I somehow missed the whole thing where Cuomo & Sliwa & the NY Post were trying to smear Mamdani as a flip flopper ad hypocrite for supporting sex work decrim legislation & then saying he didn’t want legalization 🤦🏼‍♀️ there is no tension bw those 2 positions! reason.com/2025/11/05/w...

A jury has acquitted the D.C. "Sandwich Guy," despite testimony from a Border Patrol officer about the devastating impact of the footlong sandwich against his bulletproof vest.

Fighting against the War on Sex is never popular & hard to spend political capital on. But, maybe @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social will be different. @enbrown.bsky.social explores 'What Mamdani's Win Means for Sex.' reason.com/2025/11/05/w... NYC Mayoral Election

"Oklahoma lawmakers are suggesting that a new state law aimed at "adult performances" means municipalities must predict what sorts of events might become obscene and preemptively prohibit them. It's a clear recipe for chilling protected speech—especially drag performances"

British MPs rolled out details on their ill-defined "strangulation" censorship law, saying that mere *possession* of consensually produced content, even a private video made with your partner, would carry a two year prison sentence.

There are lots of bad age-verification strategies, but Italy's is ...🤌 Agcom produced a list of 48 adult sites that need to comply, compiled seemingly at random. Some are well-known, most are not. A handful of big sites, but most competitors (to their joy, I'm sure) are left off. Mind-boggling.

Queer art isn't illegal. But lawmakers in Oklahoma believe that if they make the criminal liability threatening enough, event spaces, permit boards, municipal clerks and protest organizers will treat it as if it is — and do the censorship for them.

Bizarre how sure Oklahoma lawmakers seemed that they banned drag performers with a law banning obscene performances ... Now that they found out that, no, it doesn't work like that, they're trying to convince local governments that they have to pretend it does reason.com/2025/11/03/o...

A future functioning Dem Congress should just pass a catchall statute that says something like “for the purpose of all federal criminal laws, no action shall be taken to implicate interstate commerce unless the offense occurs in multiple states or has significant interstate econ impact.”

8th Cir stands up for federalism, holding that using a road while committing a crime dos not count as affecting “interstate commerce.” But the Fed statutes are impermissibly broad, giving Trumpian courts more room to authorize Fed involvement in local crime control. Feel like there’s an easy fix:

There are a large number of Democratic politicians who insist that Jonathan Haidt is a reliable narrator and one who they should take their legislative cues from. They should be asked why they're supporting someone the Heritage Foundation is cheering on in their efforts to censor the internet.

Three Years Ago Today: "Sex trafficking stings often serve as a general dragnet for petty offenses." – @enbrown.bsky.social maggiemcneill.com/2022/11/02/i...

Remember that the predominant form of age verification for porn sites — the new mandates passed in nearly every red state in the past few years — is a facial scan coupled with government ID.

👋🏼 friends. Brownish, imported-tattooed 🇺🇸 here. 3 x combat veteran. Who can I send my naturalization cert to to vouch for me when bio match determines I should be disappeared to Sudan? @mattburgess1.bsky.social @noupside.bsky.social @mmasnick.bsky.social witness for me? What the AF is happening rn?

An alleged sexual predator may escape conviction because the feds couldn't just leave local crime to local authorities. Arkansas had a case against the guy for trying to pay a 15-year-old for sex. Then DOJ tried to make it a federal case.... because he drove on a road reason.com/2025/10/29/m...

It’s outrageous they’re killing innocent people, but we also need to stress, every time, that it would not really matter even it were absolutely certain that they were drug traffickers. Murdering criminals is still, you know, murder.

I made an image of all the art posted by US DOL on X since approximately Labor Day

Law enforcement does this regularly, with high-profile round-ups of sex workers under the guise of stopping trafficking. They're rewarded with grant money and federal funds and PR. Meanwhile, the sex workers are jailed or forced through rehabilitation programs or assaulted. That's exploitation.

For adult creators, it's even more disastrous. The more people are dissuaded from going to legal sites, the more they seek out pirated content, which doesn't require facial scans to access. The UK government is starving creators to score a political point.

Between this and @nickmiroff.bsky.social’s Atlantic article on the fitness requirements, seems fair to say the recruiting effort is hitting systemic issues. Q is do they a) find a way to further loosen requirements; b) improve recruit targeting; c) accept smaller ICE than they hoped for.

Hat tip, as is so often the case, to @mikestabile.bsky.social, who is just absolutely the best person to follow for all news concerning sex policy

Singling out porn for special, extra taxes is both an unconstitutional singling out of speech the government doesn’t like + completely at odds with typical social concerns re: porn, like preventing sex worker exploitation and underage performers reason.com/2025/10/22/p...

Omg

Tech companies have a First Amendment right not to be pressured by the government to remove content, and the apps that have a right to not be removed due to government censorship. But even if they don't fight back, we all have a #1A right to access this information free from government censorship.

This is crazy. No one 'thought to first check passenger records before calling the cops. If they had, they would have seen that Cupp, his daughter, and several other family members—including his wife... had checked into the flight together.' New, from @enbrown.bsky.social reason.com/2025/10/20/f...

My husband, ladies and gentlemen

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification. I glanced down at the message. “Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began. So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

Just so we're clear, they're proposing a tax on speech. www.goerie.com/story/news/p...

Excited to inform you all that the Department of Homeland Security is currently attempting to ratio me (and failing, as of more than two hours later). With a heavy sigh, I repeat: bring back professionalism. For the love of god. You're running comms for the government of the USA. Act like it.

If anyone ever asks, "why don't people immigrate to the US the right way?", it's worth noting I was just quoted $14,460 for an O-1 visa application with premium processing. My first O-1 application, without premium processing, was $6,160 in 2018.

lol. LMAO, even.

Wow. Sidney Reid, the DC woman just found not guilty of assaulting an FBI agent, issues a withering and gutsy statement on Trump through her attorneys. "I feel sorry for the prosecutors really, who must be burdened by Trump's irrational and unfounded hatred for his fellow man." It's a must-read:

tl;dr: DOJ spent nearly three months to go 0-4 on the scraped knuckles case.

"Olvera's 'clandestine video voyeurism,' as his lawyer would later describe it, took place while Olvera was on duty, working as a deportation officer transporting a detainee on a flight."

"This case boils down to an armed, on-duty law enforcement officer who was actively transporting a detainee on a commercial flight using his cell phone to film underneath a flight attendant's skirt and take other compromising pictures of that flight attendant without her awareness or consent."

“This case boils down to an armed, on-duty law enforcement officer who was actively transporting a detainee on a commercial flight using his cell phone to film underneath a flight attendant's skirt and take other compromising pictures of that flight attendant without her awareness or consent."

An ICE agent argued that taking upskirt photos of a flight attendant wasn’t a crime because he was sneaky. Um, no, says the 11th Circuit, which upheld his conviction reason.com/2025/10/16/i...

An Ohio lawmaker introduced a bill to ban human + chatbot marriages. Sen. Josh Hawley wants to make it a federal crime for minors to chat with AI companions. Calm down, everyone. reason.com/2025/10/15/s...

Portland cops continue to run failed Nordic / Equality / End Demand / Anti-Sex Work Stings - which is NOT a way to ID a possible "victim" of trafficking OR provide any services. NO trafficking charges resulted from the failed sting. www.portland.gov/police/news/...

Unless and until some kind of compelling legal and moral argument is presented as to why this is a legitimate use of deadly force, this is just…mass murder.

SWOP had its bank accounts closed by Chase — sound familiar? — and now the people who do the work can’t be paid. We can’t get their bank account back, but we can get Phoenix, who spends so much of their life organizing mutual aid for others, able to meet bills this month. $phoenixcalida

But the larger point is... Anything sex work adjacent is being flagged and its crazy that wanting to give resources to people have experienced trafficking is suspicious behavior And omg nvm I remembered the timeline im in

So. Im mostly okay I will be asking for somewhere between 200-300 in the next few days because I habe bills to pay $phoenixcalida And omg I buried the lede Our org had all funding suspended so I can't access my money until we get a new bank (We have a new. Just waiting on paperwork)

Kentucky has sued Roblox over a "Charlie Kirk assassination simulator" being accessible to children. BUT their age-verification law doesn't require Roblox to verify, so the AG is suing for *waves arms* "deceptive trade practices." The right's assault on speech was never going to stop with porn.

Newsom vetoed SB 771 👏 It would have essentially made being a social media platform a civil rights violation reason.com/2025/10/13/c...

Kid’s already got a better message on urbanism than half of elected democrats

I’m the only one in our household not to fall yet and I don’t have high hopes

Critics including Elon Musk have assailed my @cato.org colleague Alex Nowrasteh's study finding that most politically motivated terrorist killings in the U.S. since 1975 have been done by persons on the right. Alex responds to the critics here and explains his methods and classifications.

+3 cont) the use of profiling, in particular, is both a from-the-top policy choice and possibly _the only heuristic_ that some random ATFer on immigration duty even has. And of course they’re not making it easy to tell who’s ICE and who’s just externing.

+2 cont) of course, no group is a monolith and some ICE agents were probably eager to do raids, and that may be correlated with the people doing the most aggro stuff. 3) THIS ISN’T JUST ICE. The use of FBI, DEA, etc for basic imm enforcement is new. These dudes aren’t trained in imm at all. +