Some articles touching on constitutional conflict:
- The State of FARA.
Last March, Arkansas proposed a bill that would require foreign agents to register in the state. It wasn’t alone: Similar bills were also introduced in Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Nebraska, and other states. This slew of legislation is part of a broader trend by states to engage in national security and foreign policy-related issues, with states increasingly adopting analogues to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Collectively, these actions portend increasing compliance burdens for companies and nonprofits with certain foreign connections, in particular due to differences between state statutes and their federal cousin.
- - Foreign Agents Registration Act.
- - Supremacy Clause.
- Minnesota’s Compelling 10th Amendment Case Against Trump’s ICE Surge.
Control over state and local government personnel is one of the powers reserved to the states by the 10th Amendment. In addition, as legal scholar Michael Rappaport has shown, the original meaning of the Constitution indicates that such control is a basic element of the sovereignty inherent in being a state in the first place.
- - The Tenth Amendment.
- Grok, ‘Censorship,’ & the Collapse of Accountability.
While the ability to misuse AI image generation technology for purposes of harassment came as no surprise, researchers long assumed that such behavior and content would remain confined to dark pockets of the internet. Experts expected that these images would be generated primarily via open-source models and shared via underground or encrypted chats. Such models also support “nudify” apps, which could be used to generate virtual “revenge porn,” create fake content featuring celebrities distributed on dedicated domains, or be used as tools for teenagers to harass their classmates. But Grok’s unique integration with X enables creation, prominent public distribution, and effortless resharing via the retweet button—and could thus normalize such behavior at scale.
Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, dismissed the torrent of outrage that followed the proliferation of the content, explicitly stating that calls to curtail Grok amounted to an effort to “suppress free speech.” Musk’s fanboys, in his X mentions and elsewhere, reflexively echoed this position.
- Free Speech: Obscenuty.
- Free Speech: CP.