“John Marshall has made his decision” regarding relations between the Cherokee Nation and the United States,  US president Andrew Jackson supposedly said of the US Supreme Court’s chief justice in 1832. “Now let him enforce it!”

That sentiment comes to mind when considering the Supreme Court’s June 27 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The court ruled that the government of Texas doesn’t run afoul of the First Amendment by requiring websites to verify users’ ages if those sites serve content the regime deems “harmful to minors.”

Even if the Jackson quote isn’t apocryphal, there are differences, of course.

One is that enforcement of Texas’s age verification law falls to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, not to chief justice John Roberts (or to associate justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion).

The other, bigger difference is that Jackson successfully defied Marshall — herding the Cherokee westward at gunpoint without further legal consequence — while Paxton stands virtually no chance of implementing his permission slip from the Roberts court to intrude on Texans’ Internet privacy.

The response of the porn industry to these state-based “age verification” laws breaks down into three types:

A few sites comply. They put up a web gate and require users from states with such laws to prove they’re over 18 by providing government-issued ID or submitting a face picture that lets AI estimate their ages.

Some other sites put up a different kind of web gate — they simply don’t allow users whose IP addresses seem to be located in states with “age verification” laws to see what’s behind the gate.

Those two responses probably cover 10% or so of “porn” sites, mainly the big operators who have a lot of money invested in their operations and don’t want legal trouble.

Most sites go a third way: They just ignore the Ken Paxtons of the world.

And, like Andrew Jackson versus Marshall, they can get away with it.

Their servers aren’t located in Texas, or possibly even in the United States. Maybe it’s possible to tell who operates those servers, maybe not. Anonymous website operators in Thailand probably don’t lie awake at night worrying about a Ken Paxton lawsuit.

Paxton might waste a bunch of taxpayer money creating a Chinese-style “Great Firewall of Texas” to stop Texans from viewing web content he doesn’t like … but Virtual Private Networks would get those Texans around that firewall. VPNs would also help those users convince sites that DO require age verification from Texans that they’re actually from the Netherlands, Japan, or Romania.

I’m a big fan of VPNs and other tools for circumventing government control of what we can access on the World Wide Web. I’m also old enough to remember the US government’s war on encryption in the 1990s. Short version for you youngsters: The government lost that war. Paxton and his co-belligerents will lose this one, too.

That’s a good thing. Government control over what we may or may not see and hear on the Internet is far too dangerous to allow.

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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Cynthia Gonzalez, vice mayor of Cudahy, California, wants to know where LA’s street gangs are: “You guys are always tagging everything up, claiming [the] hood, and now that your hood’s being invaded by the biggest gang there is, there ain’t a peep out of you …. We’re out there fighting our turf, protecting our turf, protecting our people and, like, where you at?”

By “the biggest gang there is,” of course, she means US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and its co-conspirators in the occupation of Greater Los Angeles.

A few miles away in Huntington Park, mayor Arturo Flores has instructed his city’s chapter of the Blue Line Gang to “begin verifying the identities and authority” of masked marauders attempting to abduct alleged immigrants on his city’s streets.

The move comes after masked hoodlums, accompanied by gang shot-caller Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem, terrorized a 28-year-old pregnant mother of four (and US citizen) in a publicity stunt gone awry.

“Men dressed in tactical gear, operating unmarked vehicles without displaying credentials or agency affiliation,” he says “have infiltrated our neighborhoods in direct violation of our community’s values, civil rights, and the basic principles of due process.”

Naturally, supporters of US president Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” scheme and his order for an ongoing military occupation of the LA area, now in its third week, want Gonzalez’s and Flores’s heads on pikes.

But they’re not wrong.

Flores knows what an occupation looks like, having participated, as a US Marine, in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Based on her statements, Gonzalez seems familiar with the local gangs and how they operate. She knows gang activity when she sees it.

Letting this mess escalate to full-on civil war wouldn’t be good for anyone involved.

On the other hand, ICE, the California National Guard, and the US Marine Corps need to read and heed the sign LA is hanging out. It says: NOT WELCOME.

Until they take the hint and leave, they should be shunned as individuals and resisted as a group.

Local businesses should refuse their patronage.

Citizens should hide immigrants when they learn — from ad hoc early warning systems already operating — that ICE is coming.

Activists should  relentlessly impede and harass every organized movement of the ICE gang’s street troops.

They should do it for themselves and for their friends, but inflicting utter defeat on ICE and its co-conspirators will also constitute a victory for America.

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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In 1938, five years into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” the US remained mired in the depths of a “Great Depression.” Real income still hadn’t regained its 1929 level. Unemployment stood at six times at level. The nation languished in economic failure with no end in sight, making even the far-from-free-market policies of his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, look attractive by comparison.

Then, in 1939, a miracle! Europe went to war!

FDR saw that as a way to put America back to work. He instituted a “Lend-Lease” program, spinning up manufacturing to provide England with arms. He instituted the first US peacetime military draft. Americans opposed direct US involvement in a European war, so he went to work antagonizing Japan with oil and steel embargoes, knowing — or at least hoping — he’d get a war on THAT side of the world. Which, on December 7, 1941, he did.

US involvement in World War 2 didn’t end the Great Depression — it merely masked the symptoms for a little while, at the cost of 400,000 American lives.

What ended the Great Depression was widespread destruction across most of the world’s manufacturing capacity, while America’s remained untouched. We didn’t so much create our own fortune as gravy-train on the rest of the world’s misfortune. Global militaristic folly turned the US into an economic, as well as military, “superpower.”

Donald Trump calls himself a “peace president” abroad, even as he does his damnedest to devastate the economy at home with ruinous tariffs and an all-out attempt to deport the immigrants who constitute the backbone of American agriculture, construction, and manufacturing. The resulting dissatisfaction and unrest prompted him, earlier in June, to militarily occupy the country’s second-largest city.

Donald Trump needs two things very badly right now: A distraction from the consequences of his disastrous policies going forward, and some good economic news — even if it’s entirely artificial in nature — to cover up those consequences in retrospect.

His decision to order an unjustified and unprovoked June 22 attack on Iranian nuclear facilities answered that first need, at least for a moment.

Will he try to leverage the matter in pursuit of the second need as well? Time will tell.

As tariffs and deportations continue to decimate our ability to buy food, housing, and other necessities, it becomes more and more likely that he’ll try to pull an FDR.

Even if that temporarily “works,” the price ain’t right. Only freedom can produce prosperity — or peace.

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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