The Reason Roundtable

In the bad old days before cable and the internet, TV shows didn't need to be good to be watched by millions. Even cornball programs such as My Mother the Car pulled audiences that dwarf today's blockbusters on streaming services such as Neftlix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. With niche marketing comes a massive increase in both the quantity and quality of shows, but some critics worry that the fragmentation of the viewing public means we no longer share common ground the way we did when there were just three national networks.

"I think that's a lot of crap," says Glenn Garvin, a Miami Herald staffer and Reason's television critic. "The explosion of television material that started with cable in the 1980s has been a grand thing. What if you don't want to watch My Mother The Car, The Rifleman, or The Beverly Hillbillies?" At the same, Garvin believes that cable news and most talk shows have declined in quality because they play to narrowly defined political points of view. More worryingly, he says that the move away from accuracy and fairness in reporting toward something closer to activism makes it harder for people to get informed.

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Garvin, who just covered one of the industry's biggest annual events, the annual convention of The National Association of Television Program Executives, about the shift from broadcasting to on-demand viewing, the influx of shows and formats from countries such as Turkey, Korea, and Brazil, and the proliferation of programming. "There's maybe 500 or so scripted shows on at any given time," says Garvin. "That's not too many in a country of almost 350 million people."

On today's Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss Chelsea Manning's candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat.

"Without her there is no Edward Snowden, there is no robust debate about FISA 702 and a wide variety of stuff," says Gillespie. "I don't agree with her at all on economic issues for the most part, mostly yes on social issues, [but] she represents a totally different way of slicing American politics."

Also discussed: the ongoing White House/Congress policy wrangle over immigration, the pros and cons of merit-based vs. family-based migration, missile warnings gone awry, and Kentucky's new plan to make Medicaid recipients get a job.

"There are just millions of Iranians who don't want to live under a corrupt clerical fascist state," says Bloomberg View writer Eli Lake about the current protests in Iran. That may not mean Iran is fed up with theocracy, just that they've had it with corrupt theocracy—the current protests started over the price of eggs. Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Lake about the protests and what they mean for Iran moving forward.

Few journalists have tossed more hand grenades or built more of a reputation for themselves than Matt Taibbi, who covers politics and culture for Rolling Stone when not writing bestselling books, such as Griftopia, Insane Clown President, and most recently I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, a powerful account of the death of Eric Garner, who died in police custody after being arrested for selling loose cigarettes in Staten Island. In 2008, Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for his columns and commentary at Rolling Stone.

With fame comes controversy. A 2005 piece for the defunct free weekly The New York Press was titled "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope." It was denounced by everyone from Hillary Clinton to Matt Drudge to Michael Bloomberg to that paragon of good taste, Anthony Weiner. With the publication of I Can't Breathe last fall, Taibbi has come under attack in a wide array of places ranging from Twitter to Facebook to The Washington Post for work that critics say is flat out misogynistic and sexist.

Taibbi has published at least two apologies about past work (much of which appeared in The eXile), but the firestorm has barely abated. He says that his support for Bernie Sanders throughout the 2016 campaign—even after Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination—is part of what's motivating the attacks on him, and is leading to something approaching a media blackout on his book about Eric Garner.

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Taibbi about his new book, free speech and the left, the recent negative attention that his work has received, and issues on which progressives and libertarians overlap in powerful, if always uneasy, ways.

Today's Reason Podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch, kicks off with the media's biggest takeaway from last night's Golden Globes awards in Hollywood—whether Oprah Winfrey should run for president in 2020, or whether she should just be declared commander in chief pre-emptively. Along the way we discuss why speech-making in overrated by political junkies, the reasons there are so few female directors, and the artistic heights reached in comedian Dave Chappelle's latest two Netflix specials.

Also under discussion: The fallout from Michael Wolff's White House bestseller Fire and Fury, the potential backlash against Attorney General Jeff Sessions' new directives on marijuana-related enforcement, and some possible good policy outcomes from the Trump administration in 2018.

Yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed a 2013 Justice Department policy that worked to keep federal law enforcement from going after recreational and medical marijuana users and producers in states that have legalized pot.

That's just stupid policy from any number of perspectives: A growing majority of Americans believe pot should be treated like wine and alcohol. States that have legalized have witnessed no negative social effects and teen pot use is even declining. President Trump campaigned on the promise that marijuana policy should be decided at the state level, a position fully consistent with federalism Sessions himself pretends to espouse. California and Nevada just started selling legal weed and Massachusetts is set to follow suit later in 2018. It's clear the war on pot is over and the prohibitionists have lost.

But if Sessions can't really stop legalization, says Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, he can slow it down and make it more painful and disruptive than it needs to be. In a fun, freewheeling conversation about pot, politics, and posturing, Sullum, the author of the groundbreaking Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, talks with Nick Gillespie about what red state (besides Alaska) will be the first to legalize pot, what should happen to people behind bars for crimes that are no longer crimes, and how cannabis culture will change in an America where people are fully free to smoke dope.

"Bitcoin is not competing with Visa or MasterCard. Bitcoin is competing with the Federal Reserve and the U.S. dollar," says Michael Goldstein, president of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and host of the Noded Bitcoin Podcast. His co-host and the institute's treasurer, Pierre Rochard, talk with Nick Gillespie about meteoric rise of bitcoin, how it can become a viable currency despite volatility, and how it may well spell doom for central banks and the gods of Keynesianism.

The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute is a group devoted to promoting bitcoin and working through many of the theoretical and practical challenges for the world's best-known cryptocurrency. It's named after Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of a programmer or programmers who launched bitcoin in 2009, in what Nakamoto called "a peer-to-peer electronic cash system."

Bitcoin potentially offers at least two radical things to its users. First is a non-state-based currency, and second is a fully peer-to-peer accounting system in which every actor can verify all transactions virtually instantaneously. The program resides on the computers and servers of its users, decentralized in a manner straight out of a science fiction novel. Inspired by Milton Friedman's and other economists' theories of a noninflationary currency, there is a fixed number of bitcoin that will be mined out over time into computer space, thus limiting the ability of people to inflate or deflate its value, at least in theory. Having said that, bitcoin is in the news now because of its massive spike in cost. Once trading at pennies, it recently neared $20,000 per bitcoin.

Whatever its price, Goldstein and Rochard say that bitcoin is here to stay and that what call "hyper-bitcoinization" is already well underway.

Today's Reason Podcast, which features myself, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Peter Suderman, begins with a discussion about the dramatic protests in Iran: their significance, the context, the vast amount that we don't know, the bad Twitter takes, the America-centric focus, and what Washington should do specifically about what few existing policies directly affect the situation in Tehran and throughout the Islamic Republic.

We also argue about legal (but heavily regulated) weed in California and elsewhere; President Donald Trump's recent comments on North Korea, Pakistan, and DACA; and whether cheesy '80s movies about nuclear holocaust (think The Day After and Testament) are worth rewatching.

Born in Pakistan and educated in America, Rafia Zakaria is the author of Veil, a new book which explores the history and shifting meanings of female coverings in Islamic countries and Western secular society. In a wide-ranging conversation, she talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about the theological underpinnings of veils, their use as a means of controlling female sexuality, and how they have become markers of socio-economic status and virtue signaling.

The Republican candidate has managed to capture just 37 percent of the under-30 vote in each of the last two presidential elections. What do you expect when you run candidates such as Mitt Romney and Donald Trump and go deep on issues such as gay marriage and drug prohibition, asks Lisa De Pasquale. Is Roy Moore really gonna pack in the kids?

The former organizer of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) and author of The Social Justice Warrior Handbook: A Practical Survival Guide for Snowflakes, Millennials, and Generation Z, De Pasquale has just published a novel, I Wish I Might, which features a 30-something conservative woman who runs a beauty-and-fashion website that's reminiscent of Goop and Teen Vogue. The increasingly libertarian-leaning D.C. resident thinks it's way past time for right-wingers to stop trying to police popular culture and instead start creating it.

"For me, politics has become more [about] entertainment," she says. "Being in D.C. almost 20 years now, it's not like I've seen a huge bunch of policy changes. Maybe what's left now is just entertainment." A Gen-Xer, she's also adamant that the older generation needs to get out of the way. "Anytime Fox News tweets something from The Five or from The Greg Gutfeld show, you can tell who the older commenters are because they'll say they just don't get Gutfeld or Kat Timpf," she says. "The problem is a lot of those older people are still the ones that are running for things, running organizations, and that sort of thing." Moore, the Alabama Republican who just lost a Senate election in the reddest state in the country, is not only fringe in his anti-sodomy views, she says, he's also been around forever.

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with De Pasquale about I Wish I Might, "secret laughter" inside the conservative movement, and why she doesn't think Lena Dunham is a role model.