On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he plans to nominate Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to run the Justice Department on a permanent basis. That decision is not surprising given Blanche’s demonstrated eagerness to please his boss. But that same tendency is worrisome if you think the attorney general should pursue justice rather than the president’s personal grievances.

Blanche, a former federal prosecutor, represented Trump in several criminal cases, and his dogged advocacy earned him an appointment as deputy attorney general. But last year, despite the expectation that he would continue acting as the president’s personal lawyer, Blanche reportedly resisted some of the steps that Trump took in pursuing vendettas against his political opponents. In September, The New York Times reported that Blanche and Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, had “quietly questioned” the appointment of Lindsey Halligan, a Trump loyalist with no prosecutorial experience, as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Halligan’s main qualification for that job was her willingness to deliver two indictments that Trump had publicly demanded, both of which were later dismissed after a federal judge concluded that Halligan’s appointment was unlawful. One indictment charged former FBI Director James Comey with lying to Congress, while the other charged New York Attorney General Letitia James with mortgage fraud. Blanche reportedly was skeptical of the latter case, arguing that the government did not have enough evidence to charge James.

That was then. After Trump fired Bondi on April 2 and Blanche became acting attorney general, he seemed keen to ensure his permanent appointment by catering to the president’s whims.

On April 28, Blanche announced a new indictment against Comey, which absurdly alleged that he had publicly threatened to assassinate the president by using Instagram to share a photograph of seashells arranged to form the message “86 47.” That phrase, a common expression of opposition to Trump, is featured on T-shirts and bumper stickers sold by major online retailers, which also offer variations referring to former President Joe Biden (“86 46“) and to Trump during his first term (“86 45“). Although no reasonable person would claim that people who sell or buy those products are making death threats, that is the interpretation Trump favored in Comey’s case, so it was also the interpretation that Blanche endorsed.

“Threatening the life of the President of the United States is a grave violation of our nation’s laws,” Blanche declared. “The grand jury returned an indictment alleging James Comey did just that, at a time when this country has witnessed violent incitement followed by deadly actions against President Trump and other elected officials. The temperature needs to be turned down, and anyone who dials it up and threatens the life of the President will be held accountable.”

Blanche later conceded that “86 47” is “posted constantly” by people who, unlike Comey, never face federal charges. But he averred that “a body of evidence” collected during an 11-month federal investigation would prove the “intent” required to convict Comey.

Given the ubiquity of “86 47” and the longstanding slang usage of eighty-six, which has various nonhomicidal meanings, no amount of evidence could make it reasonable to interpret the slogan as “a serious expression of an intent to do harm,” as the indictment describes it. This case therefore was doomed right out of the gate, even before any attempt to prove that Comey had the requisite intent.

One of the charges requires proving that Comey “consciously disregarded a substantial risk” that his picture would be interpreted as a threat of violence, which is the minimum level of culpability that the Supreme Court has said is necessary to convict someone of making a “true threat.” The other charge requires more than that: Prosecutors would have to prove that Comey wanted people to understand his picture as a threat to kill the president. The doubt on both scores is reasonable, to say the least.

Yet there was Blanche, claiming with a straight face that Comey’s seashell picture, which clearly qualifies as constitutionally protected political speech, justifiably provoked an 11-month investigation culminating in an indictment that threatens him with up to 10 years in prison. It would be hard to imagine clearer evidence that Blanche is willing to subvert justice in service of the president’s grudges.

It gets worse. This week, Blanche confirmed that the Justice Department will not implement the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” described in Trump’s May 18 “settlement” of his lawsuit against the IRS. That scheme provoked political and legal backlash because it was blatantly corrupt: It was the product of a pretextual lawsuit that pitted Trump against agencies he oversees, and it was designed to benefit his allies. But Blanche still says there was nothing wrong with the idea of doling out taxpayer money to Trump supporters who claim they were persecuted by Democrats, possibly including the 1,600 or so Capitol rioters whom Trump pardoned on the the first day of his second term.

“There were a lot of people in this country who had their government weaponized against them,” Blanche said during a House subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. “The reasons for the fund…remain as important as they were before.”

At that level of abstraction, it is hard to disagree. But the fund’s framing indicated that the process would favor the president’s friends.

According to the settlement agreement, the fund was supposed to compensate people who were targeted by the government for “improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.” The agreement described the fund as a response to abuses of “government power” by “Democrat elected officials, political and career employees, contractors, and agents.” Trump likewise made it clear that his goal was “helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!”

During a Senate hearing last month, Blanche nevertheless insisted that the fund was open to anyone who claims to have been a victim of “lawfare or weaponization,” regardless of his ideology or political affiliation. Even Hunter Biden, who was convicted of gun and tax charges during his father’s administration but saved by a paternal pardon, could seek compensation, Blanche said, although that “doesn’t mean the commissioners will agree.”

What about Trump supporters who committed violent crimes during the Capitol riot? “Will individuals who assaulted Capitol Hill police officers be eligible for this fund?” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D–Md.) asked Blanche. “Anybody in this country is eligible to apply if they believe they were a victim of weaponization,” Blanche replied.

What about James Comey? The fund was supposed to “compensate people who’ve been targeted by the Justice Department for, they say, personal, political, or ideological reasons,” Comey noted after the settlement was announced. “So I’m guessing I’ll be in line. I hope I’ll be ahead of those who savagely beat police officers and sacked the Capitol.”

That joke goes to the heart of Blanche’s shameless hypocrisy. He is against weaponization of government except when it benefits his boss, in which case he is more than happy to help.

Blanche also helped Trump by issuing a May 19 addendum to the “settlement” with the IRS. That provision purports to shield Trump and his family from any IRS claims based on their past tax returns, which could save Trump more than $100 million in penalties, and from liability for any federal offenses they may have committed prior to May 19.

Like the Anti-Weaponization Fund, that jaw-dropping grant of immunity had nothing to do with Trump’s claims against the IRS, which involved an IRS contractor’s illegal disclosure of his tax returns. At Tuesday’s hearing, Blanche described the addendum as “a separate attorney general order.” But it is not clear where Blanche gets the authority to control the IRS, which is not part of the Justice Department, let alone restrain the actions of every other agency in the executive branch.

It is even more mysterious why Blanche thought settling this lawsuit required protecting the president and his family from the penalties that ordinary Americans face when they run afoul of federal law. As with Comey’s prosecution, the only plausible explanation is that Blanche is determined to do whatever the president wants, without regard to legal ethics or the obligations of his office.

The supposed justification for the immunity deal was a lawsuit in which both sides were represented by lawyers who work for Trump. And under an executive order that Trump issued in February 2025, the government’s lawyers were not allowed to “advance an interpretation of the law” that “contravenes” the president’s position. The Justice Department avoided that problem by declining to mount any defense at all, even though Trump had clearly missed the statutory deadline for filing such claims and it was questionable whether the IRS could be held liable for the conduct of a contractor it did not employ.

That bizarre situation prompted Kathleen Williams, the federal judge in Florida who oversaw Trump v. IRS, to question whether the case involved an actual controversy between adverse parties, as required for the lawsuit to proceed. She ordered briefing on that issue by May 20. But because Trump dropped his lawsuit two days before that deadline, Williams never resolved that crucial question. She also never had an opportunity to review the supposed “settlement.”

Last week, in response to a May 27 motion by 35 former federal judges who urged her to reopen the case, Williams ordered a government response to their “grievous allegations.” She said the brief, which is due by June 15, should address “the charges of collusion and whether the Parties are truly adverse,” “the assertion that the dismissal in this case was premised on deception by the Parties,” and “the question of whether the case should be reopened because the Court was the ‘victim of a fraud.'”

Williams invoked Rule 11, which aims to “deter baseless filings” by authorizing sanctions against attorneys who file claims that are legally frivolous, unsupported by evidence, or driven by “any improper purpose.” Under that rule, attorneys who submit complaints, briefs, or motions are required to “certify that the filing is not presented for any improper purpose,” Williams noted. “A party’s decision to file a frivolous lawsuit for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement may qualify as such an improper purpose.”

The “party” in this case, of course, is the president of the United States, who used a phony lawsuit as a pretext to extract benefits for himself, his family, and his supporters. That scam would have been impossible without Blanche’s dereliction of duty and enthusiastic cooperation in delivering the favors that Trump wanted. As Trump sees it, that performance makes Blanche eminently qualified to serve as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

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Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi kick off this week’s episode of Freed Up with a look at California’s socialist elections and Los Angeles’ worsening homelessness problem. Then, they discuss why socialism keeps failing, Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R–Texas) claim that he is “quite libertarian,” and the U.K.’s decision to ban Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur.

Later, they break down Graham Platner’s growing list of scandals, debate whether Dracula is really a romance story, and consider when science and religion come into conflict. Finally, they talk about Robby’s struggles as a light sleeper, revisit the moment COVID-19 experts betrayed the public’s trust, examine how annual homelessness counts are calculated, and close with Robby’s memory of former President Barack Obama speaking at his university commencement.

0:00—The socialist elections in California

4:50—The Los Angeles homeless problem and Spencer Pratt

11:22—Socialism is bad.

19:48—Cruz claims he is “quite libertarian.”

22:49—Piker and Uygur banned from the U.K.

31:12—Platner has had enough scandals.

38:27—Dracula is a romance story.

41:33—When are science and religion in conflict?

50:03—Robby is a light sleeper.

58:13—This was the moment the COVID-19 experts betrayed us.

1:12:30—How they come up with the annual homelessness numbers

1:24:55—Obama was the speaker at Robby’s university commencement.

The post California Elections, Graham Platner, Recalling COVID Insanity appeared first on Reason.com.

Primary results trickle in: We have nothing useful out of California yet—current L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has advanced in her bid for reelection, but it’s not clear who she’ll be up against in the general, possibly Spencer Pratt; Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra are leading the results for governor. What we do have is an interesting upset in Iowa.

Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra, who was endorsed by President Donald Trump, lost his primary in the race for governor to Zach Lahn, a conservative farmer who was endorsed by former U.S. Rep. Steve King (R–Iowa), who has personal beef with Feenstra.

“Iowa leans red and backed Trump by 13 percentage points in 2024, but Democrats think they can make the race unusually competitive this year with a strong candidate and a backlash to Trump’s second term,” reports The Washington Post. “The Republican nominee for governor will face Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary.” There is, of course, always the temptation to extrapolate from a single political outcome; it remains to be seen how normal American voters will react to Trump-endorsed candidates. Is Trump still a kingmaker? When November rolls around, we’ll learn more.

As for this race, Feenstra kind of phoned in his campaign, and Lahn was able to work the MAHA (“Make America Healthy Again”) angle—an RFK-esque brand of Trumpism, but somewhat distinct from full MAGA. So Lahn’s victory in Iowa probably shouldn’t be read as a total repudiation of Trump.

“Feenstra’s defeat makes him the highest-profile candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump to lose a Republican primary race in years—perhaps since Luther Strange, an appointed senator in Alabama, fell to Roy Moore in a 2017 special election primary,” notes The New York Times. “Mr. Moore went on to lose the general election to Doug Jones, a Democrat.”

Scenes from New York: Yesterday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani went down to Rockaway Beach (coincidentally, my old stomping grounds) to announce he’d be expanding the city’s daycare program to cover 2-K—that is, “free” preschool for 2-year-olds—in addition to 3-K, which is already universally provided. (Nothing is ever free; more on that later.)

A limited number of spots (2,000 total) will be available for toddlers in School Districts 6, 10, 18, 23, and 27, so: Washington Heights, Inwood, Fordham, Kingsbridge, Canarsie, Brownsville, Ocean Hill, Ozone Park, and the Rockaways. These are all poorer neighborhoods in far north Manhattan, the Bronx, east Brooklyn, and south Queens. These spots will mostly be full-day, so from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the program is slated to expand over the next four years to cover the remaining roughly 48,000 2-year-olds who might want a spot.

Of course, the real Mamdani goal is not just to expand to 2-year-olds, but to cover every child in New York City from 6 weeks of life onward—at extraordinary cost to taxpayers. What this ends up being, in many cases, is a handout from the well-off to the well-off; but note how Mamdani’s 2-K announcement tries to subliminally plant the idea in New Yorkers’ heads, by prioritizing the poor neighborhoods, that actually it’s just a necessary resource for the city’s struggling working-class families.

More of my reporting on New York’s childcare system and the socialists’ dream of universal everything:

QUICK HITS

• Florida tries suing ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI. “Sam Altman and ChatGPT have chosen the AI race over the safety and security of our kids. They have chosen profit over public safety, and we’re not going to stand for it here in Florida,” said the state’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, at a press conference earlier this week. I don’t anticipate this going especially far.
• Huge advances in pancreatic cancer treatment: “Daraxonrasib hit every marker important to doctors and patients. The drug doubled survival time and kept tumors from growing for twice as long compared to conventional chemotherapy,” reports Bloomberg. “Even better, people taking the drug had about five more months before their quality of life deteriorated compared to those on chemotherapy. And because daraxonrasib is a pill, patients are spared the burden of going to a facility and being tethered to an IV pump. For a cancer known for its brutal progression, those things—being able to receive care at home, having more quality time—truly matter.”
• There’s a bed bug infestation at the USDA:

Incredible scoop from @EricM_Katz https://t.co/ZiuwwYKgge pic.twitter.com/yxAFlTBymZ

— Jeff Stein (@jstein_star) June 2, 2026

• I’ve noticed this too:

Something I’ve noticed quite a bit is that we have this ongoing subtle expansion of the service economy but it’s often sort of intermingled with the healthcare economy. Every 6 months I will discover some sort of new-to-me profession (recent examples: Occupational Therapist,… https://t.co/B5A5atL9vC

— Scarlet Astrorum (@ScarletAstrorum) June 2, 2026

The post Iowa Shock appeared first on Reason.com.

Americans aren’t interested in reinstating a military draft, but that’s not stopping the government from “streamlining” Selective Service registration—for young men’s own good, we’re told. That’s right, the government is automating draft registration, using the excuse that it’s saving registrants from the legal peril inherent in choosing to not register. The real reason, of course, is that fewer men were voluntarily registering, and the government wants to gloss over that mass rejection by potential draftees.

Automated Registration for Your Own Good?

One component of the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) “modernizes Selective Service through automatic registration,” boasted Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D–Pa.), who helped push the change. “This update will save taxpayer dollars and reverse falling registration rates by ensuring the Selective Service automatically registers young men, so that none inadvertently face the serious penalties of failing to register.”

The Selective Service System (SSS) has now formally proposed a rule to implement automatic registration.

How many men “inadvertently” face legal peril is an open question. There may well be some young men thankful that they’re being spared the challenging task of deciding whether to fill their names in on a form. But they’re probably offset by the many people who prefer to make their own choices. Admittedly, the potential penalties for not registering are stiff.

“Failure to register with Selective Service is a violation of the Military Selective Service Act,” according to the Selective Service System. “Conviction for such a violation may result in imprisonment for up to five years and/or a fine of not more than $250,000.” Additionally, “once you turn 26, it’s too late to register. Even though you may not be prosecuted, you may be denied student financial assistance, federal job training, and most federal employment at the discretion of the entity providing the benefit or service.”

Years of Declining Draft Registration Compliance

Despite the penalties, more young men have been risking running afoul of the law in recent years.

“SSS is experiencing a significant decline in registrations by 18-year-old men,” according to Selective Service documents acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request by peace activist Edward Hasbrouck. “In 2020, the registration rate for 18-year-old men nationwide was 61.8%, today it is just 39.9%.” 

Declining registration by young men reaching the age of majority eroded the total pool of men available for conscription in the case of war. The same document revealed that 90.5 percent of 18- to 25-year-old men were registered in 2020; by 2023 only 84.2 percent were registered.

That said, Hasbrouck pointed out in 2024 that “most men register eventually, but often years after their prime draft eligibility. The SSS allows men to register without penalty until their 26th birthday. Some men deliberately or inadvertently delay registering until they are close to age 26. This minimizes their exposure to a possible draft while preserving their eligibility for federal or state jobs or other programs later in life.”

The records are actually less accurate than official data suggests. Men 18 to 25 are supposed to update address changes within 10 days, but few bother. Draft registration records that don’t contain current contact information do the government little good.

To deal with its compliance problem, Selective Service has pushed automatic registration for years. In its 2024 annual report, the agency said it sought to “automatically enroll eligible individuals by leveraging existing databases, ensuring compliance without requiring additional action on the registrants’ part.” It added that 46 states and territories already had “laws enabling constituents to register when obtaining a driver’s license, learner’s permit, or state identification card.” My son was automatically registered when he got his Arizona driver’s license. The 2026 NDAA enacts Selective Service’s long-desired national policy.

Little Public Enthusiasm for Conscription

But the move towards easing military conscription flies in the face of Americans’ preferences.

A May 2026 Overton Insights poll asked, “If President Trump implemented a military draft, would you support or oppose it?” Two-thirds of respondents strongly (59 percent) or somewhat (7 percent) opposed the idea of a military draft. Only a quarter strongly (11 percent) or somewhat (14 percent) supported the idea. Note that even 41 percent of Republicans opposed implementing a hypothetical Trump-chosen military draft (43 percent supported it). Eighty percent of independents and 86 of Democrats opposed the idea of a draft.

It’s worth pointing out that the poll frames the implementation of a military draft not just as a presidential power, but one exercised by the current White House inhabitant. In fact, while draft registration is mandatory, it would take an act of Congress to reinstate the draft itself. That would spread responsibility and likely make responses less partisan. But there’s little evidence of enthusiasm for reinstating conscription. There might be even less for the new automated registration system that grants the Selective Service System access to information from a host of unrelated sources.

“In reality, this means the federal government will now access databases from state Departments of Motor Vehicles, the Socal Security Administration [sic], and the Census Bureau to gather information to register young men automatically, without their consent,” objects the Friends Committee on National Legislation. “This change also threatens the rights of conscientious objectors. Automatic registration removes the opportunity for individuals’ moral decision making.”

Automatic registration will take us closer to the day when the government unifies data storage for general use and enforcement. That might be a gain for efficiency, but it’s not obvious that we should want government officials to be able to more efficiently inflict every rule and whim on the population.

One effect of automatic registration is that it’s reminded some young Americans that they have skin in the game. There’s been a revival of long largely dormant public pushback by individuals and organizations opposed to conscription. Last month, Sens. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), Rand Paul (R–Ky.), and Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) introduced a bill to repeal the Selective Service Act, abolish draft registration, and eliminate penalties for failing to register.

Failing passage of the bill or other relevant legislative changes, draft registration becomes automatic for 18-year-olds in December 2026.

The post The Draft Is Unpopular. Registration Becomes Automatic in December Anyway. appeared first on Reason.com.

Police Chief Earl Mayo of New Chicago, Indiana, is facing criminal charges after investigators say he sold a handgun to a pawn shop that had been stored as evidence in a criminal case. When authorities discovered the gun was missing, prosecutors say Mayo tried to have another officer buy it back. Mayo also allegedly asked two officers go to go his home, one to retrieve weapons and the other to retrieve his steroids, before federal investigators could find them. Mayo is charged with theft, official misconduct, obstruction, and unlawful possession of anabolic steroids.

The post Brickbat: Pawned Off appeared first on Reason.com.

Most Americans knew the late Scott Adams for Dilbert, his beloved comic strip about an office worker and his dimwitted colleagues. Later in life, Adams became known as a kind of right-wing shock jockey. But the cartoonist caught the FBI’s attention for something a little bit different: the sex crimes investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fl.) and a bizarre blackmail scheme that grew out of it.

The FBI released its files on Adams last week, five months after his death, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Reason. The records include the heavily redacted results of a background check and a request to Twitter—the social media network later renamed X—to preserve Adams’ account data, including his private messages.

The investigation into Adams seems to have begun in the spring of 2021, when he was entangled in the Gaetz scandal. On March 30, 2021, The New York Times reported that Gaetz was under federal investigation for having sex with an underage teenager. Gaetz claimed that he was actually the victim of blackmail, and the federal investigation focused on the extortionists.

Three days later, The American Conservative published screenshots of a text conversation between Adams and Jake Novak, a former journalist who was then working on the media staff of the Israeli consulate in New York. (The Israeli consulate later told Politico that Novak’s involvement in the Gaetz case “was not in any way, shape or form a part of his role at the consulate.”)

Novak wrote to Adams that the investigation into Gaetz “is screwing up my efforts to free Bob Levinson,” a former FBI agent who disappeared in 2013 while conducting an unauthorized mission for the CIA in Iran. “Gaetz’s dad was secretly finding [sic] us. So I’m very much wanting this to be untrue. I’ve got a commando team leader friend of mine nervously waiting for wire transfers to clear,” Novak explained. He claimed that Gaetz’s extortion claim “burned” Bob Kent, a private investigator involved in the efforts to free Levinson.

Those efforts were unlikely to succeed. The federal government declared in 2020 that Levinson had died in Iranian captivity.

In a CNN interview, Kent acknowledged that he asked Gaetz’s father for money to help rescue Levinson, but denied making any “threats” or “demands.” A few months later, Florida businessman Stephen Alford—whom prosecutors called Kent’s “associate“—pleaded guilty to making “materially false promises” of a pardon for Gaetz in exchange for funding the Levinson mission. Kent and Novak were not charged with crimes.

Years later, a congressional investigation concluded that Gaetz had indeed paid a 17-year-old girl for sex, though the federal government declined to prosecute him.

Adams never quite gave a satisfying explanation for why he was involved in the case. “Jake [Novak] and I shared an interest in the mechanics of persuasion, and in interesting business/political stories in general. Most often the stuff with a persuasion or Israel angle. That was our initial connection…people often tell me their scoops before they hit the news just to build credibility. Might have been that,” he told Politico.

The FBI files do little to shed light on that mystery, but they do put some of Adams’ old comments in a new light. “Do you think they looked at my personal data because I ever had a conversation with somebody from another country? Probably. And I can’t find that out, can I? If I sued the government, could I find out if they looked at my data I could FOIA the FBI,” he said in a 2022 livestream. It turns out that the answer to these questions was yes.

The post Why did the FBI Want <i>Dilbert</i> Creator Scott Adams' Twitter Data appeared first on Reason.com.

In the February 2019 issue of Armeiiskii Sbornik, the Russian Ministry of Defense’s official magazine, there is an article titled “Supersoldiers for the Wars of the Future.” The article claims, among other things, that the Soviet and Russian militaries learned to psychically control dolphins, disrupt radio and television broadcasts, and crash computers. 

These psychic experiments began in 1924, when Gleb Bokii, head of the special section of the Soviet secret police, opened a secret laboratory at 21 Kuznetsky Bridge in Moscow. With the help of Alexander Barchenko, his spiritual guru, he conducted top-secret experiments on hypnotism, brainwashing, and mind reading.

These exploits were far from the Special Section’s most eccentric. Bokii hosted wild orgies in a secret dacha in the suburbs of Moscow. Invited guests farmed, sunbathed, cooked, and ate together in the nude before engaging in group sex. Barchenko planned an expedition to Tibet to find the legendary Buddhist Kingdom of Shambhala. He believed that an ancient civilization hiding beneath the Earth’s surface, in Tibet, held advanced scientific knowledge that could be used to accelerate the path to communism. When Soviet Foreign Minister Grigory Chicherin heard about the proposed expedition, he quashed it and greenlit a separate expedition with the more prosaic goal of probing anti-British feeling in Lhasa.

Bokii and Barchenko’s Psychic Experiments Sparked an Arms Race

The Special Section kicked off a century-long paranormal arms race—with surprising legacies that can still be felt today. 

The Russian fascination with exotic spirituality predates the Soviet era. Russian orientalism flourished after the 1858 Treaty of Aigun, which granted the czar lands that formerly belonged to China’s Qing dynasty. Russian explorers and academics ventured into Inner Asia, and further afield into Xinjiang and Tibet. The intelligentsia of St. Petersburg snapped up their travel accounts, ethnographic studies, and spiritual guidebooks. In the imperial capital, Eastern spirituality met European new age trends: hollow-earth theory and meditation, reincarnation and tantric sex, Lamaism and occult science.

Bokii was active in the Ukrainian student circles of late-imperial St. Petersburg, where romantic nationalism and revolutionary socialism flourished underground. It is likely that this is where he first encountered ideas of Eastern spirituality and the occult. Barchenko, also of Ukrainian heritage, was a failed medical student turned provincial mystic and self-proclaimed scientist. Both underground movements—socialism and spiritualism—surfaced with the collapse of the Romanov dynasty and the Bolshevik coup d’état in 1917.

The Russian Revolution was not just a change in government. When the boundaries of the church, the czar, and the empire vanished, the revolutionaries believed they could reconstruct reality itself. Alongside the unprecedented violence, the early Soviet state was a laboratory testing the ideas that had been banned or suppressed in the Russian Empire. Bokii and Barchenko were at the forefront of this revolution. Their antics are described in Andrei Znamenski’s Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia.

One psychic skill Bokii and Barchenko undoubtedly lacked, however, was the ability to predict the future—neither foresaw that they would be executed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during the Great Terror. But their experiments have had a long afterlife, including in the United States.

The CIA Responds With Stargate Project ‘Remote Viewing’ Tests

At some point in the mid-20th century, knowledge of Soviet psychic experiments reached America. In 1950, American journalist and CIA officer Edward Hunter introduced the Chinese term “brainwashing” to English speakers. In articles, a testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (where he strongly implied that the United States should have nuked North Korea), and a book titled Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds, he claimed that the Soviet secret police had taught Chinese communists advanced interrogation techniques, which were then used against American prisoners of war in the Korean War.

In 1972, Hal Puthoff, an American electrical engineer with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, began conducting “parapsychological” experiments at the Stanford Research Institute. In Puthoff’s telling, he was approached by the CIA, which told him that the Soviets were conducting similar research, and so the CIA began sponsoring his activities. This became the Stargate Project, a covert research program investigating how psychic phenomena could be used by the United States for military and intelligence purposes—later immortalized in the 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats, adapted from the book of the same name by Jon Ronson.

The results of Stargate are contested. In a 2005 interview with GQ, former President Jimmy Carter claimed that a psychic woman from California who worked with the CIA was able to locate a crashed plane—referred to as a Soviet Tupolev Tu-22 bomber in other sources—in an African  jungle. The woman entered a trance and wrote down a series of coordinates, which the Americans used to retrieve the plane. Carter wondered if this was “just a gross coincidence.” On an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Puthoff claimed that a CIA “remote viewer” reported the existence of the Soviet Typhoon-class submarine before it was public knowledge. Remote viewers were also said to have been involved in an attempt to use psychic powers during the Iran hostage crisis.

But are any of these stories true? A 1983 Defense Intelligence Agency report concluded that data from the Stargate Project was “highly variable” and “mixed with much extraneous or inaccurate information.” These concerns led to Project Grill Flame, an attempt to establish the reality and repeatability of the remote viewing phenomenon, assess its potential military and intelligence applications, investigate the psychic capabilities of adversaries, and develop countermeasures.

Grill Flame concluded that “remote viewing is a real phenomenon” and “a potential threat to US national security exists from foreign achievements in psychoenergetics.” Project documents also alleged that, in the Soviet Union, “this research is well funded and receives high-level government backing.” 

Russia Claims Soldiers Learned To Read Minds

Unfortunately, few documents from the Soviet side of the psychic Cold War have seen the light of day—but a handful of stories indicating their existence have emerged.

In a 2015 interview in Kommersant, Nikolai Patrushev, then secretary of the Russian Security Council, claimed former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright thought that Siberia and the Far East did not belong to Russia and that Americans were jealous of Russia’s resource wealth. Albright never publicly said anything along these lines. Patrushev’s “source” turned out to be a KGB-trained psychic named Georgy Rogozin who, armed with nothing but a photograph of Albright, penetrated her mind and read her thoughts. It just so happened that at that precise moment, she was thinking about carving up Russia. 

Rogozin was the deputy of Alexander Korzhakov, head of the Presidential Security Service, and advised him on all matters parapsychological. Reincarnations of Bokii and Barchenko, perhaps?

The aforementioned Russian Ministry of Defense magazine claims that Russian soldiers have learned to read documents locked in safes (regardless of what languages they were in), psychically identify terrorists, and go days without eating, drinking, or sleeping. Some of these abilities were ostensibly deployed during the Chechen Wars in the 1990s. One of these abilities was, of course, mind reading.

What Drives America’s and Russia’s Interest in Paranormal Research?

What are we to make of all this? Just as the Soviet interest in psychic espionage came after the overthrow of the czar, modern Russian interest in paranormal warfare was an aftershock of the collapse of communism. Joseph Kellner’s The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse details a rise in mysticism and new age religious movements in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, like those of the early 20th century. The fall of empires gives birth to all kinds of bizarre belief systems. 

The American interest in psychic research seems to be a case of superpower paranoia. The dawn of the Cold War in America was accompanied by Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s (R–Wis.) panic about Soviet spies, in which Hunter took part. A decade later, paranoia about Soviet moles drove former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to repeatedly purge the agency. The United States conducted military interventions in search of communists all over the world—perhaps most destructively in Vietnam. And the CIA consistently overestimated Soviet capabilities, notably failing to foresee the Soviet collapse. Of course, the Soviet Union had its own paranoid overreactions: there was the omnipresent police state, the harebrained intervention in Korea, the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia (punctuated by the Cuban Missile Crisis), a U.S.-averted scheme to nuke China in 1969, and Afghanistan. Amid all this, was funding psychic research really so crazy?

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering new content ratings for TV shows that depict or discuss gender identity. Doing so would be well outside the FCC’s legal authority, and some free speech organizations warn that such a request could constitute a violation of the First Amendment.

At the direction of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, broadcasters developed content ratings for TV shows, patterned after the ones for movies. The TV ratings span TV-Y (appropriate for all children) to TV-MA (mature audiences only), plus more specific content labels for suggestive dialogue, bad language, sexual content, and violence. They also established the TV Parental Guidelines Oversight Monitoring Board (TVOMB) to administer the new ratings.

The government now suggests those warnings are no longer sufficient.

“Recently, parents have raised concerns that controversial gender identity issues are being included or promoted in children’s programs without providing any disclosure or transparency to parents,” per a public notice the FCC filed in April. “Specifically, the industry guidelines that parents rely on are rating shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming as appropriate for children and young children, and doing so without providing this information to parents, thereby undermining the ability of parents to make informed choices for their families.”

As a result, it continued, “We seek comment here on any changes that can or should be made to the current ratings system to ensure that it is responsive to the issues that parents confront today.”

There are several problems with the memo—starting with the fact that the FCC lacks the authority to create or require new content labels.

The 1996 law did call for the government to create a “television rating code” and an “advisory committee,” unless the private sector “established voluntary rules” to do so within a year of the law’s passage. As the FCC acknowledged in its April memo, “Industry representatives chose to set up their own voluntary system, and the Commission in 1998 found that industry’s approach met the relevant statutory criteria.”

Even setting that aside for the moment, the memo’s phrasing also suggests any “transgender [or] gender non-binary” content is potentially inappropriate for children—after all, why else would it matter if parents were sufficiently warned about it?

This broad scope has First Amendment implications. “If what the Commission is in substance proposing is that any program featuring or discussing transgender and gender non-binary persons be flagged with a content warning, that is the stigmatization and marginalization of an entire segment of the population through the machinery of the ratings system, and it is the kind of viewpoint targeting forbidden by the First Amendment,” according to comments filed to the FCC by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think at Vanderbilt University.

“The FCC’s notice is so vague that it is impossible to determine what programming would actually trigger the kind of labeling the agency appears to be contemplating,” adds Ashkhen Kazaryan, a senior legal fellow at The Future of Free Speech who wrote the comments filed to the FCC. “That lack of clarity is itself a serious First Amendment problem because it invites arbitrary enforcement and political pressure around protected expression.”

“The agency’s fishing expedition here clearly sets out to eliminate or discourage specific content, invoking incurable First Amendment concerns,” advocacy group Free Press agreed in its FCC filing. “By inviting comment from the public over programming that purportedly ‘include[s] or promote[s] […] controversial gender identity issues,’ the FCC insinuates that such programming may be obscene, indecent, or profane material. This is a misguided and false attempt to wedge alleged parental concerns into these limited categories that the agency can regulate to some small degree.”

Supporters say there is no First Amendment violation because the proposal would not dictate a show’s content; it would simply label it. “Gender ideology programming could still be broadcast without restrictions. It would just carry a label that would allow parents to spot it at a glance and filter it out of their homes,” Angela Morabito wrote at the Washington Examiner. “The FCC’s proposal would simply give parents more information to make choices about what is best for their children. Anyone who wants to rob parents of that opportunity does not have children’s best interests at heart.”

“Labeling is a form of compelled speech, which the government has extremely limited ability to mandate,” retorts the nonpartisan think tank TechFreedom in FCC comments of its own. “Even if the Commission never prescribes its own rating guidelines, this inquiry will chill speech about politically controversial topics around gender identity. Warning parents that ‘gender identity themes’ might be present in children’s programming implicitly suggests that the Commission considers some gender expressions inappropriate for children.”

Restrictionist complaints like the FCC’s are nothing new.

“To the detriment of children, gender dysphoria has become sensationalized in the popular media and television with radical activists and entertainment companies,” according to a 2022 letter from five Republican senators to the TVOMB. “In light of parents raising legitimate concerns on sexual orientation and gender identity content on children’s TV shows, we expect the Board to fulfill its responsibility in updating the TV Parental Guidelines to reflect these concerns.”

In the late 1990s, with gay characters on primetime shows like Ellen and Will & Grace, some social conservatives called for warning labels for “homosexual content.”

And conservatives aren’t the only ones who have clutched their pearls over the things on television: In 1997, then-Sen. John Kerry (D–Mass.) suggested a “pre-see,” in which TV scripts were “printed in the papers” for parents to screen the content ahead of time. (Talk about a spoiler alert!)

But apart from the First Amendment implications and the proper scope of FCC authority, adding labels for gender-related content is just off-loading part of parenting to someone else.

Though the FCC gave no specific examples, there are certainly parents who would prefer their kids never see any “transgender and gender non-binary programming.” But that should not be the government’s purview. After all, the government can’t forewarn parents that they’ll encounter a nonbinary person at the grocery store or the post office—why should it warn them about one on TV?

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In a motion filed yesterday, the Trump Administration indicated their intent to appeal the US Court of International Trade’s  order requiring payment of refunds to all those businesses who paid illegal tariffs imposed by Trump using the the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). The IEEPA tariffs were invalidated by the Supreme Court, in a case I helped bring and litigate (along with the Liberty Justice Center, and others).

When Judge Eaton of the Court of International Trade (CIT) issued his order in March, I thought the administration might appeal on the grounds that it is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s ill-advised strictures against universal injunctions in Trump v. CASA, Inc. (decided last year). But, in the intervening nearly three-month period, the administration did not appeal, and indeed even set up a tariff refund system that has begun issuing payments to businesses victimized by the illegal tariffs. Victor Schwartz, owner of V.O.S. Selections, the lead client in our case, is one of those who have already gotten a refund.

The administration now plans to argue that only those businesses who filed lawsuits are entitled to recovery. To my mind, this situation illustrates why we need universal injunctions in some types of cases. We have many thousands of businesses and other importers who were forced to pay over $166 billion in illegal tariffs. Requiring each of them to file their own lawsuits would be a huge waste of time and money, and major burden for smaller, less well-funded organizations.  It would also significantly delay some of the payments, leaving taxpayers on the hook for interest payments when the refunds are finally issued.

In a previous post about the refund issue, I noted additional reasons why Judge Eaton was right to issue a universal injunction here, most notably that Trump v. CASA only applies to injunctions issued under the Judiciary Act of 1789 and its successors, not to the separate 1980 jurisdictional statute from which the Court of International Trade gets its authority.

As I have also noted in previous posts, even complete refunds for illegally collected tariffs cannot fully remedy the harm they cause. Among other things, they cannot compensate consumers who had to pay higher prices, or businesses who lost sales or suffered from diminished investment and disrupted relationships with suppliers. These factors argue against staying injunctions against the collection of illegal tariffs, as the courts mistakenly did in our case (but the CIT recently ruled the other way in the ongoing Section 122 tariff case).

The government’s demonstrated unwillingness to issue complete refunds to all the victims is another reason not to stay injunctions against the Section 122 tariffs, or any other illegal tariffs the executive might try to impose.

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Last November, six members of Congress, all Democrats, posted a video that reminded U.S. military personnel of their duty to “refuse illegal orders.” That well-established principle, which is reflected in the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual, is legally uncontroversial. And as a federal judge later noted, the video was “unquestionably protected” by the First Amendment. President Donald Trump nevertheless insisted that the legislators had committed a grave crime.

“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” He added that “their words cannot be allowed to stand” because “we won’t have a Country anymore!!!” He later reiterated that the legislators who produced the video had engaged in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR,” which he claimed is “punishable by DEATH!”

That apoplectic reaction, which led to an attempted federal indictment, was part of a familiar pattern. Again and again during the last decade, Trump has accused people who irk him of treason, sedition, or both. But those words do not mean what he thinks they do, and for good reason: Through centuries of bitter experience, Americans have learned the perils of letting the government define treason and sedition broadly enough to criminalize dissent. Although Trump clearly has not absorbed those lessons, his habitual invocation of these terms is a useful reminder of why U.S. law makes it so difficult to prove such charges.

What Treason and Sedition Actually Mean

Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution says “treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” It adds that “no person shall be convicted of treason” unless two witnesses testify to “the same overt act” or the defendant confesses “in open court.”

That stringent definition of treason was a response to historical abuses, which extended the concept to include thought crimes, offensive remarks, religious dissent, and other nonviolent conduct that did not entail armed rebellion or siding with the nation’s wartime enemies. The statutory definition of treason tracks the language of the Constitution.

That law does authorize a maximum penalty of death, which probably was what Trump had in mind when he condemned the “traitors” who appeared in the video that offended him. But nothing they said or did came remotely close to the elements of this crime.

What about sedition? Contrary to what Trump implied, there is no such stand-alone crime under the current U.S. Code. But federal law defines “seditious conspiracy” as a plot to “overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.” That also seems far afield from urging members of the armed forces to defend the Constitution and respect the law, which is what the legislators did in that video.

Eager to deliver on the president’s threat, Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, reportedly turned to 18 USC 2387, which applies to someone who “causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States.” That crime, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, requires an “intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States.” And as relevant here, the Uniform Code of Military Justice defines insubordination as willfully disobeying a “lawful order,” while the video explicitly addressed “illegal orders.”

How bad was the fit between Section 2387 and the political speech that Pirro claimed it covered? So bad that a grand jury rejected her proposed indictment in February—a remarkable setback, since grand jurors, who hear only the government’s side of a case, almost always approve charges recommended by federal prosecutors. Two weeks later, NBC reported that Pirro had decided to drop the case.

The fact remains that the president of the United States wanted to imprison six members of Congress for saying things he did not like. And instead of trying to dissuade him, a federal prosecutor tried to make his revenge fantasy come true.

That episode is especially striking because it went beyond bluster. But it was consistent with Trump’s general attitude toward his political opponents, whom he routinely describes as traitors who belong in jail.

Trump Sees Traitors Everywhere

After Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein suggested that Justice Department officials start recording their conversations with the president. That was “illegal and treasonous,” Trump said.

Failing to applaud Trump during his State of the Union address might qualify as treason, he suggested in 2018. “Can we call that treason?” he wondered. “Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”

That same year, The New York Times published an anonymous essay by an administration official who was critical of the president. That was also “treason” in Trump’s book. So was Democratic opposition to his immigration policies, Trump declared on Twitter in April 2019.

The following month, Trump said the federal investigation of his 2016 campaign’s alleged ties to Russia was “treason.” Two months later, he reiterated that characterization, describing the Russia probe as an “illegal and treasonous attack on our Country.”

Trump took a similar view of the controversy that led to his first impeachment, which involved a telephone call in which he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch a corruption investigation of Joe Biden, the opponent Trump expected to face in the next year’s presidential election. The transcript of that call “reads like a classic organized crime shakedown,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) said during a House hearing in September 2019.

Schiff then summarized “the essence of what the president communicates.” Although Schiff did not claim to be quoting Trump directly, his paraphrase, which he later said was partly “parody,” was misleading in at least one respect. But instead of simply trying to correct the record, Trump said Schiff should be “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason” because “he wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the President.”

The next day, Trump doubled down. Schiff “illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement,” “pretended it to be mine,” and “read it aloud to Congress and the American people,” Trump complained. “It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?” The following month, Trump reiterated that Schiff had committed “High Crimes and Misdemeanors, and even Treason,” adding that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) was “every bit as guilty” because she was complicit in Schiff’s “ruthless con.”

Trump also was mad at the House select committee that investigated the 2021 Capitol riot—the incident that sparked his second impeachment. The committee included Schiff and eight other legislators: Reps. Bennie Thompson (D–Miss.), Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.), Pete Aguilar (D–Calif.), Stephanie Murphy (D–Fla.), Jamie Raskin (D–Md.), Elaine Luria (D–Va.), Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.), and Adam Kinzinger (R–Ill.). In March 2023, Trump said all of them “should be prosecuted for their lies and, quite frankly, TREASON!”

Last July, Trump deployed that charge against former President Barack Obama, who he said was caught “absolutely cold” trying to “rig the election” in 2016 and 2020. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “This was treason.”

After launching a war against Iran last February, Trump objected to unfavorable news coverage of the conflict. “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement,” he said in a Truth Social post on May 12. “They are aiding and abetting the enemy! All it does is give Iran false hope when none should exist. These are American cowards that are rooting against our Country.”

A few days later, Trump accused New York Times reporter David Sanger of the same crime. “I had a total military victory, but the fake news, guys like you, write incorrectly,” he told Sanger. “I actually think it’s sort of treasonous what you write.”

As Trump described it, journalists like Sanger were guilty of “virtual TREASON,” meaning they were only “sort of treasonous.” That counts as rhetorical restraint for Trump, who on other occasions has made it clear that he thought the objects of his ire should be arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, and maybe even executed for crossing him.

The Treason Clause Was Meant to Stop Exactly This

Trump’s treason tic might seem laughable in a country where people generally are free to speak their minds without worrying that they will be carted off to jail—let alone burned at the stake or hanged, drawn, and quartered (the traditional punishments for treason in Tudor England). But there is plenty of historical precedent for Trump’s attitude, which is why the Framers decided to define treason narrowly.

Under the new Constitution, James Wilson explained at the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention in 1787, “Congress can neither define nor try the crime. If we have recourse to the history of the different governments that have hitherto subsisted, we shall find that a very great part of their tyranny over the people has arisen from the extension of the definition of treason. Some very remarkable instances have occurred, even in so free a country as England.”

Wilson, a jurist who would later serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, offered an example: “If I recollect right, there is one instance that puts this matter in a very strong point of view. A person possessed a favorite buck, and, on finding it killed, wished the horns in the belly of the person who killed it. This happened to be the king: the injured complainant was tried, and convicted of treason for wishing the king’s death.”

Whether or not Wilson recollected right, the incident he described is plausible given the broad meaning of treason under early English law. As developed by the courts, the concept included “constructive treason,” which encompassed situations that even Trump might not recognize as examples of the crime. “During the early reign of Edward III a knight forcibly held a man until he paid ninety pounds,” which “was held to be treason because the knight was guilty of accroaching, or attempting to exercise, royal power,” according to an unsigned 1959 Indiana Law Journal article.

Although the Treason Act of 1351 was supposed to rein in such extensions, it left a lot of leeway for abuse, partly because it defined the crime to cover anyone who “doth compass or imagine” the death of the king, the queen, or the heir apparent. “In the years following the reign of Edward III,” the law journal article notes, the courts “construed this to mean that if a man imagined the death of the king, he should be put to death for such imagining, without having done anything—that is, without any overt act.”

Trump probably would see nothing wrong with that understanding of treason. After all, he demanded that ABC fire late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel for telling a joke that imagined the president’s death, and he ordered James Comey’s prosecution for sharing a picture of seashells arranged to form a numerical slogan that supposedly alluded to the same outcome.

Trump likewise might welcome the legal regime established during Henry VIII’s reign, when acts or words deemed to undermine the chief executive’s dignity qualified as treason. Sir Thomas More, Henry’s former lord chancellor, was executed for treason in 1535 because he refused to acknowledge the king’s authority over the English church and declined to recognize his marriage to Ann Boleyn. Under Elizabeth I, treason included deviating from royally sanctioned religious beliefs.

The Treason Act of 1351 remained in effect during the reign of George III, the king against whom American colonists eventually rebelled, although by then an overt act was required to substantiate the charge. After Rhode Islanders burned a British vessel assigned to intercept smugglers in 1772, Edward Thurlow, England’s attorney general, and Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general, deemed the sabotage an act of treason. Two years later, they reached the same conclusion about the Boston Tea Party because the protesters had aimed to obstruct enforcement of legislation enacted by Parliament.

In both cases, the perpetrators were threatened with trial in England, a prospect that further inflamed Americans who already had a long list of grievances against George III’s government. Once the Founders decided to separate from England, they were acutely aware that they qualified as traitors subject to execution. They were also familiar with the long history of abuses stemming from a broad understanding of treason.

“In point of precision and accuracy with regard to this crime,” English common law “was grossly deficient,” Wilson observed in 1791. “Its description was uncertain and ambiguous; and its denomination and penalties were wastefully communicated to offences of a different and inferiour kind.”

Although the Treason Act of 1351 was designed to “lop off these numerous and dangerous excrescences,” its safeguards had failed “during times remarkably tyrannical or turbulent,” Wilson noted. “Admonished by the history of such times and transactions as these, when legislators are tyrants or tools of tyrants,” he added, “the people of the United States have wisely and humanely ordained, that ‘treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.'”

When America Criminalizes Dissent, It Does Not Go Well

The related concept of sedition posed similar dangers. In 1734, for example, John Peter Zenger, publisher of The New-York Weekly Journal, was charged with seditious libel, a crime that English common law defined to include speech that brought government officials into “hatred or contempt.” His offense was printing articles that criticized New York’s royal governor.

The potential penalties for seditious libel, which included unlimited fines and up to life in prison, were severe, and truth was no defense. To the contrary, an old maxim held that “the greater the truth, the greater the libel,” meaning that accurate criticism was more likely to generate popular outrage. Zenger’s jury nevertheless refused to convict him. That 1735 verdict was both an early victory for freedom of the press and a precedent that advocates of jury nullification cite to this day.

The lessons of that episode were evidently lost on the Federalist legislators who approved the Sedition Act of 1798. Amid a panic about a seemingly imminent war with France, President John Adams’ party viewed Vice President Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans as “Jacobins” inclined to aid and abet French conquerors. In response to that supposedly existential threat, Congress enacted a law abridging freedom of the press just seven years after the states had ratified a constitutional amendment that ruled out such legislation.

Among other things, the Sedition Act made it a crime, punishable by a fine up to $2,000 (something like $54,000 today) and up to two years in jail, to write or publish “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against “the government of the United States,” Congress, or the president. The Federalists, who were openly targeting their political opponents, presented the statute as less severe than the common-law definition of seditious libel, since it required malicious intent and theoretically recognized truth as a defense. But in practice, neither requirement proved an obstacle to prosecutions, which were facilitated by Federalist judges, including Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase.

The two dozen or so defendants who faced indictments included a member of Congress and various irksome journalists, all Democratic-Republicans. As the legal scholar Wendell Bird notes in his book Criminal Dissent, the Federalists sincerely believed the opposition was not just wrong but fundamentally illegitimate. In their view, the people got a chance to participate in the political process every few years through elections, and they should otherwise keep quiet if they did not have anything nice to say. The Federalists thought criticizing a duly elected government was disruptive, destabilizing, and subversive—in a word, seditious.

The Sedition Act expired on March 3, 1801—not coincidentally, the day before Jefferson took office as president. But it was enormously unpopular during its brief existence, providing a potent political weapon to Jefferson’s party, which portrayed the law as tyrannical and unconstitutional. The Federalists’ ham-handed attempt to criminalize their opponents played a major role in the party’s collapse.

Similar repression has periodically resurfaced in the United States, typically tied to war or the threat of war. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and his government arrested thousands of suspected Confederate sympathizers. During World War I, Congress approved the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a crime, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, to obstruct military recruitment. The Sedition Act of 1918 extended that crime to include “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” regarding “the form of government of the United States,” the Constitution, or the U.S. armed forces.

In the 1919 case Schenck v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Espionage Act convictions of two Socialist Party members who had distributed anti-draft pamphlets, saying such speech posed a “clear and present danger” in the context of an ongoing war. A week later, the justices applied the same reasoning in upholding the Espionage Act conviction of perennial Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who had been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for criticizing the war and the Wilson administration.

The Supreme Court also looked kindly on the Smith Act of 1940, which made it a crime to advocate “overthrowing or destroying” the government “by force or violence.” In the 1951 case Dennis v. United States, the justices approved the prosecution of Communist Party members under the Smith Act, again relying on the “clear and present danger” test. But the Court repudiated that test in the 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio, holding that advocacy of illegal conduct can be treated as a crime only when it is both “directed” at inciting “imminent lawless action” and “likely” to do so.

Disloyalty to Trump Is Not Treason

The charge Pirro tried to deploy against the politicians whose video annoyed Trump is a descendant of the Espionage Act and the Smith Act, which included similar language about “willfully” trying to undermine military discipline. But even if Pirro had managed to obtain an indictment, any prosecution would have been constrained by the Brandenburg test as well as the statute’s intent requirement.

More typically, Trump’s charges of treason and sedition are not tied to any particular law. Rather, he equates disloyalty to him with disloyalty to the nation, harking back to the commodious conceptions of these crimes that prevailed under English common law and the edicts of tyrants such as Henry VIII.

Like the Federalists in the 1790s, who portrayed their political opponents as Jacobins bent on annihilating the republic, Trump describes Democrats as “sick, sinister, and evil people” who are “trying to destroy our country” because they “hate our country.” They are “communists,” “Marxists,” “fascists,” “radical left lunatics,” and “sick people” who “live like vermin within the confines of our country” and constitute “the enemy from within.” They are a “disgrace to our nation,” Trump says, because “they’re against anything that makes America strong, healthy, and great again.”

Such thinking did not work out very well for the Federalists. It remains to be seen whether the Republican Party will pay a long-term price for tying itself to the authoritarian impulses of a thin-skinned, vindictive man who sees no difference between dissent and treason.

The post Trump Loves Accusing Critics of Treason. U.S. Law Makes That Charge Hard To Prove—for Good Reason. appeared first on Reason.com.