Questioning the prevailing narrative about the "Cornell seven" case is bound to create controversy. And at Columbia University, two student journalists drew condemnation for their views on the case from the unlikeliest of places: a college free speech group. 

On October 13, Barnard junior Christina Ma and Columbia junior Nikos Mohammadi published an article called "The 'Cornell Seven' Is Really About Liberalism" in the Columbia Sundial, an independent student publication. The piece argued that the discourse surrounding the alleged rape at Cornell University infantilizes women by omitting the possibility that in a post–sexual revolution, liberal society, women may make regrettable but consensual choices.

"In the world that, for better or worse, follows from it, we cannot claim to stand for sexual freedom and then recoil in disgust when there's a possibility that a young woman simply chose to exercise it," Mohammadi and Ma wrote. 

The piece also argues that the "collective frenzy" over the Cornell case has created a climate on campus that makes it "difficult to disagree with the maximalist position on what happened" the night of the alleged rape.

As Mohammadi wrote in UnHerd, the piece caused immense backlash. He said he received an onslaught of messages urging him to commit suicide and demanding that his "career and life be destroyed." But the criticism went beyond threatening DMs and comments. 

The day after the article's publication, the Columbia Open Discourse Alliance (CODA) canceled an event about press freedom because the Sundial's editor in chief, Nick Baum, had been slated to speak at the event. Although Baum did not author the piece, CODA wrote in an Instagram post that the free speech group "refused" to be affiliated with the Sundial's article "in any way." 

CODA also claimed that the event, ironically called "Who Gets to Tell the Story? Press Freedom and the Public Square," could not take place at a time when "many survivors in our community feel that their stories are under attack and are not being believed."

The group added that the Sundial's article "promotes rape culture and works to silence survivors of sexual assault." 

The group's president, Aum Desai, told Columbia's student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, that the group canceled the event "not in spite of, but because of [CODA's] commitment to free expression." 

Columbia graduate Clayton Smith, who founded CODA in 2025, quickly commented that he was "shocked" by CODA's statements on Instagram. Smith started the organization to create a central hub for groups hosting events promoting free speech and open discourse, including the Sundial and Columbia's Heterodox Academy chapter.

He tells Reason that CODA's rationale for canceling the event was "ironic" and "hypocritical," and he believes the group should have collaborated with the Sundial if there were legitimate safety concerns at the event. He says he was particularly disturbed by the group's condemnation of the article and CODA's claim that it promotes "rape culture."

"They don't argue or explain how it works to silence survivors of sexual assault. It is a baseless slander that they use to condemn the article because it promoted an opinion they do not like," Smith says. 

Smith says he spoke to Desai on the phone after CODA posted the statements, and Desai tried to reassure him that CODA would uphold the principle of free speech. But Smith says he did not leave the phone call feeling "very confident at all" in Desai's commitment. 

Desai did not respond to Reason's requests for comment.

CODA faculty adviser and Columbia Business School professor emeritus Eli Noam was traveling in China during the fallout from the Sundial article and was not involved in CODA's decision.

After speaking with members of both CODA and the Sundial, Noam tells Reason that he thinks CODA "made some proper decisions, some correct decisions, and some mistakes."

"I think we're dealing here with…a group of college students who kind of were confronted with a crisis at 2 a.m.," Noam says. "And kind of [made] some judgments that they now regret, and they do." 

He tells Reason that it was not "unreasonable to assume there would be a disruption" at the event, given the climate at Columbia and "about this rape allegation." He says the group suddenly "had an event where they needed college security" and could not organize in time. CODA, Noam says, is not yet recognized by the university, and he thinks the group was likely fearful of jeopardizing its recognition.  

Still, Noam says CODA's statements condemning the article were "unreasonable," and it was "disappointing that they kind of lost their nerve here."

Although he was not involved in planning the panel, Mohammadi says, to his knowledge, there were no credible threats of violence to the panel. He understood there may have been "disgruntled students" and an "environment CODA did not want to deal with." But instead of simply canceling the event or working with the Sundial to find a solution, Mohammadi says CODA overstepped by condemning the Sundial piece. 

James Applegate, an astronomy professor who serves on Columbia's Academic Freedom Council (CAFC) alongside Noam, tells Reason that he disagreed with CODA's decision to cancel the event.

Applegate tells Reason he was considering attending the event, and he was "rather surprised and disappointed" when it was canceled.

He recalled that when he was a professor in 2000, he objected to changes to the school's sexual misconduct policy on the University Senate floor. He says his statements were "similar to what was said in the Sundial article" and there was a "level of emotion in this debate." 

"Nonetheless, we had the debate. I was in it, and the degree to which it was civil is shocking when you look at where we are now. And it's sad." 

Applegate said he does not condemn CODA, however, "for the simple reason that the atmosphere on college campuses and on the left wing of politics in general in the United States is quite vicious."

CODA's honorary faculty fellow John McWhorter tells Reason he interpreted CODA's statement as "saying that an event about who gets to tell the story is untenable when or if a critical mass of people with such stories don't even feel comfortable telling them— i.e.being a participant in the event." He added, "I imagine some might think of that as cutting the salami a little thin, but then I highly suspect that Desai is equally worried about the event becoming a physical melee of some kind. In that, let's face it, he is hardly unreasonable."

Still, McWhorter said that he would have chosen to have the event himself, "especially as in the likely case that some people did talk about their experiences without any particular repercussions, it may have made the more reluctant people less apprehensive about doing so in the future."

According to Mohammadi, as of Tuesday, the Sundial, College Republicans, Platypus Affiliated Society at Columbia (which discusses leftist thought and history), and Columbia's Heterodox Academy chapter have left CODA. 

CODA was not the only group to condemn the Sundial's piece. On October 14, the Columbia Political Review's editorial board wrote that Mohammadi and Ma's piece "violates standards of integrity" and "perpetuates a culture of campus violence, rape, and assault." The editorial board of the Columbia Political Review, which purports to publish "multipartisan political discourse," stated that it would refuse to publish "any article that upholds or recreates cultures and systems of rape, sexual assault, or violence" and it urged "all campus publications to do the same."

And on Monday, Columbia's main newspaper, the Spectator, published a staff editorial accusing the Sundial of violating journalistic ethics by "its page to disparage survivors of sexual violence." 

Mohammadi tells Reason the piece underwent "far more editorial scrutiny than any other piece" the Sundial had published given the sensitive nature of the topic.

Free speech student organizations are necessary on Columbia's campus, especially as the school's free speech climate continues to crumble; it recently received a failing grade from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And while upholding free speech principles may have become more fashionable among those resisting the Trump administration's pressures on academic freedom or those defending pro-Palestinian speech, it is clear that some topics remain taboo in the public square. College is supposed to be a place where students debate controversial topics, form their own beliefs and opinions, and learn from mistakes. Hopefully, the students who demanded condemnation instead of debate will be forgiven for their perversion of free speech ideals, and they will learn to afford such grace and open-mindedness to classmates with whom they disagree.

The post A Free Speech Group at Columbia Canceled an Event About Free Speech Over 'Cornell 7' Article Controversy appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Liberal justice says recent decisions on redistricting and campaign finance have undermined democracy and polarized US even more

• US politics live – latest updates

Elena Kagan criticized rulings made by the US supreme court’s conservative majority this week, arguing that its recent decisions on redistricting and campaign finance had undermined America’s democracy.

“The court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works,” said Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, during a discussion at Catholic University’s law school in Washington DC on Tuesday, according to multiple reports.

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© Photograph: Finn Gomez/Getty Images

© Photograph: Finn Gomez/Getty Images

© Photograph: Finn Gomez/Getty Images

Since 1871, a federal statute has authorized Americans to sue state and local officials for violating their constitutional rights. But since 1982, thanks to the court-invented doctrine of qualified immunity, such claims have been allowed only when they allege violations of "clearly established" law.

Because courts often require plaintiffs to meet that standard by citing precedents involving closely similar facts, qualified immunity can prove insurmountable even for victims of outrageous abuses. But as two recent cases illustrate, there are limits to this license for misconduct, meaning officials may still be held accountable when they flout longstanding constitutional principles, even when they do so in novel ways.

In 2022, Mario Rosales and Gracie Lasyone sued two Alexandria, Louisiana, police officers, Samuel Terrell and Jim Lewis, alleging that they had pulled Rosales over without legal justification. The cops ordered Rosales and Lasyone, his girlfriend, out of the car and detained them for 21 minutes, during which they grilled the couple about illegal drugs, frisked Rosales, and instructed him to empty his pockets.

Terrell and Lewis sought refuge in qualified immunity. But last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Rosales and Lasyone had plausibly alleged several Fourth Amendment violations, including a stop based on a "fabricated traffic violation," an improperly prolonged detention, and unjustified searches.

In reaching that conclusion, the 5th Circuit relied mainly on a 1968 decision in which the Supreme Court said police may detain someone only if they reasonably suspect he is involved in criminal activity and may frisk him only if they reasonably suspect he is "armed and dangerous." Assuming the facts alleged in the lawsuit are true, the three-judge panel unanimously held, Terrell and Lewis had failed both of those tests.

When the officers stopped Rosales, the principles that the 5th Circuit applied had been the law of the land for more than half a century. Terrell and Lewis nevertheless argued that "any constitutional violation arising from the traffic stop was not clearly established," which gives you a sense of the chutzpah that qualified immunity invites.

Police commonly pull drivers over, ostensibly for traffic violations, in the hope of implicating them in drug crimes. A case that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit considered this month involved a much more unusual scenario: a judge who locked two children in jail cells because he was frustrated by their resistance to a parental custody decision.

During a 2019 hearing in Taney County, Missouri, a divorced couple agreed that the mother would have primary custody of their two children, then 12 and 14. But contrary to that agreement, the children did not want to go home with their mother, which led to an argument in the courthouse lobby.

Judge Eric Eighmy intervened, telling the children they had to leave with their mother and repeatedly warning them that they could end up in foster care if they refused to do so. When that did not work, Eighmy jailed them until they became more cooperative.

"The time spent in the holding-cell area was between twenty and forty minutes," the 8th Circuit noted. And since Eighmy did not have probable cause to believe the children had committed any offense, "much less one that justified placing them in a holding cell," the court said, their confinement clearly violated the Fourth Amendment.

If so, Eighmy argued, he had no way of knowing that. The 8th Circuit panel unanimously disagreed: "As we put it over a decade and a half ago, long before the events in this case, 'it is clearly established that a warrantless arrest, unsupported by probable cause, violates the Fourth Amendment.'"

Notably, the 8th Circuit did not think the bizarre details of the case counted in Eighmy's favor. "We are not concerned about the lack of a prior case" with "fundamentally similar" facts, it said. "Indeed, given how clear the law is, it would have been surprising to find one."

© Copyright 2026 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

The post 2 Recent Cases Illustrate the Limits of a Doctrine That Often Blocks Civil Rights Claims appeared first on Reason Magazine.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Monday that it will investigate living conditions inside the Washington, D.C. Jail following years of reports of filth, medical neglect, and brutality. 

The D.C. Jail, which holds all pretrial detainees and misdemeanor offenders in the District of Columbia, was the subject of an unflattering 2016 Reason cover story, "How Not to Build a Jail," describing how wretched conditions had persisted there for more than a century. Lawsuits, audits, and media investigations have all documented persistent civil rights problems. The jail gained additional infamy for holding pretrial detainees and convicted defendants who were prosecuted for their role in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol Building. 

The Justice Department received numerous allegations of excessive force, inadequate medical care, unsanitary living conditions, and malnutrition inside the jail, according to a department press release. The investigation will determine if D.C.'s Department of Corrections has a pattern or practice of violating prisoners' constitutional rights.

"The Constitution protects the rights of every incarcerated American, including those held in custody in our nation's capital," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a DOJ press release. "We are committed to upholding our federal civil rights laws so that no inmate is confined in unconstitutional conditions or subject to unconstitutional mistreatment at the District of Columbia Department of Corrections."

Last week, six current and former D.C. Jail inmates filed a class-action lawsuit alleging they found dead mice and cockroaches in their food.

Five different D.C. Jail inmates filed another lawsuit in September alleging guards failed to stop or adequately respond to a man in the jail's mental health unit from starting an electrical fire.

In 2021, the U.S. Marshals Service transferred roughly 400 inmates out of the D.C. Jail after a surprise inspection reported unacceptable living conditions, including guards withholding water and food from inmates as punishment.

A week before that inspection, a federal judge held the D.C. Department of Corrections in contempt for repeatedly failing to turn over the medical records of a January 6 defendant who had been waiting for months for a scheduled wrist surgery. 

The antiquated jail, opened in the 1970s, has numerous structural problems, but plans to replace it have stalled. In the meantime, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division will write a report to add to the top of the pile.

The post Justice Department Will Investigate Conditions at D.C. Jail After Years of Reports of Filth and Neglect appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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.

By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | October 15, 2026  

Canada’s Bill C-22, has passed the Canadian House of Commons and is currently being debated in the Canadian Senate, and Civil Liberties Organizations are raising the alarm bells over the unprecedented surveillance powers the bill gives to the Canadian security state.

The bill, as Kate Robertson, senior research associate at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, noted, “would empower the government to require surveillance capabilities be built into any communications technology in Canada that could be accessed by law enforcement, and to force the stockpiling of all Canadians’ sensitive metadata,” adding that “The law would apply to everything from smartphones to smartwatches, banking to health apps, video game platforms, and public WiFi or CCTV networks.”

The bill similarly “includes mandating that companies store user data for at least a year – even if the data isn’t something they would otherwise be keeping on hand for the purposes of their business”, “including location and transmission data”.

President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, John Carpay, noted that the bill not only forces these companies to gather mass data on Canadian civilians, but lowers the standard of proof needed to obtain them, noting that the bill “lowers the threshold for obtaining judicial approval for law enforcement to demand users’ subscriber information (name, address, email, IP address, account details, etc.) from ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ to ‘reasonable grounds to suspect.’”

The bill may even give the Canadian government the ability to turn on Microphones and Cameras in order to surveil citizens.

Leah West, an expert in national security law based at Carleton University, told a meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security that “C-22 would order companies to ‘provide the capabilities to turn on a remote microphone,’” adding that “So you could potentially have an order that would require that capability, and as long as it didn’t create a system vulnerability, then yes it could be implemented”.

Unsurprisingly, the bill has raised major alarm bells with Canadian civil liberties organizations.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Organization called the bill “the broadest expansion of government surveillance powers in recent Canadian history” and Matt Hatfield, Executive Director at OpenMedia, called it “the most invasive surveillance regime of any comparable democracy”.

Some of the alarm bells rung by the Canadian Civil Liberties Organization included the possibilities that the bill would:

– Pave the way for expanded information-sharing with the United States and numerous other governments including those with a history of abuse. Expansion of information-sharing with foreign governments in the absence of effective safeguards is particularly reckless at a time when cross-border persecution of diaspora communities—including through abuse of cross-border police cooperation tools—is on the rise.

– Give the government the power to force any electronic mechanism to build new surveillance tools and embed these at the core of their service, potentially transforming anything with a digital component into spyware. The mandated surveillance capability need not have anything to do with the actual functionality of the service in question. Backdoors like these also cannot be effectively limited to law enforcement access—Cybercriminals and foreign adversaries have repeatedly and successfully targeted the mass surveillance capabilities created by similar regimes. Overall, the proposal creates untenable privacy and cybersecurity risks.

– Lower the threshold for sensitive subscriber data, allowing government agencies to cast a wide net when conducting investigations; and

– the government the power to force any digital entity to keep highly sensitive information on every single person in Canada or abroad for up to one year. Information could include every single person’s location at any time over the course of the year, a complete record of everyone you interacted with online, and more. Bill C-22 includes no mechanism to place limits on who can access these data troves or for what purpose, making it potentially fair game for any and all criminal and civil investigations as well as for commercial exploitation by the private company being compelled to retain the data.

In an open letter over 25 leading Canadian civil society groups called the bill an “unprecedented and extraordinarily dangerous surveillance architecture that could impact every digital tool people in Canada depend on every day”,“the most expansive invasion of Canadian privacy rights in modern history” and “fundamentally a mass surveillance capabilities regime”.

It warned that under part 2 of the bill “the government could force the creation and installation of privacy-compromising surveillance tools and backdoors in an enormous and ill-defined set of ‘electronic service providers’, including telecom providers, social media and cloud service providers, AI tools, and any ‘smart’ device” adding that “The law could even be used to force Canadian companies to build backdoors into their products before they export them abroad” and that “The result creates an untenable threat to privacy and cybersecurity” even noting that it “far exceeds powers available to police and security agencies in the United States.”

It also noted that, “Part 2 of Bill C-22 will now also empower the government to require any digital service provider to record and retain detailed metadata on every single person in Canada or abroad, damaging the privacy of millions who are not suspected of committing any crime or posing any security threat,” adding that “companies will be forced to develop the capacity to track information that was never before available to them and is not necessary for their business purposes, then to collect and retain that information for up to one year.”

The Georgia officer responsible for killing a 1-year-old miniature donkey, HeeHaw, has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against him, claiming the body camera footage proves he "reasonably believed the donkey posed an imminent threat to a fellow officer." But even if it doesn't, the officer argues he is immune from liability. 

In the early morning hours of August 30, Hannah Michelle Israel was at her Cedartown home in western Georgia when she received a distressing phone call. A supervisor with the Cedartown Police Department "tersely informed [Israel] that a donkey on her property had been 'dispatched,'" according to her federal lawsuit. After some clarification, she learned that police had not only entered her enclosed private property in the middle of the night without permission while looking for a missing person, but also shot and killed her miniature donkey in the process. 

Israel immediately set out to search for her beloved pet, HeeHaw, only to find her bottle-raised donkey's lifeless body alone in her field. Israel told ABC7 News the incident has left her "traumatized and shocked." She continued, "I honestly can't even believe he's not here…There's no words."

Demanding accountability, Israel filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in September against the shooting officer, Officer Trenton Ryan Garner, for violating her Fourth Amendment rights and submitted a separate demand for $1 million from the City of Cedartown.  

Last week, Garner responded by asking the court to dismiss the case, arguing in part that he did not violate Israel's constitutional rights when he entered her property. Under the open fields doctrine, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in one's pastureland, even if enclosed. Further, the motion argues, exigent circumstances existed in the search for a missing 12-year-old girl. 

As far as HeeHaw is concerned, Garner claims he acted reasonably by using deadly force and argues the footage clearly shows HeeHaw "charging" and posing an "imminent threat to a fellow officer." 

However, the footage, posted by the Civil Rights Lawyer Raw, may not be so clear-cut. Garner's body camera was off at the time of the shooting but had a "rolling buffer of video," a recording without audio of the 30 seconds preceding activation of the camera, according to court documents. During the silent portion, two officers and a bloodhound are in front of Garner with flashlights in a dark field. A small donkey, roughly 3 feet tall, appears and slowly moves toward one of the officers. The officer backs away slowly, but the donkey moves closer and picks up speed. Garner pulls his gun and fires. The donkey turns and runs before falling over.

Whether Garner reasonably believed HeeHaw posed an imminent threat to his fellow officer may be up for debate.

When the audio kicks in, a fellow officer asks, "Why'd you shoot it up?" "I don't know," Garner responds rather nonchalantly before telling dispatch he had to shoot a donkey because "it was trying to attack." If another officer on the scene wasn't sure why Garner used deadly force, perhaps the decision wasn't so reasonable after all. 

In her lawsuit, Israel accuses Garner of needlessly killing HeeHaw "maliciously…and recklessly, with deliberate indifference…for [Israel's] constitutional rights." The suit continues: "No reasonable officer in…Garner's position would have believed that such force was necessary or justified." 

But whether Garner acted reasonably or not by shooting HeeHaw, qualified immunity may still shield him from accountability. Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that protects government actors from lawsuits alleging rights violations, unless the right is clearly established. In practice, that means plaintiffs must be able to point to a previous court ruling in a case with the same circumstances to show that the right was obvious to government officials. 

The bar can be quite high to show a right is clearly established. For example, in March, the Supreme Court reversed a 2nd Circuit decision in a case involving an officer who was sued for using a rear wristlock to arrest a protester. The 2nd Circuit denied qualified immunity, reasoning that a previous case from 2004 clearly established that rear wristlocks used to arrest anti-abortion protesters constitute excessive force. But the Court disagreed, stressing that "principles stated generally, such as that 'an officer may not use reasonable and excessive force,' do not suffice." 

And while there may be ample cases involving officers shooting pet dogs, cases involving miniature donkeys are in short supply. If the court finds that there is no clearly established rule that specifically prohibits officers from shooting a miniature donkey moving toward a fellow officer in the dark, the court may end up dismissing the case and sidestepping both the reasonableness and constitutional questions entirely.

The post Georgia Cop Who Shot a Miniature Donkey Says Body Camera Footage Shows an 'Imminent Threat' appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Al Mayadeen| October 15, 2026

Irish novelist Sally Rooney has agreed to the withdrawal of her books from the UK market after her support for Palestine Action created legal obstacles to the payment of royalties under British terrorism legislation.

Rooney, the bestselling author of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends”, said her publisher, Faber, had concluded that continuing to distribute her work in the UK could expose those involved to criminal liability. The decision was made with her agreement following consultations over the legal implications.

Palestine Action was designated a “terrorist organization” by the UK government in July 2025. The following month, Rooney publicly declared that she intended to continue supporting the group and direct proceeds from her book sales towards it. The organization remains legal in the Republic of Ireland, where Rooney is based.

Rooney was prepared to accept the consequences

In a statement to The Guardian, Rooney explained that her position had placed the publication of her work in Britain at risk.

She said that after expressing her intention to support Palestine Action, fulfilling contracts to publish her books in the UK could constitute a serious criminal offence. Rooney added that she had been transparent about her convictions and was prepared to accept the consequences.

The novelist had previously cancelled a planned UK visit to collect an award over concerns that she could face arrest because of her stated support for the banned group.

Terrorism legislation threatens publishing arrangements

Rooney warned in a statement supporting the legal challenge against the ban that the proscription could prevent her existing books from remaining available in British shops and block the publication of future titles in the country. Her submission to the High Court raised concerns about the consequences for freedom of expression.

The restrictions also extend to royalties from television adaptations of her work. Last year, Rooney said the independent producer behind the BBC adaptations of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends” had advised her that paying her could breach terrorism legislation if it knew or suspected she would use the money to finance Palestine Action. Both series aired before the group was banned.

Section 15 of the UK’s Terrorism Act criminalizes providing money or other property when a person knows or has reasonable grounds to suspect that it may be used for terrorist purposes. A conviction can carry a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

Faber, which publishes Rooney in the UK and Ireland, said the legislation had left it unable to transfer earnings from British sales to the author.

The publisher said selling a writer’s work without being able to pay them was unacceptable. It confirmed that, with Rooney’s full agreement, it would stop supplying her books in Britain in every format, while continuing to publish and sell her work in other markets.

Bestselling novels face uncertain future in Britain

Rooney’s novels have received widespread critical acclaim and achieved substantial commercial success. She has been hailed as a voice of her generation.

“Normal People” has sold more than one million copies in the UK, while “Conversations With Friends” and “Beautiful World, Where Are You” have each exceeded 500,000 sales.

The BBC adaptations also attracted large audiences. “Normal People” accumulated 62.7 million views, making it the broadcaster’s most-streamed series of 2020.

Demand was likely to continue

Despite the withdrawal decision, copies of Rooney’s books remained available in central London on Wednesday afternoon. Waterstones said retailers could continue selling copies already in stock.

Booksellers also indicated that they intended to keep offering the novels while existing supplies lasted.

Gian Carlo, a bookseller at Henry Pordes Books, said the shop could sell its copies without generating royalties for Rooney. He added that he understood her position.

At London Review Bookshop, bookseller John Clegg said he had ordered additional copies after learning of the development. He said demand was likely to continue, although the shop would no longer be able to replenish its stock through Faber. Clegg also criticized the legislation and said he hoped the case would encourage the Home Office to reconsider it.

Thousands arrested following Palestine Action ban

The dispute comes amid a wider legal battle over the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action.

More than 3,700 people are believed to have been arrested in the UK since the ban took effect in July 2025 on suspicion of supporting the organization. Many arrests involved people holding placards bearing the message: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

Approximately 2,500 people have been charged. However, trials have not proceeded while the legal challenge to the proscription remains unresolved. The case is scheduled to reach the Supreme Court next month.

Effect of the ban on freedom of expression

Most arrests and charges have involved Section 13 of the Terrorism Act, which carries a maximum prison sentence of six months.

Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action leading the legal challenge, said Rooney’s inability to publish her work in Britain demonstrated the effect of the ban on freedom of expression.

Ammori said Rooney had maintained her position despite the personal and professional consequences. She argued that the author’s books should remain widely available rather than disappear from British shelves because of her refusal to abandon her support for Palestinians.

She added that writers should not have to choose between their political convictions and their ability to publish their work.

A Missouri judge who locked two children in jail cells because he was frustrated by their resistance to a parental custody decision is liable for violating their Fourth Amendment rights, a federal appeals court ruled this week. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit rejected Taney County Judge Eric Eighmy's claim that he was shielded by qualified immunity, a doctrine that blocks federal civil rights claims unless they allege a violation of "clearly established" law.

"A reasonable judge should have known better," Judge David Stras writes in an opinion joined by the two other members of the 8th Circuit panel. "The law was 'clearly established' enough" to "place the issue 'beyond debate.'"

Institute for Justice attorney Dylan Moore, who wrote an 8th Circuit brief arguing against immunity for Eighmy and participated in oral arguments, welcomed the decision. "Every reasonable person knows that a judge can't throw children in jail for no good reason," he said. "Yet Judge Eighmy claimed qualified immunity shielded him from accountability anyway because no prior case told him that imprisoning innocent kids is unconstitutional. That defense is ridiculous, and we are thrilled that the court saw through it. When government officials commit such obvious constitutional violations, qualified immunity should never enter the picture."

The incident at the center of the case happened after an October 2019 custody hearing involving Kadan Rockett, then 14, and his 12-year-old sister, Brooklyn, who had achieved a modicum of fame as magicians performing on America's Got Talent. Their divorced parents, Bart Rockett and Kami Ballard, agreed that Ballard, who at that point lived in Missouri, would have primary custody of the children, while Rockett, who was living in California, would be "responsible for them at the beginning of each month and 'during TV pilot season.'" But Kadan and Brooklyn did not want to go home with their mother, which led to an argument in the lobby of the courthouse.

Eighmy intervened, telling Kadan and Brooklyn to come with him to a conference room, where he informed them that they had to leave with Ballard. "The children would not budge, even after the judge mentioned that the other option was foster care," Stras notes. "Frustrated, Judge Eighmy had the children follow him again, this time to a waiting area in the courthouse's juvenile division." A few minutes later, Eighmy "led them down a hallway to two holding cells."

Outside the cells, Eighmy again threatened Kadan and Brooklyn with foster care, but they were still unmoved. "Lock them up," the judge told an officer, who "patted them down and ordered them to remove their socks and shoes" before confining them in separate cells.

It is not clear exactly how much time Kadan and Brooklyn spent in the cells. The Institute for Justice says "about an hour," while Stras says "the time spent in the holding-cell area was between twenty and forty minutes." In any case, the children's respect for Eighmy's authority had improved by the time he came back. He "asked them one more time whether they would leave with their mother," Stras writes. "This time, they both nodded yes, so he let them go."

In June 2021, Rockett, the children's father, sued Eighmy on their behalf under 42 USC 1983, which authorizes claims against state or local officials who violate constitutional rights under color of law. In his motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Eighmy argued that he was protected by judicial immunity, which is absolute with respect to a judge's official duties. U.S. District Judge Douglas Harpool disagreed, and the 8th Circuit affirmed that ruling in 2023, noting that Kadan and Brooklyn were beyond Eighmy's contempt power because they were not parties to the custody case and that "judges do not do double duty as jailers."

Eighmy reiterated his judicial immunity claim in a motion for summary judgment, and Harpool rejected it again. After the trial began, Eighmy claimed qualified immunity twice, once after all the evidence had been submitted and again after the jury's verdict in favor of Kadan and Brooklyn. Harpool denied him that defense both times.

The jury ultimately awarded Kadan and Brooklyn $5,000 each in damages, and Harpool added about $327,000 in attorney fees. Eighmy appealed again, reiterating his judicial immunity claim. But the appeals court ruled that he had abandoned that argument by failing to raise it during the trial or after the verdict. So Eighmy was left with qualified immunity, which the appeals court said he did not deserve.

Eighmy clearly violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable seizures, Stras says, because he "did not have 'probable cause to believe that [the children had] committed' an offense, much less one that justified placing them in a holding cell. Rather, their only misdeed was one every parent knows well: resisting authority. Even in the context of legal-custody proceedings, refusing to leave with a parent is not a jailable offense. Nor were there 'exigent circumstances' arising out of danger to themselves or others."

Did Eighmy's authority as a judge give him extra leeway? Nope. "Criminal contempt was off the table because the children were neither parties to the custody case nor present inside the courtroom," Stras notes. "Nor could the power to punish a party for violating an injunction have provided the justification, given that Judge Eighmy never issued one."

Eighmy's motive for jailing the children does not change that analysis. "We have no doubt that Judge Eighmy believed he was acting in 'good faith,' and possibly even in the children's best interests, by detaining them," Stras writes. "But good faith in the Fourth Amendment context is about reasonable reliance, either on binding appellate precedent or a warrant issued by a 'neutral magistrate.'"

What about Eighmy's argument that he had no way of knowing his actions were unconstitutional? "The law in this area" was "clearly established," Stras says. "'[I]t would have been sufficiently clear [to] every reasonable official,' Judge Eighmy included, that locking up two children for refusing to follow directions violated the Fourth Amendment. As we put it over a decade and a half ago, long before the events in this case, '[i]t is clearly established that a warrantless arrest, unsupported by probable cause, violates the Fourth Amendment."

That principle was so well established, in fact, that Kadan and Brooklyn, neither of whom had attended law school, took it for granted. "I don't know how you have a right to lock us up," Kadan told Eighmy when he threatened to jail them, according to Rockett's amended complaint. "We have done nothing wrong." The complaint says Brooklyn raised the same point. "How can you just lock up kids?" she asked. "This isn't legal. We've done nothing wrong."

Given Eighmy's obvious disregard for Kadan and Brooklyn's Fourth Amendment rights, "we are not concerned about the lack of a prior case" with "fundamentally similar" facts, Stras says. "Indeed, given how clear the law is, it would have been surprising to find one." He quotes an observation that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch made as a 10th Circuit judge: "Sometimes the most obviously unlawful things happen so rarely that a case on point is itself an unusual thing."

The post The 8th Circuit Rejects Qualified Immunity for a Judge Who Jailed 2 Kids for 'Refusing To Follow Directions' 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."

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In Other Legal News

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in two cases that are worth keeping track of.

• On Tuesday, the justices weighed the matter of Beaird v. United States, which 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 a federal criminal defendant's sentencing. You can read this newsletter's past coverage of that case here.
• On Wednesday, the justices took on the matter of Salazar v. Paramount Global, which asks whether the website 247Sports violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 when it shared a user's private information, including what videos he watched, with Facebook. Past Injustice System coverage of that case is available here.

The post Jury Nullification Is Not a Crime appeared first on Reason Magazine.

RT | October 14, 2026

Foreign nationals have filled 80% of new UK jobs over the past decade, while millions of Britons have remained on out-of-work benefits, according to a new report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ).

The UK think tank said on Tuesday that British nationals accounted for just 734,000 of the 3.7 million jobs added to payrolls between 2014 and the end of 2025. EU nationals accounted for 408,000 new jobs, while migrants from the rest of the world filled around 2.5 million.

“Employers have gained unprecedented access to overseas labour while taxpayers have absorbed the growing cost of domestic worklessness,” the report said.

The findings are part of a major inquiry chaired by former UK Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. The report argues that successive governments have relied on low-skilled migrant labor while millions of Britons have been “written off” by the welfare system.

Since 2020, payroll employment among non-EU nationals has surged by 2.1 million, while the number of people claiming out-of-work benefits has risen by 2.3 million. Much of the employment growth was concentrated in health and social care, administrative services, hospitality and retail.

“Compounding this, ministers have repeatedly pulled the easy lever of immigration rather than providing a better deal for left behind communities,” Duncan Smith said, urging coordinated reforms to welfare, immigration and regional development.

Around 6.7 million people in England, Wales and Scotland now receive at least one out-of-work benefit, equivalent to roughly one in six working-age adults, according to the CSJ. Since 2019, the number of claimants exempt from requirements to seek or prepare for work has climbed by nearly 1.7 million.

Annual spending on working-age benefits is projected to reach £136.1 billion ($181 billion) in 2026-27.

The report comes amid mounting political pressure over immigration. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has repeatedly accused successive governments of favoring migrants and minorities over the white working class, demanding tighter border controls and denouncing what he calls a “two-tier” system of unequal treatment.

Britain has also struggled to stop illegal crossings of the English Channel. Some 33,374 people arrived in small boats in the year ending June 2026, down 23% from the previous year, according to the Home Office. The crossings accounted for 88% of detected arrivals via illegal routes.

Public concern remains widespread. An August YouGov poll found that 69% of Britons believed immigration over the previous decade has been too high, while 43% considered it mostly bad for the country, up from 33% in 2016.

Imagine getting a bill from your local government for $900,000 because they see a greenhouse on your property and just assume you're growing marijuana without a permit.

Imagine government demanding $400,000 because you didn't know to fill out a single-page form.

Or you get slapped with a $100,000 fine for parking your car on your own property.

It sounds absurd, but as my newest video shows, that's really happening.

How can that be? Doesn't America's Constitution say government may not impose "excessive fines"?

It happens because some bureaucrats, savoring their power, act like tyrants.

At least now there is hope for a remedy. One of these excessive fine cases has reached the Supreme Court.

Ken Jouppi worked as a pilot in Alaska for 30 years, until one day, state troopers stopped his plane before takeoff.

"I didn't think we had anything to hide," he says. "They searched the airplane, opened up this lady's boxes of groceries and found beer."

Transporting beer. That was his crime.

"Isn't beer legal in America?" I ask Jouppi's lawyer, Mike Greenberg.

"In most places," he replies. But some towns in Alaska ban beer.

Jouppi was convicted of bootlegging.

Every pilot must know which town has what rule, and search everybody?

"They think pilots should search people's luggage," says Jouppi. "It was such a terrible thing to do to another individual, invade their privacy, and assault their dignity….I just didn't feel right about doing that."

Alaskan officials say the beer was visible, so Jouppi should have known about it. They jailed him for three days and seized his plane.

"That airplane was my primary source of income," says Jouppi. "Without it, I didn't have a business anymore."

I assumed such excessive punishment would be dismissed quickly by a court. But it wasn't.

"Jouppi has been fighting to keep his plane for 14 years," says Greenberg. "The plane is still sitting on a tarmac….It's a ludicrous situation where the state has every interest in going after valuable assets rather than actually fighting supposed harms of alcohol."

Greenberg's law firm, the Institute for Justice, took Jouppi's case, and now the U.S. Supreme Court will hear it.

I hope he wins. It's just wrong when governments destroy lives for small mistakes.

They're also doing that to Tuncay Saydam, a retired professor.

The IRS demands he pay $400,000 because he didn't know to fill out a one-page form about an old bank account in his native Turkey.

"The fines," says Saydam, "will destroy my life….We have never been rich."

His unpaid tax is less than $30,000. But the IRS demands he pay them more than $400,000. A California court upheld that penalty. Northern Californian Chief Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu wrote, "Government suffered a significant tax loss."

Finally, bureaucrats in Humboldt County, California, took aerial photos of people's property to search for unlicensed marijuana farms.

When they saw greenhouses, they fined property owners.

Blu Graham was fined $900,000, "$30,000 a day, when all I've ever done is grow vegetables in my greenhouses."

"There actually was no marijuana on the property!" says Greenberg. "They were just guessing that if you built a greenhouse, this must be connected to marijuana."

Finally, a lawsuit got the county to promise to end its ruinous fine system.

But it took four years.

Why do governments fight to keep outrageous fines that punish largely innocent people?

"Unlike other forms of punishment," says Greenberg, "fines make the government money. The prosecutor's office, state troopers, they get to keep the proceeds. It's an abusive system because they have every incentive to continue to prosecute."

I invited the heavy-fining judges and government lawyers to appear in my video to explain these fines. None would agree to talk about it.

Bureaucrats always want more money. It's a reason the Constitution prohibits excessive fines.

I trust that the Supreme Court will put a stop to these abuses.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post How Local Governments Turn Minor Violations Into Financial Ruin appeared first on Reason Magazine.

If a treatment can improve your health, does that give the government the right to force it onto you? Should the state compel people with diabetes to take insulin, patients with hypertension to take their medications, or people with obesity to lose weight?

Most Americans would recoil at such proposals. Yet when it comes to people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, many people seem willing to make an exception.

A physician who administers treatment to a competent adult against the patient's will violates one of medicine's most fundamental ethical principles: informed consent. Why should that principle carry less weight when the doctor is a psychiatrist? Yet in a recent City Journal article, Stephen Eide and Valerie Franchitti of the Manhattan Institute argue that public support for involuntary psychiatric treatment reflects a welcome recognition of its potential benefits.

Strangely, the article entirely avoids the concept of informed consent. Where it acknowledges any limitations to involuntary treatment at all, it considers only the possibility that coercive treatment may increase stigma against mental illness.  

But the more fundamental objection is liberty. A psychiatric diagnosis does not extinguish your right to control your body. Competent adults have the right to decide what substances they consume, which medical treatments they accept, and what risks they take, even when others consider their choices unwise or self-destructive. As the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote in 1997, "I oppose involuntary psychiatric interventions not because I believe that they are necessarily 'bad' for patients but because I oppose using the coercive apparatus of the state to impose psychiatric relations on persons against their will."

Eide and Franchitti write, "The public is right to suspect that involuntary treatment can be effective." They cite data from the New York State Office of Mental Health showing substantial reductions in hospitalization, incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, and suicide attempts following enrollment under Kendra's Law, which mandates outpatient psychiatric treatment. Yet these data do not establish that coercion caused those improvements. Participants also received increased access to psychiatric services, case management, and other support. Without adequately separating the effects of those services from the effects of coercion itself, the reported improvements cannot establish that compulsory treatment was responsible.

The authors also justify involuntary psychiatric treatment by citing subway attacks, mass shootings, and other violent incidents. But there is a fundamental difference between holding people accountable for violating others' rights and confining them because they might become dangerous. Communities can enforce laws against assault, trespassing, and public nuisance without criminalizing homelessness or mental illness.

Moreover, involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital or rehabilitation facility—sometimes for prolonged periods—deprives people of their liberty without a criminal conviction. Although civil commitment involves judicial procedures and opportunities for review, continued confinement may depend heavily on mental health professionals' assessments of whether patients meet release criteria. As Szasz warned, coercive psychiatrists can thus function as "judges and jailers not physicians and healers."

Severe mental illness can impair decision-making, sometimes profoundly, but diagnosis and incapacity are not the same. Even among psychiatric inpatients housed for severe mental illness, a meta-review of the research at BMC Psychiatry shows, most retain the capacity to make treatment decisions. Outside of hospitalized patients, decision-making capacity is even higher. 

The legal scholar Elyn Saks, who has lived with schizophrenia, brings both personal experience and academic expertise to the debate over involuntary psychiatric treatment. Having experienced involuntary hospitalization, physical restraints, and forced medication, Saks has questioned the assumption that mental illness justifies overriding patients' wishes. In her book Refusing Care she examines the ethical and legal problems posed by involuntary hospitalization, forced medication, and physical restraints. Saks and the psychiatrist Dilip Jeste have also reviewed empirical research on decision-making capacity among people with psychiatric and substance use disorders, analyzing how capacity varies among individuals and how clinicians can assess and enhance patients' ability to make informed decisions. 

Though the medical field has developed structured interviews with standardized scores for mental incapacity, doctors can disagree on assessment. Mental capacity is also decision-specific and time-specific, not a permanent status attached to a diagnosis. That same BMC Psychiatry review of the literature describes the impairments seen in psychosis as "temporal, identifiable, and responsive to interventions," such as presenting information in simpler terms. 

Even when incapacity can be established, we must adhere to the principle of least restrictive intervention. Any intervention must be justified by the circumstances, limited to what is necessary, and designed to preserve as much individual freedom as possible. Compulsory treatment takes different forms, each imposing distinct restrictions on individual liberty. Assisted outpatient treatment allows people to remain in the community but subjects them to a court order governing treatment. Involuntary inpatient commitment deprives people of their physical liberty through hospitalization, while forced medication goes further by overriding bodily autonomy. So impaired decision-making capacity does not automatically justify confinement, let alone forced medication.

Medication can reduce psychotic symptoms, and some psychiatric patients who initially refuse treatment later believe it helped them. But evidence that medication works is not the same as evidence that compulsion produces better outcomes than voluntary treatment, particularly when a person's decision-making capacity may improve as an acute episode subsides.

In 2024, a scoping review in the journal Psychiatry, Psychology and Law found mixed evidence of benefits and harms from involuntary inpatient treatment. Patients admitted involuntarily often experienced improvements in symptoms and functioning, but they also tended to enter treatment with more severe illness, making it difficult to determine how much of the improvement resulted from compulsory intervention itself. Involuntary admission was also associated with higher financial costs and worse patient experiences, including feelings of coercion, loss of freedom, and lower satisfaction. In 2018, The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry published a systematic review of coercive measures; it found that patient experiences were predominantly negative and frequently involved adverse consequences. Overall, no consistent evidence shows that involuntary treatment itself causally improves outcomes, although it unquestionably restricts patients' freedom and imposes costs on taxpayers.

These concerns are compounded by a health care system that financially incentivizes psychiatric overdiagnosis and overmedication, regardless of whether additional interventions yield commensurate benefits for patients.

The difficult case arises when a person genuinely cannot reason about treatment options or communicate an informed choice, and when delaying intervention creates an immediate risk of harm. In such cases, the ethical principle should be the same as elsewhere in medicine: Temporary treatment may be justified when informed consent cannot be obtained, using an advance directive or surrogate when available, and only to the minimal extent necessary to manage the emergency and restore the patient's ability to decide. A credible, imminent threat to another person presents a separate public-safety justification for state intervention. But even support for those types of emergency interventions is not the same as support for broad, long-term involuntary psychiatric treatment based on supposed mental incapacity.

City Journal frequently advocates free markets, individual liberty, and limits on government intervention. Yet these writers appear willing to grant the state considerable authority over people's medical decisions without adequately distinguishing those who lack decision-making capacity from those who retain it. If we distrust government officials to make economic decisions for us, why should we trust them to make decisions about our bodies and medical care?

The post Mental Illness Doesn't Cancel Your Right to Say No 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.

George Anibowei, a U.S. citizen, is a Texas-based immigration attorney with many clients battling the Department of Homeland Security. Border agents have searched his phone at least five times without a warrant as he returned to the United States.

In the first search, agents copied the phone's entire contents, including his confidential communications with clients. The government still has that data, and Anibowei still doesn't know why it was kept or who has seen it. He now leaves his work phone at home when he travels.

On September 29, the Supreme Court asked the federal government to respond to Anibowei's petition, which asks whether the Fourth Amendment lets border agents search the contents of a phone without a warrant. (I'm one of his lawyers.) The government waived its response, expecting the Court would deny the petition without a second look.

But in 2021, the solicitor general told the Court that this very question had produced an "entrenched circuit conflict" of "considerable practical importance." The conflict has only deepened since. Seven federal appeals courts now hold that a warrant is never required to search a phone at the border, while the 4th and 9th Circuits require one in at least some cases. That means one of your constitutional rights currently depends on which airport you fly into.

While circuit courts may disagree, the Supreme Court has already shown the best answer for this question. In Riley v. California (2014), the Court unanimously held that police generally need a warrant to search the phone of someone they arrest. There is an exception for searches incident to arrest, which allows the police to arrest someone without a warrant; that exists to protect officers and preserve evidence. Data can't hurt an officer, and a phone can be secured while police get a warrant. An extension of an old exception to digital data, the court said, "has to rest on its own bottom." Treating a phone like any other container in an arrestee's pockets was like saying "a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon."

The border-search exception fails the same test. Those searches exist to collect duties, keep out people who may not enter, and stop contraband. But duties attach to physical goods, not data. And as the legal scholar Orin Kerr has put it, agents "will not find a person smuggled inside a computer hard drive." As for digital contraband, anyone who wants illicit files can carry a clean phone and download them after clearing customs. Suspicionless phone searches burden millions of innocent travelers while barely inconveniencing smugglers.

The appeals courts that disagree mostly cite one another. But the Supreme Court rejected a lopsided lower-court consensus in Riley, and again in Carpenter v. United States (2018). Counting courts is not a constitutional argument.

Defenders of these searches lean on history. In United States v. Ramsey (1977), the Court noted that the first Congress authorized warrantless customs searches in 1789, less than two months before it proposed the Fourth Amendment. True enough. But that statute let officers search ships for hidden dutiable goods. To search a house, store, or other building for the same goods, officers needed a warrant. And nothing in the statute let officers read a traveler's papers.

That distinction was no accident. Customs abuses had helped spark the Revolution. Writs of assistance gave British customs officers blanket authority to search wherever they pleased, which James Otis said placed "the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer." And the founding generation guarded letters especially closely. Benjamin Franklin, as the first postmaster general, made postal workers swear they would not open mail without an express written warrant.

Even Ramsey, the government's favorite border search precedent, respected that distinction. It upheld opening international mail to look for contraband, but the regulations before the court flatly prohibited reading correspondence without a warrant, a point the justices stressed repeatedly. The Court has never held that border agents may read a traveler's papers without a warrant. A phone holds years of correspondence. It deserves at least the same protection the Founders gave a sealed envelope.

Last month, however, the 2nd Circuit joined those courts that have disregarded this tradition. In United States v. Alisigwe, Judge Steven Menashi wrote that agents need no suspicion whatsoever to search a traveler's property at the border, phones included. A border search becomes non-routine, he reasoned, only when it intrudes on the person, as a strip search does. A phone is property, so searching it is routine.

Judge Eunice Lee concurred, agreeing that no warrant was required. But she warned that the majority's rule permits suspicionless searches for any reason, "including political or discriminatory ones."

The Alisigwe majority's premise miscasts the Fourth Amendment. The amendment's text secures "persons, houses, papers, and effects" in a single, unranked list. The abuses that produced the amendment were searches of property, including private papers. Agents may properly physically examine a phone to ensure it's not really a container for smuggling contraband. But reading or viewing its digital contents without a warrant trespasses on a person's papers and effects. The framers protected property because they recognized that human beings are not ghosts: We live in the physical world by exercising our property rights, and so searching our property can reveal much about our lives.

Alisigwe is the latest word from a Court of Appeals, but it contains complications for the constitutional issue. The trial court found that agents had reasonable suspicion, so the no-suspicion holding arguably wasn't needed to decide the case. That suspicion involved a forged passport, which goes to identity and admissibility, the core of border authority. Finally, Alisigwe was a permanent resident, not a citizen, so the government's interest in deciding who may enter was heightened.

Anibowei is simple on each of these counts, which is why one can be hopeful the Supreme Court will take it and address the Fourth Amendment question now. Anibowei is a naturalized citizen, no one suspects him of anything, and he challenges the government's search policies directly rather than seeking suppression of evidence in a criminal case. As the 5th Circuit itself acknowledged, his case "turns squarely and solely" on the warrant question.

The stakes keep growing. In FY 2025, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) searched 55,318 electronic devices, nearly 11 times as many as in 2012—and nearly a quarter of those searches targeted U.S. citizens. According to the directives Anibowei challenges, agents may keep what they find and share it with federal, state, local, and foreign agencies. Investigators have learned to wait for a target to travel and ask CBP to search his phone on the way back in, rather than go to the trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. No wonder universities, bar associations, and press freedom groups now advise travelers to leave their devices at home.

The Founders rebelled against customs officers who could search wherever they pleased and read whatever they found. A rule letting border agents scroll through a citizen's correspondence, photos, and client files without a warrant, or any suspicion at all, revives that power. The Supreme Court should take Anibowei's case. Our papers don't lose Fourth Amendment protections at the border just because they're digital.

The post Are Warrantless Phone Searches at the Border Constitutional? The Supreme Court May Soon Decide. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

RT | October 8, 2026

Brussels is steering Europe toward totalitarianism and a “Euro-Gestapo” while lecturing Russia on democracy, Slovak MEP Lubos Blaha has warned.

Blaha made the remarks during a European Parliament debate on Tuesday, responding to EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, who denounced Russia’s recent parliamentary elections as undemocratic.

The politician questioned why Brussels was focusing on Russia while cracking down on dissent within the bloc.

He cited arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters in Germany and the imprisonment of Estonian opposition figures, who he claimed were jailed for opposing war with Russia.

“Are you going to set up the Euro-Gestapo here, Mrs. Kallas, and lock up everyone who wants peace?” he asked.

The Slovak lawmaker also questioned why Brussels was debating Russia’s elections while Europe faced mounting unrest.

“You may not have noticed, but Spain is in the streets, France is in the streets, and you are here dealing with Russian elections. You must be joking,” he said.

Blaha went on to accuse Brussels of double standards over Ukraine’s suspended presidential elections.

“You blame the Russians for having elections, but you don’t mind that [Ukraine’s Vladimir] Zelensky has been governing for three years without any elections, without a mandate,” he said. “You are hypocrites!”

Zelensky’s presidential term expired in May 2024, but elections have remained suspended under martial law.

Blaha also cited the annulment of Romania’s 2024 presidential election, claiming the vote was canceled because “the wrong candidate won.” Romania’s Constitutional Court scrapped the result over alleged irregularities and accusations of Russian interference after EU- and NATO-skeptic Calin Georgescu won the first round. Pro-EU candidate Nicusor Dan won the rerun in May 2025.

The MEP argued that Russia had held elections despite the ongoing conflict and daily Ukrainian missile and drone attacks on its territory.

The September poll saw the ruling United Russia party win nearly 58% of the party-list vote.

Blaha also defended Russian President Vladimir Putin, contrasting his popularity with that of Western European leaders.

“You have nothing to criticize Putin for, Mrs. Kallas,” he declared. “Unlike you and your Merzes and Macrons, he has the support of his own population.”

Recent polls have put German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s approval rating at a record low of 10% in October, while French President Emmanuel Macron’s support fell to 17% in September. Neither Kallas nor European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was directly elected to her current position by voters, having assumed office through the EU’s institutional appointment process.

Blaha belongs to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer-SD party, which opposes EU sanctions on Russia and has criticized Western military assistance to Ukraine.

MEMO | October 6, 2026

Paris police chief Patrice Faure on Tuesday banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration planned for Wednesday, the third anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in Israel, over “risks of public disorder,” Anadolu reports.

“At the request of Interior Minister Laurent Nunez, I issued an order banning a demonstration ‘against the genocide in Gaza and for respect for the ceasefire’ in Paris on Wednesday,” Faure said on US social media platform X.

He noted that such a demonstration could pose “significant risks of public disorder,” citing a “high terrorist threat” and antisemitic acts that “remain at historically high levels” across France.

“In light of this, and in view of all the risks identified, it is my responsibility to ensure everyone’s safety. I have therefore decided to ban this demonstration,” Faure added.

Israel’s genocidal war launched three years ago in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 people, injured many more and destroyed most of the enclave’s infrastructure.

By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 6, 2026

Ian Proud’s arrest by secret police at a London airport marks a new low in how far the deep state can go to control a false narrative. But it also shows a new level of fear.

As mad as it sounds, it does appear that Western European nations at least are preparing themselves to go to war with Russia at some point in the not-too-distant future. What is particularly worrying is there seems to be a distinct vacuum in all areas of what we could broadly call ‘media’ in questioning this narrative. Thirty years ago it was considered normal for journalists to be the source of vexing questions towards state actors and to generally be a pain in the arse as they questioned every decision made and every idea presented. It was our job to be anti-establishment and to take a very cynical view of “policy”. There was nothing remarkable about this. It was what we did. Being despised by the greater powers was part of the job; working anti-social hours and having few friends also came with it.

Today there are no journalists in what we call ‘mainstream’ media doing this. They have been replaced by younger, more social-media-savvy ‘content creators’ who believe that journalism is more or less a grammatical role, where the raw material is handed to you with all the information therein, and the role of the journalist is simply to refine it to the style of the day for mass consumption.

The danger of this transition is that nearly all of what we are being presented with as news is actually fake, or at best heavily redacted to keep the masses where the elite want them to be: restrained, prepped and misinformed.

The Ukraine war is an excellent example. The main reason why people in the U.S. and UK are so fabulously biased against Russia and are so sympathetic towards the corrupt elite in Kiev is that for years they have been brainwashed with ‘news’ about Russia which has been negative and which cunningly feeds a racist bias – a prejudice which has been cultivated over at least a decade, if not more. The result is that now a number of lies have become established in newsrooms where journalists, even those who know, simply navigate around nuance and present a fairy-tale story, designed to be understood by the masses who have no other sources of information to even question it.

Just recently, Western news outlets reported a “plague” in Russia, with stories about a “lockdown”, following a case of a worker in a laboratory dying of pneumonia in circumstances which are still not certain. Western media, as part of their role to keep Russia-phobia at its peak, are so locked and loaded that their ‘hair-trigger’ reactions to bad news stories from Russia are understandable. They are also hungry for clickbait, and such stories feed a starved audience which has already had its first fix of such COVID hysteria stories and wants more. The truth is entirely immaterial. Hysteria and lies are what’s being fed at a feverish rate by ‘content creators’ red in tooth and claw, foaming at the mouth with their desire to serve the deep state and the elites who have invested so much in an agenda.

The contrast between Russia and the West is interesting, though, when we look at media. In Russia just recently, the BBC correspondent based in Moscow made the internet buzz on social media with his short interview with Russia’s foreign minister, who was kind enough to answer his loaded question about Russia’s war ideology with Ukraine. What absolutely no one noted was how Russia is happy to accommodate foreign journalists who have such a distinct agenda to feed the Russia-phobia back home, while Russian journalists have been banned in those EU capitals for years. Old Europe, which once held such values as a free press so dearly, has adopted the Soviet model, while Russia is actually more advanced when it comes to such tenets of what we expect in a democracy. Russia has no fear of the awkward questions, unlike the West.

We should be asking ourselves who really benefits from a war with Russia.

Is it too sceptical and ‘conspiracy theorising’ to assume that the industrial military complex has been successfully lobbying for such a war for AT LEAST a decade, and critically, it succeeded in convincing the intelligence and military establishment in the UK to use its leverage with media to provide journalists with the raw material which enhances a prejudice against Russia?

Normally such an idea could be dismissed as pure nonsense. But just consider how far the UK, for example, has gone to eradicate all media coverage which could be deemed as at least leaning towards Russia – or even simply just holding the UK government to account by asking the questions that British journalists have stopped asking. If the elite in the UK who control the loss-making newspapers (think about that) are so sure of their rationale that Russia is the enemy whom we must go to war with, why are they so terrified of journalists – or anyone, for that matter – simply holding a view which questions the narrative?

I can’t be the only Western pundit who believes that double agents Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were not poisoned with nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018, which was reported at the time as “sparking a huge diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia”. Isn’t the real story that British security chiefs decided, upon discovering that Sergei Skripal was actually a triple agent who was feeding information back to Moscow, that he was dispensable? And what better way to supposedly teach the Russians a lesson, while blaming Moscow for his death, than to murder him and his daughter using a nerve agent which either was Novichok – which a British lab just down the road from where the Skripals lived had conveniently sitting in a fridge – or a similar poison? What’s important to note about Novichok is that the victims usually die instantly upon contact with it. What is likely is that the Skripals were not poisoned by the Russian drug but a British version of another nerve agent. It is a shocking example of how poor British journalism is that hacks in the UK simply report the Skripal incident of Novichok poisoning without a single shred of evidence to back it up. They don’t even add a note of scepticism in their reporting about the drug and who is “claiming” that it is Novichok.

We see the same shocking level of atrocious, biased reporting about the Ukraine war, which the British public were simply told through the media narrative was an “invasion” by Putin’s army. No background, no nuance, no glimpse of Russia’s perspective, as no one can cope, it would seem, with the story being clouded by facts.

And it’s the same with the Russia “plague” story, as it was with the RAF base “attack” story recently, which was probably just local thieves buying contraband gasoline from corrupt U.S./UK soldiers looking to make a quick buck at the UK base. Notice how quickly Trump used the story as a basis to move all U.S. bombers off the base and back to U.S. soil, where they are completely useless in his so-called Middle East war. For Trump it was an opportunity for another media stunt which keeps him on the front pages and everyone guessing. He was probably grateful to the British for being offered the raw material. Another problem of this new generation of journalists is how compliant they are to report “news” which isn’t news at all, but just material used as a distraction, one day at a time. Trump is a master at manipulating media with this game, usually saying something so stupid and so controversial, which draws journalists away from doing real journalism. If you can occupy journalists with writing up stories about the latest idiotic comment or statement by Trump, then you control them as you control their time.

Just look at how the Epstein story is not being reported and investigated. How Trump got off scot-free, as since February 28th journalists’ attention was diverted to the war with Iran – which is one of the reasons why Trump keeps this story alive with constant troop movements and talk of a massive attack after midterms. People have not made the link with the Epstein material being leaked and the war with Iran kicking off practically on the same day.

For the British, the “Russians are coming” story has no cynical write-up by journalists who are 100 percent compliant with its erroneous narrative. The fear of elites in London is palpable, though, that it will always be questioned by fringe actors taking up bandwidth on social media. In the past this was the RT correspondent in London, who was able to ask difficult questions and generally be a thorn in the side of the Westminster village which controlled journalists like rats held in a basket. The main reason why RT was kicked out of the UK was that it offered a style of reporting on UK politics which had since left us thirty years ago – such is the murky world of the deep state and how it saw how in Brussels journalists could be manipulated until they become stenographers for it.

Yet even with this new Stalinist style of media control in the UK, the state is wobbly. Even with the impressive set-up it has now of total media dominance, where journalists pump out total garbage about the Ukraine war or what they are told to write about the Middle East, still the fear is there.

The example of video blogger Ian Proud, a former UK diplomat once based in Moscow, is worrying but poignant. Simply going to Moscow to attend a conference where Putin was speaking was enough to have him get the full Stasi treatment at Heathrow airport – detained and all digital content seized.

Proud’s YouTube interviews, with his dowdy style of presenting, are proving to be popular as he simply offers a more sober view of both Russia and the UK Foreign Office, his former employer. These interviews are getting the attention of UK spooks, who are so nervous about the truth getting out about Russia and the shameful lies which are being packaged now for the British public, that they had to give Proud the American prison ‘shake down’ routine. Britain, a country which once was a beacon for the world with its view of liberty and in particular its passion for free speech, has fallen to a level which we can only compare to a West African country which has just had a new dictator installed, complete with black aviators and epaulettes. What the Proud Heathrow airport case shows is that this new regime in power will stop at nothing to control a narrative, and that the last bastion of free speech – YouTube podcasts – is the next target. The more successful Proud’s channel becomes, the more inevitable it is that he will be forced to leave the UK and settle in Russia to continue practising free speech. The shoulder tassels of Britain’s deep state will not sleep well until the country has a media narrative which would make Joe Stalin blush – and British journalists are helping them with this goal.

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 5, 2026

Employees of Georgia’s largest healthcare system have until Nov. 1 to get the flu vaccine or an approved exemption, or they will be suspended without pay. If suspended employees don’t submit proof of vaccination by 4 p.m. Nov. 15, they will be fired.

According to the Emory Healthcare website, the vaccine mandate applies to all employees, including contractors and remote workers.

Employees suspended for missing the first deadline, Nov. 1, 11:59 p.m., will not be allowed to use their paid time off.

COVID-19 shots are not mandated, but employees are “encouraged to engage in shared decision-making with their provider” on whether or not to get the vaccine.

A spokesperson for the healthcare system said the requirement is intended to protect patients and staff and to encourage everyone to get vaccinated.

Dr. Sherika Newman of Doctor in the Family, a physician-led patient advocacy and health consulting service in Atlanta, told CBS News that flu vaccine requirements are common in healthcare.

“Asking health care providers or people who interact with patients to take the flu vaccine early every year is what we always mandate so that we are protecting ourselves from spreading viruses to vulnerable populations,” Newman said.

She said everyone should get vaccinated, not just healthcare workers, although only healthcare workers will lose their jobs if they don’t get the vaccine.

Cleveland Clinic: 2024-2025 flu shot increased risk of getting the flu

Flu vaccine effectiveness can vary, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which cites studies since 2009-10 showing effectiveness between 19% and 60%. The major factors influencing vaccine effectiveness are a person’s age and health and how well the vaccines match the circulating virus strains.

According to a Cleveland Clinic study published last year, people who received a flu vaccine formulated for the 2024-25 flu season had a 27% higher risk of getting the flu than those who didn’t get the vaccine.

It wasn’t the first study to find that flu vaccines could actually increase the risk of becoming ill.

A 2023 study co-authored by Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged that “viruses replicating in the respiratory mucosal environment continue to present a particular challenge for developing effective vaccines with strong protection.”

“The flu shot has never really prevented transmission of the flu and in some years (i.e., last year) the efficacy of preventing the flu is actually negative,” said Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense. “Flu would blow through a vaccinated population with nearly the same ease as it would an unvaccinated population.”

A 2012 peer-reviewed study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases showed that children who received the flu vaccine were at significantly increased risk of contracting non-flu respiratory virus infections.

Moderna’s mRNA flu shot added to the mix this year

According to the CDC’s FluView vaccination chart, as of Sept. 26, flu cases were at “minimal” levels across almost all 50 U.S. states, including Georgia.

Flu season typically begins in October and ends in May, with highest transmission rates in December and February.

The CDC recommends flu shots for people age 6 months and older, assuming they have no medical conditions that make vaccination risky.

Flu shot formulations differ each year based on information about which strains may circulate that year. The formulations aren’t tested for safety or efficacy before they’re distributed to the public.

In March, vaccine advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended trivalent vaccines to protect against two influenza A and one influenza B viruses.

In the past, most flu vaccines were made from a flu virus grown in eggs, and then inactivated and made into a vaccine. Or, they were made from recombinant protein vaccines, which have pieces of the flu pathogen that the immune system learns to recognize and fight.

This year, Moderna’s controversial mRNA flu shot, mFLUSIVA, approved in June, is also available for people age 50 and over.

Number of healthcare workers getting flu, COVID vaccines declining 

Manufacturers say they will produce up to 135 million doses of flu vaccine for the U.S. market this flu season.

In recent years, many healthcare workers have been resisting flu shot mandates and declining the shot.

For example, record numbers of frontline health workers in the U.K. refused the flu vaccine in 2024-25.

Rates of U.S. healthcare workers who take the COVID-19 and flu shots have also been declining in recent years.

Numbers are lowest among health professionals who work in nursing homes. In the 2024-25 flu season, only about 42% of those workers got the shot, compared with about 81% of workers in acute care hospitals.

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This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

BND chief Martin Jaeger’s claim comes as his agency pushes for more funding and expanded powers

RT | October 5, 2026

Martin Jaeger arrives to speak in the annual open hearing of Germany’s three intelligence services at the Bundestag in Berlin, Germany, October 5, 2026 © Getty Images ; Sean Gallup

Germany could become “embroiled in a violent conflict with Russia,” the country’s foreign intelligence chief has warned, claiming that a mysterious drone incident at Leipzig airport is an example of the “real and imminent” threat posed by Moscow.

Speaking to lawmakers at a parliamentary hearing on Monday, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) head Martin Jaeger declared that “the confrontation we are facing with Russia has taken on a new, more dangerous dimension.”

“Germany is in danger ​of becoming embroiled in a violent conflict with Russia – the attempted attack in Leipzig ⁠is just one example,” he continued, referring to the discovery of an explosive-laden drone next to a Ukrainian transport plane at the city’s airport in August.

German authorities have not released any evidence linking the incident to Russia, and Moscow has described the episode as a “hastily cobbled-together provocation” serving “exclusively the aims of Kiev and the militaristic wing of the European political class.” It is “obvious that Germany is pursuing a further course of escalation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last month.

Nevertheless, Jaeger claimed that Russia is “waging a shadow war,” and that there is a “real and imminent” threat of attacks against targets in Germany. “No other country currently poses such a direct, comprehensive, and concrete threat to Germany,” he added.

Jaeger is one of dozens of Western political, military, and media figures to accuse Russia of waging a “hybrid war” or “shadow war” against Europe in recent weeks. The accusations are, by their nature, impossible to verify, and Moscow has written them off as pretexts to deepen Western involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, justify military spending hikes, and expand surveillance and persecution of domestic opponents.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has explicitly and without evidence described the country’s most popular political party, the right-wing AfD, as “Russia-backed.” Martina Rosenberg, the head of Germany’s Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD), alluded to this claim during Monday’s briefing, telling lawmakers that the country is “threatened by diverse dangers from both outside and within.”

Jaeger, Rosenberg, and domestic intelligence (BfV) chief Sinan Selen all praised Merz’s recent efforts to grant the BND greater offensive powers, and called for further strengthening of the MAD and BfV’s capabilities.

Despite their allegations of “hybrid war,” European leaders have repeatedly stressed that they do not believe Russia to be planning any actual attacks on NATO territory. The BND has seen “no indication of an imminent large-scale Russian attack on NATO territory,” Jaeger added on Monday.

Amid an unprecedented escalation in the West’s rhetoric toward Russia, RT is tracking the statements, accusations, and threats in our ongoing ‘Escalation Watch’ special. Keep an eye on it here as we sort the facts from the propaganda and debunk the psyops in real time.