Just Asking Questions

Peter Moskos: What Does Good Policing Look Like?

Liz Wolfe — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 16:45:05 +0000

Are American cities crime-ridden hellscapes right now? Have cities rebounded from pandemic-era homicide spikes? Why do subway shootings in New York and carjackings in D.C. keep making the news?

"I think a lot of this has to be disaggregated: There is a public order problem, and there is a violent crime problem, and they're not necessarily the same problem," Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and former Baltimore cop, tells Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions.

They discussed the pros and cons of broken-windows policing, how "soft-on-crime" district attorneys affect the cities they're tasked with keeping safe, and whether New York City should become more like Singapore by cracking down on petty crimes.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

"More Americans See U.S. Crime Problem as Serious," by Jeffrey F. Jones in Gallup
Crime Data Explorer
"Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Mid-Year 2023 Update," by the Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks rates of homicide and other major crimes in 37 select cities.
New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority's December 2023 crime report
"National Guard and State Police Will Patrol the Subways and Check Bags," by Maria Cramer and Ana Ley in The New York Times
The Reason Foundation's study on Ferguson, by Vittorio Nastasi and Caroline Greer
"The correlation between more police enforcement and fewer shooting incidents in NYC," by Peter Moskos
Fifty years of officer-involved shooting data, compiled by Peter Moskos

The post Peter Moskos: What Does Good Policing Look Like? appeared first on Reason.com.

Coleman Hughes vs. Radley Balko: Who's Right About George Floyd?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 17:00:38 +0000

Writer and podcast host Coleman Hughes published a column in The Free Press in January entitled, "What Really Happened to George Floyd?" in which he analyzes a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis, which has racked up more than 6 million views on YouTube and Rumble. The documentary makes the case that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin may have been wrongly convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. In his column, Hughes ultimately concluded that it's time for Americans to "consider the possibility that Chauvin was not a murderer, but a scapegoat."

Later in January, investigative journalist and former Reason staffer Radley Balko began publishing an extensive three-part rebuttal on his Substack The Watch, which he concluded earlier this month. It's entitled "The Retconning of George Floyd," and he takes apart errors and what he says are outright lies in the documentary. He also heavily criticizes Hughes and The Free Press for failing to consult experts or include research that he says could've helped them avoid serious mistakes.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe hosted Hughes and Balko on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions. Balko argued that Hughes and The Free Press missed or misrepresented key facts about the killing of Floyd and Chauvin's trial. Hughes defended his skepticism of the felony murder verdict. They also discussed their opposing views of the protests and police reforms that followed Floyd's death.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

This is a rush transcript. Please check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Zach Weissmueller: Who's right about the death of George Floyd? Just asking questions. And on this show we do ask many questions, but we also try to provide answers when we can, and hope to today. I'm Zach Weissmueller, senior producer for reason, and my co-host is Reason Associate Editor, Liz Wolef. Hey, Liz.

Liz Wolfe: Hey, Zach.

Weissmueller: Today, we're hosting a conversation between journalist Radley Balko and writer Coleman Hughes. Hughes published an article in The Free Press in January called, "What Really Happened to George Floyd?" in which he analyzes a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis, which has racked up more than 6 million views. The documentary makes the case that police officer Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted of Floyd's murder. Hughes ultimately concludes that it's time for Americans to consider the possibility that Chauvin was not a murderer, but a scapegoat. Balko disagreed strongly and began publishing an extensive three-part rebuttal on his Substack "The Watch". A series called the retconning of George Floyd dismantles the purported errors and outright lies in the documentary, and also heavily criticizes Coleman and The Free Press for failing to consult with experts or include research that Balko says could have helped them avoid serious mistakes.

I'm grateful to both of them for agreeing to come on our show. I am fans of both of their work, and glad that we're here to have what may at times be a difficult conversation, but I hope it will also be a productive one. Radley, let's start with you. This documentary dropped in November 2023, but it seems to be Coleman's column in particular that really provoked you to respond. Why?

Radley Balko: Yeah. Well, I think it's because The Free Press is considered sort of a skeptical non-partisan publication, or at least it positions itself that way. And I don't believe Coleman and I have ever met personally, but we have a lot of colleagues and friends in common who speak highly of him. And I had watched this documentary gain a lot of momentum on the far right and among police advocates, law enforcement advocates. And it wasn't until it started gaining momentum in right of center, libertarian, centrist circles… I know the Fifth Column Podcast talked about it in slightly skeptical, but mostly in a way of endorsing a lot of its claims, or at least giving credibility to them. And then Coleman, I think, really pushed it into the mainstream. And a lot of people who have read me for a long time started sending me Coleman's column and asking if I had a response to it. When the series went up, Coleman's response and Barry Weiss' response in The Free Press was to basically to invite me onto their podcast to discuss it.

And I agreed to do this podcast because I have history with Reason. I will say though, the response to someone pointing out factual errors and errors of omission and publishing something that's, I think, deeply misleading is not to debate and discuss those issues. It's to either issue a correction or retraction, or to explain why you don't think a retraction or correction is necessary. And so far, the first installment of the series went up well over a month ago, I think the last one was 10, 12 days ago, and there hasn't been a response. So I'm happy to discuss policing issues. I debate people who disagree with me all the time. I'm not really interested in having those discussions in the absence of good faith. And I think to establish good faith, or as a demonstration of good faith, I think I need The Free Press or Coleman to address what I think are clear errors in the column Before we go any further. So there's the maximal restraint technique problems in Coleman's column that amplify what I think are clear errors in the documentary.

There are mistakes about positional asphyxia, the idea that that because it's not mentioned in the original autopsy report, it couldn't have been the cause of death, which is not true at all. Coleman really builds up Andrew Baker, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on George Floyd, but he never mentions that Baker said that Floyd samples was homicide and testified for the prosecution at Derek Chauvin's trial. When Coleman talks about Bob Kroll, the former union head, and his wife, Liz Collin, who is the narrator and produced the documentary, he talks about how they were intensively canceled but doesn't mention Kroll's long history of abuse and allegations of racism and abuse. I think you could very plausibly argue that that's an error of omission because Kroll was in a policymaking position. He was head of the Minneapolis Police Union. He formulated a lot of the policies that allowed Minneapolis police officers to have bad apples, the worst apples to continue to abuse people without consequence. It was the union negotiated contract that allowed for a lot of those policies.

Then finally, he talks about Floyd's health. We've had exchanges on Twitter about this. He claims he'd never wrote that Floyd died of an overdose or some sort of heart condition. He certainly implies that those contributed to his death, or those might have contributed to his death. And we know, and we can talk to addiction experts and emergency medical technicians, they'll tell you that the symptoms that Floyd was exhibiting or the way he was behaving in the video that we see are not consistent with somebody who's dying of an overdose or in the midst of an opioid overdose.

You basically become lethargic and sleepy, and you basically just kind of drift off. Floyd was animated. He was agitated. And multiple people who write about addiction have said that there's no evidence that that Floyd was in the midst of an overdose. Coleman also writes that it had fatal levels of fentanyl system, and this is a claim we've seen often from the right and from law enforcement sources. And it came out in trial that is levels of fentanyl were actually below the average level of people who were brought in for DWI charges, for driving while under the influence of opioids in non-fatal cases. So his fentanyl levels were lower than those cases. And there's also evidence that the fentanyl that was in his system was metabolized fentanyl. When you die of a drug overdose, it's shortly after you take the opioid, the fatal amount. If most of the opioid in your system has been metabolized, that's a good sign that you aren't in the midst of an overdose. In his ratio of fentanyl to norefentanyl, which is the metabolized form was one point something, I think the average fatality, is over nine. So he had high levels of fentanyl compared to someone who has never taken opioids, but people build up a resistance to opioids when they take them regularly. And so there is no real fatal level of opioids. Jacob Sullum has written a lot about this for a reason, about people who take high dose opioids for chronic pain. Some of them take 20, 30 pills a day, an amount that would pretty much instantly kill any us, but because they built up a resistance… And we know that Floyd had a lifelong drug problem. So I think these are the issues that I think need to be addressed, and I hope that Coleman and The Free Press will address them directly.

We were talking before Coleman came on here. I've been in journalism for 20 years. I've made a lot of mistakes over the course of my career, and I've found that when you acknowledge them and correct them, there's a hesitancy, I think to run corrections because people think it erodes their credibility, but I think it actually adds to your credibility when you admit to mistakes because we're all human. We all make mistakes. But so far I think the reaction, I think has been a little bit disappointing.

Wolfe: That makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate you laying out the case, Radley. You laid it out very well in the three-part series, but I also think that this is a pretty concise version for those who aren't going to read the entire thing. Coleman, is there anything that Radley has changed your mind about?

Coleman Hughes: Well, I want to first address some of the things that were said there, if you don't mind, at least in the abstract.

Maybe we can later go point by point and maybe in more detail, but broadly speaking, The Free Press piece that I wrote was intended to be op-ed length, ended up being a little over 2000 words. And of necessity, I triaged information. Radley's response has been something like 30,000 words if you combine everything, and I think that should be the first signal for people that what you're talking about here aren't simple factual matters, right? A simple factual error. So for example, Radley made a minor and insignificant error just by getting my age wrong. It's correctable in a single sentence. The disagreements that we have here are generally matters of actual debate. And so I'm glad that we're doing this, but the fact that The Free Press hasn't issued a correction is not because we are hesitant to admit simple errors here. Radley has done a kind of masterpiece of misreading of my Free Press piece. And I really encourage everyone to just actually read it because it's not very long. And there are just many claims and interpretations of it that make very little sense to me and things that I absolutely don't claim and never wrote. So for example, the idea that Floyd died of an overdose, you'll find that just nowhere in my piece.

Wolfe: But there are two suggestions. I want to engage with this with some depth. There are two suggestions, I believe, in the text of your piece, Coleman, that do mention possible fentanyl overdose, which I don't know, that sure seems like a suggestion that that is the explanation or is a possible explanation.

Hughes: So let me back up. OK? In a normal debate each side has a symmetric task, right? I try to summon more evidence than you that say, "Guns are good." You try to summon more evidence than me that "Guns are bad, right?" And to bring up remote possibilities constitutes a kind of grotesque just asking questions routine, not to name check the show.

But in the context of a criminal trial, the task assigned to each side is highly asymmetric on purpose, right? It's not enough for the majority of evidence to indicate guilt, and it's not even enough for guilt to be highly and substantially more likely to be true because the clear and convincing evidence standard. It has to be the case that there's no other reasonable explanation that can come from the evidence presented at trial. That's the key concept of reasonable doubt. Now, when you make the debate asymmetric in that way, what would amount to a kind of "just asking questions" routine in another context becomes a perfectly legitimate line of thinking.

Now, I want to actually zero in on what I said about fentanyl because I did not use the word overdose, I don't think anywhere in the column. What I said is that he had a potentially lethal dose. Now, the average dose found in someone that dies of fentanyl is 25 nanograms per milliliter. Floyd was found with 11, and overdose cases have been seen as lowest three. So he's around the 25th percentile of what you would expect if it were an overdose death. So to call it a fatal dose would suggest that anyone would die of it. That's why I didn't call it a fatal dose. But to call it a potentially fatal dose, it's a statement of fact. Now, in the context of what I was actually saying, and you can go back and read the column, I say that it's not unreasonable.

I'm always speaking and talking through the language of reasonable doubt, not through from the point of view of giving a definite version of events, right? So I say that it's not unreasonable to think that Chauvin killed him, right? I actually say this in the column. Where Radley takes me to be saying that Chauvin's actions definitely didn't kill him, in fact, I say the opposite. I say it's not unreasonable to think that, but it's also not unreasonable to think that there's another explanation of events here. And overdose was not actually the claim there. The claim was that it's not unreasonable to think that he died of a mix of pre-existing conditions, drugs in his system, and adrenaline caused by the arrest, which was, when push to shove, that was Andrew Baker's theory of the death. And so overdose appears nowhere. The idea that he could not possibly have died of positional asphyxia because it didn't appear in the autopsy, again, just appears nowhere in my column.

In fact, I say it's not unreasonable to think he did die of Chauvin's actions. That's almost an exact quote. And so there's a kind of masterpiece of misreading of my column here, and I think not understanding that I'm looking at it from a reasonable doubt perspective rather than a normal debate is at the core of that misreading.

Wolfe: Radley, how do you look at that?

Balko: This is kind of the way Coleman has reacted to this entire exchange from the first post that I put up. He is literally just asking questions. That's what the whole column is. It's designed to sow doubt about what actually happened and to make people think that Chauvin was somehow railroaded. But there are clear factual errors.

For example, he says that the maximal restraint technique was indeed… Let me get the exact quote here. "According to the documentary and documents I have reviewed, the move was indeed a standard hold called the maximal restraint technique, which the MPD trained its officers to use in situations where handcuffed subjects are combative and still pose a threat to themselves," goes on and on and on. And basically what he's saying is the technique that Chauvin is using on Floyd is the MRT, the maximal restraint technique that is taught in the NPD manual.

Well, he doesn't link to the version of the manual that was in effect at the time of Floyd's death. And in that manual, if you look it up, it does talk about the maximal restraint technique, but it says that it's only to be used in order to administer a device called a hobble, which is basically a way of incapacitating people, after which they're immediately supposed to roll the suspect over on their side into what's called a recovery position. And the reason for that is exactly what happened to George Floyd, positional asphyxia. When someone is handcuffed and on their stomach, it's very easy to restrict their diaphragm in a way that does not allow them to breathe properly, so they can't inhale air deeply enough into the lungs for the body to exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide. What happens is your oxygen levels then plummet and your carbon dioxide levels soar, which becomes fatal pretty quickly.

And this is exactly what the pulmonologist who testified for the state, and other pulmonologists since who've reviewed the evidence that happened to Floyd. What Chauvin did to Floyd is not MRT. And Chauvin pretty definitively says that after he reviewed the documents and the evidence, it clearly was. It wasn't. And if he had read, or if he had provided a link to the manual that he claims to have read and summarized in his column, I think readers would've seen pretty clearly that it wasn't either. It was claimed that that's what Chauvin was doing in the documentary. But in fact, in his appeal, even Chauvin's own attorneys abandoned this argument that Chauvin was trained on it, that basically Chauvin was trained on what we see in the video. In their appeal, they basically say that this technique was trained in general, and therefore, what Chauvin did to Floyd was objectively reasonable, but they could not show that Chauvin was actually trained on this particular technique.

Now, I'd argue, and I think most reasonable people who looked at the policy would argue there's no evidence at all that this is what the MPD trained its officers to do what Chauvin did to Floyd. They train them to use a technique where you put a knee on the side of the neck. You put most of your weight on your foot, but you do that to keep the person in place just long enough to administer this device called a hobble, after which you're supposed to roll the suspect over to their side so they can breathe. That is not what we see in the video. What we see in the video, Floyd is held in that position for nine minutes, including almost three minutes after he loses consciousness. That isn't taught at MPD, it isn't taught at any police department in the country, and that is where Chauvin commits the actual crime here.

Weissmueller: Yeah. Radley, I think that this is central to deciding this question and something that we need to catch our listening and viewing audience up on a little bit. When you're talking about this debate over maximum restraint technique, which police call MRT, this is really what the case is decided on. I kind of see the entire fentanyl issue is a little bit of a red herring. Maybe Coleman disagrees because the fact is whatever was contributing to his inability to breathe, whether it was simply having someone exert pressure on his back, or that in combination with whatever was in his system, if Chauvin was inappropriately restraining him in contradiction to the way he was trained, then that seems like the jury reached the proper verdict. And so we need to dig into that question. And I think the best way to do that is, unfortunately, to review some of the footage. I've watched this horrible tape a few times in preparation for this, and I don't like to play it, but I want to play just a little bit of it and go through point by point-

Hughes: Can I respond to what Radley is saying here?

Weissmueller: Sure. Go ahead and respond, and then we're going to look in detail at what actually transpired here. I'd like to get your thoughts on whether this technique was properly applied or not, Coleman.

Hughes: OK, because Radley's argument has confused me from the start here. There's one argument that what Chauvin is doing just isn't MRT at all. If it's any train technique, it's some other technique, right? And then there's a different incompatible argument that it is MRT, but it's improper MRT. So for example, at many points in your part one, you suggest that it's just not MRT at all, yet the rest of your argument is that it didn't follow the guidelines of MRT properly, i.e., too much pressure, it wasn't indicated because of the situation, Floyd wasn't a threat, these are some of your arguments, and so forth, all of which would be irrelevant if it's not MRT to begin with. In other words, it can't be bad MRT, and also not MRT. I actually don't know which argument Radley's making.

Weissmueller: Let's look at this.

Balko: Those things aren't contradictory at all. It is not.

Weissmueller: Let's look side by side. This is the argument Radley makes in his piece, is that this slide on the right, which is from the training, is supposedly what Chauvin believed he was supposed to do and was not admitted in trial. But what Radley points out is that when you zoom in on these pictures, you see that the officer who's restraining the suspect here has his weight on the ball of his foot.

Hughes: But you would acknowledge that this is MRT, right?

Balko: No, it isn't.

Hughes: Sorry.

Balko: It isn't.

Hughes: This is not MRT because you call it the MRT training slide in your…

Balko: No. What Chauvin is doing to Floyd is not MRT.

Hughes: OK. Sorry. I'm talking about the training slide right now. The training slide is MRT or is an element of MRT. Do you agree with that, or no?

Balko: Yes. The MPD has acknowledged that that slide is part of the MRT training, correct? It also says on the slide, very explicitly, that you're supposed to roll the suspect over into the recovery position as soon as possible. The policy manual also says the purpose of MRT is to administer a hobble….It's supposed to be temporary. It's not something you administer for 9 minutes.

Hughes: I understand that. But here, OK, can we zoom in on the second picture on Chauvin's?

Weissmueller: Yes.

Hughes: So the argument is that he has more weight than the picture in the slide, and therefore it's not MRT, or rather it's improper MRT, right?

Weissmueller: All of his weight appears to be on the neck. And also, Radley is saying that this is an intermediate step to getting them in a recovery position and applying a restraining device called a hobble, which never happened. Therefore, this is negligent, criminally negligent behavior.

Hughes: Yeah. OK. So now, again, in the context of reasonable doubt, the question is, is there another reasonable explanation? Now, I'm not going to say that Radley's is not a reasonable explanation, but that's not the burden of the defense. The burden of the defense is to show that there are other reasonable explanations. So as we know from the transcript, the moment they get George Floyd on the ground, Chauvin says to the partner, or "Do you have a hobble?" Tou Thao goes to get the hobble, which he can't initially find. It's Thomas Lane's hobble. And then as he's looking for the hobble, Lane or someone else realizes that Floyd has blood on his mouth and needs EMS, so they call a code two for EMS. They hike it up to code three. Eventually, Thao finds the hobble. But now that they have EMS coming, Chauvin and Tou decide that actually, we're not going to put on the hobble because it takes about 2 minutes to get on roughly.

And when you have EMS coming, hiked up to code three, you reasonably assume EMS is 3 minutes away. We know that from the trial. And you'd have to take the hobble off in order to apply medical treatment to someone. You can't really put someone easily on a stretcher on their back in the hobble. So the Occam's razor explanation of the decision to, initially the decision to use the hobble, and then the reversal, is that they now had EMS coming. So they were going to hold for EMS. And then obviously, what happened, which is not possible to see without 20/20 hindsight, is that there was, as what two different, at least one of the firefighter witnesses for the prosecution agreed, was an unheard of delay, almost unique and unheard of delay in fire's ability to get there because of a miscommunication with dispatch. And so that's one of the reasons why…. That's why they didn't apply the hobble, right? Or rather, that is certainly a reasonable explanation for why they didn't apply the hobble.

Weissmueller: OK. But Coleman, let me play just a little bit of the video because that does not appear to be what happens in the video.

[Video plays]

Hughes: Anyone can look up the transcript and confirm that this is what happened. Chauvin says, "Do you have a hobble?" Tou Thao goes to get it. But by the time he gets it, the situation has changed because now they've decided to call EMS, and EMS is on the way. And then Tou asks again, "Well, do you need the hobble now?" And they say, "No, we've got EMS coming." Essentially, that's-

Balko: So at what point is it OK to continue to put your knee on George Floyd's back after he's gone limp? After one of your fellow officers tells you he can't find a pulse? After bystanders are saying he can't breathe anymore? And then Chauvin continues to put weight on his back for another 3 minutes after that. Where's the confusion there? What's the Occam's razor explanation for continuing to put your full weight on a man who's slipped to unconsciousness?

Hughes: So my point is that there are multiple explanations. One explanation would be that he's a psychopath, right? In a criminal trial, however, the presence of other reasonable explanations constitutes reasonable doubt. So one reasonable explanation is that they were trained, as Johnny Marshall testified, who is the prosecution star witness on use of force MPD policy, that there are situations where you hold someone in the prone restraint, prone body weight restraint, and do not move them to the side recovery position until the scene is code four, meaning everything's safe and everything under control, the scene is safe.

Balko: It's hard to resist when you're unconscious. How does that mean the scene isn't safe?

Hughes: The code four does not merely include…a person not resisting, but also consists in a scene being secure and safe. So when you have an angry hostile crowd, they're taught that that's not necessarily code four. And as further evidence of that, when EMS, rather, when paramedics arrived before the fire truck…. The paramedics arrived whenever it was around 8:26, 8:27. They had two options. They could stay there and immediately start medical work on Floyd, or they can do, and we know this from trial, they can do what's called a load and go, or they get him in the ambulance, and then move the ambulance somewhere safe. They chose to do a load and go because they perceived that the scene was not code four because of the angry crowd.

In other words, if the paramedics perceived that it was not code four and chose to do a load and go, delaying giving medical aid to Floyd, then certainly the cops at the scene perceived that it wasn't code four. And their training is that there are situations where they can hold someone in prone restraint and not move to the side recovery until the scene is code four. So that is a reasonable explanation, not the only one. But in the context of a criminal trial, the presence of such a reasonable explanation can be itself exculpatory.

Balko: The key word there is reasonable. Literally, the hostility of the crowd was people telling them that you are killing this man, trying to tell them, trying to warn them that what they were doing to Floyd was dangerous. As far as I know, nobody from the crowd struck any of the officers, threw anything at the officers, [they] were literally telling them that what they were doing was killing George Floyd. If that's reason to continue to use the amount of force you are using, then just about any amount of force is going to be reasonable. Chauvin, literally, ignored warnings from his fellow officers. He ignored warning from bystanders. He ignored warnings from Floyd himself. I don't think you can say that because people saw what was happening and were angry about it, that gives you an excuse to continue doing what you're doing.

Hughes: So it's not a matter of what appears reasonable to you or me, it's a matter of whether he was doing something within training. So I have a few points to make here. One is I don't think you can say it was unreasonable to worry about the safety of the scene when the paramedics who came decided on a load-and-go and delayed treatment because they perceived the scene-

Wolfe: That was after…. But hold on, there's a sequence of events that I think matters here. That's after Chauvin had kept his weight on George Floyd's back for quite a long period of time, right? The paramedics' assessment of the situation in its wholeness and its fullness is different than how the scene was merely four minutes prior. How do you factor that into it? The paramedics' assessment shouldn't be gospel here.

Hughes: Well, the paramedics' assessment, they're coming on a scene. They're seeing that there's a hostile, angry crowd-

Wolfe: After. But the crowd was seemingly, without having been there, seemingly less hostile earlier in the act before it had become so clear that Chauvin-

Hughes: Two minutes, right? We're talking about a 3-minute difference.

Wolfe: Three minutes.

Hughes: Yeah, about three minutes.

Wolfe: No, three very consequential minutes, right? The crowd was-

Hughes: The crowd was crescendoing throughout this, and they peak when around the ambulance gets there. But again-

Wolfe: The paramedics' assessment of the safety of the scene might have been different than the assessment of the safety of the scene 3 minutes prior, right?

Weissmueller: They seem to be peaking when they notice that he has gone limp. And that's one of the key questions that Radley raises in his piece that I'd like you to answer just directly, which is that you did not mention in the piece that Chauvin kept kneeling on him after he went limp and had no pulse. Isn't that a pretty crucial piece of information?

Hughes: OK. There are four different arguments floating here [that] I think I have to address. So that one right there, again, Mercil…. It's not a matter of what you or I think looks reasonable. We're talking about putting someone in prison for murder for an unlawful use of force. So it's a matter of whether they were authorized and trained to do certain things. And Mercil testified that they're trained that there are situations where you can hold someone you've just made unconscious even after they're unconscious. This is what they're trained, that you can continue to hold someone in certain situations even after they're unconscious.

And it's possible there's a reasonable explanation where they're also trained to worry that someone who has just gone unconscious later comes back and starts fighting twice as hard. And this was all in the trial, this is all in their training….By the way, they're also trained that if you're talking, you're breathing. I'm not saying that this is true. I'm not saying that you or I believe this. I'm saying that this is what they were trained on.

Balko: That's a common myth in policing, but that's not what they're trained on….

Hughes: The defense asked Johnny Mercil, "Have you been trained or do you train that if you're talking, you're breathing?" And he said, "Yes."

Balko: You're taking deep hypotheticals….

Hughes: No, these are not deep hypotheticals….

Balko: "We don't train neck restraints with officers in service, and as far as I know, we never have." That's a direct quote from Mercil. You're paraphrasing Mercil. When asked, "You should use the least amount of force necessary to meet your goals. You can use a lower level of force to meet your objectives at safer and better"-

Hughes: You're quoting from a different-

Balko: He specifically said that what Chauvin did to Floyd is not taught by MPD. He explicitly said that.

Hughes: Yeah, yeah, he said a lot of things. He also said that a knee on the neck is something that happens in use of force and is not unauthorized. That's a double negative. I was quoting from a different part of Mercil's where he was asked directly-

Balko: You're quoting from a question the defense posed in the context of hypothetical deliberately to get him to say the kinds of things that you're quoting him from now when he was asked directly-

Hughes: No, it wasn't a hypothetical…it was a simple question, "Do you teach or train, or are you trained that if you're talking, you can breathe?" He said-

Balko: When he was asked specifically about what Chauvin did to Floyd, he said over and over that it was not trained and that it was excessive force.

Hughes: Oh, and by the way, and Tou Thao also said in his BCA, I don't know if this is called the position or whatever, that, "Yes, we're taught, if you can talk, you can breathe." I'm not saying this is good training, but that's part of my point is that if police officers are trained on all of these various things that you can hold someone in prone and not put them inside recovery position until the scene is code four, and that code four consists of an angry and potentially building crowd. And again, we can't judge in 20/20 hindsight, you have to understand that, you have to allow for their worry that a crowd is building, and it in fact was building.

Wolfe: I want to cut through to a slightly different issue. I want to go to the positional asphyxia point in a moment, and Zach will take us there. But one thing that keeps coming to mind as you guys both talk is, Coleman, your description of your piece and your assessment of the facts seems to really be quite centered around the idea of whether or not this trial was conducted fairly.

But the other component to this, which I think is important to consider here, is whether or not The Fall of Minneapolis was a convincing piece of journalism because it's not just about the facts at hand in the trial, it's also about whether The Fall of Minneapolis was good. Because at least my interpretation of your piece, and please correct me if I'm wrong, was maybe not fawning of the documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis, but certainly appreciative, certainly greeting it in a positive light, receiving it favorably. Whereas to me, it wasn't a very convincing piece of journalism in part because of glaring conflicts of interest and glaring omissions. How do you reconcile that component of your piece?

Hughes: I'm not going to defend the documentary. I didn't make the documentary. The documentary provoked my Free Press piece, but it was not the evidentiary basis for it. My claims are not [inaudible 00:38:40] it's claims.

Balko: You don't cite anything other than the documentary.

Wolfe: You cite a bunch of different complaints.

Hughes: What do you mean I don't cite anything other than the documentary? How many hyperlinks are there? There are dozens.

Balko: OK, but you didn't consult with any outside experts, any specialists. It's all based on claims. You actually don't make any claims that aren't also made in the documentary.

Hughes: That's definitely not true. I definitely make claims that aren't made in the documentary, several.

Wolfe: Yeah. Well, maybe the better way to handle that is, Coleman, which forensic analysis, … which forensic pathologists, which people who weren't used in the documentary did you consult with? And did you find anything over the course of your reporting that really contradicted some of the narrative presented in the documentary?

Hughes: Look, I watched the documentary. I've been paying attention to this case since 2020. The documentary provoked me writing the piece, but it was probably 5 percent of my research for the piece…in terms of my time spent. I talked to lawyers in particular, I didn't talk to forensic pathologists, which I understand Balko faults me for. But most of it was reading and calls with lawyers, making sure that I understand the legal and criminal law aspects of it.

Wolfe: Did you find anything in the course of your research that cast doubt on anything that you'd seen in The Fall of Minneapolis? Was there anything that left you scratching your head being like, "Well, that is different than what they said. I totally disagree with their framing of that"?

Hughes: There were definitely witnesses that seemed… There were some sort of claims about the FBI's involvement that I thought were strangely conspiratorial and suggestive and so forth. But my intention was not to do a review of the documentary. I think the nicest thing, if you want to call it that, I said about it was that it threw doubt on two claims, namely that Chauvin committed felony assault, which is one of the elements of felony murder, and that he caused Floyd's death, which the documentary did, however imperfectly….I don't doubt that there were many misleading witnesses, misleading statements. I would have to do a kind of critique of the documentary separately to parse out my disagreements, but I don't remember off the top of my head everything.

Wolfe: The other thing that I did want to ask just really fast because I do think a casual reader would be forgiven for thinking that you somewhat endorse some of the conclusions come to you and the quality of journalism done by The Fall of Minneapolis. One thing that struck me as a really glaring omission from your piece was your description of Liz Collin and Bob Kroll, her husband. Liz Collin, the producer, played a massive role in making this documentary, and the fact that there wasn't really disclosure of her relationship with Bob Kroll, her husband, who headed up the police union in Minneapolis, and who also had a pretty stunning record of disciplinary reports as a police officer, including many, many allegations of improper treatment of people that he interacted with.

How could you not represent that? Because at least… I'm obviously a libertarian, I'm biased to be against public sector unions, but that conflict of interest seems really relevant.

Hughes: Well, the piece was about Chauvin's trial, primarily, and as it was provoked by the documentary, I described the producer and the director of it. And again, it was a 2,000-word piece, I gave a cursory explanation of who I understood them to be, and I don't think I had to go into a deep dive on who Bob Kroll was for the reader to get the… Again, the thesis of my essay was that Chauvin was falsely convicted.

Wolfe: There is a paragraph about Collin and Kroll, specifically Collin, being pushed out of her job as a local news anchor and there being a public cancellation of this couple. And you literally say here-

Hughes: That's because she was the producer or director of the documentary. Had Bob Kroll been listed, I would've done something on him too.

Wolfe: To quote directly from your piece, "Both Kroll and Collin received an intense cancellation, including a protest outside their home, which led WCCO to push Collin out of her anchoring job, and eventually led to her leaving WCCO and joining Alpha News." OK, I'm sorry, but this is a portion, you're already devoting a significant chunk of airtime to this. And at least to me, I would feel misled if I got all the way through this piece and didn't get a sense of the fact that Bob Kroll has quite a record. In addition to being the police union leader, he also has a pretty significant record and lots of complaints against him, including several lawsuits.

Hughes: OK. Well, I consider that a difference between us because if I was reading a piece titled what mine was titled, "What Really Happened to George Floyd," I would not feel misled that it didn't go on a side quest about Bob Kroll.

Wolfe: But this is not a side quest; this is materially relevant to the quality of journalism produced because you simply have to disclose these types of relationships. And this is not a simple cancellation….I am as anti-cancellation as many people, you know that in our sort of corner. And to me, the way that this paragraph read was that Collin and Kroll were canceled for the heresy of possibly examining a revisionist narrative about George Floyd, as opposed to the fact that Kroll, he's a political lightning rod in Minneapolis.

Hughes: So I include the fact that he was head of the police union, right?

Wolfe: Yeah.

Hughes: So does that not reveal the conflict of interest right there? You would already understand there that he's a cop, he may have a pro-cop bias.

Balko: But you say cancellation, which it certainly implies that he was removed from his position for things that he said. And what actually happened was there was a groundswell for him to be removed because he was in an actual policy making position. He was a guy with a long disciplinary record, including record of abuse of force and allegations of racism. And he was in a position inside of the union where he was negotiating the very policies, the training policies that we're talking about here. So to say he was canceled implies he was attacked for his free speech; he was actually attacked for his record.

Hughes: Were those allegations of racism proven?

Balko: Well, there are lots and lots of them. But part of the problem, as I think you probably know if you read the DOJ report, is that there was a history of MPD of not holding officers accountable, including not even investigating allegations. But yeah, the city settled several lawsuits involving use of force against him, in which he had misused force.

Wolfe: Yeah, I'm more involved in the misuse of force allegations than the, I guess, white-power motorcycle-gang allegations. I'm more interested in the actual material harms he might have done to victims, including the settlements. But all of these things just seem like an easy thing to hyperlink out or an easy thing to add a sentence about because, I don't know, I could see why a wife of somebody who's in that position would want to make an exculpatory documentary over it. Maybe that's me being overly suspicious or overly cynical, but that conflict of interest just seems so important.

Weissmueller: I'll just say that on this question, I am more on Coleman's side. I feel like I got a sense of who Kroll was, and it wasn't as central to me as the argument he was making. But the points that you're raising about the similarity of the argument made by the documentary and made by Coleman, what I found persuasive about Radley's rebuttal to this was that both your argument and the documentary were a bit asymmetrical in terms of presenting the extent of training that Derek Chauvin likely was exposed to.

And so you're raising these questions of like, could there have been other contributing factors to Floyd's death? Was there confusion about what he was supposed to do in that situation? But then Radley goes into great detail about this issue of positional asphyxia, which apparently is a well-known problem among police departments. He embeds a 2013 NYPD training video, which I want to play a little bit of just so our viewers can get a sense of what the mainstream theory is as to why George Floyd died in that position. Whether or not Derek Chauvin's knee was on his neck or between his shoulder blades, it's more about the position that he was put in for several minutes. So let me play a little bit of that video, and then I'd like to get you to respond to the idea that you left this out of the argument.

[VIDEO]

Weissmueller: So that kind of seems like the most straightforward explanation as to what happened here, and that was from more than 20 years ago, implying that this is a well-known problem among police departments. Isn't that fairly damning of Chauvin's behavior, and why was that not included in your argument?

Hughes: So in my argument, I'll reiterate here, I said, it's not unreasonable to think that Chauvin's actions caused the death of Floyd…or rather caused Floyd's labored breathing. That's close to an exact quote from my piece, I said it's not unreasonable. And the reason I said that is because it's not the defense's burden to disprove that positional asphyxia killed him, it's the prosecution's burden to say that there is no other reasonable explanation other than explanations that implicate Chauvin's actions.

Now I'm going to give you a reasonable explanation that doesn't implicate physical pressure from Chauvin onto Floyd, and that would be Dr. Andrew Baker's explanation for his death. Now, before I get to that, let me just deal with the manner of death vs. cause of death issue. So, Radley, you fault me for not mentioning that the manner of death Dr. Baker found was homicide and rather only talking about the cause of death.

And you say in your piece, I think, that the manner of death is a legal determination, and cause of death is medical. Baker actually says the opposite twice in his testimony, but you may be using those words differently, so I assume you're using those words differently than he is. But what Baker meant to convey by that is saying manner of death is irrelevant to the legal determination of homicide. He actually says they belong to two different worlds entirely.

Cause of death is entirely relevant because it's an element of the crime. In order for Chauvin to be convicted, Chauvin's actions had to be not just a but for a cause, but according to the jury instructions, a substantial cause, which is a somewhat higher bar. And Baker's explanation of cause of death, which he explained multiple times in his testimony, was that when you combined Floyd's preexisting conditions, 90 percent constricting of one artery, 75 percent constricting of another, you combine his already weakened system to begin with, with the adrenaline caused by the arrest, his heart and lungs stopped working.

So that explanation does not include physical pressure from Chauvin as a but for or a substantial cause of his death. That is also a reasonable explanation of what killed Floyd. So in the context of a criminal trial that is exculpatory, or ought to be.

Balko: That isn't what he says. What he says under cause of death is, "That it was cardiopulmonary arrest. His heart and lungs stopped working-"

Hughes: I'm talking about his testimony when he elaborated.

Balko: "… during law enforcement subdural restraint and neck compression." He talks about restraint and neck compression in the cause of death in the actual autopsy report. Also, I wanted to bring this up earlier, I do think it's deeply misleading to talk about Baker's autopsy as the only complete autopsy to contrast it to the one done by the medical examiner hired by Floyd's family, which I agree was flawed.

But then not to include in your piece that Baker himself determined that…the manner of death was homicide and that he testified for the prosecution. Neither of those things appear in your piece, you build him up as the reasonable, sensible antidote to public hysteria about Derek Chauvin. But you don't mention that he did say it was a homicide, and he did testify for the prosecution.

Hughes: Baker explained in his testimony, as I said, that manner of death is irrelevant to the legal determination of homicide. He said they belong to, "two different worlds entirely." OK. So whereas the reason I talked about cause of death and didn't include manner of death is because cause of death is literally in elements of the crime, that's what's germane here. And when you-

Balko: You also say that positional asphyxia is not mentioned in the autopsy report, which pretty strongly suggests that you are arguing that positional asphyxia was not a potential cause of death here.

Hughes: No, that's not an accurate inference at all.

Balko: Why would you say it wasn't mentioned in the autopsy report if you didn't want people to think it wasn't a possible cause of death?

Hughes: OK, why would I want them to draw that inference? But then elsewhere saying in my essay, it's not unreasonable to think that Chauvin caused his labor breathing. You're failing to understand, again, that my whole piece is from the perspective of reasonable doubt. I'm not claiming definitively that I know what killed Floyd, I'm not claiming to have a truth here. I'm claiming that in the context of a criminal trial, the presence of a reasonable explanation is itself exculpatory because of the asymmetric task assigned to the prosecution and defense.

Wolfe: Your piece is a counternarrative piece though, right? The entire concept of it, as I see it, is to challenge two components of the traditional media narrative about George Floyd's death. I feel like you're doing a little bit of this, throwing your hands up, plausible deniability type thing.

Hughes: No, no, can I clarify this?

Wolfe: Yeah, please.

Hughes: Most people who have been to law school who read my piece, understood it completely differently than how many others understood it because they're trained to think in terms of reasonable doubt. So when I say things like, "It's not unreasonable that Chauvin caused his breathing, but it's also not unreasonable that his breathing was caused by this," people who are sensitized to think in terms of reasonable doubt understand exactly what I'm saying.

I'm not actually definitively ruling between these two things, but the presence of multiple reasonable explanations is itself exculpatory in our system. Whereas other people take me to be arguing for the second of those two interpretations as a definitive truth, which is not the defense's burden.

Balko: To say most people who went to law school read your piece differently, I talked to a lot of lawyers who were not at all happy about your column.

Hughes: They may not have been, but they certainly wouldn't fault me for coming from a perspective of reasonable doubt.

Wolfe: The other thing that's a little bit ironic here is that I don't think The Free Press exactly brands itself as the publication only to be read by those who have attended law school and successfully received their J.D., right?

Hughes: That's not what I'm arguing.

Wolfe: I'm not saying that it is, but I am saying that you're writing to a general audience, and so I wonder whether people should be faulted for taking it as one thing, and you're saying, "Well, really there's a misunderstanding here where general audience, yes, they're not quite getting what I'm after, but those who have attended law school do understand what I'm getting after." And it's like, well, wait a second, then, it's possibly not a successfully done piece if the vast majority of people perceive it as-

Hughes: I wouldn't say the vast majority of people perceived it in the way-

Wolfe: I guess I don't know what percentage of The Free Press' readers have gone to law school, but I thought it was a little bit more of a general audience publication. In fact, I thought it was a little bit of an antidote to the elitism of the mainstream media.

Hughes: So again, my pointing out that positional asphyxia… I don't think I said "positional asphyxia" wasn't in the autopsy, I said "asphyxia," in general. My reason for pointing that out, which is the genesis of this sidebar here, is that obviously asphyxia doesn't need to necessarily have signs on a corpse, someone can die of asphyxia without there being signs of asphyxia.

But in the context of a criminal trial, again, where it's not a 50-50 debate, and the defendant is presumed innocent, then it is relevant in the context of a criminal trial that the only complete autopsy ever done turned up no evidence of it. The entire burden is on the prosecution to prove that things happened beyond a reasonable doubt. So in that context-

Balko: Here's the thing, positional asphyxia does not leave signs-

Hughes: I didn't say positional asphyxia.

Balko: I know you didn't because my guess is that you weren't aware of positional asphyxia before you wrote this.

Hughes: No, I very much was.

Balko: You emphasized the fact that Chauvin's knee was not on Floyd's neck, which implies that you think that you have to restrict airways in order to die of asphyxia, which is common, it's what's promoted in the documentary, it's what lots of Chauvin promoters have said online over and over again-

Hughes: I only centered on that because it was the center of the media narrative.

Balko: OK. But that isn't what was argued at trial. If your point is that Chauvin didn't get a fair trial, why wouldn't you argue about positional asphyxia instead of just general asphyxia?

Hughes: The piece was also about the public conversation and public understanding of what happened.

Balko: OK, but you're pivoting back and forth between the two.

Weissmueller: Radley, could you explain that? Because I found your historical digression into this term called "burking" very revelatory or illuminating in terms of understanding why putting pressure on someone's back or neck in that way would not necessarily show up in an autopsy. Could you explain that a little bit for the people who haven't read your piece?

Balko: Yeah. So positional asphyxia is this idea that you can die of suffocation, or of lack of oxygen, or of a spike in CO2 without someone pressing on your windpipe, or without someone physically restricting your airways. If your diaphragm is restricted in a way that you can't inhale deep enough for the air to get deep into your lungs, where the sacs called alveoli exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, you can die of suffocation relatively quickly. You can't cover police issues and not be aware of positional asphyxia, so I knew about that, but I didn't know about the history. And there's a term called burking that's used to describe this process, and it goes back to 19th century Scotland.

Two guys were selling cadavers to medical schools for dissection. And originally, they were doing it by digging up graves, which is also illegal, but the medical schools looked the other way, but then they discovered that it was a lot easier to just kill people and sell them the bodies. And the way they did it is they would wait for the bars to close and wait for drunk people to come stumbling out, and they would tackle them, and then one would sit on the victim's back while the other person put their hand over their mouth, and within a few minutes, the person couldn't breathe.

Now, when the hands are over your mouth, you could still suck in air, but if you have that combined with the pressure on your back, you can't inhale deeply enough to actually get oxygen into your system. And so this term called burking has become shorthand for this type of positional asphyxia. By the way, positional asphyxia is not controversial outside of a police custody context. Kids have died of positional asphyxia in car seats, people in accidents or falls. If you've fallen a way that your diaphragm is restricted and you can't dislodge yourself from that position, it's not an uncommon way to die.

What's happened in police custody issues, and this is one of the things that really, I think, columns like Coleman's can be destructive, is that there's been this concerted effort on the part of law enforcement groups, in particular Axon, the company that makes TASER, to wave away positional asphyxia as a possible cause of death for in-custody deaths. And instead, they promoted this condition called excited delirium, which has no real basis in science, and it's been long disputed. It's never been endorsed by the American Medical Association or the World Health Organization, but there's this concerted effort from this network of researchers paid by Axon to excuse in-custody deaths by positional asphyxia as excited delirium.

Excited delirium is this really broad condition that includes dozens of symptoms that you can just pick and choose from, and it's become really destructive. It's not just that it excuses officers like Chauvin after the fact, it's that…they're trying to get to the point where police don't even have to guard against these deaths, they don't have to move people into the recovery position because these people argue that positional asphyxia isn't a thing, that it isn't a way that people die in police custody. And so it's basically a recipe for more deaths, more deaths that could have been prevented. And that's where I think this documentary is particularly dangerous because it advances this idea.

Look, I know I'm rambling here, but if you look at, for example, the excited delirium training that MPD gave its officers, it includes a photo of the Incredible Hulk because excited delirium, two of the symptoms are superhuman strength and imperiousness to pain. Now, that isn't an invitation for police to use more and more excessive force, I don't know what is. Now, they also taught that suspects should be rolled over onto their side and they also do teach positional asphyxia, but when you have these two competing theories of excited delirium and positional asphyxia, and police can choose from one, and one's clearly legitimate and one isn't, I think it's dangerous to spread the idea that positional asphyxia is not a common way for people to die in police custody.

Hughes: OK, I think I need to get one point in here. As I've said before, it is not unreasonable to think that Floyd died of positional asphyxia, but it's also not unreasonable, and I'd like to get a really direct response about this, to think that he died of Baker's full explanation.

So yes, the top-line cause, Baker says law enforcement subdual, so on, neck restrain, and so forth, and when asked to expand on what that meant multiple times in his testimony, he said that he believes the arrest led to an adrenaline surge, the arrest and the struggle led to an adrenaline surge, which taxed Floyd's cardiopulmonary system and led him to expire. The adrenaline was the sense in which the law enforcement subdual caused as a, and he used the analogy of taking heart medication and being allergic to it, so caused, in that sense, in the sense that it wouldn't cause in a normal person, the death. So this is another reasonable explanation that does not include the level of physical pressure being applied by Chauvin.

Balko: Except when Baker was specifically asked about positional asphyxia, he said that he would defer to pulmonologists on that matter, that he wasn't qualified to make that diagnosis, which I think is a very humble and good thing for a medical examiner to admit. This is one of the things I point out, is that this…I think Coleman and other people are right in that Chauvin was treated differently than most police officers are in these cases, but he was treated differently in the sense that they did bring in a pulmonologist, they did bring in experts beyond the medical examiner, they consulted with people because there was a lot of public pressure to get to the truth in this case.

Hughes: What's relevant when the bar is raised to reasonable doubt is, is there another reasonable explanation? And was there persuasive evidence presented at trial that ruled out as a reasonable explanation the idea that the arrest and the struggle caused an adrenaline surge which killed Floyd? I don't think there was.

Balko: Well, yes, one medical examiner mentioned the adrenaline surge. He also did not rule out positional asphyxia, and other witnesses said-

Hughes: Well, again, that's not the standard in a criminal trial. In a criminal trial, when you have multiple reasonable explanations and you've concluded that they're all reasonable, you have the only guy that did the autopsy saying it was the adrenaline from the struggle mixed with the underlying conditions, well, that is supposed to be a set of facts which is exculpatory on the issue of causation, which was not just but for causation, but substantial causation. I don't think that there's a great counterargument to this point. The fact that he wasn't an expert in positional asphyxia doesn't rule out that his explanation was also reasonable and did not involve physical pressure and physical weight as a but for cause from Chauvin.

Balko: But he didn't say that was a but for a cause. What he said was from what he found in the autopsy, but he also said he wasn't qualified to make a determination on what actually killed him, that he would defer to a pulmonologist on the issue of positional asphyxia. You're interpreting Baker's refusal to diagnose positional asphyxia as him ruling it out.

Hughes: No, no, no, no. It's not for the defense to rule out positional asphyxia. That's not the defense's burden. The defense can admit positional asphyxia as perfectly reasonable.

Balko: I'm not saying it is, I'm saying the medical examiner that you're quoting didn't rule it out.

Hughes: I'm talking about from the perspective of a jury, not from Baker's perspective. The jury has now received a reasonable explanation from the guy that did the-

Balko: It's not a reasonable explanation. You're saying it's a reasonable explanation.

Hughes: You don't think it's a reasonable explanation that the adrenaline taxed the cardio? You don't think Baker's explanation was reasonable?

Balko: Medical examiners…Well, first of all, I don't think he's saying that that is what killed Floyd. I think he's saying that that was-

Hughes: Well, that's his leading theory.

Balko: Oh, he was explaining what he found in the initial autopsy report. After he looked at the videos, he determined that it was a homicide. And so you're taking one very, just like you did with the training on the MRT, you're taking one point of his testimony that came during defense questioning.

Hughes: No, I'm not.

Balko: Well, the jury…didn't find it reasonable.

Hughes: Well, that's a circular argument. Juries can get things wrong.

Balko: Of course, they can.

Hughes: Or else I wouldn't be arguing this.

Weissmueller: So it sounds like, Coleman, that you're not really backing down from much of what you put out there. I do want to ask one more question about that before I take us to a slightly different topic, which is the trial itself. Just given what we've discussed here, some of the issues that Radley has raised, is there anything, if you were doing this over, is there anything that you would present differently? If the goal of your article was to try to evaluate this from a more legalistic perspective and say, "Was there reasonable doubt?" the critique that I'm hearing and partly putting forward is that there wasn't a full picture for the reader to evaluate that because the positional asphyxia issue wasn't in there. The extent of the details of the MRT training that tell people to turn them over on their side in a recovery position, and it's an intermediary step toward-

Wolfe: You see the hobbles, as well.

Weissmueller: … a hobble, if you were redoing this, would you construct it any differently?

Hughes: Well, I would've realized that there's no way to write an op-ed length piece here that is going to include details so as to preempt the critique that you are intentionally hiding things from people. So I would've submitted to my editors that this is not going to be an op-ed length piece or anything close to it. We're going to do the 10,000-word version and we're going to include everything, including things I think are of dubious relevance so as to preempt the critique that I'm hiding this from the reader.

Wolfe: Hold on. It was a 2,000-word piece, was it not?

Hughes: Yeah.

Wolfe: When I think of op-ed length, I think of 750 words or maybe 1,000 max. You had-

Hughes: It became 2,000 because I couldn't do it in op-ed length, but in general, it was meant to be shorter. That was the end result.

Wolfe: But this is a little bit of a cop-out, right? That's not an answer to the actual question, right?

Hughes: No, Radley wrote 30,000 words about this, which is the length of a short film.

Wolfe: Yeah, Radley's word count is way too long. If I were his editor, I would be annoyed. That's different than the actual question.

Hughes: That's the level of detail that Radley feels is warranted about this issue. And certainly, the response I'll write to Radley will be much longer, as well.

Wolfe: Well, Radley could've cut a solid 500 words of snark, but the thing that I am trying to-

Hughes: There are things that are left out of Radley's piece that I find egregious we can talk about, as well.

Wolfe: But all of this is sidestepping the actual thing, which is that this is an opportunity, albeit a venue that you might not want to do it in, but this is an opportunity to say whether there's anything substantive you wish you had communicated differently or anything that Radley, with his vast experience reporting on this beat, convinced you of. Is there anything?

Hughes: Oh, OK. Yeah. So that was your first question and I felt I had to respond to Radley's other points, so I actually never got around to it. So I think Radley's most useful contribution and the most useful thing that came out of this exchange for me was understanding why the MPD manual appear to contradict itself about the hobble. That's why I omitted the hobble from my piece in the beginning, is because, as I was researching it, many points in the manual seemed to imply that the hobble was the whole endpoint of MRT, but on the other hand, there were these two pesky clauses, 1 and 1A, which appeared to suggest the exact opposite. I didn't know what to make of it. I talked to other people who paid attention to it. They all had theories, but no facts.

And furthermore, I know Balko, Radley, you expressed your theory of this contradiction in part one, where you essentially say there's an obvious reason for the omission, which is that the manual doesn't authorize MRT for any other purpose than to administer the hobble. And I considered that as I was writing the piece. The problem for me was that it explained the if then clause, but it actually didn't explain the clause which still said that there, depending on the type of restraint, you'll place them into the following recovering positions.

If you look at clause one, you see it….So prior to this, there are many clauses, as you know, that strongly imply that the whole point of the MRT is to get to the hobble, but then there's this section. As soon as reasonably possible, any person restrained using MRT who's in the prone position shall be placed in the following positions, plural, based on the type of restraint used. Now, that sentence only makes sense in the context of multiple types of restraints. Sorry. And 1A says, "If the hobble restraint is used, the person shall be placed in the side recovery position." And it seems like there should be a 1B, but there isn't. And so I read this and it just is a contradiction and it didn't make sense to me.

And Radley, your theory of the contradiction, as expressed in part one, was that they just considered it obvious that the hobble was the only restraint device. So when they say if the hobble restraint device is used, they're not implying there's some other device, they're just saying, if it's used, that's MRT and then do the following thing. And I had considered that, but the problem is it still didn't make sense of the previous clause, which still only made sense in the context of multiple restraint devices.

Furthermore, I knew from Johnny Mercil's testimony that there were whole techniques that were just unlisted in the manual, like the ground control, the ground defense program, and all of these other things that are just nowhere in the manual. So that opened the possibility of just unknown unknowns, i.e. authorized techniques that are nowhere in the manual for a person like me to find.

So I just said, "I don't understand this," and rather than write something untrue about the role of the hobble in MRT, I'm just going to omit it. And now we know that all of these theories were wrong, including Radley's offered in part one. It turns out, because of this guy, Matt Wiener, we now know that it was just a typo from a holdover of a previous version that did have multiple restraints. In other words, the language, it's not that the writers of those clauses considered it obvious that the hobble was the only authorized restraint, it's that they considered the opposite obvious and failed to change the language.

Wolfe: That's a little bit of a fake discussion, right? It's like I was wrong, but also, so was my critic.

Hughes: No, no, no, no. It's not.

Weissmueller: But Coleman, let me just…one detail that's very important, I think, is that you're saying that there's other restraints that could be applied, but there's nothing that implies that just indefinitely holding someone in this position without monitoring them, getting them into the safety recovery position and applying some sort of restraint-

Hughes: OK, we're shifting topics right now. I can deal with that in a moment, but I just want to land the point here. The reason I omitted the hobble was not to pull the wool over the eyes of my readers, it's because the manual contained a direct contradiction about the hobble and I didn't know what to make of it. And there were only theories and no facts to support them until after Radley's part….Radley, you chose the route of confidently putting forth your version of why there was a contradiction.

Balko: And you are just so slippery, so slippery.

Hughes: No, no. It's not slippery.

Balko: The one thing that you would change-

Hughes: The bad faith here is incredible.

Balko: … about my report is this thing where I was wrong and I arrogantly put a…theory that was wrong.

Hughes: I didn't say arrogantly.

Balko: First of all, I wasn't wrong. The whole point was that you cannot conclude from the manual that, because there isn't a sub point B, that that means you can kneel on someone indefinitely-

Hughes: I didn't include that.

Balko: … until they're unconscious.

Hughes: Nowhere did I say that.

Balko: No, but that was my point. My point was not to speculate about what…. The broader point was that, look, the documentary people went on Glenn Loury Show, Colin and show, and said that the fact that there wasn't a point B meant that, because Chauvin didn't use a hobble, he could use the MRT for as long as he wanted. That's how it was interpreted. That's what I was responding to.

Hughes: So my point is that you and me, none of us knew why the manual contradicted itself until after we wrote about this. I chose to omit the topic, which what I should've done, what would've been better than what both of us did, is to simply acknowledge the puzzle and say, "We don't know why." And then we found out-

Balko: But you also didn't even link to the manual. You didn't let your readers read for themselves. They had to rely on your summary.

Hughes: I know you don't believe my explanation for why I didn't do this, why I didn't link to the manual, but I've already told you why I didn't.

Wolfe: Why didn't you?

Hughes: Because I didn't know that you could, believe it or not, and I don't care if you do, I literally didn't know that you could link to a [Google] Drive and insert it there without exposing the underlying email address, and I'm paranoid about my-

Wolfe: Wasn't it also publicly available, though?

Hughes: I only had it in PDF form. I found it was difficult to find a link to.

Balko: I found it pretty easily.

Coleman Hughes: I had it in PDF form.

Balko: It was second or third in the Google search, but …

Hughes: OK.

Weissmueller: OK. I do feel that we've reached an impasse in terms of evaluating Coleman's article. I did want to ask, Radley and Coleman, if you want to weigh in on what you think of the aftermath of George Floyd's death, particularly its effect on policing. And to tee that up, I want to play an excerpt from the documentary where they have a series of police officers complaining that this is going to demoralize them and make their job harder. So let's play that clip real quick, and I'd like to get Radley's reaction first and then have Coleman weigh in.

Weissmueller: Radley, will Derek Chauvin's conviction improve policing in America, has it done so or is it going to scare police from doing their jobs, as this officer implies, or is the effect going to be negligible?

Balko: I think, in the grand scheme of things, it's going to be negligible. I think Floyd's death and the resulting protests did move the needle on a number of these issues and it made people more sympathetic to the idea of holding officers more accountable. We did see some real substantive reforms after the summer of 2020, including cities and a couple of states banning no-knock raids, banning choke holds. We saw some movement toward police accountability, but as I talk about it in the third part of the piece, a lot of the real substantive reforms we saw were behind the scenes.

So for example, California, the legislature passed a prohibition on excited delirium as a cause of death. We saw the last two medical groups that still endorsed excited delirium, revoked that endorsement, the National Association of Medical Examiners and the Emergency Physicians Group. I can't think of the proper name. But I also think that there's been a backlash. A lot of legislatures, particularly in red states, the past laws restricting protest, removing criminal and civil liability for people who hit protesters with their cars. We've seen here in Tennessee, for example, in Nashville, we overwhelmingly passed a civilian review board for the police department. The legislature then passed a bill basically overruling that. We've seen that in a lot of states where conservative state legislatures have basically rolled back reforms passed by cities.

As far as the ability of police to do their jobs, look, I think there is something to the so-called Ferguson Effect, which is this idea that, after big protests, police are more reluctant to proactively police. In some cases, I think that's a good thing. In other cases, it can have detrimental effects. I think it's not a particularly flattering portrayal of police that, if they're criticized and if they're held accountable for abusive force, that they're going to stop doing their jobs and they're going to allow crime to take over cities or neighborhoods.

As for the particular documentary, it's designed to make us feel a lot of sympathy and empathy for MPD officers. And look, I know, during the protests, police officers took a lot of abuse, including, I'm sure, a lot of officers who didn't deserve it and didn't have a long disciplinary record, but what we did see in the DOJ report is that Minneapolis, like a lot of cities that have seen protests, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, Ferguson, there is a long, well-documented history of abuse, of corruption, of not just abuse of force, but also a complete inability to hold the worst actors accountable in these systems. That DOJ report on Minneapolis was damning.

And so when you read that, you can see where some of that anger came from. And of course, the documentary doesn't address or try to justify what that report found because there is no justification for it. That doesn't mean that abuse of particular police officers, or any police officer, for that matter, is justified, but it does mean that there is a real tangible source of the anger that we saw during these protests. And this is a mistake I think we often see from people who defend law enforcement and people vaguely the political right, is this effort to flatten these protests into the incident that precipitated them. You often see those with Ferguson when people point out that hands up, don't shoot was a myth and it was a lie, that that isn't actually what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson.

And in some sense, they're right. That encounter did not happen the way it was portrayed, and I think Darren Wilson was probably, from the evidence that we've seen, was unjustly accused and he deserved to be vindicated, but that isn't really what the protests were about in Ferguson. They were about these tiny cities that were imposing, basically treating people like walking ATMs. They were about cities that had five, six, seven times the number of arrest warrants for people as they did citizens, residents, because these places operated on fines and fees, these little towns. And so there was just this constant confrontation between police and citizens that led to generational poverty, generational mistrust, and that's what people were angry about. And I think, when we reduce these incidents, these protests to just the incident that caused them, it does a disservice to the people who have been suffering from these policies. It also just doesn't solve any problems going forward.

And so in this case, I think people are wrong about how George Floyd died, but also, there's been this effort to say it was all based on a lie. When Glenn Loury and John McWhorter did a podcast episode about this, the title of that podcast when they interviewed the makers of the documentary was The Lie that Changed America. Now, they've both since backed down on that, and Loury, I thought, had a very humble and admirable apology and said that he had been duped by the documentary, but I think it's dangerous to reduce the anger that we see at these protests. People don't protest because they're mad about one particular death, they protest because that particular death resonates with them, it resonates with something that they experienced or that people, their friends and family experienced. And so I think we need to take these protests at their whole and look at the resulting reports in journalism investigations that came out and address the core issues and not just the particular incident that kicked it all off.

Weissmueller: Coleman, I know, from reading your book, The End of Race Politics in America, that you had a fairly negative reaction to what transpired after the death of George Floyd. And I think you raised a lot of valid points in that book, which I recommend, but could you just give us your take on what transpired after this incident in America?

Hughes: I agree with Radley that the reaction to these events is not limited to what happens between one cop and one arrestee, but comes on the heels of decades of abuses, humiliations large and small, and the accumulated anger that forms between communities and the people who are supposed to protect them. At the same time, it's a massive understatement to say that there's some truth to the Ferguson Effect. And what is tragically left out of this conversation is the aftermath of what happens to these communities, which are generally disproportionately black and poor, when the media runs with the racism narrative, which can lead to riots, which can lead to de-policing policies that, while having definitely some benefits, also can quite often have the effect of increasing crime.

I went to Ferguson in 2019, and there were still businesses, mom-and-pop shops, some black-owned, that had not returned as a result of the rioting there five years prior, abandoned buildings and so forth. 2020 represented the single greatest year-over-year increase in the homicide rate in over 100 years, possibly ever according to Pew, concentrated in the black community. It is hard for me to understand what is on the opposite side of that ledger as a consequentialist that could be worth that great a loss of life, and the fact that that is left out of the conversation is galling to me and I think that it's the part of the conversation that does not get emphasized nearly enough.

At the height of 2020, Gallup polled black Americans and asked a simple question, "Do you want more police, less police, or the same in your neighborhood." Now, if you were listening to the rhetoric in the media, you would've thought probably most black people want less police. In fact, it was only 20 percent. Sixty percent wanted the same police presence and 20 percent wanted more. And so what disturbed me was the extent to which that 20 percent was hijacked and being portrayed as the central thrust of the black community when, in fact, 80 percent wanted the same or more police presence.

Now, obviously, everyone wants better police, and that's where I fully agree with Radley that these moments can be opportunities for reforms of policies that ought to be reformed, but it seems, in the past 10 years, they have, almost without exception, verged into an anti-police, de-policing, defunding of police, downsizing of police, which has harmed no one more than it has harmed black Americans.

Balko: I have several responses to that. He's right about the poll that showed a substantial majority of Black people want more police. There are also polls showing that majority of Black people have had bad interactions with police, that I think it was 35 percent or 40 percent had an interaction which they feared for their life.

I think it's true that people want more security, they want to feel safe in their neighborhoods, and more police is really the only option that they're given. I think we can shrink the police footprint pretty dramatically in ways that have been beneficial. So for example, the CAHOOTS Program that started in Eugene Oregon, that's since spread to cities across the country, has been overwhelmingly successful. And this is where instead of sending police when someone's in a mental health crisis, which to me has always just seemed really absurd, that somebody's borderline suicidal or having some sort of crisis, and the first thing you do is send an heavily armed police team, but instead sending mental health professionals.

And what they found is not only has this been overwhelmingly successful in talking these people down, they rarely need to call for police backup. So we're deescalating these situations. I think we can remove police from routine traffic enforcement to cut out some of the most sort of loaded interactions that police have with residents, particularly in marginalized communities, which are these traffic stops, where police are trained to consider every traffic stop a potential threat. And people in minority communities are taught to be very wary of police in these situations.

So I think there are lots of ways we can shrink the police footprint. I'm not an abolitionist. I do think that abolitionists have done a lot of the work in some of these areas, and I think we should take their ideas seriously. But there also hasn't been an abolition. There hasn't been a defunding. Last I checked, I think there were about a half dozen cities that even decreased funding for police, and most were by very, very small margins. On the vast majority of the country police funding has increased pretty substantially over the last… Well, since George Floyd, but also before.

Weissmueller: I did see this from a survey that shows that… And we know in Minneapolis that there was an exodus after George Floyd.

Balko: Yeah, no, I'm not disputing that people have left law enforcement, but there has been more funding.

Weissmueller: I just want to be clear on that, yeah, OK.

Balko: It's just harder to recruit people.

Wolfe: Yeah, issues with incoming cadet classes. Right? Isn't there a huge problem with recruitment and then also sometimes when budgets are slashed, that's sort of one of the first things to go? That was my understanding-

Balko: Yeah, but very few budgets have actually been slashed. There has been an exodus in policing-

Wolfe: Not totally slashed, but maybe marginally cut. And then it's the recruitment efforts and the training of new officers that is the thing that is frequently first to go.

Balko: Some cities have cut the rate of the increase in these budgets.

Hughes: Again, but part of that is downstream of what I'm criticizing, namely, when you have a culture where literally every fourth person has, "All cops are bastards," in their Tinder bio, I don't think as many young people are going to want to become cops. And then that leads to a recruitment issue. And it may even mean worse cops because less of the cream of the crop want to become cops. Right? This is all downstream-

Balko: I could also [cite] a Buzzfeed study that came out a couple years ago that found about one in five police officer social media profiles included language that was either racist, or glorified violence, or was dismissive-

Hughes: I really don't trust Buzzfeed to tell me what racist language is, frankly.

Balko: You don't think that there's a problem of racism in police culture?

Hughes: Oh, I think, yeah. I'm sure there are racist cops. Absolutely.

Balko: And that probably dissuades people in the black community or the Latino community from wanting to become cops, from wanting to join that culture.

Hughes: I don't know; a lot of black people in New York, the NYPD is majority people of color.

Balko: Right, but I've interviewed a lot of black cops who tell me that there's systemic racism in policing.

Hughes: That's true. But I don't know that that would necessarily dissuade a black person from becoming a cop. I don't know if that would enter the calculus to be honest. But I don't know-

Wolfe: Well, there's two different issues that I want to make sure that we're not muddling here and that we sort of tease out. And I believe there's not necessarily a tension between the two, and it almost feels like in this conversation we're presenting it as if there is.

Reason's cover story from October 2020 right after the death of George Floyd was entirely about different possible reforms we could make to police departments, not abolition of the police, but rather ending the use of qualified immunity, ensuring that there's transparency with body cam footage and making sure that they're released, stopping over policing. There was a really interesting piece by Sally Sattel that is along the same lines as what Radley was just talking about, which was all about rethinking crisis response.

There's a gazillion different reforms that can be made and that I think people of all political stripes can and should support to make sure that the cops that we do have, we can argue all day over how many we have, but to ensure that they're actually being held accountable and not given this total blank check and this total license to abuse their power, which is something that I, as a believer in rule of law and limited government would never want.

I want my communities to be safe. And one way of making sure that happens is to ensure that government actors are not just given extreme license to abuse the people they're interacting with. I think that that can be true, while at the same time we can critique the activist and mainstream media narratives following George Floyd, which was that these protests were mostly peaceful, when in fact they were highly destructive riots in some places, and that we totally oppose the destruction of private property. And that should be something that we do not in any way tolerate. And that is sort of where your free speech rights end.

Certainly I think it's totally fair to say we ought to expect better of our police officers and of our policing practices, but also the ACAB movement is stupid and full of completely counterproductive ideas. I don't think really citing people unthinkingly saying ACAB in their Tinder bios is particularly germane to what we're talking about here. Both of these things can be true at once, which is that we can entirely critique these activists approaches and beliefs and critique the mainstream media narrative while also expecting better and talking about serious reforms that police departments ought to implement.

These two things that you were saying, that Radley's advocating for and that Coleman's advocating for are, as I see it, not intention, but they are made more difficult the more we sort of allow kind of shoddy journalistic narratives like those offered in the fall of Minneapolis to take hold.

Coleman Hughes: We definitely need to find the places and focus on the places where they're not intentioned, where we can have our cake and eat it too, where we can take techniques off the menu for police to use, increase accountability without increasing crime. We need to find those places and universalize all of those things.

In other areas there are actual policy. I believe that sometimes there are just policy tradeoffs, right? There are two good things, and I would argue the policy tradeoffs of defunding a general culture of hostility toward police, which discourages recruits, discourages morale, all of that. If that leads to the greatest year-over-year surge in homicide in over 100 years I would argue we verged too far on one side of that trade-off. And if not that I'm not-

Wolfe: I fear that that's really sloppy. Are you talking about 2020 homicides specifically?

Hughes: Yes.

Wolfe: What other things did we have going on in 2020? We had lockdowns. We had a pandemic. We had the government-ordered disappearance of people from public spaces.

Hughes: It didn't happen in any other country. The pandemic was worldwide. It was not-

Balko: We also have more violence generally in the US.. than any other country. If you look at-

Hughes: That doesn't explain the trend. That doesn't explain the year-over-year trend.

Balko: OK, but we saw an increase in drug addiction-

Hughes: Which is also downstream of the same cause.

Balko: We saw an increase in blood pressure. We saw an increase in mental illness. We saw an increase in anxiety.

Wolfe: That's a despair, right? Suicidality.

Balko: There was an increase overall in what you call despair in this country.

Wolfe: 2020 was a statist statistically very funky year.

Hughes: All around the world there was a global pandemic. In one country there was the greatest homicide spike it's ever experienced. It also happened to be the country that had a racial reckoning directed against police. Not a coincidence. That's all I'm saying.

Wolfe: I am not familiar enough with the crime statistics of every single other country to be able to ascertain with any certainty. The only thing that I try to keep tabs on is crime rates in the United States. And even that is very hard to do because there are many different localities and many different categories.

But I do think that this is an incredibly sloppy thing to do. One other thing that we could very easily point to if we're trying to actually suss out causality here is the specific pandemic policy and the lockdowns instituted in the United States vs. in many other places. I feel like when you begin to broaden the scope like this and try to do this comparative analysis, we end up getting even sloppier than we already are in fact being, because it is impossible to hold the crime rates of, "What was Germany's crime rate, and what was the UK's crime rate, and what was Nigeria's," right?

You don't know for certain that the spike in the United States was by far the worst in 2021 when compared with literally every other country that year.

Hughes: All of our peer countries year; all of that are normal comparison countries.

Weissmueller: I think we all did agree or there was a concession that the Ferguson effect, that is a measurable thing that happens after these events.

Balko: I think it's partly because of de-policing, but it's also because these events also inspire a lot of mistrust between marginalized communities and the police. And so people are less likely to cooperate with the police, which I would argue that given what we've seen in some of these DOJ reports, that's entirely understandable, maybe even justified in some cases.

But I mean, I think what Coleman's reaction to Liz on the accountability issues is going to be a continuing problem, which is that I think a lot of people, including seemingly Coleman, but a lot of its colleagues, particularly at the Manhattan Institute, see increased-

Hughes: I haven't been there in years. Just, sorry, for the record, I haven't worked there in years. Go ahead.

Balko: Former colleagues then, see accountability as part of the problem, that the more we hold police officers accountable, the more demoralized they get, the harder it is to recruit police officers.

And I think that's a problem when we have a profession that requires as much trust as policing does and that has the kind of power that policing does, that measures of accountability are seen as an attack on the profession itself. That I think is a big problem.

We've seen some of the conservative legislatures we've seen have passed laws making body camera footage not available to the public, that only the police department could decide when they determine it. And part of that justification for that is this argument that if we let just anybody look at these body camera videos, then police are going to be unjustly accused and be dragged to the mud. And there have been some examples of that certainly. But I think when you're talking about people with the power to kill, to use lethal force, I think we need to be erring on the side of accountability, and transparency for that matter.

Liz Wolfe: I just really, once again, keep going back to this idea because I'm a frequent critic of NYPD's practices, but also specifically of the amount of crime and public disorder that we have deliberately, as a policy choice, allowed to fester on the streets of New York, where I live and where I'm raising a child. And so this is not something that I am glib or dismissive of.

I want perhaps more than other people, or perhaps just the same as my neighbors, I want NYPD to do their jobs and I want the streets that I walk to be safe. But I do struggle with this idea that spikes in crime… that there's something about bringing police to accountability and implementing these reforms would somehow lead to crime spikes and my subway system, for example, being made less safe. To me, it's not clear to me that that is or should be the trade-off.

Hughes: Well, whether it should be the tradeoff would be irrelevant to whether-

Wolfe: But is it a tradeoff?

Coleman Hughes: It is. To some extent and in some ways, yeah, and as I said, I don't want to repeat my answer, but I think we have to zero in on the ways in which it isn't a trade-off. I don't think body cams are a trade-off at all. I think every officer should wear a body cam all the time, and it will only ever throw more light on the interaction, for example.

Wolfe: The question is where that footage goes.

Hughes: I think it should all be made public immediately.

Wolfe: Yeah.

Weissmueller: Yeah. Well, and in the case of George Floyd-

Hughes: It wasn't.

Weissmueller: … that body cam footage was delayed, and possibly people might've interpreted things differently if some of it had come out earlier. But I do want to ask Radley-

Hughes: And they probably would have been interpreted it more favorably to the cops relative to the initial bystander-

Weissmueller: Very possibly, very possibly. But I do want to ask Radley this question that… Because I think this is where I find Coleman to be on pretty firm ground when he's critiquing aspects of the criminal justice movement, the sort of anti-police, or even kind of reading racial bias into things when it's not there.

Is that something that is contributing to… is that something that's preventing the kind of reforms we want to see that is muddling the conversation? Because I was looking at… this is data that's really hard to find, but the best I could find was Peter Mosco's compilation of officer-involved shootings.

And when you look back historically, back into the 1970s, you see that the rates of police violence have gone down over time. In the same way that if we take the long view of crime, I think people who are worried about crime need to cope with the fact that if you go back to the eighties and nineties, yeah, we saw a crime spike in 2020, but historically, thank God we're nowhere near as violent as it used to be. But it seems like that should be part of the conversation around police violence too, always putting these things in context. Do you have any critiques or worries about the way that police violence is framed by the criminal justice movement?

Balko: I think those two things go hand in hand. There are fewer police shootings because there's less crime in general. I mean [inaudible 01:49:09].

I also think that for a very, very long time, particularly before the advent of cell phone cameras, we had no idea how common police abuse was, because we always took the officer's word and it would take four or five, six witnesses to contradict a police officer before we would give a victim any sort of credence. It was cell phone video that really showed that police abuse was much more common than those of us who aren't the typical victim would've believed.

Are there excesses in the criminal justice reform movement and the activist movement? Are there methods and tactics used that I wouldn't use? Sure, I guess, but I'm also… These communities have been ignored for a very, very long time. A lot of their concerns have been validated in these DOJ reports. I don't really see it as my position to tell people how to draw attention to these issues and to tell them how to be activists, or to try to change things, to try to reform things.

Wolfe: But they were rioting in the streets destroying property. Does that not seem like something that ought to be-

Balko: Yeah, of course I'm opposed to rioting and destroying property. I also think… You made a comment earlier about the mostly peaceful… There was a Princeton study of the protests after George Floyd that found 91 percent of them had no violence at all. And of the 9 percent that did, a lot of that was initiated by police-

Wolfe: Sure, but surely you understand that what I was saying was a gesture at the internet meme, right? The great kyron-

Balko: Yeah, no, I know. But I think I find that meme a little frustrating because they were overwhelmingly peaceful.

Hughes: Can I agree with Radley on this by the way? I'd like to agree with Radley on that. I went to a lot of protests. Over 90 percent of the people there would never be involved in any kind of violence. Probably probably 99 percent. It was a fringe and it devolved every night. So I actually agree with the spirit of what Radley's-

Wolfe: But the meme arose not out of attempting to tar all of the protesters as violent people, but rather out of the absurdity of the media reporting on it.

Hughes: I agree, yeah.

Hughes: Guys, I have to go, but can I ask you guys one more question before I go?

Weissmueller: Yeah.

Wolfe: Please, absolutely.

Hughes: I don't mean to cut you off. You all seem to be, forgive me if I'm painting with a broad brush, but civil liberties-adjacent people, right?

Weissmueller: That's fair.

Hughes: Yeah. So there's so many aspects of Chauvin's trial that you would think would tug at the heartstrings of civil liberties people. First of all, there's the felony murder, which prosecutors love, but defense lawyers hate, criminal law professors hate, progressives hate with very good reason because it has strict liability without having to prove intent. And in particular, when you can have assault be the underlying charge of felony murder, it sneaks double jeopardy in through the back door because assault and murder are kind of the same thing. But you can make someone liable for murder based on an assault. Prosecutors love this.

You have, in the case of Chauvin, you have jury bias issues. You have one of the jurors was found with a, "Get your knee off our necks," shirt before the trial. You have jurors complaining, fearing for their safety in the event of an acquittal. You have the jury not sequestered in one of the most publicized cases in recent American history. You have rulings of evidence about not showing the MRT training slide, even though there was lots of other evidence at the trial about what was generally taught without it having to be specifically seen by Chauvin.

So why isn't there more concern about… I would have expected to get more agreement about the elements of Chauvin's trial that seemed unfair than I do.

Balko: My perspective, pretty much everything you've mentioned are common problems within the criminal justice system. I think Chauvin got a much fairer trial than a lot of people do.

Minnesota's felony murder law is unique to Minnesota. In other states, felony murder allows you to charge with first degree murder. In Minnesota, it's how you get to this involuntary murder charge. So he still got a substantial sentence, but it was not a first degree type murder charge.

As far as juror bias, I've written about the fact that there are police officers that serve on jurors in some parts of the country. It is a problem.

So assume that jurors can put their biases aside. Death-qualified juries, I think is one of the most outrageous aspects of a criminal justice system, where in a capital punishment case, any juror who says they're opposed to capital punishment on principle is removed from the jury as a matter of fact; the prosecution doesn't even have to use one of their exceptions. And what that does is not only selects for a jury that is definitely OK with capital punishment. It eliminates people who are suspect of the criminal justice system in general. Because that's one reason to be against the death penalty, is because you don't think the system can administer it fairly.

So yeah, these are all concerns. I'm very concerned that Chauvin was stabbed in prison. I'm very concerned that Chauvin was stabbed in prison. I think it's a testament to the inadequacy of our prison system that they weren't unable to protect him. But these are all common problems throughout the criminal justice system. And I think that Chauvin should be treated… I think if every defendant and prisoner or maybe not prisoner, if every defendant were given the trial that Chauvin was given, we would have a much fairer system. It would still be a flawed system-

Hughes: What's not common is jurors fearing for their safety in the event of an acquittal because it's almost O.J.-level celebrity, not celebrity, rather, but public-

Weissmueller: Are you suggesting this should have been moved to a different venue?

Hughes: It would seem that would be very logical to move it to a different venue.

Weissmueller: What do you think about that Radley?

Balko: I think there are, yeah-

Hughes: If not this trial, then what? What would be the bar for moving to another place, if not something like-

Balko: Well, I would've to look and see what the juror's explicitly-

Hughes: You have people protesting as far afield as New Zealand over this incident. That's how much-

Balko: But are jurors on record saying that they were afraid for their lives?

Coleman Hughes: Yes, there was, I quote in my piece that you critique, I quote an unseated juror and a seated juror as fearing for their safety in the event of an acquittal.

Balko: OK, well that's obviously a concern. I don't know how you have a trial that is high stakes as this one. There are lots of concerns with juror bias and how we eliminate that to the extent that we can.

Hughes: To the extent we can, but in Chauvin's case, I'm not sure we could. I'm not sure there's any way he could have got a fair trial.

Balko: So what, do you just not prosecute him then?

Hughes: No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying I'm not sure there's a way that he could have gotten a fair trial given the tenor, and every judgment call that would've made it somewhat fairer was ruled against him: sequestering, removal… Not every, but some pretty major ones.

Balko: Well, removing… The slide we've discussed in detail, I don't think…. I mean his lawyers failed to establish a foundation to-

Hughes: Well, the significance of this slide wasn't because of who saw it, it's because of who made it, namely the Minneapolis Police Department.

Balko: But that wasn't the argument that was originally made. It was that he was trained on it and they couldn't establish that.

Hughes: Right. I understand that. But the reason it was relevant from the point of view of a jury would be that the Minneapolis Police Department made this slide. Now, there was much other testimony, including the guy Ker Yang, where he was just talking about what is generally trained with no burden to show that Chauvin specifically had trained in that. And you would think a jury would really… may be prejudiced by not seeing that slide.

Weissmueller: But as we discussed, the slide does not necessarily exonerate him, given that Chauvin's weight is on Floyd and the training side is not-

Hughes: I think I'm on firm ground here saying civil liberties people, criminal law people, generally believe when someone is on trial for murder, that a lot of judgment calls about rules of evidence, they should really get the chance to make as full a defense as is allowable given the standards and rules of evidence. And there were many judgment calls here that went in the other direction.

Balko: Well, yeah, but there were also judgment calls that went in his favor. For example, removing prosecutors from the case because they met with the medical examiner without defense attorney's presence, which I can tell you is never something a judge sanctions the state for. And in this case, a judge sanctioned the prosecutors for having that meeting with the medical examiner.

Hughes: Yes by not showing the photo that looks extremely similar to the photo of what he's doing is a fairly huge one.

Weissmueller: Just to wrap this up, I'll just say I agree that there's probably some critiques of any trial that can be made. I don't know that it's enough to overturn the outcome in this case, but it's always legitimate to raise issues of fairness for a trial.

I know you have to go Coleman, so I would just want to leave each of you one last word. If there's any final thoughts, or call to action, or reflections on the conversation you want to offer before you go. Coleman, you can go first since you got to run.

Hughes: I want to thank Radley. I want to encourage people to read my piece, and just as an exercise, consider reading it as if I'm thinking from the perspective of reasonable doubt and I'm not an evil genius trying to hide a set of facts from you.

Weissmueller: Radley?

Balko: I don't think that Coleman is an evil genius. I think he wrote a piece that amidst a lot of information he got a lot wrong, and-

Weissmueller: Evil average intelligence. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.

Balko: I think he wrote a piece that got a lot wrong and that is misleading, and is misleading in particularly destructive ways. And I am pretty disappointed that I feel like a lot of people who would come to this from an ideological viewpoint that doesn't necessarily favor either of us have said that they found his column to be misleading on a lot of these points.

The fact that he can't acknowledge anything is pretty disappointing. And particularly The Free Press, which has positioned itself as an arbitrator of skepticism and a debunker of false narratives, I think this piece promotes a false narrative, the one that was put forward in the documentary, and I was hoping for at least a little bit of contrition and we didn't get it today.

Wolfe: I think that regardless of that somewhat unsatisfying or dissatisfying conclusion, it does definitely leave me feeling somewhat optimistic that both of you guys were willing to sit down and have this conversation with us. And I think engage in at times sneering, but mostly extremely respectful and really substantive conversations.

So Radley Balko and Coleman Hughes, thank you guys both so much for talking to Reason. I hope people follow all of your work and read all of the different components of this. That way they can attempt to come to their own conclusions. Thank you.

Balko: Thanks.

Hughes: Thanks.

Thanks for listening to Just Asking Questions. These conversations appear on Reason's YouTube channel and the Just Asking Questions podcast feed every Thursday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please rate and review the show.

This is a rush transcript. Please check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

The post Coleman Hughes vs. Radley Balko: Who's Right About George Floyd? appeared first on Reason.com.

Patri Friedman and Mark Lutter: Does a City Need a State?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 17:00:49 +0000

In a special edition of Just Asking Questions recorded before a live audience on the Honduran island of Roatán, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe talk with Mark Lutter, founder of the Charter Cities Institute, and Patri Friedman, founder and board member of Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in charter cities.

The conversation took place at the Alternative Visions for Governance conference sponsored by the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason. The conference happened within the jurisdiction of Próspera, an autonomous zone for economic development—known as a ZEDE—made possible by a 2013 law passed by the Honduran National Congress.

They discussed lessons learned from the launch of Próspera, which has expanded despite a hostile presidential administration, the proliferation of biohacking and medical procedures within the zone, the history of self-governing cities, the relationship between charter cities and democracy, and where in the world prospects are best for future experiments in privatized governance.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

The post Patri Friedman and Mark Lutter: Does a City Need a State? appeared first on Reason.com.

Bryan Johnson: Can This Rich Transhumanist Beat Death?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 17:31:33 +0000

Bryan Johnson made his fortune when he sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million, netting about $300 million for himself. He spends about $2 million a year creating a system to reverse his "biological age." He's 46 years old, chronologically, but claims he's de-aged himself following a program he's branded "the Blueprint protocol."

"I wanted to pose the question in this technological age: Can an algorithm, paired with science, in fact, take better care of me than I can myself?" Johnson tells Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions.

They talked with Johnson about his daily routine, the results he's published including measurement of his nighttime erections, the transhumanist philosophy he outlines in his free e-book Don't Die, the role that artificial intelligence is likely to play in prolonging human life and health spans, and the value and limitations of self-experimentation in an era of pharmaceutical stagnation.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

The post Bryan Johnson: Can This Rich Transhumanist Beat Death? appeared first on Reason.com.

Michael Moynihan: What's Up With Tucker Carlson?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 18:00:35 +0000

"One of the ways you understand a society is through its infrastructure," said Tucker Carlson as he stood in front of a Moscow subway station in a video he posted after his two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In contrast to America's public transit, Moscow's "is perfectly clean and orderly," explained Carlson. "How do you explain that? We're not even going to guess. That's not our job. We're only going to ask the question."

On the latest episode of Just Asking Questions, journalist and Fifth Column podcast co-host Michael Moynihan joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe to dissect Carlson's interview with Putin and analyze his subsequent behavior, from releasing videos praising Russia's subway stations and grocery stores to his explanation at the World Government Summit that his reason for not challenging Putin to defend his political repression is that it's not interesting because "every leader kills people."

They also discuss the recent death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison, Moynihan's experience reporting in Russia, and the state of economic and political freedom under Putin's rule.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

Russia Economy: Population, GDP, Inflation, Business, Trade, FDI, Corruption (heritage.org)

Russia World Press Freedom Index Ranking | REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS

Democracy Index (ourworldindata.org)

World Population Review, from World Bank data: Median Income by Country 2024

The post Michael Moynihan: What's Up With Tucker Carlson? appeared first on Reason.com.

Curt Mills: Should America Police the World?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 17:00:12 +0000

"The greatest risk of a Republican administration is a war with Iran, and the greatest risk of a Democratic administration is a war with Russia," says Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, a magazine for the types of conservatives who are skeptical of foreign military intervention.

Mills joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to talk about a $95.3 billion aid package, including $60 billion for Ukraine, that passed the Senate this week, which Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) called a "middle finger to America" during his filibuster of the bill. In this episode, they discuss the bill's passage, Paul's filibuster, Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent interview with Tucker Carlson, the Biden administration's airstrikes against Yemen, and whether or not the surge of foreign policy noninterventionism within the GOP is likely to last past 2024.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

How the Ukraine delusion may end | Curt Mills | The Critic Magazine

Ukraine funding package moves closer to Senate passage | The Hill

Statement from President Joe Biden on Coalition Strikes in Houthi-Controlled Areas in Yemen | The White House

Mike Lee on X: "I totally agree with @RoKhanna. The Constitution matters, regardless of party affiliation." / X (twitter.com)

Rep. Pramila Jayapal on X: "This is an unacceptable violation of the Constitution. Article 1 requires that military action be authorized by Congress." / X (twitter.com)

Letter to Biden from Sens. Kaine, Young, Murphy, and Lee,—Jan. 11, 2024

Secretary General Annual Report 2020 (nato.int)

The post Curt Mills: Should America Police the World? appeared first on Reason.com.

Peter Meijer: Can the GOP Change?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 18:00:34 +0000

"We're in dark and uncertain times, but we've made it through worse," writes Peter Meijer in a November 6 announcement that he's running for a Senate seat in Michigan soon to be vacated by Democrat Debbie Stabenow.

Meijer is a former Republican representative for Michigan's third Congressional district—a position once held by Justin Amash, the Republican-turned-Libertarian congressman. Amash recently announced that he is launching an exploratory committee and may enter the Republican primary for the open Senate seat as well.

Meijer joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to talk about his run for Senate, what the prospects are for a candidate who voted to impeach Trump for his behavior on January 6, and how he hopes the GOP can change for the better to usher in "a new American century." They also discuss how Democrats funded ads to help a Trump-backed candidate defeat Meijer in Michigan's 2022 primary, the hypocrisy of groups proclaiming to "protect democracy" while fighting against ballot access, and what Meijer thinks about the prospect of running against Justin Amash this year.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

Justin Amash on X: "I've been humbled in recent weeks by the many people who have urged me to run for Senate in Michigan and to do so by joining the Republican primary.

Peter Meijer, a Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump, Is Running for Senate in Michigan—The New York Times

Democrats Aid Far-Right Candidate Against Republican Who Backed Impeachment—The New York Times

Matt Welch at Reason: Presidential Ballot Will Be Crowded With Third Party Candidates

Meijer's farewell address to Congress.

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

Zach Weissmueller: We'll start with your campaign announcement where you say, "We are in dark and uncertain times," but that we need bold leaders to usher in "another great American century." Tell us more about what you see as the darkness of this moment and what you think it will take to escape that.

Peter Meijer: I think if we look around the world and we look at the effects of a United States that seems to have receded—terrorists and authoritarians that have kind of seized that moment. The barbarism that we saw that Hamas conducted against Israeli civilians and military personnel on October 7. We have the continuing grinding conflict in Ukraine. We have the Houthis threatening to shut down—and succeeding in at least discouraging—a lot of international maritime transit. Even Pakistan bombing Iran, right? We're in a position where everything seems far less certain, where we don't know what's going to happen, where events could easily spiral out of control.

Then you look at a homefront where some of the economic indicators are more positive than they were a year ago, but in the minds of average Americans, they're still thinking back to where their expectations were for how much they were going to pay for their mortgage. And if you have an adjustable rate, mortgage interest rate increases have led that to double. The effects of inflation and some supply chain uncertainties have continued to see elevated grocery prices. That's something that's very near to my heart coming from a family grocery chain in our family's background. And that's before you get to those significant drivers of cost-of-living challenges that have remained elevated: housing, health care, and education. American families that I have talked to, families in Michigan, they feel uncertain about what the future's going to bring. Younger families or those who want to start one are nervous about how they're going to be able to make ends meet and also support raising children.

When I say dark and uncertain times, it's just a feeling that the stability and the foundation that many people have relied upon, that maybe they have grown up feeling that, that isn't there anymore. When I talk about a new, a second great American century, [I mean] how do we get to a point where by 2050, we again feel that in the United States is not just a superpower on paper, but we feel that sense of forward momentum, that we have policies at the federal level, and we have government officials that care a lot more about what the results of their policies are going to be. And again, to be able to look at objective, demonstrable policy outcomes in a clear and rational way.

I spent two years in Washington. That is not a lot of time, but it was enough time for me to realize and understand that all the problems I saw from the outside are the consequence of other problems that you need to kind of peel back the layers of the onion of dysfunction in Washington in order to figure out how to get down to some core governing principles, how to not just get in the position of playing whack-a-mole when we have all these events that come up and make us feel like we're lurching from crisis to crisis. There's always going to be areas of disagreement. There's always going to be division. That's a reality of politics. But my God, we should be able to agree that crime is bad. So what are the policies that promote safer communities? We want to have a strong national defense. How do we do that in the most cost effective way? And what should our international engagements be that play to our strengths rather than promote weaknesses (as I think a lot of our post-9/11 military adventurism ended up ultimately doing)? And what is it that we want to see the U.S.' role in the world be? And how do we make sure that we're continuing to build on the areas of core agreement?

So I'm running for Senate because of that desire to not only put family concerns first, an outcome oriented mentality, but also to make sure that that is not just a flash in the pan idea. It's not just, "Oh, this is an easy talking point." Let's have a real conversation about the systemic ways that we can address this. Because I'm someone who enjoys the difficult art of understanding complex systems and how to improve them, not somebody who feels a high going on a cable news show or having a tweet go viral. The dopamine addiction that I think has permeated our society, has permeated our politics. And that's how we are left in those dark and uncertain times.

Liz Wolfe: That's a good way of putting it, the dopamine addiction permeating our politics. I think that's pretty true. But are we actually in exceptionally bad times? You just talked about the post-9/11 period and our military adventurism then and the sort of uncertain foreign policy situation of the early and mid-aughts. And then I'm also thinking about the late '70s and early '80s as a time of extraordinary inflation, where many of the same things you were talking about in terms of it being very difficult to afford a decent life today, families dealt with that then too. So are we really in uniquely bad times right now?

Meijer: I would say for the modern moment, I think there's a feeling of uncertainty that we probably haven't experienced this millennium since maybe the 2008 financial crisis, with the amount of sectors that are struggling and the amount of uncertainty going forward. Now to your point, on the political violence front, I am quick to emphasize in the 1970s, you had hundreds of pipe bombs going off a year. You had domestic violence coming from groups across the political spectrum. The 1960s saw periods of intense social upheaval and unrest, the assassination of a sitting president, of a leading presidential figure, and the leading civil rights figure of our time. This is not the worst time the United States has been in. I don't want to be a Cassandra around that.

It's the fact that a lot of our challenges we're dealing with, in my view, are far more manageable. And so if they're more manageable, then we don't have a good excuse to just shrug away from them or take a path of minimal discomfort, rather than being disciplined and diligent and focusing on them. I don't want to come across as pessimistic, but at the same time, the feeling I get when I talk to people, the concern and that sense of unease. It's not fear. It's not paranoia. It's not terror. We've had moments of extreme, profound fear in this country, [like] that immediate post-9/11 moment. It's just a sense of "I want to feel hope again that we're on a good trajectory." And it feels like everywhere I look, I don't see something that gives me a reason to hope.

Wolfe: Is it weird that you'll potentially be running against Justin Amash? He's launching an exploratory committee.

Meijer: For the listeners' awareness, I succeeded Justin Amash. He was in Congress. He had left the Republican Party. He was officially an independent/Libertarian during his final term or the latter half of his final term in office. I've known Justin for a while. I solicited his feedback and thoughts on legislation because I think he's a very thoughtful individual. Again, that doesn't mean I agreed with every comment or suggestion, but I think he's somebody who thinks deeply about issues. And that is very much a rarity in our political process. I'm not sure what he's going to do, whether or not that exploratory committee will turn into an actual filing. But, generally speaking, I think the more folks who are engaged in our politics and putting forward thoughtful, principled ideas, is a good thing.

Weissmueller: You both are kind of out of step, maybe in slightly different ways, with the modern Republican Party. Is there something strange about the district to which you were elected that made it possible for both you and Amash to hold that seat?

Meijer: I think a lot of people commented there must be something in the water in west Michigan. We have a fantastic water filtration facility that takes it directly from Lake Michigan, near Grand Haven. But, you know, Gerald R. Ford represented this district prior to being elevated to the vice presidency, before Justin it was, Vern [Ehlers] and Paul Henry. There were a number of officials who had represented it who I think were independent-minded in their own way. I think it's very much a close-knit community.

It's a wonderful place; it's home. So perhaps there's something in the water, but I think it's better to have members who are in office who are looking into things and not just following the crowd. That's the easiest thing to do in Washington: Look up at the board and say, "Where's everyone else in my party going? And I'll just follow their lead." I can say from experience, and I'm sure Justin would say the same thing, it's far more difficult to say, "OK, how do I approach this issue in a consistent way that can be defensible?" rather than the inherent reactionary polarization that you'll usually see.

Weissmueller: You gave a really interesting farewell speech in the House that I want to play a little bit of, because it lays out some of what you were alluding to earlier about your view of the current state of our government. And I also think it raises what I consider to be one of the most important political issues of our time. So let's roll that excerpt from your 2022 farewell address to Congress.

Clip of Peter Meijer's "Farewell to Congress" on C-SPAN:

I rise today for the last time as a member of the 117th Congress. I do not seek to dwell on the circumstances of my departure, although it does bring to mind a few lines from Yeats' Second Coming. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Perhaps it takes a cataclysm like World War One to capture the naked and malevolent cynicism of our politics. Yeats also well captured the harrowing consequence of elite ineptitude that precipitated the slaughter of tens of millions. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. I read and reread those words while flying out of Hamid Karzai International Airport last August, during the shameful end to 20 years of America's war in Afghanistan. What I saw on the ground during that waking nightmare exemplified some of the best of the American men and women in uniform, but it also reflected the helplessness and incompetence of American policymaking. The failure of our war in Afghanistan, a failure abetted by decades of Congress's lax oversight of the president and his Department of Defense.

To solve this, I push for Congress to take back its war powers, to take back that constitutional responsibility. But even when it comes to Congress asserting its own prerogative, this body has shown itself unwilling to do its job. The current budget negotiations taking place on the other side of the rotunda, also show a Congress unwilling to confront the very basic task of passing a budget on time. The last time we had a budget passed before the fiscal year started, I was in second grade. When Congress is incapable of solving problems of its own making. How can the American people have any faith that we can tackle the problems arising from the broader world? What hope do we have of outcompeting China, of winning this coming century? If we can't even get out of a mess of our own making? We need the best to regain their convictions. To set an example of what clear-eyed leadership looks like both at home and abroad. We need to hold the worst to account and reprise the moral resolve that has led us through dark times in this country many, many times before. Too many have sacrificed too much for us to squander the opportunity before us, the opportunity to rise to the challenge of this moment, to set aside petty squabbles. The opportunity to build on the promise of limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty. The promise that underpins the American dream.

Wolfe: How do you feel rewatching it?

Meijer: Those were the moments where I was still aggressively campaigning and petitioning and spending a lot of time on the Senate side to get the Afghan Adjustment Act passed, to try to get that into the [National Defense Authorization Act] or into that omnibus that was being worked on because that was a deeply personal issue. It was something that we were so close to being able to get. Ironically enough, it got zero attention. The Afghan Adjustment Act would offer some stability and kind of certainty for the folks who had supported U.S. forces in Afghanistan, that we had evacuated, some of whom we're still in the process of kind of reevaluating, evacuating, and resettling, to give them some permanence as opposed to the kind of temporary status many of them are on. And it's an unholy mess of a kind of bureaucratic conundrum there. I would say that was my main focus. I hadn't even kind of thought about it. My campaign launch video hit a lot of those same themes. I probably should have done some of my research and looked back at those words.

There's a lot of folks who think the chaos in our system right now is the product of political chaos, because of how chaotic our politics are and how our government can't function. And that's what I thought going in today. I'm a big believer that it gets the causality backwards that the more our government screws up, the more you know. The American people feel the consequences of inept policymaking: the more they reach for replacements for alternatives, for explanations for why that individual, when they got into office, couldn't do the things they promised to be able to do. This guy didn't get the job done, so we're going to vote him out and send in somebody who's even more emphatic that they'll do it. So much of the challenge though is that the power has been stripped from many of those offices in Congress. Either Congress has let the executive take it, has given it to the executive, or the executive is just taking that over. The basic kind of mechanical function of our government is broken. That's where you have that promotion of extreme new and ever more chaotic politics.

If there were fewer things that the government was screwing up—there'll always be people who are dissatisfied—you wouldn't be fertilizing the same ground. I think it's a complicated thing because you start talking about legislative supremacy and notions of subsidiarity and generic concepts. It's challenging to get that done. Not impossible, but challenging to get it done in Washington because every legislator will look at a policy and need to see a very concrete upside because the downside is always theoretically exponential. If it's not broke, don't fix it or if it is broke, try not to fix it, because no matter what you do, if you get your fingerprints on it you might be held to blame.

The art of government is trying to say, okay, politics is the art of the possible. How do you find ways in which you can make a concrete, lasting effort? It's a lot easier to do that if you're getting at some of the structures underpinning responses to issues than if you're just getting distracted by the issues at hand. You need to deal with and react to those issues but you also have to be able to get out of that reactive mindset to be able to put forward a vision and also a backward plan. How do you get to that vision from where we are? What is that pathway?

Weissmueller: Could you talk about the structural issues as it pertains to foreign policy and the balance of powers?

Meijer: I approach a lot of these with sort of a policy-agnostic, but process-obsessive mindset. If you think about war powers, oftentimes it's within the context of why we need to end this war, and that's why we need to repeal it. I mentioned the example of the war on terror in 2001 and thereafter, you had that authorization for the use of military force that was passed shortly after 9/11, had that sunset every two years or four years or six years? Probably six is too high. But two years, three years, five years, something within that band that's not necessarily saying that nothing would happen after that five-year period. It's saying that there would have to be far more frequent engagement by the Department of Defense, by the national security community with Congress. And Congress would because they'd have to cast a vote, senators and representatives would have to be casting an affirmative vote, either in favor of continuing or in opposition to continuing military efforts. They would be asking better questions. They would feel more of a sense of ownership. They would have to articulate and defend. But in the process of asking those more difficult questions, the Department of Defense would also have to sharpen its pencils. Policymakers on the national security side would have to more firmly articulate and align their efforts with what they were saying.

This notion that if we're just going to be hands-off and everything will be fine, has become so detrimental and so ruinous because you have a defense policy establishment that essentially looks at Congress as a body to avoid. There were a couple of times when I would be getting a classified briefing and I would say, "Oh my God, thank God we're finally getting a briefing on an issue. I've been waiting for a while." And then I turn around and realize they're trying to sell you a timeshare. We need your support on this bill or this authorization. So we're telling you how big of a problem is going on in this region. Not because you should be aware, or not, because it should be informing how you were approaching something, but because we're going to have to ask you for something. If the executive had to ask Congress for more, the amount of transparency would be higher. The feeling of responsibility among members would be higher. I think things would just function better again. Would that lead to less or more? I think there's arguments to be made in either direction. But if we look at the strikes that the president has just conducted recently against the Houthis, against Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Syria, both are picking from a variety of different authorizations coming from the Constitution. Whether it's article two—defense powers of the president in a self-defense capacity—or article one—authority from authorizations for use of military force that were passed in 2001 or 2002. Again. It's doing an end run. It is failing to engage, and I think it allows the American people to check out because their representatives are checked out. That type of lack of transparency, of lack of attention, lack of concern, I think ultimately only dooms those projects to failure because then, when people start to pay attention after something bad happens, they catch themselves up on 20 years and in the span of a two minute TikTok video. That's probably not going to be conveying an accurate reality.

Weissmueller: How is this rubber stamping–type approach particularly insulting to the people who serve in the military?

Meijer: It just shows a disregard, right? By way of background, I was in Iraq as a soldier doing intelligence operations in 2010 and 2011. Then I was in Afghanistan, as an [nongovernmental organization] conflict analyst with a humanitarian aid community. So no uniform, no weapons, neutral living on the economy from 2013 to 2015. I think in both of those conflicts, we found ourselves with allies of convenience that just looked at the U.S. as an entity to exploit. We didn't necessarily have any specific strategy or objective or goal we were going towards. Or if we did, it would change frequently enough that what we were doing was never aligned towards any specific intent. That notion of a self like an ice cream cone. The reality is that the entire time you're there, there's a risk that you're undertaking. American service members are dying.

I don't reflexively say you got to bring everyone home, or there's no scenario in which we should be in some of those areas. But, our policymakers sure as hell need to articulate why those risks are being undertaken. To what end? What are those terms? How often would those be reevaluated? Because I think the majority of the war on terror, or at least our kind of post-9/11 moment, has been this linear sense of engagement where it's like, maybe some sanctions, then we're going to have some airstrikes, maybe a special forces raid, maybe the Marines are going to be there temporarily, or maybe we're going to hold and build with kind of large conventional forces. To what end? What's our goal? You can't even measure if they've been effective if you don't have a consistent goal or you keep changing it. And again, lives hang in the balance. Civilian lives or military service members' lives are lost and the taxpayer is footing the bill for all of that.

Weissmueller: I pulled a couple clips from your campaign announcement that I think can give your viewers a sense of the issues you're running on. In this first one, you talk about the importance of making more babies. Let's roll that clip.

Clip of Peter Meijer's campaign announcement:

I'm Peter Meijer, and I'm running for U.S. Senate. And I want to let you in on a secret, most politicians are terrified of the media, of saying what they actually think, of proposing things that are big and bold. We should be making it easier for people to get married, buy a house, and just have more babies. My wife and I just had a son, and I can tell you babies need to be the vision for our future. And when those babies go to school, parents should never have to worry if their children are guinea pigs in someone's social experiment. Parents deserve a say and choice. That's why we need a regime change in education. We need to expel the anti-Semites and activists who are poisoning young minds with hate. We need to hold universities accountable when they swindle students by hitting them and their tax free endowments.

Weissmueller: Why is making life better for parents top of mind for you?

Meijer: You could look at our demographic issues that we're facing as a country, but a lot of this I just boil down to a simple question: how or what is our government doing to make the American dream within reach? What are they doing to further complicate things?

The number one frustration I have is when every policymaker, your legislator or politician, reacts to a problem with a new set of legislation or a new law. As opposed to saying, "what are we currently doing that is either helping or that is hurting?" If it's helping, maybe do more of it. If it's hurting, let's stop it. The easiest thing for the government to do is to stop doing things that are demonstrably ineffective or that are making the problem worse. That's a lot easier to do than proposing something new that's uncertain.

Our role as policymakers, the role of our legislature, and specifically the role of our federal government is to be able to get out of the way, to resist that urge to always tinker and fiddle. When you look at our housing policy in particular, that is where a thousand good intentions have been the individual bricks in a road that has led straight to an unaffordable hell in our current market. That is geographically dependent, but all across the board, that is a massive major strain. You have more folks who are unable to afford to buy a home, are kind of locked into renting, aren't building up a base of assets, or postponing having families for financial reasons. I'm very skeptical of what the government can do in an affirmative sense, but starting with getting the government out of the way, I've yet to have anyone who's pushed back and said, "Oh, that won't work."

Reducing the regulatory burden on the educational side is largely a state and local issue, but at the federal level, there are all of these strings attached. There are these compliance and reporting incentives that both raise costs but also can be used to tweak our education system away from sort of demonstrable objective outcomes. You kind of wake up and look at that San Francisco school district that gave a quarter million dollars of taxpayer funds to a "woke kindergarten." From a parent's standpoint, they step back and say, "Hey, you know, maybe there's a conversation there that should have taken place with those parents." But the idea of removing so much individual consent or individual notion from every single dynamic of a government that continues, oftentimes not in a malevolent way but just out of a sense of hubris and arrogance to presume they know better and drive or incentivize outcomes that, stray from objective standards and into the realm of social experiment.

I very much respect the libertarian non-aggression principle. You should be very, very humble and understand who can do what, our technocrats need to be humble, our government policymakers need to be very humble in appreciating what the unexpected outcomes of something may be. Because if you don't and you are reckless and arrogant, you know there's going to be a reckoning and that will be socially challenging. The bills come due, we're going to have to pay for it one way or the other. So let's have some humility on the front end, so we're not surprised on the back end.

Wolfe: There are some libertarians, and I would probably count myself among them, that are a little bit more concerned about what our fertility rate looks like over time and whether or not we're going to be emulating Japan with their sort of graying population. How do you look at these thorny questions? How would you convince a skeptical libertarian or a libertarian who's antagonistic to your idea that baby-making is important? What would you say to them if you had 30–60 seconds to make your case?

Meijer: I would certainly agree that the government shouldn't be in the position of promoting a specific agenda. That's where I come back to policymakers also being very humble because a lot of well-intentioned policies, especially including in the pro-nativist camp, can lead to outcomes that are far from intended. Boiling down to that affordability question, you don't achieve higher affordability through subsidies that can have a temporary impact, but eventually, the market will adjust and it becomes a dependency. There are some things that I think are relatively objective social goods that if the government is maybe not in a position to be able to affirmatively promote or where they're promoting a policy could have negative effects, it should be doing everything it can to make sure that it is not operating contrary to that social good.

Wolfe: Why does it matter at all in the first place? Why does it matter that we have children running around and attending schools and on the playgrounds vs. a situation like Korea or Japan?

Meijer: Anyone who's interested in the long term fiscal sustainability of the U.S. should care or anybody who wants the U.S. to continue to be a growing and thriving country should care. Our social security system was set up when there were 14 workers for every retiree. Now the ratio is 2.1 to one. At some point, the math just kind of runs out. I'm very skeptical of the heavy-handed role of the government, what it could do in terms of affirming those policies and why I say the number one thing is, if we agree that this is good, we should be able to agree that the government shouldn't be doing anything to prevent that. The more you peel back those layers, that should be a place where you can reach bipartisan consensus and where it's aligned with just general limited government principles.

Wolfe: I find myself generally torn on this issue. I appreciate the ability to, in a sense, play devil's advocate and promote the libertarian side that's maybe more antagonistic to your thesis. I have a 16-month-old. I am extremely soft on the issue of babies, and I think that we should probably all have as many of them as possible.

Weissmueller: One other thing that jumped out to me from that ad, which is an issue that's very important to Michigan voters, I presume, is when you're talking about manufacturing and competition with China. Let's roll that clip.

Clip from Peter Meijer's campaign ad about competing with China:

Do you know that China is graduating ten engineers for every American engineer? This is not a time where we can afford to play nice. I'm a free market guy, but if corporations want favors from our government, then they better be investing here. If we're going to have to pay for electric cars, then we better be building them in Michigan, not Mexico. And we should be using supply chains that are American, not Chinese.

Weissmueller: What I heard there was "I'm a free market guy but…" But what? Could you explain that a little bit further?

Meijer: The reality of our current economic climate is that we are a free market with a heavy asterisk around so many different areas either from heavy-handed federal policy or regulatory jawboning or just objective pieces of legislation that have been passed. Washington is picking winners and losers. We are making determinations. Plenty of companies come to D.C. for handouts. The ideal world is to peel that back and to get away from it. If we have this world and I want to deal with the world as we have it, I would like to see us get to a world, where we do have far less federal policies that are creating a more challenging business environment, especially those that are not readily defensible on grounds of safety or just objective environmental components, but are around more nebulous goals, strings attached to dollars.

In my state of Michigan right now, we have made so many parts of our state regulatory apparatus burdensome that the only companies who are coming here are those that we're forking over hundreds of millions of dollars to incentivize them to come. At that point, they're oftentimes the only companies that don't want to relocate or won't be received well anywhere else. And many of them end up having Chinese economic ties. This is where untangling that web is essential. But where do we have that web having some very clear understanding of where we are opening up liabilities with our dependence on Chinese supply chains? I'm certainly not somebody who has any issue if our pool floaties are made in China. But if the majority of our prescription pharmaceuticals are coming from outside the country, and in the event of a disruption to global trade or international shipping or anything we saw along the lines of COVID-19, now we're in real trouble. I think it's about reducing those vulnerabilities, appreciating those vulnerabilities, and not just having a reflexive, what I think we've seen all too often, a reflexive notion, and even incorporated into American policy that ends up hurting our own ability, that we can go from buy American policies to the Jones Act to a handful of other places where you can just align what the stated intent of the policy was, and demonstrably show that the policy is not reaching it. That worries me. That's where I'm highly suspect of affirmative policies. But when we're looking at how our system is being managed at the moment, being very clear that we should not be permitting or accepting taxpayer dollars, that maybe shouldn't be going there in the first place. But if they are, then those should be focused domestically. If we have these policies, then they should be promoted in such a way that is doing minimal damage while we still have them.

Weissmueller: You're known as one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his behavior on January 6, 2021. Given what the GOP has become, we've seen Trump on this glide path to the nomination. How big of a problem is that for you in terms of being viable in a Republican primary?

Meijer: I frankly don't think it's much of a problem. I was just having this conversation earlier. There's an interesting dynamic and I'm not labeling Reason as a sort of "media." You are obviously a media organization, but in the broader media narrative, everything can be reduced down to these kinds of polar dynamics. Right? You're either pro or anti; you're on one side or the other. I never called myself somebody who was anti-Trump or never Trump. I took serious issues up to and including obviously voting to impeach the former president for his actions on January 6th. I thought that that was worthy of both condemnation and also worthy of adjudication in the Senate. Because that was a dark and shameful day. The American people deserve to hear the facts presented and for the then-former president to make his case.

The reality that escapes so much of our politics and where it becomes challenging is that I don't accept that you have to be all one thing or all the other that you know, you're in either the black box over here or the white box over here. I try to call balls and strikes. I try to be as honest a broker as I can of not excusing something that I would have condemned had it been, somebody of the opposite party doing. I think that's something I grew up despising politicians for—watching John Stewart back when he was actually funny and seeing him playing clips of a member of Congress arguing against the two-year prior version of themself on the same issue, with the only difference being who was the president and they supported it when their guy did it and they opposed it when the other person's guy did it. I think that leads to the cynicism we have. So that's who I try not to be. I try to have that consistent approach to try to call balls and strikes and be an honest broker. I can honestly say I would vastly prefer my least favorite Republican candidate to a second Joe Biden administration.

Wolfe: Why were so many of your colleagues such cowards when it comes to the impeachment vote?

Meijer: There were certainly plenty of folks who had what I would say are sincere and reasonable objections. The vast majority of folks will just, and this is not limited to that vote, and almost everything it would say there is safety in numbers, where is everybody else going, I'll just follow suit.

Wolfe: Am I missing anything or is that a pretty clear-cut situation where there's just an extraordinary moral cowardice problem among Republicans right now?

Meijer: The sort of line is you never have to explain why you voted no on something. But, if you vote yes, somebody will always find something to blame. I had some colleagues who would agree with everything you said, but they read the article of impeachment and they were uncomfortable that it was alleging a criminal action, not a criminal process. But that didn't have a kind of broader dereliction of duty. There were Republicans who were trying to work with Nancy Pelosi on having a more limited article, who had committed to voting in favor of it. But she said, "No, we're going with what we drafted," because her goal was to have as few Republicans and support as possible.

I'm going to save a lot of that for a memoir. The way I look at things, change the party, change the person who's doing it from somebody who's on my side to oppose or somebody who's opposed to me to being on my side. If that changes how I view the action, then my ethics are clearly only situational, and I should find something that I can be consistent about. There's going to be things that are at a sticking point to you in the minority you might be comfortable with if you're in the majority or vice versa. But the sort of just reflexive approach where it doesn't seem like anybody actually believes anything, I don't abide by that. I don't like that. I saw plenty of it, but it disgusted me. I enjoyed quietly being like, "Now, no, you voted this way in the effort to hold Eric Holder in contempt. But, how are you making the distinction between this, and just one of my colleagues' credit?" They would say, "Okay, I can find 2 or 3 distinctions, but I don't really believe in it." Some of this just comes down to shirts and skins.

Weissmueller: You would support even your least favorite Republican over another Joe Biden presidency. We can possibly put Donald Trump into that category. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but, why is that?

Meijer: To me, the two most pivotal days in my time in Congress were January 6, 2021, and August 15, 2021, when Afghanistan collapsed. Both were moments where a lot of folks that I had thought better of or systems I had thought that had some competency—the shine was totally off. Both of those respective apples, one on the domestic political side, the other and our kind of incompetency of our national security apparatus, and the unwillingness of a lot of people to gauge and react to appropriate risks.

Weissmueller: Is it fair to lay the disaster of the Afghanistan withdrawal completely at Biden's feet?

Meijer: I want to be very clear. I felt very much betrayed and felt like that was sort of a betrayal by proxy of a lot of the folks who had hinged on us when Biden announced that he was going to withdraw by then said September 11th, and then it was moved up to September 1st. That was in April of 2021. I was supportive of that or supportive of Trump's effort to withdraw. We immediately had a bipartisan group of us working in Congress saying, "Okay, we still got a lot of folks who supported us, the Special Immigrant Visa program. What can we do now that we have a time frame, now that we have sort of a final clock, that should light a bit of a fire to go and process all of this?" It was roadblock after roadblock. Those flights only started leaving on July 29th. And it was 200 people a day. Not every day. Then within two weeks, the entire country collapsed. And we were left with the mass evacuation that we had.

When I say we encountered roadblock after roadblock, some of it was just bureaucratic incompetence, making sure everything goes through the interagency process, yada, yada, yada. There was also a great fear on behalf of the Biden administration that the evacuation of Afghans, which was supported in a bipartisan way and was very much not controversial would end up getting compared or draw light to the problems that we were having on the southern border, which at that time the Biden administration was aware of and were paranoid of that becoming a larger media focus because they thought it would be so politically damaging to them or raise uncomfortable questions. Now that fear that led to basically the evacuation of Afghans who had supported the United States forces, that we had a commitment to, that ultimately was really the inflection point that tanked his approval rating. I both have a deep feeling of kind of personal betrayal from that and just a kind of a knife in my gut that I still feel very sharply.

Weissmueller: Like the insane post-COVID spending bills?

Meijer: Like the American Rescue Plan was probably, I think the consensus estimates that at least three to four points, or at least two to three points of the inflation that we saw could be solely attributed to the $1.9 trillion coming out of that. We're always going to have some inflation just with COVID.

I think there were some well-intended policies that I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt. When you're passing policies, when there's very clearly no economic imperative to do so, and it's just all sort of a partisan grab bag that buck stops at the president's office. But the broader challenge and issue that we have, I mentioned sort of legislative supremacy, and our executive branch is far too powerful. The fact that we feel like if you elect the wrong president, the country is going to take a nosedive. A lot of that problem is because of the office. I think the office of the president is one of the most dangerous institutions in the Western world right now because of how much power, both through Supreme Court decisions and through legislative ineptitude or inattention has ultimately accrued into that office. That to me is far more important than who the individual office-holder is and what their policies are.

Wolfe: I sincerely appreciate the argument that you're making and the pragmatism that you're talking about with regard to how Joe Biden has actively made the inflationary situation so much worse in a way that harms people's budgets. But I'm still struggling with this fundamental idea that, if push came to shove, you would feel more comfortable supporting Trump than Biden, in seeking another term. How do we know that it's not going to get worse in a way that fundamentally threatens American democracy and our institutions?

Meijer: Let me try to have a consistent standard again, that notion of being consistent. Understanding the components and depths of a problem. The numbers of Democratic voters who viewed the 2016 election as illegitimate were the mirror image of Republican voters who viewed 2020 as illegitimate. That doesn't excuse Republicans from doing that. Obviously, the post-2020 election period was dramatically different from the post-2016 election period. But to me, it says that the problem that's underlying this is more widespread, right? The violence on January 6th and the violence that we saw over the summer of 2020; neither excuses nor should allow anyone to condone one while condemning the other. I think both are worthy of condemnation. Both may have degrees of difference in various attributes, but the common thread is a large group of people expressing a frustration that they felt could not be resolved within the system, so they engage in activities that were attacking the system from without rather than working from within.

Let's look at what is underpinning some of this. What is the problem beneath the problem? Because if we don't address it, if we don't get at some of those issues of institutional trust, if we don't have a government that feels like it is representing everybody, that there are minimal incompetent moments that are going to be highlighted. If we reduce the amount of times when someone looks at the government and says, what are these? Trying to swear less, but insert your profanity of choice guys doing. Then maybe we can get to the point where that temperature is boiled down. The challenge is from one partisan position to the other. Let me condemn all the things that I can on the other side and then find convenient ways of rationalizing my own.

Wolfe: When you first learned about Democrats backing and supporting the person who was trying to primary you—and was ultimately successful in doing that—who was very far to the right of you, what did that feel like at that moment?

Meijer: I wasn't surprised. I was surprised that it came through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. That was actually their first independent expenditure of the 2022 midterms. It was blunt, paid for by [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]. I have my own conspiracy theory behind that, that they make a blunder to basically send the bad signal to Democratic voters in the district to say, "Hey, you know, there's really no competitive Democratic primaries you can vote in either." Now, I don't think that had a large impact. I think I called it sanctimonious bullshit on CNN.

Again what do you actually believe in? Very few things that happened while I was in Congress came as a surprise to me in terms of me just objectively being like, I can't believe this is happening. So, a lot of my worst assumptions or worst predictions, or just my lowest estimation assumptions ended up being affirmed, but I was really surprised.

Weissmueller: There's very likely going to be a sizable percentage of voters that are voting for neither Trump nor Biden, possibly covering the spread. That's got the Democratic Party and probably the Republican Party panicked. Is there any antidote to that kind of establishmentarianism?

Meijer: No. To me, the strongest method is having trusted, objective folks who can look at a situation and just say, "Okay, you know, Democrats are railing about gerrymandering and how the Republicans are being evil down in Texas. So defend what you guys are doing in Illinois and defend what you're doing in New York." I think it needs to be called out. It needs to be pointed out.

It cracks me up the amount of times when everything is the most important. This time is different. We need to throw the rules out the window up until the time when we want those rules back because they protect us. Up until the next time is even worse. And now, trust us now. If you look at the way in which President Biden every single time, he wants to blame Republicans for something, it's always MAGA Republicans. It's always extreme MAGA republicans. It can be Susan Collins and Mitt Romney and they are extreme MAGA Republicans. I think that is certainly not helpful.

Weissmueller: What is the GOP that you, Peter Meijer, would like to see?

Meijer: To me, that party is one where you can look at a Republican-run city, you can look at a Republican-run state and say, "Gosh, that kind of seems like a place that I want to live." Where folks are moving and voting with their feet. That they're already doing that with the amount of outflows from California to Florida is telling, but having more opportunities to see policies in action.

I think that grounding or policy discussions within communities and focusing on those outcomes, it improves trust, it improves confidence. When you have subsidiarity, right, you have lower levels of governance that folks can get engaged with. Then they feel they have a voice. Then they don't feel like what is happening is something happening to them, but something that they are a part of that is a government of, by, and for the people. But that requires the right structure, that requires the right setup. It requires, you know, conservatives getting back to a fundamental idea of conserving the values of the founding and conserving the principles of the Constitution. I think it's behind a lot of the fears, a lot of the frustrations, and a lot of the anger in the Republican Party today. It's all about giving it direction. Rocket fuel can take you to the moon with the right nozzle, or you can blow up on the launch pad. We have the fuel, we need the nozzle, and we can go far.

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

The post Peter Meijer: Can the GOP Change? appeared first on Reason.com.

Do New Documents Prove a COVID Lab Leak?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 17:36:43 +0000

A recently published document reveals "smoking gun" evidence of COVID-19's lab-based origin, according to Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers and one of the earliest proponents of the lab leak hypothesis.

Ebright is referring to an invoice that shows an order for a particular enzyme that he believes scientists used to stitch together the genome for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, Alina Chan, a microbiologist affiliated with MIT and Harvard and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, says that because the documents in questions are from early 2018, they do not constitute direct evidence, meaning there still "isn't enough to say a lab accident happened beyond reasonable doubt."

Emily Kopp, a science and health reporter working for the public health watchdog group U.S. Right to Know, obtained and published this latest batch of documents—which she obtained through a FOIA request to the U.S. Geological Survey—on January 18. The more than 1,400 pages are communications about and early drafts of the DEFUSE proposal, a grant application seeking funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to collect and manipulate bat-borne viruses. EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit group, authored the grant, which they proposed as a collaboration between U.S.-based virologists and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab located in the city where the first known cases of COVID-19 appeared. DARPA ultimately rejected the proposal as too risky, but critics like Ebright believe that the work likely continued on in Wuhan anyway.

Kopp joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller to discuss the documents on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions. Also joining them was mathematical biologist Alex Washburne, who co-authored a pre-print in October 2022 arguing the genome of SARS-CoV-2 had a "fingerprint" indicating that it was created in a lab. The virus that scientists proposed creating in the newly released DEFUSE documents shares several characteristics that Washburne and his colleagues flagged in the study, such as unusually uniform segment lengths and the presence of the enzyme that Ebright flagged as a "smoking gun."

In this conversation, they discuss the documents in detail, the ways in which they validate predictions in Washburne's paper, the remaining unknowns in the COVID origin case, comments from EcoHealth Alliance founder Peter Daszak seemingly downplaying that most of the proposed virology work would be done in China, and the difficulty of getting the scientific and media establishments to take new evidence pointing to a lab origin seriously.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

U.S. Right to Know: U.S. scientists proposed to make viruses with unique features of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan

DEFUSE: PREEMPT Volume 1 no ESS HR00118S0017 EcoHealth Alliance DEFUSE

Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 | bioRxiv

Kristian Anderson criticizes Washburne's study: "Poppycock"

New Research Points to Wuhan Market as Pandemic Origin | The New York Times

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic | Science

House Minority Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Report on Origins of COVID-19 Pandemic

The post Do New Documents Prove a COVID Lab Leak? appeared first on Reason.com.

Milei vs. the WEF: Who Wins?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 17:53:48 +0000

Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina's Fundación Libertad, and podcast host, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to watch and analyze Argentine President Javier Milei's speech at the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. They also discuss the political agenda of the World Economic Forum and the anti-libertarian comments of its founder Klaus Schwab.

They conclude with a conversation about what's transpired in Argentina since Milei was sworn in as president on December 10. Falcone describes his policy approach as "an offensive against crony capitalism," which has sparked a massive strike organized by the country's largest union to protest Milei's deregulation, labor reforms put on hold by the courts that would allow workers to more easily opt out of union dues, and aggressive proposals to downsize the government.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

Klaus Schwab's anti-libertarian comments at the World Government Summit 2017

Special address by Javier Milei, president of Argentina | Davos 2024 | World Economic Forum

Transcript of remarks by Javier Milei, president of Argentina | World Economic Forum

World GDP over the last two millennia—Our World in Data

Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?—Our World in Data

The post Milei vs. the WEF: Who Wins? appeared first on Reason.com.

Matt Welch: What's Wrong With Populism?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 17:45:55 +0000

Matt Welch, editor-at-large for Reason and podcaster on The Reason Roundtable and The Fifth Column with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss the recent Iowa caucus results and talk about what it means for the 2024 election going forward.

They also talk about where libertarians and independents are leaning in the presidential race and some of the increasingly glaring divides within libertarianism that have led different factions to pursue very different strategies and hold widely divergent views of political candidates like former President Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

Iowa caucus results: The GOP presidential field narrows as Ramaswamy and Hutchinson drop out | NPR

Matt Welch at Reason: Vivek Ramaswamy Really Wants You to Know He Thinks January 6 Was an 'Inside Job'

Rand Paul announces he's "Never Nikki" on X.com

Libertarian Party of Iowa poll results

Dave Smith on libertarian populism on Just Asking Questions

The post Matt Welch: What's Wrong With Populism? appeared first on Reason.com.

Aaron Sibarium: Did Harvard's Plagiarism Scandal Doom DEI?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 18:50:01 +0000

Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, whose work has been widely credited for exposing the plagiarism of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss Gay's downfall, as well as its implications for the Ivy League; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and writers and thinkers of all kinds who can now have their work subjected to AI-powered plagiarism detection.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

"Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit With Six New Charges Of Plagiarism," Washington Free Beacon

"Excerpts From Dr. Claudine Gay's Work," The New York Times

Bill Ackman on X

"Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me," The New York Times

Christopher F. Rufo on X

The post Aaron Sibarium: Did Harvard's Plagiarism Scandal Doom DEI? appeared first on Reason.com.

Tim Carney: Why Aren't People Having More Kids?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 18:04:46 +0000

"To be a sane and happy parent, you need to be counter-cultural in our family-unfriendly culture," writes Tim Carney in his forthcoming book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.

Carney, senior columnist at the Washington Examiner, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the father of six children, talked with Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe about declining fertility in America and worldwide and why he thinks it's time for "governments, employers, and other institutions" to "abandon the idea of neutrality and instead take a side: the pro-family side." They also discussed how governments make it harder to afford large families by implementing counterproductive housing and labor regulations. The conversation delved into the role that technology might play in increasing fertility in the future, the enduring cultural relevance of Mike Judge's 2006 movie Idiocracy, and their reactions to clips about DINK couples ("double-income, no kids").

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

Americans' ideal family size is smaller than it used to be | Pew Research Center

Childstats.gov—America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2023—Demographic Background

Building the New America: Urban Reform Institute, September 2023

World Fertility Rate 1950-2024 | MacroTrends

World Population Prospects—Population Division—United Nations

The post Tim Carney: Why Aren't People Having More Kids? appeared first on Reason.com.

Russ Roberts: Life in Israel Since October 7

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 18:01:43 +0000

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.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel here or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

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.

Stella Assange: Why Isn't Julian Assange a Free Man?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 17:45:37 +0000

Julian Assange was arrested outside England's Ecuadorian embassy after Ecuador's president revoked his political asylum. The U.S. unsealed an extradition request outlining Espionage Act charges, and U.K. authorities moved him to London's Belmarsh Prison in April 2019, a maximum security facility where inmates are held in small single cells. Amnesty International has drawn parallels between Belmarsh and Guantanamo Bay. Reports and statements from doctors emerged quickly after his imprisonment testifying to his deteriorating mental and physical health.

Stella Assange—an attorney specializing in international law, a human rights activist, and the wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with whom she has two children—joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on episode three of Just Asking Questions to talk about the toll that imprisonment has taken on Assange and his family. They also discuss the threat to freedom of speech that the United States' Espionage Act case against Assange poses, why she believes that the Swedish sex charges against him were bogus, and why many in the U.S. media seem hostile to Assange and WikiLeaks.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

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

Zach Weissmueller: Julian Assange was arrested outside England's Ecuadorian embassy after his political asylum was revoked and moved to Belmarsh Prison in April 2019. That's a maximum security facility where inmates are held in small single cells. Amnesty International has drawn parallels to Guantanamo Bay. Reports and statements from doctors emerged quickly after that imprisonment, testifying to his deteriorating mental and physical health. How is he doing today?

Stella Assange: Well, as we film this, we're nearing his fifth Christmas in Belmarsh Prison, and he has been there for over four and a half years now because the U.S. has been trying to extradite him since April 11, 2019, and he hasn't left the facility to go to court since January 2021. That was the last time they allowed him to come to court for his own hearings. Since then, he's been participating remotely over video because they don't let him even go to the courtroom.

His physical state has obviously deteriorated over that time. He spends a lot of time in his cell, but he is able to receive visits. So once or twice a week I can go and see him on weekends. I can bring the kids and that obviously helps him a lot. He can call me from Belmarsh Prison during certain hours throughout the day. So we are in contact during the day for most days, unless there is some kind of problem. And that obviously keeps him sane and helps us both feel like we're not so separated.

Weissmueller: You're a mother, and you have kids together, how often are you able to travel to see him? And what is the personal situation like for you?

Assange: Well, it's obviously very difficult. Our children, the oldest one is 6 and a half, and the youngest one will turn 5 in February. All of their memories of Julian are inside this one big visiting hall inside Belmarsh Prison. And I reiterate that Julian is only there because there is this extradition request from the United States. He's not charged with any crime in the United Kingdom. They're just holding him on behalf of the United States which is opposing bail. And so we're forced to interact within this extremely harsh environment. And that's all the children know, visiting their father inside a big, loud, monitored visiting home once a week, more or less.

Liz Wolfe: How do you explain that to your children? How much do they know about their father's situation?

Assange: It's really a mix of the two. So I've tried to introduce context as they grow older. I didn't want them to understand what a prison was before for other concepts like freedom and fairness. Actually, it was our eldest son, Gabriel, at one point, I guess he was around 5, when he asked if Julian was in prison. This place that we went to, was it a prison? And I told him yes. Before that I would say, we're going to the big building where Daddy is, and it's not Daddy's home. He's just being kept there. And obviously, they experience the whole process of going through the prison security, which everyone has to go through. Everyone, including toddlers, has to be searched by the dogs. They look inside their mouths and so on. They get patted down. They've seen that, and they live it.

I explained that, yes, it's a prison, but that daddy hasn't done anything wrong. In fact, he's done good things, and he's being punished by bad people. I'm trying to explain it in age-appropriate ways and also trying to counter the immediate horror of the situation with the fact that lots of people support Julian and are fighting for his freedom. And sometimes I've taken them to protests and so on so that they actually see that there are a lot of people that support Julian and that there's something bigger going on. He's not just any other prisoner. And that's obvious from when you visit Belmarsh. There are huge banners saying "Free Julian Assange." At least once a week there's a protest. People go into the prison premises with loudspeakers and call for him to be released.

This is a unique case, and I think they can sense that there's something special about their dad. And I've told them it's not the guards themselves, who they see and interact with, who are holding their father specifically. It's the people above them, the people who decide. And they're the people that Julian made angry because he showed the world that they had done bad things. And they're angry about that.

That's generally how I try to explain it. And they understand. I tell them that Daddy's a hero. Millions of people around the world admire him. He spoke the truth. And sometimes it's difficult to tell the truth. And a lot of people will get angry and try to take revenge.

Wolfe: You first met Julian, if I'm not mistaken, when he was fighting sexual assault charges in Sweden. And you initially joined his defense team. What made you interested in that case? And what's your perspective on that whole case?

Assange: I joined his legal team in February 2011, and Julian had started publishing the WikiLeaks publications that had been sent to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning in 2010, so a year before I joined his team. These publications from Chelsea Manning were the "collateral murder" video, the Iraq War logs, Afghanistan war diaries, diplomatic cables, and the Guantanamo Bay files.

These are the same publications that Julian is indicted with now that had happened in the lead-up to me joining his legal team. And it had also started prior to any preliminary investigation being opened in Sweden. And actually, there were never any charges in Sweden. None were brought. And that's quite amazing because it kind of defies logic, right? Because there was a big extradition case, and Sweden would say, "Well, we haven't decided whether to actually bring charges against him, but we just want to question him." And then there was this question about, well, "Why don't you just question him?"

Anyway, that Swedish preliminary investigation was dropped and resurrected multiple times. It was dropped four times, resurrected three. No charges were ever brought. It's quite extraordinary. The amazing thing about this case is that the prosecutor was refusing to question him. How can it possibly be that in a sex case where, of course, memories fade and it all depends on the recollections of the people involved, the prosecutor had to be compelled by the Swedish Court of Appeal, six years after the fact, to question him? The reason the Court of Appeal compelled her was that they said she had failed her professional duty to advance the case. And, of course, this is just one aspect of how that Swedish preliminary investigation was abusive. The reason it was abusive was because it took place in a highly charged political moment in which Julian was being actively sought by authorities because he was about to publish the Chelsea Manning leaks.

He had already published the "collateral murder" video and the Afghan [Diaries]. And it was one month before WikiLeaks started publishing the Iraq War logs that he went to Sweden. There's actually a Daily Beast article that's archived in which the U.S. reporter says the State Department was contacting its allies in Europe and urging them to find a way to stop Julian in his tracks, to arrest him on whatever because by then they had arrested Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, and they knew that WikiLeaks had more major leaks coming out. And so they wanted to stop him in his tracks. They contacted the Australians. The Australians were looking to cancel his passport. And then there was an investigation by the Australian police, and then the Australian police recommending not canceling his passport thinking it would be easier to track his movements. And ultimately Sweden initiated this preliminary investigation, which was condemned by the United Nations as an abuse against Julian's rights as a defendant.

He was, in fact, never formally a defendant because he was never charged, which meant that he was never given access to exculpatory evidence of text messages that we knew existed. And so the U.N. special rapporteur on torture also did an investigation and in 2019 wrote to the Swedish and U.K. governments who refused to cooperate. He wrote a whole book about it. It's called The Trial of Julian Assange. And for any viewers who are interested in this kind of Swedish preliminary investigation, which also served to cast a shadow on Julian to treat him as an accused person without being formally accused, there's another book called Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies by Stefania Maurizi who is an Italian investigative journalist. Stefania Maurizi has done a lot of [Freedom of Information Act] work and obtained a bunch of correspondence, some of which had been destroyed by one party, which is the U.K. government, which is incredibly damning. And it shows how, in fact, there was a collusion between the U.K. and Sweden. The U.K. was telling Sweden not to question him, to extradite him, and that Sweden was going to put him in custody immediately and urging them not to progress the investigation unless he was extradited. This is extremely bizarre. Of course, denying a suspect the ability to defend himself is unjust. If you think this is just a regular case, then none of it makes sense. But once you understand the political context, then, of course, it all makes sense.

It even says in this correspondence that Stefania Maurizi discovered literally the sentence, "Please do not think that we are treating this as just any other extradition case." That's the words of the U.K. prosecution authority who was communicating with the Swedish authorities. And then when Sweden tried to drop it in 2013, the U.K. responded by saying, "Don't you dare get cold feet telling them not to drop it." So it's pretty clear. But of course, as soon as that was dropped, it was revealed that there was an indictment that had come under the Trump administration, and Julian has been in Belmarsh in relation to that extradition request from the U.S. since 2019.

Wolfe: These are not the traditional circumstances under which most people meet their spouses. What was this like for you emotionally? How did you feel signing up to work on this case and then getting to know Julian, like what was swirling around in your head?

Assange: Well, I was steeped in the documents surrounding this Swedish preliminary investigation, and there was no case to answer. From the beginning, it was pretty clear that the administrative use of the extradition request from Sweden was a way to trap him, basically to bury him in a legal quagmire in order to interfere with his publishing work. In Sweden, as I said, like the initial prosecutor who looked at the case said there, there is no crime of rape involved in these allegations. The Swedish conduct in this case also responds to local dynamics. The person who took on the case within days was also running for general elections in Sweden. He was tipped to become the new justice minister. Julian's case was in the media. There were a lot of motivations. It wasn't just the likely nudge from the State Department at the highest levels.

Julian's name was leaked to the press, which should never happen in the case of a preliminary investigation where the person hasn't even been formally accused. And as I said, he was never formally accused in those nine years. The U.N.'s working group on arbitrary detention, which looked at this case from 2014 onwards, saw the underlying investigation material. It was an adversarial process in which Sweden and the U.K. were unsuccessful in convincing this group of U.N. experts on arbitrary detention that they had conducted themselves in a lawful manner. They had, in fact, violated international obligations concerning arbitrary detention when it came to Julian, because, as I said, he was neither convicted nor even charged in relation to Sweden. And so it was this extraordinarily abusive nature of the Swedish allegations that was immediately obvious to me, as a member of his legal team. And so I could directly access the material of the case that we had access to to see that this was absurd.

And my own experience, I mean, as I got to know Julian, was to see how he was persecuted and maligned in all sorts of ways. Of course, the Swedish aspect was just one. It was an effective one because Julian had a lot of support from the left initially because these publications concerned, of course, the Bush wars and so on. And a sex case, even one without a formal accusation or a conviction or anything, obviously is going to alienate a portion of the left and a big portion of women. And there was a deliberate strategy as these FOIA documents show, to keep him in this position of not being able to defend himself, with not being able to clear his name because they refused to question him. Sweden refused to give him a guarantee that he wouldn't be extradited to the United States. Sweden, in spite of its reputation, was a participant in the CIA rendition program, it branded al-Zari and Agiza, two asylum seekers who were in the process of applying for protection, and instead they were taken on a CIA flight and tortured in Egypt. And this was one of the most obvious and one of the most shocking cases of CIA rendition.

Since 2001, Sweden, I don't know if it's still true, but while Julian was still facing potential extradition, Sweden has not once rejected an extradition request to the United States. And this is different to the U.K., which has rejected extradition requests to the United States. So this was also a factor in Julian's decision to resist extradition to Sweden, which is a very small country and views itself as a very small country, certainly in relation to the U.S.

Weissmueller: There are people who were or are friendly to the WikiLeaks mission who say that Julian Assange is a problematic figure. It's a theme that you see in multiple documentaries produced about him, including Risk by Laura Poitras, who's sympathetic but takes this position that Julian's personal troubles are intertwined too much with WikiLeaks' mission. What do you make of that kind of criticism?

Assange: It's really a dated criticism because that kind of criticism came about when the extradition case in relation to Sweden was alive. So a lot of people at the time were saying, "Well, he has nothing to worry about. The U.S. doesn't want to extradite him. This is all about Sweden, etc." And unfortunately, Risk fell into that trap. It's very dated now when you watch it, because obviously what happened was that Julian was indicted in relation to the Afghan and Iraq war publications and so on.

Look, a lot of these portrayals came about in the immediate aftermath of these publications. So what happened in 2010 and 2011 was that WikiLeaks came onto the scene and broke more significant stories than the legacy press had in 50 years combined. And of course, WikiLeaks had partnered with The New York Times, The Guardian, and three major European papers as well in Germany, Spain, and France to maximize the coverage of these big databases. And so they would publish the cables, the war logs, and so on, in coordination, doing joint investigations and so on with these big papers. Once the big papers had published together with WikiLeaks, then there wasn't much utility in that partnership, and they just distanced themselves. Julian was also a critic of the way that these major papers reported on the WikiLeaks publications, the way they redacted information that exposed them to lawsuits from oligarchs. WikiLeaks had already published on their website, so there was, from that perspective, no serious legal threat.

So Julian has been critical of the major media players. And of course, he was an outsider. He's Australian. This is an internet publisher, an internet publisher that attracted very high-quality sources who entrusted WikiLeaks as the vehicle with which this information could reach the public. And the reason for that was that WikiLeaks has a very high-grade submission system which has since been copied by the mainstream. There's a very interesting paper by Jack Goldsmith, who was the former assistant attorney general under a Republican administration, I can't remember which, called the "WikiLeaks-ization of the American Media." And what he argues is that the American press adopted the innovations that WikiLeaks had pioneered by the mid-2010s. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, etc. all have the same or similar technology. They adopted the technology that WikiLeaks invented for using encryption to be able to protect sources when they communicate, and also the submission systems so that you don't necessarily, as the receiver of information, know who the source is. And so this became adopted by the mainstream press.

Another innovation that WikiLeaks brought was to create partnerships between media organizations. It was WikiLeaks who basically forced The New York Times to cooperate with The Guardian, to cooperate with Le Monde and El País, and so on. It had never been done before. It wasn't easy. And part of the reason why there was a distancing from Julian Assange was because they didn't like to work in a way that was not on their own terms, even when it was with other major media partners. And so when Julian came onto the scene, he was seen as a competitor, but also as a threat to the mainstream media's economic model.

This is like 2010. The major papers were publishing online, and their advertising revenue was down. People weren't buying papers anymore. Lots of people are being fired and so on. And here comes WikiLeaks. That has a completely different business model, which is it's small, has a lot of volunteers, and it's reader-funded. And of course, now we see reader-funded publications quite a lot. But at the time, apart from some bloggers perhaps, this was a real reader-funded publication that was unfettered by advertising restrictions. And that at the same time was having such high-quality sources come to them and having high impact and enabling it to enter into partnerships with the biggest media organizations, the biggest media houses, and basically being able to call the shots because WikiLeaks was the one that attracted the sources. And of course, once the legal trouble started and the financial blockade, Bank of America, PayPal, Western Union, and so on blocked the donations to WikiLeaks as soon as WikiLeaks had started to publish the State Department cables. This was also the time when Julian was arrested over the Swedish allegations. This all happened within a week, so it all came down at the same time. And then these major media organizations who had partnered with WikiLeaks then turned against Julian. And basically, I think the objective was to try to kill off WikiLeaks because it was a competitor, because it had such an important impact and was a newcomer. And a threat to the gatekeeper function that we all know.

Wolfe: There is this line drawn between these people who are journalists over here, but these other people surely don't qualify. And therefore, their First Amendment protections ought to be different. How do you feel when you see MSNBC hosts treating Julian Assange in this way?

Assange: It's a bit disappointing because the criticisms that they use are just simply not true. You had Maria Ressa there. She was a CNN presenter. And then, of course, she's a Nobel Peace Prize winner and has herself faced political prosecution because of her journalism. And it's really disappointing that she says something like WikiLeaks dumping. This is one of the major distortions concerning WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks does privilege the publication of archives, but it doesn't just dump it. It provides context. It writes up context. It writes up analysis. It has redacted information and states the criteria for redactions and so on.

But even so, I mean, all of this is really irrelevant whether Julian's a journalist or not. The question is, is Julian accused of journalism? And he is. It is the activity that has been criminalized. Not whether he falls into a category or not. It's the category of the activity that is being criminalized. Receiving, obtaining, and communicating information to the public.

The use of the Espionage Act, it's very interesting because you see kind of lazy journalists, lazy reporters, talking about Julian as if he is being accused of being a spy. You enter into the realm of absurdity when you start talking about the allegations against Julian, because the first point is that Julian is Australian. He's not American. He's never lived there. And the use of the Espionage Act allows for this categorical laziness. And that's because the Espionage Act is a very broadly worded, indeterminate piece of text that was adopted in 1917, and that has been interpreted in an increasingly expansive way, and especially under the Obama administration. The Obama administration really ramped up the use of the Espionage Act against journalistic sources. Under the Obama administration, three times more people were prosecuted as sources of news stories than all previous administrations in the 100 years preceding it combined. And so this expansive crime that started under the Obama administration then continued and became even more extreme under the Trump administration.

So it actually took the U.S. eight years to bring an indictment against Julian, and it came under the Trump administration. I just found this quote that was really interesting. There was a case called the Morrison case in 1984, and this was a source who was indicted and convicted under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified photos to a British military journal. That was Judge Harvie Wilkinson, who in his concurring opinion, said that this would be limited to the role of the source because press organizations are not being and probably could not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act because of the political firestorm that would follow. So, in other words, he was saying that what limits the Espionage Act is political safeguards. It is the outcry. It is the reaction to the preposterous use of the Espionage Act against the press. And so what has happened is that the Espionage Act has been used in that way. It's been used against Julian. It's precedent setting. And the supposed outcry that was supposed to limit this kind of use of the Espionage Act has not followed.

Weissmueller: A lot unfolded in 2016 between WikiLeaks and the U.S. government during the election. How do you think that changed the tenor of the conversation and the way that people view WikiLeaks? And what do you say to people who think that there's some weird relationship between Julian Assange and Russia?

Assange: I don't think there are any Russians who have worked for WikiLeaks. Well, Julian had a talk show that was licensed to a number of channels and Russia Today at the time, this was 2011. This is a long time ago. These allegations have never been substantiated because there is nothing to substantiate. The Mueller report, of course, came up with nothing. The national security directors in January 2017, already during a congressional hearing, said that in relation to the 2016 election material, they had no evidence of anything untoward concerning WikiLeaks. It's all been speculation. It's all basically coming down to Julian licensing a show to Russia Today in 2011. It's weak, to say the least.

Of course, in relation to the 2016 publications, there was a strategy by the Hillary Clinton campaign to talk about Russia as allegedly interfering with that election and so on. But when you look at the WikiLeaks publication specifically, they had nothing to do with this other stuff, the D.C. leaks and I don't know what, which others did publish. WikiLeaks published the [Democratic National Committee] leaks and the [John] Podesta emails. And earlier in the year they had also republished the Hillary Clinton emails that had been put up on the State Department website, which were not easily accessible.

So there were actually three Clinton publications. So the DNC ones revealed how the Hillary Clinton campaign had rigged the Democratic primaries and basically defrauded the Democratic donors who were being misled. The Bernie ones who were being misled because the candidate that they were supporting actually had no chance of becoming a nominee. The Hillary Clinton campaign, of course, afterward, when [it was] found out in Donna Brazile's book there was a secret agreement between the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and there was even a written agreement. They were colluding to basically undermine and ensure that Bernie Sanders did not get equal access to the media and so on.

And then the Podesta emails, which came in October, showed how the Hillary Clinton campaign had also basically rigged the Republican primaries in the sense that they had this thing called the "pied piper" strategy. They would get their mates at MSNBC and so on to get Trump on the airwaves, because according to the Hillary campaign, their view was that Trump and a couple of other Republican candidates were extreme and unelectable and would alienate the swing voters and so on. And if they gave Trump airtime and if they convinced their allies in the press to give Trump airtime, then Hillary would win. And of course, we know what happened after that. So these were, you know, incredibly important publications.

In fact, there was a court case that many people haven't even heard about. The DNC tried to sue WikiLeaks and Julian personally in the Southern District of New York in relation to the DNC publications. And that case was thrown out by the judge on First Amendment grounds. And in fact, he said that this was the type of publication that enjoys the highest protection of the First Amendment because you cannot think of a more important publication than that concerning political candidates in the lead-up to an election. That's a really important and strong judgment. The New York Times afterward gave an interview to the BBC saying, well, if they had received it, they would have also published it.

I think it raises important questions about whether it's really possible in the U.S. media landscape to be truly independent. Can you alienate Democrats and Republicans and still enjoy protection even under the law? Like the political heat on you, and on WikiLeaks, having published damning information both about Republicans and post-2016 about Democrats, has placed Julian in an extremely vulnerable position. Vulnerable in the sense that if the First Amendment protections are not robust enough, if the political climate is such where there is a push for censorship, a push for propaganda, for repression when it comes to speech, then this political restraint on the Espionage Act becomes ineffective.

Wolfe: I want to take us back in time to 2010 for a second, which was when WikiLeaks made its first big release with the "collateral murder" video. It really exposed some of the horrors of war to an American audience for the first time. What was the impact of that video? And what is the broader impact of the WikiLeaks releases on the world?

Assange: Well, it really marks a before-and-after concerning the Bush wars. It's 2010, right? This actual event depicted in the video is from July 2007. The war had started in 2003, and it had been going for seven years by the time "collateral murder" was released. And by then there wasn't much interest in the media anymore. There were embedded journalists traveling with U.S. convoys and going to press briefings by the Pentagon and so on. But there was no real insight. There were just body bags coming back from Iraq. There was real newsworthiness, let's say, in reporting about Iraq. And then suddenly this came down, and it had such an impact because it really contrasted with the curated information that was coming through the media. And it depicts a war crime. That's what you see. It's not just the gunning down of these individuals, to begin with, where two Reuters journalists are on assignment and get killed. One of them crawls to cover and then a van pulls up, and two good samaritans come out of the van and try to pick up this journalist and then bring him into the van. And then it gets shot down and everyone dies, except for two children who are shielded by the body of their father. So this is a truly horrific video. And it's horrific not just because you're watching it, but because you're listening to the conversation and the kind of jokey, casual conversation around war.

I think Chelsea Manning has said that in just 30 minutes you see the Iraq War in its essence. And it really captured the international imagination. And in December 2011, the Obama administration had the U.S. military removed officially, at least from Iraq, in big part because of what WikiLeaks had published.

WikiLeaks had a major impact on the way U.S. policy developed after that point of the publication of the "collateral murder" video. Also with the Afghan War, it took another 10 years or nine years for that to finish. And we all know how that ended. But it didn't just show the carnage in Iraq but the senselessness of sending soldiers to fight this war in Iraq and die and get injured. And of course, the epidemic of suicides that has followed and is ongoing.

Weissmueller: For me, Julian Assange is a figure of world-historical importance because of what he unlocked with WikiLeaks. He demonstrated undeniably that the strategic use of technology like encryption would be shifting the entire global power structure. And he ushered in that new reality. He showed a whole generation that maybe resistance to these powerful super-states actually isn't futile. And if you have the right tools and you know how to use them, you can really change the world. And I think that might be a big part of why he's a marked man. But is there anything else that you want to say as we're wrapping up about his significance or his place in history?

Assange: Well, I think Julian is a visionary and a pioneer, as you say. Many of his writings and his speeches have gone viral on the Internet. In relation to Ukraine, for example, he was talking about Afghanistan, but his kind of big-picture analysis and criticism of the drivers of war have currency now. And in fact, you know, I often go back to the things that he wrote 10 years ago because they have stood the test of time. He is a global figure and a thinker of our times and the type that is direly needed. Julian has to be freed not just because this is an enormous injustice and the precedent it sets affects journalists everywhere in the U.S., but also globally. It's an extreme overreach. It criminalizes the publication of true information of the highest public importance, but also because of Julian's position as a public intellectual and as someone who promotes truth and is a critic of war.

There's a House resolution that is being pushed but has been tabled. It expresses that regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment and that the U.S. ought to drop all charges and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.

The First Amendment is something that is quite unique in the world, and it defines the political culture of the United States, which is much more open and dynamic than other parts of the world. The vast majority of politicians who look at this case seriously will understand the dangers of this case, that it should never have come to pass, that the case should be dropped. I'd ask any viewers to contact their representatives and ask them to support any efforts to drop the case against Julian.

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

The post Stella Assange: Why Isn't Julian Assange a Free Man? appeared first on Reason.com.

Thomas Massie: Why Not Vote 'No'?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 17:45:07 +0000

"I have a history of being the only vote that was a 'no,'" says Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). "I've developed some trust with my constituents on those lone votes."

In the second episode of Just Asking Questions, Massie joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe to talk about his recent votes against aid to Ukraine and Israel, as well as a controversial meme that he posted on X (formerly Twitter), which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted as "antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous."

Massie says charges of antisemitism are "simply not true" and that his objectives are to avoid "open-ended support" for Israel's war and resist encroachments on free speech.

They also discussed Massie's attempt to force an in-person congressional vote on a $2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill in March 2020, a move which prompted former president Donald Trump to label Massie "a third-rate grandstander" and demand he be kicked out of the Republican Party. Massie defeated primary challenger Todd McMurtry 81-19 less than three months later.

"I was just trying to get people on record," says Massie. "The reason I was trying to get people on record is I knew this was one of the worst votes in history and nobody was going to be accountable for it… Here we are three years later, every bad thing that I said would happen as a result of [passing the $2.2 trillion relief package] has happened."

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

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

Zach Weissmueller: I want to talk about something that's unfolding in D.C. right now, which is a vote on the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act. As part of that, the reauthorization of something called Section 702, which essentially allows the government to surveil communications between American citizens and foreign targets without a warrant. Though, after some resistance, a clean reauthorization of that is unlikely to happen. They're attaching it to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is kind of like the defense budget for the year. And they're trying to slip a more temporary extension into that. Could you tell us what is at stake for Americans with this issue?

Rep. Thomas Massie: So we're not trying to eliminate the FISA 702 program. It was established to allow our intelligence agencies to spy on foreigners without a warrant. In order to qualify to be spied on without a warrant, you have to be outside of the country and you have to be not an American citizen. If you're inside the country, or if you're an American citizen outside of the country, you can't be spied on by this program. Sounds great, right? But we've got 250,000 people on that list that we're collecting information on.

If you talk to a businessperson in France, for instance, your emails and stuff may get caught up in this data collection. Well, what they've been doing is going into this giant ball of data and they put in your name. They can put in Zach's name and search it without a warrant, without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. They are using this not to investigate suspects, but to create suspects.

Let's say that you and Liz are at a protest and they develop some nexus. They say, "Well, we think these protesters were inspired by Russia. We're just going to run all the protesters' names through this database." Now, even though the Intel community doesn't concede that they need a warrant for this, they've admitted that they violated their own protocols hundreds of thousands of times when they searched for U.S. persons data in this haystack. They say, "Well, it was created legally, so we don't need a warrant to go search it."

There are two proposals to reauthorize this program. By the way, the only chance you ever get to reform these programs is when they expire. So it's important that they do expire occasionally, and this one expires in January. And in the Judiciary Committee, which Jim Jordan chairs, and on which I serve, we've marked up a bill that would require them to get a warrant. It would create criminal penalties for people in the executive branch who abuse the program. Because there's never any culpability or blowback for anybody that's abused this program.

So we created this reform bill. And then the Intel committee has created a bill which is less than ideal. It doesn't have a warrant requirement. It doesn't have many of the reporting requirements back to Congress that the judiciary bill has. And in fact, it expands their ability to collect information. For instance, if you had free Wi-Fi at a cafe, that service provider would be treated like Google or Verizon now. And they would have to create a direct pipeline to the intel agencies for any of the communications that go through that.

So you've got two proposals out there, and we're running out of time. What Speaker Johnson has proposed and some senators have proposed is "Let's just keep the old program in place for a little bit longer." Your basic congressional kicking the can down the road exercise that's going to be passing the Senate probably today unless Mike Lee and Rand Paul can stop it. Then it comes to the House probably tomorrow.

Now, an interesting thing here is I serve on the Rules Committee, and Chip Roy and Ralph Norman do as well. And we told the powers that be that we can't go along with this. So they couldn't pass a rule to combine the FISA program with the NDAA. That's how they're going to try and get it through, attach it to must-pass legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act. Well, we said, "Nope, this shall not pass the Rules Committee." So they're going to try and do this on suspension. There's a House rule that says if you want to suspend all of our regular rules and expedite something, you need a two-thirds vote of the House. So this is going to be interesting to see if they can get effectively 290 people to vote for it.

Weissmueller: It is interesting because if you think back to when a lot of Americans were first awakened to this with the Snowden revelations about a decade ago, there were some lonely dissenters and most people just rubber-stamped this stuff. It does seem as if now there's more resistance. I assume some of that has to do with the way FISA was used against the Trump administration. Do you feel the political tides have shifted somewhat to the advantage of people who care about privacy and government surveillance?

Massie: The tides haven't just shifted, the stars have aligned. We've never had a chairman of either the Intel Committee or the Judiciary Committee who made reforming this program one of their priorities. So with Jim Jordan, we're very lucky to have him as the chairman of this committee. And one of his signature agendas is to get this reform, because we have seen abuses that have been used against President Trump.

So a lot of conservatives have woken up to the fact that this program is being used against them. You have liberals who are upset about the program. Obviously, the FBI's using this against Black Lives Matter as well.

So you do have this coalition of the left and the right. It used to be a coalition of a dozen people, Right? It was me and Justin Amash, Zoe Lofgren, and Tulsi Gabbard, maybe who were concerned about this. We used to come together and we would offer amendments to try to fix this in the funding bills. We would try to defund some of this stuff, which is a really blunt instrument. It's a lot easier to write legislation that affects the laws than it is to just defund something. And they would pat us on the head and say, "Well, you know, we appreciate the sentiment, but this isn't the time or place to do what you're doing. And you shouldn't be mucking around with the funding." But now is the time and place, the program is expiring. We've got a chairman who's sympathetic to the cause. You know, this reported out of the Judiciary Committee 35 to 2. There were only two dissenters.

Liz Wolfe: Congressman, I want to ask about foreign aid. This week, Zelenskyy came to Washington and made his pitch for why the United States, in his eyes, ought to be funding Ukraine's war against a horrible invasion by Vladimir Putin. There's also obviously a terrible foreign policy situation in the Middle East right now between Israel and Hamas. You have called funding Ukraine and funding Zelenskyy, "economically illiterate and morally deficient." Make the case for why you oppose this form of funding.

Massie: Well, the "economic illiteracy" is in reference to a letter that the White House sent to the House of Representatives last week. And in two or three of the paragraphs of the letter, they espouse the virtues of spending money with the military-industrial complex and sending that to Ukraine as a job creation program. That it would reinvigorate our military industrial complex. You've got to believe in the broken window fallacy to think this will be an economic stimulus for the United States.

Meanwhile, the moral deficiency comes from some of the senators who have said that this war is a great deal for America because all we have to do is supply the weapons and Ukraine supplies the soldiers and that we're grinding down the Russian army. We're degrading their capacity to do this elsewhere or to commit war against us. The problem with that is the number of people who are dying. Zelenskyy allegedly told the senators that he's raising the draft age to 40 and admitted that they are running out of soldiers either through attrition on the battlefield or from people who've defected and left the country.

You would think if this were a war about the existence of Ukraine and protecting a democracy and such a fine government that people would sign up, would volunteer to fight for their country. But the reality is hundreds of thousands of them had the means and the money got out of the country. Some are dying, trying to escape over mountains and through rivers to get out of the country. And far too many have died on the battlefield. We can keep supplying them with weapons. We can keep depleting our treasure, but they're going to run out of fighting-age males pretty soon.

Wolfe: Do you take that as an indictment of Ukraine's democratic system or more of a sense of leaving the country because they see it as a war that is totally unwinnable? How do you look at that situation? And more broadly, how should libertarians look at parallels, or lack thereof, between the U.S.'s involvement in funding Ukraine and the U.S. funding Israel?

Massie: Well, to your first question, I think it's both. They lived in a country where they know that bribery and corruption are part of the culture and the current government isn't immune to that. And so if you're fighting for your country, that's one thing. But fighting for the government that's in charge of your country is another thing. So I believe that's part of it. Obviously, self-preservation is going to be part of it as well.

When it's over, there's going to have to be some negotiated peace settlement. And nobody, I think, believes Crimea is going to go back to Ukraine. So why spend all their lives when the lines are going to be where they were when it started? Just realism is a third factor.

Weissmueller: Let me pick up on Liz's second point there, which is about Israel, because you've been kind of on the lonely end, certainly on the Republican side, of several votes pertaining to Israel. Could you explain your stance on Israel, where you're coming from, and what you think some of these critics might be missing about your position?

Massie: Sure. That was the first of 19 votes. Today. We're going to take our 19th virtue signal vote here in Congress. But I guess I got off on the wrong foot early and have been voting consistently ever since. The title of that bill is wonderful. I have no disagreement with the title of that bill, but there are 4 or 5 pages that go after that title.

The first objection I had was that there is an open-ended pledge of military support for Israel. We never declare wars anymore. The administration just kind of goes and does it. And Congress keeps funding it, but they find the imprimatur for their activity right there in these resolutions. So the open-ended guarantee of support for that war that's contained in the text of that bill, but not the title, could have implied boots on the ground. And that may be the only vote we get to take in Congress on whether we're going to do that or not. So, number one, I don't support that notion.

Number two, in that resolution they mentioned Iran. In the very first resolution, they're already trying to expand the war and incorporate as much of the Middle East as they can. There's some people that just can't wait to attack Iran, and they want to use this as the nexus to get there. So that was in the resolution, a condemnation of Iran. I think we should be trying to constrain the conflict, not to expand it in the first resolution of support that we passed.

Part of that resolution wanted stronger sanctions on Iran. And I don't support sanctions, never voted to sanction a sovereign country in the 11 years that I've been in Congress. I think it leads to war. Sanctions actually create crimes only for U.S. citizens because we're not going to put somebody in jail in another country who trades with Iran. What we're proposing to do when we pass a sanction is to make a federal law that would result in the imprisonment of a U.S. citizen who trades with Iran, and it hurts the people who are in the country. I think it actually edges us closer to war instead of getting us out of war. Even though I support Israel and I condemned Hamas, I did that on my own. I put out a statement. I support Israel's right to defend itself and I condemn these attacks. But that wasn't enough.

Weissmueller: You've taken more heat for what you would describe as a "virtue signal bill." It's essentially the House reaffirming the state of Israel's right to exist and recognizing that denying Israel's right to exist is a form of antisemitism. Where are you coming from on these sorts of bills that aren't even really directly tied to any sort of military aid?

Massie: Well, I recognize Israel's right to exist. I have to preface all of this stuff with that because people would imply from a vote that I don't. But when they passed that, I said, "You're basically saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism." And people argued with me about that.

What's interesting is the next week they passed almost the same resolution and they replaced Israel's right to exist with Zionism. So maybe I'm just giving them clues for how to write their bills more directly because the next resolution said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who disagree with that statement. In fact, Jerrold Nadler, who's the most senior member of Congress, who's Jewish, went to the floor and gave a five minute speech, which is a long speech in the House of Representatives. But, he gave a five-minute speech on why that's untrue, to say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

There are a lot of people who are antisemitic who are also against the state of Israel, but you can't equate the two. And I think these 19 votes, after today, are sort of part of the war effort for Israel to make it hard for anybody in the United States to criticize what they're doing.

Every two or three days here in Congress, we're taking these votes that a lot of what's in the resolution is just obvious and doesn't need to be stated. It's kind of like Black Lives Matter. You have to say "black lives matter." They're doing the equivalent with Israel. Now Israel matters. And so I agree that Israel matters, but we don't have to take all these votes. And some of them are going into campuses and trying to limit free speech by withholding federal money.

I've been called antisemitic for merely not supporting the money that goes to Israel. American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent $90,000 in my district running ads implying that I was antisemitic and then in a tweet, said that I was "antisemitic for not voting for the $14.3 billion to go to Israel." Even though I've not voted for foreign aid to go anywhere.

Weissmueller: Chuck Schumer has accused you of being antisemitic. He's blasted you on Twitter. Here's the tweet, he said: "Representative Massie, you're a sitting member of Congress, this is antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous and exactly the type of thing I was talking about in my Senate address. Take this down." And what he is referring to is the Drake meme, where you're saying, "No to American patriotism, yes to Zionism, Congress these days." What was your reaction to this?

Massie: Well, we ratioed him on that pretty soundly. I quote tweeted him and said, "If only you cared about half as much about our border as you care about my tweets."

It's just simply not true. By the way, in the replies to him, you'll find somebody who pointed out that of all 535 members of Congress, this cycle, he received more money from pro-Israel lobby according to Opensecrets.org than any other member of Congress. So it rings hollow when he says that. He's even in disagreement with Jerrold Nadler.

And I'll admit memes are not the most precise way to convey a point. But they can be effective. There's nothing in that meme that implies those two things are mutually exclusive. And that wasn't my intent. It's okay in Congress to be patriotic for Israel, but you can't be patriotic for America. That's considered nationalism, which American nationalism is a dirty word. And I know it's loaded. There are a lot of people that have attached themselves to it. But if you take it in the generic sense, it's pride in your country. Pride in America is looked down upon right now. It's out-of-fashion. But pride in Israel is something we have to vote on two or three times a week now in Congress.

Weissmueller: You have this reputation in your own district and nationally as the guy who's willing to make the meme and take the unpopular vote. I think that one of the prime examples of that is back during the depths of COVID, in March 2020, everyone was pushing for this $2.2 trillion COVID relief bill, including the president of the United States. And it was Representative Thomas Massie who was saying, "If we're going to have a $2 trillion vote here, let's follow the Constitution and have everyone come back to D.C. and actually do it in person."

And for that, going back to Twitter, President Trump's response to that was "Looks like a third-rate grandstander named Representative Thomas Massie, a congressman from, unfortunately, a truly great state, Kentucky, wants to vote against the new Save Our Workers bill in Congress. He just wants publicity. He can't stop it." He goes on to say that "the Republicans should win the House, but they should kick out Thomas Massie." What was that like having the Eye of Sauron on you for insisting on an in-person vote in March 2020?

Massie: I'll have to write a book someday. But those tweets happened about 60 seconds after a phone call ended between me and President Trump, where he basically burned my ear off, screaming at me for probably three minutes and said he was coming at me, he was going to take me down. That's a sobering proposition when you've got a primary election eight weeks away and you've been trying to keep the president out of your race. The person running against you says you don't support the president enough. And the president had a 95 percent approval rating among the primary voters who were going to vote in my election. But I just stood strong. I said, listen, if truckers and nurses and grocery store workers are showing up for work, then Congress should show up for work too. And that was, I think, an unassailable message. Because, ultimately, I was just trying to get people on record.

The reason I was trying to get people on record is because I knew this was one of the worst votes in history and nobody was going to be accountable for it. Here we are three years later, and every bad thing that I said would happen as a result of doing that has happened. And even my colleagues here in Congress, a lot of them admit to me that they were wrong about that. They won't say it too loudly lest anybody hear it.

The reporters came up to me as I walked out of the chamber that day and said, "Your own president just called you a third-rate grandstander. What do you have to say?" And I said "I was deeply insulted. I'm at least second-rate." And they didn't ever come back to that.

Wolfe: How much COVID policy remorse is there among your colleagues in Congress?

Massie: Not enough. Not nearly enough. The policy isn't just the spending, the vaccine mandates, the shutting down of our economy, the compulsory masking, the way people were treated like cattle. There should be far more remorse. But frankly, that's a reflection of the voters as well. If you poll this, most people have moved on. Even a year ago, most people had moved on.

I mean, look at Ron DeSantis. That was part of his signature issue. But he most famously opposed a lot of this COVID nonsense after it became obvious what we were dealing with. And he rode that wave and he was polling better than Trump. But I think people have moved on and they've got other issues to think about now. People have just moved on and so have my colleagues. And I think it's really unfortunate. And I wished that I had been able to get that recorded vote that day. We'd have a lot more people who wouldn't be back here in Congress perpetrating bad ideas like FISA.

Wolfe: You were elected during the era of the Tea Party reining in government spending. We care about our fiscal health. And so as a result, we can't just have the money printer constantly print money forever more. We have to be prudent because the bill always comes due. Do you think that message has any hopes of having any sort of revival in the coming years, especially given the runaway inflation that we've seen? Or do you think it's just a totally lost cause and we're all screwed?

Massie: Let me assign a 95 percent probability to that last proposition. I'm here with a 5 percent chance that we can save it. And in the 30 percent chance that if it all goes to hell in a handbasket, I can still be here and have some credibility to put it back together.

I think what's starting to curb the appetite for spending and bring some realism into the discussion is the only thing that was ever going to curb our appetite for spending, and that is our creditors are starting to balk. The rates at which the government can borrow money now aren't what we want them to be. When we go out to do an auction or a sale for treasuries or bonds what we're finding is the appetite isn't there, even at 4.5 percent, you know, to get a guaranteed 4.5 percent return on your money from the government backed by the U.S. military? That's not enough to loan that money to the government. They want 5 percent. That's an indicator that when the private sector and the other countries, the sovereign funds, usually have the appetite for our debt when they're losing their appetite, that's a sign that things are going south.

I wear this debt clock that I built in Congress to remind people of it. And one side effect of me wearing this is the rate at which the debt is increasing is going up. So for the math nerds, that's the second derivative. And today, the debt per second is $78,000. I don't think people realize. It feels like we're going over Niagara Falls right now. The rate of these bad things happening is increasing now.

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

The post Thomas Massie: Why Not Vote 'No'? appeared first on Reason.com.

Dave Smith: What Is a Libertarian?

Zach Weissmueller — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 17:45:51 +0000

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

Smith spearheaded the Mises Caucus takeover of the Libertarian Party (L.P.), telling Reason's Nick Gillespie at the party convention in 2022 that the new L.P. needs "a game changer," someone capable of "re-sparking the Ron Paul Revolution" in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

In this episode, Smith discusses what has transpired in the Libertarian Party since the convention, 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.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

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

Liz Wolfe: So for our first question: What is a libertarian? What beliefs are disqualifying for libertarians to hold today?

Dave Smith: To me, libertarianism is the belief in self-ownership, private property rights, and the non-aggression principle. I think that's the best philosophically sound definition of it that isn't circular. It's not just a definition like someone who believes in freedom or maximum freedom or something like that. So a libertarian would be someone to me who believes in that. And I would argue that almost everyone who calls themselves a libertarian, whether they would agree with my definition or not, whenever they're arguing for a libertarian position, it's completely consistent with all of that.

Now, what beliefs are disqualifying to you is tough to quibble about, because, I don't know. Gary Johnson wanted to legalize pot, but not any other drugs or not any harder drugs. I'm not going to say he's not a libertarian, but I would say he's not a libertarian on heroin, if that makes sense. That just completely contradicts what libertarians believe. So I don't know exactly.

Although I will say there are certain things, to me, like war and peace is the biggest issue. And people who support wars, I really do not consider them libertarians. I just think that if you are for freedom and against the government, there is no worse government policy in the world than war. There's not even a close second. And that tends to violate more freedom than any other policy.

Wolfe: Where do you encounter pro-war libertarians?

Smith: If you want to listen to Ted Carpenter, who just left Cato, he gave like a 45-minute speech on how much there is at some of these libertarian organizations. I just had a debate with Austin Petersen, who was an L.P. candidate for president years ago. I mean, I think they're out there. Certainly, during the Ukraine war, there were a lot of people who called themselves libertarian who were very quick to say you are a Putin propagandist for bringing up the fact that us giving a blank check to this war has done nothing but kill hundreds of thousands of people. So they exist.

Zach Weissmueller: But there can be wars that libertarians would support, right?

Smith: Yeah. I think the American Revolutionary War would be legit, yes. If you're invaded by an army, you have a right to violently try to get them out. But not too many of those.

Weissmueller: That's where it starts. You put the non-aggression principle at the center of libertarianism, and that's where it starts to get a little murky for me because I think that there would be legitimate wars of self-defense. But how would you square that with the non-aggression principle?

Smith: If there's an invading army, I think that, by definition, they are the aggressors. I think it's reasonable. Am I going to split hairs down to the point that like this other soldier in that uniform hasn't fired a shot yet, so is he fair game? I would say, yes. You rolled in with an invading gang and you've given up your rights.

Weissmueller: With the Ukraine-Russia war, for instance, the libertarian-type people who were siding with Ukraine in that war saw Ukraine as repelling an invader. I presume your objection to that is more so about America's involvement, not necessarily the Ukrainians?

Smith: To be clear, I think that Ukrainians have a right to self-defense and they have a right to stay and fight for their territory if that's what they wish to do. But there's a lot more to that picture.

My problem is American involvement and NATO's involvement going way back for decades. This intentional policy of trying to needle the Russians over and over again and then finally being surprised when it resulted like this.

Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves. If someone pulls a gun on you and asks for your wallet, you have a right to fistfight that guy. It's not necessarily a good idea. And so that's more been my thing with Ukraine. You're fighting a fight you can't possibly win. This was blasphemy for me to say for the last couple of years, but now everybody has come around to acknowledge that even with the blank check from America over these two years, they just have no shot of winning. So now we're right back to negotiating time. And yeah, I'd be against Americans being forced to fund a war which both armies are being forced to fight because these are two conscripted armies, after all. So there's nothing libertarian about that.

Weissmueller: Where it starts to get complicated for me is when you're talking about the role of America's military. You and I share a libertarian genesis. I became a libertarian a few years before Ron Paul made his run. But Ron Paul's 2008 run was certainly energizing for me. However, there are times when it seems as if some libertarians automatically choose the side that America is not funding like in the case of Ukraine. However, there is a self-interest for America's defense to make it costly to Russia. Is there not something to that?

Smith: That is the thinking in D.C., at least for the most part. Putting some type of penalty on Russia for invading is in America's interests. Let's just be really brutally honest, the cost of that is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives. If that's a cost you're comfortable paying, fine, but maybe take that Ukraine flag out of your Twitter bio because you're really the most anti-Ukraine person.

But then again, maybe it would have been in America's best interest if democracy had swept the region in the Middle East. And then they were all like Jeffersonian Republicans or something like that. But that plan doesn't seem to be working out too well. I think that the U.S. dollar as the reserve standard of the world is probably in more jeopardy right now than at any point in my lifetime. This has driven Russia and China to be much closer allies. You've seen almost a real crack to the unipolar world, where it's not even clear that we really are in a unipolar world anymore.

My perspective on the Russia thing is that obviously that Vladimir Putin is wrong to invade and the war has been horrific. I do think that not living in a libertarian universe, living in the real world, and trying to have some type of reasonable modern expectations for what governments are going to do, is the idea that Vladimir Putin said for years, "You cannot expand your military alliance to Ukraine, that is off the table. That is my red line." And they knew this. I mean, there's that great memo. If you've never read it, "nyet means nyet", where the current CIA director privately writes to Condoleezza Rice and is like, listen, this is for real. This is their red line. And there is just no way America would tolerate that. I mean, can you imagine if Russia was like, "We're bringing Mexico into our military alliance?" What do you think the reaction from Washington D.C., would be? "Absolutely, you are not." And we would send troops there in a second if that was the plan.

Just before the war broke out Vice President Kamala Harris was over there saying we're still bringing NATO in and it's still the plan. There is no powerful country that would have reacted differently. That doesn't mean it's good or it's right, but my takeaway from that is like, why would we be so stupid as to keep doing this for no benefit other than, like, world domination?

Weissmueller: Look at what just happened in Israel, what did the U.S. do? The U.S. sent one of our largest aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean to prevent all these other players from getting involved. The idea is to stop this from escalating into a regional war. That would seem to be in America's self-interest, to stop that escalation. And it's relatively low cost—we're just going to park this carrier here. Would that fall within your definition of conforming to the non-aggression principle?

Smith: Well, I mean, no, not really. I'm a complete noninterventionist on all this stuff, so I don't support that. It's not the most egregious thing that the American military has ever done on the scale of things to be outraged by. But look, you're looking at one tiny little element of this huge conflict and being like, "Well, look, this one thing here was done, you know, that could prevent a wider war."

The whole thing only exists because the U.S. has been propping up this status quo for 60 years. And the fact that we think we're going to maintain this thing where we say, "We're going to prop up Israel, we're going to make it so that the entire global community, which has been outraged about the treatment of Palestinians since 1967, we'll veto everything at the U.N. We'll ignore all of these global human rights organizations. We're going to prop up dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia." And then it blows up. The takeaway to me isn't we do have to sometimes prevent these wars from happening. The truth is that none of this should be America's business. If you're anything that considers yourself a libertarian, or you 70 percent agree with me or whatever, that doesn't come with being the world empire.

There is no such thing as a restrained, constrained constitutional republic that is also the empire of the world. War is the health of the state. War always grows the government for other purposes other than just the war. Civil liberties are lost the most during times of war.

Wolfe: These are themes that we were touching on in a recent stream where we interviewed Russ Roberts, who I think comes at this issue from a very different perspective than you do. But the thing that I wish more libertarians would grapple with is the difference between the aspiration of the role America plays and figuring that out from where we currently are. What is the appropriate approach to get to where we want to be?

I think we can all recognize that the U.S. has been funding Israel and supporting Israel for a very, very long time. And I think many good libertarians would say, "Hey, you know, it's long past time to cut Israel off and allow them to really stand on their own two feet. They have the ability to do that." But realistically, that's not something we can do right now. We can't just fully cut off funding right now and expect there to be no awful ramifications that would stem from that. So the thing that I always struggle with is, how do you get from point A to point B?

Smith: I think I kind of reject the assumption that it would be some type of disaster if we were to cut off aid to Israel right now. It would put enormous pressure on them to negotiate. That's really what they'd have to do. This isn't 1948. Israel isn't in a state of war with all the Arab surrounding nations.

Wolfe: This is the precise argument that many people make for why we should have cut them off from U.S. funding and support before. But if we do that right now, surely that does have ramifications beyond what they would have been had we done that in 2019, right?

Smith: No, I agree it has ramifications, but I'm just saying that like they might be very positive. Israel has been at peace with Egypt since the 1970s. They're at peace with Jordan. They're at peace with Saudi Arabia. They bomb Syria constantly. Syria never responds to them. It's not even like an issue. Iran might funnel some money to Hamas, maybe some to Hezbollah. Israel, if they didn't have the backing of the United States of America, would be heavily incentivized to actually deal with the Palestinians to actually work out a real peace process, not this pretend one, to grant them their independence, and to stop occupying their areas.

Part of the reason Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are so willing to be provocative is because they know they have the baddest bully in the world that has their back. And if they didn't, they might be like, "Okay, well, look, we really got to think about this." Maybe we shouldn't just bomb the hell out of Gaza right now because that might actually piss off the world, you know? And so, there's this tremendous moral hazard that we create when we, as the strongest country in the history of the world, are like, "We have your back."

Weissmueller: Israel is making very tough moral choices right now and they're making choices that I don't always agree with. And to have us being perceived to be joined at the hip with every bomb that they're dropping is a very bad situation. So I would like to see us get disentangled. On the other hand, I think that at the moment, they have my moral support. It's not a war crime to root out Hamas to the degree that that's possible.

Smith: I don't think there's reason to believe that Israel is going to really take the gloves off if America stops backing them. I think it would be much more reasonable that they would be more concerned coming from a slightly more vulnerable position. Israel won a war in 1967 and they've been holding these people ever since. And they just don't have a right to do that.

Wolfe: You mean the West Bank. It's worth noting also that the situation in Gaza has changed in the last 16 or 17 years.

Smith: Yes, absolutely. But I'm just saying, they won the war in 1967. They have literally not granted these people their independence since then. If you want to talk about what's happened over the last 15 years or so, they then took on an intentional goal of supporting Hamas specifically so that Palestinians could never get their independence. So they could never get their state.

In their own words, Benjamin Netanyahu and all types of top government-level people said "This is our plan." And for this reason, we are going to support Hamas because no one will ever grant them statehood as long as Hamas is in control.

Wolfe: If you are making a case that the Israeli government errors and fucks up in a million ways, I totally agree with that.

Smith: I'm coming at it from the point of view of being like, "Oh, well, listen, I do kind of root for them and they do have the moral right to do this." But we're talking about the guys who had an intentional policy of propping up this terrorist organization to use them so that they could never grant the Palestinian people who, just like the Israelis, are separate from their government, so that they could never grant those people their own independence and autonomy. And then it blew up in their face.

If you look at the numbers, they've dropped more bombs than we did in a year in Afghanistan, in Gaza over a few weeks. And so, no, I don't look at that situation and go like, "Oh, well, they do have the moral right to root these people out." The people who did October 7 all deserved to die.

But I'm sorry, when your plan was to prop up a terrorist organization so that the people in Palestine never get their autonomy, and then you use that as an excuse to then just start slaughtering them.

Wolfe: I do want to stifle some of my greatest Zionist shill thoughts and move us back in the direction of actually what libertarians should aspire to be. I think we have established that libertarians aren't generally war hawks and we are not generally Hamas shills or even Zionists. Zach, how do you look at this question of what is a libertarian defining yourself totally independent of Dave's or perhaps in response to it?

Weissmueller: There's a lot of overlap. Unsurprisingly, I see libertarians as extreme skeptics of state power. And the reason for that is that we are against violent monopolies and for voluntary association to the degree that it's possible. And that is because of self-ownership. We believe in the idea of self-ownership, self-authorship, you control your own destiny, and you write your own story.

The way I like to think of it is this phrase: "right to try," like you should have the right to challenge monopolies. And that is something I think libertarians across the board recognize. The state is a monopoly on violence and they use that monopoly to create other monopolies. We've got Elizabeth Warren out there always talking about monopolies. I think she was just tweeting about a sandwich shop monopoly that she's going to break up. But the real monopolies are created by governments.

I think where the differences come in is that we have different reasons for thinking that monopolies are bad. But my reason for thinking monopolies are bad is because I believe that experimentation and competition create progress and prosperity.

Wolfe: I agree. And my definition is perhaps even simpler. Libertarians don't look to the government to fix what ails us. I think libertarians ought to have and generally do have a high degree of comfort with voluntary action existing in civil society outside from government. Libertarians, I think, frequently gravitate toward voice, but also I love the strain of libertarians that gravitate toward exit, trying to exist outside of government institutions.

I look at people living off the grid and people choosing to homeschool. There are so many ways that people can just kind of prove out the idea that we actually don't need the government to take care of us in a gazillion ways. We sometimes prosper far, far, far outside of the purview of the state. And in fact, people can be so much freer to live better lives that way.

Obviously, the non-aggression principle is pretty core to all of this. But I think libertarians just positionally tend to be people who take incentives seriously and second-order impacts consequently unintended consequences. And I really appreciate how libertarians are so frequently asking this question of government policies. Well, what are the alternatives or what are bad incentives that could possibly be created by this? I love how libertarians focus on tradeoffs, and it drives me absolutely insane that so much of the left and the right seem to never entertain the possibility that a government policy could actually lead to awful unintended consequences.

Smith: I pretty much agree with what you guys are saying. The definition I give is the core of the philosophical belief. But I agree with everything both of you guys said. And I just think that the fundamental libertarian insight is that what the government is, as you said, a monopoly on violence. I don't even know if that's the perfect way to say it.

They have a monopoly on the legal initiation of violence. They can do it legally. To me, it's like, if you believe in morality at all, which almost everybody does, and there are some people who just reject it entirely, but almost everyone in the political realm agrees. If you listen to Bernie Sanders, he'll say it's immoral that there is this income inequality.

But if you believe there is such a thing as right and wrong, then I would say inherently morality has to transcend what organizations we create. In other words, if you think murder is wrong, and you were on a deserted island and there's no government and there's no rules and someone murdered somebody, that would be just as morally wrong there as it is here. There just doesn't happen to be a legal system or police or whatever. But the morality has to be the same. Otherwise, we're not really talking about morality.

If any other group of people did what the government does, we wouldn't know what to call it right away. You would just be like, "Oh, this is the Mafia or this is a criminal" like taxation is theft, or you're just forcing someone to give you their money. You know, wars are mass murder campaigns. If anybody else, any other group of people decided like, we deem ourselves the regulators and we're going to go around and start regulating these businesses, you'd be like, "Oh, no, you're a gang." Like you're a criminal organization. And so if you believe in morality, I think it has to be the same whether the government does it or not. And that voting doesn't somehow change the moral characteristics of what a group of people do.

Weissmueller: We don't know if the absence of this legitimate monopoly on violence is a stable situation, like it's something that is yet to be seen. I'm open to the possibility that everything could be privatized one day or something. That's why I favor this definition where it's a little bit more experimental and you're saying, let's try to not have the state do this thing that we're all used to the state doing.

Smith: Fair enough. And I'm not even like, I don't want to do a whole anarchy versus minarchy thing because, in today's day and age, it seems so crazy because we're so far from both. So then it's like you're completely against monopolies and you recognize that monopolies just lead to these terrible results. Why is it just writing laws and courts and police and military or things that have to be run by a monopoly? If we're saying that monopolies, especially violent monopolies, are really bad at producing things, then why would it be that they are really bad at producing things in every other field, but the most important things must be run in the worst way to produce things? Otherwise, we'd all be living in a dystopia.

Wolfe: I like what you're saying and you surely will not find this to be satisfactory or something particularly earth-shattering, but I do believe in a little bit of the unique power of the U.S. Constitution and some of the structures outlined in it. I think many a liberal who did their Trump hysteria op-ed piece and acted like American democracy was horribly imperiled during the Trump years, don't place very much faith in our Constitution and don't place very much faith in our court systems or in federalism or in the abilities of this very complex system of checks and balances.

And I think we're libertarians, right? There are lots of things that we could sit here and point to and say, well, surely the Constitution has failed us and X, Y, and Z ways. However, with that massive caveat, I do think constitutional limits have done a pretty good job of ensuring some of these state institutions have actually done a decent, but imperfect job of serving their intended function.

Smith: I'm not saying that there are examples here where some unconstitutional policy has been struck down. But if you want to zoom out and just look at how good the Constitution has done at limiting government, I mean, we're the biggest government in the history of the world, by far. The biggest organization in the history of the world is the U.S. federal government by any metric.

Weissmueller: Just saying that it's the biggest government in history doesn't really capture the fact that this is not the most tyrannical government in history.

Smith: I would bet we have more federal employees in D.C. than China has. I don't know for sure. But look, in terms of how much money it spends and how many bases it has abroad. And so if you're going to judge America, you can't just judge America based on, like, "Hey, it's kind of nice to live in Brooklyn." You have to judge it on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. We have killed millions of innocent people just in the last 20 years. I'm not even going to go back to Vietnam.

Weissmueller: This is foreign policy where we have a lot of agreement. America is not living under tyranny by historical standards. America has a flawed foreign policy, to say the least. That does not justify throwing out all of the constitutional protections, all the pro-liberty aspects of the U.S. government, and saying we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is where I think we butt heads a little with your camp.

Smith: The goal should be a thousand Liechtensteins, you know? There are positive qualities that different countries have.

Weissmueller: Let me pick up on the Liechtenstein point because this is essentially the strategy of the Mises Caucus that took over the Libertarian Party. Nick Gillespie interviewed you in Reno during the Mises Caucus takeover of the Libertarian Party in May 2022. He asked you what you want to see the L.P. doing in the years leading up to the 2024 election, which are now rapidly approaching, and this is what you said: "If we're ever going to get to a free society, we're going to need a lot more people who desire a free society. And what we need here is a game changer, unlike, say, Bill Weld." So do you think that the new Libertarian Party is poised to deliver a game changer?

Smith: Well, I hope so. That's what I try to do, right? I'm always trying to do that. I think the Mises Caucus taking over the Libertarian Party was necessary for there to be a chance for the Libertarian Party to do that. We're still fighting a very uphill battle. Anybody who believes in liberty is fighting an uphill battle.

You could say that big donors have walked away from the Libertarian Party since they came in. The truth is that there was basically a civil war within the Libertarian Party. And no matter what happened in Reno, believe me, if we had lost in Reno, we represented like 80 percent of the party. I mean, tons of people would have walked away from the party.

The truth is that when lockdowns came, the old Libertarian Party basically rolled over and took it and didn't want to say anything. And in fact, the only comments they would make would be like, "Well, we do think you should stay home." If they're not even going to try to stand up for liberty, then I don't care if some big donors will support you and are alienated by us.

And again, the Jo Jorgensen campaign. I mean, this is like a total embarrassment. Jo Jorgensen would go to give speeches where a crowd full of people in masks were forced to be socially distanced in a park where a father had been arrested a week earlier for having a catch with his son. And talk about the drug war or how socialism is bad or something like that, and not even want to touch the moment that she was living in. So in terms of like, can the Libertarian Party spark like the next Ron Paul movement? Well, no, not if it's doing that. It has no chance.

Wolfe: When I look at Angela McArdle and Michael Heise and the Mises Caucus takeover and Jeremy Kauffman, I don't really see champions for the things that I value.

Smith: So first of all, I hate the Twitter edge-lording and posting that stuff. I just hate it. I hate all of that. I've been on record about this for years.

Now, there's one state affiliate in New Hampshire where that is their entire thing. And they've basically been at war with the Mises Caucus. But there's also been on the other side, non-Mises controlled state affiliates that do like a ton of this just engagement farming, shock-value stuff. And I just don't like it. I just don't like any of that. What got people excited about libertarianism to me was Ron Paul giving history lessons and this stuff is just lame.

Weissmueller: There was this awful messaging that existed before, this very out-of-touch messaging, during one of the most insane years in modern history. And so this new leadership came in. They came in pretty hot. And now they've dialed it back a little bit.

I looked into some of the numbers coming into this, some of these were compiled by the Mises Caucus' enemies, the Classical Liberal Caucus. What they compiled here is that revenues are down historically when you adjust for inflation and not only big donors, but monthly donors are down. And I looked into the actual reports behind the numbers and it's all accurate except the Libertarian Party did not adjust for inflation, which seems like something you should do.

Smith: Well, what do you mean? Raise prices? So what's your takeaway from that?

Weissmueller: My takeaway is that revenues are down monthly.

Smith: But that's if you have a job where you're making a hundred grand a year and then you just keep your job and someone's looking at that and says, "Dude, your income is way down from there." I mean, yes, that's true. If you're blaming the Federal Reserve, then I'm with you. But if you're blaming the Mises Caucus for that, I don't think that is correct.

Weissmueller: Well, I'll leave it for the audience to judge whether that is good or bad. But what do you think is going on here internally?

Smith: Just to be clear, I have no position in the Libertarian Party. And if you talk to Angela or someone like that, I'm sure she could give you a much better answer than this. I just do stand-up comedy and podcasts about this stuff. But from what I understand, there was this major problem with this software thing. I don't exactly know the details of it. This is something that started before the Mises Caucus took over… A big basic disaster of transferring data. So I think that hurt them a little bit.

But regardless of any of that, I think that the state of the Libertarian Party, no matter what happened at Reno, was going to be rebuilding. There's a lot of people who were very turned off by the Mises Caucus in the Libertarian Party. And there were a lot more people who were willing to go to fight for them and that's why we won.

There are these storms that come in where things are very sensitive to talk about. Like right now it's the Israel-Palestine storm that we're living in where it kind of takes a little bit of courage to talk about these things because you're going to get this backlash, the storms end and then it's like no one cares, like lab leak theory. And for me, libertarians have the most value when, in those storms, we're willing to stand up and say the courageous thing. This is what Harry Browne wrote When Will We Learn? on September 12 is the most amazing thing ever, because the day after 9/11, he had the courage. The only way this Libertarian Party thing is ever going to work and grow is if in those storms we have the courage to say things.

Wolfe: If you actually put any of these people in power, I'm not sure they would know the first thing about what to do with it or how to actually craft any sort of policy.

If you can't run an extremely small, speaking candidly here, political party and you're not able to keep your supporters in any way, why would anybody trust your competence overall? I mean, who's even running for president this year, Right? It's important not to draw overly broad conclusions about that, but say you wanted to take your argument seriously and you wanted to look for these small green shoots that are poking up through the dirt as to the ways in which the Mises Caucus takeover has been successful, where would you tell us to look?

Smith: There have been local elections that they've won. And that stuff does matter. There are people we've gotten on school boards and on city councils and mayors. And I think a couple of sheriffs.

The Mises Caucus has launched this project, Decentralized Revolution, which I think is a really great template for how the Libertarian Party should run. And it's very different from the way it's been before. This is now targeting winnable elections with nullification powers. The idea is building this thing where the national party is kind of messaging and then trying to funnel that into like the local winnable elections with nullification.

I'll take responsibility, in some way, that a lot of my guys on Twitter can fly off the handle and say some wild shit. But the one thing I will say about my guys is they don't compromise on the libertarian stuff and they're not going to be afraid to say the thing that will get you a lot of backlash when it really matters.

Wolfe: I am so in favor of being bold and aggressive and courageous and truth-telling and saying that unpopular thing at an important time. I felt very riled up in the COVID days. I'm in favor of all of that. I'm in favor of that sort of boldness, but I don't see that in what the L.P. post-takeover is doing. And that's something that gives me pause.

Smith: I think to some degree you might be a little bit guilty of the same thing that I think the New Hampshire guys are guilty of. The truth is that there are 50 state affiliates and a whole bunch of them are doing exactly what you're saying you'd like to see done, but you're totally fixated on the one because they're saying this wild shit, even though everybody at the top of the Mises Caucus leadership has totally called them out for it and been like, "Hey, we think this is stupid and unhelpful." So I'm just saying that like there's a ton of those guys, there's a ton of the state party affiliates.

Weissmueller: I think we spent a good chunk of time there talking with the Libertarian Party, but for libertarians, what do you think libertarians should be doing differently to win?

Smith: So I'm a big believer in the Rothbardian populist idea. I think you see this with Javier Milei, right? This is the way it can be done. This is the way to do it—to tap into this kind of populist streak, particularly at a time when the elites have so mismanaged everything and talk to people about how they're being ripped off.

And then the problem with populism always is that it's completely devoid of any type of theory. You know what I mean? Like, that's basically the issue with the New Right in general, there's just no theory there. It's just everything they're against. But libertarians already have that. It's like libertarians have all the theory, but we're missing all of the populism to make it appeal to people.

Ron Paul really is who our blueprint should be. And Ron Paul had a lot of things going against him. He's the greatest living hero in America to me as far as I'm concerned. He wasn't the best public speaker. He wasn't the most charming guy. He was older when he really got very popular. He had a way of connecting ideas and knowing what's going on in the world right now and then connecting it to the average person and how this is screwing you over. So that to me is always like my blueprint.

Libertarians are way too removed, just in theory, and that's not what anyone except us cares about. To me that was the most impressive thing about Ron Paul was that this guy was a country doctor who just knew more.

Weissmueller: Looking at the motivations of why government actors are doing what they're doing, I think that saying that they're all a bunch of goofballs is not the right way. But also saying that people in government are particularly nefarious or evil isn't helpful. I subscribe to just basic public choice theory where they're driven by the same incentives that the rest of us are.

Smith: But to your point about the same incentives that drive all of us. There's some truth to that. But that's almost like if there's some young man out there who's incentivized to get laid so he tries to charm a girl and take her out on a date. And then there's another 25-year-old who rapes a girl. They may have had the same incentives to some degree, but those are not the same type of people.

By the way, did you ever hear Hillary Clinton on tape laughing about getting a child rapist off when she knew he was guilty? Laughing about it like she just thinks it's hilarious. These people at the top level of government are horrifically evil people who will knowingly put in place a policy where innocent people will die, they'll lie through their teeth to sell the policy, and their buddies will all get rich off of it. The top levels of our government are permeated with violent sociopaths who are very comfortable doing very evil things.

This is true in media too. That woman from ABC who was caught on the hot mic talking about how she broke the Jeffrey Epstein story, but they pulled it from her. One of the crazy things about that hot mic is that she was upset about not being able to break the story. If you listen to her, it's not what you think any normal person should be upset about.

Wolfe: A hefty portion of the media class is obsessed with their own bloated and frequently wrong sense of moral superiority, as well as this just astonishing self-importance that God made them journalists. And they're God's gift to man.

Smith: Think about how evil that is. She didn't even quit. You didn't quit and go break this story anyway. You just stayed there. What? Because of the paychecks. Good. So you're telling me you had a story about a child rapist ring with the most powerful people in the country implicated in this story? I'm not saying she goes home and kicks her dog in the face every day, but I'm saying what she is doing in her professional life is something morally repugnant. And that's how I feel about the highest levels of government and media. That there's just this mass compliance now. I'm not trying to get all Alex Jones on you here. And I don't like to jump down to conspiracies that I can't prove. But it is totally reasonable to look at something like the Epstein thing, to look at Bohemian Grove, to look at these things and go, yeah, there's something going on here that's pretty weird.

Weissmueller: What I'm saying is it's structural. Hayek even had an essay about why the worst get to the top. And it's because the incentives of power do tend to draw certain personalities. So you might even be right that there's a disproportionate amount of sociopaths or psychopaths in government, just like there are in corporate America.

Smith: Yeah, that's why there's so many pedophiles who are baseball coaches or little league coaches. That's why there's so many abusive people who are cops because these positions draw in those types of people. Right? That's part of the natural cycle of it.

Weissmueller: But the reality is that it's the power structure itself.

Smith: But both can be true at the same time, right? I think both of those things are true. I think, yes, power corrupts. The mix of democracy and big government draws out the most dumbed-down slogan to play to the most uninformed voter. This is why Donald Trump did so well, because Donald Trump is like, "I'll do you one better. I'll talk like a kindergartner." And but really, it's not as if any of the others are much better than that.

Look, by definition, politics is going to attract people who want to rule over other people. That's what the magnet is there. The problem is this mix of big government and democracy, which are very related. So you have to appeal to a population who, by definition, aren't going to know much about politics, because that's true about everything. Only a small percentage of people have expertise in any field. Right? So then you have that. And then because the government is so big there is so much power being wielded that it's inevitably completely corrupted. I mean, what is our federal government going to spend this year over $6 trillion, isn't it? If you're spending $6 trillion, somebody is going to be actively lobbying to get that power.

Weissmueller: This right-wing that you mentioned does exist, the natcons [national conservatism], or whatever we want to call them, they just want to install their version of a virtuous leader to impose their vision of the world. We have these corrupt degenerates running the government and we need, good, virtuous Caesars running the government. I worry sometimes about that populist strategy. This is a pattern you see throughout history; the socialists wreck things and then the right-wing, the fascists, or whatever form they take, come in and impose right-wing dictatorship or whatever.

Smith: I basically think you're almost exactly right. That tends to be like this pattern that's played out over time. You could see this where there'd be these awful right-wing movements as a response to communism like all throughout the world in the 20th century. I think, almost to me, that's why you need this libertarian populism even more, because it's one of the most important components to put out this right-wing fire.

You got to try to harness that populist energy, but in an explicitly libertarian way. The only answer here, and this is the great libertarian insight, because fundamentally, we're kind of like a compromise that's almost like a truce. Like you don't get to impose your view on them and they don't get to impose their view on you. But you both get to do what you want to do, right?

Weissmueller: Do you think that most people at their core are more libertarian or authoritarian?

Smith: I don't really know the answer to that. And I don't spend too much time thinking about that. What I know is that I was totally compelled when these ideas were introduced to me and I know that we're not at our ceiling. You know what I mean? Everywhere I go, and I travel a lot, every single city I'm in, every single town, every single show, somebody comes up to me and goes, "You're the reason I'm a libertarian. You introduced me to this, and then I found this and then I found this and then it all made sense."

I want to introduce this line of thinking to as many people as I can. But I never, in my mind, think we need to get 51 percent of the population to be libertarians because then we can win some elections. Because the truth is that like, nations are never moved by 51 percent of the population. Let's say there's a few million. Could we get that up to 20 million?

The truth is, if you talk to the average person on the street, you just go stop a random person right here and you ask "What do you think of Ron Paul?" Most of them won't know what you're talking about. At best, they think you're talking about Rand Paul, and they definitely would not be able to really articulate and explain to you what the libertarian position is. There's still so many people who have never come in contact with a lot of these ideas. So my thing is like let me try to say it in the most compelling way on the biggest platforms that I can get on and try to get as many new people on board as we can.

Wolfe: The related question that I have for all of us, not just Dave, is what is your libertarian white pill? What's the thing that makes you the most optimistic about where things are headed?

Smith: Let me give the Gene Epstein case for radical optimism, which I always love. This just speaks to my soul. But what he said was, "If you were sitting around in 1845 and you said to your buddy, I think in 20 years slavery is going to be abolished. They'd be like, you're out of your mind. The slave trade is at the height right now, like slavery is right. It's just been an institution for all of human history." In what world could you imagine that in the next 20 years, across the West and in the United States of America, there's just not going to be slavery anymore? But that crazy guy would have been right.

There are moments like that where things that were seen as just inevitable institutions are just gone and they don't come back. Look in the year 2002 and I remember the whole year of war propaganda leading up to the war in Iraq. And like, that was just it. It didn't matter if you got your news from Fox News or The New York Times or MSNBC or anything, it was just unanimous. They sold the story and there was just no one else. There were other people, but they didn't have a platform. But now it's like you have Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and then just like a million different shows that have their shows that we don't even know about with half a million followers. There's probably 50 shows that we all don't know about with half a million people watching that show all the time. And so much of that, those dissident voices are getting out there now. I think for the first time maybe in human history, the monopoly of governments over the receiving of information has been broken. I think they're freaking out about that. I see this as an enormous white pill. I have kids. There's no option for me to be a pessimist.

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

The post Dave Smith: What Is a Libertarian? appeared first on Reason.com.

Just Asking Questions: A New Reason Podcast!

Zach Weissmueller — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 22:01:33 +0000

For the past several months, Reason Associate Editor Liz Wolfe and Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller have co-hosted a show on Reason's YouTube channel and on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie podcast feed called The Reason Livestream.

The show has featured discussions with economist Russ Roberts about life in Israel after October 7, Rand Paul on his Senate investigation into the origins of COVID, journalist Josh Barro on the state of the GOP, sex worker and data analyst Aella on state crackdowns on online porn, and multiple conversations about the rise of Javier Milei.

Next week, Liz and Zach are launching a new version of the show with a new podcast feed and a new name: Just Asking Questions.

On Just Asking Questions, Zach and Liz will continue to bring you more long-form conversations diving deep into a single topic for an hour or more at a time with data, media clips, and guests who can teach, challenge, and have fun.

New episodes will air on Reason's YouTube channel every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern and Fridays on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed.

Subscribe now to Just Asking Questions on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts to get notified about full episodes going forward. If you prefer to watch a day early on YouTube, subscribe and turn on notifications.

The first episode of the new version of the show will go up next Thursday and will be a special in-person taping with podcaster Dave Smith. Given Liz's and Zach's past interactions with him, you're not going to want to miss this one.

The title question of the episode: What is a libertarian?

Join us on Thursday to get some answers.

The post Just Asking Questions: A New Reason Podcast! appeared first on Reason.com.