Walking through East Cleveland, Ohio, feels a touch like you've wandered onto the set of a postapocalyptic film noir. Grand, gilded homes announce themselves on neighborhood streets, some crowned with turrets, many with windows punched out like missing teeth. Often, no one is home, because no one lives there. It is safer than 1 percent of U.S. cities.
So why did local law enforcement pour considerable time and resources into pursuing a man for a sound truck?
That question is not really a legal one, at least not in the most technical sense. But it is the driving force behind a thorny case a federal court recently resuscitated: Fambrough v. City of East Cleveland, a saga concerning a man whose vehicle became an obsessive target of the East Cleveland Police Department (ECPD) after he used it to campaign for a mayoral challenger.
Some of the facts are in dispute. But the basic gist is as follows: William Fambrough, long a politically engaged East Clevelander, campaigned for Juanita Gowdy—a challenger to then-Mayor Brandon King—by broadcasting messages around the city with his sound truck. That ultimately came to an end after law enforcement impounded the car, cited him for parking and noise violations, and prosecuted him for the latter.
Fambrough sued, alleging the complex legal odyssey set into motion over his step van amounted to First Amendment retaliation, an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment, and a violation of the 14th Amendment's proscription against selective enforcement. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit rejected some of those claims. But it resurrected claims against King and his chief of staff, Michael Smedley—depriving them of qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that inoculates state and local government officials from facing lawsuits if their alleged misconduct was not "clearly established" as illegal in prior case law. It also revived Fambrough's retaliation claim against the city.
As the 6th Circuit summarizes: King "says he received a phone call from a resident who complained about Fambrough's sound truck and someone else's box truck being parked in a residential area," so he told someone to take care of it. Scott Gardner, then the city's chief of police, "was concerned about selectively enforcing" the parking ordinance—which prohibits parking a truck in front of residential property, except for loading or unloading—because it is indeed almost never enforced. This was the beginning of a long pursuit, which ultimately saw a swarm of officers dispatched to Fambrough's house in August 2021 to confiscate the vehicle, allegedly resulting in $6,000 in damage. Fambrough also had to pay $528 in fees to get the damaged truck back.
"All the attention City officials gave Fambrough struck Gardner as unusual," the 6th Circuit notes. "The mayor's office wasn't this attentive even in homicide cases. And considering that the City had around only 50 police officers at the time and had 'serious crime problems,' Gardner thought it was odd to devote this much attention to permitting and parking issues." Based on available data, East Cleveland's violent crime rate is 1,409 per 100,000 residents, about four times higher than the national average.
Yet Gardner ultimately got on board. Smedley phoned him on August 9 "extremely upset," according to Gardner, and told the police chief he was "incompetent" for failing to "take care of" Fambrough's sound truck. Smedley wanted the "utmost enforcement as possible." So Gardner sent an email. "Please, find this vehicle and tow it," he wrote to all of ECPD. "Cite the operator with disturbing the peace and loud music. Please contact me as soon as this is complete to claim a surprise." A surprise!
Police succeeded. "On its face, the email told officers to tow Fambrough's truck regardless of whether it was parked illegally," writes the 6th Circuit. "And the Noise Ordinance authorizes seizure only of 'the sound device used,' and only upon conviction. So Gardner's instruction to tow the truck wasn't authorized by municipal law." The court still held that the seizure did not violate the Fourth Amendment. It also gave Gardner qualified immunity, ruling it is not clearly established that someone who acts as a conduit for someone else's alleged retaliation—which here came from the mayor's office—is a "responsible party."
Heather McCollough, the city's assistant law director, subsequently prosecuted Fambrough for allegedly violating the noise ordinance. According to a sworn declaration from Fambrough's attorney, McCollough outlined some of Fambrough's offenses on a call: that he "made complaints about the police department" and filed "public records requests," among other issues. Notably, it is legal to do those things. McCollough was typically willing to resolve minor noise complaints, she added, but not so much in this case, because Fambrough needed to "stand down." (He ultimately pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct, a reduced charge.)
"Only after [Fambrough] began supporting Gowdy's election was the weight of the law thrown against him," the 6th Circuit writes in its analysis of potential municipal wrongdoing. "And the City's police officers didn't uncover Fambrough's violations of their own accord. Instead, City decisionmakers sent them to Fambrough's home each time to enforce the Parking Ordinance. So the timing of the parking-related enforcement actions supports an inference that Fambrough's political speech was the motivating factor—as does the fact that the City rarely enforced the Parking Ordinance against anyone else despite having plenty of opportunities to do so." Incredibly, a photo of another truck can be seen down the street on the same day law enforcement came to fetch Fambrough's vehicle. (The law also includes pickup trucks, so the city arguably has a lot of enforcement to do if it sincerely believes this law matters.)
King allegedly set the chain of events into motion while Smedley took the driver's seat. "Smedley's pattern of incessantly calling and berating Gardner," the 6th Circuit adds, "clashes with the idea that Smedley was chiefly concerned with minor permitting, noise, or parking issues." After all, if that were true, why would the problem appear to begin and end with one person?
Over five years have passed since the ordeal. Although Fambrough is now potentially closer to getting in front of a jury, he has yet to actually state his case, still burdened by the onerous process government actors invoke to kill such suits before the community can assess the merits. King, meanwhile, won that election. He left office in May 2025, however, after he was found guilty of one count of theft in office, four counts of having an unlawful interest in a public contract, three counts of representation by public official or employee, one count of filing a false disclosure statement, and one count of soliciting improper compensation.
The post He Campaigned for the East Cleveland Mayor's Opponent. Then Police Came for His Truck. appeared first on Reason Magazine.
© Photo Illustration by Meg Griffiths for The New York Times
Each week, MS NOW legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, co-host of our “Main Justice” podcast, answers legal questions from our audience in our MS NOW Membership exclusive series, “Answers with Andrew Weissmann.”
This week, Weissmann addresses a question from MS NOW Member Diana and B’Lee the Kitten on the Trump administration canceling its plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nadal Hasan. Watch his response above.
Other reader questions Weissmann addressed this week:
Become an MS NOW Member to watch all of Weissmann’s answers, get the chance to submit your own questions and explore full episodes of all the MS NOW Membership exclusive series.
The post What the canceled livestream of the Fort Hood shooter’s execution says about the Trump administration appeared first on MS NOW.
President Donald Trump on Thursday called off plans to livestream the December 3 military execution of Nidal Hasan after the announcement generated widespread disgust.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that the U.S. government would livestream the firing-squad execution of Hasan, a former Army major who shot and killed 13 people at the Fort Hood Army base in 2009. A court-martial jury sentenced Hasan to death in 2013.
It would have been the first public execution in the United States since a hanging in Missouri in 1937, though the last well-known public execution occurred a year earlier in Kentucky. Rainey Bethea, a black man, was hanged before a crowd of roughly 20,000 people in Owensboro. Kentucky became the last state to outlaw public executions two years later.
The plan to livestream Hasan's execution drew comparisons to the Taliban. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called it "a barbaric promotion of a culture of death." Writing at The Lamp, an orthodox Catholic journal, Matthew Walther noted that it would be the "first ever government-sanctioned snuff film in American history."
However, Trump and Hegseth didn't trip over just liberal and religious pieties, but a deep-rooted American aversion to bloody displays of state power that goes back to the colonial era.
Lynn Novick, the director of Ken Burns' upcoming PBS documentary series Crime and Punishment in America, tells Reason that public executions "haven't been a regular part of American life since the Colonial time in the early years of the Republic, and there's really good reasons for that."
One of American colonists' many complaints about oppressive British rule was England's expansive criminal code, known derisively as the "bloody code" because it contained more than 200 capital crimes.
"In Colonial America, [an execution] was an everyday occurrence," Novick says. "There were executions all the time, and one of our scholars told us that most people would have seen someone executed in their lifetime."
Excessive capital punishment also ran contrary to emerging theories by leading Enlightenment thinkers that punishment should be proportional to the crime and not driven by revenge or bloodlust.
Perhaps more importantly, public executions were disorderly affairs that, rather than reinforce the power of the state, inflamed the passions of the mob to a dangerous degree. "In many cases, crowds would become very boisterous, riotous, angry, excited," Novick says. "There were sometimes violent outbursts at these events."
As a result, many of the Founding Fathers saw frequent public executions as disruptive to the fragile social order. The early American republic's move away from sanguinary spectacle was driven by a desire to create a stable, virtuous citizenry and sever itself from the European continent's tradition of public torture and execution.
As Reason described in a recent cover story, the result of this was the invention of the American penitentiary in the early 1800s, which was sold as a humane and rehabilitative replacement for the whipping post and gallows.
States transitioned from public to private hangings behind their newly built prison walls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before switching to the use of the electric chair. This was not done out of entirely humanitarian concerns, especially in the South, where public executions often became quasi-religious ceremonies, with the condemned declaring their ultimate victory over death (and the state) through Jesus Christ.
"Executions had contested meanings," Michael Ayers Trotti wrote in The End of Public Execution. "They were moments of justice, of state power; but they were also moments of religion, exceptional moments that transcended normal life."
The main reason that public executions disappeared over the long term, though, is obvious to anyone who's not a sociopath: It's weird and dehumanizing to gather in a crowd to watch someone else be killed, to participate in the government's promotion of its power to take a human life.
Rachel Abbott, who witnessed Bethea's 1936 hanging when she was 5 years old, told WKU Public Radio in 2016 that she had nightmares about it years later.
"I remember it well, but I didn't want to," she said. "I tried to get away from it because it was hurting me so bad. I started having me nightmares after I was older. It's like his spirit was just hanging all around me. The first thing you'd know I'd start crying because I felt he wanted me to help him get buried, get sent back to his gravesite by his father. I still have tears running when I think of it."
The post America Abandoned Public Executions for a Good Reason appeared first on Reason Magazine.
A couple of months ago, Donald Trump appeared on a conservative radio show and said that “a lot of people” wanted to see the president pardon himself in his first term.
“I had the absolute right to do it,” he said. “Instead, I fought it through the courts and won.”
While that wasn’t an entirely accurate summary of recent history — Trump, who was convicted of several felonies in New York, only “won” when the federal criminal cases against him ended upon his return to the White House, not because they were adjudicated in his favor — the president’s rhetoric about his “absolute right” to pardon himself stood out.
This week, he returned to the issue during an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty.
Trump suggests he is going to pardon everyone, including himself: "I'm allowed to do a self-pardon … I don't want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-16T00:20:10.130Z
Asked specifically whether he’s “seriously considering a self-pardon” before he leaves office, the president initially hedged, saying he’s done “nothing wrong,” before adding, “I’m allowed to do a self-pardon. I’m allowed to pardon. … The pardon is very powerful. I know that. They say it’s the most powerful thing a president has, the power of pardon.”
As my MS NOW colleague Jordan Rubin explained in detail just last week, whether presidents can actually pardon themselves is a matter of some controversy. Ahead of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a memo concluding that presidents can’t pardon themselves, though OLC opinions are not binding on the courts, and the matter has never been tested — at least not yet.
But also of interest was the other point Trump made as part of the same exchange.
On the topic of pardons, the Republican went on to say, “I can tell you this, I don’t want to see my people go through — because these people are lunatics on the, on the left — I don’t want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”
This came a few weeks after Trump also told Time magazine that he’s prepared to issue pardons to members of his administration.
Time will tell whether he follows through, and just as notably, just how many members of his team are considered for presidential clemency. But that Trump keeps making comments like these might very have a real impact in the White House and throughout the executive branch: The president is effectively letting a small army of political appointees know that, no matter what they do as part of their duties, he’s inclined to hand them a pardon, whether or not they deserve one.
Systemic government corruption is already a problem in the Trump era. The signal he’s sending to his team is likely to make matters worse.
The post ‘I’m allowed to do a self-pardon’: Trump opens the door to pardons for staff and himself appeared first on MS NOW.
A federal judge referred Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and one of his deputies to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution for alleged misconduct. In response, Krasner's office filed a motion seeking to force the Judge--Paul Diamond--from a case involving his office.
Yesterday, Judge Diamond rejected the Philly DA's motion with a terse and forcefully worded order.
Here, from the order, is some background:
In the last two years, the Third Circuit, this Court, and the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court have condemned as dishonest repeated post-trial concessions of relief made by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office. . . . The Pennsylvania Supreme Court was so concerned that it took the remarkable step of ordering all Philadelphia Common Pleas Judges to seek the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General's intervention whenever the DAO made a post-trial concession, so that the Attorney General could confirm the concession's honesty. . . .
The DAO's present post-trial concession is also remarkable: Here, four DAO supervisors credibly testified that the District Attorney himself and his lieutenant, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Stiegler, urged them to make false representations to this Court to "protect the office." According to "the Four," the District Attorney threatened them with "consequences" if they did not. Because these and related accusations, if true, could amount to criminal misconduct, I disqualified the District Attorney and Stiegler from participating further in this case and referred the matter to the Department of Justice for investigation. In the DAO's newly-filed Motions and the District Attorney's unsworn "Declaration"—all of which generate more heat than light—the DAO seeks my recusal from all matters in which the Office appears and asks me to reconsider my rulings in this case. I decline to do either.
And on the merits of the recusal request, here is what Judge Diamond had to say:
During the three-day hearing before me, the DAO failed to object to virtually all the rulings and actions it now challenges. That the Office chose to object only after the Court issued a decision unfavorable to the District Attorney and his lieutenant confirms that the DAO merely disagrees with those rulings. . . .
The Office challenges my noting that the District Attorney neither testified nor offered an affidavit in response to the Four's testimony—on which I based my disqualification order and DOJ referral. I do not credit the District Attorney's absurd suggestion that he did not know he could testify—especially after I twice asked DAO counsel if he wished to call any witnesses. Nor has the District Attorney explained why he did not offer a responsive affidavit, which would have required the declarant to tell the truth (under penalty of false swearing). The Office thus cannot truthfully dispute that the District Attorney chose not to give his version of events in Court under oath. The DAO's apparent belief that this tactical choice was reasonable hardly warrants recusal.
Finally, the DAO believes that I should have been leerier of Mason's testimony—the various corroborative documents notwithstanding—and more responsive to the uncorroborated, dubious testimony of Stiegler. Again, disagreement with my credibility determination is not a basis for recusal. Liteky, 510 U.S. at 555 ("[O]pinions formed by the judge on the basis of facts introduced or events occurring in the course of the current proceedings . . . do not constitute a basis for a bias or partiality motion unless they display a deep-seated favoritism or antagonism that would make fair judgment impossible."); Wecht, 484 F.3d at 220–21 (recusal not warranted despite the court's "skewed and unfair reading of the record"). The other arguments the DAO raises do not warrant discussion. Accordingly, I will deny as frivolous the Motion for Recusal.
And on the question of reconsideration:
The DAO does not discuss or even mention the burden and criteria a party seeking reconsideration must meet. Rather, as it did in seeking my recusal, the Office urges me to revisit my rulings because it disagrees with them. Once again, that disagreement does not warrant reconsideration. . . .
I will not discuss here every protest the Office makes to virtually all my rulings, my credibility determinations, and (once again) my reference to the District Attorney's silence in the face of damning testimony from his own employees and former employee. In his belated, unsworn "Declaration" the District Attorney attacks three of these witnesses as unworthy of belief. This after-the-fact attempt to cram "evidence" into a closed record seems intended to persuade the media, not the Court. In any event, the evidence is unpersuasive and does not warrant reconsideration. . . .
Accordingly, I will again deny the DAO's frivolous Motion.
Judge Diamond's order concludes:
Four of the District Attorney's supervisors offered powerful, unrebutted testimony that their boss and Stiegler urged them to misrepresent to this Court. When the Four told the District Attorney that he had thus created a conflict compelling them to inform the Court and withdraw from this case, he threatened them with "consequences." There are few attorney transgressions more serious than lying to the Court, urging others to do so, or threatening them should they tell the Court the truth. . . . If this in fact occurred, it is all the more serious because it occurred after four Courts condemned the DAO's conduct in circumstances like those presented here. Disqualifying the District Attorney and Stiegler and referring them for investigation is thus reasonable and warranted. That the District Attorney chose not to testify but sought to "make his case" with an unsworn declaration—the credibility of which I am unable to assess—makes that investigation even more necessary. Although Mr. Krasner may yet have the opportunity to testify under oath in another forum, his intemperate filings provide no basis for recusal or reconsideration of my rulings.
The post Judge Refuses to Recuse in Case Involving Alleged Misconduct by Philly DA's Office appeared first on Reason Magazine.
According to The Washington Post, "The chairman of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee is investigating two D.C.-based activist groups over hosting what he called 'jury nullification training sessions,' claiming that their instructions given to potential jurors were an illegal attempt to subvert federal prosecutors."
The committee chair in question, Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.), has set his sights on the groups known as Free DC and Harriet's Wildest Dreams because they, in Comer's words, believe "that potential jurors should not make decisions impartially based on applying the law as instructed to the facts presented before them in the case, but based on their subjective, personal beliefs and activist agendas."
I hate to break it to Comer, but many prominent members of America's Founding generation would have agreed with those D.C. activists.
The debate over jury nullification asks whether there is a proper place in our legal system for a jury to acquit, not because of any lack of evidence of a defendant's guilt, but because the jury believes the underlying law that was supposedly broken, or the prosecutor's particular enforcement of that law, to be unconstitutional.
In 1791, the influential Founding Father James Wilson, who was a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, delivered a widely discussed lecture on law at the College of Philadelphia. "Whoever would be obliged to obey a constitutional law, is justified in refusing to obey an unconstitutional act of the legislature," Wilson said. "When a question, even of this delicate nature, occurs, every one who is called to act, has a right to judge." Needless to say, jurors are among those "called to act" in this very manner. Jurors therefore have their own "right to judge" the constitutionality of the law (and prosecution) before them.
Thomas Jefferson made a similar point in a 1789 letter to Thomas Paine. "The trial by jury," Jefferson wrote, is "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." How else may a jury hold the government accountable to the principles of the Constitution than by judging for itself the constitutionality of the government's actions, including the actions of the police and prosecution?
According to Comer, the job of a juror is mechanically "applying the law as instructed to the facts presented before them in the case."
But that's not what Founding Fathers such as Wilson and Jefferson thought. They argued that the job of the juror was to apply the text of the Constitution to the actions of the government and to acquit the defendant if either the law or its enforcement came up short. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it in his great book, Democracy in America, the jury "places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or a portion of the governed, and not in that of the government."
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in two cases that are worth keeping track of.
The post Jury Nullification Is Not a Crime appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Thanks to a 2005 DUI conviction in Pennsylvania, Edward Williams permanently lost the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. But he did not realize that until a decade later, and his confusion on that point is understandable.
The federal law that stripped Williams of his Second Amendment rights is commonly described as applying to "felons," and Williams' offense was a misdemeanor. But although his sentence did not include any time behind bars, his crime theoretically could have sent him to prison for up to five years. That was enough to trigger 18 USC 922(g)(1), which covers anyone convicted of "a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year."
When a lawyer alerted Williams to that wrinkle, which made his continued ownership of firearms a federal felony, he got rid of his guns. But he did not think that requirement was fair, reasonable, or constitutional, and this week a federal appeals court agreed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit recognized a historical tradition of disarming "physically dangerous individuals" whose possession of firearms would pose a threat to public safety. But it said Williams plainly does not fit into that category.
"The federal government spent nearly a decade trying to permanently disarm a peaceable man over a nonviolent misdemeanor—and it lost bigly," says Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, which supported Williams' lawsuit. "The government does not get to turn a nonviolent conviction into a lifetime ban on exercising a constitutionally protected right."
The 3rd Circuit's en banc decision in Williams v. Attorney General affirms a 2023 ruling by a federal judge who likewise concluded that disarming Williams was unconstitutional. It elaborates on the logic of Range v. Attorney General, a 2023 decision that restored the gun rights of a Pennsylvania man who had been convicted of food stamp fraud. In both cases, the 3rd Circuit held that applying Section 922(g)(1) to the plaintiffs was not "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation"—the Second Amendment test established by the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Writing for the majority in Williams' case, 3rd Circuit Judge Paul Matey acknowledges that the Supreme Court has described "longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons" as "presumptively lawful." But "those longstanding customs restricted the violently dangerous (within which some felons would be included), not felons writ large," he says. "Felons were restricted because they posed a physical danger, rather than for their offense of conviction."
Matey argues that "focusing on physical dangerousness corrects the erroneous argument" that "only law-abiding and responsible citizens can exercise the rights protected by the Second Amendment"—a claim that the Supreme Court rejected in the 2024 case United States v. Rahimi. "We find no history that supports disarming irresponsible people, where 'responsible' is defined by the whim of the sovereign or the will of the majority," he says, alluding to the danger of allowing legislators to whittle away at the Second Amendment by criminalizing an ever-widening range of conduct.
Matey emphasizes "the novelty of forever restricting all felons from possessing firearms for lawful purposes." The original restriction, which Congress approved in 1938 as part of the Federal Firearms Act, applied only to violent crimes such as murder, manslaughter, rape, kidnapping, robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon. In 1961, Congress expanded the ban to cover nonviolent crimes punishable by more than a year in prison.
Williams' 2005 DUI conviction qualified for two reasons. He had a prior DUI conviction, stemming from a 2000 arrest in State College. And when he was arrested again in Philadelphia four years later, his blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.223 percent. That made his second offense a first-degree misdemeanor, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.
Since then, Williams has stayed out of trouble. "He has done nothing violent, let alone dangerous, for over twenty years, and has held steady employment at the same job for over three decades," Matey notes. Williams drinks only occasionally, and a psychological evaluation found he "has a normal personality, without psychopathology and without addiction or violent tendencies."
The Justice Department nevertheless argued that Williams' continuing disarmament is consistent with the Bruen test, which requires historical analogs that are "relevantly similar" in motivation and scope. In making that case, the government relied mainly on early laws aimed at "habitual drunkards"—the same analogy that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected last June in United States v. Hemani, which involved the federal ban on gun possession by "unlawful" drug users.
Although the Justice Department "acknowledges it may proscribe Williams's possession of firearms only if he 'presently poses a physical danger if armed,'" Matey says, it "offers no evidence to establish this as the aim of the habitual drunkard laws." Those laws, the Supreme Court noted in Hemani, "did not seek to protect the public from violence so much as to protect habitual drunkards from themselves and their families from financial devastation."
Nor did the habitual drunkard laws permanently disarm people, as Section 922(g)(1) does. "Most statutes capped the commitment of habitual drunkards to the state inebriate asylum, prison, or hard labor to a few months or years," Matey notes. "Others provided for an indefinite period of incarceration, but had no indication that upon release individuals continued to forfeit their arms. Rather, once someone was 'safe' to 'go at large,' they were restored to the status of a full rights-bearing citizen."
Contrary to the considerations that the Supreme Court deemed relevant in Hemani, Matey says, the Justice Department "fails to show that Williams threatens to 'misuse[] a gun while intoxicated,' or that he 'poses a danger to himself or others as a result' of
alcohol abuse. In fact, much like those nineteenth-century drunkards released from custody and restored their rights, the record shows that Williams poses no present physical danger from the use of a firearm, or anything else."
The 3rd Circuit is one of three federal appeals courts that have allowed people with nonviolent felony records to argue that Section 922(g)(1) is unconstitutional as applied to them. But such challenges have been blocked in six circuits, notwithstanding compelling historical evidence that the law reaches much farther than the Second Amendment allows. So far, the Supreme Court has declined to accept any of the many petitions asking it to resolve that circuit split.
The post The 3rd Circuit Upholds the Gun Rights of a Man Who Committed a Nonviolent Misdemeanor 2 Decades Ago appeared first on Reason Magazine.
The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments today in an important case that asks how much judicial deference is owed to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's commentary on the federal sentencing guidelines when a judge is applying those guidelines during the sentencing of a federal criminal defendant. That may sound like a somewhat dry legal dispute, but the ramifications are big not only in the realm of criminal law, but also for the broader legal battle over statutory interpretation, the role of the courts, and the authority of those federal agencies that some critics have called "the administrative state."
The case is Beaird v. United States. Kendrick Jarrell Beaird was arrested for pointing a gun at someone and, because he had a prior felony record, was convicted as a felon in possession of a firearm. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, Beaird faced an even higher sentence if the firearm "involved…is capable of accepting a large capacity magazine." His gun's magazine was capable of holding 17 rounds. Did that count as large capacity and thus trigger a higher sentence? The federal sentencing guidelines did not directly say, but the U.S. Sentencing Commission's commentary on the guidelines did: According to the commentary, a magazine capable of accepting "more than 15 rounds of ammunition" counts as large capacity.
Are the federal courts bound to follow the Sentencing Commission's commentary in a case like this and dutifully impose a steeper sentence? Or may the courts impose a lower sentence based on their own alternate view of the best reading of the text of the sentencing guidelines?
In Stinson v. United States (1993), the Supreme Court held that the commentary to the federal sentencing guidelines is entitled to major deference from the courts. "We decide that commentary in the Guidelines Manual that interprets or explains a guideline is authoritative," the Court said, "unless it violates the Constitution or a federal statute, or is inconsistent with, or a plainly erroneous reading of, that guideline."
Among the questions at issue in today's oral arguments in Beaird is "whether Stinson v. United States still accurately state[s] the level of deference due to the Commentary of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines." In other words, should there be cases in which a judge's alternate reading may trump the interpretation favored by the commission's commentary?
Those questions alone make this a notable case. But this particular dispute also arrives in the midst of a broader, ongoing battle over judicial deference to the authority of federal regulatory agencies. For instance, in Kisor v. Wilkie (2019), the Supreme Court narrowly upheld a precedent which said that a federal agency's interpretation of its own "ambiguous" rule is entitled to broad judicial deference unless the agency's interpretation is "plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulations being interpreted."
Justice Elena Kagan's 5–4 majority opinion in Kisor v. Wilkie justified this holding on the grounds that the Court's deferential doctrine "enables the agency to fill out the regulatory scheme Congress has placed under its supervision."
Writing in dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch faulted this approach for requiring judges "to accept an executive agency's interpretation of its own regulations even when that interpretation doesn't represent the best and fairest reading." That sort of deference, Gorsuch argued, "creates a 'systematic judicial bias in favor of the federal government, the most powerful of parties, and against everyone else.'"
This Kagan-Gorsuch clash of legal visions is likely to arise again in the Beaird case. Whether or not Kagan's pro-deference view will still command the majority, however, remains to be seen.
The post A New Supreme Court Case Tests the Limits of Judicial Deference to Federal Agencies appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Louisiana recently started executing death-row prisoners after more than 20 years of not doing so (save a “voluntary” execution in 2010, when a prisoner waived his right to appeal and said he wanted to die). John Corley, an award-winning writer who is incarcerated at Louisiana’s Angola prison, reflects on how MAGA politics have re-invigorated the practice of state killing in Louisiana and elsewhere, and what it means for the tenor of life in institutions like Angola:
Dalton Prejean Jr, who is serving time for manslaughter, found Hoffman’s execution particularly painful. When he was ten years old, in 1990, his father died in the penitentiary’s electric chair. “The day it all went down, it was almost like reliving the moments leading up to my father’s execution,” Prejean told me. “At ten o’clock the news reporter announced that Hoffman was dead. My heart skipped. I couldn’t believe they had actually killed somebody. Was what he did so bad that he just couldn’t be allowed to go on living? Wasn’t there anything about him that was redeemable?”
Twice a week, the inmate counsel substitute Gary Boudreaux makes rounds on the five death row tiers. He knows each of the surviving men housed there. “There was no tension on the row because the guys believed the execution wouldn’t happen,” Boudreaux said. “It had been so long, and they have good lawyers. They just didn’t think executions would come back.”
A week after the execution, Boudreaux returned to the row. The atmosphere was “totally different.” The men now knew that Governor Landry “is serious about executing people, and the state will execute people. There’s no doubt in their minds about that any more.”
Federal law enforcement officials in Minneapolis announced at a press conference last week that FBI agents arrested a Minnesota teenager plotting to commit a mass shooting at the Mall of America.
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, an 18-year-old American-born citizen of Somali descent, was arrested in a public park on October 6 by FBI agents immediately after he allegedly paid an undercover agent posing as a member of the Islamic terrorist group ISIS $600 for an AK-47 rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition. The arrest was the culmination of a two-year investigation into Mohamud, who allegedly planned to commit a mass shooting at the mega-mall on October 24.
According to the criminal complaint filed against Mohamud, he exchanged hundreds of messages with a confidential FBI informant expressing his desire to travel to Somalia to join ISIS, but lacking enough money to travel, he eventually settled for an alleged plot to attack the Mall of America because it was owned by Jews.
"I want to do this, I am very serious I don't care about anything in the world, I am 100% committed to the cause of dying for the sake of Allah only," Mohamud allegedly wrote in one text message, according to the complaint.
Christopher Dotson, a special agent running the FBI's Minneapolis field office said at a press conference that Mohamud's messages "document the idolization of ideologically motivated violence, a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life, a blind hatred of people of other faiths, and a cold commitment to carrying out his vision of violence in our community."
As I explained in a 2022 Reason magazine feature, "It's (Almost) Always the Feds," the FBI has a long history of using its sprawling network of paid informants to locate and bait would-be radicals in undercover sting operations.
The FBI's Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), created in 2011 to stop domestic recruitment by foreign terrorist organizations, has focused heavily on Somali immigrant communities in Minnesota and elsewhere because of Somalia's links to ISIS and al-Shabab, two Islamic terrorist groups.
An ISIS-affiliated account posted a video in 2015 calling for an attack on the Mall of America. In 2016, a Somali man in the U.S. on a refugee visa stabbed 10 shoppers and employees at a St. Cloud mall. Last year, a Minneapolis man was charged with attempting to join ISIS.
However, the sort of young men who usually get onto the FBI's extremist radar have grand and violent ambitions but limited means to carry them out. They tend to be unemployed or marginally employed, sometimes still living with their parents, and socially awkward.
In one text exchange, the confidential informant asked Mohamud how school was going.
"It's terrible man but I gotta keep doing it and if I fail its straight to just killin kuffar [a derogatory term for non-Muslims]," Mohamud responded, according to screenshots included in the criminal complaint . "And im already failing so if I don't pass in a yr ill probably save up for a gun."
The informant responded with the "grinning squinty face" emoji.
Mohamud continued to chat with confidential informants, praising terrorist attacks and sharing terrorist propaganda videos, according to the complaint. He didn't have a phone, so he had to use his sibling's computers and tablets to chat with informants. Last month, he recorded a video of himself pledging allegiance to ISIS on his little brother's iPad.
Despite persistent criticisms from civil liberties groups that the FBI is in many cases manufacturing terror plots to ensnare young men with limited to no ability to carry them out, the federal government has been enormously successful in securing convictions because of the high bar for defendants to prove entrapment.
The FBI's use of paid informants and these sting tactics have resulted in hundreds of convictions since 9/11, but it's also created long-term credibility problems for the bureau, especially when administrations have used those criminal cases to advance their political narratives.
For example, in a 2024 speech condemning political violence, former President Joe Biden cited the plot to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. However, text messages and other records uncovered by defense attorneys during the case showed that the farcical plot was in large part concocted and encouraged by paid FBI informants and their bureau handlers.
"We have a saying in my office," one FBI special agent told a confidential informant in the Whitmer case. "Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story."
The CVE program and related counterterrorism initiatives have also subjected tens of thousands of Somali refugees and other ethnic and religious minorities to heightened surveillance and infiltration by government informants, sowing distrust and fear, all based on a relatively small handful of incidents. Reason's Eric Boehm wrote in 2018 about how Minnesota's peaceful and entrepreneurial Somali refugee communities had become a domestic front in the war on terror, as well as microcosm of the national debate over immigration and national security.
None of this is to say the investigation into Mohamud was unwarranted, or that he wouldn't have been able to eventually get a gun absent the FBI's assistance. Nor is it a statement on his guilt or innocence, although he is as a matter of law innocent until proven guilty. It is a reminder to read carefully and wait for all the details to come out whenever the FBI announces it has thwarted another terrorist plot.
The post FBI Foils Plot To Attack Mall of America With FBI-Provided AK-47 appeared first on Reason Magazine.
In a near unanimous vote, city council members in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adopted a policy order suggesting that local law enforcement authorities shouldn't arrest or prosecute sex workers.
With eight members voting yes and one voting present during the council's October 5 meeting, the new policy aims to "let folks in our community know that we do stand in support of not arresting or prosecuting people who sell sex," as Councilor Patricia M. Nolan put it.
The order's stipulation with regard to sex customers, however, is unclear. And what practical effect it will have is uncertain, since Cambridge City Council members can't change Massachusetts state law, under which both buying and selling sex are still crimes.
The new policy order states that it is the council's "belief that the arrest of adult persons for consensual sex work should continue to be amongst the lowest law enforcement priorities for the City of Cambridge" and that "the Middlesex County District Attorney should cease prosecution of persons for consensual adult sex work and cease prosecution of persons who provide support services to sex workers absent unlawful means."
The district attorney's office does not have to take this recommendation, of course. Still, it seems meaningful that government officials are urging prosecutors to adopt some level of decriminalization policy when it comes to prostitution. The Cambridge City Council isn't even the first in the area to do so. "In 2019, Somerville City Council voted to direct Somerville police not to arrest sex workers," Cambridge Day points out.
Originally, some Cambridge authorities wanted to go even further. An earlier draft of the order urged "the State House to support efforts to achieve the full decriminalization of consensual adult sex work statewide," but that language was removed before passage of the final policy last week. The change was made so as "not [to be] taking a stand on…full decriminalization of the buyer," Nolan said at the meeting.
Yet according to The Cambridge Somerville Independent, Council Member Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, who authored the new policy, said that even as adopted it still supports full decriminalization (that is, decriminalization of both full-service sex work providers and their clients):
In the version that passed, some councillors believed they voted for something different: that customers remain seen as criminals and that the goal is to end sex work rather than allow the trade to continue safely with protections for human and worker rights. "People are going to read it a little differently," Sobrinho-Wheeler said, but he and supporters believe the order continues to cover clients and suppliers of sex work.
Sex worker rights advocates are calling the policy—which also includes plans for a phone line that sex workers can use to report crimes against them without having to interact with police—a win.
"Victories seem rare. This one is special because of how many sex workers, survivors, and allies supported our effort," Mary Carol, co-chair of the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective, said in a press release.
During the public comment portion of the council's October 5 meeting, at least 27 people—including current and former sex workers, lawyers, and people in social services—spoke in support of full decriminalization.
"I choose to do this work and I choose to do this work without going to jail for it," said Rita Romero, who said she has been "a sex worker for over 20 years."
A woman describing herself as "a student, a mother, an advocate, and a sex worker" told council members: "We are not asking you to understand every choice that we make. We are asking you to understand that criminalization does not make us disappear, it only changes how safely we are able to exist."
"Our commonwealth should protect people's dignity, not punish them for trying to survive," opined Kayla Kittredge, an independent candidate for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.
Several speakers who described themselves as survivors of sex trafficking supported the policy order. This included Quinn, who said she was "pushed into the sex industry as a teenager" and still supports full decriminalization.
Clients "didn't hurt me because of a lack of punishment," Quinn said. "They were able to hurt me because I had a lack of power, political power, to keep myself safe and to determine the trajectory of my own life. The fact is full decriminalization—not partial, not the equality model—only full decriminalization has been proven to afford both trafficking victims and sex workers more political power, actual political power."
Only three people—two with the group Safe Exit, which helps people who do not want to be selling sexual services to stop doing so—spoke against the policy.
Safe Exit's Audra Dooty said the policy would "hurt people and get more vulnerable folks sucked into the life" and advocated what's alternately known as the Nordic model, the equality model, or partial decriminalization, in which sex workers are not criminalized but their clients are.
Several speakers at the council meeting directly opposed any policy that still prioritizes arresting sex buyers. Claudia Torres, a staff attorney at Justice at Work, noted that while some say decriminalization removes protection for vulnerable people, "vulnerability does not make meaningful consent impossible. Whether coercion is present is a fact-intensive, context-specific inquiry."
"Criminalizing buyers does not eliminate dangerous clients or exploitation," said Molly Lynch, a licensed clinical social worker. Instead, it "makes it harder for sex workers to protect themselves from those dangers." Lynch added that having worked with street-based sex workers, she learned that "sex workers are experts in their own safety."
"In other industries, like domestic work, we say the solution is giving people more labor protections," Jessica Van Meir told the council. "We don't say the solution to trafficking of domestic workers is to criminalize hiring a maid."
The new Cambridge policy order puts on the record what already seems to be police policy. Shameka Gregory with the city's Domestic and Gender-Based Violence Prevention Initiative said the Cambridge Police Department has made only about four sex worker arrests in the past five years. She did not say if any or how many solicitation arrests were made.
But even if local police aren't proactively going after prostitution, sex workers and/or their customers in the area may still face arrests and prosecutions. In recent years, Cambridge has been the home of a high-profile "brothel" bust involving both federal and state police. More than 30 clients were arrested and prosecuted on state charges, and three people who ran the business were prosecuted on federal charges.
Where will the Trump administration livesteam its firing squad? (What a sentence to have to write.) "Depending on how much [social media platforms] want to bend over backwards (or should I say, bow down?) to appease Donald Trump and the bloodthirsty Pete Hegseth, all of them except Meta can make unfortunately credible claims that livestreaming an execution by firing squad doesn't technically violate their policies," notes Mike Masnick at Techdirt. "Meta cannot say that. I'd argue that the videos likely do violate YouTube, X, and TikTok's policies as well, but it very much depends on subjective calls for all three."
"Remember, some of the earliest moral panic over how 'bad' social media is came from US elected officials losing their minds about terrorist execution videos on YouTube," adds Masnick:
It's kind of incredible how far we've come: Now the US government itself is planning to stream a gruesome execution of its own, and any platform that pushes back will likely be attacked by the president and his supporters for not being patriotic enough.
Continuing in what's apparently a surrealist theme of today's newsletter…
Will Ukraine decriminalize porn to help fund its military? Sofya Owl has helped fund Ukraine's defense efforts by selling nude photos. That could make her a criminal in Ukraine, "where producing and distributing pornography remains a criminal offense," explains Mariana Lastovyria at The Counteroffensive:
For years, it has had a thriving market for adult content that operates largely in the shadows.
Now, as the country faces a roughly $27 billion shortfall in defense funding, lawmakers are considering whether to remove pornography from the criminal code—potentially bringing part of that underground economy into the legal tax base. This gap is critical, as the money is needed now to pay for supplies at the front line for the first quarter of 2027.
According to recent estimates by Ukrainian lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak, who co-authored a bill to decriminalize pornography production, legalizing the industry could bring the state budget up to $25 million a year in tax revenue. He says that amount would be enough to purchase around 30,000 drones.
Why are campus administrators teaching about sex toys?
Setting aside whether universities should be in the business of providing this kind of advice, the real question is why therapeutic bureaucracies are now somehow responsible for attending to every last private corner of student life, right down to the "bondage and fetish gear." https://t.co/TmJ7ayMM5C
— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 8, 2026
Two very different Flock rulings: Last week, this newsletter covered a federal court ruling in which the judge called automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems such as Flock "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance." But all is not well in Flock/Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.
"A decision that a California judge issued the following day, which dismissed a lawsuit arguing that San Jose's ALPR network violates the state constitution, is much more typical of litigation in this area, which so far has been almost uniformly unsuccessful," reports Reason's Jacob Sullum. More:
The contrast between those two decisions suggests the challenges such lawsuits face as judges grapple with the implications of Supreme Court precedents involving cellphone location data. Although the relevance of those precedents might seem obvious, state and federal courts generally have perceived important differences between cellphone tracking and police use of roadside cameras that record images of passing cars.
Related: more cops facing criminal charges for misusing Flock.
• Playboy says: Your parents were having more sex than you are. (If you're in Gen Z, that is.)
• Claude is trolling cops now?
• Are bondage photos a political career-killer in 2026? We'll soon find out!
• Always read Chris Ferguson on cellphone ban studies (and do it quick before he gets himself locked in a padded room rather than have to scream about effect sizes one more time).
• The winner of Britain's prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing is now under question, after "the AI detector Pangram flag[ged] almost the entire story as AI-generated," notes The Atlantic. And "this isn't the first prize-winning story to be flagged by Pangram. It comes after similar scandals over this year's Commonwealth Prize and Prix Goncourt—two other renowned literature contests—in which Pangram flagged AI use among finalists."
• "The case for screen time limits rests in part on an unproven assumption that fewer hours will mean fewer anxious and depressed kids. The best evidence doesn't support it," writes the Columbia University psychiatrist Jonathan Slater in The New York Times:
Limiting screen time can promote children's overall health. But the amount of time children spend on screens has only a small effect on their mental health. Genetics and certain experiences in childhood, as well as the lack of proper diagnosis and treatment, appear to be far more influential. Limiting screen time is not the first line of treatment for children with anxiety or depression.
• Abortion pill update: "The Food and Drug Administration expects to complete its safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone in March," reports NBC. In a court document filed by the Department of Justice last Wednesday, the agency "said it plans to compare mifepristone's safety to that of surgical abortions through 10 weeks' gestation. Its review will measure the frequency of side effects among roughly 100,000 women who took mifepristone, it said."
• The Pentagon has been a bad influence on Silicon Valley.
• Is AI slop what the people really want? "They like the slop, they're eager for more, and whoever's serving it to them is just fulfilling the authentic demand for unlimited AI-generated garbage," suggests Jeremiah Johson at The Argument.
• A win for cryptocurrency: "The U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has withdrawn its proposal for a rule that would require financial institutions to report on cryptocurrency transactions that they 'know, suspect, or have reason to suspect' involve mixing in a foreign jurisdiction," reports Reason's Matthew Petti. "The proposal was first made in October 2023, and the government withdrew it this week, citing complaints from the crypto industry and privacy concerns."
The post Cambridge Decriminalizes Sex Work—Sort Of appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Ammon Bundy was once considered the face of America's far-right militia movement. Now he's speaking out against President Donald Trump and his treatment of immigrants.
"How do you demonize them to the point where they should be rounded up by armed men in the government, kicking down their doors and dragging them off?" Bundy tells Reason.
Bundy views Trump's violent, indiscriminate immigration crackdown as just the latest example of how an oversized, tyrannical United States government is stomping on individual rights. Bundy has sacrificed a lot for his beliefs, including serving a two-year stint in federal prison (though he was ultimately acquitted) and being stripped of his property. It hasn't stopped Bundy from continuing to fight for what he believes in.
The anti-government activist first entered the national spotlight in 2014 when he joined his father, Cliven Bundy, in an armed standoff against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) at the elder Bundy's Bunkerville, Nevada, ranch. The BLM had impounded 400 of Cliven's cattle after a decades-long disagreement over land rights had ended with Cliven's refusal to pay his grazing fees. Cliven and Ammon solicited militias from around the country to join them in confronting the federal agents guarding the confiscated cattle. The show of force caused the BLM to stand down and release the cows. The conflict, closely followed by the national media, made Ammon and his father celebrities and established a pattern in which the younger Bundy would aggressively challenge what he deemed to be the federal government's violation of individual rights.
Just two years later, Bundy championed the cause of Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who were imprisoned for allegedly setting fires on federal land adjacent to their property. Bundy says their prosecution was simply another power play by the government. Rather than accept the United States Court of Appeals decision to re-sentence the Hammonds to an additional five years, Bundy led a group of armed followers to occupy the nearby Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon to protest the court's decision. Again, the national media spotlight was on Bundy. The occupation, which lasted 41 days, ended with an FBI ambush, resulting in the death of one of Bundy's allies, an Arizona rancher named LaVoy Finicum.
"They shot him three times in the back, and he died in the snow," lamented Bundy.
Bundy and his allies were arrested on January 26, 2016. The FBI simultaneously pursued charges against Bundy for the Oregon occupation and the earlier Bunkerville standoff. He faced life in prison. After spending about two years locked up, he was acquitted of all charges. Then on July 10th of 2018, Trump pardoned the Hammonds, and they were released from prison.
"That wouldn't have happened if we hadn't made such a big deal out of it," continued Bundy.
Bundy was living in Idaho during the COVID-19 pandemic and was arrested multiple times for protesting lockdown measures. In 2022 he challenged Idaho's Republican establishment by running for governor as an independent. Two months before the primary, the 10-month-old grandson of Ammon's campaign manager was taken by Child Protective Services after doctors at St. Luke's Hospital in Boise suspected the parents were neglecting the child's health. Bundy, furious, accused St. Luke's of kidnapping. The child was returned to his parents six days later, but St. Luke's sued Bundy and his campaign manager, saying they bullied and intimidated staff while disrupting business at the hospital. With the lawsuit pending, Bundy lost the election to the Republican incumbent, Brad Little, though received 17 percent of the vote. Bundy did not show up in court, and he and his co-defendants were ordered to pay St. Luke's nearly $53 million in damages. Bundy's home and most of his assets were seized. He faced the possibility of another lengthy jail sentence.
"They got a gag order against me where I couldn't speak about (the baby) Cyrus's case. And of course, I kept speaking about it. They kept getting contempt charges until finally they ended up getting a $250,000 bond against me, and I had to leave the state."
Bundy fled with his wife and five kids to Cedar City, Utah, where a friend offered them a one-room attic apartment. He joined his brother's diesel truck parts business and was eventually able to move his family into a house.
After vocally opposing Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric during his first run for president, Ammon continued to criticize Trump in his second term, drawing parallels between the federal agents who seized his father's cattle and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents acting with impunity in American cities.
"If I and my family were threatened by federal agents in an unconstitutional way, I would do all I could to oppose them. In fact, I have pretty good experience with that," Bundy said in a Facebook post during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis in early 2026.
In 2025, Bundy circulated a self-published essay titled, "The Stranger: A Christian and Constitutional Case for Protecting Those Who Come to America." In the essay, Bundy argues that treating immigrants like criminals simply for lacking "official permission" to cross the United States border violates constitutional ideals and defies the spirit of an American society built by legal and "illegal" immigrants. He also draws heavily on scripture to assert that Christians have a spiritual calling to protect and welcome immigrants.
Bundy's criticisms of Trump's immigration crackdown has cost Bundy friends, including some of his allies from Oregon and Bunkerville. He had a falling out with one former ally who "was bragging about how the ICE agent pulled his gun so fast," to shoot and kill Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old intensive care nurse in Minneapolis. The ally "was someone that literally went to prison with us," continues Bundy. "How in the world do you take that position, after having federal weapons pointed at you? How could you possibly say something like that? It's disgusting."
Despite recent dust-ups with friends and supporters, Bundy remains in high demand for guidance and inspiration. While Reason was filming Bundy in his small auto parts shop fulfilling orders, a friend called him to ask for advice on legal troubles. Bundy reassured him and asked him to send the paperwork over so he could be of better assistance. That inclination just seems to be second nature for Bundy. He's always ready to lend a helping hand, while simultaneously advocating for personal responsibility.
"If you want a healthy nation, you must look at an individual and protect those liberties, protect those freedoms," says Bundy.
As for how Bundy feels about the direction of our current government—it's unflinching.
"Like George Washington said, government is like a fire. It can be a useful tool or a terrible master. And a terrible master is what our government has become."
Photo Credits: Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom ; Mike Stotts/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Andy Nelson/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Vyacheslav Prokofyev/TASS/Newscom; Sean Madden/Planetpix/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Prentice C. James/Cal Sport Media/Newscom; Mark Black/ZUMA Press/Newscom; John Nacion/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Jeremy Hogan/Polaris/Newscom; Karen Focht/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Sarah A. Miller/TNS/Newscom; facebook/realammonbundy; Benjamin Hanson/Middle East Images/StringersHub/Sipa USA/Newscom; Charles Reed/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Carol Guzy/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Dave Decker/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; EyePress/Newscom; Roberto E. Rosales/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Carol Guzy/TNS/Newscom; Allison Dinner/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; National Archives; Library of Congress; Elijah Scott/SiPA USA/Elijah Scott/Sipa USA/Newscom; Jen Golbeck/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Lela Edgar/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom; Chris Kleponis - CNP/CNP / Polaris/Newscom; Wayne Gooden/Image of Sport/Newscom
Music Credits: "The Tomorrow War" by Or Chausha via Artlist; "Under Pressure" by Michael Kobrin via Artlist; "Beyond the Stories" by Ian Post via Artlist; "Long Road" by Oakfield via Artlist; "Railroad" by Max H. via Artlist; "Hidden Answers" by FableForte via Artlist; "Foreboding" by Kyle Preston via Artlist; "Whodunit" by FableForte via Artlist; "No Decides" by Or Chausha via Artlist; "Witness" by Oliver Michael via Artlist; "It Comes at Night" by Adam Dib via Artlist; "Dusty Roads" by FableForte via Artlist; "Lullaby" by Assaf Ayalon via Artlist; "Unsettled" by Matt Evans via Artlist; "Uneasy Atmosphere" by Matt Evans via Artlist; "Reset" by sero via Artlist; "Dream Life" by DJ Taz Rashid via Artlist; "Can't Lose You" by The Likes of Us via Artlist; "From the Ground Up" by Earth Tone via Artlist; "Pianissimo" by Adrián Berenguer via Artlist; "Washed Away" by Mark Grundhoefer
The post The Anti-Government Rebel Who Turned Against MAGA appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Login