This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Reason: Having been in the libertarian movement for nearly half a century, how do you assess the current state of libertarian ideas and the broader libertarian movement?

Boaz: I think there are a lot more libertarian ideas. When I was in college and thought of myself as a libertarian—but also thought of libertarians as part of the conservative movement—who did we have as intellectuals? [Friedrich] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman and [Ludwig von] Mises.

It was kind of a good set of years there, because Hayek won the Nobel Prize in '74—which was stunning to us, because even as naive college students we knew nobody like that had won a Nobel Prize before. Then in 1975, [Robert] Nozick won the National Book Award, which really helped to put libertarianism on the map of political philosophers. Then in 1976, Friedman won the Nobel Prize. I was out of college then, but that period really boosted libertarian academic credentials.

These days, just like everybody says, we have nobody like [Ronald] Reagan and [Margaret] Thatcher. But in the time of Reagan and Thatcher, they said, "Where are the people like [Winston] Churchill and [Franklin] Roosevelt?" I look back and say, "Wow, weren't those great? And who is that today?" But at least one answer is there's a lot more libertarian intellectuals today. Maybe nobody is a Hayek these days, but there's definitely a lot more libertarianism in the academy, more libertarian intellectuals, more people reading those people. Some of them even get published by major publishers. There's more of that, and I think that means there's more people who think of themselves as libertarians.

What's the essence of libertarianism for you?

To me, the essence of libertarianism is the nonaggression principle. You have no right to initiate force against people who have not initiated force against you. From that comes freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of property and markets, ideally within an ethos of cosmopolitanism and pluralism and tolerance. At that point, we're kind of talking about liberalism, and these days I'm worried not just about libertarianism, but about liberalism.

Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, pluralism—where do those come from and why should those be interconnected? If we compare the nonaggression principle to the core of a nuclear reactor, why should the surrounding framework be akin to cosmopolitanism?

I think libertarianism is set within classical liberalism, and I think of libertarianism as the intellectual core of liberalism, the intellectual vanguard. I often say I'd like to be part of a libertarian intellectual vanguard leading a broader liberal movement. And for my whole career, we haven't had that. We've had liberals divided into people who emphasize free markets and people who emphasize civil liberties and tolerance and equality under the law for all. Libertarians have not had a great record on equality under the law for all, although I think it's clearly inherent in what we believe. But you didn't see many libertarians involved in the Civil Rights Movement, critical of Jim Crow, and they should have been, and they should have been out there.

The Cato Institute, where you've spent most of your career, was founded in 1977 in San Francisco. How did it come into being?

Ed Crane was in Washington running the MacBride for President campaign in 1976, and he observed that [the American Enterprise Institute] and Brookings had a significant influence on limited budgets. And he said, "There ought to be a libertarian think tank, one representing the values of the American Revolution." So he talked to Charles Koch, who had money to help. And Charles said, "OK, I'll put some money up if you'll run it." And he said, "Well, you don't want me to run it because it needs to be in Washington, and I'm going back to San Francisco." And, as he used to tell it, "Charles was smarter than I was, and he knew if I started this, I would in a few years realize it should be in Washington."

The idea was to set up a think tank that was neither liberal nor conservative, and that would put libertarian ideas on the policy map, as well as just the pure theory map.

What were the big issues in the 1970s that you guys were obsessed with?

The big influences in the early '70s were Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation. I used that trio often to explain why there was an efflorescence of libertarians in the 1970s. The government had just accomplished Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation, which gave people a very different view of a government that they perceived as having solved the Depression and won World War II. It was a different generation that was coming up.

What were the main issues? The answer is they're kind of the same issues over and over. History is not a bunch of new things. It's one damn thing, over and over. For Cato, the original agenda was, "Well, we're going to take on Social Security, the linchpin of the welfare state. We're going to take on school choice, which underlies so many problems. And we're going to take on the foreign interventionist state." Early on, we were writing about all of those things. Our first real book was about an alternative to Social Security, how to get out of it. At least one of our first papers was on Social Security, but we had a very early pro-immigration paper. We had a very early paper on conscription, which was a live issue at that time.

Is Social Security unstoppable at this point? 

That seems to be the observation all over the world. We've made a lot of progress on free trade. We've made a lot of progress on human rights, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. We've made some progress on some microregulation issues. We're making some now on housing. We repealed a lot of the New Deal regulations in the 1978 to '81 era. When people say we're on the road to serfdom, I tell them about all these things. We ended conscription, we ended the [Civil Aeronautics Board], we ended the [Interstate Commerce Commission]. We created a structure that continuously brought tariffs down. All those things were progress. There was significant progress, and people still say, "Yes, but what about all this government spending and everything?" I think the answer there is once you create a program that people think they're getting benefits from, it's very hard to take those benefits away.

We can argue that Social Security is not, on net, benefiting people, but there's a huge constituency of people who paid money in and they don't want it taken away from them. That's true for every program. It's true for the farm program. That's one of the reasons that we always say it is so important to stop a new entitlement in the beginning. Because Medicare was expected to cost a billion dollars a year, 10 years after it was founded. That was crazy. It was much more than that. You've got to stop it.

In the '80s, what was your attitude towards Ronald Reagan? A lot of libertarians, or people leaning libertarian, would say he was really good. Is that right or is that wrong? 

My own trajectory with Reagan was in the '70s. I was in [Young Americans for Freedom] and I went to the 1976 convention on behalf of Reagan, not as a delegate, but just there to cheer him on and everything. I liked Reagan, and I was actually a delegate to the state convention or maybe the county convention for Reagan.

Then in 1978, I got hired to work on the Clark for Governor campaign, and that shifted my allegiance. Ed Clark for governor, California 1978—the first big Libertarian Party campaign that actually had some money and a professional staff of me and one other guy [laughs].

While Reagan was president, I was a libertarian, and we were pretty much critical of everything he did. Well, not everything, but many things he did. As time went on, and we saw other presidents, I think we got nostalgic for the Reagan-Thatcher era—two people who, even if they didn't always live up to it, did enunciate a lot of libertarian rhetoric. I think Thatcher in England revived British entrepreneurship and appreciation for enterprise. Reagan did some of that too. I think to a great extent, Reagan's speeches about freedom revived the American spirit, maybe as much as his tax cuts did.

How disastrous was the George W. Bush administration for America and for libertarian advances?

That was pretty bad. And we were sort of optimistic when he came in! We didn't like Republicans. They did a lot of bad things. But Bush had told Ed Crane that Cato's Social Security plan was on the right track, and he wanted to do something like that. Early in his administration, he appointed a commission, which we were sort of opposed to because a commission is usually the way to put an idea to bed. But it turned out he appointed a commission of Republicans and Democrats that was stacked in favor of some kind of privatization. So that was good.

But then 9/11 happened, and Bush got distracted from everything else. Then he gets reelected, and he says, "I'm going to use my political capital on reforming Social Security." It turns out, somehow he got reelected but everybody hated him. We did a poll at the time, and we said, "Would you support an idea that would allow you to put your own money into retirement and then not take Social Security at the end?" And 60 percent said, "Yeah, that sounds good." When we said, "President Bush has a plan," it got 40 percent approval. So that kind of killed it.

How bad was the war on terror and the USA PATRIOT Act, for libertarian ideas?

It was definitely bad that we got the PATRIOT Act, but also, just the general [feeling that] we have to respond with war. We even have to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. And the PATRIOT Act and the surveillance state that was created—very bad for the country, bad for libertarians too, although it gave us a lot of targets to complain about. But we didn't get very far in aiming at those targets.

Was Barack Obama particularly bad? While there were overblown accusations, such as him attempting "to destroy America as we know it," is there validity to the idea that he was putting us on a particularly terrible path?
Yes. For one thing, like I said, every time you create a new entitlement, you'll never get rid of it. He was trying to create those, and he had some success. We had stopped HillaryCare. We were not able to stop Obamacare. That's what we said at the time: You'll never get rid of it. We kept trying, but we didn't. So yes, he did put us on that bad trajectory, a bigger government than we'd had before. Although every president was giving us a bigger government than we had had before.

How did Donald Trump scramble the libertarian movement? There are people who claim that "Trump is the most libertarian president ever." What do you think people mean when they say something like that?

Yes, there were. I had lots of fights. I blocked more people that year on Facebook than ever before. I had a lot of fights with old friends who said, "He's the most libertarian president." I mean, when he was running…he said he would cut taxes. Any Republican that year would've been campaigning on tax cuts. He said he would cut regulation. He did campaign against immigration and against trade. I never did understand. I guess he said, "Drill, baby, drill." So libertarians who thought of American energy independence, or at least production, liked it.

I think a lot of libertarians, certainly a lot of conservatives, liked the fact that he fights, he stands up, he calls the left a bunch of dickheads. I think in the subsequent five years, it occurred to me that the people conservatives and some libertarians are gravitating to are not necessarily the ones who are most conservative, certainly not the ones who are making the most compelling cases; they're the ones who are the most anti-left.

Sean Hannity on Fox: He's just partisan, anti-left all the time. Tucker Carlson. Charlie Kirk with Turning Point USA. Charlie Kirk had been kind of "Free market! Socialism sucks"—that was his organization. And then he just went all in for Trump. Then I saw other people going all in for Trump. The defense of Trump now, as the most libertarian president, I think would be tax cuts, and conservative Supreme Court justices who many libertarians think are better than liberal Supreme Court justices. And they'll say deregulation. There wasn't that much deregulation, but there was less regulation than in a Democratic administration.

What's the case against President Joe Biden?

The case against Biden is he is a bankrupt spender. I think Trump may have spent more in four years than Obama did. Biden then comes in and says, "I'll see you and raise you." So there's certainly that.

The best case I heard for Trump is from one of my colleagues. He was saying, "Hillary will bring 4,000 dedicated regulators to Washington. I don't know who Trump's going to appoint—Republican hacks, [former president of the Heritage Foundation] Ed Feulner's list, his cronies—but they won't be dedicated regulators." I think that's definitely happened with Biden. He campaigned as a moderate, and compared to either [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren or Trump he seemed centrist. But he has empowered an administration that wants to regulate everything.

Some of it is woke regulation: sexual harassment on campus, hate speech, all that kind of stuff. Some of it is just pure economic regulation, and you see it every day. "The Biden administration is going to require…" "The Biden administration is going to ban…" One of the problems there, of course, is abuse of presidential power. Every time I see one of those, I'm like, "Where in the Constitution does it say the president can do that?" Of course, it doesn't anywhere.

Going back to what I said in the beginning about cosmopolitanism and tolerance: Obama comes in, campaigns. He's black; he's the first president to welcome gay people into his administration, even though he's not for gay marriage until right before the 2012 election. But he looks like somebody who believes that everybody is part of America. Trump is obviously the exact opposite of that. And with Biden, it's gone way beyond that.

Now we are looking at another Trump vs. Biden. Neither of these people, neither of these parties, are in any way committed to libertarian principles. What are libertarians to do? How do we maneuver a political landscape such as this?

That's a good question these days. Some people tried in 2016 to run a presidential ticket composed of two governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, both well-respected, against the two worst candidates in history, and they got three and a half percent of the vote. That didn't seem to work out very well.

Now the Libertarian Party has fallen apart, so they're not going to do that. I guess you have to pick the party you believe in. I would love to see a fiscally conservative, socially liberal centrist party. I do believe there are millions of voters who think that way, maybe a plurality of voters who think that way. But the two parties are controlled by, more or less, their extremes, and how do you break into that? My [former] colleague Andy Craig has thought a lot about election reforms. I never thought much about them. I always figured if there's enough libertarians, they'll make themselves felt within whatever political system. But maybe something like ranked choice voting, not so much that it would help libertarians, but that it might hurt extremists and get more of a consensus candidate.

And hey, when I was a young guy, I didn't ever think I'd be looking for a consensus centrist country.

Although we are more free as individuals, certainly to express ourselves and to live the way we want to, many don't really feel that way. Can you talk about a culture of libertarian freedom and cosmopolitanism, and how it aligns to our contemporary experiences?

I think that's partly because people always have this nostalgia. On Twitter, there's all these things: "Remember when a man with one income could afford this house?" Then economists come along and say, "Adjust for inflation and adjust for house size and things, this is not true." Plus you have all the knowledge in the history of the world in your pocket right now. Nobody had that. David Rockefeller didn't have it in 1990.

Part of it is just that we always look back and think, "Oh, things were better and now they're worse." But I do think a lot of people know they're freer because they're black people who are allowed to aspire to things. I'll tell you, when Karine Jean-Pierre was appointed press secretary, I wrote a blog post and said, "This is a sign of progress. A black lesbian could not have been the president's press secretary even maybe five or 10 years ago. This is a sign that we're a more open and accepting society." And I got a lot of blowback from alleged libertarians saying, "She's an affirmative action appointee. You're endorsing diversity, affirmative action." I said, "Look, I don't know if she'll be any good, but I'll tell you this: There are positions in your administration you would put diversity hires in, I don't believe you make the most visible face in your administration an affirmative action hire. It's important how she speaks on behalf of your administration. Whether she's good or not, I don't know, but I think they think she is."

We see more black people, more women being able to rise in corporations and politics. And of course, as a gay person in high school in the '60s, now living in a world where I can live with a longtime partner and my friends can get married, all of this is pretty much taken for granted, even among conservatives.

There's a huge surge in illiberalism both on the left and on the right. Where is that coming from, and where does that leave libertarianism?

That's a good question. I've been writing about this, not so much about libertarianism, but about liberalism. We live in a liberal world. Brian Doherty wrote in his history of the libertarian movement [Radicals for Capitalism], "a world that…runs on approximately libertarian principles." You look at that first and say, "What?" And then you think, "Well, yes, the United States, Europe, and more parts of the world are generally based on free markets and private property, and on free speech and freedom of religion, and expanding human rights to people to whom they were denied." All of that is basic libertarian principles.

OK, we're arguing about gay marriage, and OK, we spend too much money. There's all those things, but we do live in a liberal world. And yet we have these big sets of illiberals on both left and right, in the United States, and in other countries, in countries like Hungary and Turkey and India. We're moving away. It's not just Russia, China, Mexico.

My question is: Liberalism works so well! Have you looked around? Do you realize what your grandparents, your great-grandparents had, even your parents? My parents had a black and white TV for a long time. I have four televisions in my house of two people.

A critique of liberalism is that while it gives material resources, it lacks deeper meaning. Critics say it does not reward true believers with a unifying faith, goal, God, or mission. Is this a legitimate critique of liberalism?

To some extent, yes, it's a legitimate critique. Liberalism is a philosophy of individual autonomy. No established church, no established ideas. [Chinese Communist Party leader] Mao [Zedong] said, "Let a thousand ideas bloom," but liberalism actually did that. It's a significant critique, but it's a good thing. We should defend the liberalism that allows people to find meaning in their own lives. Preachers and teachers and authors may want to help guide people to find meaning in their own lives, but we're not all going to find the same meaning. What we want is people being able to choose their own churches, or no church, choose their own ideas and so on. We don't want the church, the king, the Vatican, the government imposing a meaning on everybody. That's what the liberal revolution was about. It was in great part a revolution against the established churches.

There's all these illiberals on the left, there's all these illiberals on the right, and yet liberalism endures. We do mostly live in a liberal country, in a liberal world. Something is attractive enough about liberalism to resist most of these assaults. I think it is that most people, at least in the United States, do want a world of private property and free markets and free speech and human rights and freedom of abortion and women's rights and to choose jobs. They resist the real impositions.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post David Boaz: Libertarianism Is the Intellectual Core of Liberalism appeared first on Reason.com.

Pano Kanelos is the president of the University of Austin, which will be admitting its first class of 100 students this fall. The college was founded in 2021 as an antidote to left-wing monoculture in academia and is committed to free speech and the pursuit of truth. Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Kanelos, a Shakespeare scholar and first-generation college kid who grew up in a Greek diner in Chicago, about how the University of Austin will be different from virtually every other college around, why the humanities have virtually disappeared from higher education, and how a chance encounter with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow changed his life. He also does a quick, improvised close reading of the poem "Ovid in the Third Reich," by Geoffrey Hill, one of his major intellectual influences.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Pano Kanelos: 'Ideology Is the Death of Ideas' appeared first on Reason.com.

Did you know that a mere 44,000 votes spread across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin kept Joe Biden and Donald Trump from an Electoral College tie in 2020? That was even tighter than in 2016, when 80,000 votes in three states gave Trump a decisive Electoral College win. 

Patrick Ruffini is a Republican pollster at Echelon Insights and author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Ruffini about why the major parties continue to leak market share, why 2024 is going to be another super-close presidential race, and whether small-l libertarian voters will make the difference in November.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: What's the elevator pitch for your book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP?

Patrick Ruffini: I think that it's no secret to anyone that there have been quite a few changes in our politics over the last decade or so. Specifically, a lot of those involve changes in who's voting for the parties and, fundamentally, who the parties are for. What do they seem to stand for? I go back to my early days in politics, which were at the tail end of an era in which Democrats were primarily pitching themselves to voters and receiving the votes of people who were in the working class. They really seemed to hold the moral high ground when it came to issues of who's really going to care about someone like me, an average person in this country. And [Democrats] would routinely pillory Republicans as the party of the rich, as the party of the well-to-do, the disconnected elite. 

I think what we've seen is that has largely flipped. Specifically, it flipped after 2016, when Democrats really seemed to [begin to] have a lot of trouble holding on to the broad mass of working-class voters, which are today defined as voters without college degrees. Sixty-four percent of voters do not have college degrees. We obviously saw in 2016 how they lost some of those blue wall states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—largely because Trump was able to appeal to this electorate in a way that no Republican had before and flipped states that no Republican had won since 1988.

Gillespie: Early on in the book, you write, "I had egg on my face in 2016." Can you talk a little bit about why you had egg on your face? Of course, it wasn't just you. It's virtually all pollsters, strategists, and activists.

Ruffini: The presumption, I think, heading into the 2016 election was that Trump was a sure loser in the election. If not in the Republican primary, then he's a sure loser in the general election. There is always a question of, "Will he succeed in this hostile takeover of the Republican Party?" Initially, I was skeptical, but not long after, it was very clear he was the odds-on favorite because he had really captured a large chunk of the electorate. Everyone else was squabbling for scraps at the table. Even if only at 35 percent, no one else was higher than 10 percent, practically speaking, at the time. But the idea was [that] maybe he can win the Republican nomination, but he's a sure loser in the general election based on just his off-color commentary, his unhinged rally speeches. Everything that was really conventional wisdom among political observers in 2016 [pointed to] a Trump victory—a victory of somebody who just flouted political norms as he did—being flat out unthinkable. 

I was part of that conventional wisdom. Hillary Clinton seemed to be doing herself no favors. I didn't completely discount that. A lesson that I learned after that is voters also don't really care about the integrity of political norms as a whole. There are some segments of voters that absolutely deeply care about them. But in terms of the center of the electorate, I don't think most voters are saying, "Oh, politics is this noble thing that Donald Trump is degrading." I think they see politics as something that's down and dirty, dishonest, corrupt in large measure. Lots of people see it that way.

Gillespie: It's an interesting kind of issue, because one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton was so vulnerable was because she was seen as almost uniquely corrupt and in bed with all sorts of bad interests.

Ruffini: The idea is that for people like me who work in politics, and particularly for a political class, that are just trying to see the people we work with as basically well-intentioned people who are trying to make a positive difference for the country—it turns out just very few people actually see it that way. And Hillary Clinton was absolutely somebody who was painted that way.

I write about the parallels between Trump and Bill Clinton. Because Bill Clinton too was kind of viewed as this unsavory, seedy type of figure during his campaigns and his presidency. He was Slick Willy. He could get away with anything. In the same way, Trump was somebody who maybe had disreputable things, both that he had said and that he had done in his past, and he always seemed to evade accountability. I think that there's something to the idea that you can succeed in this environment if people view you as sort of being authentically that rascally, scoundrel-like figure who is in some way honest with voters about what they're getting. It's when you've got people who are trying to portray themselves as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and then don't live up to that image, that they get in trouble.

Gillespie: Trump, the billionaire who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was a TV star, was talking about the forgotten man. He spoke for the forgotten man. Whereas Biden—who is not working class—talked about [the working class] incessantly and coming from Scranton, Pennsylvania, etc. He's dumped a ton of money into the country, but that doesn't seem to be resonating with voters, does it?

Ruffini: I think it's ultimately who does the working class identify with? Somebody who is not fundamentally a creature of Washington, D.C., and not fundamentally a creature of this dirty, unsavory political game—I think that's what they saw in Trump. They saw a certain authenticity, and they saw somebody who spoke like them, somebody who was angry at the same people that they were angry at. I think that carried the day, ultimately.

Gillespie: It's worth pointing out that he squeaked into office with a historically low popular vote. Clinton in '92 got in with a smaller amount, and about the same amount or a little bit more in '96. 

I want to zero in on what working class means. Biden carried voters who made less than $50,000. He carried households making between $50,000 to $100,000. Trump took those making over $100,000. What you say in the book is that the key divide is education, and maybe also geography, instead of economic class. It's socioeconomic status or education level. How is that functioning differently than just the amount of money that a household is bringing it? 

Ruffini: It's true that at some level, the amount of money that you have in your bank account does actually dictate a lot about the way you view the world. There may still be some truth to that. 

But the point I'm making is that, in terms of what manifests politically and what we're seeing happen politically in the country, education is by far the better variable that predicts everything that's happened, and particularly what's happened among white voters. So I put in the book the caveat that non-white voters don't necessarily act the same way in terms of there not being a class divide. There's more of a different pattern of behavior.

Gillespie: What percentage of the electorate is white? Is it still a vast majority?

Ruffini: In 2024, it's mid-70 percent.

Gillespie: So votes by white Americans are going to comprise the vast majority of ballots cast.

Ruffini: I would say whatever 70 percent is, if it's the vast majority, but it's still a pretty strong majority. But increasingly that white vote does not really behave as a unit, does not really matter in terms of anything politically. You're really talking about white voters without a college degree and white voters with a college degree, that used to be back in the '90s very similar in how they voted. You could kind of talk about there being a "white vote" in the 1990s. Today, you can't talk about it that way. The 40 percent of voters are going to be white non-college and the 30 percent of voters who are going to be white with a college degree. Those used to vote very similarly, and are [now] 40 points apart on the margin in who they're voting for.

Gillespie: Then you talk about the distinction between cosmopolitans and traditionalists. What does that mean?

Ruffini: It maps pretty cleanly onto this idea of white college, white non-college. I'm really interested in where things are moving. Because even though, as you cited some statistics, Biden is still winning some of those lower income voters, but what's happening there is that you still have quite a few low income minority voters in that pool of people. So Biden wins. But that gap between sort of the low income and high income voters, it is nowhere near where it was in 1996, 2000—it's just a completely different ballgame there. 

When I say that, it means, who is a group of voters that is uniquely motivated by these sort of more abstract ideals of protecting democratic norms? Those are the same groups of voters, who live in cities, embrace ideas about diversity, are just generally more progressive or liberal in their outlook, but are uniquely motivated by these questions of social equality. 

Then you've got a large group of voters that are not motivated by those issues. They're either motivated on the other side by a more traditional cosmopolitan view. But when it comes to some of these minority voter communities that still vote Democratic, what you find is, they are very much the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in terms of their views on social issues. They don't really place any sort of prioritization on these animating issues behind the Democratic coalition today on this Dobbs [v. Jackson Women's Health Organization] and Democracy message. Their allegiance to the Democratic Party is more historic. It was rooted in this identity of the Democratic Party as the party of the working class, of the marginalized minority communities.

Gillespie: So as the faces of the Democratic Party become more of a multiracial coalition or a rainbow coalition, they are actually losing touch with the very people they claim to be representing more directly?

Ruffini: In the revealed preferences of voters, what you actually don't find is either Hispanic or Latino voters being motivated by identity politics. In 2016, you had Trump throw every insult in the book at Mexicans, saying they're rapists, bringing crime, drugs over the border. He didn't really seem to lose a whole lot of Latino support. I mean, you would think he would. Similarly, you had Trump after the [Black Lives Matter] protests in 2020 sort of behaving badly in that context, saying that police should shoot looters and all those things. He gained support among black voters in 2020. The revealed preferences of these voters are not that they are uniquely motivated by this kind of racial identity rhetoric that is coming from the left.

Gillespie: How much of the swing from Democrats to Republicans is Trump appealing to people? How much of it is Democrats not addressing people whose votes they're taking for granted?

Ruffini: Absolutely, you can't write Donald Trump out of the story completely. You have a catalyst for the shifts we've seen. It appears that he's obviously very, very highly likely to be the Republican nominee. When you look at polling for 2024, we're seeing a further shift of African-American and Latino voters in his direction. In fact, that's most of the gains that he's been getting in the polls. To the extent that those partly materialize in 2024, what I think we're going to see is this realignment that he helped bring into being. The question is what happens if and when Donald Trump fades from the scene, and whether or not we believe we will see some sort of return to the old coalition line, to a more Romney 2012-style coalition. 

The entire history of our politics suggests that that's not going to happen. I think you'll see some mean reversion. I think if Nikki Haley were the nominee—very unlikely to happen—you'd certainly see her do better in the suburbs. You'd probably see her frankly do better overall in the election. Not quite as polarizing a figure, but I don't think you would ever see a return back. And there's a good reason for that. That's because this kind of thing is happening throughout Western democracies, where the working class sort of is aligning itself more and more with the parties of the right. The more highly educated voters are aligning themselves more and more with parties on the left. Those countries don't necessarily have a Donald Trump. But this does seem to be something that is naturally occurring—was to some extent occurring before Donald Trump. So I don't think it's exclusively on him, but he was a catalyst for accelerating.

Gillespie: Is any of this generational in nature? Overwhelmingly younger people voted for Democrats, at least in presidential elections.

Ruffini: This is a big issue. This is a big debate right now. Are you actually going to see people as they grow older becoming more conservative? That's what we've seen in generations past. But there's a lot of discussion that millennials aren't quite following that same trajectory. Partly the big generational divide that I really talk about is that we now have an electorate that is entirely passed through the education sorting machine, in terms of when they were coming up and they were young, they had the opportunity to go to college or not go to college, and that was a legitimate choice, as opposed to maybe for those in the silent generation where most people just didn't go to college. 

As a result, you've just got much more education polarization because more people have made the decision. If you have made that decision, "Yeah, I'm going to leave my hometown and kind of not pursue knowledge and, maybe move to a big city after college and really be part of this knowledge economy," that's just fundamentally a different kind of person than the person who stays closer to the people in places they knew growing up. I think that's part of the generational story. 

I also think the generational story can't be separated from the question of race, because you just have a younger generation that is much, much more diverse. The silent generation and boomers are just much more white. You actually do see that they are more liberal and traditionally have been much more liberal as a result in the younger generation. But it's really a function of race, I think that that's true. I write about the ways that's changing. 

I don't really tackle this question of generations directly because I do think it's downstream of race. I think that to the extent that younger Hispanics are not tied to the voting patterns of their parents, younger African Americans are not tied to the same voting patterns of their parents—what you're actually going to see is more of them voting Republican. You see it as a whole, diverse, younger generation that is going to be more politically balanced.

Gillespie: You point out the fact that the country is more mixed than ever. There is a huge amount of what would count by various measures as desegregation going on—younger generations, millennials, and Gen-Z are more multi-ethnic. How do you consider yourself, if let's say, you're a third-generation Puerto Rican who married an Asian woman, then you divorce them and marry a black person? What are your kids? I think we're seeing an attempt to kind of keep two or three categories intact when the social reality is just vastly outstripping that.

Ruffini: As of today, the number of voters who are genuinely more than one race—it's actually a pretty small number. But when you look at the children born in the United States, one in five children being born today are of some kind of mixed racial background, and that doesn't even count Hispanics, because we don't have a really good way of actually accounting for Hispanics because of the way the census collects data. 

I do think that this assumption we've had about non-white groups being a loyal Democratic bloc, especially within the African-American community, was predicated on the idea that this was a marginalized, discriminated-against group that needed to organize under the banner of one political party to advance their interests. What happens when that identity is no longer salient? That identity of, "I don't view myself as a victim." I don't view myself as somebody who is going to be discriminated against as a result of my skin color, and that's just fundamentally not who I am. I am many different things. I am potentially of many different races. But I also live in a suburb with people of all different sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds. I think that's fundamentally, in one way or the other, just going to change voting patterns over time.

Gillespie: The idea that Trump actually was getting more minority votes than somebody like a Mitt Romney or a John McCain…What was the swing in black support for Trump? It's still low, even historically going back to somebody like [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. But what's the swing? What are the issues that black voters—if we can talk about a median black vote—care about?

Ruffini: There's different data sources on this. If you look at precinct data, there's something like a 5 to 6 point swing on the margin from a very low base. But that means in some cases, you had precincts where there were literally zero voters and they go to, all right, maybe Trump gets five voters or ten voters in 2016 or 2020. 

Gillespie: But he did particularly well among black men, right?

Ruffini: Yeah. In general, you've seen a little bit of recovery and some other data sources have it as much as 10 or 12 points among black voters, from 2016 to 2020, when you had a swing of about 18 points among Hispanic voters. So you're right. That was something that kind of blew my mind too early on. But when you kind of start to see that this is actually part of the same trend of white working class voters. The vast majority of Hispanic and African-American people in this country are working class in terms of not having a college degree. It's a part of the working class shift more broadly, even as college educated shifted to Democrats, the non-college educated are shifting Republican. I do think that that has been the shift. 

I think that particularly Trump—a lot of it goes back to his personal demeanor, which I think if you talk to people along the coast, people like us would say that's a liability. But it turns out that's not a liability to a lot of people in the country. In fact, it's something that attracts a lot of people to him, including some unexpected voters. So when it comes to, again, these younger minority men, who I think are a key group, kind of heading into this election cycle, who themselves speak pretty bluntly and forthrightly, this idea of somebody who does not necessarily adhere to the genteel mannerisms of political discourse is, on balance, more appealing than somebody who does.

Gillespie: If Trump's appeal to blacks is growing and that's partly powered by an appeal to non-college-educated black men who like blunt speaking, what is it with Hispanics? 

Ruffini: I think number one, it's the economy. This is an upwardly mobile, striving community. It's a community where that old historic pattern of if you have more money, if you've made it in the country, you actually are voting more Republican. It just turns out there's a pretty good upward trajectory and upward trend in Hispanic incomes over the last few generations. You actually do see a lot more loyalty to the Democratic Party in the sort of lower income first generation communities that you see moved to second and third generation communities.

Gillespie: As you point out in your book, your name ends in a vowel. It is Italian. I am Italian on my mother's side, who grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from where you grew up. Michael Barone, 25 years ago wrote The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, and likened the Mexican-American experience to the Italian-American experience. Part of his argument was that two or three generations in, they are indistinguishable from native-born people. 

Yet we fail to grasp that because Latino or Hispanic immigrants keep coming to the country. We keep thinking everybody is here for six months or a couple of years. And we don't recognize that since Reagan's second administration, if not longer, Latinos, particularly Mexicans, have been here, and now they're in their second or third generation. So they're really as American as Italians, right? 

Ruffini: That's right. I think there's a big divide by generation in terms of partisanship. But you mentioned that the group is not a monolith. There's no shared unique experience among Latinos in America. You've got Mexican Americans, got Puerto Ricans, got Cuban Americans. All the different [groups] came from incredibly different contexts. When you look at the issue of why does Trump actually make gains after he elevates the issue of immigration? It's because Hispanics who are already in the voting public, do they see the people coming across the border today as people like them or do they see them as fundamentally different from them? I think they see them as more different than they do similar. If you're voting and if you show up in these election statistics that I talk about, you've probably been here for a while. You're a citizen of the United States. You are a legal immigrant to the United States, if you have immigrated at all to the United States. It's just a fundamentally different experience. 

In particular in the polling, in the work I've done on the southern border, it's very clear that the people down there do not see the people crossing as being one of them, especially in the current wave. What you see also increasingly is, the people here in those communities tend to be more Mexican-American. And what you see is people from Venezuela, but you're also seeing non-Latino people crossing. You're seeing people from Haiti, the Caribbean and further afield, who are part of this migrant crisis. It's just fundamentally different. A typical Latino voter is as far apart from the people crossing today than a typical white. And that's the reality.

Gillespie: Has immigration been defined by the chaos at the border or the inability to control the border?

Ruffini: There is no question that this situation on the southern border has overshadowed and dominated the whole question of immigration, such that when you even bring up the question of immigration in this survey, people see it as an issue that is a liability for the Biden administration. People want to go back to something like the Trump administration policies. But you did see increasingly, post-2016, there was a backlash among Democrats to what was seen as Trump's xenophobia, intolerance of immigrants, and so they, as a result, putting on their jerseys to some extent, decided to be a party that was openly advocating for immigration, whereas you wouldn't have seen that in the Democratic Party of yesteryear, which was where labor was a big factor. Labor, in and of itself through the 1990s, was very skeptical of open immigration.

I think that the old populist Democratic Party went away. As a result, Biden had to commit to a much more open set of border policies that has invited political disaster for him.

Gillespie: At the same time, Bill Clinton in '96 spent a huge chunk of his renomination speech saying he was going to get rid of illegal immigrants. He was going to remove them from the country.

Ruffini: That is a really good point. I think there's a world of difference between Bill Clinton and what Joe Biden is going to do. You don't really see Biden touting the fact that he is now tough on the border, like he is the one who was tough and wants to get something done on the border, in such a way that it would register with voters. 

The other day on Twitter, I imagined, what would a Bill Clinton-style ad look like about the current border crisis? I know he'd be talking about the Biden border plan to crack down on illegals. If you were rerunning the Bill Clinton 1996 playbook, which, by the way, I think that would work, I think that would still work today. But you won't see him do it because the climate within his own party has just dramatically changed when it comes to anything that's adjacent to diversity or anything like that. It's just unimaginable that he would do something like that.

Gillespie: Let's talk about Asian Americans. How do they factor into the multiracial coalition that might remake the GOP? How bad is it to characterize all Asian Americans as peas in a pod? But then what is the highest-salience set of issues for them?

Ruffini: This is a very bifurcated community because about half of the Asian electorate is college-educated and votes in many ways similar to the white, college-educated electorate. You have a large number of Asians in California, which is a very blue state. They started out from a very democratic baseline. But if you look at the Asian American professionals in one of the major metro areas, they're pretty indistinguishable, actually, from a white educated professional. 

In terms of the places where you have an identifiably Asian voting bloc—places like Little Saigon in Orange County or in San Jose, California, or places in Queens, which have received a lot of attention over the last couple election cycles—those are oftentimes first generation immigrant communities where a lot of people speak the original language. These voters are very different from this professional class that you've seen a shift in? You actually start to see more of a class divide in the Asian community. 

But you look at places like in New York City—and particularly this realignment kind of gained steam in 2022—[former Rep.] Lee Zeldin [R–N.Y.] won a lot of those voters. You had three Asian American Republicans getting elected as Assembly people in Brooklyn, when no one was really expecting that. It is a very different community. You really see it particularly among Koreans, among Vietnamese, to some extent Chinese Americans. Less so among Indian Americans, I don't think you see it as much there. But there's a huge divide by education.

Gillespie: What about groups like Chinese and Japanese, who might be a very small population? Do you see the same kind of pattern where if they've been here for three generations or more they have become indistinguishable from white voters or native-born Americans?

Ruffini: It depends on the context of what are they moving to. To some extent, the Hispanic working-class voter is essentially this generation's version of the white working-class voter of yesteryear. They're moving into places like Northeast Philly, which was a traditionally more conservative place. We had a pretty conservative white electorate. But they're living a solidly middle-class existence. This is not like, "Oh, we're living in the barrio." We are living a solidly middle-class existence. There's a pathway where you can see how they're becoming more Republican. 

Look at the Asian American voter. It's a little bit more complicated because you mentioned The New Americans by Michael Barone, where he drew these parallels. The parallel he draws with Asians, is if Hispanics were the new Italians, Asians are the new Jews, in terms of they seem to be a very highly educated group, with very high levels of educational attainment, very high levels of rising up the income ladder, almost in a very steep pattern where they're leapfrogging every other group. There is a sense that that has led to a more Democratic outlook among a newer generation or people entering the professional class. You see that more and more among Asian voters. 

But to some extent, the Democratic Party has spurned the Asian American vote. The progressive movement has spurned the Asian-American voter in the push for diversity, ironically, in higher education, where it's really Asian-Americans who are the losers. If you de-emphasized merit in higher education—I'd love to see your Republicans actually do more to seize upon that issue in Asian communities.

Gillespie: We all know that the 2016 election was unbelievably close. It was as tight as it could get. But in 2020, Joe Biden won overwhelmingly in the popular vote as a percentage and in the Electoral College. But how close was that election? Was it a blowout, or was it actually pretty close to 2016 when you factor in things?

Ruffini: I'm smiling because actually the perception that it wasn't a close election, it's just completely wrong. It's actually, technically speaking, closer than 2016 when you look at the number of votes needed to have flipped in the Electoral College. People forget how close Trump came to winning the election—just a shift of 0.7 percent in the popular vote spread uniformly across the country would have won. That means he would have been the president, squeaking by with 6 million fewer popular votes than Biden. Why is that? Partly it's due to this working-class coalition. 

The working class is concentrated in states that are more just electorally significant to the outcome of the election. Part of the reason that this realignment really is the best avenue and bet for Republicans to win elections moving forward is because they're overrepresented in the electoral college. Now, we'll see if that happens again in 2024. But, it was a very, very close election, and particularly compared to the polls going into the election, which Biden I think was up by eight points in the last polling average. He only wins by four and barely squeaks by in a way that allows Trump to make an argument to his voters that it was stolen from him. 

Gillespie: Do you believe that or are you saying that Trump made that argument?

Ruffini: No, I don't believe it was stolen from him. But I do think that had we seen Biden actually win the election by as much as he should have won the election, as much as polls were saying, and was expected to win the election, then I think Trump would have just had a much harder time convincing people. 

Gillespie: Assuming the 2024 election is Trump vs. Biden and assuming each of them is brain damaged in their own unique, special ways, is it totally up for grabs?

Ruffini: I think that it would be. It's a fair assumption about any election, no matter what the polls say at this point. You start from the prior that it's a jump ball. But, it's a very different election right now. Right now, Trump is polling ahead and that's been very consistent, no matter what the economic numbers seem to do. I don't think you could ignore that. It's not a fundamentally different election from the standpoint of pre-election polling than it was in 2020. That said, I think we will likely still see a very, very close election. But, right now, Trump seems to be doing a lot better than he was at this point in 2020. 

Gillespie: The economy compared to 2020 is doing relatively well. Inflation was a big issue then. Despite Biden being terrible on the economy, things for most people are doing pretty well. Is that because voters don't really care about the actual reality?

Ruffini: I wouldn't say the results are reality and the ground doesn't matter. If the economic situation kind of quiets down, he'd rather have that than the alternative. But a perception has set in particularly as it relates to Biden's fitness and his age that is very hard to recover from, unless something dramatic happens, either in the form of a Trump conviction or in the form of Trump has his own health crisis, that does seem to be something that is weighing down Biden pretty heavily, independently of the state of the economy. But also just a pretty deep-seated perception that the grass was greener on the other side of the street. 

Even if Biden is able to somehow recover on the economy, and maybe make it a little bit more of a draw, does he still win the debate with Trump over who best is able to manage the economy? They still win that retrospective look back, I was better off. The perception that set in, that things were at least under control on the global stage when Trump was president, I seem to be making more money.

Gillespie: Towards the end of your book Party of the People, you say, "I come to tell the younger me that the libertarian dream of smaller government is debt." You also talk a fair amount when you're looking at the future of politics about a quadrant chart that Lee Trotman put together, which shows that what used to be called the libertarian quadrant—the shorthand is fiscally conservative, socially liberal—there are no voters there. How do you justify that?

Ruffini: That's something your colleague Stephanie Slade tackled very aptly in a feature piece at Reason recently. Growing up, I very much drank the Kool-Aid, supply-side economics and a lot of, not just maybe a more libertarian economics, but the whole Reagan view of, let's say, limited government. The reality is that not a lot of voters are motivated by those sorts of questions in the real world. You see both parties increasingly motivated on cultural questions and activated on cultural questions. That's particularly true of Republican voters, and particularly around the issue of immigration. We saw that very clearly with Trump in 2016. I also don't think that a whole lot of voters are motivated by a left-wing ideological critique of the Reagan era or support for social democracy. 

I think that the questions that actually motivate voters on a real level are fundamentally different from the ones that motivate activists, and the ones that motivate people like me growing up—we're very invested in these economic ideologies. Trump really kind of pulled that back and said this isn't really at a fundamental gut level what's moving people, even though they do have. I write this in the book that it's not like Republicans should just become a party that supports social programs, and that's how you win working-class voters. They do have this gut-level identification with capitalist or free enterprise, or business and hard work as a way of working your way up. But they're just not quite as invested in reading Milton Friedman as maybe that younger version of me was thinking.

Gillespie: If the Republican Party no longer seems to be courting libertarians in a way that they were at the end of the aughts to the beginning of the 2000 teens, it doesn't mean that libertarian voters have disappeared. Emily Ekins and David Boaz at the Cato Institute, using various measures that are alternative to some of the ones that you and Lee Trotman use, hypothesize that 10 percent to 20 percent of voters pretty reliably vote socially liberal and fiscally conservative. 

Where do those voters go, assuming they're not completely just making that up? In an election like the one that we're going to have now, in an election like in 2022 or 2016, where are those libertarian voters and who do you think they would be going for in something like this?

Ruffini: You're right that even if a group is smaller in the electorate, it turns out they matter quite a lot. And I think Joe Biden doesn't win in 2020 without all the third party voters from 2016 who primarily backed him. But when you talk about how we define that socially, more moderate, or liberal and fiscally conservative voter, I think we are used to viewing that libertarian vote as adjacent to the Republican vote. As something that belongs to Republicans. What we'll be actually seeing more and more is more of a crossover between libertarians and Democrats recently. Because those cultural issues seem to be the tie-breaker. They seem to matter more. 

Number one, Trump isn't fiscally conservative. He's not really standing up for that side of the argument. But you also just see social issues and cultural issues kind of matter more. I'm not talking about the hardcore Libertarian Party voter, I am talking about that sort of voter in the northeast corridor, that likes to say they're socially more moderate and fiscally conservative. What you've seen more recently, in a more recent election cycle is that those voters go more Democratic. Whereas that moderate voter again, that's the Obama-Trump voter. That's the voter in Michigan. That's the old autoworker. That's pro-life. They see a role for the government in the economy. Those voters have been moving in completely the opposite directions.

Gillespie: What are the signs to look for going into the election, and then after that will there be a long-lived realignment of the parties?

Ruffini: We don't necessarily know after 2024 if this new coalition survives. Certainly, there's a case for the shifts that we've seen, particularly as it relates to non-white voters continuing, you're seeing that in the polls right now. There's also a case to be made that this is more of a long-term process. In the book, I write about looking ahead. Let's actually conduct a thought experiment that if this actually happens, what does 2036 look like? What would the election of 2036 look like? 

Overwhelmingly, because we have a pretty good idea of what the demographics are going to be in that year. We know the country is just getting more non-white. What would the breakdown need to look like? It would need to look something like this: Republicans draw pretty even among Hispanics, they're winning about maybe 40 percent of Asian voters, and they're winning almost a quarter of the African-American vote. What's interesting is there's polls out there that show that's happening in 2024. It could be that I'm way too conservative. But I think you really have to view this over a long-term trajectory and not election to election, which is very noisy. I think that subject to all sorts of factors that are specific to the cycle. 

Right now we have this tendency to view Ronald Reagan as this golden era of Republican normalcy, as somebody who is moderate on immigration and for free trade and for internationalism and global leadership. Certainly, that's true, but I think it understates the extent to which Reagan himself was a disruptive figure in the Republican Party in the '70s and '80s, where he was fundamentally—in the same way Trump is disrupting the existing Republican order—disrupting challenger Gerald Ford from the right. As a result, the party moves, the party shifts, and it becomes a really unambiguously conservative party after Reagan. 

In some way, I think the party will become an unambiguously more populist party. Now, whether or not we have somebody who is quite as much of an avatar of that as Donald Trump in the future, I'm not sure. I think he is somewhat sui generis. I think you will, by default, have somebody more "normal" in the future, particularly someone who can get elected president. But, I think that just the baseline has shifted. It shifted with Reagan and I think it's now shifted with Trump. 

Gillespie: Where do you think the Democratic Party is shifting to? Are they undergoing a similar process, if they are now appealing to educated cosmopolitan voters? 

Ruffini: It's a coalition that is shifted in terms of the voters it's appealed to significantly. It's really openly making the case on cultural issues, openly making the case for a more open society, really talking up these sort of more abstract concepts of democracy as opposed to the kind of campaign we saw as recently as 2012 when Obama was railing against Mitt Romney as the scion of private equity. You didn't care about people like you. You just don't seem to see that kind of rhetoric anymore, even though that remains part of the party's policy commitment. I don't necessarily think they're going to go conservative on economic issues.

Gillespie: Medicare and Social Security appear to be completely inviolate at this point. It is beyond the third rail of American politics now. To even invoke it, other than to say you are going to keep it forever and maybe make it shinier, is complete political death. Is there any way that that's going to change? 

Ruffini: What's going to change, if nothing else, are the actuarial realities of these programs that are going to impose upon everybody's tidy the political notions and ideas. What you would say now is that it is absolute political death for anybody to touch that entitlement reform. Particularly when you frame the question as cuts to entitlement programs. I think you're absolutely passing that rubicon of we're no longer able to pay out benefits at the state level. It's going to fundamentally be another major disruption, akin to but somewhat I think much greater than what we saw in the last three years with 20 percent inflation. I think that that is going to be in and of itself going to upend a lot of our politics. 

But, Trump intuited, not incorrectly, that this was not a political winner for Republicans and he was actually willing to—and I think probably others had intuited that beforehand—make the argument, which have made it overall very much more difficult for any political party that is calling out for some kind of solution.

Gillespie: Are there new ways to talk about entitlement spending that casts it in a more populist sensibility, because it's clear that Social Security and Medicare both take money from relatively young people and relatively poor people and give it to relatively old and relatively rich people. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan failed because he didn't make the commercial throwing grandma off a cliff. He should have owned that and said,
we need to do this, and she wants that for us anyway."

Ruffini: It's fundamentally different for a lot of people. You'll have Hispanic voters really voicing the sentiment around, "We don't want welfare cheats." And frankly, that's a real, palpable sentiment. They completely exclude Social Security and Medicare from that calculation.

 Whereas for a lot of people, when people take offense to the idea that these are quote-unquote entitlements—aka welfare programs—when the technical definition of an entitlement is you're entitled to it because you theoretically paid into it. Fundamentally, this is actually the political consensus in the working class, is anti-welfare and pro-Social Security. They're making the distinction based on the fact that they believe they paid into these programs, and they're just getting out what they have already paid in. Which is not reality, but that's a very strongly held belief.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credit: Wennphotostwo121965

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• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Patrick Ruffini: Why Blacks and Hispanics Are Turning to Trump appeared first on Reason.com.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

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You probably already know that the national debt is bigger than our whole economy. But relax, because things can always get worse! And they will, regardless of whether Biden or Trump gets elected in the fall. Each has a proven track record of spending like a drunken sailor and most projections show that debt will grow to between 181 percent and 340 percent of GDP over the next few decades. Reason's Nick Gillespie discussed all of this and more with Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute. Riedl explains why massive and growing debt is really bad, why reducing it is really hard but really important, and why young people should be really pissed.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Gillespie: We know who the candidates are going to be. It's going to be Biden vs. Trump. They both have track records that you have been tracking as a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute talking about debt and deficits. You, last fall, released a big book of charts and doom and deficits. The Congressional Budget Office [CBO] is projecting $119 trillion worth of deficits over the next 30 years. And that's optimistic. 

You note that we have gone from the national debt being $3 trillion in the year 2000 to $27 trillion in the past quarter century. According to the CBO calculations, depending on what happens, debt will be between 181 percent and 340 percent of gross domestic product [GDP] in another 30 years. So we got a lot of debt floating around here. Why are debt and deficits bad?

Riedl: Modest and sustainable deficits are not bad. It's like any sort of borrowing. It's OK to go into debt for your mortgage. It's OK to borrow for school. I am not a balanced budget absolutist. 

Every year's deficit adds up to the national debt. Modest borrowing is not bad. It doesn't raise interest rates very much. It doesn't cost taxpayers much. The problem is debt gets out of control when it grows faster than the economy forever. It's just like a family. If your debt is growing faster than your income forever, it's not sustainable. And for most of the period after World War II, the debt was about 40 percent of GDP, which most economists considered sustainable. It didn't raise interest rates very high, and the interest costs as a share of federal spending were manageable. 

The problem is now we've gone from 40 percent to 100 percent, and we're going much higher. If that happens, the dangers are, in a basic macroeconomic angle, higher interest rates. Because the more savings the government borrows, the less savings are available for everyone else to borrow. And that'll bid up interest rates and reduce investment. But what becomes even a bigger issue is how Washington's even going to be able to borrow that much money. Is there enough savings for Washington to even lend? And if they are able to borrow it, are the interest costs going to be so high that we could have a situation where 50 percent or 80 percent of your federal taxes are just paying interest on the debt rather than getting anything of value?

Gillespie: What about the idea that long, persistent, and growing national debt decreases long term economic growth?

Riedl: Absolutely. Again, modest debt doesn't make much of a difference. But, if you think of it, there is a certain pool of savings in America and in the global economy. That savings usually would be borrowed for home loans, car loans, business loans, investment to grow the economy. But the more the government borrows this money, the more they soak up the savings. And instead of spending on investment, they spend it on consumption. They're going to give it to seniors to consume. 

There's going to be fewer money for home loans, car loans, student loans, and business loans. Ultimately, because investment is the lifeblood that drives the economy, when you starve the economy of investment dollars, you're going to get less business investment. It's going to create fewer jobs. There's going to be lower wages and lower growth. And you could argue we've already seen this. Japan has a debt of 200 percent of GDP. Their economy has been a basket case for 30 years.

Gillespie: Both the federal government and the Federal Reserve System are ostensibly independent. They've just said, "OK, well, we're just going to keep printing money. We're going to create money out of thin air." Is that also unsustainable?

Riedl: Yes. In fact, of the growth in debt over the past decade or so, about $4 trillion to $5 trillion of it has essentially been funded by the printing press. The Federal Reserve's holding of Treasury bills, which they essentially buy with printed money, has gone up $4 trillion to $5 trillion. The Fed is actually looking to unload that $4 trillion to $5 trillion. But if they didn't, let's say they keep printing money, you're just going to get hyperinflation. 

The [Modern Monetary Theory] MMT crowd says you can always just print more money and the debt goes away. You can't expand the money supply by tens of trillions of dollars without creating significant inflation. My worry is long term. There's going to be a lot of pressure in Congress to go that direction. [It's] what's called fiscal dominance, when interest rates are set more to keep borrowing costs low than to stabilize the economy. That's my worry.

Gillespie: What is driving the debt? What is driving persistent deficits?

Riedl: The debt up until now has been driven by all sorts of factors. When you go from $3 trillion to $27 trillion, there's going to be a lot of blame to go around. We've had Social Security and Medicare costs rise. There have been wars, tax cuts, just yearly runaway spending. The pandemic cost about $5 trillion. But moving forward from where we are now, there's one answer: Social Security and Medicare. Over the next 30 years, the Social Security and Medicare systems will run a shortfall of a $116 trillion.

Gillespie: As we mentioned, we're looking over the next 30 years at $119 trillion in total deficits. It's all Social Security and Medicare.

Riedl: The long term budget is roughly balanced if you take out Social Security and Medicare deficits. We do not really have a budget problem. We have a Social Security and Medicare problem.

Gillespie: In your book you mention that there are specific episodes where things cost a lot of money. It's fascinating. After 9/11, there wasn't the type of spike there was after the 2008 financial crisis. There was a massive blowout of debt finance spending. And then there was, of course, COVID. Broadly speaking from 1960 to 2022, spending was 20.4 percent of GDP. 

So the government is spending 20.4 percent of the equivalent to the economy; revenue average over that same time was 17.4 percent. So that explains where we're at now. But you're saying going forward, it's going to get worse. And it's almost all because of old age entitlement.

Riedl: Right. You mentioned revenue has averaged 17.4 percent of the economy since 1960. It's projected to rise above that depending on whether or not we extend the 2017 tax cuts. Revenues are going to be 18 percent or 19 percent of the economy over the next 30 years. That's above average. 

The problem is spending is going to jump all the way to 30 percent of the economy under the rosiest scenarios that the CBO can come up with. So people can have their own value judgments, like, "Well, I think revenues are lower than they should be." But if you're just looking at the moving variable driving deficits, it is 100 percent above average spending. There is no below average revenues projected for the next 30 years. We're going to have the highest sustained revenues in American history under the baseline. But it can't keep up with spending jumping 10 percent of GDP.

Gillespie: One of the things that you talk about in your book of charts—you have a piece  recently at The Dispatch that talked about this—is that this is not a Republican or Democratic issue. It is both parties. How do Democrats tend to spend money? And then how do Republicans tend to spend money?

Riedl: Democrats like to do big bursts when they get a new presidency. For instance, Barack Obama came in, spent trillions of dollars on stimulus, then did Obamacare. The next year, you get this big burst of activity. And then it was similar with Joe Biden. Biden comes in, spends $4.8 trillion in new legislation in 20 months, which is remarkable.

Gillespie: And as remarkable as that is, he came in promising $11 trillion in new spending. So he got halfway there.

Riedl: He got halfway there in 20 months. And, who knows, had the Democrats had a good election year in Congress, they could have gone further. Democrats not only do these bursts, but Democrats also are the defenders of the status quo with entitlement costs. The quiet driver of deficits is Social Security and health care costs rising 6 percent or 7 percent a year. And Democrats are the adamant party that says we can never touch that. So even if they weren't passing their bills, that Social Security and Medicare 6 percent or 7 percent a year buries us.

Gillespie: So what about Republicans? How do they jack up spending?

Riedl: Republicans talk a good game. But if you take a look at 2017 and 2018, Republicans had the trifecta. They had the House, the Senate, and the presidency. They didn't reform entitlements at all. There was a little bit of push to repeal Obamacare that failed. There was no Social Security reform, no Medicare reform, no Medicaid reform. Instead, they came in, cut taxes, and busted the discretionary spending caps with a 13 percent hike in one year. 

When Republicans get the trifecta, when Republicans control the government, the first thing they want to do is reward their constituents. They're not thinking in terms of deficit reduction. They're thinking in terms of handing out benefits to constituents, whether it's big defense hikes, big discretionary hikes, or tax cuts. You don't get the fiscal spinach from Republicans when they control everything. They consider it time to party. Republicans need to be judged by their actions, not their rhetoric. You listen to Republicans give speeches, "We're going to balance the budget. We're going to reduce wasteful spending, and we're going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse." It's all empty rhetoric. If you look at Republicans, not only is their past record terrible, but their current proposals to reduce the deficit don't even reduce the deficit. Every Republican presidential candidate has an economic plan that increases deficits, every one of them.

The House Budget Committee released a budget blueprint that was entirely gimmicks. The Freedom Caucus, for all their talk, has released no actual blueprint to how to balance the budget. In fact, Republicans take 75 percent of spending off the table. They say, "We're not going to touch Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans, and interest." They immediately take 75 percent off the table. So it's hard to trust a party that cuts taxes, increases spending, and then moving forward takes 75 percent of the spending off the table and won't tell us where they'd cut the other 25 percent. I think you need to judge them by their actions, not their empty balance the budget rhetoric.

Gillespie: Are there Democrats who are more serious about fiscal responsibility?

Riedl: There are some. What are the modern equivalent of blue dog democrats? The blue dogs were wiped out under Obama. There is a quiet group of Democrats, about two or three dozen of them in the House, that are trying to work with Republicans kind of under the table on budget process reform, Social Security and Medicare reform. They're very quiet about it. 

In the Senate, you have [Sens.] Joe Manchin [(R–W.Va.)], Michael Bennet [(D–Colo.)], and Mark Warner [(D–Va.)]. There are some Democrats who at least talk a better game than even Republicans. But there hasn't been, of course, much action. The Democrats who are reasonable on this issue are unfortunately overshadowed by the loud progressives who cost their party any credibility when you have [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren [(D–Mass.)], [Sen. Bernie] Sanders [(I-Vt.)] and [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.)] demanding $40 trillion in spending.

Gillespie: How important is the presidency when it comes to increases or decreases in spending? 

Riedl: The president cannot cut spending himself or herself. The president does not have the full power of the purse. And that's why I think sometimes presidents get too much blame when spending rises. When they tried to cut spending, Congress wouldn't cut it. That being said, you can't cut spending without the president being involved. The president has to sign the bills. And the president also has the bully pulpit to frame the issue. If presidents would actually invest political capital in spending cuts, they can create the framework in order to help us get there. They can't do it themselves. But again, the problem is we haven't really had a serious fiscal conservative president in memory. Not only are they not a help, they're usually a barrier to spending cuts.

Gillespie: The budgeting process that comes out of Congress was reformed in the mid-'70s or early '70s. People in Congress don't follow it. Is that part of the problem?

Riedl: The 1974 Budget Act has been neutered into oblivion. One way to think about how it works is every year Congress is supposed to pass a budget. They never do.

Gillespie: And they're supposed to pass a budget before that budget year starts.

Riedl: Right, they're supposed to pass the budget in March for the following October 1. 

Gillespie: How many times does that happen?

Riedl: Rarely. And then after that, you're supposed to pass 12 appropriations bills that actually fund the programs. The first problem is the appropriations bills only fund discretionary spending, which is 30 percent of the government. The budget process takes 70 percent of spending on autopilot out of the process. We're talking Social Security, Medicare, anti-poverty programs, Medicaid, farm subsidies. They're not even part of the budget process. They're just set aside on permanent autopilot. 

Congress spends all year tearing itself apart over the remaining 30 percent that's discretionary spending. And then you have situations like now where we're almost six months into the next fiscal year, and we still don't have discretionary appropriations for this year. We're still just running last year's numbers on autopilot. So the '74 Budget Act simply doesn't work anymore. If its goal is to help Congress set priorities, make tradeoffs, and shape a holistic view of the budget, it's nonfunctional.

Gillespie: What gave rise to the '74 Budget Act? And does that have any lessons for how we might reform things today?

Riedl: The '74 Budget Act resulted primarily from Nixon trying to impound money. There was a huge constitutional crisis under Nixon, where he was trying to impound money that had been already appropriated by Congress. Impoundment means the spending has already been signed into law and the president says, as chief executive, I'm not spending the money. 

Gillespie: What was he trying to not spend money on?

Riedl: That I do not know right now. But the Supreme Court essentially shot down impoundment and said, if the law says to spend it, the president doesn't have a choice. That's why the Budget Act was called the Budget and Impoundment Act. But also what was happening back then is the budget was expanding. We were just past the Great Society. You had huge new government programs and a totally unwieldy process. It was just kind of all funded on an ad hoc basis. So the combination of the Great Society and impoundment drove the '74 Budget Act.

Gillespie: Is there anything that might spark a reform of the budgeting process?

Riedl: The challenge right now is everybody in Congress knows the process is broken. The debt limit, the government shutdowns, that often motivates members to say that this is no way to run a country. We keep having debt limit crises. We keep having government shutdown crises. The problem with budget reform that we've run into is there have been a lot of commissions in Congress and a lot of working groups and a lot of special blue ribbon lawmaker commissions. Nearly every reform they come up with dies because somebody's ox gets gored. Some committee is going to lose power, whether it's that the Appropriations Committee is going to lose to the Budget Committee or that the Budget Committee is going to have to give power to Appropriations, or the Ways and Means [Committee] is going to lose some authority over some of their entitlement programs. 

Budget process starts out idealistic and good government, and it ends up devolving into a turf war between members over who can control what, and the whole system falls apart. One way of doing it, potentially, is enact reforms that don't go into effect for five, seven, eight years so that members who are voting on it don't have to worry that they won't be the committee chairman anymore.

Gillespie: What's the role then of public opinion? In your theory of social change, does it come from people protesting bad budget processing and things like that?

Riedl: You know, I have a sign up in my office. I believe it's a quote that says, "Do not think that public opinion doesn't matter in the long run. It's the only thing that does matter." And ultimately, I have worked 20 years trying to adjust public opinion because when I worked on the Hill, I worked for six years in the Senate as chief economist of Sen. Rob Portman [(R–Ohio]). And when you're working in Congress and you talk to lawmakers, they will tell you the same thing. We know all these problems. We know it's unsustainable. But if I try to do anything about it, the voters will kill me. 

So one of the reasons I left the Senate was I'm like, "OK, if everything comes down to public opinion because lawmakers are just weather vanes, we have to fix public opinion." The challenge addressing public opinion on deficits is nobody believes it and nobody feels it. And they've been hearing concerns of deficits for a long time. But they don't feel it as much. I mean, there's been a little bit with interest rates. My fear is that we're not going to get real budget reform until the pain starts to hit us hard enough that people feel it.

Gillespie: And that will be inflation. 

Riedl: Inflation, rising interest rates, the bond market cutting us off, stock markets falling, and the danger, of course, is by the time you've gotten to that point, it's too late to fix it in any way that's not totally brutal. But I have spent 25 years trying to motivate people, even looking for a Ross Perot type or something to motivate people. 

One of the reasons it's harder to get people motivated on the deficit now than, say, in the 1990s is in the 1990s, the deficit was smaller, and you could fix it by reforming programs that didn't matter as much. Today, the deficit is $2 trillion and driven almost entirely by Social Security and Medicare. It's really hard to motivate people to address the deficit when they realize that's the ox that's going to be gored. It's going to be Social Security, Medicare, and middle-class taxes. You're not going to be able to tweak your way to this like you did in the 1990s.

Gillespie: Before we go into what is to be done—and I want to talk about some of the proposals that you've articulated over the years—let's talk a little bit about Trump and Biden. 

By the time George W. Bush left office, he ended up adding $10.3 trillion in deficits, beyond what was expected. Obama added $4.6 trillion in a 10-year budget window. Trump in four years had $3.9 trillion extra budget deficits that he added to the baseline. Biden, I guess, in his first 20 months, because it's still going on, added $5 trillion. So does that tell us anything essential about these people or the parties they represent?

Riedl: You don't just want to look at what the deficit was when they arrived and when they left because you might inherit a budget where everything is on autopilot getting better or everything's on autopilot getting worse. But you can further divide up these changes between legislation vs. the economy. And if you do that, Trump comes out a lot worse. Trump actually added $7.8 trillion in deficits, but he was able to save $3.9 trillion through faster economic growth, which cut the impact in half.

Gillespie: Obama came in with a terrible economy, and I think we would both agree that the actions that came after him slowed down the recovery. But by the time Trump came into office, things were picking up.

Riedl: Sure, exactly. Especially in those first three years, the economy overperformed. 

Gillespie: And Biden also inherited a bad economy.

Riedl: So if you go by just legislation and you further take out the economy, Bush's legislation added $7 trillion in borrowing, Obama $5 trillion in borrowing, and Trump nearly $8 trillion in just four years. So what you see is that Bush and Trump added more than Obama, and much of Obama's debt was actually extending the Bush tax cuts. But Biden really came in all guns blazing. Like I said, he added $4.8 trillion in 20 months. He added as much debt in 20 months legislatively as Obama did in eight years. And so I think things are getting worse. That's why I'm concerned about a Trump-Biden rematch, because you have two presidents with two of the worst fiscal records of the past 100 years.

Gillespie: What is the option beyond despair when we look at the 2024 election? 

Riedl: I think one hope you can have on spending in deficits is gridlock. I think if you get a full Republican government or a full Democratic government, you're going to see massive deficits. If you get gridlock, you might have some hope that even if neither side cares about the deficit, they don't want to increase the deficit the other way. Republicans don't want spending hikes. Democrats don't want tax cuts. 

But other than that, the real danger coming up after this election is we have an epic fiscal cliff coming next year. Next year, the tax cuts expire and are up for renewal. That's about $4 trillion over 10 years. The recent Obamacare expansion that Biden signed expires. The discretionary spending caps expire. The infrastructure bill expires, and we hit the debt limit. So it's going to be interesting to see whether we have a unified or divided government in a situation where we have $6 trillion or $7 trillion in renewals coming, and whether or not they're going to try to constrain or blow this out of the water.

Gillespie: Talk a bit about how gridlock has operated in the 21st century. Because Bush came in and ultimately, by 2004, he had a united government. But in 2006, he lost control of the House and the spending slowed down toward the end of his term. Obama, as we discussed, basically elected a Republican Congress. There was a massive increase and then a kind of flatlining. It didn't quite work that way with Trump, although he also managed to fracture control of Congress. But is gridlock viable and is it good? 

Riedl: Historically, gridlock is the only thing that has reduced spending and deficits. I can go a little earlier to the 1990s when President [Bill] Clinton came in and spent his first two years trying to nationalize health care. It was a disaster. Newt Gingrich comes in 1994, and all of the sudden, the entire debate is over how to balance the budget. And four years later, the budget was balanced. Clinton was dragged kicking and screaming by Republicans into this. Similarly, as you mentioned, Obama in the first two years did about $1.5 trillion in stimulus bills plus Obamacare. And it was after Republicans took the House in 2011, the next six years were six of the best years we've had. There was very little expensive legislation passing. It was Boehner and Obama at each other's throats on spending, and you had legitimate deficit reduction. 

It kind of fell apart under Trump after Trump lost in 2020 because you had the pandemic. And also, the Trump Republican Party had changed so much that they were happy to team up with Nancy Pelosi to increase spending, even outside the pandemic. Like I said, even when Republicans had unified government, that version of the Republican Party was happy to make deals with Democrats that said, if you give us a 10 percent hike in defense, we'll give you a 10 percent hike in domestic discretionary spending. So, we went off the rails there. But historically, the GOP has worked really hard to constrain Democratic presidents. That's probably been the top formula for spending restraint: a Republican Congress constraining a Democratic president.

Gillespie: Let's talk about the '90s, because we managed to have balanced budgets for three years in a row? 

Riedl: '98 through '01.

Gillespie: So, what happened there and how did that come about?

Riedl: There's a lot of mythology about the 1990s balanced budgets. There is a certain view that it was a massive amount of fiscal consolidation. The fiscal consolidation was actually pretty minor.

Gillespie: What do you mean by fiscal consolidation?

Riedl: Policies to reduce the deficit. You had President Clinton raise taxes in 1993, but it was only about half a percent of GDP out of a deficit that was about 5 percent of GDP. You had some modest spending restraint. But the real reason the budget got balanced and balanced faster than anybody predicted was, a) the end of the Cold War created a defense dividend. Defense spending absolutely plummeted from about 5 percent or 6 percent of GDP down to 3 percent of GDP. 

At the same time, you had a big revenue bubble in the late '90s when the stock market was on fire. The defense savings and that temporary revenue bubble provided about 90 percent of the deficit reduction in the late '90s. If you want to give Clinton and Gingrich credit, it was basically staying out of the way. They didn't pass big, expensive bills. They didn't do big tax cuts. They didn't do big spending hikes. They stayed out of the way and let the defense savings happen and the revenue bubble happen.

Gillespie: And Gingrich never talked about that partly because he didn't want to be seen as 

cutting defense spending.

Riedl: Right. He didn't mention that. But, you wonder then, why did the budget become unbalanced in 2001? Well, all the savings were due to a revenue bubble and defense cuts, and then you have the revenue bubble burst and then you have 9/11. The revenue bump went away at the same time the defense savings went away. You were suddenly right back to where you were 10 years earlier.

Gillespie: And then you have the added kind of secret future costs by expanding Medicare.

Riedl: And then the Bush spending spree. I think one thing that gets lost on a lot of individuals is when Bush ran on compassionate conservatism in 2000, that theme was a repudiation of Newt Gingrich. Because there was a concern that Republicans were being too aggressive cutting spending, even though they really didn't successfully cut that much.

Gillespie: Yeah, but they cut defense spending.

Riedl: Right, they didn't cut social programs at all. But there were government shutdowns. So Bush was trying to repudiate that. Bush was announcing in 2000, unlike meanspirited Newt Gingrich, I'm compassionate and I'm going to increase spending. And he did. We had no Child Left Behind, farm subsidies, a huge highway bill. Domestic discretionary spending was rising about 8 percent or 9 percent per year in addition to the defense programs. So Bush made it clear at the outset in 2000 that he was going to be a big spender. 

And then 9/11 just kind of put it on the acceleration. Even if there were some fiscal conservatives in the Bush White House, the prioritization of 9/11 defense funding meant that they didn't really didn't have much leeway to play hardball with Democratic spenders. In fact, when you talk to people from the Bush White House, they will tell you, we didn't want to increase discretionary spending as much as we did. But we needed our Homeland Security and defense funding from Democrats, and we had to give them what they wanted.

Budgeting is about tradeoffs. It kind of always reminds me of [the saying], "If we can afford to go to the moon, we can afford to do something else." No, because if you do A, you cannot afford to do B.

Gillespie: In 2021, we were spending $59,188 per household. Currently it's at about $48,000. So it's come down from the peak, but not that far.

Riedl: [It's] still much higher than before the pandemic.

Gillespie: Yeah. And then it's projected in another 10 years or so to be up to $55,000. That kind of figure, does that crystallize for people that government spending is out of control?

Riedl: It does. When I talk to audiences, they can't believe the numbers. I say the government is spending at the peak of the pandemic $59,000 per household and right now about nearly $50,000 per household. And I frame it to audiences [like this]: Imagine what you could do if you were able to keep even a fraction of that money for yourself in the first place without sending it to Washington. And that crystallizes it for people just how big it's gotten. I remember when George H.W. Bush was president, we were spending $27,000 per household. That seemed high. And that's all adjusted for inflation. 

But I think that should crystallize it for people. And it reminds me of a report and Wall Street Journal op-ed by my colleague at the Manhattan Institute, Judge Glock, who showed how much of people's taxes come back to the same household in benefits. I think he was estimating around 20 percent directly come back to the same household and much of the rest of it indirectly comes back to the same household. And it's really kind of dumb to send this money to Washington, have them cut an administrative haircut, and then send it right back to you.

Gillespie: This is current spending, the way the federal budget is split up: 34 percent currently goes to Social Security or Medicare, 19 percent goes to anti-poverty programs, 13 percent to defense, 10 percent to interest, and then there's 23 percent in another category. What are some of those?

Riedl: The other category? Basically education, infrastructure, border security, health research, housing. All that kind of stuff.

Gillespie: This is only going to get bigger, but a third of federal spending is Social Security and Medicare.

Riedl: And that's going to go way up. 

Gillespie: And interest will likely go up if interest rates continue to climb and things like that. In the early '60s, defense spending was close to half of federal spending. And it's not so much anymore because we spend less proportionately on defense, but it's also because we spend so much on everything else.

Riedl: We've gone from one-half to one-eighth of the budget on defense. 

Gillespie: What do we do in order to pay for this type of spending? Can we tax our way out of it?

Riedl: It is mathematically impossible to tax our way out of this. In order to stabilize that long term, you need non-interest savings that gradually rise to about 6 percent of GDP outside of interest. I did a report last year on taxing the rich that showed that, realistically, you can only get about 1 percent of GDP and higher revenues. If you set all upper income taxes at the highest possible rate at the revenue maximizing level, and you adjusted for the economic damage that would create, you get 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP. 

Just to put a finer point on this, if you seized every dollar of every billionaire's wealth in America, their home, their car, their stocks, their vacation houses, their yachts, their businesses, you could fund the government one time for nine months. That's it. If you assessed 100 percent tax rates over $500,000 a year, you still wouldn't balance the budget. So taxing the rich should be on the table because everything needs to be on the table, but when I hear lawmakers say all we have to do is tax the rich and it'll pay for everything, that is spectacularly, mathematically false.

Gillespie: In your book you show actually that according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—and the OECD are advanced economies. The United States actually has the most progressive tax code. We are taxing the rich. The rich pay a higher percentage of government revenue in the U.S. than in any other country. 

Riedl: Substantially more. And it's because we tax the rich at a similar level as other countries. In fact, our highest rates are actually higher for other countries. But we tax the nonwealthy so much less than other countries that it makes us more progressive.

Gillespie: The upper 10 percent of income earners in the U.S. pay about 90 percent of the taxes.

Riedl: The highest 20 percent of earners pay 90 percent of all income taxes. The bottom half collectively pays zero.

Gillespie: So does that mean in order to balance the budget, we have to tax the middle class or we have to tax a wider range of income earners?

Riedl: Here's the part that makes me really unpopular with all our audiences. If you try to build a stable budget for the next 30 years—and I don't mean stable, I don't mean balance the budget, I mean just one small enough deficit that the debt share of GDP stays at about 100 percent—you can't really get there on spending cuts alone. You have to cut that 5.5 percent of GDP. You can't really find 5.5 percent of GDP in reasonable cuts. You're going to have to have some revenue. And if taxing the rich is limited, there's going to be higher middle-class taxes. This is just a mathematical reality. 

As I explained in my Dispatch article, you can't stabilize the debt with revenues at 17 percent of GDP. Spending is going to 30 [percent]. You're not going to get spending all the way down that low. And you can't get there from taxing the rich. So, middle-class taxes are going to rise.

Gillespie: Yeah, so what's the median household income now? $76,000? Something like that? What will they be paying in taxes 10 years down the road vs. now?

Riedl: It remains to be seen. I can't give a number. I think people are surprised to hear, though, that the median earning family in America today pays an effective income tax rate of 2 percent. And people say I pay more than that. 

If you actually adjust for what they actually pay with the child credit, and sometimes the [Earned Income Tax Credit], the middle earning family pays an effective income tax rate of 2 percent. And then they pay an effective payroll tax of about 10 percent when you count the employer portion. So they do pay payroll, but it's going to go up from that. And the question eventually is, are we going to do most of this through payroll taxes and a value added tax, which is like a national sales tax, or through income taxes?

Gillespie: And in Europe, that is everything, right?

Riedl: We are the only country in the OECD that does not have a value added tax. I would like to keep it that way.

Gillespie: Why? What's bad about a value added tax?

Riedl: Value added taxes are actually more efficient than income taxes, if you're starting a government from scratch, because you're taxing consumption. The danger, though, is value added taxes are a cash cow. Once you start with a 1 percent rate, it's so easy to raise it to higher rates and collect a huge amount of revenue. And my concern is, I wouldn't mind replacing the income tax with a value added tax, but I don't want to get to the point where families are paying large income taxes and large value added taxes because then you're burying families. A lot of conservatives have said if we're going to switch to a consumption tax, the income tax needs to be destroyed, burned, and salted the Earth first.

Gillespie: The income tax is not that old, right? In a way, we could conceivably do that.

Riedl: It's 100 years old, the income tax. But yeah, if you're starting a government from scratch, your bets are better. 

Gillespie: Can we grow our way out of this?

Riedl: No. And this might be news to Vivek Ramaswamy, who said that he was going to balance the budget by growing the economy 6 percent per year, which was absolutely absurd. 

The first challenge is, we can't get that much additional economic growth, because when you look at the economic growth rates of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, most of that was rising population. The population is set to pretty much level off for the next 30 years. We're going to have almost zero growth of the work force population, which means all the growth is going to have to come from productivity. You're not going to get 4 percent, 5 percent, or 6 percent growth entirely from productivity. Mathematically, that doesn't work. You would need to do it like we did in the past with people. But the other side is, while economic growth does reduce the deficit, it also increases Social Security, Medicare and Interest costs. 

Your Social Security payment is tied to your lifetime wages. The faster the economy grows, the more your wages grow, the bigger benefits you get. On Medicare, higher income is associated with higher health care consumption. Also, faster economic growth typically brings higher interest rates. And when you're in debt that much, every point interest rates rise has an enormous effect on deficits. So don't get me wrong, faster economic growth is very good and it can modestly reduce the deficit. But as long as entitlement spending and interest costs rise alongside, you're not going to get a huge deficit reduction.

Gillespie: So why don't we just cut Social Security and Medicare? Social Security was a New Deal program. It was a Depression-era program. Medicare was called the last act of the New Deal by President Lyndon Johnson. Those are programs that were designed for an economy in which you were more likely to be poor if you were an old person, if you were past retirement age. You also didn't live as long. Wouldn't it make sense to say, OK, what needs to be on the table, first and foremost, is this massive growing blob of space?

Riedl: Mathematically, it's going to have to come from Social Security and Medicare. Thirty years from now, Social Security and Medicare are going to be running a deficit of 12 percent of GDP. Just these two programs are going to be running a deficit of 12 percent of GDP if you count the interest costs that they create in the budget. 

You can't raise other taxes and cut other spending enough to close 12 percent of GDP gap. The challenge, of course, is even if everything is on the table, most savings are going to have to go with the actual policy driving it. The problem is the politics. You have Republicans even tripping over themselves to say they won't touch Social Security and Medicare because the voters will kill them, because there is this perception that you're just getting back what you paid into the system, which is absurdly, patently false.

Gillespie: How is that false? Are you getting more back?

Riedl: Social Security benefits are designed to become substantially more generous each generation, even adjusted for inflation. On Medicare, it's even a bigger gap. The typical retiring couple today gets back triple what they paid into Medicare. And that's after you've adjusted in the net present value. So you can't say, "Oh, [it's because of] inflation and interest." No, even adjusted for all that, you get triple. But there is this perception that there's a savings account for me in Washington that is just going to send me back by money. 

The reality is seniors get back more than they paid in. The programs are becoming more generous every generation. And baby boomers today are the richest generation, the richest age group, in the richest country in the world in the richest time in history. As a matter of fact, retiree income over the last couple decades has grown four times faster than the income of workers paying the benefits. So, Social Security and Medicare right now largely redistribute money up the income ladder, not down. Yes, some seniors struggle and you can design reforms. And I've designed reforms that protect struggling seniors. But it's really absurd that seniors making $1 million a year after retirement are still getting generous benefits.

Gillespie: This was also an issue with COVID relief. You had families making up to $400,000 cashing checks from various benefits for COVID. We've completely lost the distinction between even just median income families, much less struggling families, and people who can afford it. 

Riedl: Right. And keep in mind, when we're talking about senior income, seniors making half a million a year or $400,000 a year after they retired, this isn't even wage income. This is interest and Social Security income. These are net worths far into the millions.

Gillespie: But, the youngest boomers are 59, I guess, right? So, they're moving into retirement and they will die. And I think about that on an almost daily basis as a boomer myself. But they're going to give a lot of that money back to people, right? They have so much, they're going to leave it to their kids. Does that affect these calculations?

Riedl: It can, over time. I mean, if you assume a certain degree of inheritance, especially simply housing values. Boomers have so much home equity, and frankly, they're hanging on to the home equity a little too much to make the housing market difficult for their kids. But eventually, when they go, those are going to be inherited by their kids. And those huge 401(k)s are going to be inherited by their kids. That should make it a little easier. I'm Gen X. That should make it easier for Gen X and millennials to get by with less. And I've been telling people for years, if you're a Gen X or a millennial and you're assuming that Social Security is going to be there forever in its current form with no savings, you're just not paying attention. You should save as if Social Security and Medicare are a bonus because the programs will exist, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't take the little mailing you get from Social Security with your future benefits too literally.

Gillespie: How do we activate Gen X, but especially millennials and Gen Z, to get motivated about this? How do we reach them to start creating that movement for social change on this policy?

Riedl: That is the million dollar question. It's kind of remarkable that we are facing the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in world history. And while young people are often voting on the trendy issues of the day or not voting at all, seniors are going to the polls in record numbers and robbing them blind. And young people are completely oblivious to the fact that seniors are robbing you blind while you're voting on side issues. You have to get their attention. And one thing that I try to point out to younger progressives, and I haven't had a lot of luck, is whatever priorities you have in the future—not having your taxes go up, family leave, child care, health care, climate safety net—you're going to get squeezed. 

There is no way we can pay for any of the priorities you have. If we're giving $116 trillion in extra benefits to senior citizens, the math doesn't work. One thing that a lot of conservatives think about with motivating young people is climate change. Young people are so focused on climate change, even though it's something that's 30 to 40 years off—you don't feel it now, and some years it gets a little better and some years it gets worse—but young people are totally attuned to these long term climate projections and their effect. 

And conservatives are often asking, well, how do we get them to focus on long-term debt projections, which is a danger to them—I don't want to say just as much as climate. I don't want to get into that debate, but it's real. And the costs that are in the system are not theoretical projections. The seniors walk among us and they have the letters saying how much they get. If there's a way we could motivate them the same way they're motivated on climate, that would be a success. But we haven't had much luck.

Gillespie: What about younger conservatives? And to be honest, I don't care about progressives or conservatives. I care more about libertarians, and they seem to be somewhat in sync with these ideas. If you're right of center, and you're not as suspicious of capitalism, or you're not as motivated by climate change, what works to grab people?

Riedl: If I knew, I would have grabbed them by now. I think there is a certain perception, at least among right-of-center young people, that Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable. I don't think you have to really convince them of that. I think you have to get them to care about it though. And when I talk to young people on the right, to be honest, they're a little too focused on Twitter, the culture war, and Trump owning the libs that you can't really get much policy focus. They get it, but they're just not motivated on it yet. And again, if I knew a way to reach them better, I'd love to do it.

Gillespie: How do you reach your own generation of Gen X? It was very popular in the '90s, as I recall, that members of Gen X were more likely to believe in UFOs than that they were going to get collective security or Medicare. Are they still keeping the faith or are they lost in the hurly burly of everyday life?

Riedl: I think Gen X now has it in their DNA to be skeptical that Social Security and Medicare are going to be there for them. When I talk to people in my generation, they're not necessarily motivated to do anything about it, because I think when you talk to Gen Xers, there's bigger things going on in the world that are getting their attention politically. There is Trump, Biden, all the culture war stuff. That's what they're voting on. But they're aware that we're facing problems.

Gillespie: The leading edge of Gen X is really going to be in the pinch point when all of this blows up. 

Riedl: We're going to be the ones hit with the drastic changes when you have to do it. But you mentioned the '90s with Social Security. That was the time to fix it. You know, the reason to fix Social Security in the '90s was not because the program was going to go bankrupt in the '90s. It was always going to go bankrupt around 2030. 

But that was the time to phase in the reforms while people were young. And we missed the window in the '90s and early 2000s to gradually phase in reforms for boomers. And because we didn't, now we're going to have to do the more drastic reforms. And as you mentioned, when there's a ratchet of benefits, we're going to be the ones being ratcheted because we didn't do the reform 20, 30 years ago when we were warned to do it.

Gillespie: Do you think we'll be in a better place fiscally, or in terms of budget, a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now?

Riedl: We're going to be in a worse place just because I think deficits are looking to get much bigger—$2 to $3 trillion deficits. I don't see Congress going in the other direction. Things are going to get worse until either voters wake up or the financial markets cut us off. I'm really hoping it's the first option, that voters wake up, but I'm just not seeing it.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Brian Riedl: Who Bankrupted Us More—Trump or Biden? appeared first on Reason.com.

Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run.

Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and then joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.

They talked about the 2024 presidential election and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. And about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship, and American exceptionalism.

This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual event for Students for Liberty that took place recently in Washington, D.C.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Nick Gillespie: Why is Congress broken and how do we fix that?

Justin Amash: We can take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to. We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized, where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for our country. Among them is that the president has an unbelievable amount of power because the president now only has to negotiate with really a few people. You have to negotiate with the speaker of the House. You have to negotiate with the Senate majority leader and maybe some of the minority leaders. But it's really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. And when that happens, it gives the president so much leverage. 

So when we talk about things like going to war without authorization, as long as the speaker of the House isn't going to hold the president accountable and the Senate majority leader is not going to, the president is just going to do what he wants to do. And when it comes to spending, as long as the president only has to negotiate with a couple of people, the president's going to do whatever the president wants to do. So it's super easy in the system for the president to essentially bully Congress and dictate the outcomes. 

But there's a deeper problem with all of this, which is that representative government is supposed to be a discovery process. You elect people to represent you. You send them to Washington, and then the outcomes are supposed to be discovered by these representatives through discussions and debates, and the introduction of legislation, and amendments. You're supposed to have lots of votes, where the votes freely reflect your will representing the people back home. But instead, in Congress today, a few leaders are deciding what the final product is and then they're not bringing it to the floor until they know they have the votes. So there's no actual discovery process. Nancy Pelosi used to brag about this; she wouldn't bring a bill to the floor unless she knew it was going to pass. Which is the opposite of how Congress should work.

Gillespie: What are some of the ways to decentralize power within Congress? When you were in Congress, you founded the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be kind of a redoubt of people who believed in limited government and libertarian and conservative principles and actually even some liberal principles, but decentralizing authority. You got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, right?

Amash: Well, I resigned from it.

Gillespie: Well, you were asked to leave. The police sirens were coming, and it's like, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to go," right? But even places like that, that were explicitly designed to act as a countervailing force to this unified Congress, how can that happen? What can you do or what can somebody do to make that happen?

Amash: Well, it does take people with strong will. I think that when we go to vote for our elected officials, when you go to vote for a representative, when you go to vote for a senator, you have to know that that person is willing to stand up to the leadership team. And if that person's not willing to break from the leadership team on a consistent basis—and this doesn't mean they have to be mean or anything like that; it just means that they have to be independent enough where you know they're willing to break from their leadership team. If they're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter how much they agree with you on the issues, don't vote for them because that person is going to sell out. There's no chance they're going to stand up for you when it counts. I think you need to have people who have a strong will, who are going to go there and actually represent you and are willing to stand up to the leaders.

Gillespie: If you are interested in Congressman Amash's commentary on contemporary issues, go to his substack Justin Amash. The tagline is: "A former congressman spills on Congress and makes the practical case for the principles of liberty." It's a great read, particularly on issues you mentioned.

Can you tell us how you discovered libertarian ideas? You got elected in 2010, which was a wave election. It was part of the Tea Party reaction to eight years of Bush, and more problems during the financial crisis and the reaction of the government to that. Where did you first encounter the ideas of liberty, and how did that motivate you to get into Congress?

Amash: The ideas of liberty are something that have been with me since I was a child. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. I think they came from my parents' immigrant experience, coming to the United States. My dad came here as a refugee from Palestine. He was born in Palestine in 1940. And when the state of Israel was created in '48, he became a refugee. My mom is a Syrian immigrant. 

When my parents came here, they weren't wealthy. My dad was a very poor refugee. He was so poor that the Palestinians made fun of him. So that's really poor. When he came here, he didn't have much, but he felt he had an opportunity. He felt he had a chance to start a new life, a chance to make it, even though he came from a different background from a lot of people, even though his English wasn't great compared to a lot of people. So he came here and he worked hard, and he built a business. When we were young, he used to tell us that America is the greatest place on earth, where someone can come here as a refugee like he did and start a new life and have the chance to be successful. It doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter what obstacles you face. You have a chance here and you don't have that chance in so many places around the world. 

I think that's where that spirit of liberty came from. It was from my dad's experience especially, my mom as well, coming here as a young immigrant. So I was always a little bit anti-authoritarian as a child. I rebelled against teachers at times. I didn't like arbitrary authority, let's put it that way. When someone would just make up a rule, like this is the rule, "I just say so." Well, tell me why. 

Gillespie: Have you rethought that as a parent?

Amash: No, I mean, I let my kids think very freely.

Gillespie: As long as they follow the rules.

Amash: I don't mind when they are a little bit rebellious. I think it doesn't hurt for kids to have some independence. I encourage them to challenge their teachers, even when they think the teacher is wrong about something. I think that it's a good thing for people to go out there and not just accept everything as it is.

Gillespie: You famously, as a congressman, explained all of your votes on Facebook, which is a rare concession by authority to say, okay, this is why I did what I did.

Amash: Yeah. Actually, a lot of the people in leadership and in Congress didn't like that I was doing that because I was giving people at home the power to challenge them. Instead of just being told this is the way it is, now I was revealing what was going on.

Gillespie: You grew up in Michigan. You went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad and for law school. Was it there that you started coming across names like Hayek, and Mises, and Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard?

Amash: Not really, no. My background is in economics, my degree is in economics. I did well in economics at Michigan, but we sure didn't study Austrian economics. We didn't study Hayek. I think he might have been mentioned in one class. Very briefly he was mentioned, like there was one day where he was mentioned. But I'd say that what happened is, as I went through my economics degree, and then I got a law degree at Michigan as well, I started to realize that I had a lot of differences from other people who were otherwise aligned with me. I was a Republican. I aligned with them on a lot of things, but there were a number of issues where we didn't align— some of the foreign policy issues, but certainly a lot of civil liberties issues. 

I started to wonder, what am I? What's going on here? I just thought of myself as a Republican, and I would read the platform and hear what they're saying. They believe in limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty. 

But when push came to shove on a lot of issues, they didn't believe those things. They'd say they believe those things, but they didn't. I've told this story before, I just typed some of my views into a Google search, and up popped Hayek's Wikipedia page. Literally, it was like the top thing on Google. So I clicked on that, started reading about them, and I was already in my mid-20s at this time. And I was like, yes, this is what I believe.

Gillespie: It is interesting because you would have been coming of age during a time when the Republicans were ascendant. But they were the war party. And we were told after 9/11 that you should not speak freely. That was kind of a problem, right?

Amash: Yeah, sure. Throughout my life, I believed in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression. These are critical values. Maybe they're the essence of everything that makes this country work. The idea that we come from a lot of places—there's an incredible amount of diversity in the United States. I think diversity is always treated or often treated like a bad word these days. But it's a blessing to our country that we have people who come from so many backgrounds. Actually, the principle of liberty is about utilizing that diversity.

It's in centrally planned systems where diversity is not utilized, where someone at the top dictates to everyone else and doesn't take advantage of any of the diversity. They say no, a few of us at the top, we know everything. It doesn't matter. All of your backgrounds, all of your skills, all of your talents, that doesn't matter. What matters is we've got a few people in a room somewhere, and they're going to decide everything. And they know best because they're experts.

Gillespie: You came into office in 2011, and it seemed like there was a real libertarian insurgency within the Republican Party. But more nationally in discourse, people were tired of continued centralization, and government secrecy—famously, a lot of Bush's activities and particularly war spending early on was done in supplemental and emergency preparations, not really open to full discussions.

All of the stuff coming out of the Patriot Act, somebody like Dick Cheney kind of saying we're in control. But then Obama also promised the most transparent administration ever and plainly did not deliver on that. 

That energy pushing back on centralization and government power and government secrecy that helped bring you and other people like you to Congress seems to have dissipated. Do you agree with that? And if so, what took that away?

Amash: Yeah, I agree with that. When I was running for office, both for State House in 2009 and when I got to Congress in 2011, there was a lot of energy behind a limited government, libertarian-ish republicanism. I felt like libertarianism was really rising. There was a chance for libertarian ideals to get a lot of traction. A lot of people who used to be more like Bush conservatives were coming around to the libertarian way. 

I felt really good about where things were heading. And for the first, I'd say three or four years that I was in Congress, I felt like we continued to move in the right direction. The creation of the Freedom Caucus was kind of a dream of bringing people together to challenge the leadership. They weren't all libertarians or anything like that. There are a few who are libertarian-leaning, but the idea that a group of Republican members—it wasn't determined that it was going to be only Republicans, but it ended up being Republicans—got together and said, "Hey, we're going to challenge the status quo. We're going to challenge the establishment." That was kind of a dream that had come together. 

Then when Donald Trump came on the scene, I think a lot of that just fell apart because he's such a strong personality and character, and had so much hold over a lot of the public, especially on the Republican side, that it was very hard for my colleagues to be able to challenge him. 

Gillespie: What's the essential appeal of Trump? Is it his personality? Is that that he said he could win and he ended up doing that at least once? Is it a cult of personality? What's the core of his appeal to you?

Amash: I think he is definitely a unique character. He has a certain charisma that is probably unmatched in politics. I don't think I've ever seen someone who campaigns as effectively as he does. It doesn't mean you have to agree with all of the ethics of what he does or any of that, or the substance. 

Gillespie: To keep it in Michigan, he's a rock star. He's Iggy Pop. You may not like what he's doing on the stage, but you can't take your eyes off it.

Amash: That's right. He holds court. When he's out there, people pay attention. He really understands the essence of campaigning, and how to win a campaign. He understands how to effectively go after opponents. Now, again, I'm not saying that all of these things are necessarily ethical or that other people should do the same things, but he really understands how to lead a populist movement. 

Gillespie: How important do you think in his appeal is a politics of resentment, that somehow he is going to get back what was taken from you?

Amash: The whole Make America Great Again, there's a whole idea there of "someone is destroying your life, and I'm going to get it back for you." That's a very powerful thing to a lot of people. For a lot of people out there, it is more important to get back at others than necessarily to have some kind of vision of how this is all going to work going forward. It's not appealing to me because I understand, we live in one country. We have people of all sorts of backgrounds. And if you're going to persuade people, you have to be able to live with them and work with them, regardless of your differences. It doesn't mean that you can't be upset, be angry about what some other people are doing or saying. But there has to be an effort to live together here as one country. We have too much in common in this country.

Gillespie: Michigan was a massive swing state when he won the election. You voted to impeach Donald Trump. What went into that calculation? What was the reaction like to that? That's a profile in courage.

Amash: Well, I don't think that's my most courageous vote, not even by a long shot. 

Gillespie: What was? Naming the post office after your father?

Amash: I didn't name any post offices after my father, to be clear. I think that the courageous votes are the ones where everyone is against you. And I don't mean just one party. It's one thing to vote for impeachment and half the country loves what you did and half the country doesn't like what you did. That's, in my mind, not that challenging or difficult. It's when you take a vote and you know that 99 percent of the public is going to misconstrue this, misunderstand it, be against it. The vote is going to be something like 433 to 1 in the House or something like that. Those are the tough votes. And there are plenty of those votes out there, where you're taking a principled stand and you're doing it to protect people's rights. But it's not the typical narrative. 

Gillespie: Is there an example that, in your legislative record, you would put forth for that?

Amash: One of the ones I've talked about before is, they tried to pass some anti-lynching legislation at the federal level and everyone's against lynching, obviously, but the legislation itself was bad and would actually harm a lot of people, including harming a lot of black Americans. There was this idea that this legislation was good and parroted by a lot of people in the media. They didn't read the legislation. In fact, I complained about it and it mysteriously did not pass both houses of Congress after I pointed out all the problems with it. It did pass the House of Representatives. Did not pass both Houses and get signed by the president. Mysteriously, the next Congress, they reintroduced it and rewrote it in a way that took into consideration all of my complaints, and they tried to pass it off like they were just reintroducing the same legislation. I pointed out: They actually saw that there was a problem here and then tried to pretend like, "Oh, we're just passing it again." Those kinds of votes are tough because when you take the vote, everyone thinks you're wrong. Everyone. And you have to go home and you have to explain it. Those are the ones that are tricky. 

Back to the impeachment point. Look, I'd impeach every president. Let's be clear. I'm not the kind of person who's going to introduce impeachment legislation over every little thing that a president does wrong. When you introduce legislation to impeach a president, you have to have some backing for it. It can't just be one person saying, let's impeach. 

For example, I would definitely impeach President Biden over these unconstitutional wars 100 percent. But the idea of introducing impeachment legislation suggests there's other people who will join you. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in futility. You introduce it. It doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. If we're going to impeach people, there has to be some public backing, which is why I try to make the case all the time for these impeachable offenses, why some legislation should be brought forth. But you've got to get the public behind you on that kind of stuff. I think that every president should be impeached, every recent president at least. 

Gillespie: If Trump's populism, national conservatism, and politics of resentment are sucking up a lot of energy on the right, how do we deal with the rise of identity politics and a kind of woke progressivism on the left? Where is that coming from? And what is the best way to combat that?

Amash: I think a lot of it is just repackaged socialist ideas, collectivist ideas. The idea of equity, for example, is really like a perversion of the idea of equality. In most respects, when people say equity, they mean the opposite of equality. It means you're going to have the government or some central authority decide what the outcomes should be, how much each person should have, rather than some system of equality before the law, where the government is not some kind of arbiter of who deserves what. When you think about it, there is no way for the government to do this. There's no way for the government to properly assess all of our lives. This is in many ways the point of diversity: we're all so different. There's no way that a central authority can decide how to manage all that. 

For many of the people on the woke left who say they care about diversity, they don't care about diversity if they're talking about equity. These things are in conflict with each other. The idea that you're going to decide that someone is more deserving than another based on some superficial characteristics. As an example—I've talked about this and I've talked about this earlier in this conversation—my dad came here with nothing as a poor refugee. Yet, in a lot of cases, he might be classified as just a white American. Even though he came here as an extremely poor Palestinian refugee. The New York Times, for example, classifies me as white. They might classify someone else who's Middle Eastern as a person of color.

I think a lot of this is just, someone is making decisions at the top saying, "Well, we think this person is more like this or that, and we're going to decide they're more deserving." But they don't know our backgrounds. They don't know anything about us. They don't know who deserves this or who deserves that. No central authority could figure that out. The best thing we can do is have a system of equality before the law, where the law treats everyone the same. It doesn't give an advantage to any person over another person. It may not be fair in some sense to some people. Some people might say, "well, that's not fair." 

Some people, instead of having a dad who's a Palestinian refugee, their dad was some Silicon Valley billionaire. Some person might have a dad who was a professor. Another person might have a dad who worked at a fast-food restaurant. You don't know what the differences are. The government can't figure all of this out and say who is more deserving than someone else. So I really think that the woke left, when they pushed this idea of equity, they're really pushing against diversity. They're saying, a few people at the top are gonna decide who's valuable and who's not valuable, and they're not going to actually take into consideration any of our differences, because no central authority could take it into consideration.

Gillespie: You are a libertarian, not an anarchist. You believe there is a role for government, but it should be obviously much more limited. You are also an Orthodox Christian. Could you talk a little bit about how in a world of limited government, a libertarian world, the government wouldn't be doing everything for everybody, but placing organizations and institutions like the church or other types of intervening, countervailing, mediating institutions would help to fill the gaps that are left by the government?

Amash: The place for these organizations is to help society, not to have government deciding it. When you have some central authority deciding it, you are really limiting the opportunities for the public. You're limiting the opportunities for assisting people. You're deciding that a few people are going to make all the decisions, rather than having a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals making decisions. 

When you centralize it all, there are a lot of people who are going to be missed, a lot of people who are going to be ignored. When you let the marketplace work this out, when you let private organizations work this out, there is a lot more opportunity for people who need help to get help. I think that's really important.

Gillespie: There was a libertarian wave—I like to call it a libertarian moment—which I think we're still living in, but we don't understand, rhetoric aside. What are the best ways to get libertarian ideas and sensibilities in front of young people, to really energize Gen Z? The world is getting young again. How do we make sure that these people are hearing and understanding and maybe being persuaded by libertarian ideas?

Amash: For one thing, we have to meet them where they are. I spend a lot of time, for example, asking my kids, which social media kids use these days? They're in a lot of places that the adults aren't. We might be on Facebook—I mean, my generation, your generation. Other people are on X or Twitter. And there are other people on TikTok. 

You have to meet them where they are and if they're not on X and—it's still weird to call it X—if they're not on X and you are, well, they're not hearing your message. That's an issue. That's something we all have to work on. I'm probably reaching primarily Gen X and millennial people on X, and I'm probably not reaching Gen Z people as well. I think we need to work on getting them in those places.

Also, I think people who have libertarian instincts, people who want to present libertarianism and have an opportunity, go speak to students at schools. I used to do this as a member of Congress. I used that opportunity as much as I could. When schools would invite me, I'd say, "Yes, I'd be happy to come to the school to speak to the students" and take all their questions and be open about being a libertarian. Tell them frankly that your philosophy is libertarianism and talk to them about it. I think it's great. A lot of teachers end up surprised. I've had many teachers walk up to me and whisper to me, "I think I'm a libertarian, too," after having the conversation because they have stereotypes about what it might mean to be a libertarian and you have the opportunity to change their mind.

Gillespie: I have seen a lot of chatter. I have actually helped publish a lot of chatter that you may be running for the U.S. Senate from the mediocre state of Michigan. Do you have an announcement that you would like to make?

Amash: As a part of the national championship-winning state of Michigan this year, I am exploring a run for Senate. The [Federal Election Commission] FEC requires me to state that I am not a candidate for Senate, but I am exploring a run for Senate. 

If you're interested in checking it out, go to https://exploratory.justinamash.com/. I'm giving it serious thought. I think that there is an opportunity for libertarians this year, and there's an opportunity to win a Republican Senate seat this year. So I'm looking at the Republican primary. I think this is probably the best shot libertarians have had in a long time in the state of Michigan.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser
• Motion Graphics: Isaac Reese
• Cameras: Students For Liberty

The post Justin Amash: 'I'd Impeach Every President' appeared first on Reason.com.

In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee dragged the heads of Meta, TikTok, and X, formally known as Twitter, to Washington to charge them with exploiting children by allegedly addicting them to social media that sexually harms them, drives them to eating disorders, and even kills them. The Spanish Inquisition vibe of the proceedings reached a crescendo when Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) demanded that Mark Zuckerberg apologize to the families of children for the "harms" supposedly caused by Facebook and pay compensation out of his personal fortune.

But is social media really that bad for kids? And is the solution being pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike—universal age verification for all users of the internet—even technically feasible without shredding the First Amendment, destroying privacy, and creating major security issues? The answer is a resounding no, according to Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at R Street, a free market think tank, and author of "The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age-Verification Legislation." Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Weissmann in Washington, D.C., in early February.

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• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
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The post Shoshana Weissmann: Online Age Verification Rules Are Unconstitutional and Ineffective appeared first on Reason.com.

Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. The book is a history of the drug known as molly and ecstasy that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently evaluating as an aid in fighting PTSD.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Nick Gillespie: Why did you write I Feel Love? 

Rachel Nuwer: There are really two answers to that. The first is a sort of common good answer, which is, there wasn't a book about MDMA. It's this huge cultural phenomenon. We're probably going to see it—well, hopefully see it—approved by the [Food and Drug Administration] for PTSD treatment within the next year. Yet, there wasn't a resource that brought all the information about this complex, nuanced drug together in one place. People needed to have that touchstone. There are just so many misconceptions about MDMA that I wanted to dispel those, not just for readers but also for myself. 

The other part of that answer is a more personal one. It was the height of the pandemic. Like many people, I was kind of having a crisis. What am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? And for me, that was really manifesting in worries over my career. I'd spent about a decade reporting about illegal wildlife trade, which is not a cheery topic. We're talking slaughtered rhinos and elephants. And there just weren't many hopeful stories there. And I really realized that I was looking for a change of pace, for a new intellectual and personal challenge, and MDMA turned out to be the answer. 

Gillespie: And that helps explain the subtitle of the book, right? Which is? 

Nuwer: "MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World." 

Gillespie: So this is like your pandemic baby?

Nuwer: This is exactly that. It's kept me very occupied in the pandemic. And my last book, I went to 12 countries to report it, but this one I could very easily do from the phone, right here in the good ol' U.S.A.—and a quick hop over the pond to the U.K. 

Gillespie: We talk about the psychedelic renaissance at Reason and obviously other people do, but that might be one thing the pandemic really helped because you couldn't travel out. So travel in. 

Nuwer: Exactly, yeah. And I say this in the beginning of the book, so it's not a surprise. But the idea for the book came to me while I was on MDMA, but not in a club, which is my preferred environment for this. I was just sitting on my couch at home at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. 

Gillespie: Before we get into the conversation about the history of MDMA, I'm struck by you saying, "This came to me while I was on MDMA." As a broad cultural background, how old are you? 

Nuwer: I am—let's see, what am I now? 38. Keeps changing. 

Gillespie: Have you always felt comfortable saying, "I use drugs that are technically or still openly illegal." Have you always felt comfortable doing that? Or is there a shift going on in our society? 

Nuwer: I was definitely not always the person who was like, "I use drugs. I like drugs." I was a D.A.R.E. kid from the '80s. 

I completely swallowed that message. I internalized it. If I heard of friends doing drugs, whether it was weed or ecstasy, I looked down on them. I judged them. I thought people who do drugs are looking for an escape, or they're burnouts, or they're going to frazzle their brains. Wasn't for me. That began to change in college. I had a friend who introduced me to mushrooms, but I didn't really know anything about them. It didn't have the stigma attached to it like ecstasy did. So I was like, "Sure, I'll try a new thing." I love new experiences. And that was great. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't open my eyes to MDMA at all. I still had this negative connotation. 

Gillespie: Is it because MDMA is engineered? MDMA is a pharmaceutical of some sort. It's a pill. It's not a naturally occurring thing. 

Nuwer: I think for a lot of people that is absolutely the case. For me, I had a personal negative connotation. In my freshman year of college, a friend's brother committed suicide. And this is in my small town in Mississippi, and everyone blamed his use of ecstasy. They specifically said, "Chris, he was taking all this ecstasy. It made him so depressed, and he killed himself." So instead of looking at the underlying drivers of what led him to make that decision, everyone just pointed out the drug. My D.A.R.E. kid self said, "It must be this awful ecstasy thing. I'm never going to touch that." 

Gillespie: Let's talk about the rediscovery of MDMA in the late '60s, early '70s. Lay out the history of MDMA. And for the people out there—you might know it as molly or ecstasy. But what is MDMA, and where did it come from? 

Nuwer: That's a great disclaimer for everyone out there. Molly and ecstasy are the same thing. And they refer to what is supposed to be MDMA. Whether your street–bought molly or ecstasy is MDMA is another question. But they refer to the same thing. It's just a branding tactic. So, the history part of the book, surprisingly, was one of my favorite parts to write. My mom's a historian, but I'm not a history person myself, and I just really got into it cause there were so many unexpected twists and turns. 

So, first of all, MDMA is a lot older than most people think. It was first patented, let's say, on Christmas Eve 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck—a respected group. And they weren't looking for something to change people's brains. They were looking for a blood clotting agent, and MDMA was just a chemical intermediary on the steps they needed to get there.

Whether or not anyone at Merck actually tried it, we don't know. They've been really cagey about letting people into their archives. It seems like maybe they did. There are little hints here and there of chemists being like, "Hey, this is pretty interesting. Let's take a closer look." Fast forward to the 1950s. MDMA pops up in the U.S. for the first time. This is during the U.S. government's search for a chemical truth serum. So, let's figure out how we can control the minds of our enemies by conducting experiments on U.S. citizens to see how this goes. 

Gillespie: So this is part of MKUltra, and it's the epiphenomenon of that?

Nuwer: It wasn't MKUltra itself, but yeah, it was the army's version of the CIA trials. Again, we don't have the sort of smoking gun evidence that MDMA was ever given to anyone under this experiment. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. People who have had more time than I have to pursue the Freedom of Information Act process have gotten really close to revealing that, indeed, the U.S. Army did do this. 

A student named Nicholas Dunham—I think he's gotten his Ph.D. now, so, Dr. Nicholas Dunham—tracked down a document that pointed to Tulane University in New Orleans as having contracted with the army, and MDMA was on their list of drugs. But when Nick asked for the specific document from the U.S. government that would show whether or not it was actually given to anyone, they said, "Oh, we lost it".

So MDMA pops up again in police records of seizures in around 1970–1971, which probably just points to the fact that the Controlled Substances Act had just come out and had criminalized MDA—which is a closely related molecule—and entrepreneurial chemists were probably just looking for a way to get around the law by sticking an extra methyl group. Poof:  MDMA. So, the police even thought that they were seizing MDA. But we don't know anything about those chemists. We don't know who their customers were. We don't know who was using it for what. What we do know is that MDMA comes up again in 1975 when a Ph.D. student at Berkeley named Carl Resnikoff got with his mentor there, a guy named Alexander Shulgin. Everyone calls him Sasha, a famous psychedelic chemist. And they were working on a summer project together. 

Gillespie: And Shulgin is kind of the Thomas Edison of psychedelics. 

Nuwer: That's the correct way of putting it. Incredible chemist. Invented, like, 20 molecules. He would test them on himself and his wife if they were interesting and share them with friends. Young Carl was really enamored with Shulgin and his work, because Carl had tried LSD when he was in eighth grade. He was all about it. And Shulgin said, "OK, you need to do a summer project. What do you want to do?" And Carl was a big fan of MDA—as we were talking about earlier—and thought, "OK, methamphetamine is more euphoric than plain amphetamine. The difference is this methyl group. Why don't I just stick the same methyl group onto MDA and see what happens?" It's pretty logical and Shulgin's like, "That's a great idea. Let's do it." So they hole up in the summer of 1975 at U.C. Berkeley and synthesized MDMA together, and Shulgin took most of it home. But he gave Carl a little baggie, measured out just perfectly. I think it was like 125 mg. Two doses. And Carl and his girlfriend Judith wound up taking it on a beautiful September day on a boat ride across the San Francisco Bay to Sausalito. 

Gillespie: Sometimes MDMA is that drug you do by yourself or with a loved one or somebody you want to connect with. And when I say intimate, not necessarily sexual, but like a deep bond. And then, it becomes the ultimate rave. Well, actually, club drug first. And then rave drug. How does it start shifting out from that? 

Nuwer: Well, back up just a step before that. So Shulgin did try MDMA after Carl reported back with very positive experiences in '76, and he realized this molecule's potential for therapy. He introduced it to a therapist friend of his who became sort of this—I guess people say the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA in the therapeutic community. So, it quietly started spreading among first Bay Area therapists and then broader around the U.S. and even internationally. But people were keeping really quiet about it, because a lot of these therapists had either worked with LSD in the preceding decades or knew exactly what had happened with LSD being criminalized. So, they knew that if word got out about this new psychoactive drug, it would absolutely be criminalized, just like LSD. And they didn't want that to happen because they were seeing such powerful results. 

Gillespie: How did they use it in a therapeutic context? 

Nuwer: There are some early studies from [George Greer and his wife Requa Tolbert] out of New Mexico. And at first, it's kind of funny, they were following the LSD model, but they were kind of just experimenting themselves with what worked and what didn't work. And, in those original trials, they would actually take MDMA with their clients, but they realized, "OK, we need to not be high on MDMA because we need to focus on you and not make this about us." So that stopped. But they would—kind of like the trials today—bring people to their house, give them a low or whatever dose they thought would be appropriate, and just let them work through whatever issue they were trying to work through. 

Gillespie The idea is that it opens people up. It allows them to be in touch with their feelings and feel connected.

Nuwer: Exactly. Shulgin used the word "window." So it opens this window on yourself where you can find answers to questions you're asking your own self or partners, without fear, without anxiety, without the typical neuroses or clutter of our brain that gets in the way. 

So yeah, people used it for all kinds of things, from couples counseling to just "I'm having this trouble at work. I want to work through that" to "I want to know myself deeper" to more serious things like trauma. So that was all going on through the '70s. But, as you said earlier, MDMA did make this jump from the therapist's couch to the dance floor. And, the Greers said to me at one point of the interview that it was inevitable that this was going to happen. It's a drug that makes you feel good. People want to take drugs that make you feel good. And there was a lot of tension between the recreational and the therapeutic community, just as there was with LSD years before. 

Gillespie: We should point out that LSD, particularly during the '50s and early '60s to some degree, was being used widely by therapists, just to help treat things like alcoholism. Yesterday—while we're taping this—was Cary Grant's birthday. And Cary Grant is probably the best-known kind of celebrity who took LSD and publicly extolled its virtues, saying it made him feel alive again, etc. So MDMA is kind of an echo of that. 

Nuwer: Exactly. It was really the LSD therapists that paved the way for MDMA to then just slot right into this empty pool that had been left by LSD being criminalized. And the thing is, at this time, MDMA is completely legal. The government isn't aware of it. So the therapeutic community, many of them wanted to keep it a secret, only a thing that friends tell friends. You can't, like, just spread it around a club. But there's also a different contingent of people who wanted to just release it on the world and also make a nice profit in doing so. 

So the sort of figurehead of the recreational scene at this time was a guy named Michael Clegg. He ran a group that came to be known as the Texas Group because a lot of them were operating out of Dallas. And Michael Clegg just wanted to churn out as much MDMA as possible, as quickly as possible, making a lot of money. But he wasn't the typical drug lord that you think of, like, "I'm just going to get everyone hooked and make money." He had these ideas of himself as enlightened, wanting to serve a bigger purpose in the world and wanting to help people be saved, whatever that means to them. So that was Michael Clegg. He really spread MDMA across Texas, California, and the United States. And that is what attracted the attention of the U.S. government. 

Gillespie: Right. So then what happened? 

Nuwer: Well, the [Drug Enforcement Administration] moved to schedule MDMA. In the summer of '85—which is when I was born, coincidentally—MDMA was put on the emergency Schedule I list, and that meant that it was illegal. Well, the DEA, what they did not see coming—they thought this would just be a normal scheduling—is that there were all these therapists, professors at Harvard, who believed in MDMA and thought it was worthy of study and worthy of use. So this group of therapists, including Sasha Shulgin, put together a case to bring the DEA to court and say, "Hey, this is a drug with medical purpose, so it can't be Schedule I because Schedule I is defined as no medical purpose. It should be Schedule III. Allow us to work with it, allow us to study it, control it, but, you know, come on." And the really fascinating thing is they actually won that trial. The administrative law judge sided with them and said, "Yeah, you guys have shown that MDMA does indeed have value as a medicinal tool. It's being used by therapists. It should be Schedule III." But because of whatever bureaucracy—I don't understand the federal system—MDMA was put on Schedule I because that judge's determination was only a suggestion. So the DEA just did what they wanted to do the whole time. 

Gillespie: I am old enough to have taken MDMA before it was illegal and after. I have a strong memory of it being—in the early '80s, before it was illegal—more of a reflective, introspective drug. 

Post-prohibition, the biggest thing that was a problem about it was that it made you dangerously social, where you would go out and dance all night and kill yourself. Like you couldn't stop, you were part of a hive mind, which is just kind of bizarre. 

So, talk about MAPS—the nonprofit that's been working since the '80s to bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. How did they get involved and what role did they play in this world where MDMA has been banned? 

Nuwer: So I'll say that we would not be where we are today in terms of MDMA-assisted therapy being on the cusp of potential federal approval if it were not for MAPS—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS was founded in 1986 by a guy named Rick Doblin. Rick was this kid who grew up outside Chicago, raised on stories around the family dinner table of the Holocaust. So Rick was this kid who was afraid that at any moment, all the people around him could just break out in like a maniacal genocide mode. And Rick really made it his mission in life—he's a strange kid, apparently—to find a solution for that. Just a strange guy, a very interesting and unique character. Rick wound up at New College in Florida, where he was introduced to drugs, and he thought that doing mind-melting doses of LSD was the way to enlightenment. He did not find the answers that route. But through those connections, he found his way to MDMA. And at first he thought it was like, "How profound could this drug be if you can still talk on it?" But he quickly realized for himself the utility of just being able to communicate with people in the open way we were talking about earlier, and he thought, "Huh, maybe this drug is the answer for getting people to set aside their differences and seeing that we're all just human. We all want love. We all want the same thing. We have more in common than we have different." Rick got involved in that DEA trial. He was one of the three younger people that was sort of spearheading the organizational effort: getting the money, getting a lawyer, and getting everyone to write letters. 

After the trial, everyone gave up. Most people stopped using MDMA in their practice because they didn't want to lose their license. Rick was the one person who did not give up, and everybody thought, "You're an idiot. You're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. It's just a matter of time until you too see the writing on the wall. This is not coming back." But Rick just is very hardheaded, I guess, like the most tenacious person ever. And there was something that Rick actually learned at the trial. He was talking with one of the DEA agents who was representing the government and this guy, Frank Sapienza, told Rick, "Look, kid, there might be something to this MDMA thing, but you are never going to get anywhere with it unless you go through the federal route. You need to get approval. You need to do FDA trials, clinical trials, that's the way you have got to do it." And Rick really took that to heart. So he founded MAPS to see that through. And, you know, it's taken like 38-plus years

Gillespie: Where are they now for FDA approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy?

Nuwer: So, clinical trials have to have three phases. Phase one is just to show like, OK, this isn't going to kill like a bunch of rats and people. Phase two is more about efficacy and safety. And then phase three is the more rigorous, like, OK, does this work and is it safe? They have just completed the end of the phase three section. And again, this has taken literally 20-plus years. Rick was doing this all on fundraising, and it costs millions literally to do clinical trials. And also just jumping through all the paperwork and permission hoops of the government. 

So the last phase three trial is done, and MAPS' Public Benefit Corporation, which has now become a pharmaceutical company, just submitted an application to the FDA at the end of December asking for a new drug approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So the FDA has a certain amount of time to respond. But long story short, hopefully there'll be some sort of answer by mid-2024. That's the year we are in now. 

Gillespie: Parallel to MAPS trying to get MDMA in certain circumstances approved—what happened in the '80s and '90s and the aughts with MDMA? Timothy Leary once famously talked about how LSD escaped the CIA labs and went into the mainstream. MDMA certainly escaped any kind of lockdown on it. What was going on there?

Nuwer: A lot was going on. So in the late '80s, MDMA made its way to the U.K., which basically created raves because people wanted to keep partying after clubs closed, and hence raves. And raves in turn led to the multibillion-dollar electronic dance music industry that we have today. MDMA through that rave pathway became a global phenomenon. So like tons of people doing MDMA, mostly youngsters [at] warehouses, clubs, potentially dangerous environments. And we started to see our first MDMA deaths. Nothing like the number of alcohol deaths we see or [deaths we see from] other drugs, but a few deaths that would be overly covered in the news.

Gillespie: And this is from people taking too much and having cardiac events or dehydrating and kind of dancing themselves to death. 

Nuwer: I mean, hyperthermia was the main one. Overheating. So MDMA became this hysterical news story. "Ecstasy is killing our children." It was seen as this threat to sort of puritanical American and likewise British values. So there were tons of just really severe laws that came down banning it.

Gillespie: Joe Biden was involved in the Rave Act.

Nuwer: Oh, yeah. Trying to criminalize pacifiers and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia, for example. But what that did is it really tarnished MDMA's reputation. Almost in the same way as LSD's reputation was tarnished by being attached to the counterculture. It was like a political strategy to try to take this drug down. And, at the same time, the U.S. government especially was pumping money into studies to prove that MDMA was neurotoxic, that it impacted the brain in a detrimental way. Millions of dollars of federal funding went into labs literally trying to prove this. And in the end, they didn't approve it because MDMA really isn't neurotoxic. It, of course, can be dangerous if you take too much. But, the lasting effect of that, from the late '80s and through the '90s and even early aughts, was that MDMA's reputation was really tainted. Any public understanding or awareness of its therapeutic value was completely paved over by this negative connotation. And it's that kind of connotation that I grew up with in the '80s. 

Gillespie: It's kind of flipped, right? Because there was that story, but then people were like, you know what? I feel really good on this or I've had good experiences. When did things seem to start tipping away?

Nuwer: Yeah, I absolutely agree. Well, I can tell you my personal experience of when I flipped. So I wrote this book proposal during the pandemic, like I told you, and my agent sent it out to a bunch of editors, and we got all no's. People were saying Michael Pollan already wrote this book, because they just don't understand the difference between a mushroom and MDMA or whatever. Other people were saying this book looks too positive about ecstasy. Why isn't this about the negative effects of ecstasy? And others were saying there's just not enough there to say anything about ecstasy; this isn't a book project. Then the first MAPS phase three study came out. I wrote about it for The New York Times. Suddenly, the conversation just shifted in this really significant way. I started getting interest in the book proposal. I really think that that trial kind of legitimized MDMA and put it out there in the broader public understanding in a way that wasn't present before.

Gillespie: What are the benefits of the MAPS approach, of going through FDA approval and showing that this is a medicine?

Nuwer: I have heard people who are more part of the underground scene, and they're afraid that, oh, this is going to make MDMA less cool if it's suddenly this medicine or, oh, we're sterilizing the industry. I'm just remembering a comment from Ben Sessa, who is a psychiatrist in the U.K. and also works with MDMA and other drugs like this. He's like, "You know, I can put on my white coat and then I can go to a rave, you know, whatever. It doesn't make MDMA less cool, but this is what we have to do to legitimize it, to eventually move toward hopefully legality, not just for therapeutic uses but also for recreational uses or whatever people want to do." And that's going to make these things safer in the end, because then we're going to know where we're getting our drugs. We're going to know how to take them. We're going to have education about how to use them properly. 

Gillespie: This is almost always the case with what the government calls illicit drugs—not even illegal, they're immoral—not knowing what's in them, which is hard to do in black markets because dealers don't spend a lot of time putting labels on stuff.  What's the role of the rave culture in kind of popularizing ecstasy?

Nuwer: I think hearing your friends or people you trust say, "Hey, I tried this thing and not only was it the most fun night I've ever had, it also was a profoundly beautiful experience." That's actually how I found my way to this drug. My now husband was a '90s raver kid in Colorado going out to warehouses. And when I met him, I still had these negative connotations about ecstasy. And then hearing his stories—and he was by no means trying to push me into this, he was done with MDMA—I was finally just like, I want to try this too. It sounds really fun. And I think that we really look over or we don't give the rave scene its due credit. Millions and millions of people around the world have tried MDMA. Millions of them have had profound, beautiful, wonderful experiences on it. Yet there's very little rigorous attention paid to them by the scientific community. There's just no funding or interest to study them. Because the government is providing them most of the funding. And people aren't dying en masse like they are with meth or some other drug. So I think there's just so many interesting questions to be mined there and stories to be heard. 

Gillespie: And then you have kind of underground movements that come above ground. Burning Man is not certainly exclusively about MDMA, but that's part of the culture and the rave element of that or the Electric Daisy Carnival.

Nuwer: Definitely. I mean, I think it really serves the purpose of these gatherings in the past that we could rely on from religion or mystical gatherings or whatever that we're really missing today. And people are seeking that out. I know that's why I like to go to raves. In terms of what it's actually doing, I mean, massive dumps of serotonin. It not only blocks your receptors in your brain from taking up serotonin, which is the sort of jack-of-all-trades neurotransmitter, it does all kinds of things. But, your neurons actually dump out their stores of serotonin. Something like 80 percent of your serotonin floods your brain on a night of MDMA, or a day. Oxytocin gets triggered as well. So there's just this whole chemical formula that's going on in your brain to produce that feeling. 

Gillespie: How do you think MDMA specifically fits into the larger kind of resurgence of psychedelics?

Nuwer: Well, I do think that MDMA is paving the way through this potential FDA approval. I think all things look good for MDMA to be the first psychedelic over that finish line. So that is absolutely major. You know, returning to that stigma and that taint we talked about in the '90s and 2000s, I think that was a really big obstacle to overcome, in a way that mushrooms didn't have to overcome because they just didn't have that same negative connotation that MDMA or LSD had. I mean, you never hear anything about LSD. Hardly at all. MDMA I hear less about than I hear mushrooms. I was reading U.C. Berkeley's newsletter today, The Microdose. It's like, oh, Indiana's moving to invest dollars in psilocybin research on PTSD and this and that. But the states aren't as eager to do MDMA—I think it is the connotations, the stigma from earlier decades. And also referring back to that synthetic issue that you mentioned, for some reason people are more comfortable with a natural substance than one that was made.

Gillespie: Legalizing nature, there are a lot of movements to just save plant-based entheogens or certain types of psychedelics. Maybe it's that they're harder to regulate because they could grow anywhere. I think it's an artificial distinction between nature and artifice.

Nuwer: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. But, at the same time, I think MDMA is just such a useful and powerful tool for therapy just because it's such an easier medicine to work with. 

Gillespie: Why does there seem to be so much interest in this? I mean, it's definitely changing. The laws seem to be changing, and there's a cultural moment where a lot of serious people are talking about this. 

Nuwer: I think it's a complex mix. So I think people are just fed up with the war on drugs. They're beginning to realize just how idiotic it was, that there's no way to win this war, just what a waste of money and lives and environment, the list goes on. 

I think people also have come to realize that the quick chemical fix that we were hoping would come through psychiatric drugs isn't working. There are more and more people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, trauma. So we're looking for other answers. And then a little bit more cynically, I think people like the idea of this magic wand cure-all. And they're just like, "Psychedelics are going to rid me of all my problems."

Gillespie: They're going to do what Prozac failed to do.

Nuwer: Exactly. And people want to believe in these magic cures. And it's not going to be that for most people. 

Gillespie: A parallel with MAPS, they're a bit behind, but Compass Pathways, a pharmaceutical company, is pushing psilocybin trials for depression and anxiety with the FDA. Is that a good sign or a bad sign that the big pharmaceutical companies are kind of starting to circle around this?

Nuwer: I think, unfortunately, it was just inevitable. It's great that they're pushing trials through to get these medications to people. The monetization of it isn't great, but this is the system we live in. And I don't think that psychedelics were ever going to be able to reform the system.

Rick Doblin was hoping that he could get MDMA over the finish line with charity alone. And I mean, incredibly, he raised $140 million in donations. And then he even says himself that he was sort of a victim of his own success because by helping bring the psychedelic renaissance about through MAPS, suddenly we have these companies like Compass popping up that are for-profit. And then donors are like, why would I give you free money that I'm not going to see a return on when I can make an investment over here? So MAPS isn't going to make it over the finish line with MDMA as a philanthropy-funded product. They just spun out a pharmaceutical arm that is for-profit. They have a board. They have investors. They tried really hard not to. But this is just the system that we live in.

Gillespie: Do you see any big obstacles in the next couple of years to the medicalization or legalization of these substances?

Nuwer: I'm sure there's going to be some kind of bureaucratic whatever. I mean, there's a lot of positive signs from the federal government that they're into this. Biden released a memo about it. There's language in a new bill about veterans for investigating this. But the government is very, very conservative. So I can see there being all kinds of hitches that delay this, like, years.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser
• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki

The post Rachel Nuwer: MDMA Is On the Cusp of Legalization appeared first on Reason.com.

As Ronald Reagan's first budget director, former Michigan congressman David Stockman led the charge to cut the size, scope, and spending of the federal government in the early 1980s. He made enemies among Democrats by pushing hard for cuts to welfare programs—and he ultimately made enemies among his fellow Republicans by pushing equally hard to slash defense spending. His memoir of the era, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, is a legendary account of how libertarian principles got sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

Stockman's new book is Trump's War on Capitalism, and it takes a blowtorch to the former president's time in office. "When it comes to what the GOP's core mission should be…standing up for the free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, personal liberty, and small government at home and non-intervention abroad," he writes, "Donald Trump has overwhelmingly come down on the wrong side of the issues."

At a Reason Speakeasy event in New York City, I talked with Stockman about his political journey from being a member of Students for a Democratic Society who protested the Vietnam War to being one of Reagan's main advisers to his denunciation of Donald Trump and his hope that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy helps throw the 2024 election into the House of Representatives.

Stockman also explains how Trump led the disastrous charge on COVID-19 lockdowns, got rolled by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, and why his nativist views on immigration are inimical both to freedom and economic growth.

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• The Reason Speakeasy.  The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. Go here for an online archive and go here to sign up for information about upcoming events.

The post David Stockman: Trump's War on Capitalism and Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

While some of us went a little nuts during the COVID-19 lockdowns, others—including many of our country's leaders and people in the media—went absolutely batshit crazy, often with disastrous results. 

Exactly why that happened is the subject of author Jon Ronson's latest season of Things Fell Apart, a podcast that explores the deep origins of today's culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades ago.

I talked with Ronson about why he believes the creation of a fake medical condition called "excited delirium" in 1988 ultimately led to the death of George Floyd in 2020, how law enforcement fixations on white supremacy warped the investigation into a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and how the director of the massively influential Plandemic documentaries was actually rewriting the script of Star Wars.

Ronson is best known as the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, an account of a U.S. Army unit that tried to perfect paranormal powers like walking through walls, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which helped define cancel culture just as it was becoming widespread via social media.

We also talk about Things Fell Apart, how he survived COVID, and how critical thinking and media literacy are more important than ever in a world in which we can all produce and consume our versions of the truth.

Today's sponsor:

• Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.

The post Jon Ronson: Why We Went So Crazy During COVID Lockdowns appeared first on Reason.com.

"If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry," wrote James Kirchick recently in The New York Times, "the solution is not to expand the university's power to punish expression. It's to abolish speech codes entirely."

Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage at the deeply nuanced and deeply hypocritical defense of speech offered by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at a congressional hearing about antisemitic and anti-Zionist campus reactions to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.

Although Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, is an ardent defender of Israel, he is also a self-described free-speech absolutist who is disgusted by calls to restrict expression, whether on or off-campus. He says that instead of clamping down on speech, we should be arguing more openly and publicly, even when it's deeply uncomfortable, as it was when he raised novelist Alice Walker's antisemitic views during a literary conference at which they were both speaking.

We talk about how identity politics has overwhelmed the left's traditional defense of free speech, why so many younger journalists seem lukewarm at best to the First Amendment, and how to muster the courage to speak up for first principles in uncomfortable and hostile situations.

Previous appearances on The Reason Interview:

How Homophobia Warped the Cold War, June 1, 2022

The Very Idea of Europe Is Finished, April 23, 2017

The post James Kirchick: 'Abolish Speech Codes Entirely' appeared first on Reason.com.

Did you know that by 2050, a quarter of the planet's population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all.

Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that supports think tanks and activist groups in the developing world. A serial entrepreneur, she's currently the CEO (and founder) of SkinIsSkin, which sells a series of skin and lip products sourced in Africa.

Wade is also the author of the new memoir and manifesto, The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied To about African Poverty, and What That Means for Human Flourishing. She claims the solution to Africa's problems lies with what her mentor, the late economist George Ayittey, called "the cheetah generation," young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, "conscious capitalism," charter cities, and how cryptocurrencies are helping people like her build the Africa—and the world—they want.

The post Magatte Wade: The Real Reasons Why Africa Is Poor and Why It Matters appeared first on Reason.com.

This week's episode of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie is hosted by Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward. She sat down with former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

During his two terms as governor, Ducey managed to pass a flat income tax with a rate of 2.5 percent, reform public sector pensions, universalize important school choice measures, reform occupational licensing rules, turn a budget deficit into a surplus, and substantially shrink the size of the government work force. He also built a makeshift border wall out of shipping crates, pushed back on marijuana legalization, and was accused of doing both too much and too little by his constituents during the COVID pandemic. Today, he runs Citizens for Free Enterprise.

In December, Ducey received the Reason Foundation's Savas Award for Privatization, which is given annually to someone who is advancing innovative ways to improve the provision and quality of public services by engaging the private sector. In this week's episode, he talks to Mangu-Ward about his worries for the future of the Republican Party, his commitment to fusionism, and why Arizona politicians are so weird.

Watch the full video here.

The post Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey Loves Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman appeared first on Reason.com.

William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries To Solve Big Problems. He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, but 30 years ago, he was the director of government reform for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason and this podcast. In fact, I interviewed with him when I applied for my first job here. 

Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper scope and function of government. I talked with him about Bridgebuilders, what he's learned over the past three decades about making government more effective and less intrusive, and why it's long past time to move beyond what he and his co-author call "the vending machine model" of government.

The post William D. Eggers: Making Government More Effective and Less Intrusive appeared first on Reason.com.

Was Milton Friedman the most important libertarian of them all? That's part of the conversation I had with today's guest, Stanford historian Jennifer Burns, who has written a masterful and definitive new biography of the Nobel Prize–winning economist. Without reservation, I recommend you check out her new book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. 

Friedman was arguably not just the most influential free market economist of the 20th century but the central figure in building the broad political and intellectual coalition that successfully challenged Keynesian economics and the top-down rule of experts in so many aspects of our lives. I talked with Burns about Friedman's conceptual and methodological breakthroughs in economics; his way-ahead-of-his-time collaboration with female economists such as Anna Schwartz and his wife Rose; his role in popularizing free market economics through his columns in Newsweek and the TV series Free To Choose; his controversial engagements with politicians such as Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet; and his role in ending the military draft and championing school choice. We also talked about Burns' previous book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, and its connections to her new work.

This episode was taped at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of this podcast. Go here to get information about Speakeasys and all our upcoming events.

The post Jennifer Burns: Why Milton Friedman Matters More Than Ever appeared first on Reason.com.

Quitting is massively underrated, says Annie Duke, an author, psychologist, and former professional poker player who holds a bracelet from the 2004 World Series of Poker.

Her latest book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away. Using examples ranging from Muhammad Ali's refusal to retire from boxing earlier in his career to the over-budget, much-delayed California high-speed rail project to catastrophic American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, she makes the case that blind commitment to grit and stick-to-it-iveness routinely leads us down the wrong path is our careers, politics, and personal lives.

She talks about misleading mental tics like the sunk-cost fallacy, the cult of identity, and the endowment effect, and how to understand and reverse them in our personal lives, our work, and our politics. She earned her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, getting her degree in 2023 after taking a 30-year break from academia. We talk about how her experience of knowing when to quit in poker—and higher education—informed her high regard for knowing when to head for the exits.

To see a Reason interview about Duke's previous book Thinking in Bets, go here.

Today's sponsor:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.

The post Annie Duke: Quitting Is Totally Underrated appeared first on Reason.com.

Just Asking Questions is a new Reason podcast hosted by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe. Each week they bring you long-form conversations diving deep into a single topic for an hour or more, with data, media clips, and guests who can teach, challenge, and have fun. To hear future episodes, subscribe to Just Asking Questions and watch video premieres on Reason's YouTube channel every Thursday.

In this inaugural episode of Just Asking Questions, podcaster Dave Smith joins the show to tackle a fundamental question: "What is a libertarian?"

Smith discusses what has recently transpired in the Libertarian Party; his past and present disagreements with Reason-style libertarians; whether politicians are incompetent, evil, or both; and his greatest libertarian "white pill" for the future.

The post A New <I>Reason</I> Podcast Is <I>Just Asking Questions</I> appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past decade, no legal scholar has pushed arguments for free speech as far or as influentially as today's guest: Jeff Kosseff, a former journalist who now teaches cybersecurity law at the U.S. Naval Academy. In previous books, he defended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet and stood up for anonymous speech in The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech.

His new book is his boldest yet. It's called Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation and I liked it so much that I blurbed it, calling it "a smart, wry, deeply researched and utterly convincing defense of legal protections for 'misinformation' in an age when we are less likely to agree on basic facts than ever before."

We talk about why "misinformation"—however defined—should be legally protected, how the boundaries between private companies and government are getting blurrier and blurrier, and why so many journalists are calling for limits on the First Amendment.

Today's sponsors:

• DonorsTrust. DonorsTrust is the oldest and largest donor-advised fund made for people who live out with their charitable giving the idea of free minds and free markets. If you don't know about donor-advised funds, you should, especially here at the end of the year. A fund gives you a simple, tax-advantaged way to support the charitable causes you care about. There are lots of providers of donor-advised funds, but DonorsTrust is the one that understands you the best. DonorsTrust is a great friend of Reason and all other nonprofit groups like it. Go find out yourself at donorstrust.org/nick. Watch a short video on how it works and request information to get started.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Go here to listen to past Speakeasy events and go here to learn about upcoming ones, including one on Tuesday, December 12 with Stanford historian Jennifer Burns, whose new book is The Last Conservative, a highly praised biography of Milton Friedman.

The post Jeff Kosseff: Why False Speech Deserves First Amendment Protections appeared first on Reason.com.

This is a bonus episode, hosted by Reason Features Editor Peter Suderman. A few weeks back, at our Washington, D.C. HQ, he moderated a discussion with former Reason Editor in Chief Virginia Postrel (Reason archive here)and American Enterprise Institute Fellow James Pethokoukis about the future—why it matters, why it's misunderstood, and how we might get a better one.

Both have written extensively on the topic. Postrel is the author of many books, including The Future and Its Enemies. Pethokoukis is the author of the just-released The Conservative Futurist—How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. 

It's a great conversation about economics, progress, science fiction—and kitchen gadgets.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason webathon. Once a year, we ask our readers, viewers, and listeners to make tax-deductible donations to support our principled libertarian journalism. Go here to see giving levels and make a contribution.

The post Virginia Postrel & Jim Pethokoukis: How To Get a Great Future appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Sandra Newman, my favorite novelist currently at work in America—I highly recommend her recent works The Men and The Heavens. Her new book is titled Julia and it's a retelling of George Orwell's 1984 from the point of view of Winston Smith's lover who, as you probably recall, is ironically a member of the Anti-Sex League.

I don't even know how to do this novel justice—it's a stylistic and conceptual tour de force that updates and expands Orwell's universe in deeply profound, disturbing, and highly contemporary ways. We talk about the book's origins—the Orwell estate asked Newman to write it—and why 1984 continues to resonate with readers. We discuss the role of literature in a world where television and movies command greater audience attention and past controversies involving Newman's writing.

It's a wide-ranging conversation and one of my very favorite episodes of this podcast.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason webathon. Once a year, we ask our readers, viewers, and listeners to make tax-deductible donations to support our principled libertarian journalism. Go here to see giving levels and make a contribution.

The post Sandra Newman: Reimagining <i>1984</i> from Julia's Perspective appeared first on Reason.com.

Born and raised in Texas, Jeb Bush moved to Florida in 1980. The son and brother of presidents, he was governor of the Sunshine State from 1999 to 2007, where he quickly became known as a champion of school choice and fiscal responsibility. In 2016, he made an unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination and he now resides in Miami-Dade County—happily retired from political life. 

A self-proclaimed "old-school conservative with libertarian blood running through [his] veins," I talked to Bush a few weeks ago for our new special issue of Reason devoted to all things Florida (subscribe now and read the full issue online!). 

He told me that more people are moving to Florida than any other state in the country because "we don't try to micromanage people's lives" and that the government "works pretty good," especially when it comes to education, regulation, and infrastructure. We discussed what he really thinks of Gov. Ron DeSantis, former President Donald Trump, current President Joe Biden, and whether the "Florida Man" meme captures something essential about the state's residents. "It's probably not fair, but who cares?" he says. "It's funny. We should embrace it. We're striving to have a disproportionate number of candidates for the Darwin Award each year. We should be very proud of it."

And we talked about what really makes America great. "I would say the shared identity should be that it doesn't matter where you start in life," Bush told me. "It doesn't matter where you were born. What matters is that you have a chance to rise up, that your hard work will be rewarded, and that you will be part of the exceptionalism of our country where people…have a chance to succeed. That's being challenged like never before."

Today's sponsor:

• Join us on November 27 in New York City for a viewing (and afterparty) of the new Reason documentary, Bitcoin, Bathhouses, and the Future of Energy, and a panel discussion on cryptocurrency, the environment, and human rights featuring Nick Gillespie, Zach Weissmueller, Alex Gladstein, and others. Tickets and details here.  

The post Jeb Bush: What He Thinks of Trump, Biden, DeSantis, and 'Florida Man' appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

"Senator Paul, you do not know what you what you are talking about." Those were the words that Anthony Fauci spoke in July 2021 to Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) following a series of questions from Paul about the possibility that Fauci's agency had funded research in Wuhan, China, that led directly to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paul's new book, Deception: The Great COVID Cover-Up, aims to show that, in fact, he very much did know what he was talking about when it came to U.S. funding of risky gain-of-function research that involves making viruses more infectious and deadly to humans. 

Internal emails later obtained by Congress showed that in February 2020, Fauci was concerned about gain-of-function research in Wuhan, and National Institutes of Health Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak admitted in an October 2021 letter to the House of Representatives that the agency had funded work there that led to a virus becoming more deadly in mice with humanized lungs. 

I spoke with Paul about his book and his investigations into the origins of COVID-19. I  asked him to reflect on his famous exchange with Fauci and what he thinks real accountability would look like. We also talked about his proposals to end all government funding of gain-of-function research and to prohibit government officials from meeting with social media companies for the purpose of censoring legal speech.

The post Rand Paul: Pursuing Accountability on Lab Leak 'Deception' appeared first on Reason.com.

"I'm under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions," argues Coleman Hughes during a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City.

Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. His new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America is about returning to the ideals of the American Civil Rights movement because our departure from the "colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment." When his recent TED talk was seen as "hurtful" by some TED conference attendees, for example, he discovered that TED actually suppressed his presentation. Hughes describes how that situation left him concerned, "that TED, like many organizations, is caught between a faction that believes in free speech and viewpoint diversity and a faction that believes if you hurt my feelings with even center left, center right or, God forbid, right-wing views, you need to be censored."

The post Coleman Hughes: The End of Race Politics? appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

When Russ Roberts, an economist and host of the podcast EconTalk, received a job offer to become president of Jerusalem's Shalem University, it seemed like "a no-brainer," he wrote in his 2022 book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Giving up his ability to work from his home in America on whatever interested him intellectually as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution? "Only a fool would take the job," he wrote. But that was only if one considered the opportunity using a purely utilitarian pro/con checklist. For Roberts, this was a "wild problem," one that required him to consider "who I am and who I want to be." And with that in mind, he said, "it was a no-brainer in the other direction." He took the job and moved to Israel in 2021.

Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller spoke with Roberts about Hamas' October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and their aftermath. They discussed how the attacks have transformed Israeli culture and politics, what it's like to live within a 90-second missile trip from Gaza, how a free society should respond to openly anti-Jewish rallies and actions such as tearing down hostage posters, and what the relationship between the United States and Israel has been and should be.

The post Russ Roberts: Life in Israel Since October 7 appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Colleen Eren, a sociologist at William Paterson University in my favorite state in the country, New Jersey. She's also the author of the fantastic new book Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement To End Mass Incarceration.

Signed into law by Donald Trump in 2018, the FIRST STEP Act is one of the few major reforms in the past 50 years aimed at reducing federal prison time and post-incarceration stigma and recidivism. The legislation was championed by the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose father had served time for tax evasion and witness tampering, and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Alyssa Milano. It also drew major support from philanthropic foundations all over the political and ideological spectrum. It's a great case study of how political change actually gets done. 

Eren's book is a masterful account of how grassroots activism on a cause that very few people really cared about blossomed into a win for not just better treatment of people convicted of certain crimes but a better use of tax dollars. She blends original interviews with major players in the reform movement with great storytelling and a sociological framework that illuminates the complexities of all reform efforts.

This is a wide-ranging discussion that also covers my time back in the 1980s when I ghostwrote an advice column for Alyssa Milano, who really played a major role in helping the FIRST STEP Act become law, at the late and unlamented magazine Teen Machine. We talk about what it's like being a libertarian-leaning academic—which Eren is—in today's universities and the value of the oft-maligned discipline of sociology as a framework for understanding who we are as a society. And, of course, we talk about what, if anything, might come next in criminal justice reform. As its name implies, the FIRST STEP Act was supposed to be the start of something, not its final triumph.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.
• The Best of Reason Magazine. Every Tuesday, listen to a curated selection of some of the best writing from Reason, read aloud to you by a robot voice modeled on Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.

The post Colleen Eren: Why Donald Trump Signed the FIRST STEP Act appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

"At its core, money is a ledger," writes investment analyst Lyn Alden in her new book Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better. 

And if money is a ledger, she says, the most important question to consider is, "Who controls the ledger?"

Zach Weissmueller spoke with Alden about her book, which is a true tour de force that lays out the history of money from its inception to present, takes you deep into the dueling schools of thought around money's fundamental properties, offers a macro analysis of today's global monetary and fiscal situation, and charts a path forward for transitioning the world to better, more sound money in the future. If you care about any of this—and really, who doesn't care about money?—this one is a must-read.

The post Lyn Alden: Our Money Is Broken appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Swedish historian Johan Norberg, author of The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World, which caught the eye of Elon Musk. "This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right," Musk tweeted. 

Norberg wrote the book to combat a growing belief on the right and the left that libertarian values of individual autonomy, property rights, limited government, and free enterprise are failing to raise living standards and need to be ditched in favor of more centralized power and control over virtually all aspects of our lives. A senior fellow at the CATO Institute, Norberg shows that life is actually getting better for all of us—especially the world's poor—and that economic globalization, political liberalization, and cultural freedom are the main drivers of that improvement.  

We talk about how liberals and conservatives get the past wrong, why he's not worried about China's supposedly unstoppable economic growth, and why the cases for free trade, free expression, and more immigration need to be constantly updated and renewed.

Norberg's previous appearances:

Johan Norberg: How Sweden Defied Dire COVID Predictions

America Should be More Like Sweden. But Not for the Reasons You Think

Capitalism and Neoliberalism Have Made the World Better

Johan Norberg: 10 Reasons To Look Forward To the Future

Swedish Myths and Realities

Today's sponsor:

• The Best of Reason Magazine. Every Tuesday, listen to a curated selection of some of the best writing from Reason, read aloud to you by a robot voice modeled off Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.

The post Johan Norberg: Why We Need a <i>Capitalist Manifesto</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

Javier Milei, the self-described libertarian candidate for Argentina's presidency, surprised the world with a first-place finish in the primaries this August. But in the presidential election this past weekend, he finished second behind Argentina's current economy minister, Sergio Massa, a part of the Peronist political movement that's long governed Argentina. Neither candidate passed the threshold needed to become the next president, so they will have a head-to-head rematch on November 19.

Does Milei still have a chance against an entrenched political elite that began handing out money and free bus passes in the run-up to the election? If elected, how will Milei deliver on his promise to take a chainsaw to government, abolish the central bank, and dollarize the economy? And what can American libertarians learn from the movement Milei has built in Argentina? 

Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller discussed these questions and reacted to recent interview clips of Milei with Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina's Fundación Libertad, and podcast host. 

Mentioned in this podcast:

Argentina's 2023 presidential election results

"Argentina's (Unexpected) Libertarian Moment," by Marcos Falcone

"Argentina's presidential election delivers a surprise result," writes The Economist

Support for Milei by party affiliation, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit

"A man, a plan, a chainsaw: How a power tool took center stage in Argentina's presidential race," by Daniel Politi and David Biller

"Is Javier Milei's Movement in Argentina a Cult of Personality in the Name of Liberty?" by Antonella Marty and Jose Benegas

"What's in Javier Milei's head?" by Federico Rivas Molina

The post Marcos Falcone: Can a Libertarian Still Win in Argentina? appeared first on Reason.com.

"We've taught young people that any of their missteps or any of their heterodox opinions are grounds to tear them down. That's no way to grow up."

That was journalist Rikki Schlott speaking before a sold-out crowd on Monday night at a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Schlott, 23, teamed up with Greg Lukianoff to co-write The Canceling of the American Mind.

Lukianoff, 49, is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author with Jonathan Haidt of the bestselling The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Schlott is a fellow at FIRE, a New York Post columnist, and a cohost of the Lost Debate podcast. 

Cancel culture, they argue, constitutes a serious threat to free speech and open inquiry in academia and the workplace and is best understood as a battle for power, status, and dominance. I talked with them about the roots and extent of cancel culture, whether it's fading, and whether firing or not hiring someone who supports Hamas' killing of Israeli citizens is an act of cancel culture.

Live tapings of this podcast take place once a month in New York at the Reason Speakeasy. To find out when the next one is happening, go here. For past Speakeasy events, go here.

The post Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott: <i>The Canceling of the American Mind</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

"Despite clear interests on almost all sides against a regional war [in the Middle East], all sides are acting in a manner that makes such a war increasingly likely," writes Trita Parsi in an October 15 article calling for the Biden administration to push for "de-escalation" between Israel and Hamas. Parsi is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a D.C. think tank that promotes a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. He is the former head of the National Iranian American Council and the author of several books, including A Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S.

Parsi says that although the Biden administration is "well aware" of "escalation risks" that might lead to a broader regional war, talk of de-escalation remains off-limits. HuffPost reported late last week that it has obtained State Department memos instructing employees to avoid terms like "de-escalation/ceasefire," "end to violence/bloodshed," and "restoring calm" in press materials and statements.

Is de-escalation feasible after Hamas slaughtered Israeli civilians and continues to hold more than 200 hostages? How should Israel respond to the worst terrorist attack in its history? What can U.S. policymakers do to make the prospect of a bigger war less likely?

We discussed these questions and more with Parsi. We also revisited the topic of domestic reactions to the Hamas attack, namely the comments of a Cornell professor who claimed to be "exhilirated" by it.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

"Biden refuses to talk 'ceasefire' even though it could prevent a regional war," by Trita Parsi

"Stunning State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza 'De-Escalation' Talk," by Akbar Shahid Ahmed

"Source: Iran warns Israel through UN against ground offensive in Gaza," by Barak Ravid

"Iran says 'preemptive action' by resistance front expected in coming hours," by Reuters

"Talks fail to let aid reach Gaza; Israel evacuates Lebanon border," by Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Dan Williams and Yusri Mohamed

"Biden is expected to request $100 billion for Israel, Ukraine and other crises," by Karoun Demirjian

The post Trita Parsi: Is De-escalation Feasible in the Middle East? appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest is Shane Mauss, a comedian who tours the country discussing his psychedelic experiences in fantastic, immersive shows like DMT: A Love Story and A Better Trip. If you're in the New York City area, he'll be appearing at the Psychedelic Assembly in midtown October 27-31 as a part of a Halloween-themed show called Spookadelic.

I caught up with him at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, held in Denver this June, where he participated in a "roast" of the psychedelic scene. Go here for "The Psychedelic Renaissance Is Here," Reason's 30-minute documentary about that event and the larger psychedelic movement.

Mauss, who also hosts a science podcast called Here We Are, shared his thoughts about the mainstreaming of psychedelic drugs, the surprising pace of legalization efforts, and the role that Joe Rogan, Aaron Rodgers, and other public figures play in normalizing psychedelics and promoting cognitive liberty.

Today's sponsor:

• DonorsTrust, the principled, tax-friendly way to simplify your charitable giving. Do you want to make a real difference in the world instead of relying on ineffectual government programs? Consider opening a giving account with DonorsTrust. Giving accounts with DonorsTrust are simple, secure, and tax-advantaged. The DonorsTrust team understands the conservative and libertarian philanthropic landscape and they know which charities are clawing back our civil liberties. Visit www.donorstrust.org/nick to get a free copy of their donor prospectus.

The post Shane Mauss: Finding the Humor in Psychedelics appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

Hamas stunned the world last weekend by launching a brutal terrorist attack on Israeli civilians and posting their crimes on social media. Israel's government responded with a sustained bombing campaign and a total blockade of the Gaza Strip. Why would Hamas provoke what was certain to be a devastating response from the powerful Israeli military? What is likely to happen next in an Israel-Hamas war that threatens to spill far beyond the region? And what, if anything, should be America's involvement? 

To explore these questions, Reason's Liz Wolfe and I spoke with Max Abrahms, a political science professor at Northeastern University and author of Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History, a lengthy study of terrorism and insurgency. 

"The first thing smart militants do is recognize that civilian attacks are a recipe for political failure," writes Abrahms. "You might say that the first rule for rebels is to not use terrorism at all."

While he's called Hamas's attack a "major strategic mistake" for the Palestinian cause, he told Reason that their objective might not be to secure autonomy for Palestine at all in the near term but rather an attempt to position "itself as a leader in the larger global Sunni terrorist movement" by provoking a violent response that will galvanize jihadists from around the world to join them. 

We analyzed the likely outcomes of Israel's response to the terrorist attack, reacted to statements from GOP politicians like Lindsey Graham who has called for America to bomb Iran if U.S. hostages are killed in Gaza, discussed the principle of US military noninterventionism as articulated by Ron Paul in clips that have circulated social media in the wake of the attack, and the, frankly, insane reactions from American leftists who celebrated Hamas' violent attack as an act of "decolonization."

The post Max Abrahms: Historic Escalation in the Israel-Hamas War appeared first on Reason.com.

Beyond obvious political polarization and the rancor that generates, Alexandra Hudson says that contemporary America—and the world—is "otherizing" people in a way that makes us all worse off by threatening our ability to peacefully coexist. In her new book The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles To Heal Society and Ourselves, Hudson draws on the writings of figures from antiquity through Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. to show how to reawaken classical liberal virtues of mutual respect and tolerance in a world seemingly hell-bent on putting politics at the center of human meaning.

We talked about the difference between civility and manners, the need for and limits of civil disobedience, Hamas terrorism and the rules of war, and whether the decline of religion, family, and traditional forms of community spell the end of self-governance. Hudson publishes a Substack called Civic Renaissance, "a newsletter and community dedicated to ennobling our public discourse with the wisdom of the past."

This episode was taped live in New York City as a Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. Go here to listen to past Speakeasy events and go here to learn about upcoming ones (including one on October 23, featuring Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott discussing their new book, The Canceling of the American Mind). This event was cosponsored by Young Voices, "a nonprofit talent agency and PR firm for a rising generation of heterodox thinkers." Go here to learn more about them.

The post Alexandra Hudson: How Civility Can Save America—and the World appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

On June 30, Pornhub—America's most-trafficked adult website—announced that it was blocking access in Mississippi, Virginia, and Utah. Why? Well, Pornhub was reacting to the passage of age-verification laws in those three states. Similar laws have passed in Louisiana, Texas, Montana, and Arkansas, leading Politico to declare that "A Simple Law Is Doing the Impossible. It's Making the Online Porn Industry Retreat." But the industry is fighting back and won a preliminary injunction against Texas' law.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe talked about these developments with Aella, a former OnlyFans star and outspoken libertarian defender of sex workers who leverages her sizable social media following to run sex polls and surveys, the results of which she analyzes and publishes on her blog Knowingless. In this conversation, they discuss Aella's sex surveys, delve into the psychological literature examining online porn consumption, unpack the privacy implications of age verification laws, and talk about a recent debate Aella attended hosted by The Free Press and FIRE about the effects of "the sexual revolution" on American society.

The post Aella: Is Porn Too Pervasive? appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk, the founder of the online magazine Persuasion and the author of the important new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. 

The Identity Trap explains how identity politics and social justice discourse have come to dominate contemporary discussions of just about everything, analyzes their negative influence on society, and shows how to confront and defeat them in the name of liberal values of free expression and open inquiry.

Yascha was a prime mover behind the 2020 open letter on "justice and open debate" in Harper's magazine and is one of the most powerful defenders of free speech and the marketplace of ideas at work today.

This interview took place at the Reason Speakeasy, a live, unscripted monthly conversation held in New York City with outspoken defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking. Go here for information about upcoming events.

Today's sponsor:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.

The post Yascha Mounk: Avoiding The Identity Trap appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

The second GOP primary debate of the season took place this Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, absent frontrunner Donald Trump. The debate revealed real divides among the candidates on issues like foreign policy, broad agreement on topics like closing the southern border, and some candidates' increased willingness to take direct shots at Trump.

To help sift through the debate, Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmuller are joined by Josh Barro, a journalist and political commentator who publishes the newsletter Very Serious and co-hosts the Serious Trouble podcast with attorney Ken White. Barro is a former Republican voter who turned Democrat after Trump's nomination in 2016. 

We discuss Ron DeSantis' proposal to send U.S. troops to Mexico to fight the drug cartels, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy's feud over TikTok, the candidates' scuffle over whether to continue sending military aid to Ukraine, and more. We wrap up with a broader conversation about the 2024 election and what the best-case scenario might look like for libertarians and political independents. 

The post Josh Barro: A Republican Presidential Debate Detached From Reality appeared first on Reason.com.

In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg burst onto the international scene with his bestselling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The onetime member of Greenpeace said that climate change is real and that human activity is clearly contributing to it, but he said the best science didn't support the apocalyptic visions put forth by people like Earth in the Balance author and former Vice President Al Gore.

Lomborg went on to create the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank that applies cost-benefit analysis to problems facing the global poor and works with Nobel laureates, policymakers, philanthropists, and researchers to develop pragmatic, relatively low-cost solutions to issues such as tuberculosis, malaria, lack of education, and access to food. 

His new book is called Best Things First and it presents what Lomborg says are "the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest people." He argues that for about $35 billion a year—a little more than half of what the U.S. spends annually on humanitarian aid—these policies could save 4.2 million lives and generate an extra $1.1 trillion in value every year.

I caught up with Lomborg in New York City during the latest meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. We talked about Best Things First, his view of the current environmentalist movement, and why politicians and the media continue to fixate on the possibility of a future climate apocalypse rather than helping the global poor in the here and now.

The post Bjorn Lomborg: How Our Climate Fixation Hurts the World's Poor appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

This week, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe sat for an in-depth discussion with Johan Norberg about the lessons to draw from Sweden's pandemic policies

The Swedish government's decision to forgo lockdowns as most of Europe, Asia, and North America's political leaders forcibly closed businesses and schools in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic became one of the most controversial policies of 2020.

The New York Times in April 2020 designated Sweden "the world's cautionary tale," and President Donald Trump proclaimed that "Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown" as an early wave of COVID deaths hit Sweden harder than its Nordic neighbors.

But to Swedish officials, "it looked like it was other countries that were engaging in a dangerous experiment," writes Cato Institute Senior Fellow Johan Norberg in a policy paper entitled "Sweden during the pandemic: Pariah or paragon?"

Today, Sweden's COVID-19 death rate is not an outlier, and its excess death rate from 2020 to the present is the lowest in Europe.

In a retrospective report on the country's pandemic response, Sweden's public health officials say that they should have more aggressively protected senior citizens and tested and quarantined travelers from COVID hot spots in those early days, but they consider the focus on public health recommendations that people can "follow voluntarily" over coercive lockdowns was "fundamentally correct."

Norberg also points out that Sweden avoided the economic contraction that its neighboring countries suffered, as well as the learning loss experienced in countries that closed schools for months or even years.

The post Johan Norberg: How Sweden Defied Dire COVID Predictions appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past few episodes, I've been talking with people involved with what we at Reason are calling a psychedelic renaissance, or a rebirth of interest in substances long associated with the CIA and hippies and counterculture. Today's interest in these substances is mostly motivated by a desire to help veterans and victims of sexual violence who suffer from PTSD and related conditions, including substance abuse. The psychedelic renaissance may well sound the death knell for the war on drugs, at least in its current form.

So it makes sense that today's guest is a historian who studies the man who coined the term psychedelic.

Erika Dyck is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan who studies the history of psychedelics with a special interest in the legacy of Humphry Osmond, the British-born psychiatrist who gave Aldous Huxley his first dose of mescaline, and conducted pathbreaking work using LSD to help alcoholics stop drinking. Among Osmond's best-known patients was Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Reason sat down with Dyck at the MAPS Psychedelic Science 2023 conference held in Denver this June, where a reported 13,000 people gathered to talk about all aspects of today's psychedelic renaissance. We talked about why drugs such as MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD are making a comeback; how tensions are rising between indigenous people and medical practitioners; and whether prohibitionists have finally lost the war on drugs.

The post Erika Dyck: Are We Living in a Psychedelic Renaissance? appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

It's back-to-school season, and for some parts of the country, that means dealing with COVID restrictions again. Americans are no longer experiencing indefinite school closures or ubiquitous masking, but intermittent school closures, temporary mask mandates, and COVID vaccine requirements persist.

Will it ever end? Or are we in "the new abnormal"?

To examine these questions, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe spoke with Aaron Kheriaty, the psychiatrist fired from the University of California, Irvine for refusing to get vaccinated. He's a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who wrote a book called The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, in which he argues that the authoritarian measures implemented during the pandemic are sure to linger and reshape American society for the worse absent concerted and organized political pushback. 

Zach and Liz discussed his firing at length, surveyed the landscape of remaining COVID restrictions across America, reacted to clips of both Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom reflecting on their governance through the emergency, and talked about policies that can best help us escape "the new abnormal."

Sources referenced in this conversation:

ABC News: "School districts in Kentucky, Texas cancel classes amid 'surge' of illnesses including COVID"

Bloomberg: "Covid Mask Mandate at Elementary School Draws Ire of Some Republicans"

Reason: "The University of Michigan Will Force Students With COVID To Leave Campus"

Cochrane Library: "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses."

American College Health Association report on campus vaccine mandates and COVID policies

Reason: "A Federal Judge Blocks California's Ban on Medical Advice That Promotes COVID-19 'Misinformation'"

Aaron Kheriaty in The Wall Street Journal: "University Vaccine Mandates Violate Medical Ethics"

Aaron Kheriaty's lawsuit against the University of California, Irvine

5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Missouri v. Biden

The post Aaron Kheriaty: Will COVID Restrictions Persist Indefinitely in Schools? appeared first on Reason.com.

In June, I traveled to Denver with Zach Weismueller to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a group that has been working to gain Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD since the late 1980s. We produced a 30-minute documentary about today's "psychedelic renaissance."

The most surprising speaker at the conference was Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and Trump administration energy secretary. What in tarnation was a conservative Republican doing on the stage, extolling the virtues of drugs long associated with hippies and 1960s counterculture?

I sat down with Perry to learn why he believes psychedelics should be legal medicine for veterans and others suffering from PTSD, how to allow more immigrants to come to America lawfully, and why if he were ever to take a psychedelic drug it would be Ibogaine, a notoriously powerful substance made from the bark of an African tree.

The post Rick Perry: The Conservative Case for Psychedelics appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe sat down for a live discussion about the political and social ramifications of the indictments of Donald Trump with George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin.

"Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election well deserves punishment from the standpoint of both retribution and deterrence," wrote Somin following the four-count indictment filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith in early August. "For the head of state in a democracy, there are few more serious crimes than using fraud to try to stay in power after losing an election."

Somin also says "some of the charges seem compelling" in the case against Trump in Fulton County, Georgia.

Critics of the indictments have pointed out the conspicuous timing of a scheduled trial date, accused Trump's prosecutors of trying to "criminalize speech," and suggested that the former president is being held to a double standard. Others worry the prosecution will inspire "ever more aggressive tit-for-tat investigations."

Sources referenced in this conversation:

"Retribution, Deterrence, and the Case for Prosecuting Trump for Conspiring to Overturn the 2020 Election," by Ilya Somin

"The Georgia Case Against Trump," by Ilya Somin

William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen on Trump's presidential eligibility and the 14th Amendment

"FBI resisted opening probe into Trump's role in Jan. 6 for more than a year," by Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis

John Eastman's memo for how to challenge the 2020 election results

"Conservative Legal Luminaries Release Report Entitled 'Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election,'" by Ilya Somin

"Section 3 Disqualifications for Democracy Preservation," by Ilya Somin

Today's sponsor:

• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.
• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.

The post Ilya Somin: Should Libertarians Support the Prosecutions of Trump? appeared first on Reason.com.

In June, I traveled to Denver with Zach Weissmueller to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, which was organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a group that has been working to gain approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and related ailments since the late 1980s. We produced a 30-minute documentary about what is rightly called today's "psychedelic renaissance," or a new flourishing of substances and subcultures that mostly went underground at the end of the 1960s. The documentary tells the history of psychedelics and how today's proponents of better living through chemistry are doing things in a very different way than Timothy Leary and others did back in the '60s. Rather than confront and antagonize the mainstream, MAPS is working within the system. You can watch the documentary here.

MAPS founder Rick Doblin is, more than any other single person, the man behind today's psychedelic renaissance. Reason has been writing about him and MAPS for decades and his goal of getting Food and Drug Administration approval for MDMA-assisted therapy is on the near horizon (he predicts it will happen within a year). We spoke about a lot of topics related to drug policy, self-actualization, and the relationship between mainstream culture and countercultures.

Doblin, who earned a Ph.D. in public policy to help him be more effective in changing laws, is a deep and nuanced thinker about the nuts and bolts of legislation and social change along with the more abstract and visionary "cognitive liberty" he hopes to accelerate. He's also one of the increasingly rare people who has built wide-ranging, beyond-partisan coalitions to effect policy change (at the opening of the MAPS conference in Denver, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a liberal Democrat, and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a conservative Republican, both spoke). Long-lasting social change only happens when a true consensus forms, and it takes a lot of work to build that sort of agreement, especially when you're talking about something as powerful and scary to many as psychedelics.

Today's sponsor:

• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.
• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.

The post Rick Doblin: The Man Behind the 'Psychedelic '20s' appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

The topic this week was a lawsuit challenging California Community Colleges' new diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility—or DEIA—teaching standards, which allegedly "mandate viewpoint conformity" and "compel professors to teach and preach the State's perspective," according to the lawsuit Palsgaard v. Christian, filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.  

Reason's Zach Weissmuller and Liz Wolfe welcomed FIRE attorney Jessie Appleby and Bill Blanken, a plaintiff in the case and a chemistry professor at Reedley College in California. Blanken says the standards advanced by the state's community college board amount to  "compelled speech" in the classroom and that he will not comply with them.  

We talked about the details of the case, dove into the substance of the proposed changes in the classroom, discussed the origins of the DEIA standards that now pervade academia and the corporate world, and examined FIRE's other case against Florida's Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits exactly the kind of classroom instruction that California's new standards compel.

Today's sponsors:

• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.

The post Jessie Appleby and Bill Blanken: Do California Community Colleges 'Mandate Viewpoint Conformity'? appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Eli Lake, a repeat guest who for almost 30 years has been one of the country's leading national security journalists, working as a columnist for and contributor to publications such as Bloomberg Opinion, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, The New York Sun, and Commentary. His 2010 article for Reason, "The 9/14 Presidency," strongly argued for time-limiting all authorizations of the use of military force, especially those involving amorphous struggles such as the global war on terror.

In recent episodes of his podcast, The Re-Education, Lake has conducted deep dives into the dark histories of the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI and how they routinely disregard constitutional limits on their activities. At a recent event in New York City, I talked with him about the fundamental tension between America playing an outsized role in world affairs and having secretive agencies that often keep Congress and voters in the dark about their operations. Can democracy and self-governance survive in such an environment?

Previous appearances:

"Eli Lake: Trump, Russiagate, and the End of FBI Credibility"

"Should Anyone Be Offended by Ye? Live with Eli Lake"

"How the United States Can—And Cannot—Help Iranian Protesters"

"The Deep State's 'Political Assassination' of Michael Flynn Was an Epic Abuse of Power"

"Bradley Manning Trial Discussion: The Verdict Approaches"

"The Reason.tv Talk Show, Episode 3"

Today's sponsor:

• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.

The post Eli Lake: Exploring the Darkest Corners of the Deep State appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

The topic this week was the rise of Javier Milei, a self-described libertarian and Austrian school economist who defied polling expectations in Argentina's recent presidential primary elections, finishing in first with 30 percent of the vote. Milei will head into the October general election as the frontrunner. 

Reason's Zach Weissmueller spoke with Gloria Álvarez, a libertarian author and radio and TV host who is a fierce critic of socialism and populism in Latin America and who has declared she's running for president in her home country of Guatemala, and Eduardo Marty, an Argentine political economist who founded the Foundation for Intellectual Responsibility and supports Milei's candidacy.

They talked about Milei's economic policies—which include slashing taxes, abolishing the central bank, and dollarizing an economy beset by triple-digit inflation—and reacted to fiery media appearances in which he lashes out at socialists and calls for the removal of a "parasitic" political class that he says has wrecked and plundered Argentina. They also analyzed U.S. media coverage of Milei, with some outlets characterizing him as an Argentinian Trump and a "far-right libertarian."

Today's sponsors:

• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.

The post Gloria Álvarez and Eduardo Marty: The Potential for a Libertarian President in Argentina appeared first on Reason.com.

Carol Roth is a self-described recovering investment banker and bestselling author whose new book is You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How To Fight Back.

"The United States has been at the center of the global financial universe for about 80 years," she tells me, but that's changing for a whole lot of reasons, most of which are beyond any regular person's ability to control. Yet she isn't one to despair. Instead, she counsels that we should all proactively "do things to control our personal resources and our wealth." Roth's analysis and advice are worth listening to.

Today's sponsor:

• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.

The post Carol Roth: You Will Own Nothing! appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

Zach Weissmueller talked with Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, and John Vecchione of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. They are among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, which names the president, the Justice Department, the FBI, and nearly the entire federal public health apparatus as defendants. Attorneys general for the states of Missouri and Louisiana brought the case against the federal government in May 2022 for what they describe as "open collusion with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content." Bhattacharya and Vecchione say that the government illegally squelched their speech throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election by pushing social media platforms to remove or minimize the reach of heterodox views on COVID-19.

In July, U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a preliminary injunction ordering the federal agencies to cease meeting with social media companies for the purpose of "inducing in any manner the removal…of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms." Last week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments challenging that injunction.

Bhattacharya and Vecchione talk with Zach about the state of the lawsuit, what a victory or loss in court would mean for free speech online, the legal limits of government–social media "partnerships," and the ways in which the government blurred the line between private content moderation and outright censorship to suppress or mislabel factual information or opinion as "misinformation" during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.

The post Jay Bhattacharya & John Vecchione: Biden's Social Media Meddling Was Illegal appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Eric Boehm, a reporter at Reason who specializes in economic and trade policy. He's also the host of a fantastic, new six-part podcast series, Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Each episode looks at different ways that import and export laws and other sorts of mostly hidden regulations radically alter what we can buy, how much things cost, and how many options we have.

In one episode, Eric explains how the great baby-formula shortage of 2022 was vastly exacerbated by insanely stupid trade laws. Another episode explores why imported women's underwear is taxed at higher rates than men's underwear—and then there's one that shows how frozen chicken is being held hostage to decades-old trade wars. (All the episodes will be released over the coming weeks.)

It's an incredible podcast series that you should subscribe to here, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also talk with Eric about how growing up in eastern Pennsylvania and being raised Catholic shapes and informs his worldview, his politics, and his reporting, long after he has left behind both the Keystone State and weekly attendance at Mass. We also talk about the 2024 election season and what, if anything, he's looking forward to.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.

The post Eric Boehm: How Protectionist Trade Policies Screw Us All appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

The topic this week was the strikes by Hollywood writers and actors and the guest was Rob Long, whose long and storied career in the entertainment industry includes stints writing and show running for the classic sitcom Cheers, among many other things. He's also a longtime contributor to National Review, a columnist for Commentary, a co-creator of the online community and podcast platform Ricochet, and the host of the weekly radio commentary Martini Shot.

Zach Weissmueller and I talked with Long about how the studios and streaming platforms like Netflix brought most of their problems on themselves; whether fears of artificial intelligence taking over Hollywood are overblown (spoiler alert: they are); why studios and production companies refuse to create more mass-audience content like the Roseanne reboot and Top Gun: Maverick; and why Rob believes we are in what he calls an "age of blunder," where really smart people in charge make really terrible decisions on everything from COVID-19 to foreign policy to the creation and distribution of TV shows and movies.

Previous appearance:

• How Rob Long Went From Cheers to National Review to LSD

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.

The post Rob Long: Welcome to the Age of Blunder in Public Health, Foreign Policy, and…Hollywood appeared first on Reason.com.

What does Kim Kardashian have in common with Leonardo Da Vinci?

Much more than you might have ever guessed, says Tara Isabella Burton, author of the new book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. As in her previous work Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Tara explores the amazing and ever-increasing freedom we have to define our identities and all the complications, problems, and possibilities that come along with greater choice.

We talk about how figures as different as Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, and Clara Bow exemplify aspects of self-fashioning; whether Kim, Kris, or Caitlyn Jenner is the ultimate Kardashian when it comes to reinvention; and how traditional and avant-garde cultures mix uneasily but inevitably in a free society.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.

The post Tara Isabella Burton: Self-Made, From Da Vinci to the Kardashians appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

The guest this week was actor and filmmaker Alex Winter, whose new documentary is The YouTube Effect, an in-depth look at the ways in which that video site has radically altered how we produce and consume politics, culture, and ideas. In past documentaries, Winter investigated Napster and its users; told the story of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road dark web site; and profiled the life and legacy of rock musician and free expression activist Frank Zappa.

In The YouTube Effect, Winter traces the rise of YouTube from its launch in 2005 to its status as the second-most-visited website on the planet, behind only its corporate owner, Google. My co-host Zach Weissmueller and I talk with him about his concerns about polarization and disinformation in a lively and spirited conversation about the future of free speech and creative expression.

The post Alex Winter: Is <i>The YouTube Effect</i> Good or Bad on Balance? appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is comedian Doug Stanhope. No performer is as idiosyncratic and outspoken about their politics and their personal habits as Stanhope, who dresses exclusively in Goodwill cast-offs and has written can't-put-down books about everything from helping his terminally ill mother commit suicide to celebrating the on-the-road debauchery that ended in him getting married.

Stanhope has been entertaining audiences with his bad taste and unapologetically libertarian tirades for nearly 30 years. Back in the early 2000s, he cohosted The Man Show with Joe Rogan, including an episode where he entered a boxing ring against disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding and took a bit of a beating.

I caught up with Stanhope at FreedomFest, an annual event held this year in Memphis, where he performed a characteristically uncensored set that had the audience alternately groaning and laughing. We talked about why he's dreading the presidential election season, how he survived COVID's effect on touring, what he likes about psychedelics, and why he prefers creative independence over mainstream acceptance.

Today's sponsor:

• Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.

The post Doug Stanhope: 'Nothing Stands Above Everything Else. Everything Annoys Me Equally.' appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

A recent poll found that 44 percent of Millennials want to criminalize misgendering people, showcasing a censorial attitude that has been building among some young people for years. Many Millennials also feel left behind economically, especially compared to baby boomers and Gen Xers.

Can Millennials and boomers ever get along? Or are they creating a generational gap every bit as vast as the one between boomers and their parents? 

Today's guests are Reason Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who reported on the poll and writes about generational issues, and psychologist Jean Twenge, whose new book is Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents–and What They Mean for America's Future. 

We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including the central role of technology in changing how we live and how we interact with people younger and older than us.

The post Jean Twenge and Elizabeth Nolan Brown: What Do Millennials Want? appeared first on Reason.com.

Before Matt Taibbi was sparring with Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier this year over the Twitter Files, he was a darling of the progressive left, appearing regularly on shows like Democracy Now! and others hosted by Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow.

Though he was always a fierce critic of the Democratic establishment, the rise of Donald Trump suddenly meant that anyone nominally left of center—including progressive journalists like Taibbi—was expected to support Hillary Clinton unconditionally. So when he attacked her as a sellout, argued that the Russiagate narrative was mostly bullshit, and equated the manipulative tactics of right and left media personalities, progressives gave him the cold shoulder. Elected Democrats started treating him like a puppet of the right.

In 2020, Taibbi started publishing his work on Substack and quickly became one of the platform's most popular writers, earning far more than he ever did at Rolling Stone, where he had been chief political reporter. He became even more of a pariah by publishing exhaustive reports that documented how the government sought to control what was said on Twitter about COVID-19 and efforts by Russia to influence U.S. elections. Congressional Democrats unconvincingly pilloried him as a fake journalist, an apologist for Vladimir Putin, and a stooge for Elon Musk.

I caught up with Taibbi at FreedomFest, an annual gathering held this year in Memphis, to talk about the new challenges to free speech, why legacy media is dying, and how identity politics are poisoning political discourse.

The post Matt Taibbi: How the Left Lost Its Mind and Legacy Media Its Audience appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

A recent House of Representatives committee report entitled "The Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up" exposes how Anthony Fauci and other leading government officials pressured researchers and the media into dismissing the COVID lab leak theory.

Acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley, co-author with Alina Chan of Viral: The Search for Origin of Covid-19, explains how the interference played out and why it matters to the future of medicine, politics, and an open society.

The post Matt Ridley: Why Did Anthony Fauci et al. Suppress the Lab Leak Theory? appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Mike Rowe, the bestselling author, Emmy winner, and podcaster best known for his stint hosting The Discovery Channel's long-running Dirty Jobs, where he performed the sort of work we all rely on but don't want to think about too much.

From cleaning septic tanks to putting hot tar on roofs to disposing of medical waste, he's done it all—and loves to talk about the value of the hard, honest work that he thinks is devalued by a society fixated on sending everyone to college. I caught up with Rowe at FreedomFest, an annual gathering held this year in Memphis. 

We talked about how his mikeroweWORKS Foundation matches young people interested in learning trades with employers dying for applicants, why men continue to fall further behind women in school and work, and how Rowe's booze brand Knobel Spirits, named after his maternal grandfather, is fueling his nonprofit's impact.

The post Mike Rowe: The Missing 7.2 Million Male Workers appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the government's response to it cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars and resulted in a major hit to global freedom. What should governments, private companies, and individuals do differently next time disaster strikes?

Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, has assembled a team devoted to analyzing and applying the lessons of the pandemic. The institute has published papers arguing that Operation Warp Speed was a success that should be duplicated, for greater investment in indoor filtration, and for better biosurveillance. Stapp joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe for a live conversation about how to prevent the next global catastrophe.

The post Alec Stapp: Give Trump Credit for Operation Warp Speed appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past quarter-century, Jonah Goldberg has made his name as one of the most provocative and unapologetic conservative journalists around. He was the editor of National Review Online for years before leaving over differences related to Donald Trump and he's penned bestselling books such as Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West. He was a Fox News contributor for years, resigning in 2021 in protest of the channel's airing of Tucker Carlson's documentary Patriot Purge.

Along with former Weekly Standard editor Steve Hayes (who also resigned from Fox over the Carlson documentary), he founded The Dispatch in 2019. He also hosts the popular podcast The Remnant.

At a recent event in New York City, I talked with him about the fracturing of the political right into groups such as national conservatives, integralists, Never Trumpers, anti-Trumpers, and more. We also discussed the 2024 election and whether libertarians and conservatives can get along.

Previous appearances:

Jonah Goldberg on Why He Left National Review, Dislikes Sean Hannity and Seb Gorka, and Is Inching Toward Libertarianism, December 4, 2019

Is Jonah Goldberg Turning Into a Libertarian? It Sure Sounds Like It., July 5, 2017

Jonah Goldberg on The Tyranny of Cliches, Creating NRO, and the Firing of John Derbyshire, May 31, 2012

The post Jonah Goldberg: A NeverTrumper's Take on the 2024 Election appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

The guests this week were the podcaster and writer Coleman Hughes and the Cato Institute's Walter Olson. We talked about the recent high-profile Supreme Court cases that struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions and ruled that a web designer in Colorado could not be forced to make a site for same-sex couples. Along with the legal issues involved, we discussed the immense cultural changes over the past 50 years related to racial, ethnic, and sexual identities.

Today's sponsor:

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.

The post Coleman Hughes and Walter Olson: The Supreme Court Got Its Affirmative Action and Gay Website Cases Right appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is the immensely popular podcaster and writer Bridget Phetasy, who recently packed up her family and left Los Angeles for Texas in search of affordable living, lower crime, and quieter evenings—all within an easy drive to Joe Rogan's Comedy Mothership club in Austin, where she sometimes performs.

Leaving the hustle-heavy entertainment capital of the world hasn't dulled her edge, though. "What stupid fucking times we live in," reads a signature tweet (she's a must-follow on that platform). In recent columns for The Spectator, she talks frankly about how she "learned to stop worrying and love the 'burbs," when she realized she needed to leave California, and talks with members of the LGBTQ+ community about "why Pride lost the public."

We talk about all that, especially what motivated her and her husband to choose Texas over California, and why she remains "politically homeless" despite just moving to a red state. At one point in our conversation, she says that living in a blue area surrounded by red voters might be the best of all possible worlds. She also explains why she's done with Joe Biden and Donald Trump but muses over the circumstances under which she might just vote for conservative Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Within hours of our talking, she messaged me with a link to a terrible DeSantis campaign attack video accusing Donald Trump of being too trans-friendly and touting the Florida governor's bona fides on shutting down gay-friendly activities in the Sunshine State. "I knew I never should have said that I'd vote for him," she wrote, with a laugh/cry emoji. "Puke can we rerecord."

Today's sponsor:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.

The post Bridget Phetasy: Why I Left California for Texas appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

The guest for this week's livestream was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist and anti-vaccine activist who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. My colleague Zach Weissmueller and I talked with him about the war in Ukraine, COVID-19 policy, gun rights, bitcoin, pardoning Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Ross Ulbricht, and much more.

To watch the video version, go here.

Today's sponsor:

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.

The post Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: COVID, Ukraine, Bitcoin, Guns, Free Speech, and More appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Kevin Kelly, one of the original gang of people at Wired magazine back when it was not just reporting on but helping to create digital culture and cyberspace (he remains listed on the masthead as a "senior maverick"). He's a longtime techno-optimist who worked with people like Stewart Brand at the Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, and CoEvolution Quarterly and has published a shelf's worth of books such as Out of Control, which helped popularize the idea of emergent orders and self-regulating systems as preferable to traditional, top-down systems of control. 

Since 2000, he has published Cool Tools, "which recommends the best/cheapest tools available" and he is one of the people behind a weekly Substack newsletter that suggests interesting gadgets, books, and offerings. He is one of the founders of The Long Now Foundation, which pushes people to think in 10,000-year-long increments, and he maintains a comprehensive database of the writing, art, presentations, blogs, and other material he's generated over the past several decades.

His new book is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, a collection of 450 aphorisms and insights gleaned from a life spent traveling the globe and at the intersection of technology and culture. We talk about his body of work, how his Christianity informs his scientific beliefs (and vice versa), and not only why he believes optimism wins in the long run but also why he believes it's warranted by the facts on the ground.

Today's sponsor:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.

The post Kevin Kelly: Excellent Advice for Living From the World's Leading Optimist appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Brendan O'Neill of Spiked, whose new collection of essays, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable covers heated topics such as attacks on J.K. Rowling by trans activists; dismissals of populist moments that gave rise to Brexit, Donald Trump, and Emmanuel Macron; and the refusal by elites to own up to their mistakes related to COVID lockdowns. I blurbed this provocative and irresistibly readable book, writing that "Brendan O'Neill is the reincarnation of Christopher Hitchens, a devil's advocate who is willing to always state his case clearly, convincingly, and courageously."

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. On Monday, June 26, Nick Gillespie talks with Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan. For details, go here.

The post Brendan O'Neill: A Heretic's Manifesto appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

The guest for this week's livestream was Clark Neily, senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. We talked about the indictment against Donald Trump, the parallels between the former president's behavior and Hillary Clinton's, whether the Espionage Act should exist, and deep-seated corruption at the Justice Department and the FBI.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. On Monday, June 26, Nick Gillespie talks with Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan. For details, go here.

The post Clark Neily: Regardless of Guilt, Trump Won't Go to Jail appeared first on Reason.com.

Adam Smith turns 300 this week, and the July issue of Reason commemorates his life and legacy with a great set of articles by fantastic economists such as Deirdre McCloskey and Nobel Prize–winner Vernon Smith (no relation!), both of whom are recent guests on this podcast. My favorite piece in the issue, though, was created by today's guest, Peter Bagge, the legendary alternative comics genius behind Hate, Neat Stuff, and graphic biographies of Margaret Sanger, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rose Wilder Lane.

Born in 1957, Peter has been drawing professionally for over 40 years and contributing to Reason for the entirety of the 21st century. I talk with him about Adam Smith, material and moral progress, and what it's like to be an ardent libertarian in a creative space dominated by liberals and left-wingers. An eyewitness to the punk scene in New York in the late 1970s and the grunge scene in Seattle in the late 1980s, we also talk about what might be coming next in politics and culture and why he's optimistic that the future will be better than the past.

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. On Monday, June 26, Nick Gillespie talks with Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan. For details, go here.

The post Peter Bagge: From Adam Smith to Punk to Grunge appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

The guest for this week's livestream was Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed, the creator of the 3D-printed "Liberator" gun. We talked with Cody about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which is trying—and failing—to shut down Defense Distributed's ability to sell unfinished gun components; the philosophical roots of his crypto-anarchist project and interest in cyberpunk thinking; and his predictions about the future of gun control and American politics as we enter the 2024 presidential cycle.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On June 26, Nick Gillespie talks with Tara Isabella Burton, author of the phenomenal new book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. As in her previous Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Burton zeroes in on the amazing freedom we have to define our reality and all the complications, problems, and possibilities that come along with such freedom. They'll talk about her findings in Self-Made, whether Kim or Kris is the ultimate Kardashian, the insights she picked up while getting a Ph.D. in theology from Oxford, and how traditional and modern cultures mix uneasily. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan. For details, go here.

The post Cody Wilson: The Future of Gun Control and U.S. Politics appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is the Gutfeld! show and Fox News contributor Kat Timpf, whose new book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All In This Together, is a massive bestseller. It's also a full-throated defense of free speech and a compelling argument for humor as the best possible coping mechanism.

I talk with Kat about her life as a standup comedian, her past work at National Review and Barstool Sports, how she deals with sexism, what it's like to be an unapologetic libertarian at Fox News, and how her mother's untimely, tragic death convinced her that humor can be a powerful tool to bring a fragmented country together.

This episode was taped live in New York City at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking. Get information about upcoming events by signing up for Reason's NYC Events newsletter.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. On Monday, June 26, Nick Gillespie talks with Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan. For details, go here.

The post Kat Timpf: Make America Funny Again! appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

The guest on this week's livestream was Dave Rubin, the host of The Rubin Report. A self-described classical liberal, Dave talked with Reason about why he's supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president. We cover a lot of ground, including DeSantis's highly controversial and very successful handling of COVID, his disturbing willingness to use the government to punish corporations that cross him, and why Rubin has soured on Donald Trump, who he supported in 2016 and 2020.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On June 5, Nick Gillespie talks with Fox News contributor Kat Timpf about her best-selling book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan. For details, go here.

The post Dave Rubin: Why Libertarians Should Vote for Ron DeSantis appeared first on Reason.com.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote, "he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that." He was laying out the case for robust, good-faith, and systematic debate as essential to an open society. If you don't test your beliefs by engaging with people who disagree with you, you're more likely to make weak, incomplete, self-serving, or irrelevant arguments, leading to ruinous outcomes in policy matters or acrimonious misunderstandings in social life.

That's where the group Open to Debate comes in. Founded in 2006 as Intelligence Squared U.S., Open to Debate has hosted hundreds of debates with the goal of "restor[ing] critical thinking, facts, reason, and civility to American public discourse." Through a mix of online and in-person events, Open to Debate brings together artists, officials, public intellectuals, scientists, and entrepreneurs from across the ideological spectrum to work through contentious, heated, and seemingly irresolvable issues of the day.

Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward, for instance, was part of a debate that asked, "Is Capitalism a Blessing?" Over the years, I've argued for legalizing all drugs and against Medicare for All, net neutrality, and forgiving student loan debt. I also moderate debates for them, including one in New York about millennials taking place on June 7. Open to Debate invites audience participation, and it airs all its programming on public radio, YouTube, and the group's own website, where it provides voluminous notes and materials, all designed to help audience members reach independent and informed conclusions.

My guest today is Open To Debate's CEO, Clea Conner, who tells me about her group's mission, its name change, and its push to host actual presidential debates rather than "joint press conferences with really rehearsed talking points."

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On June 5, Nick Gillespie talks with Fox News contributor Kat Timpf about her bestselling book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan. For details, go here.

The post Clea Conner: America Needs More and Better Debates appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

Our topic was the release of and reaction to the Durham report, an investigation into the FBI's probe of possible collusion between former President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian government actors during the 2016 election. Our guest was Eli Lake, host of the Re-Education podcast and a contributor to Commentary and The New York Sun.

"If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect [Hillary] Clinton's campaign while launching a full investigation into [Donald] Trump's campaign on the thinnest of pretexts," he wrote in a recent article for The Free Press.

Lake says the 306-page report from special counsel John Durham, released to the public on May 15, is a "black eye for the FBI," which he says was sloppy, inconsistent, and possibly "helped inject what may have been Russian disinformation into the American political discourse."

Related episodes and links:

• "Should Anyone Be Offended by Kanye West? Live With Eli Lake"
• "Jacob Siegel: 'Disinformation' Is the Hoax of the Century"
• "Beverly Gage: The Dark Truth About J. Edgar Hoover's FBI"
• "From Russiagate to the MyPillow Guy, Let's Stop With Electoral Conspiracy Theories"
• "How the United States Can—And Cannot—Help Iranian Protesters"

• "The Deep State's 'Political Assassination' of Michael Flynn Was an Epic Abuse of Power"

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On June 5, Nick Gillespie talks with Fox News contributor Kat Timpf about her bestselling book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan. For details, go here.

The post Eli Lake: Trump, Russiagate, and the End of FBI Credibility appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is journalist and podcaster Jesse Singal, who first came to national prominence a few years ago when he wrote a cover story for The Atlantic titled "When Children Say They're Trans." The article was meticulously reported but questioned various aspects of contemporary activism and created a firestorm that continues to this day. Since then, he has emerged as a fierce advocate for free speech, open debate, and honesty about the use and limits of social science in journalism and public discourse. 

In 2020, he and Katie Herzog started hosting the immensely popular podcast Blocked & Reported. In 2021, he published the excellent book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills.

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at a small gathering in New York City. We talk about Jesse's work and research, how he came by his commitment to truth over advocacy, and how we can all push back against cancel culture and other forms of soft and hard censorship.

Related episodes:

• Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal on Left-Wing Cancel Culture
• Jesse Singal: Why We Keep Falling for Psychological Quick Fixes

Today's sponsors:

• Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On Monday, June 5, Nick Gillespie talks with Fox News contributor Kat Timpf about her bestselling book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, and food—and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan. For details, go here.

The post Jesse Singal: How To Stay Honest While Doing Journalism appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream that takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

The topic this week was whether falling birthrates in the United States and other countries are a bad thing that governments should try to reverse. My guests were Reason Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown, whose June cover story is "Storks Don't Take Orders From the State," and Scott Winship, who runs the American Enterprise Institute's Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility and has written widely on the myths and realities about economic and cultural decline.

We talk about whether past government policies have proven effective in changing birthrates, whether the state should be involved in such decisions from a moral perspective, and why the right and left are increasingly committed to pro-natalist policies.

Today's sponsors:

• The Soho Forum. Reason is proud to sponsor The Soho Forum, a monthly, Oxford-style debate held in New York City on topics of special interest to libertarians. The next one is on Monday, May 22, and features Andrew Koppelman and Gene Epstein debating the proposition, "Libertarianism has been thoroughly corrupted by delusion, greed, and disdain for the weak." For more information and to buy tickets, go here.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, unscripted, monthly event that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie podcast. The next one is on Monday, June 5, and Nick Gillespie will talk with Fox News contributor Kat Timpf about her best-selling book, You Can't Joke About That. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soda, and food. For details and to buy tickets, go here.

The post Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Scott Winship: Governments Can't Increase Birthrates. They Shouldn't Even Try. appeared first on Reason.com.

Is the world getting better? Or is it on the verge of collapse?

Stefan Sagmeister emphatically believes that things are looking up, and his art exhibition "Now Is Better" showcases a bold new way to convince the world that he's right. He takes actual paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, disassembles them, and creates new works by juxtaposing them with data visualizations of just how much things have improved since the good old days. 

Some works chart the incredible decline in deaths on the battlefield, from famine, and from natural disasters while others map how much cheaper food and lighting have become in real terms. One piece documents the explosion in the number of guitars per person on the planet—an indicator of growth in leisure and entertainment—while another charts the persistent belief that crime is always rising despite its well-documented decline.  

A heralded graphic designer who has designed album covers for Jay-Z, The Rolling Stones, and Lou Reed, Sagmeister has won two Grammy Awards, including one for his design of the Talking Heads' boxed set Once in a Lifetime. Born in Austria in 1962, he's called New York City home since the 1990s. He draws on sources such as Our World in Data, Human Progress, and the work of Steven Pinker, who has written the foreword to a book version of the "Now Is Better" series coming out later this year.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Sagmeister tells me why it's so important to acknowledge and defend material progress, why art and commerce aren't enemies, and what he loves about the New World he's adopted as his homeland and how that ties into the "Now Is Better" project.

The post Stefan Sagmeister: An Artist Who Believes 'Now Is Better' appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of this week's The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

This week's topic is artificial intelligence, or A.I., and my Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller interviews two leading thinkers on the subject. 

Jaan Tallinn of the Future of Life Institute organized an open letter calling for a pause on A.I. development that was signed by Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and 27,000 other people. Tallinn is a tech investor, one of the software developers who created Skype and Kazaa, and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute.

On the other side of the issue is George Mason University economist Robin Hanson, who thinks the worries over A.I. are overblown. He says much of today's A.I. anxiety is a more generalized "future fear," which is likely to imperil technological progress that would greatly benefit humanity.

To watch the video version, go here.

The post Jaan Tallinn and Robin Hanson: Should We Pause A.I.? appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is one of my favorite people in the world. Vernon Smith is the 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work in experimental economics. He's almost certainly the only male Nobel Prize winner who showed up with a ponytail and an Adam Smith bolo tie. More than anybody else, Smith is responsible for taking economics out of the lecture hall and testing its hypotheses by running actual experiments with living, breathing humans.

Born in Kansas in 1927, Smith has lived a life that sounds like a Bob Dylan song. His mother's first husband died in a freak railroad accident, and she used the insurance money to buy a farm that sustained her family during the darkest days of the Great Depression. An engineering whiz, he graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1949 and then turned to studying economics, first at Kansas University and then Harvard. He's taught all over the country, especially at places far flung from big cities, doing much of his most important work at Purdue University and the University of Arizona. He's currently at Chapman University in Southern California, where he created the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, which seeks to "reintegrate the study of the humanities and economics in the spirit of Adam Smith."

I caught up with Smith recently at Reason Weekend, an annual conference sponsored by the nonprofit that publishes this podcast. We talked about the upcoming 300th birthday of Adam Smith and why The Wealth of Nations author remains absolutely essential to understanding the contemporary world—Vernon gives him a special birthday greeting at the start of this show.

We also talked about the people that he namechecked in his Nobel toast—an inspired group that included his co-Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, Friedrich Hayek, and the poet Kahlil Gibran—and his impressions of former President Jimmy Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize the same year that Vernon won the economics prize. Smith calls Carter "the great deregulator" and shares a wonderful story about the former president learning late in life how governments and bureaucracies often get in the way of people trying to help one another.

Today's sponsors:

• DonorsTrust. DonorsTrust is the principled, tax-friendly way to simplify your charitable giving. Do you want to make a real difference in the world instead of relying on ineffectual government programs? Do you want to push back against heavy-handed government regulations that encroach on civil liberties, especially after living through the corruption that became so apparent during the pandemic? Consider opening a giving account with the folks at DonorsTrust. The DonorsTrust team understands the conservative and libertarian philanthropic landscape, and they know which charities are clawing back our civil liberties. For more information on how DonorsTrust can help you with your charitable giving, visit www.donorstrust.org/nick to receive a free copy of their donor prospectus.

The post Vernon Smith: Adam Smith's Relevance, Jimmy Carter's Deregulation, and the Fed's Biggest Mistake appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which I co-host every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern with my Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller. 

Today's guest is Jacob Siegel, a journalist who served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He's written a fantastic essay for Tablet magazine called, "A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation." 

This is, simply, the best piece I've read about how what Jacob calls "the ruling class" is trying to literally and figuratively control political and cultural discourse about politics, public health, and other pressing topics. Jacob provides a history and a deconstruction of the concept of disinformation, a term borrowed from Cold War spycraft that became ubiquitous in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016.

Along the way, we discuss elite apologetics for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story on social media, the revolving door between the national security state and the media, and how tactics devised for use overseas in the global war on terror are now being used against Americans on a daily basis.

The post Jacob Siegel: 'Disinformation' Is the Hoax of the Century appeared first on Reason.com.

For today's episode, I talk with Ben Smith, the first editor in chief of recently shuttered BuzzFeed News, former New York Times media columnist, and founder of Semafor. In his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, The Huffington Post, Breitbart News, and his old employer.

In the '00s and early 2010s, these sites dominated news cycles and pulled millions of eyeballs due to their unique abilities to shape media narratives in surprising and irresistible ways. Indeed, it seemed they would define the new century while legacy outlets such as The New York Times would be lucky to survive in the new, massively online mediascape. Yet the rise of Donald Trump, revenge lawsuits, untimely deaths, and the vagaries of the internet ended up disrupting the disrupters.

Ben and I talk about all that, plus his controversial decision at BuzzFeed to publish the Steele Dossier, what the firings of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon mean for journalism, and his aims for his new media platform, Semafor.

This episode was taped at The Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. Go here to sign up for future events in New York City.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you. Because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.

The post Ben Smith: Why It Matters that <em>Gawker</em>, <em>BuzzFeed News</em>, and <em>Breitbart News</em> Failed appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Vivek Ramaswamy, an Ohio-based biotech entrepreneur and best-selling author who is running for the Republican presidential nomination. His America First 2.0 platform combines some libertarian elements (prioritizing economic growth, opposing central bank digital currencies, shutting down whole federal agencies) with others that are anything but ("using our military to annihilate Mexican drug cartels").

He tells Zach Weissmueller and me why Donald Trump has accomplished as much as he ever will as president and why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who, like Ramaswamy, opposes woke corporate activities—is simply "responding to what the base wants, jumping like a circus monkey without actually having independent thoughts about what our actual principles ought to be." He discusses why he thinks Julian Assange should be pardoned and why the FBI, IRS, and other federal agencies should be shuttered. And he explains why he no longer calls himself a libertarian.

We also discuss his new book, Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn't Vote For, a critical analysis of ESG rules and what he calls "lurking state actions" that he says are driving corporations to develop policies to ward off government interference.

This is a podcast version of Reason's weekly livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

The post Vivek Ramaswamy: Why He's Running for President—and Against 'Woke Capitalism' appeared first on Reason.com.

Established in 1958 and peaking in influence and membership in the mid-1960s, the staunchly anti-communist John Birch Society quickly became a powerful force in conservative politics, with leading figures such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan making appeals to its members without fully endorsing its paranoid vision of a country secretly controlled by Soviet agents. Indeed, the society's founder, retired candy magnate Robert Welch, denounced President Dwight Eisenhower as a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy."

The society also became a running punchline during its heyday, with Bob Dylan recording a song called "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and the society's fixation on water fluoridation and vaccines finding its way into a character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove who is obsessed with protecting "our precious bodily fluids."

In the new book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, George Washington University's Matt Dallek puts the rise and fall of the Birch Society—which still exists and is based in Appleton, Wisconsin—into a larger Cold War context and argues that its influence on contemporary conservative politics remains as strong as it is unacknowledged.

"More than the most hard-line Goldwater, Nixon, or Reagan Republicans," he writes, "the Birch Society…bequeathed to subsequent generations an extreme antigovernment zeal and rhetorically violent appeal" that remains part and parcel of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. The Birchers' focus on ending the Federal Reserve; getting the United States out of the United Nations, NATO, and the World Trade Organization; and anti-interventionist foreign policy parallels many of the key elements of the political program articulated by libertarian Republican Ron Paul, who keynoted the group's 50th Anniversary Celebration. And the society's past antagonism toward integration and continuing attacks on feminism and gay rights—and emphasis on traditional Christian values and family structures—is widespread among contemporary conservatives.

Dallek's book is not a sneering attack on a backward-looking group but a deep dive into the context and personalities that made it so powerful, if only for a short period of time. He recaptures a sense of just how radical post-war America was, both on the right and the left, and how "conspiracism"—the idea that things are never simply what they appear to be but are really the result of hidden elite machinations—continues to inform how we all think about politics.

The post Matt Dallek: The John Birch Society's Deep Influence on Trump's GOP appeared first on Reason.com.

Forty years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform, a scathing indictment of public K-12 schools in America. "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war," announced the report's authors, who included Nobel Prize–winning chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti. The report catalyzed massive increases in per-pupil spending, standardized testing, and "common core" style curricula. Yet by almost every measure, educational outcomes are no better than they were in 1983.

In Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students, the Libertas Institute's Connor Boyack and the American Federation for Children's Corey DeAngelis outline what's wrong with the ways our public schools function—and they offer concrete solutions to improve outcomes for children.

In this podcast version of The Reason Livestream, I talk with Boyack and DeAngelis about why they support maximizing parental rights through education savings accounts (ESAs), disagree with conservative Republicans who want to ban critical race theory and other controversial concepts, and believe that the end of "factory schooling" will vastly improve the civic life of the United States of America.

The post Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis: Why K-12 Education Sucks and How To Fix It appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Daniel Akst, a journalist and novelist who has written one of the most remarkable books I've read in a while. War By Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance is an irresistibly readable history of peace-mongering practitioners of "Christian libertarianism" who refused to sign on to America's entry into World War II even after Pearl Harbor.

Two of the main figures in the book, Bayard Rustin and David Dellinger, served prison sentences in the 1940s for refusing to even register as conscientious objectors—they said the state had no right to make such demands on them. Along with others such as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, they pioneered the use of nonviolent resistance that energized the Civil Rights Movement and anti–Vietnam War protests in which they would figure so prominently.

Akst discusses Dwight Macdonald, the leftist writer and editor who worked at Fortune magazine, staunchly opposed the Soviet Union, ruthlessly critiqued mass media, and mentored a generation of public intellectuals including Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Bruno Bettelheim. He also explores the origins of the short-lived America First Committee, which opposed U.S. entry into World War II and whose members and sympathizers included a wide range of people, including future President Gerald Ford, Kennedy in-law and Peace Corps leader Sargent Shriver, author Gore Vidal, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and National Review founder William F. Buckley.  

In War By Other Means, Akst recovers a lost current in American politics that will make you think differently about the past and the present, especially given how identity politics and the worst sort of unprincipled tribalism reign supreme in our world today.

Read Max Longley's review of War By Other Means in the March 2023 issue of Reason.

Read Akst's Reason archive.

The post Daniel Akst: The World War II Pacifists Who Changed America Forever appeared first on Reason.com.

The good news is that President Joe Biden has officially signed legislation declaring the end of "the national emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic." The bad news? Governmental responses to the pandemic were "a catastrophe for human freedom" all over the globe, says the Cato Institute's Ian Vásquez.

He's the lead author of Cato's annual Human Freedom Index, which tracks personal, civil, and economic freedom in 165 countries. The latest version uses data through 2020, and Vásquez says that year saw the single-greatest drop in freedom in the past two decades.

In this podcast version of our weekly The Reason Livestream, my colleague Zach Weissmueller and I get into the specifics with Vásquez about how Covid ran roughshod over freedom everywhere from Armenia to Zimbabwe—including the United States, which dropped down seven slots and out of the top 20 freest countries. Worse still, Vásquez says overall human freedom peaked in 2007, so COVID has merely exacerbated the trend toward a radically less-free planet.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Roundtable live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street)! Tickets are $25, include entry to the after-party, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview podcast. The next one is in New York City on Monday, May 1, when Nick Gillespie interviews Ben Smith, the first editor in chief of Buzzfeed News, former New York Times media columnist, and founder of Semafor. In his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, HuffPost, Breitbart, and his old employer Buzzfeed. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. It's always a great evening of camaraderie and conversation, so come on out. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.
• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller host live, unscripted conversations at Reason's YouTube channel with leading policy makers, activists, writers, and thinkers about everything from attempted internet censorship to COVID policy failures to the future of the Libertarian Party to cryptocurrency crackdowns to the failure of K-12 education. Find the online archive here.

The post Ian Vásquez: COVID Accelerated the Global Decline in Human Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

My guests today are University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi, authors of The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. This is the definitive intellectual history of a movement that they argue began in recognizable form in the 19th century in Europe as a response to socialism and in the United States as part of the abolitionist movement. I liked the book so much that I blurbed it for Princeton University Press. We talk about virtually every aspect of libertarianism, including its strange lack of interest in the civil rights movement given its origin in abolitionism.

Today's episode was recorded in New York City before a packed house at a Reason Speakeasy, a monthly live taping of this podcast. I spoke with Zwolinski and Tomasi about major 20th-century figures such as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard, as well as the complicated and often-contradictory contributions each made to libertarian thinking. We also spoke about the rise of the Mises Caucus within the Libertarian Party, the seemingly complete rejection of libertarian ideas in the contemporary GOP, and whether the larger libertarian movement is ascendant or sputtering out.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Roundtable Live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street)! Tickets are $25, include entry to the after-party, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview. On Monday, May 1, at Manhattan's Blue Building (222 East 46th Street), Nick Gillespie interviews Ben Smith, the first editor in chief of Buzzfeed News, former New York Times media columnist, and founder of Semafor. In Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, HuffPost, Breitbart, and his old employer, Buzzfeed. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For details and to buy tickets, go here.

The post Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi: Who Owns Libertarianism? appeared first on Reason.com.

Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I go live at YouTube and Facebook with great thinkers, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, policy makers and other people who are central to the world in which we live. We're excited to present the audio of those conversations as bonus episodes of the Reason Interview podcast.

This time around, we talked with The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz and Coin Center's Peter Van Valkenburgh about bipartisan congressional efforts to ban TikTok and pass the RESTRICT Act, a far-reaching piece of legislation that imperils not just online free speech but all sorts of privacy rights and economic freedom, especially as they related to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Roundtable live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street)! Tickets are $25, include entry to the afterparty, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!

The post Taylor Lorenz, Peter Van Valkenburgh: Why Banning TikTok Is Stupid and Unwarranted appeared first on Reason.com.

"This book is born of an anxiety I was feeling, which was this sense that we were leaving pieces of ourselves, in all these different forums, in all these different media," says today's guest, former Reason Senior Editor Kerry Howley, whose new book is Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State.

"There's a piece of yourself in your email. You're leaving traces in Facebook Messenger and text, and the possibility [exists] that all of these could be reassembled to form an identity that looks like you but is not you," she says. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs "tells the story of a young whistleblower named Reality Winner to whom this truly happened. Her life was reassembled by prosecutors in a truly absurd way to suggest that she was a terrorist. And so she is kind of an illustration of that anxiety but also the reality that we're all living in."

Howley is now a staff writer at New York magazine and a multi-finalist for the National Magazine Award, the industry's highest honor, most recently for a profile of anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser. 

In a wide-ranging conversation about surveillance, privacy, and journalism in an age where nothing we say or write or post ever really goes away, Howley talks about getting inside the mindset not just of whistleblowers like Reality Winner and Daniel Hale but also the people who would lock them up and throw away the keys. We also talk about how her work at Reason and her stint at an openly censored newspaper in Myanmar continues to inform her worldview.

Today's sponsors:

• Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you. Because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Roundtable Live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West Third Street)! Tickets are $25.00, include entry to the afterparty, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!

The post Kerry Howley: A Journey Through the Deep State appeared first on Reason.com.

Every Thursday at Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I go live at YouTube and Facebook with great thinkers, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, policymakers and other people who are central to the world in which we live. We're excited to present the audio of those conversations as bonus episodes of the Reason Interview podcast.

This time around, we talked with Ethan Nadelmann, the former head of the Drug Policy Alliance and the host of the excellent Psychoactive podcast. Ethan is one of the the main reasons we live in a world where legal marijuana is increasingly available for adults—and why other drugs are being decriminalized and legalized too.

The main was whether we should legalize all drugs and, if so, how best to go about it? It's an in-depth conversation about all aspects of drug policy, drug use, and drug culture, including decriminalization versus legalization, addiction and treatment programs, and the effects of reforms in Portugal and elsewhere around the world.

The post Ethan Nadelmann: How To Legalize All Drugs! appeared first on Reason.com.

"What we want is a nonslave society, a society without masters," the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey told me late last year at the annual Liberty Forum conference of the Atlas Network, a group founded in 1981 by British businessman Antony Fisher. The Atlas Network supports nonprofits around the globe that fight against authoritarianism and push for free markets, the rule of law, and self-determination. McCloskey was one of a half-dozen participants I spoke with, and she was explaining the end goal of classical liberalism.

Strolling through the conference, which was held in a midtown Manhattan hotel, was like attending a great music festival. People from dozens of different countries and organizations were strategizing and planning on how best to defeat new threats to freedom while keeping and expanding the political, economic, and cultural gains we've made over the past decades.

These are uncertain times—many human rights activists agree that "tyranny is on the rise"—and the vibe at the conference was a mix of deep anxiety and upbeat commitment to empowering individuals in developing and advanced countries alike.

What follows are short conversations I had with McCloskey—whose acclaimed body of work documents the role of property rights, markets, and pluralism in lifting living standards (and whose interview begins at the 0:17:05 mark)—and five other people, including:

• Magatte Wade [0:02:55], a Senegalese entrepreneur who coordinates Atlas' work in Africa;
• Alex Gladstein [0:10:25], chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and a bitcoin evangelist who helps people use cryptocurrency to evade state monetary restrictions;
• Mohamad Machine-Chian [0:38:35], an Iranian journalist forced into exile due to his criticism of his country's theocratic leaders;
• Tony Woodlief [0:45:46], the head of State Policy Network's Center for Practical Federalism and author of I, Citizen: A Blueprint for Reclaiming American Self-Governance; and
• Tom Palmer [0:54:30], who leads Atlas' international programs and has almost 50 years of experience in the libertarian movement.

I talked with each of them about what they do and whether they're optimistic about the future.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Roundtable Live in New York City! For the first time ever, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch will tape live and unfiltered in New York, a city that is arguably the most hostile place in the country when it comes to taxes and regulation and arguably the most welcoming when it comes to living however the hell you want—a paradox that urban anarchists and minimal-government types can both savor and argue about. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground. Tickets are $25 and must be purchased online.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview podcast. The next one is in New York City on Monday, April 3, when Nick Gillespie interviews University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi about their new book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. It's always a great evening of camaraderie and conversation, so come on out. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.

The post Deirdre McCloskey: 'What We Want Is a Nonslave Society' appeared first on Reason.com.

Most people have no idea that pinball was illegal in New York from the early 1940s until 1976, when a journalist named Roger Sharpe finally won his crusade against the city to free the flippers.

The story of that insane ban is the subject of the new movie Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, which Richard Brody of The New Yorker called "better than all ten of the Best Picture nominees."

The film is written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg, longtime producers at Reason best known for collaborating with Remy on his massively popular song parodies and for making libertarian versions (often featuring Andrew Heaton) of Star Trek, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and other pop culture franchises. A production of MPI Original Films, Pinball is available for streaming on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, and other platforms.

I talked with the Bragg brothers about how they came to tell Roger Sharpe's story, what goes into making the perfect satire in an era when reality is far stranger than anything we can imagine, and the libertarian message of Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.

Today's sponsors:

• DonorsTrust. Want a principled and tax-friendly way to simplify your charitable giving? Open a DonorsTrust giving account. Giving accounts are simple, secure, and tax-advantaged: You deposit money with DonorsTrust, tell them where to send your gifts, and they take care of all the paperwork for you. The added bonus? When you open an account with DonorsTrust, you become part of a community of like-minded givers that honor and share your belief in free markets and limited government. Visit DonorsTrust.org/nick to get a free donor prospectus and learn more about DonorsTrust.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview podcast. The next one is in New York City on Monday, April 3, when Nick Gillespie interviews University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi about their new book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. It's always a great evening of camaraderie and conversation, so come on out. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.
• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller host live, unscripted conversations at Reason's YouTube channel with leading policy makers, activists, writers, and thinkers about everything from attempted internet censorship to COVID policy failures to the future of the Libertarian Party to cryptocurrency crackdowns to the failure of K-12 education. Find the online archive here.

The post Bragg Brothers: Remy Videos, Libertarian Parodies, and Their Acclaimed New Film, <i>Pinball</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is William Bratton, the former police commissioner of New York City and former chief of police in Los Angeles. He is widely credited for playing a major role in the historic decline of crime in the Big Apple in the 1990s, and he's a major presence in the new documentary Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York, which will be released on video on demand on March 21 (pre-order here).

Bratton also had a highly acclaimed run in Los Angeles in the '00s, where he reduced crime and raised trust in a police department that had a truly awful reputation among the people it served. He is an outspoken defender of "broken windows" policing and also helped pioneer the use of CompStat, a data-driven system that focuses resources on where crime is happening at the moment.

Bratton is not without his critics, especially when it comes to supporting controversial policies such as "stop and frisk," which detractors say targets minority youth and abrogates civil liberties without increasing public safety.

My Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller and I talked with Bratton about all that, plus the recent increases in crime around the country and how qualified immunity, bad training, and weak leadership lead to horrors like the deaths of Tyre Nichols and George Floyd at the hands of the police. We also mixed it up with him over his insistence that legalizing marijuana was a mistake. It's a wide-ranging conversation with one of the most important law enforcement figures of the post-war era.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview podcast. The next one is in New York City on Monday, April 3, when Nick Gillespie interviews University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi about their new book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. It's always a great evening of camaraderie and conversation, so come on out. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.
• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller host live, unscripted conversations at Reason's YouTube channel with leading policy makers, activists, writers, and thinkers about everything from attempted internet censorship to COVID-policy failures to the future of the Libertarian Party to cryptocurrency crackdowns to the failure of K-12 education. Find the online archive here.

The post Bill Bratton: Fighting Crime Without Shredding Civil Liberties appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.

The author of two books on how bad medical policy persists long after it has been recognized as ineffective or even deadly (Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People With Cancer and Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives), Prasad has become a lightning rod during the COVID pandemic because he is outspoken both in his support for vaccines and his criticism of the way they're being implemented. We need to think about risks and benefits for individuals, he insists, and not force a one-size-fits-all solution on a country of 330 million people.

He's also outspoken in his criticism of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, and other aspects and figures of the public health system. "Trust is justified based on how an organization or system performs," he writes. "And the truth is, the entire public health apparatus, failed."

My Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller and I talked with Prasad about all that and much more—including the unwillingness of authorities to admit when they are wrong, the lack of evidence for mask mandates, under what circumstances vaccine mandates are actually legit, and why he is so disappointed with the inability of liberal progressives (his tribe, he admits!) to acknowledge government failure with regards to COVID policy.

Today's sponsors:

• Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you. Because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Speakeasy. This is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. The next one takes place in New York City on Monday, April 3, with Nick Gillespie interviewing University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi about their new book The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now. For an archive of past events, go here.
• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller talk live and in-depth with newsmakers, rhetorical bomb-throwers, elected officials, writers, thinkers, and activists who are changing how we think and live. Tune in live at Reason's YouTube channel and ask questions, or check out the archive.

The post Dr. Vinay Prasad: You're Right Not To Trust Public Health appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's Reason Interview podcast has double the hosts and double the guests.

Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I host a live interview on Reason's YouTube channel. Today's episode is pulled from our recent conversation about government regulation of cryptocurrency and related matters that we had with Hester Peirce, a renegade commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Depression-era agency whose task it is to supposedly "protect investors,"  "maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets," and "facilitate capital formation." 

When the SEC recently fined the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken for supposedly offering an unregistered security, Peirce publicly broke with her colleagues, denouncing the decision as "paternalistic and lazy" and sadly representative of the government's unwillingness to issue clear regulations governing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We talk with Peirce, who used to work at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, about why she believes the SEC is overreaching when it comes to crypto regulations and what good regulations might look like.

In the second half of the show, we're joined by Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures and a leading proponent of blockchain technology and the crypto future. He talks about why he didn't invest in Sam Bankman Fried's FTX and how the crypto industry needs to do more to police itself from fraudsters, whose inevitable collapse makes it more likely government will step in with terrible, soul-and-commerce-crushing rules and restrictions.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller host live, unscripted conversations at Reason's YouTube channel with leading policymakers, activists, writers, and thinkers about everything from attempted internet censorship to Covid-policy failures to the future of the Libertarian Party to cryptocurrency crackdowns to the failure of K-12 education. Online archive here.

The post Hester Peirce, Nic Carter: The Government vs. Cryptocurrencies appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is the Edgar Award–nominated mystery writer and Reason contributor Kat Rosenfield, whose new novel is You Must Remember This, a Gothic whodunnit set in Maine that is simply impossible to put down. Kat is one of the most fearless—and most interesting—cultural critics at work today. She joined me in February at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast. (Go here for information on upcoming events.)

l talked with Kat about the persistent appeal of the mystery genre and how gender politics play out both in fiction and in the publishing world. We also talked about her recent essay and video for Reason, "Stop Spazzing Out About 'Spaz': Social media, streaming, and a new era of digital self-censorship," which looks at the troubling ways in which major artists such as Lizzo, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift are internalizing the values of cancel culture. We also discussed her provocative essay on cultural appropriation for Unherd, "Is It Racist To Like Big Butts?" and Feminine Chaos, the podcast she cohosts.

The post Kat Rosenfield: Why It's Important for Novelists To Speak Freely appeared first on Reason.com.

Do we use social media—or does it use us?

That's one of the fundamental questions posed by artist Dave Cicirelli in a series of works produced in different media—including social media, in real time—over the past decade. He creates what he calls "experiential art" because the audience must interact with it rather than passively contemplate it in order to make sense of it. His signature works include:

• Fakebook: A True Story Based on Actual Lies, a memoir of a fabricated, increasingly unbelievable cross-country trip that Cicirelli documented in real time for his followers on Facebook;
• Fake Banksy Sells Out, a street sale of openly counterfeit paintings in Central Park;
• All Minus One, a graphic novel version of John Stuart Mill's ideas on free speech and social conformity done in collaboration with Jonathan Haidt and Richard V. Reeves; and
• The Infinity Cube, a mind-blowing, glass-and-mirrors immersive installation that challenges participants to deny their urge to take a selfie.

Born in 1983 and raised in New Jersey, Cicirelli studied art at Rutgers University, where 60 years ago Allan Kaprow and other members of the Fluxus movement pioneered art "happenings" that forced audience members both to participate in the creative process and to produce their own meanings. A longtime Reason reader who is skeptical of both government and corporate power, he is quite possibly the only artist alive who counts comic book legend Jack Kirby and politician Barry Goldwater among his inspirations.

Cicirelli's work forces us to contemplate: Why is there so much fakeness in a world that places so much value on authenticity and transparency? How do we maintain our individuality when social media algorithms group us into simplistic categories and tribes? And has technology become a substitute for reality rather than something we use to express our true selves?

Watch an abridged video version of this interview:

The post Dave Cicirelli: Does Selfie Culture Destroy Real Individualism? appeared first on Reason.com.

In the 1990s, Marc Andreessen helped make the World Wide Web navigable by co-authoring Mosaic, the first super-popular web browser, and then by co-founding Netscape, one of the first great internet initial public offerings (IPOs). As a founder of the venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz, he has had a central role in funding Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Lyft, and other companies that define our age.

Unlike many of his peers, Andreessen is also a congenital optimist, who places his hope for the future squarely in the hands of what he once called "the 19-year-olds and the startups that no one's heard of." 

On this episode, Reason's Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Andreessen to talk about what the future will look like and whether it's still going to emerge from Silicon Valley, the role of government in fostering or destroying innovation, and what you should read on your next beach vacation.

Today's sponsors:

• Lions of Liberty Podcast Network. Take your first step toward freedom by checking out one of the oldest libertarian/anarchist podcast networks in the world. On Mondays, John Odermatt delivers a powerful mix of inspiration, health, and faith to set your mind, body, and soul free with Finding Freedom. On Wednesdays, Brian McWilliams will make you laugh at our broken world while providing the promise of a better future with Mean Age Daydream. Friday's offerings include shows like Meme Wars, Hatewatch, and Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor. Listen today at Lions of Liberty Network and everywhere podcasts are found. Past episodes featuring Nick Gillespie talking postmodernism and South Park and Rick and Morty are here and here.
• When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you. Because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.

The post Marc Andreessen: What the World Needs Most Is More Elon Musks appeared first on Reason.com.

I'm the father of two adult sons who are thankfully out of the K-12 educational system. I say thankfully because I found education inherently anxiety-inducing. Turning your kids over to a school for years is no simple thing and my own ambivalent memories as a student didn't help.

I'm pretty sure it's always been this way, but today it just seems at a fever pitch of awfulness. There's growing (and ineffective) per-pupil spending; lack of meaningful choice for many, if not most, parents and students; a lack of transparency and accountability; the lingering effects of COVID-related lockdowns; the rise of highly politicized curricula about everything from critical race theory (CRT) to gender and sexual orientation; and a return to fights over library books.

Today's guest is Robert Pondiscio, an education expert with the American Enterprise Institute who wrote How the Other Half Learns, a fantastic book about Success Academy, a controversial and highly effective charter school system based in New York City (watch my 2019 interview with him about that). What's more, he actually taught in a low-income public school in the South Bronx.

Pondiscio is going to add another worry to our list of concerns: Schools aren't teaching kids to read in any meaningful way. He's a strong advocate for all forms of school choice and reform, but he says choice itself is simply not enough to help the lower-income kids who can most benefit from a really good education.

We talk about all that, plus wokeness and a ton of other related topics. Let's call this episode "Everything You Wanted To Know About What's Wrong With K-12 Education But Were Too Afraid To Ask." It first ran as a Reason livestream at YouTube (watch here) and is cohosted by my colleague Zach Weissmueller.