On January 10, US president-elect Donald Trump officially became a convicted felon as New York judge Juan Merchan sentenced him on 34 counts of falsifying business records to disguise “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels as legal expenses.

The sentencing followed a 5-4 Supreme Court rejection of Trump’s request that it intervene to postpone the sentencing. That the vote went 5-4 instead of 9-0 constitutes a far greater scandal than anything Trump stands convicted of.

Most elements of the case against Trump — the payments to Daniels before he was elected in 2016, and the charges and trial after he left office in 2021 — relate to periods of time when he was not president.

Even the part that relates to the period of time when he WAS president — his reimbursement, disguised as “legal expenses,” to the attorney who acted as cut-out for the hush money — didn’t concern any “official act” of the presidency conferring immunity for such per last July’s Supreme Court ruling (which itself lacked any convincing constitutional justification).

In effect, the four dissenting justices claim that anyone who has ever been president of the United States should enjoy life-long immunity from criminal prosecution (at both the federal and state level), even for acts committed outside the scope or time frame of that person’s presidency.

So, what were those four justices trying to save Trump from?

The sentence included no prison time, no fine, and no probation requirements.  Merchan’s “unconditional discharge” consisted entirely of entering the convictions into the public record.

That doesn’t mean the convictions bring no consequences.

Under New York law, felons must provide DNA samples to law enforcement.

Under New Jersey law, Trump’s golf courses may lose their liquor licenses.

Under (unconstitutional) federal law, Trump may no longer possess firearms.

And some countries’ regimes deny entry to convicted felons, which in theory could impede his ability, even as president, to visit those countries.

It could have … and, for anyone not named “Donald Trump,” likely would have … been far worse.  He faced, among other possible consequences, up to 20 years in prison.

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that anyone not named “Donald Trump” would have faced prosecution over the matter, or that even he himself would have faced prosecution if he’d lost the 2016 presidential election and faded into obscurity.

Whatever Trump may be wrong about, he’s right that this was all about politics.

And politics makes people — including Supreme Court justices — stupid.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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When you pull out your phone, tablet, or laptop — or sit down at a desktop computer — what Internet content should you not need the government’s permission to view?

It’s a simple question and the only correct answer is “all of it.”

But Florida’s politicians, following those of several other states,  are stomping their feet, declaring themselves your babysitters, and yelling that if you want to view particular web sites, you need to beg for their permission first.

HB3, which came into effect on January 1, includes two silly components and one truly terrible implementation hook.

Component #1: HB3 restricts access to social media for those under 14 years of age, and requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds to use social media accounts. Fortunately, that part has been blocked by the courts … for now.

Component #2: HB3 requires users to be 18 years of age or older to access “material harmful to minors” — that is, pornography.  But there’s already a federal law (18 US Code § 1470) against providing pornography to those under 16. It’s not Florida politicians’ job to enforce that law or to change its age threshold.

The implementation hook is a requirement that social media platforms and porn sites implement “age verification” protocols for all viewers.

How are these platforms supposed to “verify” your age? By requiring you to show them your government-issued identification card, of course.

So even if you’re an adult, you’re not allowed to view pornography on the Internet, from Florida, anonymously.

Some porn sites are complying with the law. Others are blocking access from Florida IP addresses. And still others are simply ignoring the whole thing.

Fortunately, the whole matter remains entirely in the hands of Floridians, thanks to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

These handy-dandy services — some free, some paid, and of varying reliability and variety — allow you to disguise where you’re from when visiting web sites.

For example, you might be at your desk in Gainesville, Florida, but access Pornhub (one of the sites blocking Florida IPs) “from” the Netherlands. Yes, I just did that. Purely for research purposes, of course.

Unsurprisingly, according to media reports, Floridians’ use of VPNs has increased by a factor of ten or more since January 1.

Are some of those Floridian VPN users minors? Of course. I’d rather children didn’t view porn, but I know they’re going to (I feel old; when I was a kid, my friends and I  didn’t have the Internet and had to raid adults’ hidden print magazine stashes). Forbidding it just makes it more attractive.

The cool thing about VPNs isn’t that they make it possible to view porn when politicians don’t want you to.

It’s that they make it possible to view ANYTHING, whether politicians want you to or not, and without those politicians even being able to know you viewed it.

Internet freedom and Internet privacy are important — which is why it’s important that HB3 fail, and fail spectacularly, and be SEEN to fail spectacularly, in its mission of making politicians our Internet babysitters.

Fortunately, it’s doing just that.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“I need to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost,”  Master Sergeant Matthew Alan Livelsberger (US Army) allegedly wrote in an explanatory note on his phone before shooting himself inside a Tesla Cybertruck packed with fireworks and gas tanks set to detonate outside a Las Vegas casino, “and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”

I say “allegedly” because, as is often the case, we’re only getting details and versions of the story that the government and its law enforcement agencies choose to release. Those details and versions are at best incomplete and at worst not necessarily true. But I consider that particular sentence the elephant in the room.

The rest of the released content indicates a kind of fuzzy political motive, but Livelsberger’s personal life and mental health also seem to have been unraveling in various ways leading up to the incident.

Yes, incident — not, really, an “attack.” Based on what’s been publicly released about his Special Forces experience and skill set, if he’d wanted to create a true mass casualty event, he wouldn’t likely have ended up killing only himself (and inflicting allegedly minor injuries on seven others).

While the whole thing clearly didn’t amount to a “cry for help” — he no longer needs, or could use, help — it was definitely a cry of some kind rather than an attempt to kill others.

Back to that elephant in the room:  More than one in four American “mass shooters” come from military backgrounds, while only 7% or so of the general population has that kind of experience and training.

On the same weekend as the Las Vegas explosion, army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14 and injured dozens in a New Orleans rampage using a truck.

Timothy McVeigh received the Bronze Star as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle gunner in Desert Storm before going on to commit the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Does military “service” make one more likely to engage in violent conduct?

Or does a proclivity for such conduct cause future mass shooters to seek out such “service?”

Maybe it’s a bit of both. Maybe there are other factors. But the correlation seems strong enough to believe there’s a connection of SOME kind.

While the whole subject is likely too complex to admit of simple solutions, the problem can clearly at least be reduced at one end — by creating fewer people who find themselves mentally twisted and morally haunted by the experience of killing other people.

Preferably, none of those people at all.

But even just adopting a sane foreign policy that doesn’t entail decades of needless war without end, and significantly cutting the head count of the US armed forces to match, would be a good start.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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