An uncanny strength of the second Trump administration has been its ability to be involved in so many scandals that no single one seems to become a dominant story.

Take the most recent allegations about Alina Habba, Trump's former personal defense attorney, who recently landed a plush gig working for Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan banker. Habba will get $50 million over five years to do unspecified work for a company that barely exists, according to The New York Times, while Herrera got a presidential pardon for a 2025 campaign finance charge.

That's just a typical day for the current White House, where the mingling of personal and public business has become routine. Some days, the story is President Donald Trump trying to help himself to taxpayer funds by suing the government he runs, or shipping billions of taxpayer dollars to a foreign mining company partially owned by his sons. Other times, it is Trump selling political influence in the form of digital coins, or his appointees getting caught in naked pay-to-play schemes. If you have a hard time keeping track of it all, I get it. The corruption is so deep and wide that focusing on any singular item becomes difficult.

But that constellation of corruption might finally be breaking through to voters ahead of next month's midterm elections.

A recent Fox News poll found that "government corruption" was the top issue for voters, ranking ahead of inflation and gas prices. Conservative commentators are taking notice.

"What they're saying is, 'Look, we're tired of you getting rich and us getting poor,'" former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said this week.

Tim Carney, senior columnist at the conservative Washington Examiner, also tabs the corruption issue—along with other "avoidable mistakes" such as the Iran War and tariffs—as one of the major reasons why Democrats are likely to win the midterms:

Trump and his family have enriched themselves in this second term in ways more similar to third-world regimes or Cook County than to any previous administration. He and his family operate a financial company that has received heavy investments from Qatar's government. He's sold access to himself by selling otherwise worthless cryptocurrency. The IRS he controls settled a lawsuit with him, promising to pay him $1.8 billion (this settlement was voided by a judge).

Trump is not directly on the ballot next month, of course. And most voters might not be able to tell you the details of any single Trump scandal in detail. Even so, this may turn out to be the defining narrative of the second Trump administration, and there seems to be a growing consensus that Republicans have allowed (if not aided and abetted) his corrupt behavior, so it's time to give Democrats a shot at reining it in.

The Trump corruption issue is like the Biden cognitive decline issue in one key sense: Everyone around the president or even supporting him professionally from afar should be asked about it, and their lies/claims of ignorance should be hung around their necks like dumbbells.

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) October 20, 2026

Vice President J.D. Vance told journalist Mark Halperin this week that he's "never seen any evidence that anybody's selling access to the president." When Halperin pushed back, Vance doubled down: "What I would say is I don't think there's evidence that the Trump family has become enriched by politics," the vice president said.

So either Vance isn't paying attention, or he's deliberately misleading. "Credit to Vance, it's as good an argument as is available to him," writes Daniel Foster at National Review. "The bad news is it's still not very good."

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The internet nearly crashed on Wednesday as digital security and website administrators scrambled to patch two vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language that serves as the basis for many websites.

"Since its development in the 1990s, PHP has evolved into an essential scripting language for web development and is used across vast swaths of the internet in websites and software," explains Wired. "Everything from publishing systems like WordPress and Drupal to e-commerce platforms like Adobe's Magento are built on PHP."

Amid fears that hackers and AI agents could exploit the security weakness, many websites were taken offline. The National Security Agency and its counterparts in the United Kingdom and the European Union sounded the alarm. Even the prime minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, was telling website administrators to take the issue seriously.

The potential hacking abilities of advanced AI agents make these sorts of security risks more serious. In this case, however, the problem was also identified with the help of AI.

"Ryan Austin, a researcher at Calif, uncovered the flaws with help from GPT-5.6 Sol, one of OpenAI's most advanced models, during an audit of PHP's source code in August," The Wall Street Journal reports. Another security researcher had flagged the issue years ago, but it had never been fixed because it was considered "considered too difficult to exploit" by human hackers.

This is the future of humanity's digital landscape. "Given the severity of these flaws and PHP's widespread use, we consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory," OpenAI said in a statement on Wednesday. "It highlights how AI can uncover security flaws with internet-scale impact, but the same capabilities can also help attackers rapidly develop offensive tools and exploits."

(A shoutout to Reason's web development team for keeping us up and running, today and every day.)

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"Fanciful fiction." Media outlets also continue to face decidedly nondigital threats over articles and polls that make the president unhappy.

The White House threatened Politico on Wednesday with unspecified "consequences" for publishing "fanciful fiction" in a series of articles earlier this month about White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. If the articles are not retracted, it would trigger "an immediate review of Politico's relationship with the White House, and, of course, consideration of all other appropriate and available legal remedies," wrote White House counsel William O. Scharf in a letter to the media outlet's publisher.

Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued vague threats to broadcasters who cover what Carr called "Fake Polls" intended to "alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm."

These sorts of threats are an affront to the First Amendment, of course. But they are downstream of a more significant issue: the very existence of the FCC.

It's a problem, obviously, that the FCC is run by an authoritarian jackass. But the bigger problem is that the agency contains so many tempting tools for an authoritarian jackass to wield. https://t.co/Q4IJXntkOy

— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) October 21, 2026

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QUICK HITS

• A judge in New Mexico ordered social media giant Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram, among other things) to pay $25 billion for misleading users about data privacy. Last month, a jury found that Meta had violated the state's consumer protection laws 43 million times.
• Officials are trying to pin the blame on Elon Musk for a Starlink slowdown that limited the effectiveness of Ukrainian missile defenses. Musk says the decision was made by the U.S. military and Trump.
• Peter Thiel joins the majority of Americans in thinking that Trump's Iran War was a mistake. Even so, the U.S. and Israel are reportedly planning another round of attacks after the election.
• The environmental studies for California's high-speed rail line include such absurdities as counting bumblebees "one by one" and considering the train's "acoustic impacts on waterfowl and shorebirds." That's how to spend 16 years and $15 billion building nearly nothing.
• Obvious metaphor alert!

A group dispatched by Hegseth's team in February attempted to move the historic globe, said to be used by Eisenhower during World War II.

They lifted it from its home in an Army office in the Pentagon … and dropped it. pic.twitter.com/vTjWdYXn0k

— Dan Lamothe (@DanLamothe) October 22, 2026

The post The Swamp King appeared first on Reason Magazine.

We're two weeks out from midterms, and President Donald Trump's approval rating just hit a new low. Per a New York Times/Siena University poll, "36 percent of likely voters said that they approved of Mr. Trump's performance, while 59 percent said that they disapproved," which makes that the president's "lowest approval rating recorded in any Times/Siena poll." Yikes.

The likely voters say that cost-of-living, the war in Iran, and gas prices are the primary reasons why they're frustrated with the Trump administration.

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Ohio's race gets nasty: The governor's race, between Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and Democrat Amy Acton, somehow got even dirtier when a video started circulating, gaining traction earlier this week, showing Acton's estranged mother calling her daughter a "liar."

The ad does not show who made or financed it, and the Ramaswamy campaign was slow to take responsibility for it. But late yesterday, that campaign confirmed that it was responsible for the ad and would spend millions to air it all over the state.

"Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar," said her mother in the video. "She's lied her entire life. My daughter needs help."

"Don't vote for people who lie," continued her mother. "Don't let her become your governor. If you think she'll make your life better, you're fooling yourself. It will only get worse."

The gubernatorial candidate's family history appears to be rather tragic: "Acton's campaign provided extensive documentation, from court records and contemporary reports in local media, that corroborated her account that she and her brother were removed from their mother's home after her second husband, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and indicted in 1978 and charged with rape of 'Amy Stearns being less than thirteen (13) years of age,'" per The Washington Post. It appears that Acton's mother took the side of her husband, not her daughter; Acton's biological father was the one who reported the sexual abuse by the stepfather to law enforcement. Her brother said in a statement that "our birth mother stayed married to Amy's rapist until he died." Amy Acton appears to have no relationship with her mother.

It's not clear why Ramaswamy and other Republicans who've visited the state, campaigning on Ramaswamy's behalf, feel the need to stoop so low. Vice President J.D. Vance, for example, recently implied that Acton is a drunk. The race is extremely tight, but that's still no reason to drag Acton's rape-victim past and family drama into the mix. I wonder whether this ad could have the opposite effect to what was intended: Acton seems impressively resilient in the face of trying circumstances, and Ramaswamy's team just looks rather desperate, trotting out a person who seems to be a terrible mother and an unreliable source to attempt to sink the Acton campaign.

I like Vivek and think a lot of the smears against him are unfair. He is very intelligent and highlights real policy problems. But his latest ad exploiting the abusive mother of Amy Acton disgusts me. This woman was so horrible she lost custody of her at age 12.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) October 20, 2026

Another possible take: The Ohio voters struggling with high cost-of-living might be put off by all of this; really gross mudslinging at the expense of talking about real kitchen-table issues.

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Scenes from New York: "Federal, state and city investigators searched about a dozen adult day care centers in New York City on Tuesday, focused in part on operators who they believe fraudulently billed Medicaid for clients who received no services or were dead, three people with knowledge of the matter said," reports The New York Times. "The searches came as the Trump administration is focusing on investigating accusations of fraud at adult and child day care centers, often underscoring what it says is wrongdoing in Democratic-controlled states. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was with investigators at one or more of the search locations on Tuesday, according to two of the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss a law enforcement matter." I am fully in support of stamping out Medicare and Medicaid fraud and deploying lots of federal government resources to do so.

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QUICK HITS

• "The public is hotly debating whether AI is a normal technology—something that will transform our world like the internet did—or more like the arrival of postindustrial modernity to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s: something that vaporized a culture overnight," writes Kelsey Piper for The Argument. "The third option is that AI is more like the rise of humanity as seen from the perspective of livestock animals. (In this scenario, AIs are the humans, and we are the animals whose fate will make no sense to us.) Anthropic believes that the second possibility is already baked in, and it's hoping to prevent the third—but its plan for preventing that looks more like hope and guesswork than something we should trust it with." I agree with pretty much every worry Piper expresses in the piece.
• "President Donald Trump said he has committed more than $400 million to help Republicans in the midterms, including $300 million already spent on advertising, contacting voters, holding rallies and other efforts," reports The Washington Post. Republicans seem to believe you can just outspend and that you don't necessarily need to draft compelling candidates. Interesting theory.
• The Wall Street Journal has a good piece on Anthropic's draft prospectus ahead of its possible IPO next month.
• The expats who fled America regret it.
• The welfare state as it currently stands should be dismantled:

In DC, a family with a housing voucher can rent a 3-bedroom apartment for up to $5,301, which is significantly higher than the market rent in even the most expensive DC neighborhoods. pic.twitter.com/CwnYwjItA4

— Kevin Corinth (@kevincorinth) October 20, 2026

The post New Lows appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Can Republicans just spend their way to success in Ohio? "Republicans have bombarded Ohioans with ads with $19 million spent on competitive races through Oct. 12, intended to sell voters on the tax law that had been called the One Big Beautiful Bill," reports The Washington Post. "But the message is struggling to connect with voters amid anxiety over tariffs and the war with Iran, which have pushed up prices for everyday products. The ad blitz, the most spent on the topic in any state with competitive races, is aimed at bolstering vulnerable GOP candidates in a state that was considered safely Republican for the better part of the last decade."

Republicans in states across the Midwest (and the country) have experimented with distancing themselves from the Trump administration and its agenda; it's hard to know if this strategy will prove successful, or if it's just too little, too late. In Ohio, though, Republican candidates are mostly staying close to Dear Leader.

Sen. Jon Husted, a Republican, is running for U.S. Senate against Democrat Sherrod Brown in what looks to be an extremely tight race; ads claim Husted has "supported ending taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, plus a $200 million investment in rural hospitals," trying to tie him closely to President Donald Trump's agenda. But it's really not clear whether this type of pitch will be enough to make voters forget about tariffs and inflation, the war in the Middle East and gas prices. A New York Times/Siena poll found that 79 percent of likely Ohio voters disapproved of Trump's handling of gas prices. It's hard to sell people on a tax cut when they're paying a different tax, in the form of tariffs, every time they go to the store; Ohio voters might not be so easily swindled.

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Gun laws in Oregon: In the aftermath of the tragic shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, where a 16-year-old killed three little kids and one teacher, some parents of elementary schoolers there are asking what laws can be changed.

But "Oregon earns high marks from gun safety advocates for its firearms laws," notes The New York Times. "Everytown for Gun Safety, one of the nation's largest gun violence prevention organizations, ranks Oregon 12th in the country for the strength of its laws, citing recent legislation tightening storage requirements, banning untraceable 'ghost guns' and prohibiting devices that can convert semiautomatic firearms into machine guns." Gifting laws are pretty lax, though, and that might be what happened here: The 16-year-old's mother seems to have been the one who purchased the Maverick 88 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, so it's possible she either gifted the gun to her son or that he stole it from her. "Decades ago, Oregon lawmakers made an exception to gun laws that allow parents to give rifles and shotguns to minors. In many areas of the state, as in other parts of the American West and South, it's a rite of passage for a young person to receive a weapon for hunting or target practice."

There's no law that can really prevent theft of weapons, especially when the thief is a teenager living inside the home where the gun is stored, and there's no law that can prevent parents from foolishly gifting guns to teenagers or young adults whom they've misjudged as capable of handling the responsibility. These are terribly unsatisfying realities.

Prosecutors could, of course, attempt to try the parent for the crimes of their teenager. They "could consider charges ranging from reckless endangerment to manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison," continues the Times. "But that would require evidence of more than just a parent's awareness that a child was troubled. Prosecutors would have to establish that the mother disregarded—or, in the case of criminal negligence, failed to recognize—a substantial and unjustifiable risk."

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Scenes from New York: "Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Monday that New York City will expand free child care for 2-year-olds to Staten Island and across the Bronx as the city moves to add 10,000 seats next school year," reports The New York Times. Here's why that won't work:

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QUICK HITS

• Something juicy for you, readers, since I too frequently subject you to my Catholicism. Let's switch it up: "I'd been thinking about turning down the speed on my vibrator for a long time, but I'd considered my affliction personal, not society-wide. Now it was dawning on me that the problem wasn't simply mine. Women are being sold egg-shaped suction devices in the pages of New York magazine, and BookTok influencers pair with sex-toy companies for promotional collabs. Yes, there is a bookmark that doubles as a vibrator," writes Sarah Hepola for The Atlantic. "Does this consumer game of one-upmanship amid the mainstreaming of vibrators even matter? There are too many varieties of women's razors, too, and I don't care. But what worries me is how this points in the direction in which so much of modern life has been barreling: self-pleasure, self-love, self-care, self, self, self.…Like so much of our day-to-day lives, getting off is becoming more efficient, easier, faster. But has it gotten better?"
• "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America," wrote Elon Musk on X yesterday. "This will be the first of many."
• "Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate arrested last year by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents amid campus protests, appealed to the Supreme Court on Monday in an attempt to prevent his deportation," reports The New York Times. "Khalil, a legal permanent U.S. resident who is married to an American, became an early and high-profile example of President Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses."
• Is California's new billionaire tax a net revenue loser?
• Play the discretionary review computer game! See how far you get as a developer in San Francisco!

The post Will Ohio Voters Buy Republicans' Pitch? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Is this really about cost of living? Over the weekend, the civil unrest that had been at a simmer boiled over in cities all over France. Over 1,000 police officers were injured, with seven seriously injured. More than 2,400 people were arrested.

"Rioters…attacked city halls from Lille in northern France to Marseille in the south, where they broke into the local government headquarters and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic," reports The New York Times. "A fire destroyed a tourist office in Lyon, and 1,500 shops were damaged or looted nationwide, according to Alexandre Bompard, head of the French federation of commerce and distribution, who estimated that the cost of repairs could run into hundreds of millions of dollars."

"They came prepared," claimed the French journalist Paul Amar on CNews. "They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners. In a street in Marseille, all businesses owned by Jews were set on fire. Businesses run by Muslims weren't." The Jewish Community Protection Service has disputed such claims.

Reason's Matt Welch has a good write-up of how the violence and destruction have altered Lyon, Paris, Marseille, and Limoges, where the city hall was burned and collapsed.

Ces images doivent faire le tour du monde. Nos voisins doivent savoir.

Lyon l'une des plus grandes villes de France le 17 octobre est l'une des villes les plus touchées.

A Lyon, aucun commerce n'a été épargné, oui aucun commerce n'a aucun épargné vous avez bien lu. Toutes les… pic.twitter.com/15dG6QB5lK

— Guillaume Herblot (@Guigz75116) October 18, 2026

What was nominally about cost of living and budget issues appears to have expanded far beyond those. ("Free Palestine" and "ACAB" graffiti have been seen everywhere.) President Emmanuel Macron has blamed far-left protesters, saying they have taken advantage of the situation. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen has blamed the "Macronist administration that is out of steam, exhausted, and disoriented."

It's not clear to me how the possibility of that retirement age needs to be raised will in any way be changed by, say, donning black balaclavas and breaking into the Louis Vuitton store:

French rioters loot Louis Vuitton store located just 2 KM away from the Élysée. pic.twitter.com/cnb5aWczcN

— Drew Pavlou (@DrewPavlou) October 17, 2026

Here's how it all started: Since September 18, lycée (or secondary-school) students have held demonstrations, starting in the Paris suburb, Créteil. The students said the Education Ministry had neglected them—not enough resources, not enough teachers, and overcrowded classes. (The original demands were met and that strike ended, but not before sparking a wider movement.) This was all happening concurrently as the government was deciding its budget, and public-sector strikes were beginning. High social-program spending, an aging population, and high debt-to-GDP, plus an ever-increasing cost-of-living is resulting in a math problem that politicians have no real way out of except by raising the retirement age. Over the last few years, the French have had several hissy fits over the possibility of that happening.

Lawmakers from left-wing party La France Insoumise were at the first blockade on September 21, which has sparked questions about whether the party helped fuel the protests ahead of April's presidential election. I take all this—the disparate movements, the sheer volume of violence, the political-party involvement, the elections coming up—to mean that what started as an education-quality/cost-of-living protest has been used to lodge all kinds of grievances, and is attracting allies with an unquenchable thirst for violence and destruction.

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Scenes from New York: "Darrel Rodriguez, 26, was shot on Saturday in the 7th Avenue Station on 53rd Street, a few blocks from Times Square, the police said. An unidentified man approached Mr. Rodriguez on the northbound E train platform, drew a gun and shot him once in the chest, they said," reports The New York Times. The man who shot Rodriguez was wearing a full balaclava-style face covering, and has not been found by the cops.

Philadelphia enacted a ban on such masks back in 2023. Just anecdotally, I've seen a lot of them in New York, but not by people trying to stay warm in the cold—these types of masks are used by people hopping turnstiles, stealing from bodegas, and more. Some bodega owners have started posting signs on their doors saying masks aren't allowed, since it's become such a problem.

"As of Oct. 11, there have been 1,697 crimes in the transit system since the start of the year, 27 more than the same period in 2025," reports The New York Times, citing Police Department figures.

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QUICK HITS

• Inside the property-tax rebellion.
• In Texas, Ken Paxton appears to have lost the support of suburban women, according to The Washington Post.
• "Jewish life in the Emirates has grown quieter and less visible," notes The New York Times. "Religious symbols have disappeared, and gatherings have moved into private. Many have become more guarded about their online presence and their willingness to speak to the media. Some are reconsidering how openly to identify themselves as Israeli or Jewish, while others weigh whether they can still build a life in a nation they once considered a haven."
• Can you really see everything?

YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING is doing a public service if it gets the general population to question why, precisely, folks lend so much credence to documentaries as vehicles of truth. https://t.co/n7CHwkmDmr pic.twitter.com/IHUvEbKECl

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) October 18, 2026

• "I recently attended a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, where I officially enrolled as a member. Though I was new to the party, I put forth a number of proposals, many of which were met with considerable enthusiasm and, I'm happy to report, have now been incorporated into their manifesto," writes Larry David in a satirical essay for Airmail. "We contend that the only way anyone can be rehabilitated is through the simple act of love. When the D.S.A. takes over, it will be our policy to close the jails and release all prisoners. Once released, the former prisoners will continue to walk around in their orange jumpsuits, the easier to spot them. People will be encouraged to give them a pat on the back, offer some words of encouragement, and maybe even get them to open up about their crimes. Imagine how upsetting it must be to know you've taken a life! To err is human, to forgive, divine. With empathy and compassion, it's easy to see a day when these former convicts will be contributing to society in a very meaningful way." It's not that funny of an essay, but I think it's great for more people to be talking about how asinine DSA ideas are.

The post France Burns appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Musk is the big Paxton funder: According to campaign filings released yesterday, Elon Musk sent $158 million in September to a super PAC that immediately gave that amount of money to a group backing Texas Republican Ken Paxton's Senate bid against Democrat James Talarico.

"On Sept. 9, the first day of the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Musk gave $75 million to SLF," reports The Texas Tribune. "The next day, SLF put $75 million into a new entity called Texas PAC. By the weekend after the convention, the new super PAC was up on the air with a positive spot about Paxton's work on sex trafficking and a negative ad attacking Talarico as being for 'they/them, not you.'"

Then, two weeks later, "Musk gave an additional $83 million to SLF, according to the group's filing. Sure enough, SLF deposited $83 million into Texas PAC's coffers the following day."

It would be wild if Paxton still loses. Paxton has been embroiled in rolling scandals for years, and some current polls have him underwater by 13 points. A New York Times/Siena survey found only 38 percent of likely Texas voters believe he has "good character," versus 56 percent for Talarico.

Paxton was indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, and that case dragged on for most of a decade before ending in a pretrial agreement. Then the Texas House, led by Republicans, accused him of bribery and abuse of public trust and successfully impeached him in 2023. The charges centered on allegations that he used his office to help donor Nate Paul—so you can imagine why Musk might want to curry favor with Paxton. Though Paxton was later acquitted by the state Senate, scandal keeps chasing him: Last year, his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on "biblical" grounds, citing adultery as one of the reasons.

Of course, many Republican voters at the state level saw the impeachment as nothing more than a political hit job, one echoing what's happened to President Donald Trump at the national level. But what far-right, already-convinced Republicans believe about Paxton is sort of beside the point: He needs turnout, and he needs to win over more moderate Republicans and maybe even some fence-sitters if he hopes to beat Talarico. It's possible Musk's cash infusion will help, but it's also possible a cash infusion of many millions of dollars won't be enough to rehabilitate Paxton's shitty image.

A poll from the University of Texas and Texas Politics Project conducted in August "contained four major warning signs for Paxton: a drop in his support from June, lagging GOP motivation to vote, worse favorability numbers than Talarico and Trump's approval being underwater in the state."

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Scenes from New York: "When Gov. Kathy Hochul first ran for re-election, Republicans in New York tried to prey on fears over crime, rising inflation and illegal immigration to boost the chances of their ticket statewide in the critical 2022 midterms," reports The New York Times. "The strategy seemed to work. Republicans flipped four House seats in New York, while putting a scare into Ms. Hochul, who eked out a six-point victory over Lee Zeldin, then a Long Island congressman who now leads the E.P.A." This year, Republicans have picked Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, as the guy with the best odds of beating Hochul, and they're running on crime fears again. But it's not working so well.

The crime and public disorder is, to my mind, still a problem, but it's not as rampant as it once was during the peak pandemic years. And it's certainly not perceived as very bad right now.

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QUICK HITS

• "Three children and a teacher were killed, and two others were critically wounded, in a shooting Thursday at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, authorities said," reports CBS News. "The suspect, a 16-year-old male, was shot and killed by a bystander, Bend police said.…Officials would not say exactly what type of weapon was used in the attack or how many rounds were fired. Multiple law enforcement sources told CBS News the suspect used a shotgun, and The Associated Press cited a law enforcement official briefed on the incident as saying it was a pump-action shotgun purchased by his mother."
• "A climate of radical paranoia around AI seems like it will be a feature of our world for the foreseeable future," writes Ross Douthat in The Free Press, "because human beings are really good at being paranoid about mysterious new things. With, of course, the AI doomers themselves being a prime example: As Mike Solana of Pirate Wires notes in his own recent reading of the doom canon, the prophecies of Yudkowsky and Co. are already moderately less credible insofar as they don't account for their own cultural success."
• "Taiwan is preparing to tighten export controls on AI chips to further align with US restrictions, according to a senior official in Taipei, joining a Trump administration clampdown on the smuggling of cutting-edge semiconductors to China," reports Bloomberg. "Taipei plans to add artificial intelligence servers and cutting-edge semiconductors to a list of controlled items, Taiwan's Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin told Bloomberg News. After the measures take effect, he said, shipping restricted AI hardware to China will become a criminal offense under the Foreign Trade Act."
• I'll leave you with a quote from Kennedy (not John or Robert) to start your weekend off right: "Kimberly [Guilfoyle] talked about sex so cavalierly that she made Samantha from Sex and the City seem like Greta Thunberg."

The post Musk's Meddling appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Two ships sink: "A ​container ship and a dry bulk carrier have both sunk near the Strait of Hormuz in the past ‌24 hours after being hit by projectiles in separate incidents, maritime officials said on Wednesday," reports Reuters. One ship was Singapore-flagged and the other was Antigua and Barbuda–flagged; one crew member has died so far, but the majority were safely evacuated. "Attacks around the waterway have surged over the past 10 days, with Iran saying it is stepping up strikes in response to the US blockade of its ports and tougher sanctions introduced last month." Basically, Iran is escalating because the U.S. naval blockade—reinstated in July—has choked off its new oil exports, and Tehran's answer is to make sure no one else's oil gets out either. Shipping volumes in the Strait have plunged as attacks have escalated.

These two are the third and fourth commercial ships to have been sunk since the Iran-U.S. war began in February, depending on how you count. The India-flagged Haji Ali went down off the coast of Oman, and the Malta-flagged container ship Safeen Prestige was struck and later sank in the Strait of Hormuz as well. Back in July, a cargo ship sank after colliding with another vessel in the Strait, though that wasn't technically an attack. And in September, the U.S. destroyed several Iranian tankers—at least two in the Gulf of Oman area and one near Kharg Island, among others. So many ships have been caught in the crosshairs, though relatively few have gone down.

Why does the decline of religion matter? "The decline of American religion over the last thirty years bears…a significant responsibility for the dysfunctional state of American politics," writes Jacob Williams for Cracks in Postmodernity, reviewing Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kaemingk's new book, Can Religion Save Democracy? "Religious communities—churches, mosques, and synagogues—channel our spiritual impulses in a healthy direction. Religion—actual, traditional, 'organized' religion—appeals to mankind's need for wonder, mystery, and ultimate purpose; and it schools those impulses into forms conducive to civic virtues like humility, tolerance, forbearance, and constructive disagreement."

"Religion does all this," continues Williams, "because it achieves the Augustinian virtue of desacralizing politics and lowering its stakes to a less eschatological plain, in which we see political conflict as 'serious but not sacred.' Our need for ultimacy is directed onto what is actually ultimate—God—and not onto conflict with our fellow man. We learn epistemic humility by hedging our arguments with the recognition that, as Muslim scholars put it, 'God knows best.' Ritual formation reminds us at a deep 'pre-rational level' that we are not divine and that losing an earthly struggle is not final: 'prayer…is a daily concession speech.' Even belief in Hell, paradoxically, makes us less judgmental about one another's flaws, since if true evil will be punished in the hereafter, we can easily face the prospect of its survival in the here and now."

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Scenes from New York: Comedian Shane Gillis is apparently in hot water, once again, for hosting Saturday Night Live and offending people with the jokes in his monologue. Gillis was, of course, fired from SNL back in 2019, immediately after being hired, because of anti-Asian slurs he'd used in a podcast the year prior, while doing a bit where he was pretending to be a landlord. The first time he was invited back to give a monologue, he "bomb[ed] on 'SNL' with Down syndrome and gay jokes," according to The Daily Beast. And then this most recent time, he offended people by saying, "I haven't been to the gym in so long, I didn't know women just dress like whores now." Given the prevalence of "scrunch butt"–style leggings, I kind of think he's dead-on, but I've also long been a Gillis apologist.

"In that very same monologue, Gillis denigrates men, gay men, his sisters, and himself—repeatedly," writes Reason's Robby Soave. "He admits that he's fat and ugly. That's the basis of the humor. It does not suggest that he has some problem with women or enjoys laughing at their expense and solely their expense. He's doing observational comedy, and no one is spared, not even Gillis." Gillis seems dumb as a bag of bricks, but he's actually quite incisive.

I do think there's a deeper thing going on, though, given that Gillis keeps getting into trouble, which is that bro-y culture no longer unites us as a country. Bros are dwindling in number and prominence. Gillis isn't widely regarded as funny because the culture killed off the bro. And I, for one, mourn that loss.

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QUICK HITS

• Anthropic reportedly plans to IPO next month; OpenAI intends to wait until 2027.
• "When President Trump announced that Katie Zacharia would serve as the next White House press secretary, he referred to her as an attorney. But she hasn't passed the bar exam in the U.S.," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after graduating from law school at Pepperdine University in 2011, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, but she didn't pass." Truth be told, I don't think the fact that she hasn't passed the bar yet represents herself as a lawyer matters all that much; I think the fact that she seems terrible at public speaking is the greater problem, given her new role.
• James Talarico continues to really like his own line that "the Bible is silent on the issue of abortion." I don't think he's especially persuasive to the Catholic voter he was confronting in the above clip, who countered with an invocation of the Ten Commandments, but I guess voters will decide soon enough.
• "With less than three weeks until Election Day and Republican approval numbers down, President Donald Trump is taking unorthodox measures to drum up support for the GOP," writes Ryan Curtis for Reason. "Last week, Trump sent out $90 payments to over 20 million Americans on Medicare Part B—which covers doctor visits and regular checkups. The money was made available to help seniors 'pay for their Medicare Part B premiums,' which cost $202 per month."
• Watch the quote-tweeted video only if you dare:

These people will drag you back to 2020 tomorrow. We don't have to live like this. https://t.co/5U3DvNkrp8

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) October 14, 2026

The post Sinking Ships appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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QUICK HITS

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

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

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

• Not wrong:

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

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

— Jack (@tracewoodgrains) October 13, 2026

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

Durable changes: This midterm season, activist groups have set their sights on amending state constitutions as a way of skirting never-ending culture war battles.

In Nebraska, voters are being asked to consider "enshrin[ing] in its constitution an existing law that prohibits transgender students from playing on girls' and women's sports teams," reports The Washington Post. "It also would require school teams to be designated as male, female or co-ed." The campaign behind it, Fairness for Girls, turned in 211,000 signatures in June, and its $3.1 million in cash contributions as of July 31 came entirely from a single nonprofit, Restore the Good Life Inc.

Voters in Washington, Colorado, and Arizona will see similar measures on their ballots related to transgender athletes and what schools should allow—though these would change state law rather than constitutions. Arizona's was put on the ballot by the Republican Legislature, while Colorado's and Washington's came from citizen petitions. Transgender students who say they are girls are already barred from girls' school teams under Arizona state law; the state's Proposition 318 would now ban student athletes from using restrooms, locker rooms, and showers that don't match an athlete's sex at birth, plus extend the rules to private schools and club sports.

Meanwhile in Alabama, voters will be asked whether the state's constitution should be altered to require public schools to allow prayer—led by students—at the start of the day. The same amendment would also put the daily Pledge of Allegiance, which state law already requires, into the constitution. Students couldn't be forced to take part in the prayer and would be able to opt out of the pledge.

Interestingly, Alabama has been here before. In Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), the Supreme Court struck down an Alabama statute authorizing a moment of silence "for meditation or voluntary prayer." It's not clear why they're trying basically the same thing all over again. ("What is the oversight power of the school in something like this?" Steven P. Brown, a professor of political science at Auburn University, asked the Alabama Reflector. "If you have a kid who stands up and wants to give a prayer to Satan, there is no question the school is going to step in." It's a fair question!)

"This year has brought a total of 19 ballot initiatives related to K-12 and higher education, the most since the midterms in 2018, according to a database maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures," reports The Washington Post. It seems like activists are growing tired of constantly relitigating culture-war issues, and instead hope to create a more durable consensus via amendments to state constitutions and voter-approved statutes that are harder for legislators to alter.

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Dissent: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) has sounded off about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's idea of livestreaming the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army major who killed 13 people in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

Johnson says the video of the execution by firing squad could become "a recruiting tool for future terrorists," according to Johnson. "We've got to think through the policy implications of all that," Johnson told CBS News on Monday.

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Scenes from New York: "Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Monday that the Police Department had strengthened its accountability systems after an officer was allowed to retire before facing a disciplinary trial over the death of a teenager," reports The New York Times. "Mr. Mamdani also ordered the police to conduct a review of their use-of-force policies, which were central to an oversight board's decision to recommend excessive force charges against the officer, Salvatore Alongi, in the death of the 19-year-old Win Rozario in 2024."

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QUICK HITS

• "Federal agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) Monday as part of a criminal investigation," reports The Wall Street Journal. There's not much additional detail available at this time, though "Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told a conservative podcaster in September that there was a continuing federal investigation into Omar, who he said 'married her brother to try to bring him into the United States'" which is a claim Omar has denied.
• "A federal judge issued a temporary order Sunday blocking the Trump administration from airing taxpayer-funded campaign-style television commercials. But the administration blew past a Sunday evening deadline and ran two of the ads into the early hours of Monday, advertising data from AdImpact shows," reports The Washington Post. 
• "That's a moderate (or perhaps even conservative) view that I think derives naturally from an ethic of 'I believe in parks and libraries and buses and public pools because I intend to use them personally,'" writes Matt Yglesias at Slow Boring. "This is also relevant to perennial political-economy conflicts between users of public services and their providers, where, again, the notion that you need to be tougher on public sector unions is sometimes right-coded. But I do think it also raises the question of what the correct and authentically progressive attitude is toward these things. After all, a pool that is appealing to an upscale liberal who can afford membership in a private pool club is also a pool that is doing a good job serving hard-working low-income families who can't afford a private pool."
• "Eleven sailors were missing at sea on Tuesday from ​a ship sunk by a drone attack off the coast of Bulgaria, possibly the second deadly sinking of a ‌cargo vessel in the area in a week, prompting Bulgaria to summon Russia's ambassador," reports Reuters. "Two cargo ships were hit by drones overnight and one was sunk, Bulgarian officials said. Bulgaria stopped short of explicitly accusing Russia of carrying out the attacks but Prime Minister Rumen Radev said their outcome 'benefits the Russian Federation.'"

The post Settling the School Wars appeared first on Reason Magazine.