The Reason Roundtable

"It's been a circus," says Reason Senior Editor Damon Root of the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Even before the hearings officially commenced, Democratic senators called for a halt to the proceedings. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) released confidential documents and likened himself to Spartacus, a self-promoting act of "civil disobedience" that mostly earned the likely 2020 presidential candidate tons of Twitter abuse.

In the latest Reason Podcast, Root, the author of Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court, regrets the lack of smart questions from senators and candid answers from Kavanaugh. Root says the D.C. Circuit judge has at times ruled as a strict majoritarian, which is troubling from a libertarian perspective. A former member of the Bush administration, Kavanaugh has also written positively of wide-ranging executive privilege in ways that are especially disturbing during a presidency as embattled as Donald Trump's. Root talks to Nick Gillespie about all that, plus the history of confirmation hearings and why they are now so heavily scripted rather than open-ended conversations about judicial philosophy and temperament. Root expects Kavanaugh to be confirmed along strictly partisan lines.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

SCOTUS scholar Damon Root says Trump's nominee still hasn't answered pressing questions about government snooping and unchecked executive power.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explain how "good intentions and bad ideas" have made young people super-fragile—and how to make things better.

Maybe the people acting all outraged on social media are doing exactly that--*acting* all outraged. So discuss Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Peter Suderman.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

'The Insider Theme' by The Insider is licensed under CC BY 3.0

Before demanding censure or intervention, take a step back from the Twitter machine and ask yourself whether anyone really cares about this stuff.

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.

“There’s been a massive effort by both the federal government and now the state governments to stop Cody from putting information on the internet,” says Josh Blackman, attorney for Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson, the self-described “anarchist” fighting for the right to post downloadable instructions for 3D-printed guns online.

“The efforts to silence people always fall on those who are outside the mainstream, those pushing the boundaries. And that’s precisely what the First Amendment ought to protect,” says Blackman, who joined Wilson’s legal team in 2015 and also teaches constitutional law at the South Texas College of Law Houston. “The mere fact that this is code doesn’t make it not speech.”

Reason Senior Editor Damon Root recently spoke with Blackman about the current state of Wilson’s case and about the fundamental constitutional questions it raises. In a wide-ranging conversation, Root and Blackman talked speech, guns, “Lochner-izing the First Amendment,” and why Blackman thinks “the ACLU has been MIA” from the legal fight over 3D-printed guns. “If this case involved banning the posting of blueprints to 3D-print sex toys,” Blackman says, the ACLU “would be fighting to the teeth. But when it comes to guns, they’re just not there.”

It only took hours before the national remembrance of John McCain turned into a battle over imperial etiquette. Are we elevating Beltway manners over real-world policy impacts? Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch discuss.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

'Aspirato' by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0

What the reaction to John McCain's death tells us about the values of Washington's political class

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.