By Reason
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The podcast currently has 52 episodes available.
Is Trumpism America's new governing ideology? Just asking questions.
Trump won decisively by modern standards, meaning for the first time in several cycles nobody is seriously disputing the results, but did he really win bigly? Does he have a governing mandate?
Today's guest says, not really. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. He co-authored a paper published just before the election called "Politics Without Winners" about the inability of either Democrats or the GOP to build a lasting governing coalition in the 21st century.
He recently published some of his thoughts on the election in The Dispatch under the headline, What Trump's Win Doesn't Mean, writing "The 2024 election was very much of a piece with our 21st-century politics: It was a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization." We dig into that negative polarization, whether Trump was given a "mandate" by voters, and how Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine is still a relevant divide in contemporary politics.
Sources Referenced:The post Yuval Levin: What is Trump's "Mandate"? appeared first on Reason.com.
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Donald Trump won the presidential election decisively, taking every single battleground state, and as we discussed last week with Patrick Ruffini, winning over new voters across all sorts of racial, age, and gender demographics. He's, once again, remade the electoral map, with Republicans capturing the Senate and the House.
What should Democrats learn from this loss? Lee Fang is an independent journalist and political commentator who runs a Substack at leefang.com. One of his most recent posts comments on the complete lack of self-reflection coming from many of the highly paid Democratic consultants who seem to have whiffed so badly with the Harris campaign messaging.
Sources Referenced:The post Lee Fang: Will Democrats Ever Recover From 2024? appeared first on Reason.com.
Why did Donald Trump win?
Trump is back. Back again. He's secured the Electoral College majority needed to become America's 47th president and looks on track for a popular vote majority—the first Republican to pull that off in more than 20 years.
A New York Times breakdown shows that across just about every type of county—urban, suburban, older population, younger, white, black, Latino—Trump improved his numbers.
Surprising to many was Trump's large improvement among Latinos of all kinds, despite—or maybe in some cases because of—his hardline immigration stances and insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" at his Madison Square Garden rally shortly before the election. Yet seven percent more Puerto Rican Americans appear to have voted for Trump this year than in 2020.
One person who is less surprised than many is today's guest, Patrick Ruffini, who wrote a book predicting much of this called Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. He's a Republican Party strategist, a pollster for Echelon Insights, and writes at The Intersection.
Sources Referenced:The post Patrick Ruffini: Why Did Trump Win? appeared first on Reason.com.
Is this the most important election ever? And who should win? Just asking questions.
Next week, America decides: elect the 78-year-old criminally indicted, twice-impeached ex-president who's pledged to impose a universal tariff of 20 percent and embark on the largest mass deportation in American history; or his opponent, the vice president, swapped in for a malfunctioning Joe Biden, whose first major policy proposal was to cap grocery store prices to fight inflation, and who has trouble explaining how she'd govern any differently than her increasingly unpopular predecessor. It's a close race.
Independents, including libertarians, will likely decide it.
So we've invited three of them on today with three different perspectives to explain their votes. The first is David Stockman. He's the former director of the Office of Budget Management under Ronald Reagan. He served as a U.S. representative, and he says whoever wins we're basically screwed because neither candidate is addressing the most important policy issues facing America today.
Then we'll talk to Dave Smith, a repeat guest on the show, host of the popular Part of the Problem podcast. He says he's reluctantly and probably voting for Trump because of the threat that Kamala Harris—and the political machine that she represents—poses to liberty in America.
And lastly, we'll talk with Jacob Grier, a writer and Reason contributor who says that from a libertarian and small government perspective, the choice is obvious. Donald Trump is an authoritarian threat and Kamala Harris is a far superior choice.
Let's just ask each of them some questions.
Sources Referenced:The post Dave Smith, David Stockman, and Jacob Grier: Who Is The Lesser Evil? appeared first on Reason.com.
What's the agenda of the World Economic Forum? And what was The Great Reset? Just asking questions.
Every year, there's a big gathering of global elites in Davos, Switzerland: world leaders, titans of industry, Hollywood celebrities. It all started in 1971, thanks to Klaus Schwab—a German economist and business professor who launched what was then called the European Economic Forum as a place to discuss best business practices and promote a theory he'd developed called "stakeholder capitalism," the tenets of which Schwab laid out in the original "The Davos Manifesto." It insists that a company's CEO must serve not only shareholders but entire "societies" and "assume the role of a trustee of the material universe for future generations."
While critics have for years lampooned Davos for its brigade of private jets dropping billionaires in an idyllic Swiss mountain town to lecture us about climate change, the WEF and Schwab himself attracted unprecedented attention amid the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic following the July 2020 publication of his ominously titled book The Great Reset. Countless articles, podcasts, and videos theorizing on the real meaning of the Great Reset followed, including one produced by the co-host of this podcast. But you might notice there's another name underneath Schwab's. Thierry Malleret was his co-author on The Great Reset, and again on the follow-up The Great Narrative, and he joins us on the show today.
Malleret is an economist who's worked as an adviser for major investment banks and governments. He conceived of—and planned—the program at Davos for several years before parting ways with Klaus Schwab. And he's also an author, most recently of a very interesting book we're going to discuss at length called Deaths at Davos, a dark satire of what's going on within the WEF.
Sources referenced:The post Thierry Malleret: Is the Great Reset Underway? appeared first on Reason.com.
What should the federal government do in a disaster?
Two major hurricanes made landfall within two weeks, devastating the southeast. Hurricane Helene has killed more than 200 people, and more than 90 are still missing in North Carolina, where overflowing rivers and tributaries flooded the western part of the state. More than 9,000 remain without power.
Hurricane Milton grew to Category 5 status in the Gulf before hitting Florida's west coast just south of Tampa Bay as a Category 3. It caused at least 23 deaths, and both storms are likely to cause over $100 billion in economic damage.
Today's guest is part of an organization that's been on the ground in both places helping with disaster relief. Brian Trascher is the vice president of the United Cajun Navy, a volunteer organization that started in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.
Trascher discusses the origins of the Cajun Navy after Hurricane Katrina, conditions on the ground in North Carolina and Florida, the federal government's response, growing distrust of FEMA, and how to better prepare for disaster.
Sources Referenced:Photo credit: Travis Long/TNS/Newscom
The post Brian Trascher: Has FEMA failed North Carolina? appeared first on Reason.com.
How do immigrants change American culture? Just asking questions.
While the economy ranks as voters' top concern as of a Wednesday Gallup poll, immigration remains "extremely" or "very" important to 72 percent of registered U.S. voters. As with most issues, there's a large partisan divide, with 63 percent of Republicans responding that immigration is an "extremely" important election year issue, and only 23 percent of Democrats answering the same.
Gallup found this summer that more than 55 percent of Americans believed immigration should be decreased, a number higher than it's been for more than 20 years. Although there, too, there's a large partisan divide. In the long view, Gallup finds a fairly stable consensus that immigration is a good thing for the country today, with 68 percent of respondents answering as such in the summer of 2023. This is all in the context of Border Patrol reporting 2.7 million border encounters so far in fiscal year 2024.
So what we see is a picture of an American electorate that likes immigration in theory but is increasingly concerned about it in practice. Today's guest predicted that immigration would become the "defining issue of the 21st century" in an article published in an August 2015 opinion piece for The Week, where he wrote that, "just as the building of trade routes and maintenance of empires defined the mercantile age, then the construction of a political economy (capitalist or socialist) became the major problem of the industrial age, the mass movement of people may be the defining issue of whatever we're calling the information age."
Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer for National Review, the William F. Buckley Senior Scholar at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and a critic of the kind of libertarian unfettered movement of peaceful people across borders that I favor. We begin by asking why the digital world has brought the issue of immigration to the fore.
Sources referenced:Photo credit: Qian Weizhong/VCG/Newscom
The post Michael Brendan Dougherty: How Will Immigrants Reshape America? appeared first on Reason.com.
Who's most to blame for the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021? How much does it matter for the election in November 2024?
We all remember the events of January 6, which resulted in unforgettable images, an evacuation of the Capitol, several deaths, $2.7 billion in costs, more than 1,200 criminal charges, an impeachment, and decades in prison for many involved.
Today's guest was there during the lead-up to January 6—not as a participant, but as a chronicler. Ford Fischer is a documentary filmmaker and editor in chief of News2Share, which is on the scene for seemingly every major act of political unrest. Ford was also once upon a time an intern at Reason. Most recently, he was a co-writer and cinematographer on a new documentary about January 6 called Fight Like Hell, directed by Jon Long, which is now available for free on YouTube.
There are several documentaries about this event out there, but this one contains some footage that Fischer captured in the months and days leading up to the capitol riot, helping the viewer better understand the mechanics of the movement. We focus largely on Fischer's firsthand experience of covering months of "Steal the Steal" protests.
Sources Referenced:The post Ford Fischer: What's the Untold Story Behind 'Stop the Steal'? appeared first on Reason.com.
How well-protected is Donald Trump?
On July 13, Trump became the first U.S. president to be shot in more than 40 years, and the first to be shot during a campaign since 1912. Then, incredibly, the Secret Service stopped a second would-be assassin who was stationed with a rifle on the perimeter of Trump's golf course as the former president was one hole away: two unnervingly close calls in about two months. What's going on?
Some Republican lawmakers say Trump is under-protected and accuse the Biden administration of politicizing the Secret Service to intentionally put the president in danger. Media reports say that Trump has made the Secret Service's job too difficult by insisting on golfing on short notice at unsecured locations. The Secret Service says it's understaffed.
Today's guest will give us an insider's view of how the Secret Service works and what might have gone wrong. Richard Staropoli served as a special agent in the Secret Service for 25 years, served briefly as the chief information officer for the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration, and is now the senior managing director for Rivada, a telecommunications and satellite internet company.
Sources referenced in the conversation:The post Richard Staropoli: What's Wrong With the Secret Service? appeared first on Reason.com.
What are the schools really teaching our kids?
It's back-to-school season, which means the curriculum wars are back on the agenda. The right has accused activist infiltrators of "indoctrinating" the next generation with woke struggle sessions, confusing kids about their gender and sexuality, and turning K-12 campuses into war zones by replacing discipline with pseudoscientific therapy. The left has accused the right of authoritarian book bans, whitewashing history, and discriminating against LGBT students and teachers. What's actually happening on campus?
Joining us to talk about it today is Erika Sanzi. She's the Director of Outreach for Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit with a stated mission of fighting "indoctrination in schools" and "promoting the restoration of a healthy, nonpolitical education for our kids." She's also serves on the board of the Boys Initiative and is a mother of three teenage sons.
Parents Defending Education falls clearly on the side of believing that schools are in danger of becoming full-on "indoctrination centers." In fact, their website features an "IndoctriNation Map" which lists examples from around the country. The conversation opens by defining the difference between indoctrination and education.
Sources referenced in the conversation:The post Erika Sanzi: What Are Schools Really Teaching? appeared first on Reason.com.
The podcast currently has 52 episodes available.
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