Table of contents for May 2026 in Reason

VICE PRESIDENT J.D. Vance and outgoing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem both said Renée Good, an activist shot three times in her car by a federal immigration officer, was engaged in “domestic terrorism.” Two weeks later, after officers shot Alex Pretti at least 10 times, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called Pretti “a domestic terrorist [who] tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” And in October 2025, a Border Patrol officer shot Marimar Martinez five times in her car; unlike Good and Pretti, Martinez survived. DHS deemed her a “domestic terrorist” who had “rammed” the officers’ vehicle while it was “boxed in.” Even after Martinez demonstrated in court that officers had sideswiped her before opening fire, DHS refused to retract its characterization of her as…

PANAMA CITY IS often reduced to a canal. That’s understandable: The Panama Canal is one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure ever built. But that’s also a misunderstanding. The canal didn’t create Panama City’s identity as a trading hub; it formalized it. Long before steel ships crossed from ocean to ocean, the isthmus functioned as a corridor for exchange, connection, and movement. Arriving in Panama City today feels like landing in a more tropical version of Miami. Glass towers line the coast. Luxury malls sit beside logistics offices. Container ships hover offshore, waiting their turn to go through the canal’s locks. A massive airport connects continents. The city looks global because it has always been oriented outward, and because it doubled down on trade even as much of the…

AS HE CELEBRATED the 50th anniversary of Social Security, then–Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill (D–Mass.) hailed the program’s epic accomplishments. In the days before Social Security was born, O’Neill said, “Life for the elderly is filled with uncertainty, dependency, and hor-ror. When you get old, you are without income, without hope.” The federal government’s payments to retirees, he continued, meant that Americans no longer had to live in “fear and dependency” in old age. It was a tidy summary of the conventional wisdom surround-ing America’s old-age entitlement state—which includes not just Social Security, but also Medicare and many other taxpayer-funded efforts to subsidize the supposedly nasty, brutish, and not-so-short lives of the over-65 crowd. It is a narrative that deserves to be shoved off a cliff. Today’s retirees, most…

AT THE FEDERAL level, Republican-written AI bills tend to be less concerned with policing how individuals use the technology than with regulating the development and deployment of the underlying technology—large language models (LLMs). Democrat-written bills tend to focus on individual malfeasance rather than the tech itself. Accordingly, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) was so outraged last year by a (hilarious) deepfake of herself that she called on Congress to affirm “the right to demand that social media companies remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness.” In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills in 2024 that restricted the use of AI to create political content deemed deceptive in advance of elections. On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) doesn’t just want to ban driverless cars to…

WHEN SEN. ROBERT “Fighting Bob” La Follette Sr. opposed American entry into the Great War, the Wisconsin Republican warned that intervention abroad would carry consequences at home. What he did not anticipate was that he himself would be the target of a government-organized propaganda campaign designed to end his political career. Eric T. Chester’s Silencing “Fighting Bob” reconstructs how that campaign unfolded—and how it extended far beyond a single senator during the fraught months between the debate over intervention and the height of U.S. mobilization in 1918. By illustrating the reach of wartime state power, this unsettling work of history resonates in an era of both continual foreign interventions and renewed domestic dissent. Organized into four chapters, the book examines the federal government’s campaign against three left-leaning social groups and…

SINCE 2015, THE U-Haul Growth Index has been shining a light on domestic migration trends by looking at where people picked up one-way truck reservations and where they dropped them off—a clever if imperfect proxy for relocations. As in recent years, red states such as Texas, Florida, and Tennessee topped the rankings for drawing new residents in 2025, while blue states such as California, Illinois, and Massachusetts filled out a majority of the bottom spots. Because votes in the Electoral College are determined by a state’s total representation in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and because House seats are apportioned based on population, these changes could have huge political implications. Two recent analyses—one from the political scientist Jonathan Cervas at Carnegie Mellon University and the other…

A SMALL LOGGING contractor in upstate New York had a truck empty and needed someone with experience, and I needed a job. At that point I’d been trucking for nearly 20 years in four different countries and had done a fair bit of logging. It seemed like a natural pairing, and when I went to meet the man behind this small outfit—we’ll call him Travis—he expressed optimism. “I think you’ll like this old Kenworth we’ve got here,” said Travis. “My uncle was driving it until he got sick, and we’ve been having a hell of a time finding a decent driver for it. The last two clowns we had didn’t work out: One guy wouldn’t show up for work every day—I think he might have been a methhead—and the other…

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS BEFORE he was scheduled to report to federal prison, Keonne Rodriguez was still talking about code. In 2015, Rodriguez launched Samourai Wallet, a bitcoin wallet designed for financial privacy. Its signature feature, called Whirlpool, allowed users to combine their bitcoin with others’, obscuring the trail of who paid whom. “I think the best analogy for it is like smelting gold,” Rodriguez told Reason in 2022. “You take your bitcoin, you add it into Whirlpool, and Whirlpool smelts it into new pieces that are not associated to the original piece.” Federal prosecutors saw something very different. According to the Department of Justice, Whirlpool was a money laundering machine. When prosecutors filed charges against Rodriguez and his co-founder, William Hill, they argued that the app was “specifically intended to conceal…

ONE LESSON OF Front Street, Brian Barth’s book of immersive reporting from the sprawling homeless encampments of Silicon Valley, is that there is no full-bore solution to the problems presented by the homeless. The unhoused, and the larger community they aggravate, have only least-worst options. Barth’s well-reported stories stem from three sprawling multiblock or multiacre tent cities, chronicling the types of people who compose them and the communities—troubled communities, but in some ways surprisingly effective ones—that they form. All three are eventually bulldozed away. But such destructive reactions don’t make the homeless disappear, even if they solve short-term problems for neighbors by making them fade from sight at least temporarily (and at least on that particular site, though they often regroup a mile away). Barth is on the side of…

5 YEARS AGO May 2021 “Without Roe [v. Wade], political battles over abortion will continue, but they will mainly involve state-by-state legislative debates rather than arguments about constitutional law and the composition of the Supreme Court. While neither side will be happy with that situation, it will reduce the stakes of any given legislative or judicial decision and turn down the heat of a controversy that has frequently dominated national politics.” JACOB SULLUM “The Right to an Abortion Isn’t Going Away” 10 YEARS AGO May 2016 “After seven years of economic realities smacking Democratic promises in the face, [Sen.] Bernie Sanders has arrived to say that the problem with all the spending, the centralizing, and the stimulusing, is that it did not go nearly far enough. It would be more comforting to…

YOU MAY HAVE heard that the U.S. Supreme Court killed off the practice of nationwide injunctions, the practice where a federal judge stops a federal policy from going into effect everywhere in the country while a single lawsuit challenging that policy plays out in court. As a result, you may think that President Donald Trump is now free to implement his national agenda of immigration crackdowns without facing any more interference from pesky lower court judges, who have enjoined such presidential policies in the past. That was certainly how the White House characterized the Supreme Court’s June 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which lifted several nationwide injunctions against Trump’s executive order purporting to abolish the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship for millions of U.S.-born children. “Today’s decision restores the…

TWO YEARS AFTER the U.S. Senate held hearings on the threat that comic books purportedly posed to American youth, a Rhode Island commission reported its findings on the subject to the state legislature. “After months of study of this demoralizing material, it seems to us that what’s at stake here is the decency of society,” the 1956 report said. “The issue is not censorship but one of self-defense.” Although “we can do little other than urge the publishers or producers to clean house,” the commission said, “there is a definite responsibility on the distributor and retailer alike to avoid feeding our children a constant diet of crime, horror, sex, violence and depravity.” The report recommended a ban on the sale of such material to minors and the appointment of “a…

In 2025, the United Kingdom paid a record £1.5 billion ($2 billion) in “constraint payments” to keep wind farms from producing energy. When high winds cause turbines to produce more energy than the nation’s outdated power grid can handle, the government must pay wind farms to shut down to prevent an overload; it must then pay other sources, such as gas plants, to turn on in order to meet demand. The government spent nearly £380 million ($512.5 million) paying wind farms to shut off, and it paid power plants £1.08 billion ($1.46 billion) to make up the difference. Leticia Mariscal of Madera County, California, pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft for using her position in social services to steal food assistance funds. Prosecutors say Mariscal accessed county databases to steal…