It was not alone: Five of Illinois' 12 public universities, plus four of its community colleges,

But Heinrich began to have second thoughts as she learned more about how the cameras can be used—for example, Flock allowed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to access over 80,000 of its cameras. In September 2025, ICE arrested a student near Elgin's campus.

More than half of Elgin's students are Latino, Heinrich told the Sun-Times, and enrollment began to suffer.

"In August of 2025, Flock publicly announced it would no longer conduct pilot projects with federal agencies," according to the company.

Still, Heinrich said, the school chose to end its contract with Flock "out of an abundance of caution for our students."

"Elgin Community College staff notified Flock in October 2025 that they wanted to cancel their contract and have the cameras taken down," Philip wrote. "Within a day, Heinrich said, Flock rejected the request and refused to uninstall the equipment on the basis that the company had not breached their agreement."

The school reached out again in December, offering to pay out the rest of the contract, but according to Heinrich, Flock did not respond.

Since the school no longer wanted the cameras to operate, and Flock refused to remove or disable them, officials zip tied garbage bags over the cameras on campus. But in a peculiar twist, "workers in an unmarked vehicle, which Heinrich assumed belonged to Flock, repeatedly removed the coverings."

This continued until the school's contract expired in April, when Flock finally removed the cameras.

Granted, the situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that while Elgin is a public institution, Flock is a private company.

"Per Flock contract conditions, the company retains ownership of the products it sells to cities," Caroline Haskins reports at Wired. "This means that when people damage or destroy cameras, cities are on the hook for the cost." Covering cameras with garbage bags will apparently work until Flock comes and cuts them down, but removing or disabling the cameras without the company's permission will incur fees to replace them, even if the city has already said it doesn't want them anymore.

But since the product that Flock sells is a searchable database of license plate images compiled from its interconnected nationwide system of cameras, the reality is more complicated than that.

Indeed, while Flock says repeatedly that customers own all data that their cameras capture, that's little comfort when the information is also available to any other customer with access to Flock's database.

Between June 2024 and May 2025, police in Illinois searched the Flock database over 4,000 times for immigration-related reasons, even though a state law prohibits ALPRs' use for that exact purpose. This implies the searches were done at ICE's request, meaning federal immigration authorities could access not just the license plate data in those Illinois communities, but also the thousands of communities nationwide that use Flock cameras.

It's also particularly troubling that Flock would make it so difficult for customers to end their contracts. In that, Elgin Community College is not alone: Plenty of jurisdictions have kept using Flock even after supposedly canceling the service, though it's usually the police who fight the cancellations.

In June 2025, the Austin, Texas, City Council declined to renew its Flock contract. Though the city police department supported the program, officials cited concerns about the cameras' capacity to target vulnerable communities.

But in February of this year, public radio station KUT reported that at least two neighboring towns were sharing access to the Flock database with Austin police.

In July 2025, the Board of Lucas County Commissioners in Toledo, Ohio, voted 2–1 to approve 27 Flock license plate cameras across the county, costing $250,000 over four years. But a week later, one commissioner changed his mind, citing fears of how the data would be used, and the board voted again to rescind the previous approval.

In a letter to the Lucas County prosecutor the following day, Sheriff Michael J. Navarre said the commissioners "have a legal obligation to honor this contract" and alleged that the decision to rescind it was borne out of personal animus toward him.

"I cannot sit idly by and allow them to make decisions out of spite that negatively impact the safety of my deputies and the community they protect," he wrote. To be clear, what apparently put everyone at risk was the decision not to move forward with a series of license plate cameras.

County prosecutor Julia R. Bates wrote back to the sheriff in September 2025, stating that since he had already signed the contract from the original resolution, the rescission was "void."

Elgin Community College's experience is not quite the same—in that case it wasn't the police department, but Flock itself, that refused to take down the cameras. But it's still indicative of the widening rift between those who worry about our growing surveillance state and those who apparently see it as worth the tradeoffs.

The post An Illinois College Tried To Cancel Its Flock Contract. Flock Refused. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

President Donald Trump on Monday tried to boost Sen. Jon Husted's reelection campaign by attacking two groups of Black immigrants during a rally in Ohio.

The mailers are sponsored by Enough Promises Ohio PAC and began arriving in voters' mailboxes in recent days.

A text message containing an image of nude Shrek holding his ogre…appendage…loomed over an Ohio courtroom on Friday, during the prosecution's closing argument in a two-day trial that captured the attention of Ohioans, free speech advocates, and the national media.

"The question is whether you should be entitled to a little bit of privacy and not sent that message," said prosecutor Matthew Lallo.

The message at the center of this trial was sent by Ohio Substack writer D.J. Byrnes (a.k.a. "The Rooster"). Back in May, the blogger sent the racy image of Shrek to state Sen. Jerry Cirino (R–Kirtland). According to Signal Ohio, the blogger was arrested on June 1 after Cirino reported the messages to the Kirtland Police Department. The outlet reported that Byrnes spent 23 hours in jail before posting bail on a misdemeanor telecommunications harassment charge. 

According to The New York Times, Byrnes sent the "gloating text messages" after Cirino announced he would no longer run as state Senate president. 

An accompanying text to Cirino said, "Good to see you finally made your final humiliation public, Young Mussolini!" Byrnes' message also added, "THE PATRIOTS CAUCUS sends its regards!!!!!!!!!!!"  

During Byrnes' trial, which began on Thursday, his defense team argued that the texts were intended as political statements, and they did not constitute harassment. The defense emphasized that Byrnes had frequently criticized Cirino in the past, and the texts were sent in the context of Cirino withdrawing from his bid for state Senate president. 

"The point is clear," said Byrnes' attorney during closing statements. "Shrek was exposing himself and so was Senator Cirino, finally exposing himself as he couldn't win the presidency even though months earlier he had predicted that it would be wrapped up by March." 

On Friday, the jury sided with the prosecution, finding Byrnes guilty of telecommunications harassment. Byrnes was sentenced to pay court costs and a $200 fine, reported The Ohio Capital Journal.  

"This wasn't a free speech issue; this was a harassment statute that I believed he was in violation of," Cirino said after the verdict, according to the outlet. 

On Monday, Axios reported that the judge barred Byrnes from raising a First Amendment defense in the trial, "leaving the defense to argue that Byrnes' messages did not satisfy the statutory definition of harassment." 

Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tells Reason he was not surprised by the verdict given the "broad and vague language of Ohio's telecommunications harassment statute." The statute, he notes, "criminalizes sending even a single electronic communication 'with purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse' the recipient," which "sweeps in a vast amount of constitutionally protected speech."

"It's easy to imagine the same law being used to prosecute social media users who reply to government officials' posts with harsh or vulgar criticism," he says. "If Byrnes appeals, he should and likely will challenge the law's constitutionality."

And the Shrek saga does not seem to be over. According to Axios, Byrnes has "confirmed plans to appeal the ruling." What began as a "Shrext" may end up becoming a serious free speech matter for Ohio's appellate courts. 

The post Thinking of Sending a Nude Shrek Pic to an Ohio Official? You Could Be Found Guilty of Harassment. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

U.S. President Donald Trump was halfway through his speech at a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, this Saturday, surrounded by his usual supporters: mostly white, dressed in red, wearing MAGA hats, and displaying messages of support for the Republican. “It’s amazing. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap me,” he boasted. On cue, the crowd, amid laughter, applauded.

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© Eric Lee (REUTERS)

There is less than a month left until the midterm elections on November 3. The outcome will determine which party controls both houses of Congress and begin shaping the post-Donald Trump era.

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© Kathryn Gamble (The Washington Post vía Getty Images), Tom Williams (CQ-Roll Call vía Getty Images)

Lo stabilimento di camion di Springfield ha chiuso con il passaggio da International Motors a Roshel. E un suo elettore ora farà campagna per i democratici

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has halted the one remaining execution for 2026 after a woman named Christa Pike on Wednesday survived two injections of pentobarbital, a situation described as unprecedented.

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© Correccionales De Tennessee (EFE)