The Reason Roundtable

Q&A with the president of National School Choice Week, Andrew Campanella

The Manhattan Institute's Howard Husock debates Economic Policy Institute's Richard Rothstein at the Soho Forum.

How our social media wars turns Covington, Buzzfeed, and everything it touches into a garbage fire.

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Mark McDaniel.

Covingtongate, Buzzfeed's bomb, Baby Hitler, Kamalamentum…maybe it's time to pull the plug.

Covingtongate, Buzzfeed's bomb, Baby Hitler, Kamalamentum…maybe it's time to pull the plug.

Nancy Rommelmann and Leah McSweeney on the "toxic femininity" of Asia Argento, anti-Semitism at the Women's March, and 21st-century sexual liberation.

Journalists Nancy Rommelmann and Leah McSweeney make no apologies for critiquing what they call the "toxic femininity" of Asia Argento and the anti-Semitism of some of the leaders of this weekend's Women's March in Washington, D.C.

Argento, they tell Nick Gillespie in a new Reason podcast, acted like Harvey Weinstein when it came out that she had slept with a 17-year-old boy she had known for a decade. She denied it, attacked the credibility of her accuser, and paid him hush money. In a blockbuster December story for Tablet co-authored with Jacob Siegel, McSweeney documented that top organizers of this Saturday's Women's March, which began as a protest against sexism and Donald Trump, "claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade" and pushed Jewish women out of leadership roles. The story was picked up by The New York Times and other outlets and has led to a number of high-profile supporters and organizations pulling their support for the March, especially after the organizers refused to denounce Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the source for much crackpot history regarding Jews and the slave trade. After the two created a YouTube channel called #MeNeither, where they critique aspects of contemporary feminism and talk about contemporary call-out culture, an outraged viewer started a campaign against Ristretto Roasters, the Portland-based coffee-shop chain owned by Rommelmann's husband.

McSweeney, who is the founder of the punk-influenced clothing line Married To the Mob (sample t-shirt: "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Bleeding"), and Rommelmann, author of 2018's To The Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder and a Reason contributor, tell me they are feminists who believe in equal opportunity and legal treatment for women but recoil from the excesses of current identity politics. It's a wide-ranging, foul-mouthed, and frank conversation about contemporary sexual mores.

Photo Credit: R Barnswell.

He also offers up concrete proposals not just to reform government but to route around it and get on with our lives already.

Philip K Howard burst on the scene over 20 years ago with his best-selling book, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, which argued that out-of-control lawsuits and and rules and regulations were choking off vitality, innovation, and common decency. In 2002, he founded Common Good, a nonprofit whose credo is "simplify government, put humans back in charge, and cut mindless red tape." In 2014, Nick Gillespie interviewed Howard about his book The Rule of Nobody.

A lawyer by training and profession, Howard's new book is Try Common Sense: Replacing Failed Ideologies of Left and Right. Gillespie spoke with him about how Americans might route around the federal government and get on with their lives.

Photo Credit: Common Good

Rebutting Krugman, cracking on Graham, and searching in vain for "freedom" in a caucus.