Reason Video

If you live in one of 65 U.S. cities, you've probably seen electric scooters.

To unlock one, you just use an app on your phone. It costs one dollar to unlock and 15-cents a minute after that. You go where you need to go, and then just leave the scooter anywhere. The scooter stays there until someone else rents it. It has a GPS which allows riders to locate them and prevents theft.

John Stossel tested one in Washington, D.C. He wonders if this is the next revolution in urban travel.

Stossel says, as often happens, entrepreneurs invented something great. He wonders how many cities will impose destructive regulation.

Joshua Childress, 37, spent seven years as a U.S. Border Patrol agent out of Arizona's Yuma Station, tracking footprints to catch crossers. He resigned last month after changing his mind about illegal immigration.

Though Border Patrol wouldn't confirm or deny the circumstances leading to Childress' departure, Reason obtained documentation showing that the resignation was filed for "personal" reasons.

Childress says that when he began at Border Patrol, he believed in the agency's mission and thought he could apply useful skills he'd acquired while serving in the military.

He says that in one memorable incident, he witnessed lash marks on a man's back. Upon further questioning, the man revealed that the scars resulted from a whipping that a drug trafficker gave him for refusing to carry drugs over the border.

What also changed his mind was listening to podcasts while driving around the border 8 to 10 hours a day, specifically a show called Unregistered, hosted by historian and Reason contributor Thaddeus Russell.

He says one particular episode featuring author and sex worker Maggie McNeill made him re-examine his fundamental beliefs.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick and Weissmueller.

"Marimba on the Hunt" by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 License

Photo Credit: "Immigration activists hold signs against family separation." Joshua Roberts/REUTERS/Newscom

Photo Credit: "Estanislao Perez huge his son." Stringer/REUTERS/Newscom

Photo Credit: "Members of activist group Rise and Resist." Erik McGregor/ZUMA Press/Newscom

Democrats and Republicans are once again in the midst of a deep partisan battle, this time about whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in history or a crypto-racist hiding his shadowy résumé. Days of speeches, protests, and calculated outrage have not changed the expected outcome, and Judge Kavanaugh will almost certainly become the next Supreme Court justice.

In the latest Reason video, we explore what we would have liked to see during the Kavanaugh hearings.

Written and starring Austin Bragg and Andrew Heaton. Edited by Bragg.

In 2015, psychology professor Jonathan Haidt and free-speech activist Greg Lukianoff published "The Coddling of the American Mind" in The Atlantic. It argued that speech codes, trigger warnings, and safe spaces on college campuses are "disastrous for education—and mental health." It quickly became the most-read article in the history of the magazine.

Now they've expanded it into a new book with the same title.

Lukianoff, a lawyer by training, heads FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which fights for free speech on campus. Haidt teaches at New York University and is a co-founder of Let Grow, the free-range parenting advocacy organization, and Heterodox Academy, which promotes intellectual diversity among faculty.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with them to talk about why they believe that, as their book's subtitle puts it, "good intentions and bad ideas" about the supposed fragility of young people is "setting up a generation for failure."

Edited by Alexis Garcia. Intro by Todd Krainin.

Hearings begin today for President Trump's Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh.

John Stossel wonders whether Kavanaugh will be good for liberty.

Libertarians are right to worry. Kavanaugh has shown deference to government when it spies on people.

Should libertarians be happy with Kavanaugh overall, Stossel asks?

Zachary R. Wood came to national attention when, as a undergraduate at ultra-liberal Williams College, the student group that he helped lead was pressured to cancel its invitation to Suzanne Venker, a conservative author and critic of feminism.

Activists accused him of "causing actual mental, social, psychological, and physical harm" to his fellow students, and "paying for...the continued dispersal of violent ideologies that kill our black and brown (trans) femme sisters." After he invited the former National Review writer John Derbyshire to speak, the university president unilaterally shut the event down.

The self-described "liberal Democrat" and Hillary Clinton supporter says his commitment to open dialogue comes from dealing with his mother's mental illness, his frequent moves as a child, and being a black scholarship student at mostly white, wealthy schools. Around the fourth grade, he explains, he started going to private schools. "I was coming from a disadvantaged community and going to a school in a more affluent community and that meant I had to be open and making friends with peers from very different backgrounds." He notes that he and his new schoolmates were quick to project both negative and positive stereotypes on one another. "Part of what that experience challenged me to do was to assess those stereotypes and resist the inclination to make them."

In Uncensored: My Life and Uncomfortable Conversations at the Intersection of Black and White America, Wood writes about the urgent need for civil discourse and open debate, especially on college campuses. The recent graduate talked with Reason about how administrators are as much or more to blame as student activists for the repressive atmosphere at universities, and why he looks forward to exploring issues of class mobility and how school choice can benefit low-income minorities in his work as a journalist.

"Gouging" becomes an issue every hurricane season. After big storms, some people raise prices. Then politicians and the media freak out. Both demand tougher laws against "gouging."

But Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman says, "the gougers deserve a medal" because they take risks to bring in goods that people desperately need.

Annelise Kofod, Erika Lewis, and Maggie Hroncich are students who get that.

As the eponymous host of The Greg Gutfeld Show, which airs Saturday evenings on Fox News, co-host of the network's hugely popular afternoon talk show, The Five, and creator of the defunct, path-breaking late night show, Red Eye, Greg Gutfeld is one of the most ubiquitous presences on cable news.

He's also one of the sharpest and funniest.

A prolific writer and former editor of Maxim and Stuff magazines, Gutfeld has a new book out, The Gutfeld Monologues: Classic Rants from The Five, which features annotations and corrections by the author of past mistakes.

Nick Gillespie sat down with the libertarian-leaning conservative, to talk about his book, the origins and persistence of punk rock attitudes, the exaggerated death of print media, and just how great it would be if Rosie O'Donnell challenged Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

In the 1980s and '90s, novelist Bret Easton Ellis captured more fully than anyone the excitement and ennui of a wealthy and smug America that was stumbling without knowing it into a century filled with terror, disruption, and generalized hostility. In the book and movie versions of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho, Ellis dissected what happens to a society in which depth of feeling is synonymous with failure to thrive. In this century, Ellis is back in his hometown of Los Angeles writing and producing movies like The Canyons with the likes of Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen, whose shambled personal lives might as well have been scripted by Ellis in one of his most darkly comic moments.

He's also putting out one of the most engaging and insightful podcasts available on Patreon, in which he talks with guests like Kanye West, Rose McGowan, and veteran writer/director Walter Hill about the ways the entertainment industry is built on an unstable foundation of economic, sexual, and political hypocrisy.

Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Ellis about the ways Hollywood is failing to come to terms with ever-changing methods of production and distribution, what Ellis sees as the excesses of the #MeToo movement, our rapidly changing and failing public discourse, and the enduring interest and relevance of his work in 2018.

Produced and edited by Paul Detrick.

"Shibuya" by Bad Snacks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Bernie Sanders is all over the internet. His videos are everywhere and, unfortunately, millions watch.

How have his socialist ideas reached so many people? John Stossel explores.

Many of Sanders' videos are just him ranting about how Republican ideas hurt people. He claims that the repeal of Obamacare will mean "tens of thousands of [people] will die." He ignores the possibility that thousands will live if the economy is allowed to grow.

Many videos focus on President Trump. One claims Trump "uses the same kind of language the Nazis used" because he called people animals. The video didn't mention that, in that case, Trump was talking about the MS-13 gang.

A common theme in Sanders' videos is income inequality. Sanders says that's "immoral" and "causes suffering for the working classes." Stossel explains that the wealth gap doesn't cause suffering. Yes, rich people got richer, but the poor and the middle class got richer too. Sanders never says that.

Stossel says Sanders' videos are a mix of socialist propaganda and economic ignorance. Unfortunately, millions watch.