Young Radicals Against Free Speech: Reason's Robby Soave on His New Book, Panic Attack
The 30-year-old journalist talks before a live audience about his new book on millennial activism in the Trump era.
Reason's Robby Soave has been writing about culture, free speech, due process, and moral outrage on campus since joining the magazine in 2014. Next week will see the release of his first book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which examines the ascendancy of the intersectional left and the identitarian right.
Soave was one of the first reporters to question the veracity of a Rolling Stone article that accused several fraternity brothers of a horrific gang rape at the University of Virginia—a story that the magazine later retracted because of insufficient evidence. Earlier this year, when a clip of MAGA-hat-wearing high school students appearing to intimidate a Native American man went viral, Soave was one of the first journalists to carefully scrutinize the raw video, discovering that the interaction was more complicated than the initial outraged reports had claimed. Major media organizations later looped back to acknowledge that they had erred in their reporting.
Reason's Zach Weissmueller talked with Soave in front of a live audience at Reason's L.A. office about his experience reporting and writing the book, today's political climate on campus, and why he thinks the college activists' emphasis on identity is misplaced.
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Audio production by Ian Keyser.