The Reason Roundtable

"When we buy into this narrative that free speech is a conservative value and censorship is a liberal value, we basically invite this chasm where the First Amendment and free speech values steadily get less and less support," says attorney Ken White, who's the proprietor of the legal blog Popehat, the host of the Make No Law podcast, and a contributing editor at Reason. "Saying that the First Amendment is conservative is historically completely illiterate. It's [protected] mostly progressives from being suppressed through most of the twentieth century."

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with White, who spends his days as a criminal defense attorney at Brown White & Osborn in Los Angeles. They talked about Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, the dismissal of director James Gunn from the Guardians of the Galaxy series, what limits should be put on employee speech inside and outside the workplace, and his libertarian views on law and society.

Government is the "giant, vicious dog you bring in to protect you from robbers," says White, and it "traditionally ends up protecting the interests of the moneyed, the connected, and the powerful."

Produced by Paul Detrick. Edited by Lorenz Lo.

"Massive" by Podington Bear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Driving/Massive

Over the weekend, Donald Trump tweeted that "tariffs are working big time" and said that his trade war would help us pay down the national debt. On today's Reason Podcast, special guests Eric Boehm and Robby Soave join Katherine Mangu-Ward and Peter Suderman to talk about the latest escalations in Trump's trade war and how Trump's bad trade policies are enabling cronyism.

Also on this week's podcast: Medicare for all costs how much? Will 3D-printed guns doom us all? And what are we supposed to make of The New York Times hiring technology writer Sarah Jeong, even with a history of controversial tweets? As always, we end with recommendations for books (Manhattan Beach), television (The Affair), and a video game (Wolfenstein II: The New Colussus).

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music by Nine Inch Nails. Licensed under Creative Commons. (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US.)

The podcast crew takes on the The New York Times' controversial new hire, Trump's trade war escalations, Medicare-for-all, and 3D-printed guns.

In Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, Michael Shermer seeks to explain why so many of us are deeply invested in the idea of a world beyond the one we're already living in. Shermer isn't just talking about religious believers. He also chronicles the ways socialists and others have tried to create paradise now, and the obsessions of transhumanists trying to create a secular version of immortality.

One of the world's best-known "skeptics," Shermer teaches at Chapman University, is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, writes a column for Scientific American, and has penned a shelf of best-selling books on such subjects as evolution, the brain, and the morality of capitalism.

In a wide-ranging conversation taped at FreedomFest, an annual gathering of libertarians held each July in Las Vegas, Nick Gillespie asked Shermer about his long association with libertarian ideas, including his involvement with Andrew Galambos, an idiosyncratic self-help guru whose ideas about intellectual property were famously parodied in Jerome Tuccille's underground classic, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. They also discussed the welcome return and explicit defense of Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, disinterestedness, and progress—in his work, and in the work of such figures as Matt Ridley, Deirdre McCloskey, and Steven Pinker.

Reason magazine was founded 50 years ago, in 1968, by Lanny Friedlander (1947-2011), who was then a student at Boston University. As part of Reason's ongoing 50th anniversary celebration, Nick Gillespie has been interviewing past editors of the print magazine for the Reason Podcast. Previous episodes include conversations with Robert W. Poole, Marty Zupan, Virginia Postrel, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward.

A few weeks ago, it was Gillespie's turn to be interviewed about his time at the top of the mast. Gillespie joined the staff in 1993 as an assistant editor and served as editor in chief of the magazine and website from 2000 to 2008. Then he became editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV, a dual position he held until earlier this year, when he became an editor at large.

Katherine Mangu-Ward conducted the wide-ranging interview at the center of today's episode. She zeroed in on a 1999 cover story by Gillespie, "All Culture, All the Time," as illuminating many of the themes that Reason would explore under his stewardship. The story celebrated what Gillespie called "cultural proliferation" and the breakdown of single standards of greatness, quality, seriousness, and legitimacy. Just as the economic sector had been deregulated and liberalized in key ways during the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, the cultural sphere of our lives was finally deregulated. Let a 1,000 websites bloom! Gillespie likened what was happening at the turn of the century to the breakdown of state religion in 17th-century England.

From today's podcast:

"Religious freedom didn't mean that people gave up on standards or religion didn't matter anymore or anything like that. It meant that people could finally express themselves and create the worlds that they wanted to live in. They could debate and argue and mongrelize and hybridize things. I think that's a really powerful way to look at the world that we're in now. The other [main point in the story comes from] James Buchanan, the recently vilified libertarian economist who helped to create 'public choice' economics and won a Nobel Prize for doing so. He talked about Albert Hirschman's ideas of 'exit, voice, and loyalty.' He used to stress in a lot of his work that when people can exit systems, it's a good thing. That's basically what I think cultural proliferation [does]. It allows people cultural exit. It didn't mean they didn't want culture. It just meant they got to embrace their own culture and their own morality and things like that. It's an incredibly liberating and better world because of that."

The late Jonathan Gold wrote about food in Southern California with an intimacy that brought readers closer to the people that made it. The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic visited high-end brick-and-mortar restaurants as well as low-end strip malls and food trucks in search of good food wherever he found it. Gold died of pancreatic cancer last month, but he still influences writers like Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist and author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.

Arellano sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about Gold's legacy, political correctness in cuisine, and why Donald Trump's love of taco salad gives him hope in the midst of all of the president's anti-Mexican rhetoric. The interview took place at Burritos La Palma, named by Gold as home to one of the five best L.A. burritos.

Produced and edited by Paul Detrick.

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By the time she arrived last year at The New York Times to help write and edit its Opinion section, 34-year-old Bari Weiss had already done stints at the online magazine Tablet and The Wall Street Journal. She had also made a number of enemies who accused her of being a narrow-minded, right-wing, pro-Israel, anti-Arab bigot. Far from bringing some fresh ideas to The Gray Lady's leftish commentary section, her hire, wrote The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, emodied the paper's "worst failings—and its lack of viewpoint diversity."

In Greenwald's reading, Weiss "has churned out a series of trite, shallow, cheap attacks on already-marginalized left-wing targets that have made her a heroine in the insular neocon and right-wing intelligentsia precincts." Her widely read pieces about the identity-politics excesses of a lesbian march in Chicago and of the #MeToo Movement, and her chronicling of the "intellectual Dark Web" didn't represent anything new, just more of the same. Greenwald wrote an attack on Weiss's student days at Columbia, claiming that she defamed anti-Israel professors as racists and tried to silence them academically. That charge prompted National Review's David French, who in a previous life was the president of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), to write that Greenwald and others were "sliming" Weiss.

Nick Gillespie sat down to talk with Weiss at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians held every July in Vegas. She was in town to attend the Reason Media Awards because she was a finalist for the Bastiat Prize which "honors writing that best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence. Indeed, she took home the top prize, besting finalists Jake van der Kamp of South China Morning Post, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, Gustavo Arellano of The Los Angeles Times; and Bonnie Kristian of The Week. We talked about Israel and Jewish identity in America and her work, why she considers herself a liberal (among other things, she's pro-marriage equality and abortion), how to avoid becoming the cartoon version of your most-outspoken critics, and more.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

President Donald Trump's current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, spent the weekend calling Trump's previous lawyer, Michael Cohen, a liar, while Trump continued to make false statements about the Russia investigation. On today's podcast, Reason's Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Christian Britschgi try to sort out who and what, if anything, we should believe. In the moderator's chair, Peter Suderman—that's me!—fills in for Matt Welch, who is still on vacation.

Later on, the gang discuss the latest twists and turns in the Trump trade war drama, Britschgi's groundbreaking reporting on plastic straw bans, and why everyone is talking about socialism. As always, this fun-filled and freewheeling hour of news and opinions ends with staff recommendations: for board games (Secret Hitler), documentaries (Far From the Tree), books (To the Bridge), and TV shows (Sharp Objects).

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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The Reason Podcast crew takes on Trump's lawyers, trade wars, plastic straw bans, and the rise of socialism.

When President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Randy Barnett—a libertarian legal scholar, Georgetown Law professor, and Volokh Conspiracy blogger—praised the choice, writing that "Kavanaugh's appointment would move the Court in the direction of textualism and originalism. He's very interested in the separation of powers in general and with respect to the administrative state in particular."

In a new Reason Podcast recorded at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas, Barnett fleshes out his assessment of Kavanaugh, including areas in which the judge is not so good from a libertarian point of view (think Fourth Amendment). Barnett also talks about the history of Supreme Court confirmation hearings and the radical departure things took with the nomination of Robert Bork to the high court in 1987.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.