Strait Outta Commission
Plus: Tucker Carlson says the CIA is after him, and Reason mourns the loss of longtime staffer Brian Doherty.
President Donald Trump has called on foreign countries that rely on oil from the Middle East to help reopen the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz. Iranian forces have closed the strait to most ship travel, which has fallen by about 90 percent in recent days. Due to the threat of Iranian attacks, international shipping companies have ceased using the all-important passage, causing global oil prices to spike. Iranian authorities have declared that the strait is closed only to enemies of the regime.
In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump asked China, France, Japan, South Korea, and the U.K. to deploy ships to reopen the strait.
"In the meantime, the United States will be bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian Boats and Ships out of the water," wrote Trump. "One way or the other, we will soon get the Hormuz Strait OPEN, SAFE, and FREE!"
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China did not specifically respond to this request, according to The New York Times. The French governments indicated it would be unlikely to intervene until the situation in the region was less precarious. Trump spoke with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer about the matter on Sunday, but no concrete plan has emerged from that conversation. In other words, nobody seems particularly inclined to help.
American public opinion regarding the war with Iran is decidedly mixed, and it is likely to atrophy as casualties and costs mount. Higher gas prices will certainly not help the GOP as it heads toward midterms.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration is prepared to continue a major bombing campaign against the Iranian regime. The administration reportedly believes that Mojtaba Khamenei, the new leader of the country, is alive but wounded following the strikes that killed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson claims that the CIA is out to get him. In a video posted on X, Carlson said he has learned that the CIA is preparing a criminal referral for the Justice Department on the basis that he is "acting as an agent of a foreign power." Carlson denies that is doing anything of a sort. The feds have not confirmed whether Carlson is the target of such an investigation.
When you discover the CIA has been reading your texts in order to frame you for a crime. pic.twitter.com/XgoluHw8EG
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 14, 2026
Carlson, an outspoken opponent of the Trump administration's bombing campaign against Iran, tried and failed to talk Trump out of the war. More broadly, he is a prominent leader of the noninterventionist faction of MAGA, which extracted the (now broken) "no new wars" promise from Trump when he ran for president in 2024.
According to Carlson, the CIA has read his text messages and monitored his conversations with Iranian officials, and on that basis is claiming that he is violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). FARA requires lobbyists who work on behalf of foreign governments to publicly register that they do so. The requirement is selectively enforced: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not registered under FARA, even though the group engages in political activity designed to defeat officials who, for instance, oppose giving military aid to Israel.
Weaponizing FARA against dissenters in the name of cracking down on foreign influence is a serious First Amendment concern. Reason's Matthew Petti has noted the ways such crackdowns can censor legitimate political speech. "Practically, the question is how to separate Americans being ordered or tricked by a foreign government from Americans doing things of their own accord," wrote Petti last year. "Philosophically, the question is whether stamping out 'foreign influence' is possible or desirable in a free society—especially one that is so heavily involved in the rest of the world."
It's hard to say what exactly is happening with Carlson, given that we don't even know for sure whether this CIA inquiry is real. But we should be very worried at the idea of the government reading American citizens' texts, disagreeing with their foreign policy views, and then branding them puppets of foreign adversaries. Washington cannot require public commentators to register themselves: The First Amendment precludes such a thing.
Moreover, it would be a huge double standard if the Israeli government's lobbyists within the U.S. were somehow exempt from declaring themselves as such but opponents of Israeli government lobbyists had to first ask the feds for permission to speak up.
Brian Doherty, an esteemed chronicler of the libertarian political movement who has worked for this magazine for more than three decades, died unexpectedly over the weekend. He was 57.
Doherty will be fondly remembered and sorely missed. I was part of the wave of college students who came upon libertarianism in the '00s, during Ron Paul's rise; Doherty was a vital source of information about the campaign and the broader movement it birthed. His writings helped connect me with the libertarian professional network: the Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Reason. He knew our movement's lore better than anybody else.
Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie have both published reminiscences at Reason about Brian's life and work. This is from Matt's piece:
"Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility. Brian embodied both," Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward recalls. "His weird, colorful life—filled with comics and festivals and music and books—was a model of life lived freely and openly. And in his thinking, reporting, and editing, he was one of the most conscientious and responsible people I have ever met. A libertarian hero in every sense."
Spelunking in subcultures both libertarian and whimsical led to a lot of early discoveries that the normies only sussed out later. Doherty profiled New Hampshire's Free State Project way back in 2004, caught Seasteaders on their then-rise in 2009, and started covering Bitcoin in 2013. Though, as he ruefully admitted later, he knew about the groundbreaking crypto currency as early as July 2010 yet somehow neglected to cash in.
"Had I shelled out, say, $2,000 on this innovative, anti-inflationary currency even a lazy six weeks after I was introduced to it," he wrote, "today I would be sitting on 28,571 bitcoins, the equivalent at press time of over $212 million in cash." More like $2 billion now, but who's counting?
After news of his death broke, Doherty's work colleagues filled up a long Slack thread with fond memories of his deep-seated sense of tolerance, his garrulous laugh, his fury at personal technology, his sometimes elliptical prose style. A staffer once made a T-shirt from a typically verbose Dohertian Slack message: "I try not to assume that because crazy people with crazy beliefs believe or used to believe the things I believe for what I think are right and sane reasons, that that is a sign that I am crazy. But it's getting harder and harder I confess."
Last June, I had the pleasure of interviewing Doherty at FreedomFest about his views on libertarianism in the age of Trump. He was sharp and insightful as ever; I remember him sparring with an audience participant who demanded that he commit himself to the Trump agenda. Rest in peace.
Scenes from Washington, D.C.: It's been just warm enough to commence non-winter activities: grilling on the rooftop, jogging by river, and, of course, riding my e-scooter.
QUICK HITS
- One Battle After Another won the Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards last night.
- Paul Ehrlich, author of the false prophecy The Population Bomb, has died.
- Gen Z voters are turning on Trump over the Iran War.
- Meanwhile, Trump is demanding that certain journalists who cast doubt on his war be "brought up on Charges for TREASON."
- Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin have escalated their war of words; the words now include "micropenis."
