Inhoudsopgave van February/March 2026 - Reason

ASKED BY A college student if Republicans ought to be more cautious about “abusing that power” when they control the federal government, Vice President J.D. Vance left no doubt that he’s unworried. “The left is already going to do it, regardless of whether we do it,” he added. You’ll have a hard time finding a more concise formulation of the will-to-power sentiment that has seized so much of the conservative movement in recent years. And this was no gaffe—Vance has said similar things on several occasions, and he posted a video of this comment to his official X account. The full context of the moment is worth appreciating. At a Turning Point USA event in October 2025 at the University of Mississippi, Vance took a question from a student who…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has sought to justify his policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers by arguing that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with criminal organizations that supply prohibited intoxicants. Yet the Trump administration also insists that U.S. forces are not engaging in “hostilities” when they blow up boats believed to be carrying illegal drugs. Those positions are hard to reconcile with each other, but they are consistent with Trump’s disregard for legal limits on his use of the military to prosecute a literalized war on drugs. His administration has tied itself in knots to portray murder as self-defense while avoiding congressional constraints. As of early December 2025, Trump had ordered 21 attacks on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing a…

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION believes you don’t have the right to record Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in public. This stance is both factually wrong and an attempt to chill free speech by conflating it with violence. At a July 2025 press conference in Tampa, Florida, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said, “Violence is anything that threatens them and their safety, so it is doxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles.” In September 2025, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin called “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online” a form of doxing. She added, “We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents…

SINCE AUGUST 11, President Donald Trump’s “Safe and Beautiful” plan has pulled more than 2,000 National Guard troops into Washington, D.C.—a visible show of force to deter crime and signal federal control. A U.S. district court judge ruled on November 20 that the deployment is unlawful and ordered that it end, but stayed that order for 21 days. Trump’s lawyers have argued his National Guard powers are “unreviewable.” For locals, the guard members’ effect on crime remains debatable, but the accompanying checkpoints and stops have been uncontroversially disruptive. The oddest part of the spectacle is captured in the photos that follow. Uniformed and armed men and women from across the country can be seen all over the city wielding leaf blowers, hoses, and brooms as they do municipal chores—tasks for…

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TV DEATH BY LIGHTNING NATALIE DOWZICKY Mike Makowsky opens Death by Lightning, a four-part miniseries he wrote and produced, with a chilling line: “This is a true story about two men the world forgot. One was the 20th president of the United States. The other shot him.” Yet this drama about President James Garfield and assassin Charles Guiteau reminds us that we should wish for more forgettable presidents. Garfield, played by Michael Shannon, is depicted as a quiet, reserved statesman who reluctantly becomes the Republican nominee only after a unifying speech vaults him above party factions. As the political drama unfolds, the series shows glimpses of Guiteau’s increasingly erratic life and the strange ways he keeps crossing paths with Garfield on the road to a fateful morning at the Baltimore…

HOW HIGH IS your risk of developing pancreatic cancer or suffering a heart attack in the next 20 years? A new generative artificial intelligence system called Delphi-2M aims to answer that question and offer personalized forecasts of your long-term health trajectory. Developed by a team of European biomedical researchers and detailed in a September 2025 Nature article, Delphi-2M represents one of the most ambitious efforts yet to apply AI to predictive medicine. Large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots such as ChatGPT trained on massive amounts of text data to predict the next word in a sentence. Delphi-2M trained on a vast amount of medical data to predict the next stage in a person’s health. Delphi-2M treats medical histories as sequences of events, much as ChatGPT processes words. Its training…

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act into law in 2024. Citing potential national security concerns, the law required the social media app TikTok to either separate from its Chinese parent company or cease operations in the United States. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term delaying implementation of the law. But his administration is still wielding government power to shield Americans from China—whether we like it or not. The Washington Post reports that several federal agencies, led by the Department of Commerce, intend to ban the sale of TP-Link wireless routers. Users routinely praise these popular routers, but since the company was founded in China, regulators have raised concerns that the Chinese government could access…

“WHILE FAMILIES WITH young children comprise about 14 percent of the city’s population, they comprise about 30 percent of the set of New Yorkers who are leaving the city,” said Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani at a visit to a day care center in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he hyped his plans for those families. Mamdani ran on the most ambitious universal child care proposal in the country: free day care for all kids ages 6 weeks and above. Apparently, this pitch was compelling to the city’s beleaguered parents: The self-styled socialist won by a hefty margin. New York City already has universal child care guaranteed to 3- and 4-year-olds. When Bill de Blasio ran for mayor in 2013, he aimed to distinguish himself from then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had created 4,000…

ACROSS 1. Wall Street vs. ___ Street 5. Biceps exercises 10. The Lion King bad guy 14. River of Tuscany 15. Available at a pub 16. Food with a soft or hard shell 17. Plank of Zohran Mamdani’s platform that’s likely to worsen housing shortages 19. Letters that might precede a hot take 20. Salesperson’s speeches 21. Words before a synopsis 23. Solo of Star Wars 24. “Understood,” in a text 26. “Bad” cholesterol letters 27. Type of business Zohran Mamdani thinks should have a city-run option 33. Clear of data 34. 2112 band 36. Light bulb holders 39. ___ the buzzer (with no time to spare) 42. As well 43. Account established by ERISA 44. Kaley of Harley Quinn 45. Having little excess, as a budget 46. Rate Zohran…

IN A 1995 episode of The Simpsons, teachers at the dilapidated Springfield Elementary School make an impassioned plea for more school funding at a PTA meeting, telling parents, “It’s for your children’s future.” Principal Skinner easily changes their minds by simply rubbing his fingers together. “Oh yeah, the taxes, the finger thing means the taxes,” exclaim the disgruntled parents, who then reject any funding that requires a tax increase. There are several parallels between that episode and the real-life property tax revolts sweeping Florida and Ohio. In both states, spiking property values have led to rising property taxes and growing anti-tax sentiment among homeowners. Lawmakers and activists are responding with proposals to cap, cut, or even eliminate property taxes altogether. Florida lawmakers have unveiled not one, not two, but seven…

TALK IS CHEAP—but Polymarket lets you put your money where your mouth is. Nearly four years after being shut down by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the online betting company that allows you to stake money on future events has become CFTC-compliant and relaunched for U.S. residents at the end of 2025. Not everybody is thrilled about Polymarket’s return. Commentators across the political spectrum have warned that betting, on sports or on anything, can cause financial and psychological harm, especially for those with a history of addiction. It’s prudent to abstain from speculating with money you can’t afford to lose, but Americans should still welcome Polymarket’s comeback. Shayne Coplan, an early ethereum investor and self-described cypherpunk, founded Polymarket in June 2020, when he was just 22 years old. The…

THE NATIONAL PARK Service reinstalled Washington, D.C.’s only statue of a Confederate soldier in October 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s effort to restore preexisting monuments in the capital. The depiction of Brigadier General Albert Pike was toppled by protesters in the summer of 2020, with many treating it as just another symbol of Confederate nostalgia. But it was erected to honor Pike’s civic and philanthropic legacy, not his role in the Civil War. Pike’s bronze likeness was not donated by a Southern historical society or heritage league, nor funded by a Jim Crow–era government. It was privately commissioned by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry of Washington, D.C., as part of a fundraising effort that began in the 1890s—years before the wave of Confederate monument construction. The statue honors…

WE CAN THANK Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act for much of our freedom to communicate online. It enabled the rise of search engines, social media, and countless platforms that make our modern internet a thriving marketplace of all sorts of speech. Its first 26 words have been vital, if controversial, for protecting online platforms from liability for users’ posts: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” If I defame someone on Facebook, I’m responsible—not Meta. If a neo-Nazi group posts threats on its website, it’s the Nazis, not the domain registrar or hosting service, who could wind up in court. How Section 230 should apply to generative AI,…

DRAMATIC SCENES HAVE come to define the second Donald Trump administration’s immigration policy: federal troops patrolling the streets of American cities, agents snatching international students on video, hundreds of Venezuelan migrants disappeared to a brutal Salvadoran prison. Behind those scenes, Trump is reshaping the country’s immigration bureaucracy. In just its first 100 days, the second Trump administration had “taken 181 immigration-specific executive actions,” found the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI), “a sixfold increase over the fewer than 30 actions during the same period in Trump’s first term.” Visa processing and bureaucratic rulemaking don’t grab as much attention as harsh, highly visible enforcement actions, but they’re making it harder for immigrants to work, learn, and live in the United States. De-Documenting Immigrants IN OCTOBER, THE Trump administration ended the automatic extension…

NEW YORK MAYOR-ELECT Zohran Mamdani is inheriting a public school system that has made some progress in student learning but is completely dysfunctional in terms of financial stability and operations. And his campaign promises are likely to worsen the system’s flaws. New York City’s public schools once educated more than a million students, but the system’s enrollment has been steadily declining. Since 2020, it has lost 10 percent of its K-12 students. Even with the expansion of pre-K and 3-K programs for young children, the schools are serving 115,000 fewer students than they did seven years ago. Yet the budget for the city Department of Education (NYC DOE) has greatly increased, rising from $33 billion in 2019 to over $40 billion this year. This disconnect between enrollment and budget has…

“PERSONNEL IS POLICY,” as the Reagan-era slogan had it, so Zohran Mamdani’s 400-person transition team tells us a lot about how he’ll run a city with an already-bloated $115 billion budget and 300,000 municipal workers. He’s cleaning house, demanding 179 Mayor Eric Adams staffers resign before he takes control of New York City—far more and far faster than the norm. The 17 transition committees include some familiar and experienced names, including former Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, City University of New York Chancellor Félix Matos Rodriguez, and outgoing business-oriented Partnership for New York leader Kathryn Wylde (of whom one Gothamite in the know declares, “What a shameless sellout!”). In other words, a man who’s never run anything but a failed rap career is putting some establishment tokens on his team. Look…