A Prince in Handcuffs, Your Anonymous Tweets in a Federal Database, and the Government That Broke Your Grocery Bill Wants to Fix It
February 19, 2026
1. The Crown Finally Ran Out of Favors
BREAKING: Six unmarked police vehicles rolled up to Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate this morning and arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on his 66th birthday. Happy birthday. The charge: suspicion of misconduct in public office.
Not sexual assault. Not trafficking. Not any of the things the public has suspected for the better part of a decade. Misconduct in public office. Specifically, that he shared confidential British trade intelligence with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as the UK's trade envoy between 2001 and 2011.
Emails released on January 30 as part of the DOJ's Epstein files dump show what appears to be Andrew forwarding classified reports from official visits to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vietnam directly to Epstein and his associates. One email from May 2010 references an envoy trip to Kuala Lumpur and discussions about "The Green Park Group," a vehicle linked to Epstein's financial network. The man entrusted with representing British commercial interests abroad was allegedly feeding insider intelligence to a convicted sex offender's business operation.
The timeline is instructive. Epstein's first conviction was in 2008. Andrew continued his friendship, continued sharing sensitive government reports, and continued attending Epstein's gatherings until at least 2011. After Epstein's death in 2019, Andrew did that legendary BBC Newsnight interview where he claimed he couldn't sweat and had been eating at a Pizza Express in Woking. Virginia Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit in 2021 alleging she was trafficked to Andrew as a minor. He settled for roughly $16 million in 2022, funded by the late Queen Elizabeth from Prince Philip's estate. Giuffre died by suicide last year. Her siblings said today: "He was never a prince. For survivors everywhere, Virginia did this for you."
King Charles stripped Andrew of his royal titles in October 2025. Today's arrest makes him the first senior royal taken into custody in modern British history. Charles released a statement saying "the law must take its course." Prime Minister Keir Starmer: "Nobody is above the law."
Misconduct in public office carries a maximum sentence of life in prison in Britain.
Here's what the ponerology textbooks would note: the system protected Andrew for decades. The royal family, the British establishment, the intelligence services, the legal system, the media (until they couldn't ignore it anymore). Every institution that should have held him accountable instead shielded him. When Giuffre accused him publicly, the palace paid her off. When the Epstein files became undeniable, the palace stripped his titles. Only now, with documentary evidence published by a foreign government that even the British establishment couldn't suppress, did a local police force show up with handcuffs.
And the charge is sharing trade reports. Not the thing everyone suspects. Power doesn't sacrifice its own willingly. It yields the minimum it must, as late as it possibly can. The question now is whether "misconduct in public office" is the beginning of accountability or the ceiling of it.
Sources: CBS News, NPR, NYT Live Updates, The Guardian, CNN, BBC
2. Your Anonymous Account Isn't Anonymous if Google Gets a Strongly Worded Letter
We flagged the DHS surveillance expansion earlier this week. It's gotten worse. The Department of Homeland Security has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord demanding the real identities behind accounts that track or criticize ICE operations. Not warrants signed by judges. Administrative subpoenas, which DHS signs and sends on its own authority.
The New York Times reported last week that the subpoenas target accounts "that do not have a real person's name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents." The targets include community safety pages like "Montco Community Watch," a bilingual Facebook and Instagram account with roughly 10,000 followers that posts about ICE sightings in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Google, Meta, and Reddit complied with some of the requests. In one case documented by WinBuzzer, Google received an ICE subpoena for user data and fulfilled it the same day it notified the user, leaving zero realistic opportunity to challenge the demand. The subpoena left the section describing the suspected violation completely blank. Google handed over the data anyway.
Meta unmasked at least one user without providing any prior notice at all.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued an open letter to ten major tech companies calling the subpoenas "lawless" and urging them to require court intervention before complying. The EFF notes a telling pattern: when a handful of users managed to challenge subpoenas in court (with ACLU help), DHS withdrew every single one rather than let a judge rule on their legality. "These subpoenas are unlawful, and the government knows it," the EFF wrote. DHS's own inspector general had previously criticized the agency's use of administrative subpoena authority.
Steve Loney, senior supervising attorney at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, told the Daily Beast: "It's a whole other level of frequency and lack of accountability."
Meanwhile, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has sued Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for coercing platforms into removing ICE-related content. The lawsuit accuses officials of attempting "to control what the public can see, hear, or say about ICE operations." DHS threatened to sanction CNN for reporting on ICE-tracking apps. Officials demanded Meta delete a Chicago-based Facebook group with 100,000 members. FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau is investigating Signal group chats used by people tracking ICE activity.
The Founders had strong feelings about anonymous speech. The Federalist Papers were published under the pen name "Publius." Cato's Letters, the very essays that inspired the libertarian think tank we eulogize later in today's newsletter, were published anonymously. The right to criticize government without revealing your identity to that government isn't a loophole. It's the foundation.
What's happening here is not an immigration enforcement story. It's a First Amendment story. The government is demanding that private companies reveal the identities of people who criticize government agents, using subpoenas that even DHS won't defend in court, and the companies are folding.
Sources: NYT, EFF Open Letter, Daily Beast, WinBuzzer, FIRE Lawsuit, Military.com
3. The Arsonist Brought a Fire Extinguisher
Democrats have a bold new plan for your grocery bill: make it illegal for prices to go up.
The Center for American Progress published a proposal today, led by Jared Bernstein (Biden's former Council of Economic Advisers chair), calling for a two-year freeze on the prices of 22 essential grocery items. The list: eggs, steak, chicken, pork chops, canned tuna, milk, cheese, butter, rice, flour, bread, pasta, cereal, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, apples, oranges, strawberries, canned corn, dried beans, and coffee.
The "voluntary" plan works like this: grocers agree to cap prices at 2026 levels. In exchange, they get lower credit card processing fees. Who pays the difference? Credit card companies, involuntarily. A draft of the proposal actually said the Federal Reserve could force credit card companies to subsidize the arrangement. That provision was quietly removed after the Washington Post asked questions about it.
The numbers tell the story of why this is politically tempting. Since 2020, the cost of bread is up 32%, lettuce 39%, mayonnaise 50%, and coffee 80%. Wages are up 29%. The squeeze is real, and voters feel it every time they check out.
The economics tell the story of why this is insane.
Ryan Bourne, who holds the Cato Institute's chair for the public understanding of economics, read the proposal before publication: "Price controls on food have a long, storied history of failure. Holding prices of 'essentials' below market rates will produce some combination of shortages on shelves, deteriorations in product quality, and black market re-selling." He added: "In the 1970s, Nixon's price ceilings led poultry farmers to destroy millions of chicks and dairy farmers to cull herds rather than sell at a loss."
Steven Kamin at the American Enterprise Institute put it even simpler: "Maybe it's impossible to produce eggs at $3. Maybe the cost of producing them is $3.50. In which case the eggs come off the market entirely."
The proposal projects that a family of four would save a grand total of $229 per year. That's $4.40 a week. The savings come from about half a typical household's grocery trip, and the Center for American Progress estimates a nationwide maximum savings of $13 billion. For context, the federal government spent roughly $6.7 trillion last year.
The intellectual whiplash is staggering. The government printed trillions of dollars during COVID. It ran record deficits. It imposed tariffs that economists across the spectrum confirmed were paid by American consumers. It created the inflation. And now one faction of the same political class proposes to fix the damage by telling grocery stores what they're allowed to charge. One economist who supports the plan, UMass's Isabella Weber, was candid about the real motivation: "Biden should have done some sort of shelf in supermarkets clearly branded: 'This price-stabilized shelf is from Biden stepping in on behalf of the American people.' I still think doing that kind of thing could have saved us Trump."
It's not about economics. It's about branding.
Sources: Washington Post, WaPo via DNYUZ (full text), Cato Institute
4. Don't Vote. It Only Encourages Them.
Edward H. Crane died on February 10 at his home in Falls Church, Virginia. He was 81. Heart failure.
That's the news part. The story is bigger.
In 1972, Crane was in the room at the founding convention of the national Libertarian Party in Denver. Five years later, he opened a policy research shop in a San Francisco storefront with $500,000 in seed money from Charles Koch. Murray Rothbard, the anarcho-capitalist economist, came up with the name: Cato, after the pen name of two 18th-century British essayists who argued for republican government over monarchy. (The same Cato's Letters, incidentally, that the Founders devoured and that inspired the anonymous speech tradition DHS is now trying to dismantle.)
Over 35 years, Crane built that storefront into the nation's pre-eminent libertarian think tank. By 1993, Cato occupied its own six-story building near the White House. The Washington Post called Crane "the lion king of button-down libertarianism." His philosophy was dress conservatively, think radically.
The Cato under Crane was genuinely heterodox. Its scholars advocated privatizing Social Security and NASA. They argued for legalizing marijuana and opposed universal healthcare. They were anti-interventionist on foreign policy when that position cost serious donor money, opposing the 1999 Yugoslavia bombing and the 2003 Iraq invasion. Crane pushed Social Security privatization onto George W. Bush's agenda. He backed gay marriage before it was acceptable in either party. He championed open immigration. He brought ideas from the fringe to the mainstream and did it with style.
He also had a quip for everything. He didn't vote, and when asked about it, his answer was perfect: "Don't vote. It only encourages them." He resisted marrying his partner, Kristina Knall, because he didn't need the government's permission. When she insisted, he agreed on one condition: they'd get "a very strong government" to do it. In 1988, they flew to China and married at People's Marriage Office No. 9 in Shanghai.
The Koch split is the cautionary tale. Charles Koch had recruited Crane, bankrolled Cato to the tune of roughly $30 million, and then, as the Koch network aligned itself with the Republican Party, wanted Cato to follow. The Kochs expected the think tank to supply intellectual ammunition for Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group that helped engineer the Republican House takeover in 2010. Crane refused. "This is an effort by the Kochs to turn the Cato Institute into some sort of auxiliary for the G.O.P.," he told the New York Times in March 2012.
The Kochs sued. Crane lost. He was forced out as president in June 2012, and the brothers installed their own man, former banking chain chairman John Allison. Cato survived, still does excellent work, but the lesson is etched in institutional stone: build something on someone else's money, and eventually the money wants the steering wheel.
Robert A. Levy, a former Cato chairman, said it simply: "While Charles Koch provided the seed money, it was Ed who ran the thing, and it was Ed's impetus that built the institution into what it is today."
Crane's legacy is mixed in the way that all institutional legacies are. He demonstrated that libertarian ideas could be taken seriously in Washington, which is both an achievement and a compromise. The question he spent his life working on remains open: can you change the system from inside without the system changing you?
He answered it his own way. Rest in peace, Ed. And don't vote.
Sources: New York Times, Cato Institute, RealClearMarkets, Washingtonian (2012 profile)
5. New York Elected a Socialist. Guess What Happened Next.
Zohran Mamdani, New York City's democratic socialist mayor, has been in office for less than two months. He ran on rent freezes, free transit, universal child care, and massively expanded city spending. On Tuesday, he unveiled a $127 billion budget and threatened a 9.5% property tax increase to close a $5.4 billion budget gap.
To understand how breathtaking this is: the $127 billion budget is $5 billion more than last year's. As Reason noted, almost the entirety of the budget gap could be solved by holding spending at current levels. Instead, Mamdani wants to spend more, tax more, and blame Albany when the math doesn't work.
Here's the play. The city can raise property taxes on its own. What it cannot do without state approval is raise income taxes on the wealthy, which is what Mamdani actually wants. So his "last resort" property tax hike is a hostage play: give me the wealth taxes, or I'm raising property taxes on 3+ million residential units whose median owner income is $122,000. That's not soaking the rich. That's soaking the middle class.
Governor Kathy Hochul, who offered a $1.5 billion bailout the day before, isn't having it. "I'm not supportive of a property tax increase. I don't know that that's necessary," she said.
Neither is his own city council. Speaker Julie Menin and Finance Committee Chair Julie Lee issued a joint statement: "Dipping into rainy day reserves and proposing significant property tax increases should not be on the table whatsoever." Andrew Rein of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan watchdog, called it a "false choice": "The best choice is to eliminate spending that does not improve New Yorkers' lives and make government more efficient."
It gets worse. The same week Mamdani threatened property tax hikes, he seized control of the Rent Guidelines Board to deliver on his campaign promise of a rent freeze for roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. A rent freeze with a property tax hike is financial poison for landlords who are already drowning. Some 25,000 apartment units currently sit vacant because owners can't raise rents enough to finance necessary repairs. At least 10% of rent-stabilized buildings are already running at an operational loss. Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, said the combination "virtually guarantees the physical destruction of tens of thousands of units of housing."
Reason's headline for this saga: "Austerity Socialism." Florida Senator Rick Scott, anticipating a wave of wealthy New Yorkers relocating south, captured the situation perfectly: "Surprise, surprise... it took Mamdani less than 3 months to demand a massive tax hike."
Reason called it "Austerity Socialism." Kenny Burgos called it "the physical destruction of tens of thousands of units of housing." Florida's already running ads. The buildings don't care about ideology. They just need repairs that nobody can afford to make anymore.
Sources: NBC New York, Reason, NYT, Politico, The Guardian, Crain's NY