With Republicans likely headed for a good ol' fashioned ass kicking in next week's midterm election, it doesn't seem too premature to ask the next big question: What are the Democrats going to do once they have a congressional majority?

The New York Times reports that Democrats will move quickly on four items that are "consensus items among their members that are basic enough to bypass time-consuming committee consideration and go straight to the floor."

Two of those items are really good ideas: ending President Donald Trump's tariffs and ending the war in Iran (or ordering Trump to "seek authorization from Congress to continue it"). Both would restore proper congressional authority in areas where Trump has expanded executive power, with terrible results.

The other priorities, however, include reversing Medicaid spending cuts included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and extending some Affordable Care Act health care subsidies that expired last year. Both would require higher spending at a time when the federal government is already running $2 trillion annual deficits and the national debt is at a record high.

But that's probably a pretty good summary of what Democratic control of Congress for the next few years will look like: a mix of critically important reforms to combat Trump's big-government agenda and, well, the Democrats' own big-government agenda.

Over at National Review, John Puri has an extensive list of "truly frightening" policies Democrats could pursue after the midterms, including stuff like bypassing the filibuster to borrow more heavily, arbitrarily restricting commerce, handing out taxpayer money to political allies, and promising "free" money for everyone. Gosh, I sure hope none of that happens (again).

More seriously, there are also likely to be some major investigations into corruption and other executive branch misdeeds. Trump's family and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are likely to be among the main targets. Hegseth could "face impeachment—which would make him just the third Cabinet secretary in history to face such a sanction," The Atlantic reports.

No wonder Hegseth is reportedly looking for an exit strategy.

Of course, there are plenty of caveats to this. Most importantly, Trump will still be the president—and will be able to veto anything the Democrats pass through Congress. There's also the Senate's filibuster rules. Even the biggest of blue waves is highly unlikely to deliver a 60-seat majority.

Though they may dream big, Democrats will face some serious constraints on their policymaking agenda. They will face fewer obstacles in blocking, unwinding, and investigating Trump's unlawful and corrupt actions—and that's where I, for one, hope they will spend their efforts.

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Scenes from Washington, D.C.: "On Sept. 16, Leo J. Terrell threatened to choke a Justice Department intern with a computer charger."

So begins The Harvard Crimson's scathing and deeply reported takedown of Terrell, the former talk radio host and Fox News contributor who is now the senior Justice Department official running the Trump administration's crackdown on elite universities (which is ostensibly an effort to police antisemitism but seems more like an excuse to use federal taxpayer dollars to fight a culture war).

The computer cord incident "was one of a series of episodes described by Billa and three other interns, all Jewish," the Crimson reports. "Terrell isolated them from the rest of the Justice Department, berated them over minor mistakes, and repeatedly threatened their jobs or careers."

When he's not harassing his staffers, Terrell seems to be overcome with delusions of grandeur. A planned 15-city media tour in advance of the midterms "was supposed to be the centerpiece of Terrell's work" and would have put him on stage with singers, comedians, and professional athletes. One event has been held so far: "an Oct. 14 gathering at a synagogue in Southfield, Mich. with Terrell as the keynote speaker."

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QUICK HITS

• Hackers stole $6.3 billion of bitcoin from the Binance crypto exchange. Another hacking attempt on Thursday targeted Polymarket.
• ProPublica has "tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent reportedly detaining a citizen during the current administration—more than 500 cases from Inauguration Day through Oct. 21, 2026."
• Federal debt held by the public has surpassed the size of the U.S. economy for the first time since World War II. Unlike back then, however, the debt is being driven by entitlement spending, which means it is going to keep spiraling higher.
• Relatedly, five states are carrying more than $30,000 in debt per capita, according to a new report from the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason: New York ($37,006 per capita), New Jersey ($35,100), Connecticut ($33,189), Illinois ($31,582) and Hawaii ($30,759). All told, America's state and local governments are more than $6 trillion in debt.
• If you ever wanted a Mothman license plate (and who doesn't), that's now available in West Virginia.
• Patrick Stewart, the legendary actor whose range included everything from Shakespeare to starships, died at age 86.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Fund   https://t.co/luC5CdcWDy
Alzheimer's Foundation of America Caregiver Resources    https://t.co/zvNptfyuNd

Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia pic.twitter.com/XNncEVq56X

— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) October 29, 2026

The post What Will Democrats Do? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

The plot thickens: Last night, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, said he would launch an investigation into Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola. This is because of late-breaking allegations that Peltola's staffers tried to recruit candidates to run in the Senate race that could confuse voters into not voting for her opponent.

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Scenes from New York: A Brooklyn woman, Halima Salman, was apparently training with ISIS. Salman, an American citizen, was brought to Syria by her father when she was a teenager and somehow developed close ties to the terrorist group. "Salman, who faces up to 10 years in prison at sentencing, is believed to be the first woman accused of being an ISIS member to stand trial in federal court," reports The New York Times. (There are a lot of jokes I could make here, most of which would not be so tasteful, so I'll let our esteemed commenters handle it.)

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QUICK HITS

• "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entered Tuesday's Israeli election with a governing majority and is now on course to exit with something less," reports the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. "That's one way to understand the result, but it was also widely anticipated. The surprising news is the opposition's failure to come out ahead of Mr. Netanyahu. He may not have won, but the opposition lost.…At present count Mr. Netanyahu's Likud party is in first place, projected to win 26 or 27 seats in Israel's 120-seat Knesset. That's down from 32 in the current Knesset but up from the 19 or 21 in pre-election polls. The opposition Yashar party of former military chief Gadi Eisenkot lags at 21 seats."
• "Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh on Wednesday left the central bank on track to raise interest rates again this year, even as he stuck to his refusal to offer any explicit guidance on the future path of policy," reports Bloomberg. "Operating within his self-imposed communication boundaries, Warsh used his assessment of a strong economy and warnings over persistent inflation to signal the Fed's job is not yet done. The message reinforced expectations that officials will raise borrowing costs in December—after holding them steady Wednesday—with the potential for another increase in early 2027."
• Allie Beth Stuckey is politically burnt out, says Bloomberg.
• The differences between sex realism and gender realism, and what sex-realist feminists are actually fighting for.

The post Antics in Alaska appeared first on Reason Magazine.

The House looks pretty likely to go Democrat, but the Senate appears to be more in play. Basically, Democrats need to pick up four seats to get control of it; seven races are considered toss-ups by Cook Political Report as of right now, just a few days before Election Day, but Democrats have leads (within the margin of error) in all of them, despite heavy Republican spending in most.

"If Democrats win all seven races, along with the ones in which they are favored, they would secure their largest Senate majority since the Obama administration," notes The Washington Post. "If Republicans win all seven races, they would maintain their current 53-47 majority in the Senate, picking up a Democratic-held seat in Michigan to offset a loss in North Carolina."

The math is less daunting for Democrats than it was at the start of the cycle. They need three of the six Republican-held toss-ups to reach 51, assuming they also hold Michigan, the only Democratic seat on the list. Michigan looks like the GOP's best shot at going on offense, since Mike Rogers cleared the Republican field without a primary while Democrats slugged it out all through August.

Meanwhile, the rest of the map looks like a list of Republican problems rather than Democratic strengths; make of that what you will. Maine is the only Republican seat up this year in a state Trump lost in 2024; Ohio features Sherrod Brown, who lost his seat by just four points in 2024 while Trump carried the state by 11; and Alaska has Mary Peltola, who in 2022 became the first Democrat to represent the state in the House in half a century. Each of these races is close for its own reasons, but the reasons happen to cut one way this year.

Not included in the list of toss-ups—Alaska, Kansas, Maine, Iowa, Michigan, Texas, and Ohio—are Georgia, where Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff looks likely to win, and New Hampshire, an open seat that anyone could technically take but that looks likely to go Democrat. Toss-up is merely a description of how close races look right now; earlier in the cycle, Georgia and New Hampshire were considered toss-ups, but Democrats are now favored to win. These things aren't static, of course, and different forecasters think about each race differently. Some of the toss-up races are primarily due to one party—frequently Republicans—running really terrible candidates (such as Ken Paxton in Texas, whose prospects we discussed on this week's Reason Roundtable). Other races have their own specific quirks, like in Kansas, where a Democratic Methodist pastor who is broadly liked (with no voting record to ding) is running against a Republican incumbent, who is facing headwinds related to high diesel prices that have raised the cost of running farm equipment and shipping goods, along with beef import tariffs that have pissed off farmers.

It's always possible pollsters are wrong. But most pollsters surveyed by The New York Times—including Nate Silver and Patrick Ruffini, both former guests on my show, Just Asking Questions—seem to believe Democrats will win both the House and Senate.

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Scenes from New York: "After a woman said she was raped at knife point in Central Park over the weekend, the police said on Monday that they had stepped up patrols of the park as they searched for an assailant," reports The New York Times. "The 39-year-old woman told the police that she was jogging on the east side of the park near East 66th Street shortly before 8:30 p.m. on Saturday when a man dressed in black approached her brandishing a knife. He dragged her into a wooded area, raped her and ran off, the police said." This is the latest in a string of crimes in the area, including the murder of a 63-year-old homeless woman who slept in the park, and a 32-year-old woman who was robbed while riding a bike.

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QUICK HITS

• "Flávio Bolsonaro fled Brazil for the US hours after losing the presidential election and being ordered to surrender his passports, Folha de S.Paulo reported citing allies of the conservative senator," reports Bloomberg.
• Microsoft shrinks headcount.
• "Fox News is suffering a catastrophic drop in viewership, which has plunged to historic lows just before the midterm elections, according to new data. Preliminary Nielsen ratings obtained by Status ahead of their official release show that the Trump-friendly juggernaut is on track to post its lowest-rated month in total day viewers since December 2023, averaging just 1.1 million total viewers throughout October 2026," reports The Daily Beast. "Among the key 25-54 demographic coveted by advertisers, the outlet is headed for its lowest-rated month in a quarter-century, averaging a paltry 98,000 viewers. The collapse represents a brutal 27 percent drop in total viewers and a 32 percent dive in the 25-54 demographic compared to last October."
• Subprime mortgages for people with bad credit! How could this go wrong?

.@PhillyMayor Cherelle Parker tells @EmilyRPeck that the city hopes to launch its historic mortgage program "before the end of 2026."

"Imagine getting a mortgage, a 30-year commitment, with no PMI," Parker said, and accessible "with less-than-perfect credit." #AxiosLive pic.twitter.com/DDDYMWBMAL

— Axios (@axios) October 27, 2026

The post A Democratic Senate? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Will Bibi survive? Israelis head to the polls today for the first election since the October 7, 2023, attacks. The election is widely seen as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu's, or Bibi's, governance. Supporters say the last few years have been a success, as he "seized half of Gaza, dramatically expanded West Bank settlements, decimated Hezbollah in Lebanon and coaxed President Donald Trump into going to war against Iran," per The Washington Post—"all while offering a full-throated defense of Israel against accusations of war crimes and genocide."

But "many of those who seek change have rallied around the bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot, a centrist former military chief who, according to final polls this week, was running slightly ahead of Netanyahu," reports The Washington Post. "Heading a sprawling bloc that ranges from Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister who once managed a West Bank settlement council, to Yair Golan, a retired general known for his dovish views toward Palestinians, Eisenkot has pledged to investigate Netanyahu over his response to Oct. 7, to force the ultra-Orthodox to enlist and to rein in violent settlers in the West Bank." Eisenkot says the war against Hamas has been a failure, since the terrorist group is still in power. He is in opposition to some of the far-right alliances Netanyahu has made and broadly critical of Netanyahu's wartime leadership.

So far, turnout has been extremely high, the highest in 45 years—though the day isn't over yet; at publication time, it's about 3:30 p.m. in Israel. Polls close at 10 p.m. An estimated 70,000 Israelis have returned from overseas to cast their votes.

Here's how Israeli elections work, courtesy of The New York Times: "Every party creates a ranked list of its candidates, and voters choose a party or slate. The leader of the party with the most votes could become the country's next prime minister—though it is not automatic—if that candidate can form a government, but the parliamentary system is complicated and involves extensive negotiations.…No single party has ever won a majority of votes, which means parties must form factions and party leaders try to forge a governing coalition of at least 61 lawmakers. Within seven days of the official election results being announced, Israel's president, who plays a mostly symbolic role, meets with elected representatives of the parliamentary factions. Israel's president, Isaac Herzog, will assign a member of the Knesset—usually the leader of the party or faction that has won the most seats—to form a government." That person gets roughly a month to negotiate with potential allies and form a government; if they fail, another person gets picked to attempt the process.

"If a candidate who has been selected to form a government can propose one, along with a policy agenda," continues the Times, "and their proposal wins a plurality of votes in the Knesset, the government is formally invested, and that candidate becomes the prime minister."

"If neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot can form a governing coalition in the 120-seat parliament," reports Reuters, "Netanyahu could stay on as caretaker until another election is held. His opponents have managed to wrest him from the premiership only once since 2009, and that took four inconclusive elections in two years. He was back 18 months later." So, Netanyahu seems unlikely to win outright, but likely to still be in charge at the end of all this—very much not a mandate, and something that would probably trigger elections again next year.

Kalshi and Polymarket betting markets seem fairly confident that Eisenkot will emerge victorious; polls are less optimistic.

Who's in charge in Israel, and how much of a mandate they believe themselves to have, matters an awful lot when it comes to American policy in the Middle East; tensions with Iran are still high, and though it's receded from view to some degree, shipping is still snarled in the Strait of Hormuz, with no resolution in sight. Given the complexities involved with forming a government, we're not going to get a clear answer for a while, but we will get some indications over the next few days as to how Israeli citizens are thinking about Netanyahu, his legacy, and the path forward.

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Scenes from New York: "Many young professionals in their 30s have reached a breaking point in recent years and moved away in droves to raise families—contributing to an enrollment crisis in New York City's school system," reports The New York Times in an interesting reported piece on people in their 30s struggling to make ends meet and delaying milestones like getting married, having kids, and owning their own places. "Am I entitled to have what my parents had? I'm not sure," said one 31-year-old schoolteacher out in Queens. "But it's hard to know that I can't [have it]."

I don't think these people are totally off base; the tradeoffs are intense right now, with rental costs growing ever more wild. It's a shame most New Yorkers don't seem to understand the relationship between market-distorting policies (like rent control and stabilization) and housing costs getting so out of whack, and increasingly favor handouts (free daycare) to alleviate the strain they feel from the high cost of living.

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QUICK HITS

• DoorDash is in talks to acquire Instacart; will someone please do a wellness check on Elizabeth Warren?
• "While global tech stocks teeter, in China they have already crashed as lofty valuations collapse under worries about AI demand and curbs on Chinese exports," reports Reuters. "The meltdown, tanking the mainland STAR50 index, of AI and semiconductor leaders by 40% in less than four months ​and vaporising some $480 billion in market value, is an ill omen for wobbly world markets and a dampener on China's efforts at encouraging its savers into stocks to ‌fund the AI boom."
• "Most classrooms, most of the time, are nonideologically muddling along with a mix of lecture and activities—just like most classrooms, most of the time, are nonideologically muddling along with a mix of phonics and guess-and-bluff reading strategies," writes Kelsey Piper for The Argument on school curricula. "That means that fixing classrooms takes more than bold truth-telling about what works. It's going to take changing how we teach teachers, acquire curricular materials, and measure results."
• "Clashes erupted in Paris as a mass march drew to a close Saturday, with more than 400,000 people rallying across France over school funding and soaring living costs in a fresh challenge to President Emmanuel Macron," reports the Associated Press. "Police made nearly 1,000 arrests, the government said."
• Don't miss this week's Reason Roundtable!

• As for me and my house, we will cook up amazing hockey-themed parties and never let the AI overlords take this from us:

I cannot be replaced by A.I. became I come up with extremely niche and/or ridiculous themes. i.e. Fourth birthday party for my son was "Miracle on Ice, USA vs. Soviets 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid" (we painted the hockey players together, which is why they're, uh, imperfect) https://t.co/P4NvKaIPjy pic.twitter.com/JhwJCTDdYa

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) October 26, 2026

The post Israel Goes to the Polls appeared first on Reason Magazine.

California's experiment: Will California's proposed wealth tax, Prop 40, pass next week? And if it gets passed, will it end up actually costing the state money instead of generating revenue?

The basics: The proposal features a one-time 5 percent tax on people with net worths over $1 billion who lived in the state on January 1, 2026 (with the net worth amount calculated as of December 31, 2026). The idea for the snapshot date is presumably to prevent capital flight once the tax passes. The tax's supporters say the tax's revenues will amount to $100 billion and will fund California's health care system, which need to make up for federal Medicaid cuts.

Seven billionaires, representing 30 percent of the total billionaire wealth in the state, left California before January 1, 2026, when news of the possible tax broke. Peter Thiel, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are among the deserters. The French economist Gabriel Zucman—an intense defender of the wealth tax—seems committed to the idea that this flight won't matter too much. He argues that while removing those seven brings down revenue estimates to $89 billion, adding in less-prominent small-time billionaires raises revenue to $115 billion.

This is silly. As The Washington Post's Megan McArdle points out, there's no reason to believe those less-famous billionaires would stay put. We have a hard time estimating what the total preemptive flight looks like, and how many billionaires have successfully taken up residency elsewhere.

"Either the tax is annual—and in that case it generates revenue annually, and some billionaires leave," claims Zucman. "Or the tax is one-time—in that case it generates revenue in just one year, and there is no incentive to leave. It can't be both at the same time." Zucman doesn't seem to consider that billionaires have already left, as soon as the idea was seriously floated, thus taking early steps to shield their wealth from the state.

Will it pass? "Likely voters are essentially where they were a month ago," reports Politico, based on recent polling data, "with 46% in favor of Proposition 40 and 43% opposed—despite a recent push by backers of the measure, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, to rally support." Interestingly, "a strikingly high share of registered voters (84%) said they'd been exposed to advertisements or messages about the tax, but a 45% plurality said the communications had not swayed them, and those whose views had shifted were just as likely to be more opposed as more supportive."

There's another complication: On that very same ballot, voters will decide on Propositions 41 and 42, competing measures that could keep Prop 40 from taking effect. Prop 40 will be nullified if either one gets more votes; but Prop 40 will nullify both of them if it gets more votes. Prop 42 would bar new taxes on personal property such as businesses, investments, retirement accounts, trusts, and art collections—things Prop 40 targets. It also bans retroactive taxes, thus making Prop 40 impossible to pull off.

Back in January, Pirate Wires' Mike Solana spoke with a bunch of billionaires who were worried about the tax and making plans to flee, partially out of distrust that the tax would be one-and-done. "Three men I spoke with in the largest billionaire Signal chat said they ran an informal poll, and seventy percent of the chat (around sixty people, not all of whom were billionaires) indicated they would leave the state if the ballot proposition passes," reports Solana. "According to that same poll, around 15% have already left the state."

"There is now real danger in appearing successful in the state of California," writes Solana, "as the far left, imbued with a great deal of power, and benefiting now from several years of wealth scapegoating throughout the mainstream press, attempts to liquidate its perceived enemies in business."

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Scenes from New York: I'm fully aboard this train these days, though open to being convinced why I'm wrong:

If you truly *love* American cities, you MUST support strict enforcement of laws against anti-social behavior. Paying bus fares, red light cameras, camping on sidewalks, smoking on trains, off-leash dogs, etc etc

If people want to do whatever they want, that's FINE in the… https://t.co/XU0WQR30yz

— Bobby Fijan (@bobbyfijan) October 26, 2026

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QUICK HITS

• "Brazilian markets are heading for a major rout when local trading begins after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pulled off a stunning comeback to defeat Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing candidate that many investors preferred," reports Bloomberg. This will be da Silva's fourth term.
• Is dynamic pricing on the rise? Customers say yes, but most companies say they're wrong. My thought: Even if it's not currently happening to the degree angry customers claim, it certainly will be big in the future, as online shopping takes over and AI makes implementation easier. Consider the upside, though, noted in this Wall Street Journal piece: "Much current angst is focused on electronic shelf labels, which have replaced the printed labels that dotted shelves at groceries and other stores. Research on digital shelf labels in the U.S. and Europe, where grocers have widely used the technology for more than a decade, found the labels don't lead to surge pricing, in part because price changes are obvious to anyone walking by. Rather, research found, grocers have used the labels to discount goods that are about to expire, reducing food waste."
• Great Washington Post headline: "Europe is running out of other people's money."
• President Donald Trump claims the ships passing past Cuba on their way home from Iran will just, uh, handle the situation there. Sure.
• Interesting:

Striking detail in the big NYT piece on Taiwanese families adjusting to working at the huge new TSMC chip plant in Arizona: their surprise at the lack of rigor in US schools. pic.twitter.com/YkSPzbHCuE

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) October 26, 2026

The post Will the Wealth Tax Fail? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

If you're reading this, then the internet still works. But that's something that we shouldn't necessarily take for granted after this week's global cybersecurity meltdown.

"Think of it this way: someone discovered that millions of buildings in the country have the same broken lock, and now everyone knows how to open it," writes Matt Shumer in a lengthy post on X about the situation. "The lock maker has sent out a fix, but every building owner has to install it themselves, and many haven't yet."

That massive vulnerability was identified with the help of AI, but the growing capabilities of AI-powered hackers mean that vulnerabilities can be exploited much more rapidly too.

This is the world we live in now. In August, more than 100 tech companies signed a letter warning about exactly this possibility. On Thursday, one of Anthropic's top information security officers wrote that cybersecurity threats "are going to get a lot worse before they get better." Major banks are rushing to secure themselves after reports of autonomous agents operating inside accounts (though many of them may have been authorized by account holders).

This is unlikely to be the last incident like this. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says it saw twice as many "agentic intrusions" (hacking done by an autonomous or semiautonomous AI) in August as in July, and then the number doubled again in September.

Scary stuff, for sure. As is usually the case, however, prevention is better than panic.

Shumer's post contains many helpful suggestions for better online security—it is particularly important to secure your email accounts, since that is the gateway to so much of what we do online. Here's a 15-step plan to stay more digitally secure in the AI age. (And if you're really worried about everything falling to bits, Reason's got you covered there too.) If your devices and browsers have updates available, install them. And for the love of digital gods, don't click on random links in strange emails!

The man who (maybe) saved the internet? There is an old XKCD webcomic—and I'm dating myself as a very specific type of millennial by even referencing that—that seems to perfectly sum up what happened this week. Here it is:

Here's the craziest part: That's basically true! Except the one random person lives in Czechia instead of Nebraska. His name is Ondřej Surý, and The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel found him:

Surý, who lives in Czechia, does not work for the PHP Foundation. But alongside his day job as director of domain-name-system engineering at the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium, in a volunteer capacity, he maintains and helps automate patches for the coding language. His work, with that of just a handful of others, has allowed countless websites and organizations to fix these vulnerabilities quickly. Over the past 48 hours, he's become arguably the unsung hero of the entire internet—despite the fact that the only compensation he receives is from modest donations. "Ondřej will save the internet today," a user in the PHP Subreddit wrote.

In the war between AI hackers and AI defenders, it's still humans who are the heroes. At least for now.

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Art of the steal. Yesterday, in this space, I detailed how voters are fed up with the Trump administration's seemingly endless stream of corruption. But it's been a whole 24 hours, which means there is yet another scandal in the news—thanks to a Vanity Fair article about President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The article is an excerpt from a forthcoming book. In it, author Matthew Cole claims that Dutch investigators gained access to Kushner's phone with the help of Russian hackers. The evidence from the phone and other sources shows that Kushner has been taking money from the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to "push their agenda with Trump."

Kushner says the article's claims are "outrageous and categorically false."

But wait, there's yet another corruption story. The Justice Department is reportedly probing whether Trump ally Corey Lewandowski profited from his role as a top adviser at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Washington Post reports that the investigation is based on a referral from the DHS inspector general and is focused on "contracting fraud."

It may or may not be connected to other allegations that surfaced in September, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Lewandowski approached officials in Qatar and the UAE about being hired to help with "visa issues" and other matters.

In both matters, Lewandowski has denied the allegations. He's no longer working for the department, having been fired earlier this year amid a messy scandal involving then–DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who was also canned.

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Scenes from Virginia: Federal prosecutors indicted state Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D–Portsmouth), one of the most powerful Democrats in Virginia, on charges of racketeering and money laundering in connection with illegal marijuana sales. (Don't get me started on how dumb it is that recreational marijuana use has been legal here since 2021, but commercial sales are still forbidden. If it's legal to use something, it should be legal to sell it!)

Lucas pushed the failed Virginia redistricting effort and has been an outspoken critic of Trump. She plans to fight the charges. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, also a Democrat, said in a statement that the timing of the indictment, just days before the midterm elections, "further erodes the trust the American people deserve to have in the Department of Justice."

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QUICK HITS

• "The last thing José García-Sorto remembers after being shot in the chest is being pulled from his car, pinned to the pavement and handcuffed, his blood pooling around him on a Phoenix interstate. All he could think about was what would happen to his two young children if he died." The New York Times has a harrowing account of a Honduran immigrant who was shot by immigration officers last year. He's never been charged with a crime in connection with the incident, which suggests "the authorities did not find evidence that he had put anyone in danger."
• Phil Magness and David Hebert debunk the notion that tariffs can help "infant industries" grow and succeed in a global market.
• The Cato Institute's annual ranking of "Freedom in the 50 States" is out. Arizona takes the top spot. How did your state do?
• Is alchemy real now? A California company claims it has successfully turned mercury into gold.
• The World Series begins tonight, and it ought to be terrific. Despite low payrolls, Tampa Bay and Milwaukee were the top teams in their respective leagues this year. They are deep, talented teams full of characters worth cheering—Brewers' star pitcher Jacob Misiorowski is a huge Pokémon nerd; Rays' star hitter Yandy Diaz escaped from Cuba after being imprisoned there. And this is the first World Series since 1980 to match two franchises that have never won a championship.

The post The Man Who Saved the Internet appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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.