The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Established in 1958 and peaking in influence and membership in the mid-1960s, the staunchly anti-communist John Birch Society quickly became a powerful force in conservative politics, with leading figures such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan making appeals to its members without fully endorsing its paranoid vision of a country secretly controlled by Soviet agents. Indeed, the society's founder, retired candy magnate Robert Welch, denounced President Dwight Eisenhower as a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy."

The society also became a running punchline during its heyday, with Bob Dylan recording a song called "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and the society's fixation on water fluoridation and vaccines finding its way into a character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove who is obsessed with protecting "our precious bodily fluids."

In the new book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, George Washington University's Matt Dallek puts the rise and fall of the Birch Society—which still exists and is based in Appleton, Wisconsin—into a larger Cold War context and argues that its influence on contemporary conservative politics remains as strong as it is unacknowledged.

"More than the most hard-line Goldwater, Nixon, or Reagan Republicans," he writes, "the Birch Society…bequeathed to subsequent generations an extreme antigovernment zeal and rhetorically violent appeal" that remains part and parcel of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. The Birchers' focus on ending the Federal Reserve; getting the United States out of the United Nations, NATO, and the World Trade Organization; and anti-interventionist foreign policy parallels many of the key elements of the political program articulated by libertarian Republican Ron Paul, who keynoted the group's 50th Anniversary Celebration. And the society's past antagonism toward integration and continuing attacks on feminism and gay rights—and emphasis on traditional Christian values and family structures—is widespread among contemporary conservatives.

Dallek's book is not a sneering attack on a backward-looking group but a deep dive into the context and personalities that made it so powerful, if only for a short period of time. He recaptures a sense of just how radical post-war America was, both on the right and the left, and how "conspiracism"—the idea that things are never simply what they appear to be but are really the result of hidden elite machinations—continues to inform how we all think about politics.

The post Matt Dallek: The John Birch Society's Deep Influence on Trump's GOP appeared first on Reason.com.

Forty years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform, a scathing indictment of public K-12 schools in America. "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war," announced the report's authors, who included Nobel Prize–winning chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti. The report catalyzed massive increases in per-pupil spending, standardized testing, and "common core" style curricula. Yet by almost every measure, educational outcomes are no better than they were in 1983.

In Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students, the Libertas Institute's Connor Boyack and the American Federation for Children's Corey DeAngelis outline what's wrong with the ways our public schools function—and they offer concrete solutions to improve outcomes for children.

In this podcast version of The Reason Livestream, I talk with Boyack and DeAngelis about why they support maximizing parental rights through education savings accounts (ESAs), disagree with conservative Republicans who want to ban critical race theory and other controversial concepts, and believe that the end of "factory schooling" will vastly improve the civic life of the United States of America.

The post Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis: Why K-12 Education Sucks and How To Fix It appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Daniel Akst, a journalist and novelist who has written one of the most remarkable books I've read in a while. War By Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance is an irresistibly readable history of peace-mongering practitioners of "Christian libertarianism" who refused to sign on to America's entry into World War II even after Pearl Harbor.

Two of the main figures in the book, Bayard Rustin and David Dellinger, served prison sentences in the 1940s for refusing to even register as conscientious objectors—they said the state had no right to make such demands on them. Along with others such as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, they pioneered the use of nonviolent resistance that energized the Civil Rights Movement and anti–Vietnam War protests in which they would figure so prominently.

Akst discusses Dwight Macdonald, the leftist writer and editor who worked at Fortune magazine, staunchly opposed the Soviet Union, ruthlessly critiqued mass media, and mentored a generation of public intellectuals including Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Bruno Bettelheim. He also explores the origins of the short-lived America First Committee, which opposed U.S. entry into World War II and whose members and sympathizers included a wide range of people, including future President Gerald Ford, Kennedy in-law and Peace Corps leader Sargent Shriver, author Gore Vidal, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and National Review founder William F. Buckley.  

In War By Other Means, Akst recovers a lost current in American politics that will make you think differently about the past and the present, especially given how identity politics and the worst sort of unprincipled tribalism reign supreme in our world today.

Read Max Longley's review of War By Other Means in the March 2023 issue of Reason.

Read Akst's Reason archive.

The post Daniel Akst: The World War II Pacifists Who Changed America Forever appeared first on Reason.com.

The good news is that President Joe Biden has officially signed legislation declaring the end of "the national emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic." The bad news? Governmental responses to the pandemic were "a catastrophe for human freedom" all over the globe, says the Cato Institute's Ian Vásquez.

He's the lead author of Cato's annual Human Freedom Index, which tracks personal, civil, and economic freedom in 165 countries. The latest version uses data through 2020, and Vásquez says that year saw the single-greatest drop in freedom in the past two decades.

In this podcast version of our weekly The Reason Livestream, my colleague Zach Weissmueller and I get into the specifics with Vásquez about how Covid ran roughshod over freedom everywhere from Armenia to Zimbabwe—including the United States, which dropped down seven slots and out of the top 20 freest countries. Worse still, Vásquez says overall human freedom peaked in 2007, so COVID has merely exacerbated the trend toward a radically less-free planet.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Roundtable live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street)! Tickets are $25, include entry to the after-party, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview podcast. The next one is in New York City on Monday, May 1, when Nick Gillespie interviews Ben Smith, the first editor in chief of Buzzfeed News, former New York Times media columnist, and founder of Semafor. In his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, HuffPost, Breitbart, and his old employer Buzzfeed. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. It's always a great evening of camaraderie and conversation, so come on out. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.
• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller host live, unscripted conversations at Reason's YouTube channel with leading policy makers, activists, writers, and thinkers about everything from attempted internet censorship to COVID policy failures to the future of the Libertarian Party to cryptocurrency crackdowns to the failure of K-12 education. Find the online archive here.

The post Ian Vásquez: COVID Accelerated the Global Decline in Human Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

My guests today are University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi, authors of The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. This is the definitive intellectual history of a movement that they argue began in recognizable form in the 19th century in Europe as a response to socialism and in the United States as part of the abolitionist movement. I liked the book so much that I blurbed it for Princeton University Press. We talk about virtually every aspect of libertarianism, including its strange lack of interest in the civil rights movement given its origin in abolitionism.

Today's episode was recorded in New York City before a packed house at a Reason Speakeasy, a monthly live taping of this podcast. I spoke with Zwolinski and Tomasi about major 20th-century figures such as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard, as well as the complicated and often-contradictory contributions each made to libertarian thinking. We also spoke about the rise of the Mises Caucus within the Libertarian Party, the seemingly complete rejection of libertarian ideas in the contemporary GOP, and whether the larger libertarian movement is ascendant or sputtering out.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Roundtable Live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street)! Tickets are $25, include entry to the after-party, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview. On Monday, May 1, at Manhattan's Blue Building (222 East 46th Street), Nick Gillespie interviews Ben Smith, the first editor in chief of Buzzfeed News, former New York Times media columnist, and founder of Semafor. In Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, HuffPost, Breitbart, and his old employer, Buzzfeed. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For details and to buy tickets, go here.

The post Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi: Who Owns Libertarianism? appeared first on Reason.com.

Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I go live at YouTube and Facebook with great thinkers, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, policy makers and other people who are central to the world in which we live. We're excited to present the audio of those conversations as bonus episodes of the Reason Interview podcast.

This time around, we talked with The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz and Coin Center's Peter Van Valkenburgh about bipartisan congressional efforts to ban TikTok and pass the RESTRICT Act, a far-reaching piece of legislation that imperils not just online free speech but all sorts of privacy rights and economic freedom, especially as they related to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Roundtable live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street)! Tickets are $25, include entry to the afterparty, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!

The post Taylor Lorenz, Peter Van Valkenburgh: Why Banning TikTok Is Stupid and Unwarranted appeared first on Reason.com.

"This book is born of an anxiety I was feeling, which was this sense that we were leaving pieces of ourselves, in all these different forums, in all these different media," says today's guest, former Reason Senior Editor Kerry Howley, whose new book is Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State.

"There's a piece of yourself in your email. You're leaving traces in Facebook Messenger and text, and the possibility [exists] that all of these could be reassembled to form an identity that looks like you but is not you," she says. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs "tells the story of a young whistleblower named Reality Winner to whom this truly happened. Her life was reassembled by prosecutors in a truly absurd way to suggest that she was a terrorist. And so she is kind of an illustration of that anxiety but also the reality that we're all living in."

Howley is now a staff writer at New York magazine and a multi-finalist for the National Magazine Award, the industry's highest honor, most recently for a profile of anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser. 

In a wide-ranging conversation about surveillance, privacy, and journalism in an age where nothing we say or write or post ever really goes away, Howley talks about getting inside the mindset not just of whistleblowers like Reality Winner and Daniel Hale but also the people who would lock them up and throw away the keys. We also talk about how her work at Reason and her stint at an openly censored newspaper in Myanmar continues to inform her worldview.

Today's sponsors:

• Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you. Because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
• The Reason Roundtable Live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West Third Street)! Tickets are $25.00, include entry to the afterparty, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!

The post Kerry Howley: A Journey Through the Deep State appeared first on Reason.com.

Every Thursday at Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I go live at YouTube and Facebook with great thinkers, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, policymakers and other people who are central to the world in which we live. We're excited to present the audio of those conversations as bonus episodes of the Reason Interview podcast.

This time around, we talked with Ethan Nadelmann, the former head of the Drug Policy Alliance and the host of the excellent Psychoactive podcast. Ethan is one of the the main reasons we live in a world where legal marijuana is increasingly available for adults—and why other drugs are being decriminalized and legalized too.

The main was whether we should legalize all drugs and, if so, how best to go about it? It's an in-depth conversation about all aspects of drug policy, drug use, and drug culture, including decriminalization versus legalization, addiction and treatment programs, and the effects of reforms in Portugal and elsewhere around the world.

The post Ethan Nadelmann: How To Legalize All Drugs! appeared first on Reason.com.