The Reason Roundtable

Citing the movie The Matrix, Candace Owens says she "took the red pill," waking up to see that conventional wisdom as wrong.

Now she shares her perspective with millions of people on YouTube.

"I launched my career on YouTube....My second video went trending worldwide with 80 million views," Owens tells John Stossel.

She hopes to convince other black people that Democrats' big government policies are harmful.

Owens argues that the big issue facing blacks is not racism or police shootings, but dependence on government. That began, she says, more than 50 years ago with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Since then, the rate of black unwed mothers has risen to 77 percent.

Owens blames the government, "they incentivized mothers not to marry their fathers. That's why single motherhood is up. The government would give you more if you didn't marry him."

Owens tells Stossel regulation and overreach hurt the black community. "We've got the government regulating nail salons, eyebrow salons. Government has extended an overreach into every single arena of our lives."

The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel, his independent production company, Stossel Productions, and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have reenergized the national movement to restrict gun ownership following a mass shooting that claimed 17 lives. Their efforts culminated with the massive March for Our Lives Rally on Saturday in Washington, D.C.

Teenagers have every right to fight for a cause they believe in, and the students from Stoneman Douglas are justifiably enraged about an event that claimed the lives of so many friends and classmates. But feelings shouldn't trump facts, and we should never craft policies from a place of fear.

Music: Clean Soul by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Attribution 3.0 International License.

Interviews by Robby Soave. Produced by Mark McDaniel and Alexis Garcia. Camera by Mark McDaniel and Todd Krainin. Edited by Austin Bragg.

Since 2013, The Americans has revisited 1980s America and Cold War politics with a depth and nuance usually reserved for PBS documentaries. The first season begins in the early Reagan years, when the Cold War seemed forever on the verge of escalating into nuclear war.

Nick Gillepie recently sat down with

Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, to discuss the genesis and meaning of the series, their thoughts on the Cold War, how changing technology is leading to better television, and what we can expect from the series' sixth and final season, which debuts on FX on March 28.

Interview by Gillespie.

Produced and edited by Meredith Bragg.

On March 13, 2018, President Donald Trump traveled to the border near San Diego to tour prototypes of the "big, beautiful wall" that served as the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.

Reason was on hand at a pro-Trump rally nearby to find out what supporters hope it will accomplish.

America, observers are fond of saying, is the only country based upon an idea. That idea—that all men and women are created equal and have inalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness—is directly informed by the Enlightenment, the movement that dominated ideas and culture in the 18th century.

But are we still an Enlightenment nation?

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Steven Pinker, Harvard linguist and author of Enlightenment Now, to discuss that question and more.

Edited by Todd Krainin.

In homage to Dad Joke videos everywhere, Reason's Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg try their hand at one-liners, cornball punchlines, and "comedy."

Written and produced by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton. Shot and edited by Bragg and Bragg. Starring Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg.

Music: "Quirky Dog" by Kevin MacLeod

In America, tech giants know a lot about us. John Stossel says that's fine with him. He knows what information he's handing over and he does it voluntarily. But he says we should worry about becoming like China, where the government is starting to use online data to create 1984 in the real world.

China's government has announced that they'll assign a mandatory government "social credit score" to everyone in the country by 2020. It will be based largely on what you do online. Say something that gets censored, you lose points. Same if you watch porn, or are late in returning a rented bike, or buy lots of alcohol.

China's government boasts that the social credit system will "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step."

Plus: Facebook goes after Trump's social media firm, and Trump tiptoes toward a trade war.

Science writer Gary Taubes has a knack for subverting the conventional wisdom. Sixteen years ago, he published a groundbreaking feature in the The New York Times Magazine, arguing that decades of government-approved nutritional advice attacking fatty foods and praising carbohydrates was flat-out wrong, ideologically motivated, and contributed to rising rates of obesity and diabetes.

He was widely attacked—including in the pages of Reason. His 2007 book Good Calories/Bad Calories followed up on that story, as did Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It, which appeared in 2011. Today, his thesis is gaining traction among heath and nutrition researchers, and has been highlighted once again in The New York Times and Time magazine.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Taubes in his kitchen in Oakland, California, to talk about his latest book on nutrition, The Case Against Sugar, which recently came out in paperback.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Interview by Nick Gillespie. Camera by Paul Detrick, Justin Monticello, and Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Brett Raney.

Reason's webseries "Mostly Weekly" is wrapping up–for entirely legal reasons that absolutely do not involve tax evasion. No reason to be suspicious.

The final episode of the series tackles creative destruction. In free and open markets people are able to make new technologies and business models, which displace older, established ones. That process of starting new companies and jobs destroys some professions while creating others.

In the end, it's better for everyone to look at the world as it is and to move forward than to try and halt progress through the force of law.

Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind. Watch past episodes here.

Script by Andrew Heaton and Sarah Rose Siskind with writing assistance from Brian Sack.

Edited by Austin Bragg and Sarah Rose Siskind.

Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.