Just Asking Questions

How likely is a Kamala Harris presidency? Just asking questions. 

Join Zach Weissmueller, Reason senior producer, and Liz Wolfe, Reason associate editor, at 12:30 p.m. ET for a live discussion on their show Just Asking Questions with Nate Silver, statistician and author of the new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Silver founded the renowned polling aggregator and politics website FiveThirtyEight and now runs his own Substack, Silver Bulletin.

They'll discuss Vice President Kamala Harris' rise in the polls, the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a vice presidential candidate, the "long, strange political shadow of 2020," and how Silver's experience as a gambler, as documented in his new book, affects his view of the world.

Watch the full conversation above or on Reason's YouTube channel.

The post Nate Silver: How Likely Is a Kamala Harris Presidency? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Is the future of the GOP more libertarian, nationalist, or, somehow, both?

Joining us today is Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, author, and former presidential candidate. He's been making a hard pitch for what he's called a "libertarian-nationalist alliance" for the past several months. He was at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention where he tried to convince libertarians to vote Republican. Reason's Zach Weissmueller also saw Ramaswamy at the Republican National Convention, where he was trying to convince MAGA supporters to be more libertarian. Reason's Stephanie Slade saw him make his case for "national libertarianism" at the National Conservatism Conference. That event was also attended by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who has a different vision for the conservative movement. Those dueling visions are the subject of today's episode.

Note: This episode is plagued by technical issues due to a software malfunction. With the exception of an approximately nine-minute section (which is marked in the episode), the full conversation is intact.

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

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The past month has been one of the most tumultuous in modern American political history: a devastating face-plant in a televised presidential debate, an attempted assassination of an ex-president favored in the polls to win reelection, a COVID-19 infection of the sitting president and his subsequent exit from the race, and an endorsement and loads of money pouring into the campaign of a previously unpopular vice president.

What was going on behind the scenes that led us to this moment? This week on Just Asking Questions, Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller are joined by Alex Thompson, who writes about Joe Biden's White House for Axios. He's had a number of scoops about the internal goings-on in the Biden White House despite the fact that, according to previous guest Dave Weigel, Thompson has been pushed away for his previous reporting on Biden's declining health.

They discuss the internal politics behind Biden's decision to drop out, the prospects for Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement in the 2024 presidential race, the media's insistence that Harris was not the president's "border czar," and the reluctance of former President Barack Obama to endorse Harris. Liz and Zach also react to Biden's exit speech, Harris' recent rally, and musician Charli XCX endorsing Harris as "brat."

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The post Alex Thompson: Why Did Biden Drop Out? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Where does former President Donald Trump want to take this country?

As the Republican Party coronates Trump as its presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, there will be a lot of talk about Trump's vice presidential pick, his dominance in the polls, and the decline of President Joe Biden. But what about policy? What is the Trump agenda? Trump's opponents implore us to fear Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation proposal that they characterize as a vengeful, authoritarian power grab. Trump himself waves that away and tends to focus more on his plans to levy tariffs on foreign goods, deport illegal immigrants, and yes, finally build that wall. Neither Trump nor the Democrats seem interested in talking much at all about our soon-to-be $35 trillion national debt, which has eclipsed our total national gross domestic product for the first time since World War II.  

To help us anticipate what an increasingly likely second Trump term might look like, and help explain how Trump 2024 is even possible all things considered, we've invited Mary Katharine Ham, a conservative political journalist and commentator at Fox News and on her own podcast Getting Hammered. We wanted to talk with her because she's Trump-critical, but also understands the conservative mind and movement as someone who's been immersed in it for years.

Note that this episode was recorded on Friday, July 12, 2024. A new introduction by Zach Weissmueller was recorded on Tuesday, July 16, contextualizing this conversation in light of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

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

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The post Mary Katharine Ham: What's Trump's Agenda? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

What if President Joe Biden drops out? Just asking questions. 

Biden is facing increasing pressure from his own side to drop out of the 2024 race, which nearly every poll taken since his disaster debate performance last week shows him losing. The latest RealClearPolitics average has him down by about 3.5 percentage points nationally. Several Democratic congress members have called for him to step aside. So have Democratic megadonors. Much of the national press, once dismissive of those pointing out Biden's mental deterioration, has turned on him. 

So where do we go from here?

To help us begin to answer that, Just Asking Questions invited David Weigel, a political reporter for Semafor, and previously for The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Slate, and Reason.

Weigel talked with Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe about the media's slow acknowledgment of Biden's deteriorating condition, Biden's turn against the Democratic "elite," getting "coconut-pilled" on a Vice President Kamala Harris candidacy, and what a contested Democratic primary might look like.

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

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Are the boys okay?

For much of history, parents have preferred boys, perceiving them as the providers, the family legacy, the heirs to the throne. A dark consequence of China's 36-year-long one-child policy was a 120 boy to 100 girl birth ratio. But in 21st-century America, the script seems to have been flipped. The New York Times has run headlines like "Wanting Daughters, Getting Sons" and "It's a Boy, and It's Okay to be Disappointed." Boys are falling behind in school, are more likely to display behavioral problems, and are more likely to be both perpetrators and victims of violence. Shifting gender norms, changing conceptions of masculinity, and the pitched political battles around these questions have made boyhood—and parenthood—that much more complicated. Raising boys these days ain't easy.

Today's guest knows this all too well. Ruth Whippman is the author of BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, and the mother of three young boys. The book is about her experience as a modern "BoyMom" living in the hyper-progressive Bay Area, as well as what she learned from studying the psychological and sociological research on boys and from talking to boys and men across the country and the political spectrum about their experiences and, importantly to the theme of this book, their feelings.

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

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The post Ruth Whippman: How Is Masculinity Changing? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Can a Catholic be a socialist? Can a libertarian be a Catholic? Just asking questions. 

Today's guest, Trent Horn, is an apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers and a defender of capitalism. He hosts The Counsel of Trent podcast and has authored several books on Catholicism, including Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? In this episode, we discuss the themes of that book, respond to some of the anti-capitalist rhetoric that has come from the Vatican over the past decade, analyze the rise of "post-liberal" Catholics on the right, and question whether religion is becoming more palatable to the modern person.

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

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The post Trent Horn: Can a Catholic be a Socialist? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

How's it going in Javier Milei's Argentina?

Milei, Argentina's self-described libertarian president, notched his first legislative victory last week. Argentina's Senate passed a major omnibus bill, also known as the "Bases Law", that's been debated since February.

It would further deregulate the labor market, privatize national industries, cut taxes for foreign companies investing in Argentina, and hand emergency powers to Milei.

Because Milei's party controls seven out of 72 Senate seats, the bill only passed with a lot of compromise and a tie-breaking vote by the vice president, and it could get pared down even more by the lower chamber before reaching the president's desk. Nevertheless, the proposed changes were dramatic enough to inspire large, raucous, and destructive protests outside of the National Congress building during the debate.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller was in Argentina last week during that debate shooting a forthcoming documentary. While there, he attended a conference jointly hosted by the Cato Institute and Libertad y Progreso, a libertarian think tank. Milei gave a keynote speech there, following a warm-up act by Elon Musk.

This week's guest, Ian Vasquez, is vice president of international studies at Cato and an organizer of that conference. Vasquez joined the show to share a thorough update on the political and economic situation in Argentina since Milei's inauguration.

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

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Are embryos people? And are there downsides to designer babies?

Earlier this year, Alabama's Supreme Court handed down a controversial decision declaring that frozen embryos should be treated as children, and therefore their destruction treated legally as wrongful deaths, leaving in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics with a big problem. Less than a month later, the state's Republican governor, Kay Ivey, signed into law a bill protecting access to IVF treatment in the state. As Reason reported at the time, the court ruling had "caused near-immediate chaos, with three IVF providers in the state shutting down operations." Widespread backlash ensued, including from conservatives like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who told CNN, "We want to make it easier for people to be able to have babies, not…make it harder….And the IVF process is a way of giving life to even more babies."

Today's guest is not only pro-IVF as an infertility treatment but also as a way for parents to select desirable genetic traits for their offspring. Diana Fleischman is an evolutionary psychologist, a regular host of The Aporia Podcast, and creator of the Dissentient Substack.  

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

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The post Diana Fleischman: Are Designer Babies The Future? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Can San Francisco be saved?

San Francisco, the beautiful city on the bay, has become a national punchline. During his debate with Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis displayed a map of citywide poop sightings, which were apparently reported to 311 more than 35,000 times in 2023, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Works. The city's population slumped starting in 2018, but has slowly crawled back. And a 2022 San Francisco Chronicle poll found 65 percent of respondents say life is worse in the city now than when they moved there.

Today's guest, Mike Solana, wants to be part of the solution. He's the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund—the Peter Thiel–founded venture capital firm—and editor in chief of Pirate Wires, a new media company covering tech from the Silicon Valley perspective.

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

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The post Mike Solana: Can San Francisco Be Saved? appeared first on Reason Magazine.