The Reason Roundtable

So what happened at Unite the Right II?

The organizer's permit application stated that about 400 attendees would gather outside the White House to commemorate last year's rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The estimate was later downgraded to about 200, but by the time the rain started falling on Lafayette Square, it was clear that fewer than 30 were showing up amid a significant presence of cops and counterprotesters. Most of downtown Washington, D.C., was shutdown.

Bands of black clad Antifa members came with shields, helmets, and gas masks, and police surrounded far right protesters to protect them from violence. Most counterprotesters never laid eyes on anyone from the group they came to stand against.

Shot by Todd Krainin, Mark McDaniel, and Austin Bragg. Edited by Bragg.

"Quirky Dog" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

"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

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.

Despite policy changes designed to increase deportations, the Trump administration has yet to match the deportation numbers from the early years of the Obama administration, during which Barack Obama earned the moniker "Deporter-in-Chief."

Five days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing ICE to begin targeting "all removable aliens" living in the country. The Department of Homeland Security released a memo rescinding much of the discretion that ICE agents, prosecutors, and judges were previously allowed to exercise.

The number of immigrants ICE has arrested and detained from the interior of the country has increased by about 30 percent between 2016 and 2017, but arrests at the border and the rate of deportations have slowed, while the backlog of pending cases has spiked. Mackins says that the lack of discretion emanating from the executive order and the DHS memo is causing a system overload.

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.

"Hang for Days" by Silent Partner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music

Celebrities, union activists, and politicians demand that the government raise the minimum wage for restaurant workers. They are upset that in 43 states, tipped workers can be paid a lower minimum wage than other workers. The logic behind the lower minimum is that the tips make up the difference.

That's not good enough for people like Buffalo University law professor Nicole Hallett. She tells John Stossel that, "the problem with tips is that they're very inconsistent." She wants to "require restaurant owners to pay the same hourly wage that all other employers have to pay."

But many restaurant workers like the current system. Waitress Alcieli Felipe tells John Stossel, "don't change the rules on tips.... If you raise the minimum wage, it'll be harder for restaurants to keep the same amount of employees." She works at Lido, a restaurant in Harlem, and says, with tips, she makes $25 an hour, "by the end of the year I made around 48 to 50,000 dollars."

Nevertheless, several cities and states have increased the tipped minimum wage. This had unintended consequences. Michael Saltsman, Research Director at Employment Policies Institute tells Stossel, "in the Bay Area you've got a 14 percent increase in restaurant closures for each dollar increase in the minimum wage." The year after New York increased its tipped minimum wage, the city lost 270 restaurants.

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

The corridors of power opened to the world's oldest profession last month. About forty sex workers came to Washington to meet with thirty members of Congress to push back against the Fight Online Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA). Organized by Survivors Against SESTA, the event sought to open up lines of communication with elected representatives and allow sex workers to voice their opposition to the law.

"We have a motto in sex work activism: 'Nothing about us without us,'" says sex worker Jinx Lierre, a self-described anarchist. "And this definitely happened without us. So we are here to explain to folks what ended up happening as a result of this anti-trafficking legislation."

Produced by Todd Krainin.

"You may learn about eminent domain, but until you are in the crosshairs of the government, you don't understand how it really works," says Marianna Trevino-Wright, the director of the National Butterfly Center, a 100-acre private wildlife refuge located in Texas near the U.S. border with Mexico. "They invoke it, they take your land, and they do what they want."

The National Butterfly Center, or NABA, is directly in the path of Donald Trump's planned border wall. Part of the Rio Grande Valley Conservation Corridor, it's home to the largest concentration of butterflies in North America.

The border wall project is moving ahead in the Rio Grande Valley. In the 2018 omnibus spending bill, congress authorized one component of the project, a 33-mile section of fencing running through the Valley. And the Department of Homeland Security is threatening to use eminent domain to seize the land.

The National Butterfly Center's land will be cut off in two by the border wall—70 percent will become contiguous with Mexico and difficult to access. The government is also planning to establish a "control zone" for monitoring illegal entrants, which will mean clearing up to 200 yards of vegetation, specifically planted to host butterflies, on the river side of the wall. That land could be taken through eminent domain.

Summer Days by Kai Engel is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Rate Sheet by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Thread of Clouds by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

The Stone Mansion by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Two in the Back by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Sino de Cobre by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) is a thorn in the side of the GOP establishment. He has voted against so many bills, including measures championed by his own party, that in 2013 Politico dubbed him "Mr. No."

Reason sat down with Massie at FreedomFest in Las Vegas to discuss his battles with the Republican establishment, how Trump's tariffs are breeding cronyism, why federal marijuana prohibition will come to an end, and the impact that he and his fellow libertarians in Congress are having on policy. A member of the GOP, Massie also explains why he won't be switching over to the Libertarian Party anytime soon.

Edited by Justin Monticello. Music by The Grand Affair.