The Reason Roundtable

Bassem Youssef, known as the "Jon Stewart of Egypt," was the host of the most popular television show in the history of the Arab world. A heart surgeon by training, he was inspired by The Daily Show frontman to start a weekly YouTube show in 2011, just as the Egyptian revolution and Arab Spring were getting underway. He taped it from his laundry room.

Called Al-Bernameg, which means "The Show," its audience grew to 30 million per episode.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Youssef discusses the limits of satire, political correctness, comedy on college campuses, Trump, how political leaders use religion, and more.

Produced by Justin Monticello. Music by Topher Mohr and Alex Elena and Pavel Malkov.

Should taxpayer funding follow children to schools that their parents select, or should it go directly to pay the costs of the existing system? In a debate held in New York City last night, Bob Bowdon, the executive director of the education news site ChoiceMedia, went up against Samuel Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University's Teachers College and the author of Education and the Commercial Mindset.

Katherine Mangu-Ward joins fellow editors Nick Gillespie and Peter Suderman to discuss Mike Pence's call for boots on the Red Planet, President Trump's push for leaders at the G20 Conference to defend the West from annihilation (pitting his nationalist vision against the globalist ambitions of France and Germany), and Chuck Schumer's quest to protect the nation from the evils of snortable chocolate.

"The cases of misreported or erroneously reported major news stories begin to make you wonder, 'Are the news media just out there to get Trump,'" says W. Joseph Campbell, communications professor at American University and the author of Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. "The relationship with the president is very tense and is very strained and very stretched, and probably more stretched than strained than it has been in the recent past."

Campbell also runs Media Myth Alert, a blog that tracks the recycling of fake news stories in the mainstream media. In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie about the state of legacy media, the relationship between the press and the president, and the need for media literacy, Cambpell talks about journalists' penchant for overstating their significance and how they often leads them to run with bad information.

"Media power tends to be overstated, it tends to be episodic," says Campbell, who has debunked the role of Walter Cronkite in "ending" the Vietnam War and the Washington Post in bringing down Watergate. "But most of the times, the media are not as powerful as we like to give them credit for or we tend to give them credit for."

On June 13 at New York's Subculture Theater, The Soho Forum staged a debate over the resolution: "Adam Smith should be honored as the founder of modern economics and free-enterprise capitalism."

FreedomFest impresario and economist Mark Skousen argued for the affirmative while Barron's books editor and Soho Forum co-founder Gene Epstein argued the negative. Naomi Brockwell moderated.

In an exclusive interview with Reason, Austin Petersen, the second-place finisher (to Gary Johnson and John McAfee) in the Libertarian Party's presidential primary, explains why he is running for the U.S. Senate in his home state of Missouri—as a Republican.

While he may have switched parties, Petersen's platform is exactly the same one he put forth while making his run at the LP nomination: He is staunchly anti-war and is calling for an audit of the Pentagon; favors school choice, drug legalization, and gay marriage; wants to simplify and reduce taxes while cutting overall spending; pushes criminal justice reform, an end to regulations large and small. He remains opposed to abortion, which is a minority position among libertarians, but calls for strong religious liberty and a total repeal of Obamacare/Trumpcare.

Missouri is an open primary state, meaning that voters don't need to be members of a party to vote in its primary (August 2 in Missouri), and Petersen hopes to turn out LP members and independents for the GOP contest.

The incumbent, Democrat Claire McCaskill, is widely regarded as one of the most vulnerable sitting senators in the country and no high-profile Republicans have publicly entered the race.

On today's podcast, Welch joins Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Andrew Heaton to discuss the president's Twitter outbursts (including his retweet of an anti-CNN wrestling video and his tirade against Mika Brzezinski), and the hijacking of a helicopter by a former action-movie star in Venezuela, who then dropped a grenade on the country's Supreme Court—attempted coup or a false flag operation? Other topics: Trump escalating rhetoric on North Korea, whether Chris Christie is abusing his power (to lounge on a beach), and favorite July 4th memories (most of which involve explosives).

Do libertarian voters actually dwell among the American electorate? A new analysis of the 2016 election concludes no.

Dividing voters into one of four groups, he finds 44.6 percent are liberal ("liberal on both economic and identity issues"), 29 percent are populist (liberal on economic issues, conservative on identity issues), 23 percent are conservative (conservative on both economic and identity issues), and less than 4 percent are libertarian (conservative on economics, liberal on identity issues).

Not so fast, says Emily Ekins, the director of polling at the Cato Institute (a position she previously held at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website). Libertarians are real, she documents in a new article, and they're spectacular. By her count, libertarians make up 10 percent to 20 percent of the electorate .

Peter Suderman joins Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward in a discussion moderated by Andrew Heaton. In addition to making sense of the unimaginative Republican bill and suggesting more radical reforms in place of it, they discuss a new CATO piece about the true number of libertarians in America; the cultural impact of Harry Potter two decades in (and which house Gillespie and Mangu-Ward would would fall into); and who should replace Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court if he retires.

"There's a huge story to be told," says Anthony Lappé, "about the actual extent of the U.S. government's involvement in drug trafficking."

And that's exactly the story Lappé and his co-producers Julian Hobbs and Elli Hakami tell in a mesmerizing four-part series that debuted this week on cable TV's History Channel. Through dramatic recreations and in-depth interviews with academic researchers, historians, journalists, former federal agents, and drug dealers, America's War on Drugs (watch full episodes online here) tells true tales of how, for instance, the CIA and Department of Defense helped to introduce LSD to Americans in the 1950s.

"The CIA literally sent over two guys to Sandoz Laboratories where LSD had first been synthesized and bought up the world's supply of LSD and brought it back," Lappé tells Nick Gillespie in a wide-ranging conversation about the longest war the U.S. government has fought. "With that supply they began a [secret mind-control] program called MK Ultra which had all sorts of other drugs involved."

The different episodes cover the history of drug prohibition, the rise of the '60s drug counterculture; heroin epidemics past and present; how drug policy has warped U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia, Central America, Afghanistan, and beyond; the bipartisan politics of prohibition; and much more. America's War on Drugs features exclusive and rarely seen footage and documents how, time and time again, the government was often facilitating trade and use in the very drugs it was trying to stamp out. The show's website adds articles, short videos, and more information in an attempt to produce an "immersive experience" that will change how viewers think and feel about prohibition.