Since announcing his late-breaking presidential bid last week, Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) has been making the interview rounds—with Politico's Tim Alberta, CNN's Jake Tapper, MSNBC's Chuck Todd, The Washington Post's David Weigel, and Reason's own Nick Gillespie, among many others.
In a recording released this morning, the candidate added to that list The Fifth Column, a podcast I co-host with FreeThink's Kmele Foster and Vice News Tonight's Michael C. Moynihan. The conversation ranged from the coronavirus response to armed Michigan protesters to the decline of Amash's own House Freedom Caucus, from Foster's unwillingness to serve as vice president to the congressman's claim that contemporary Americans are more classically liberal, yet let less constitutional, than the Founding generation.
"They loved the Constitution but couldn't see the evils they were doing," Amash said. "We see the evils but reject the Constitution. It doesn't make any sense!"
You can listen to the conversation here.
Below is an edited transcript:
Moynihan: You weren't, of course, always a Libertarian—you were independent, and prior to that a Republican. Can you give us a little kind of sketch of the arc of your career as a Republican, and why and how you left the Republican Party, which I think a lot of people who don't really know you would be interested in finding out?
Amash: Well, I've always been a small-l libertarian, and I probably think of myself as more on the classical liberal side of things, for those who are maybe a little bit wonky about it. I'm more of an F.A. Haeyk guy than anything else.
I've been kind of anti-authoritarian since I was a kid, and didn't really describe myself as a libertarian for a lot of my life. When I got older, I started to really realize where I fit in the political world and I spent some time reading and studying libertarian thought. So Hayek is a guy who really came up first for me, when I really was immersed in a lot of this.
I was looking at the state government and seeing a total disaster, a total mess brought on by Republicans and Democrats, and I thought at that time it would be good to take a crack at it, to run for office as a Republican. At that time I didn't really think about any parties other than the Republicans and Democrats; those were the ones that were on my radar as a twentysomething-year-old. I thought that I could maybe cast the Republican Party in more of a libertarian image. They weren't that far off on a lot of the things they talked about. In practice, they weren't doing any of it, but at least they were talking about it. So I thought, well, maybe I can bring people along.
It was obviously well-received by my constituents. They elected me to Congress after one term in the state House, so it worked. People liked what I was talking about.
And when I got to Congress, at first I thought, well, this is a disaster again, just like the state House, but we can make some headway. And the first few years I thought we were making headway; I thought we were improving the political system. I thought we were improving the Republican Party and moving it into a more liberty-oriented direction and a more representative direction than where it had been.
But then I would say about, I don't know, 2014–2015, things started to take a really bad turn in the party. You had a few people at the top, starting with [Speaker John] Boehner of course, who really started to lock down the legislative process and try to wrestle control away from the members who are interested in some of this change, or interested in making it a more liberty-oriented party or a more representative party. And then you saw a gradual creeping of nationalism into the party's messaging that happened before Donald Trump. I'd start to see it in town halls. And so I could sort of see Donald Trump coming ahead of time before he was even a candidate. You could see this starting to grow at town halls, where you'd hear people on the left and the right talking in a more nationalistic way.
Moynihan: So you heard that from constituents?
Amash: Oh, yeah. I definitely heard that. And I was still doing very well in my district; I'd win these elections with good margins. But I started to more and more hear things about nationalism and protectionism and things that were really counter to the Republican Party of, say, the '80s and '90s, which had moved in more of a Reagan direction, if you will—not necessarily quite libertarian, but a little more free market and classical liberal in many ways.
So I saw it coming. And now, I don't even really recognize the party. It's very different from the party I was a part of. It's more of a party of personality than anything else. It's quite nationalistic, of course, but it really revolves around personality, I think, a little bit of a culture of ridicule. It's almost like a class warfare of a new sort. The media is all "evil" on everything. Of course everyone has problems with particular parts of the media; it's not like I go through a year and I don't think "Oh, this story is not great" or that someone wasn't unfair. But it's really turned into a culture now.
Even this "Deep State" stuff. The government's bad in many ways, but I think the president uses it like a hook on everything now—no matter what he does to grow government, there's always some Deep State that wants to thwart him for some reason. His growing of government is not his fault; it's the Deep State.
Foster: Along these same lines, I think a lot of people, when they hear your story or encounter it, the sensibility is that you somehow abandoned the president and abandoned the party. I was re-reading the editorial you wrote around the time that you left the Republican Party, and it seemed very obvious that your concern wasn't merely what was happening in the Republican Party but some sort of broader change that you were seeing with respect to partisanship and the country. Could you speak to that a little bit?
Amash: That's absolutely right. Both parties have their own sets of problems, and you're not seeing the Democratic Party act in any representative way either. What I'd like to see is a government where you take all these ideas, and libertarians can come into the government, conservatives can come in, progressives can come in. And we can all debate these ideas, and then have a vote, and whatever happens, happens. But let us debate the ideas in front of the American people and let them weigh the outcomes. Let them make decisions based on what happens in our debates, in our discussions, and judge us on the outcomes we produce.
Instead, what really happens in both parties is a few people at the top control everything. Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi controls the entire legislative process right now. [Former Speaker] Paul Ryan controlled the entire legislative process. And I can't speak for the Senate; presumably the Senate operates in a very similar way, with a very top-down structure. But speaking for the House side of it, it's really stifling, and you don't have any discussion anymore of policy.
People don't even bother reading the bills, because why should they? What's the point of reading a bill, from their perspective, if you're not going to have any say in it, all the leadership wants is your vote—yes or no? They don't care whether the details aren't right. They're not interested in your amendments or your thoughts on it.
Paul Ryan shut down the legislative process so badly that for the first time in our country's history, we had a whole Congress where there wasn't a single amendment that could be brought to the floor without being preapproved by the speaker of the House. The history of our country, our government, is one where the House is supposed to be a deliberative body: If you want to present something, especially an amendment on an appropriations bill, you bring it to the floor and you offer that amendment and nobody can stop you as long as it's germane to the bill. Nobody can stop you. You have a vote on it, and you win or you lose.
Paul Ryan said, "No, we're not going to do that anymore. From now on, you want any amendments? I will decide whether you get that amendment." And you can imagine what kind of amendments get to the floor if the speaker gets to decide—only amendments that don't really do anything, or amendments that he's pretty confident are going to fail. So if your amendment does something and might pass, it's excluded; you can't have it. He was the first speaker of the House to do that. Now Nancy Pelosi is the second speaker of the House, so two in a row right now.
And what this does, is it creates a lot of tension in society, because my constituents, just like other people's constituents, are saying things like, "Hey, can you offer this amendment? Can you offer this idea?" And we're basically not able to offer anything or do anything. The committee process is totally shut down too; the speaker decides what goes to the committees. When you have all of this tension and all of this breakdown in the system, you get a huge level of polarization. Now the members of Congress who can't debate policy anymore, what do they do? They debate personalities.
And that's how you ended up with something like Donald Trump, because you created an environment that is perfect for a candidate like Donald Trump to come in and tell the people, "Drain the swamp! Make America great again! Look at how they're not doing anything!" So he's capitalizing on this broken system that Congress has created.
What I want to do as a president is go in and force Congress to represent the people. And this is what makes my candidacy very different from Donald Trump or Joe Biden. We've seen how Donald Trump works; Joe Biden is going to operate in the same status quo way as every other president we've had in the past few decades. It's not going to change.
We have to open up the process. And when Speaker Pelosi or any speaker comes to my office and says, "Hey, I want to go negotiate with you on his legislation," I'll say, "Have you negotiated with the legislature? You should negotiate with them first. Bring the legislation to Congress, run it through Congress, allow the committees to work, allow the floor to work, and then you bring me what you got after everything's worked. Then I'll tell you if I've got an opinion on it: I can sign the bill or I can veto it." But I don't want to take power away from the people.
So I'm promising to be a president who will reduce my power. And that's a unique sell to the American people, and I think that's something that we really need, because if the president can check his own power, then we can get Congress back doing its own job, and we can help make the American people more satisfied that they're represented.
Welch: You talked about a variety of speakers you were as instrumental as anyone else in dethroning, defrocking, [especially] John Boehner. So it sounds like because of your good work there's been no amendments ever introduced again on the floor of Congress. Congratulations!
But my question is more about the vehicle by which you did that, which was the House Freedom Caucus, which you co-founded. After Donald Trump became president, he picked fights with you a lot. You were stubborn about a variety of issues, mostly spending, and some other things too, [like] Obamacare repeal/replace/whatever-the-status-of-that-was in early 2017.
You left the House Freedom Caucus even before you left the Republican Party. How did this organ that you helped start and create, along [the lines of] a lot of these principles that you talk about, go so quickly from stubborn independence [and] reigning in executive power to being [the] talent pool for the attack dogs to defend Donald Trump against congressional investigations? What happened? Name names.
Amash: Well, I'll try to name some names.
But what happened was, the House Freedom Caucus was designed to address the things I talked about earlier. It was designed to open up the process. That's why it existed. People think it started as a conservative group. It didn't start as a conservative group, and I know, because I was instrumental in trying to steer it in the right direction right from the get-go. There's a reason "conservative" is not in the name of the group. There's a reason that when you look at the mission statement of the group, it doesn't say anything about conservatism, because that wasn't the point. The point was to open up the process so that everyone could participate, so that everyone in America could feel represented, and that includes progressives and conservatives and libertarians and anyone else who wants to participate in the process.
People forget that Donald Trump took aim at it early on, as you mentioned. Donald Trump was a person who said that we must defeat the House Freedom Caucus. He declared that on Twitter. But what ended up happening is he realized that this was a bad strategy to make enemies of the House Freedom Caucus, and that he needed to start picking off the members. So he started elevating them to executive positions. He started to play nice with some of the members. And I think what happens is people get enamored with someone who pays attention to them, especially if that person is the president of the United States.
So if the president is constantly flirting with you, and you're one of the House Freedom Caucus members, it's easy to get taken by it. He calls you up and he says, "Hey, you want to go golfing? Hey, you want to go for dinner?" You're not going to turn the president down. So you have House Freedom Caucus members who start doing that stuff. And once you get to spend time with someone, even if it's a person who's been a jerk in so many ways publicly, or has called for the defeat of your group, or whatever he might have done, it's easy to get taken by it and say things like, "Well, he's not so bad. Maybe I can work with this guy. Maybe we can change him. Maybe if I stay close to him, I can start to amend his ways and, and get him on the right track."
And I'd start to hear this from my colleagues. They'd say, "Oh, well, you know, Justin, we don't agree with him, but we can work with this guy and we can change him." But what ends up happening is not that they change Donald Trump but that Donald Trump changes them. And that's what they're not seeing. Donald Trump changed them. They didn't change Donald Trump.
He's the same person he was before, and they are different now. They no longer care about things like fiscal restraint. And sure, you have a vote, and some of them will vote against it, especially some of the ones who are the true believers in that stuff. But in terms of actually pressing the president, or pressing House Republican leadership, they've totally forgotten about that. They're not interested in the fight anymore. They don't want to have that fight on any of the principles that they used to talk about, like opening up the process or making sure that our government is restrained properly by the Constitution.
Now they're fully on board, and the superficial went to the real, when you started to get House Freedom Caucus members [Mark Meadows] serving as the chief of staff. But then again, what power do they have as chiefs of staff? What power have they really had? What influence have they had? I haven't seen it. It's run the same way, whether you had a House Freedom Caucus member there or not.
Moynihan: I always appreciate the phrase—and I mean this—when someone says, "true believer," because it implies that everybody else doesn't believe it. And that has become apparent to me over the years. I remember when I was at Reason and I first interviewed Paul Ryan, and Paul Ryan gave me the absolute Randian stuff, he was going through the whole thing. And it was maybe a year, a couple years later that I did a double take, and said "Who is this guy?"
And this seems to be pretty consistent. I rarely see somebody who doesn't fall victim to this. Why will it not happen to you?
There's a lot of dealmaking that has to go into to the position, and what you saw—you, being cut out of the process—[as president] you start making that process. And then you say you want to devolve power from the presidency: Can you do that without having Washington take advantage of you?
Amash: Yeah, I can. And I've proven that by breaking from the Republican Party multiple times on a whole host of issues. I know people focus on the Mueller report, but really I've broken from the Republican Party time and again on issues where I thought they were overreaching, where they were pushing for constitutional violations or not standing up for their principles.
I think at the end of the day, what makes me tick is quite different from what makes some of my colleagues tick, even in the House Freedom Caucus. And I have close friendships with many of them, so I'm not trying to suggest they're bad people or anything like that. But people get into politics for different reasons. And for me, it's important to stay true to my principles. I really believe in what I'm fighting for, and I always made a commitment to myself that I didn't want to be in politics if I couldn't stand up for what I believe in.
Moynihan: What is politics without principles?
Amash: I mean, there's no point of politics without principles, in my opinion. Why even get involved? What's the point of running for office and then fighting for things you don't believe in? It doesn't make any sense. I don't want the job—
Foster: You can enrich yourself, you can get a cushy job afterwards so you make a couple million dollars a year, that sort of thing…
Amash: I don't want this job just for the job. A lot of my colleagues do just want the job, I think. I think at the end of the day, they like being called congressmen and showing up at the meeting and having everyone applaud for them.
What I want is to stand up for the principles I talk about, and when I go home at the end of the day feeling good about myself and about the fact that I did what was right and I stood up for my beliefs. The people have the right at home to vote for who they want; we're not elected to have a direct democracy, where we just poll our constituents and then we vote according to the poll. We express what our principles are, and I tell my constituents what my principles are, and then they get to vote. And if they like what I stand for on principles, then they vote for me to use my judgment. And so I believe standing up for those principles and standing up for that judgment is really important. I don't want the job if I can't do that. That, to me, is the essence.
And so that makes me quite different from a lot of my colleagues. At the end of the day, what they want to have is the Republican leader come and pat them on the back and say, "Hey, you did a good job today. Let's go get a dinner. I want to introduce you to some of my lobbyist friends. I want to introduce you to this fundraiser over here." And getting the text messages from the leadership or from the president saying, "Hey, I really appreciate what you're doing. I know that that was a tough vote, you know, voting against your principles, but you're really helping the team." They like that kind of stuff.
If you're doing that, though, you're not helping anyone. Helping the Republican Party achieve some kind of short-term win doesn't help the American people.
Moynihan: So what you're saying is that the Hollywood vision, the negative Hollywood vision of what Washington, D.C., is—lobbyists, golfing, donors, backslapping—is true.
Amash: Yeah. I think that that is basically the way it works.
I think the thing that people get wrong is that it's not direct lobbyists' influence on individual legislators. It's indirect influence through the leadership. There's an assumption that the lobbyists are going to each individual House office and picking off the legislators one at a time, but that's not what's happening. They're going to the Republican or Democratic leadership and getting them to do their bidding, and getting the members to go with the leadership team.
Moynihan: That's depressing.
Foster: When you were making your case for the American people, and you talked about them having a government that's truly responsive to them and explicitly devolving some of the power that's accrued to the executive—it's interesting to have a conversation about that. One, I fully endorse the program, and I fully endorse you. Not that you need my endorsement, but you have it.
Amash: Thank you.
Foster: But to go a step further—
Moynihan: He's fishing for the veep! He wants to be your vice president.
Welch: Yeah, I can hear it.
Moynihan: I'm just telling you, that's what he wants.
Foster: I'm not doing it, I'm not doing it.
Amash: That'll be the call afterwards.
Foster: That's what the people want, but I can't speak to that.
But in a time of COVID, it seems to me that there are a lot of Americans who almost certainly want a super-empowered executive branch. They look to the government, and they have an expectation that the government will be big enough and strong enough to protect them, because many imagine that it perhaps is not, and that the president in particular will somehow articulate a vision to rescue them from their current circumstance.
Obviously, there's been a lot of legislative action related to COVID, some pretty extraordinary numbers in terms of the amount of dollars that have been tossed at this, but it's likely that the whole of the presidential election might turn on this very issue. The quality of the response, the quality of the aid that's being rendered to Americans, and perhaps the subsequent battle against the economic depression that we might be contending with: Is it being entrusted to the right hands? How can people be confident that your hands are the right hands and that your program is consistent with the really good outcome here?
Amash: Well, this big government response hasn't worked. There are people who have called for the president to have even more power, but imagine if he had even more power: I think you'd have a worse outcome. At least we have the fact that these 50 states can make their own decisions on a lot of things; that helps protect the rights of the people while also balancing the particular needs in the community. Not every state has the same issues with respect to COVID, and they need to address it differently. People talk about, "Well, the risk is the same every single place." It's not the same every single place. And the doctors and epidemiologists will tell you it's not the same. Otherwise, when we were talking about "opening things up," as we often use that phrase, why would they be saying some places have to open up at different rates? They're admitting that it's not the same everywhere. They acknowledge it.
And what I would say is, you do need a federal government that is available to provide some kind of coordination between states when you have something that is international like this. You have a virus that's come across borders, and it can affect the whole country—you do need some federal coordination involved. But the federal government doesn't need to direct every decision. You can leave a lot of the decision-making to the individual states and individual communities.
I would say, federal government leaves it to the states, states can then make decisions about how to divide things up among the various counties and cities, perhaps. But if you have the federal government in charge of everything, you're actually making a big mistake in terms of addressing things quickly. Because now if one part of the whole system makes a mistake, the whole system is broken, the whole system collapses, and you don't want that. It makes the system very vulnerable. It makes it fragile. It's not a good way to run a government.
So look at this coronavirus relief package as an example. Here's a package which shows you how adept the federal government is at things. They put this convoluted package together that puts all sorts of barriers in the way when, if you wanted a federal solution and you want it to have it happen quick, just get money to the people quickly. So if the federal government's going to be involved, it should be as simple as possible, and as quick as possible, and otherwise it should really try to get out of the way as much as possible while coordinating things but letting people on the ground make decisions. Because the federal government doesn't have all the knowledge that's needed to resolve the issue. You don't have a bunch of people at the White House sitting in a room who can figure out what's going on in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It doesn't work that way. People in Grand Rapids, Michigan, need to make that decision.
I think the federal government has overreached in so many ways but at the same time failed the people in so many ways with its overreach, with this massive $3 trillion package that mostly benefits large corporations.
Foster: How does that happen? How does it happen that a policy like this comes out of the pandemic? Democrats especially are not supposed to favor big corporations, but all of these rescue packages nearly always seemed to be calibrated in this particular way. You've seen the way the sausage gets made. Why is that happening?
Amash: There's one simple reason, which is that if you get relief directly to the people, you don't get that much political capital out of it. In other words, the two parties could get together and say, "Hey, let's get the relief to the people right away. Let's just start sending out checks. We'll send out a $2,000 check. It'll be fast and simple and easy." But guess what happens when you do that? You make millions of Americans happy, but you don't get much political capital out of it. You still end up with several industries that come back to you and say, "Hey, what about us? We want something special." What about farmers? What about truck drivers? What about labor unions? Everyone wants something else.
So what they try to do is they put together the most convoluted package that gives a little bit of something to a bunch of discrete constituencies. And then all those people can say and tell it to their own membership, "Oh, look what a great job our congressman did. He got us this thing." And I see this right now with my colleagues, I see a lot of them going around and saying, "Hey, I did so much for the particular industry X, I did this thing for them." And they're bragging about it, something that was stuffed into the bill. But at the same time that they're bragging about all this stuff, millions of people are not having their needs addressed. They're on unemployment, but they're not getting their benefits. Or they can't even get onto the unemployment system, and they're going into food banks when they were doing OK before but now they can't get a job because they've been told to stay home.
So the Congress has not addressed these concerns, and they've made it more convoluted, and that's because this is the system they're used to. This is the one that works for them. They want to be able to go to constituencies and say, "I did this for your particular constituency," rather than say, "I helped all the American people in one fell swoop."
Moynihan: The initial bailout, of—I can't even keep track, was it $2.5 trillion out of the gate? And the half a trillion for the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program], you know, to support small businesses, supposedly. Some small businesses like Potbelly—
Foster: The Los Angeles Lakers.
Moynihan: The Lakers is a very, very small team, as these things go.
On both of those, you voted "present." You didn't vote against.
Amash: No, no, that's not true. On the $2 trillion plus package, I voted no. We didn't have a recorded vote, but I recorded my vote as "no."
Moynihan: You recorded your vote as no. OK, so let's take the second one, then, the most recent, the PPP. Tom Massie, I guess four other Republicans, and AOC [voted no]. And AOC's objection was there wasn't more money in there. Explain why you voted present and not no.
Amash: Yeah, so the bill doubles down on the first package, the one I opposed. I voted no on that first package—at least I submitted my vote to the record. They didn't take a recorded vote, so I had to specially submit my no vote to the record. But the second bill doubles down on that system. In other words, it doesn't address all of the problems in that convoluted package, including with the PPP program. They didn't fix the program. The program can work for a lot of businesses, and in even in this broken stage or state, it does work for some businesses, but it doesn't work for a great number of businesses. And they didn't really fix the program. So here's a bill that doubles down on that messed-up, convoluted bill, the $2.2 trillion bill, with this new bill.
But at the same time, I'm a big rule-of-law guy. And when I see this PPP program, where many of the more connected businesses got benefits through the program even if they aren't well-crafted and even if the bill is not very well-designed, they still were able to go and get a loan. When I see all of these businesses that got in there and got it done, and they're the ones who probably don't need it as much as many of the ones who are left out, then that causes me concern. And so, I think it would be wrong to also double down on this idea that we're going to design the system to benefit those who need less help, and the ones who need more help, we're going to leave them out. So it doubles down on a bad piece of legislation, the previous package, and it doubles down on a rule-of-law violation, and these cut in opposite directions.
So I voted present, because you have a good reason to vote no and a good reason to vote yes on the bill. And to me, the rule of law is important. So I voted present. I didn't want to send the message to the businesses that were left out that you don't deserve to be treated the same way as the businesses that got in. I think that's a bad message to send.
Welch: The last two years haven't been very friendly to people who spend a lot of time talking about constitutionalism, fiscal restraint, and whatnot. You could just march right through it: Your friend Mark Sanford gets bounced out of a primary election as an incumbent in South Carolina in 2018. Gary Johnson, runs as a Senate candidate in New Mexico [and] only gets 15 percent—he's running against an absolute nobody Republican who doubles him up there. Jeff Flake retires rather than face the voters who were ready to absolutely kick him to the curb in Arizona. Bill Weld tries to run against Donald Trump, gets squashed like a bug. Sanford thinks about it for a half a second, gets squashed like a bug, and retreats.
What makes your story or your moment any different than all of the people who in different areas, different parties, different moments over the last two years have made at least somewhat overlapping cases to people electorally?
Moynihan: Why are you so stubborn, Congressman?
Amash: I think I have a unique combination of skills I can get out there, and get this message out in a way that is maybe unique. I've been good at social media. I have ease of access to a lot of the young people out there, I think, who can get this message out. And I have a lot of experience in Congress with the problem I'm talking about. I understand what ails our system, and I'm talking about it in a way that is different than the generic "Hey, we just need more liberty and we need someone who's going to respect the Constitution." People need to understand when you talk about liberty and the Constitution, they need to understand why those things are important to them. They need to understand how the Constitution is connected to our overall system and how that's connected to people's rights.
So it all goes hand in hand. And I think I'm uniquely positioned to really talk about this message with the American people, because I understand the problem and I've been talking about it for a long time. And it's not going to be a simple message like we've had before, of "Oh, the government is just spending too much money" or "The government is doing too much." We have to assess the problem. We have to explain to people at home why this is happening. Why is the government spending too much money? Why is the government not following the Constitution? Why is the government not protecting our rights? They need to understand the why, if you want to resolve this problem and make some headway in the political world. You can't just say these are problems; you need to tell people why that is.
Moynihan: I mentioned something before we started recording about somebody who was a friend of yours, who said, "I love Justin. I'm a friend of his." But he said it to me in kind of a conspiratorial way in the halls of Congress—like, Don't want to say it too loud, but he's great and we really appreciate him.
I am interested in what sort of pressure people within the party are putting on you. Because all those people that were squashed like bugs—some of them, anyway—have talked quite openly about how the party apparatus kind of came for them in some way.
And for you, obviously those are your former colleagues, people who know you, and a lot of whom were ideological comrades who decided to defect and go to the other side. What is that interaction like with people? Is there a lot of pressure to say, "Hey, stop it. It's not good for anyone, and this is only going to hurt you"?
Amash: There was early on. For example, when I left the House Freedom Caucus, that was a big deal. And even before that, when I said the president had committed impeachable conduct, that was a big deal to a lot of people within the House Freedom Caucus and within the Republican Party. And they did come pretty hard at me to try to get me to apologize or change my ways or say that I didn't really mean it or whatever. It was kind of like a hostage situation in some ways. "You have to recant, we're going to put you on tape…"
Moynihan: Hold today's newspaper.
Amash: Right. So there was a lot of pressure like that early on. When I became an independent, all that all went away, because now my colleagues on the Republican side at least were saying to themselves, "Well, he's not one of us anymore, so we don't have to pressure him in the same way."
You mentioned one of my colleagues. I still get this from colleagues, a lot of colleagues who respect me on the principles and respect what I'm doing but aren't willing to say it publicly. They don't want to go out on a limb, and some of them are almost in hiding. They're out there willing to defend the president in some ways, but in many ways they're staying kind of quiet and trying to just ride it out and hoping that it all ends at some point. When I look at former colleagues, I've had a lot of former colleagues, people who used to be in the party, I get messages from them all the time thanking me for what I'm doing. And a lot of unlikely people, people who would have been fighting me left and right in the old days, coming out and saying, "Hey, thank you for what you're doing. I really appreciate it. You're standing up for truth and principles."
Moynihan: Can I quote Matt Welch and say, "Name names," Congressman?
Amash: I'm not going to get into names, because I want to respect, especially when a lot of them are private citizens now, but—
Welch: Bill Kristol really loved you about three months ago. That was fun to watch.
Amash: They're all just people who loved me before and now they don't…
Foster: Yeah, a lot of the NeverTrumpers have had very unkind things to say about you recently.
Amash: To get into that topic, just very briefly: They are not the largest group of Republicans, let me put it this way.
There are lots of people in the Republican Party who still do not like Donald Trump. Now if you poll them on it, and you say, "Do you approve of Donald Trump or don't approve of Donald Trump?"—they will still say they approve of him. Because a lot of people, when they get those polls, they're thinking about Donald Trump versus Nancy Pelosi, or Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, or someone else. So they're saying, "Yeah, well, compared to those people, I definitely approve of him."
But if you really press them on it—I know Republicans. I've spent a lot of time with Republicans. I've served as a Republican in Congress. There are a lot of them who do not like Donald Trump. And with my entry to this race, I provide them an alternative, someone who they would consider voting for. Because for a lot of them, their first choice might be Justin Amash, but their second choice is not Joe Biden. It's Donald Trump still. They don't like him, but they're still voting for them.
And I think that's what a lot of Democrats are not understanding. You know, I've gotten some pushback from Democrats in the past few days. People think it's NeverTrump Republicans, [but] there are actually very few NeverTrump Republicans who have pushed back, because there are very few NeverTrump Republicans like that. There just aren't that many people out there relative to other population groups who have a first choice of maybe Justin Amash, let's say, and a second choice of Joe Biden, a third choice of Donald Trump. That's not a big subset.
What is a pretty big group is: first choice Justin Amash, second choice Donald Trump, third choice Joe Biden. That's a much larger group, and for some reason people are all up in arms now on the left, because they're listening to some of these prominent Republican figures who no longer support the Republican Party and they support Joe Biden, and they think that's what a lot of Republicans are thinking too. And it's just not true.
Foster: Obviously, you still need to achieve greater name recognition. That is hard in any normal campaign cycle. This is anything but normal. We have no idea what November will look like, but leading up to November, how do you stay relevant? How do you maintain the presence that you've been able to have over the course of the last week or so since you announced?
Amash: Well, I just have to keep pushing. I'm lucky that I'm 40 years old. I feel like that makes me old now, but I'm still young relative to the other candidates. It's like when you're in your thirties you still feel a little bit like you're a kid, but now I'm 40, and I still have the energy and still can go out and do this day after day. I'm not confident that my two general election opponents—if I'm fortunate enough to be the nominee of the Libertarian Party—I'm not confident that those two opponents are going to have the energy to do the kinds of things I'm doing. So I'm going to keep pressing, keep doing programs like this. I'm going to keep doing things day after day, getting on the radio, getting on TV, putting out social media posts, and just trying to spread the message so people can understand what I'm about.
Right now, people have a very simplistic notion of what I'm about, right? They don't really know much about Justin Amash because I'm not familiar to them. My name ID is low nationwide. And so the only thing they know about me is I'm a guy who voted to impeach the president, and now for some reason I want to run against the president. Those are the things that they know about me, and they can't figure out why it is that he would want to run against the president when he voted to impeach him. How could this be?
Moynihan: You're in Michigan, and of course these protests that are getting a lot of attention in Michigan are making me wonder what you think about this. Because on one hand there's people out there talking about liberty. They're talking about government overreach. And when I see them visually, I think these are the exact people that Justin Amash doesn't really like, because he left the party—the MAGA hats, that sort of strain of conservatism. But there's kind of probably some balance in there, I'd imagine. So what do you make of these people in your home state who are sometimes armed and sometimes storming into buildings? What do you think of this protest?
Amash: Well, I can't speak to them as a general group, because they come from all sorts of places. Some of them are doing the right thing, and some of them are doing the wrong thing. You've seen some people who've come to the Capitol with Nazi symbols or Confederate flags or things like that, and of course I reject all that stuff and denounce all that stuff. That's not OK.
I also don't think it's a good idea—even though I'm the strongest supporter of our gun rights and strong supporter of the Second Amendment—I don't think it's a good idea to open-carry large weapons in the Capitol. I think that that is intimidating to a lot of legislators. Whether they intend it or not, that's how it's perceived by people: It looks like you're trying to pressure the legislature to do your bidding. And I just think that's a really bad idea and bad look, and does not help the cause of people who support open carry.
I support the idea of protecting people's right to keep and bear arms, including open carry. And I think that this kind of stuff makes people second-guess it. And you don't want to have some kind of a weird constitutional amendment in Michigan that prohibits it or something like that. These ballot initiatives are pretty easy to get done in Michigan. So I think they have to be really careful about that stuff.
Well, look, people are not happy about what the governor has been doing here. The governor has done a lot of things that are really draconian. Everyone understands the need for social distancing and staying home, and there are a lot of measures that most people would say, "Yeah, this is reasonable." I think you'd get 80, 90 percent of the population to say, "Yeah, those are pretty reasonable measures, and we're okay with that." But when you start telling people things like, if your bike is broken, you can't take it to the bicycle repair shop to get fixed because you might get sick. Or she says you can't have landscaping services, because then that will mean more people have to go to the gas station; the landscapers have to stop at the gas station, and that will increase the spread of COVID-19.
Of course any kind of interaction marginally increases spread of anything—COVID-19, the flu, anything. But you have to weigh the marginal increase in risk versus the significant detriment to people's lives when they feel really frustrated and feel like they can't get things done and can't live their lives enjoyably.
People in Michigan were told you can go to the store but that store shouldn't be selling a particular item—the government has decided that that's not an OK thing to be selling at that store at this time. We'll just have them tape off the aisles so that you can't get the item. And that makes no sense! And then the governor says, "Well, there are other stores that specialize in this stuff, and you could go to the other store and get it." If you're worried about spreading coronavirus, why would you send someone to another store? How does that make any sense?
Moynihan: They just went to two stores now.
Amash: So now you just send someone to two stores. These kinds of things don't make sense. And I promise you she is getting advice from people; I know she's hearing from epidemiologists and doctors, but it's not always good advice. Just because someone gave you advice doesn't mean it makes sense, even from a specialist in the field. You have to use common sense, and you have to think about society as a whole. And you're telling people, too, they can't go between two homes that they own. Look, I'm not, like, super-sympathetic to all these people who have these two homes that they want to go to. I don't think it's the most important thing to be doing right now.
Welch: Yeah, Kmele!
Amash: Between your lake home and your other home. However, it doesn't make sense as a restriction. It just doesn't make sense. You get in your car; you go from one home to the other. OK. You had to stop to get gas. Yeah, you've increased the marginal risk somewhat, but it's so small relative to the overall risk, that it's not worth making everyone angry and frustrated. Because when you do that, guess what happens? People stop paying attention to the reasonable guidance that they're getting. They start to think things like, "Well, if she's going to do this, then we're not even going to socially distance. We're going to just meet up in big groups and we're going to protest and we're going to do other things." And she creates more havoc this way. People don't take it seriously anymore. They don't respect their government.
It's like something Bastiat said: "If you want to make the laws respected, then you have to make them respectable." And he said it in French, and I'm sure it was more eloquent than that, but that is an important point.
Foster: I saw a congressperson today, it sounds like, calling for us to take over Chinese companies, perhaps in an attempt to recoup some of the costs associated with this particular pandemic. So there's a lot of saber-rattling that is in some cases explicit. There's things happening in the South China Sea that make me very nervous. But even just the general tone of the criticism that you see emanating from Washington these days directed at people who are our trading partners, but some would also describe them as adversaries, and I think with good cause in a lot of respects. How do you keep things calm? What is your level of concern about the likelihood of the United States becoming entangled in some potential military conflict beyond the entanglements we already have? And do you think that that likelihood is going up as a result of some of the economic dislocation that's taking place, not just in the United States, but around the world?
Amash: Well, China deserves a lot of condemnation for what it's doing here, there's no doubt about that. And we still haven't gotten to the bottom of everything with respect to China, and they're being very secretive about it. So I think a lot of that is warranted, of course. But you don't want to get to the point where you end up in some kind of armed conflict. And so you have to be really careful about how you handle foreign policy situations like this and a foreign policy crisis like this. You want to make sure that you get to the bottom of it, but at the end of the day, you don't want to start pointing guns at each other. And the more you talk about things in a tense way, or the more you start to threaten the other country, the more likely you get into that situation.
So what I think every American understands, and our businesses certainly understand this now a lot better, is that we do have to think about our ability to survive some kind of situation like this. Some of our trade ends up making us more fragile as a country, and we do need to think about that very carefully. And that's a decision for individual businesses to make, about whether they bring more stuff home or diversify their trading partners. And I do think that there is a lot of cause for a lot of companies in the United States to start thinking about how we diversify things so that we are not as reliant on a country like China.
But that doesn't mean we should shut off all trade, or put all sorts of tariffs in place, or try to create a huge economic conflict with a country that may eventually lead to a physical confrontation. We have to avoid that at all costs, and let people through the marketplace now make decisions about how they handle countries like China. And I think a lot of American companies are going to make different decisions going forward about how they do things.
Welch: We've had a kind of a populist moment, internationally and in this country, on both left and right, that seems to be on the increase in the preface to the coronavirus. So looking around, to the extent that you do, at the domestic politics of other countries, do you see any classical liberal strains? Do you see any other countries where there are, in a populist moment, people going in a more Amashian direction? Are there any role models for you out there politically in the world right now, or evidence that there's an audience for this kind of case? Or do you think it's more of a kind of sui generis America-remembering-its-own-heritage type of thing?
Amash: Well, America has a unique heritage in this respect, I think with respect to classical liberalism. It's an old country in terms of classical liberalism, even though it's a young country. So we have a lot of heritage and history there, and that's still largely embedded in people's souls. People really believe in classical liberalism in this country, in a way they maybe don't in a lot of other countries.
And then you look at populations of other countries, and it's not really reasonable to compare a country with a population of five million or 10 million, maybe the size of a New York City or something, or even smaller than New York City, and then compare it to the United States. It's easy for countries with very small populations to do particular experimentation. You know: having a more capitalist method of this or a more socialist method of that. They can try these little experiments because the people are more represented, in a sense. It's a smaller unit of government. It would be like Michigan trying something, or New York City trying something.
So I don't think you can compare a lot of other countries. And when you look at other large countries, you're talking about China and India and Brazil and Indonesia. And there are some countries out there that are big, but we obviously are the one that is the most free when you look at countries of that size. And so I don't think that there are other role models for us. I think we have to look at our own history.
And for those who haven't heard me talk about this before, for many Americans, when you look at our history, they say, "Well, it's a history of intolerance, and it's a history of all sorts of wrongs." And that is true; that's a part of our history. Our country did not start out as some kind of beautiful flower. It had a lot of problems. There was slavery at the beginning, and evil that was still perpetrated at the beginning of our country. There was, for many, many years, discrimination and segregation on levels that are not comparable to today. Today there's still discrimination, there's still racism, but it's not the same as, say, 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. There were some really bad things perpetrated. Women couldn't vote for a long time.
So we have gotten better in terms of reforming our institutions. I think we are, in many respects, more of a classical liberal country in terms of our institutions today than we were at the founding. Our Constitution has changed very little over the two-plus centuries. But the changes that have been made have largely been positive. Not all positive, obviously—there are a few amendments in there related to taxation and other things that a lot of people will quibble with, but a lot of the other changes are positive.
The 14th Amendment, for example, put the federal government in a role to protect individual rights in a way that did not exist before. As much as people talk about states' rights—I hear that all the time—states don't have rights; individuals have rights. And the job of the government is to secure those rights. We have a federal government that is more suited to securing those rights now, thanks to changes we have made to our Constitution.
So I look at our own history, and how we've overcome things and we've adapted and we've improved, and what's missing right now is that we have a government that doesn't respect the system that we've created. We put together a great Constitution. It's a fantastic document for how to operate a government. And then we don't follow it. We don't allow the system to actually work in a representative way. And this is why people are so frustrated.
When you go back and read things like The Federalist Papers, they didn't even conceive of the kind of liberty that we have today. They didn't even think about the true equality of all people. Yet they could see the brilliance of the system, our system of federalism and separation of powers. They could see the sensibility of having a Bill of Rights back then. They could see how the rule of law was important, even if they didn't always follow it. They still talked about it and they could still see that it was important. They just were blind to a lot of their evils and wrongs.
Today, I think we are more open to seeing the evils and wrongs. And now we reject the Constitution! It's weird. They loved the Constitution but couldn't see the evils they were doing. We see the evils but reject the Constitution. It doesn't make any sense! Now we're in the prime position to actually follow the Constitution. We see a lot of the wrongs that are going on, and we have a great Constitution. Let's follow it!
The post Justin Amash: 'I'm Promising to Be a President Who Will Reduce My Power' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Beloved former Reasoner and current Vice News Tonight correspondent Michael C. Moynihan is not the world's best driver or most law-abiding citizen. So it may not come as a big surprise to his friends and acquaintances to hear that the man famous for catching plagiarists was himself nabbed by New York's finest for coloring a wee bit outside the lines.
But would you believe he was stopped at a random checkpoint, told to summon a friend to pick up his young daughter, then handcuffed and jailed for nine hours, all over an unpaid parking ticket from…1998?
Thus begins an infuriating, educational, though mostly hilarious story on the latest episode of The Fifth Column, the podcast I co-host with Moynihan, Kmele Foster, and Anthony Fisher. We cover the non-applicability of Miranda rights, Judge Andrew Napolitano's old Reason feature about checkpoints, and the ethics of jailhouse snitching, but mainly sit back and laugh at a crazy story well told. It's at the top of the show here:
The post That Time Michael Moynihan Got Handcuffed at a NYC Checkpoint for an Unpaid 1998 Speeding Ticket appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's been a contentious day/week/month/year/decade/century for the exercise of free speech. What better time to check in with Danish activist Jacob Mchangama, host of the great new podcast Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech (which Eugene Volokh recommended here)?
On this week's episode of The Fifth Column, which was taped last Friday, Mchangma, who got into the free speech business after the Danish cartoon controversies of 2005-2006, gave Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and me a sobering update on the state of European law. "During the cartoon affair it was mostly the center-right in Denmark that sort of said, 'Free speech is absolute, we can't compromise on free speech, it doesn't matter whether you're a minority or majority,'" he told us. "But then, in the past couple of years, we've had a center-right government in Denmark that has passed more laws restricting free speech than at any other time since the Second World War. And all those laws are basically aimed at Muslims who engage in extreme speech."
It's a wide-ranging conversation, touching on the NFL national anthem controversy, hate speech crackdowns in England, publishing cowardice in the U.S., and the history of blasphemy. You can listen to the whole thing here:
Here's a partial transcript, mostly covering the European component of the conversation:
Kmele Foster: You are the host of A Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech, which is a podcast that you're producing for FIRE for a limited engagement, a very good podcast. Could you give folks some context….what it is all about, and why you embarked on this journey to come across the pond to hang out here?
Jacob Mchangama: So I was born and raised in cozy, liberal, Denmark, where nothing much happens, and I'm very much a child of the cartoon affair. A Danish newspaper [Jyllands-Posten] published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, [and] the whole world went batshit crazy, or at least certain parts of the world. And I was living in a country where there'd been a long-established tradition of writers, cartoonists being able to poke fun at Christianity and religion in general. And then suddenly I see Danish flags are burning, I suddenly see the cultural elite and lots of politicians saying, "Yeah, well, free speech is important, but we shouldn't offend…." These were people who made a living—their whole livelihood depended on them being able to enjoy free speech. And suddenly they were saying, "Jyllands-Posten, as bad as the Islam is, there are extremists on both sides."…
So during the cartoon affair it was mostly the center-right in Denmark that sort of said, "Free speech is absolute, we can't compromise on free speech, it doesn't matter whether you're a minority or majority." And I was very much on board with that. But then, in the past couple of years, we've had a center-right government in Denmark that has passed more laws restricting free speech than at any other time since the Second World War. And all those laws are basically aimed at Muslims who engage in extreme speech.
And then suddenly all of those on the center-right who had been [saying] "free speech is absolute" during the cartoon crisis turned around and basically made the exact same arguments that the left had made with the cartoons. Only this time it came to, "Yeah, free speech is important, but we can't have people defending Sharia Law," or can't have imams saying this or that.
To me it was just depressing. And I found that discussions over free speech in Denmark—but also here in the States very much, basically across the board—were so captivated by tribalism, and very few arguments had much substance, including my own. A lot of what I wrote was very abstract things, and I thought: OK, if free speech is important, why not delve into the history? Why is it important? Is it important? Where does it come from? What have the red lines been throughout the ages? What can we learn from the past, if anything?
So I decided to stop and go all the way back to ancient Athens as the first episode, and right now I've worked my way into the Middle Ages. At some point I'll end up with artificial intelligence, I don't know….
Michael Moynihan: To be clear here—and this is an important thing that I think that probably no one knew at the time, and no one outside of Denmark knew—is that Denmark had blasphemy laws.
Mchangama: Yeah. I think when I retire one day, what I can be happy about saying is that my organization actually played a very crucial role in defeating the blasphemy law. There was a Muslim organization that reported Jyllands-Posten to the police, and the prosecutor decided not to press charges against it. But we had a blasphemy law, and it was actually revived.
So even though we've had a guy—and this says a lot about how much fear since the cartoon crisis has affected Denmark—so we've had a guy in the '90s, he burns the Bible on national TV. Then we have a guy in 2015, somewhere in the north of Denmark, who burns the Koran, puts it up on YouTube. Fifty people and their dogs watch it. And the guy ends up being charged for blasphemy.
And that's when the whole ball started rolling. This was too obvious, that it was basically the jihad is veto. Meaning that Islamists get to determine the red lines.
Foster: Threats of violence carry the day….
Mchangama: And what's interesting is we had artists who in the '60s and '70s made art that offended Christians—and at the time it was very much the left that sort of said "free speech!" These are the guys that would defend the Piss Christ here in the U.S. [They] said, "Yeah, you can make fun of Christianity, but don't go after the brown Muslims, because they're a minority."
And what got lost in all this is the countries that put pressure on Denmark and for Jyllands-Posten to apologize were Muslim-majority countries where you could go to jail if you offended the majority religion. So it was just sucked up into contemporary identity politics with very little understanding of the principles that were at stake.
For a long time freedom of speech had not really been top of the agenda in Denmark, because no one felt threatened; you could basically say anything. And then once we were put to the test, a very important segment of those who were supposed to be manning the barricades just…said, "Those who want to kill you might have a point. They might be a bit too extreme, but…"
Moynihan: Why do you think that happened?…There's obviously kind of a double standard here, isn't there?
Mchangama: There is a huge double standard. I think one thing has to do with a perception that Muslims are a vulnerable minority, or a visible minority, and therefore different rules should apply to them. You shouldn't gratuitously offend their feelings because you're using your power to punch down. I hate that expression, "punching down," but you saw the same arguments with Charlie Hebdo, the French magazine, where a number of journalists were butchered by jihadists—and by the way which had been one of the few publications that had supported Jyllands-Posten by publishing the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed…
Matt Welch: And was firebombed as a result…
Mchangama: Yeah, and this is one of the interesting things from doing the History of Free Speech podcast, where I actually did an episode called "The Caliphate," where I go back in time. These were rules developed in Medieval Islam where people, apostates and blasphemers, could be killed for saying the wrong thing. This was not about protecting vulnerable people…[It was] a religious state executing people for transgressing the red lines.
And these are basically religious norms that people that happen to be a minority are trying to enforce in Western Europe. And I don't think it should matter what the color of your skin, your religion. If you try to enforce religious rules through violence, people have to stand together and say, "We are not going to accept that, this is completely beyond the pale, and it doesn't matter how much we disagree with whatever might provoke you, you've got to show solidarity."
Foster: But they didn't.
Mchangama: A lot of people, they didn't….
Welch: Is it fair to say that in the historical research that you're doing right now, that the vast majority of blasphemy laws are written by the power structure against the comparatively powerless minority populations? Is that a fair characterization of the history of blasphemy laws?
Mchangama: Very much so. The last episode I did was on heresy and the Inquisition, where you had the Catholic Church being very concerned about heterodox beliefs. So they start a Crusade, it doesn't help, and then they sent inquisitors out into Europe that questioned people, and ultimately it was a minority who were burned. That was ultimately what could happen if you were a heretic.
So very much, blasphemy laws have traditionally been an instrument to consolidate power…of secular rulers, but also of religious rulers. It's a completely ahistorical idea that blasphemy laws should protect minorities….There are now, I think, 13 Muslim-majority countries where you have formally the death penalty for blasphemy or apostasy.
The interesting thing is, if you go back in time to the 10th century, you actually had some really interesting free thinkers in Medieval Islam who basically rejected the authority of the Koran. You had a time where in the Abbasid Caliphate you translated almost all Greek signs, and philosophy, including Aristotle, and you had some of the most powerful intellectuals, philosophers, of the time. But some of that clearly has been lost, and some of the things that were written, I think in the ninth and the 10th century, would probably send you to jail today in Saudi Arabia or places like that. It's a real shame….
Moynihan: It's good to have Jacob here because of the differences between how we've used free speech in the United States and in Europe, where we kind of conflated these things for so long. This idea of hate crimes, which we do indeed have in the United States, and hate speech, which I'm increasingly hearing thrown around just lazily in America. In Europe that's an actual category, and most places in Europe, one can be prosecuted, one can be hauled in front of a court for an errant tweet, or an offensive tweet. We don't have that so much here.
My worry, and I'd love to hear Jacob on this, is that as we enter this era of hyper-identity politics, and these ideas which I hear from young people constantly and hear amongst colleagues, of "it's hate speech," which we don't have as an actual legal category—that we are lurching slightly more towards the European model on this….
Jacob, this is a different kind of world that you live in in Europe. The enlightened Europe, that we wish that we were more like in the United States, has kind of backwards laws on such things, don't you?…
Mchangama: I think there's been a shift in values in the West towards seeing free speech as a zero-sum game, meaning free speech is about winning….So free speech means my views, and they have to be protected absolutely, but those that threaten my worldview should not enjoy the same protection, maybe no protection at all. And I think it comes from the left, and it comes from the right as well….
So I think the NFL, because it's not a legal issue so much here, it becomes very much a cultural issue in the U.S. I think the NFL issue is the mirror image of conservatives crying about social justice warriors at universities and so on.
Foster: The James Damore firing at Google.
Mchangama: Yeah, exactly. And the NFL thing is precisely the same. The national anthem, you know, national symbols—that's something conservatives care deeply about, you cannot profane that. And so mentally, you're just able to convince yourself that this has nothing to do with free speech, because this is something special.
If you are on the left, you have different sincere beliefs that makes you able to justify why this restriction on free speech really is not a real restriction, or this is justified.
But in the U.K., there were at least 3,300 cases of people being detained and questioned for quote unquote, "grossly offensive posts on social media."…
Moynihan: [The argument that some people make], and I'm particularly interested in hearing Jacob talk about this if this has happened in the scope of free speech history, is that words are dangerous.
Foster: Words are violence.
Moynihan: They're violence, they can injure people….I asked somebody in [a recent Vice] piece, "Do you believe a joke can be harmful?" and then she says, "Yes, it can." What do you guys think about this?…
Welch: I am interested in the words-as-violence thing. Is that new?
Mchangama: It's a pervasive idea, I would say so. Take the trial of Socrates. So there are different accounts of why he was condemned to death, but one of them was that he didn't respect the religious traditions of the Athenians, the idea being that if you upset the gods they're going to punish you, and the Athenians had had a lot of bad shit happening to them, they've lost some wars, and so he was condemned.
And you see it very much in Christianity, you know, why did the Catholic Church go after heretics? It's not because the inquisitors were evil and they enjoyed burning people—they didn't at all. They actually really wanted to save people from being condemned, and in their view heretical ideas would spread, infect, and ultimately you would risk the punishment of God; God would inflict punishment upon you. And if you were convinced that wrong belief would incur the punishment of God, then you can understand why it would be the less evil to ultimately burn someone, because you're saving everyone else, you're saving society from being contaminated.
So in that sense, it's a very old idea that words have very serious consequences if they breach the fundamental values. Religion actually comes from the—OK, I'm getting really geeky here—but it comes from the Latin word religare, which means binding together. So religion binds society together, and so if you untie those bonds, everything is going to go to hell. Literally.
Welch: And maybe on the flip side, there's a piece by [John McWhorter] called "The Great Awokening"…that puts that kind of identity politics, that fervor, into a religious context.
Foster: Not the first time he's done that.
Welch: And so maybe that's what this is on some level.
Mchangama: Yeah, and I think it shows why we should leave that behind.
I think this is one of the crucial things about free speech that I think we have to address: Is free speech a threat to minorities, or is it a safeguard for minorities? And my thinking on it is very much that free speech is extremely important for minorities.
Take my own country, Denmark. So, like I said, the center-right used to be pro-free speech with the cartoons. But now…There was this documentary showing some imams instructing their congregations in really hardcore Shariah Law, and so we had politicians go out, and we have now a law which [says] that if you are explicitly condoning certain illegal acts as part of religious training, you can go to jail for three years. So if you're an imam, and you're standing in a mosque, and you say, "Islam allows polygamy, and it's a great thing," you could potentially go to prison for three years.
Muslims in Denmark, if they had in general said, "We really don't like the cartoons, but we understand that living in a secular democracy you have to put up with shit like that," then I don't think these laws would have returned. But when you're a minority, you are very vulnerable, you basically say, "OK, let's use the law against someone." But then when things turn, you're going to be the one that gets hit the hardest.
And so it's a really, really dangerous game for minorities to try and get laws to be used against speech that they don't like, because it is basically freedom of expression, freedom of religion, that allows minorities to live within secular democracies. Once you undermine that, you basically undermine your own freedom and safety and security. And I see that happening, and no one stands up.
Flemming Rose, who published the cartoons, he's also been very [supportive], but all of those that we stood together with during the cartoon crisis, all of them have basically—not all of them, but a lot of them—have drifted away. No one would stand up for fundamentalists, Islamists, on principle. It just couldn't be done. So we're looking around: Where are all our allies, you know?
The post How the Right Abandoned Free Speech in Europe appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>What is the "Intellectual Dark Web"? The technical answer might be, "A phrase coined by mathematician and Thiel Capital Managing Director Eric Weinstein to describe a loose confederation of left-right intellectuals who share in common an open, occasionally career-altering defiance of the 'gated institutional narrative' enforced by media/academia/Hollywood, particularly as concerns identity politics."
Vanity Fair writer Tina Nguyen is getting criticized this week by IDW types for a piece connecting ideological traveler Kanye West to the movement, which she characterizes as being "comprised of right-wing pundits, agnostic comedian podcasters, self-help gurus, and disgruntled ex-liberals united by their desire to 'red pill' new adherents." More charitably, L.A. Times columnist Meghan Daum contends that dark-webbers "wish to foster a new discourse that can allow innovative thinkers to wrestle with the world's problems without having to tiptoe around subjects or questions deemed culturally or politically off-limits."
Whatever the adjectives, it's a group of people, many of them familiar to Reason readers, who are interested in free speech and free thought, sensitive to intellectual conformity, and adept at using new media to route around hostile gatekeepers. Their ranks are generally said to include Jonathan Haidt, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Claire Lehmann, and James Damore.
One of the foundational members of the Intellectual Dark Web is Eric Weinstein's brother Bret, most famous for being at the center of the gobsmacking Evergreen State College controversy last fall. Weinstein, now untethered from Evergreen after a reported $500,000 settlement, is an evolutionary biologist of some repute, as is his wife, the also-untethered-from-Evergreen Heather Heying. Weinstein and Heying recently sat down with Kmele Foster and I for a wide-ranging Fifth Column conversation about the IDW, campus free speech, identity politics, the race/IQ minefield, and Weinstein's (questionable!) ideas about regulation in academia and media. You can listen to the conversation, which I for one found very illuminating, below:
Below, a transcript from a sliver of our conversation, having mostly to do with free speech, the Intellectual Dark Web, and Jordan Peterson:
Kmele Foster: Is there a free speech crisis on American campuses? This seems like a question the two of you, I'm certain, have been asked before, but have a unique perspective on, having endured some unique circumstances—I'd say probably the archetypal instance of, say, a speech-related panic on campus. So, please.
Bret Weinstein [after long detour through definition of terms]: Then the last issue is whether or not this has anything inherent to do with college campuses or whether college campuses are simply where we are seeing this unfold first. And I would argue that what we're really watching is a breakdown in society's capacity to reason with itself. Yes, of course that has manifestations on college campuses, but it won't be limited to college campuses.
If you look at the one story that doesn't fit with all of the others so far, it's the Google memo story, where Google fired an engineer for doing exactly what they asked them to do: responding to a prompt about questions of equity between men and women among the engineering staff at Google. So, James Damore wrote a memo that analyzed that question. He did a very good job in doing so. They fired him. And so that was Google, a private corporation, that decided to fire an engineer. And then the NLRB, which is a governmental organization, said that his firing was valid, not on the basis that what he had said was wrong, but on the basis that the harm done by what he said was so great that it justified his firing.
This is civilization losing its coherence, right? Google has a huge effect on what we think, because it has a huge effect on what we see when we search for things. It understands or at least is capable of evaluating our email for patterns and figuring out what it is that we're beginning to suspect. Google is a very dangerous entity if it decides to take an active role in controlling what conversations can happen, and Google has told us that at the very top, it is actually interested in seeing some conversations silenced. That should worry us at least as much as what's going on on college campuses, which is itself not a small matter.
Matt Welch: […] I'm curious about the notion that it's sort of society-wide. We've talked a lot here, because we work in the media and work in New York… [that] there's a generation gap: The twentysomethings, the woke millennial kids who are working in media have a much different perspective on a whole lot of things having to do with speech, having to do with the Me Too movement and what exactly are the boundaries of acceptable male/female kind of mating rituals and anything else. So the theory that we've bandied about here is that, okay, you think it's sort of just a college campus thing, but they're graduating and they're moving out into the world. But that kind of suggests that it's sort of like the campus is the furnace and they're spitting out these lumps of coal out there.
This is all terrible metaphors here, I recognize, but the way that you posited this is maybe it's just a society-wide thing and the campus is a place where obviously people are ready to go and kind of clash and do battle, as it always is.
Heather Heying: I think campuses are concentrating the problem, that we do have a generational problem. And it's in part—these issues have been discussed widely—but it's about the rise of iPhones and tech and the decrease in children spending time outside and getting physical experience with their world, and becoming more social creatures. You take a generation that has been raised in that way and you put them into a campus culture where there are some disciplines that have become so enamored of postmodernism that they actually do not necessarily believe that there's an objective reality out there to be reckoned with….
If those kids who actually haven't spent much time racing down hills on bikes or climbing trees and falling and experiencing gravity in real time, are told, "Actually, objective reality is a sign of the patriarchy and it's about power and it's not actually about reality," that feels really confirming to certain people. I would say that Bret and I spent 14, 15 years in classrooms with mostly millennials, and it's really easy to disabuse people of these ideas in real time when you have time, when you can build trust, when you can build community, and then yank the rug out from under people when they say things that are actually batshit crazy.
When you actually take them also into the field and you say, "Okay, now we're gonna get dirty, we're gonna get wet, we're gonna get uncomfortable, and we're gonna come back and eat good food and share stories around the campfire, and you're gonna see that we're all reasonable people who make mistakes and have beliefs that are congruous and incongruous with one another, and that's okay, and that is what being together in community is about." But if you have a classroom—and we know for sure that there are lots of classrooms out there in which dissent is considered harm—so there is a conflation of….
Welch: Dissent to who?
Heying: Any kind of dissent. Any kind of disagreement is considered harm, and so emotional harm is conflated with physical harm. I think it's easier to have that happen if you've not actually been exposed to physical harm, if you don't actually know what it is to experience your own body as a real instantiation and, like, meat space.
Welch: So you're totally bought in to the Lenore Skenazy/Jon Haidt theorem.
Heying: Yes. […]
Foster: The left eating its own is a phrase that I've encountered [from you] in the past, and one of the things that I was talking…about when we were getting ready for this conversation is the fact that the Intellectual Dark Web, I think is the phrase—and you can provide some context and explain what that is, Bret—but that the Intellectual Dark Web seems to be dominated by conservative voices, seemingly.
It at least, perhaps, seems to be particularly concerned with these kinds of phenomena that are occurring on the left. And one wonders…I mean, there are certainly examples of speech prohibitions on campuses on the right. Like, certain groups, a pro-Palestinian group or something that might be facing some sort of obstacles on campus. There are certainly conservative people on campuses who have ostracized folks on the left in different instances; at least I know the folks at FIRE have taken up cases where they are advocating on behalf of a liberal student in a circumstance like that.
So I wonder about the ideological complexion of the Intellectual Dark Web, and I wonder what your thoughts are on what the consequences of having this conversation—this, in my estimation, much needed conversation about the need to be able to have complicated, potentially "dangerous"…conversations in public—how it all works together. I'll stop there.
Weinstein: So, first, let me just say, "Intellectual Dark Web" is a term coined by my older brother, Eric Weinstein, and it's a term that makes some people uncomfortable, including me a little bit, because the Dark Web itself is obviously a place where lots of stuff happens, some of which is perfectly horrifying….
What Eric was saying in coining the term Intellectual Dark Web is really that this is an intellectually unpoliced space, that it is a space outside of what he calls the "gated institutional narrative," which are the stories that we are supposed to believe. It is a very interesting conversation precisely because nobody involved in it believes in those rules. In fact, I think everybody associated with the Intellectual Dark Web is sort of constitutionally resistant to being told what questions they're allowed to think about or what answers they might be allowed to advance. So, in any case, the idea of the Intellectual Dark Web is a space that is intellectually free, at a moment in which the mainstream intellectual space is increasingly constrained by things like what we were talking about before.
In terms of the association, there is a very clear focus amongst all of the folks who are associated with the Intellectual Dark Web about the free speech crisis or whatever the proper term for that would be if we were to re-figure it, right? There's a reason for that, which is that we're all people who would tend to be shut down by the mainstream that wish to maintain control over the narratives that are central to the way we govern ourselves and the way we interact. So it's not surprising that, A) people in the Intellectual Dark Web would be prone to being de-platformed, and B) that we would be particularly sensitive to the danger of ruling certain opinions beyond the pale.
As for the political complexion of it, it isn't at all what people think, and this has been something that Heather and I have discovered in a very odd way. What happened to us at Evergreen felt and was almost literally like being kicked out of the political left. We had spent our entire lives [there], right? The left told us "You're not welcome anymore." In fact, you're not even left—you're right, or, you know, if it's really pissed at you, you're alt-right, or you're a darling of the alt-right. These are the things that were said.
None of this was true, right? I'm still as far left as I was before. I'm skeptical that the left knows what to do, I'm very skeptical of what the left advances in terms of policy proposals, but in terms of my values, they haven't changed at all. The interesting thing, though, is having been effectively evicted from the left, we ran into all sorts of other people who we thought might be a bit right of center, who it turned out were actually also left of center and had also been similarly evicted and then misportrayed. So there is a way in which everybody should think twice about why you expect the people are on the political spectrum where you think they are, because maybe they aren't. In each case, you ought to just check whether or not you think that for a good reason or you just think that because you've heard that somebody's over there.
The Intellectual Dark Web involves me, it involves Heather, it involves Eric. We're all left of center. It involves Jordan Peterson—he's a little bit right of center, but if you actually listen to him, there are certain topics on which he sounds downright conservative, and then there are other topics where he really doesn't. He's a little bit hard to peg.
Welch: I just reviewed his book for Reason and got kind of deep into his business. He's a classical liberal who's a little bit obsessed with the postmodern Marxist left, and I think he has developed a—and this is an interesting kind of question for, I think, a lot of people in the Intellectual Dark Web; maybe it is for you, too. There's a reward system over there. His fan base comes [for] that minority of his interactions when he sort of swells up and says, "Men must be dangerous!" or when he criticizes feminists for being potentially submissive and that's why they don't criticize Islam that much. When he rises up and trolls a little bit, that's exactly when he's rewarded. And that's not his best work, as far as I'm concerned. His best work is his kind of clinical practice, is sort of pragmatic, buck up, straighten yourself. I still straighten up my back, my posture, after reading his book.
But if the reward structure is for precisely when you are out there transgressing, you're dancing on that kind of borderline where you're supposed to [engage in] the sort of taboo subjects, right?
Weinstein: Yeah.
Welch: So, it's hard not to become corrupted, I think, in that process.
Foster: Is it the reward structure? Because part of that is there's a bright red warning light. Those are the flashpoints, where people start to scream at you. It's not only….
Welch: Bro is pulling 90 Gs on Patreon a month.
Foster: I'm with you, but that's not …
Welch: That's a reward structure.
Foster: That's not the point that I'm making. The question I'm asking here is, is it a situation where what he is saying predominantly to the audience that's paying for the subscription on Patreon is he's pressing hot buttons over and over again to keep them paying, or are they perhaps tuning in for the substance, in which case the outrage is what seems to respond most loudest to the things that he says that are, in many cases, I find—or at least often, because I can't say "many"; I only monitor him so closely—but they're often misconstrued.
Heying: Yes.
Foster: It's the conversation that you have about gender roles, for example, where the person who's sitting across from you keeps insisting that you're saying something you're not saying at all, because they don't care about nuance.
Welch: No, but if you go on YouTube and you have a fan say "Jordan Peterson's greatest hits," it's gonna be seven times him smashing [leftists]….
Foster: That may be the case.
Welch: I mean, that's what's going on.
Weinstein: I think we need to be fair to Peterson here….There is a distinction between the broadcasting of some kind of reward that would typically persuade somebody, and whether or not he is altered in what he believes or what he says based on it. And I don't think anybody can be certain; probably he himself can't be certain. On the other hand, I think Jordan Peterson is three things that we can see, right? He is a guy who is telling people, primarily young men, to straighten up and get their lives in order and self-author and all of this stuff, right? So, there's something…I hesitate to use the term "self help"…
Welch: It is.
Weinstein: But I can't think of a …
Welch: Absolutely is.
Weinstein: … better one.
Foster: Nothing wrong with that.
Weinstein: Nothing wrong with that. And in fact, if he's taking people, especially people who might fall into the alt-right or something, and he's getting them to wake up….
Heying: More power to him.
Weinstein: More power to him. He is a messianic figure, which is something that I think he has a very uncomfortable relationship with. He's aware that people see him this way and…
Welch: Sees himself a little bit in that way, too.
Weinstein: He may, but I know he's worried that people see him that way, and that that suggests things and has implications.
And then there's the thing that he has, I believe, so far been least well-recognized for, which is that he's actually a top-flight intellectual, right? He is somebody who has done very high quality work building what appears to be a model of human psychology that certainly borrows from the best of what takes place over in that field, but is also independent of that field where that field goes insane. So he's not vulnerable to the replication crisis that is engulfing the rest of psychology, because he's very careful about which conclusions in psychology he pays attention to. So his psychometric bent basically frees him in large measure from the fads that circulate in psychology.
But in any case, what I would say is there's enough overlap between what Heather and I think about as evolutionary biologists who think about humans, and what Peterson, as a psychologist who thinks about evolution, think about in tandem, that we can actually evaluate how good he is at this. I don't think there is any chance that you could say something to Jordan Peterson on the topics in psychology that he holds most dear and broadcast enough love at him to get him to say stuff he doesn't believe.
Welch: Sure.
Weinstein: I think he is completely deaf and intentionally deaf to what people want him to say in that space that he…
Heying: That is what has helped make him ascendant, and that is the good part. Very much the good part.
Weinstein: Right. So, the intellectual is an honest broker. Which doesn't mean he's right about everything, but it does mean that he's not going to be persuaded by Patreon followers or people applauding to think things about psychology that he doesn't actually believe. He's arrived at all that stuff on his own, and for better and worse, I believe he'd be very hard to move emotionally on that front.
The messianic stuff is a little dangerous. I don't know where that leads. The self-help stuff probably is to the benefit of the world that people who otherwise don't have a direction are seeing somebody that they can admire and they're following it.
Welch: It's authoritarian by definition on some level—I mean, it's instructive. I'm broadcasting. These are rules for life. But I don't mean to cast him in a negative light, I was actually trying to say that he's…I think the messianic stuff is ultimately the most troubling, and it's actually when he rises up and does his cobra strikes that sometimes it's funny and witty and good and on point, but for me, it's ultimately the least interesting.
But I was shocked, because his reputation precedes him. It takes until page 302, literally, before you get to him bitching about postmodernism on college campuses. I really thought he would all just be "feminazis," and it really is not that. That's not the majority of his work, which I find pretty interesting. He's a classical liberal who got caught up in a thing, and it's a ministry. That's kind of what it is, and he's aware of it, and it's fascinating. To just reduce him as an alt-right caricature or a fascist character, which I think they were trying to do in The New York Review of Books recently, is just a gross misread of the situation.
Heying: That's right.
Foster: Generally speaking, most of those caricatures aren't particularly helpful in allowing us to figure out what people are talking about in most contexts.
Welch: And it's fascinating to figure out why that is resonating, and what that can teach a person about the art of political persuasion or just discussion right now in contemporary life. I don't have any conclusions about it, but it's more interesting just than, "Hey look, a bunch of Charlottesville Nazis like this guy."
The post What Is the 'Intellectual Dark Web'? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Less than 24 hours before rap/footwear supernova Kanye West melted down the internet by tweeting about his love for fellow dragon energy–haver Donald Trump, showing off his autographed #MAGA hat, scheduling meetings with Peter Thiel, and retweeting Chance The Rapper's observation that "Black people don't have to be democrats," I was in a small podcasting booth with the one person I'd want to hear talk about Yeezy's politics, superfan Kmele Foster.
On the latest dispatch of The Fifth Column, our mostly weekly, often slurry podcast, Foster provides insight into West, black-conservative identity politics, red-pilling YouTuber Candace Owens (who Kanye recently complimented), and the Joy-Ann Reid controversy. Also of potential interest during the discussion are my racist choice of infant toys, qualified defense of Rand Paul's flip-flop on Mike Pompeo, and unified theory of Trolls vs. Bouncers. You can listen to the whole thing, including a cameo by Kat Timpf, here:
The post Kmele Foster's Sympathy for Joy-Ann Reid and Disinterest in Kanye's Politics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It has been a bad couple of days for those Republicans and conservative commentators who had warned pre-#ReleaseTheMemo that not only would the FBI malfeasance against President Donald Trump be revealed as worse than Watergate, but in fact "100 times bigger" than the underlying beef colonists had against King George III. But as Nick Gillespie pointed out this morning, it's also been a pretty bad 12 months for Democrat/lefty connect-the-dots, government-aggrandizing hyperbole as well.
It's gotten so routine that people barely notice it anymore. "Is it possible that the Republican chairman of the House Intel Committee has been compromised by the Russians?" political analyst John Heilemann asked on Morning Joe this Tuesday. "Is it possible that we actually have a Russian agent running the House Intel Committee on the Republican side?" Flipping on cable news Thursday it took me all of five seconds to hear the nonsense-burger phrase, "The Russians are attacking our Constitution." (Even sillier, such sentiments are usually preceded by throat-clearing about how this is the crucial underlying issue being lost in the din of day-to-day political shouting.)
We catalogue the heavy breathing on both sides in the latest episode The Fifth Column, recorded pre-memo and posted after. Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and I also go down some Sockless Joe Scarborough musical rabbit holes, and end up with a surprisingly long conversation about the relationship between foreign policy "realism" and the Trump administration. You can listen to the whole thing here:
The post Republicans Aren't the Only Ones Prone to Russia-Investigation Conspiracy Theories appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Did you see the Saturday Night Live skit this weekend about good New York liberal yuppies tiptoeing on eggshells about a NYT op-ed on Aziz Ansari and the #MeToo movement? Take a look:
The piece in question was written by Bari Weiss, a staff editor and writer over at the Times' opinion section (Robby Soave discussed her piece here). Luckily this bit of immortalization happened two days after the latest recording of The Fifth Column, the podcast featuring Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and myself, so we were able to spend nearly two steadily inebriating hours talking with Weiss about #MeToo, government shutdowns, immigration deals, anti-Mueller conspiracies, why Kmele still doesn't think Donald Trump is a racist, and so forth.
But one of the biggest eye-openers was her discussion about her previous employer, the Wall Street Journal. After never experiencing much resistance to placing political op-eds on the editorial page, Weiss said, "all of a sudden I was being told that I didn't, you know, have the standing to write about these things, or that they were too anti-Trump." This happened on "several" occasions, she said, with the atmosphere contributing to the exodus not just of her but of a number of prominent #NeverTrump types. "It was heartbreaking for me to see people who I thought that we sort of shared fundamental values making peace with a candidate who, I mean, just from the most basic perspective ran a campaign on denigrating and demonizing the weakest people in our culture," Weiss said.
Listen to the whole thing here, and sorry about the spotty audio:
Over at Esquire last month, Sam Tanenhaus wrote more about the WSJ ed-page controversies:
Much has been written about friction between the Journal's down-the-middle, just-the-facts news reporters and its highly ideological editorial department. But the more significant story—an obsession for the Never Trumpers—is the rupture within the Journal's editorial pages and the exodus that resulted.
Bret Stephens, who won a Pulitzer in 2013, was the defector with the highest profile. He was deputy editor when he jumped over to the Times, where he was soon joined by his editor at the Journal, Bari Weiss. The Journal's books editor, Robert Messenger, is now at The Weekly Standard. Sohrab Ahmari, a foreign-policy writer, went to Commentary. Mark Lasswell, an editor, was told not to return from a book leave.
Those were heavy losses in pages whose content is managed by fewer than thirty people in total. And the reason, according to several defectors, was the Journal's skidding reversal once Rupert Murdoch realized Trump could win. Several sources pointed to the editorials by one writer, James Freeman. "All-in for Ted Cruz" during the primaries, Freeman wrote a strong attack on Trump's Mob dealings, and had a second ready to go. But as Trump got closer to clinching the nomination, Paul Gigot kept delaying publication, saying "it needed work." Once Trump became the likely Republican nominee, Freeman executed a neat volte-face. "The facts suggest that Mrs. Clinton is more likely to abuse liberties than Mr. Trump," he wrote. "America managed to survive Mr. Clinton's two terms, so it can stand the far less vulgar Mr. Trump."
Since then, the Journal has gone further. Even jaded readers were startled to see the editorial-page call for Robert Mueller, who is leading the Russia investigation, to resign.
The post Bari Weiss: 'It Was Heartbreaking for Me' to See the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> Editorial Page Go Soft on Trump appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During Reason's annual webathon, in which we ask our most loyal readers to make a tax-deductible gift to support our libertarian journalism and commentary, we have a tendency to showcase the serious stuff: the decade of pathbreaking video journalism, the development of a podcast line, the anti-hysterical political coverage, the reportage on far-flung libertarian insurgencies across the globe, the New York Times infiltration, the (otherwise unpaid!) TV representin', the crypto coverage, and…OK, the inebriated unicorn masturbation as well. But mostly very serious journalism for very serious times, and won't you please donate to Reason today?
Then there's…The Fifth Column.
Not technically a Reason joint (Freethink Media bankrolls the ongoing experiment), this weekly podcast featuring myself, Reasoner-turned Vice News correspondent Michael C. Moynihan, and host/impresario Kmele Foster from Freethink (previously of Independents fame), still showed up with some regularity in the donors' comments of last year's webathon. Why? I suspect is has something to do with abiding love for Foster (who is scheduled to become a father today, by the way, if I can bury the lede!). But I can testify that for some reason—rubbernecking?—people enjoy hearing the sound of three allegedly grown men drink alcohol and slur about media and politics.
Which brings us to the wonder that is this week's episode. We brought on the wickedly amusing Ben Dreyfuss, social media honcho over at our rival Mother Jones, to talk about the usual sex scandals, Donald Trump tweets, and clickbait ethical conundrums, all while draining a bottle and a half of listener-provided whiskey. (Mysteriously, people never stop sending us booze.) Things quickly got pear-shaped when Moynihan asked some innocent personal follow-up questions about the harrowing revelation a month ago from Dreyfuss's younger brother Harry that Kevin Spacey had groped him in the same room as their oblivious father Richard Dreyfuss (who had his face in a script) when Harry was an 18-year-old high school student. "I was like 'Look Harry, you're 18 years old, who wants to fuck you? You're fat, I'm skinny, like, I'm more attractive than you, Harry," Ben recalled of his sibling rivalry, and to reveal anything more than that may take away from one of recent history's better punchlines, so listen to the whole sloppy enchilada. The greedy can fast-forward to the Alger Hiss family impersonations beginning at around the 42:40 mark:
The Fifth Column has had an eclectic guest list over the past year including Reasoners (Katherine Mangu-Ward, Ron Bailey, Damon Root), Reason pals (Radley Balko, Kennedy, Thaddeus Russell), newsmakers (Ajit Pai, Rep. Thomas Massie), and journalists/commentators from all over the political spectrum. By all accounts the show has found special success among the non-libertarian family members of libertarians (providing they don't mind the occasional F-bomb, end-of-show verbal deterioration, and Moynihan's Jesse Jackcent).
Beginning in May, the show was picked up on weekends by SiriusXM POTUS as well, which means that weird libertarian arguments about race, Trump, and the media (not necessarily in that order) get beamed to God knows how many unsuspecting truckers. I have also become a regular guest-host over at Sirius, yakking frequently with Reason types from Bob Poole to Elizabeth Nolan Brown, in addition to interviewing (and publishing transcripts over here with) Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), Sen. Mike Lee, Massie, Ken "Popehat" White, Kat Timpf, and others. Not bad for "Hey, let's sit in a room with a microphone, see what happens."
There are so very many different ways to engage the world with libertarian ideas and POVs. Your tax-deductible donations help us experiment with more of them, in ways that can have butterfly effects on the world of political discourse. We're out here creating stuff, whether it's this podcast, or the Reason podcast, or Stossel on Reason, or Andrew Heaton's hilarious Mostly Weekly. Want more like that, to share with your friends and enemies alike?
You know what to do. Donate to Reason today!
The post When Ben Dreyfuss Discovered He Was Too Old to Seduce Kevin Spacey appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Ajit Pai announced this morning that he is submitting a proposal to repeal what he characterized as the "heavy-handed, utility-style regulation" of Internet companies adopted by the Obama administration in 2015.
Colloquially (if misleadingly) known as "net neutrality" (see Reason's special issue on the topic from 2015) the rules, which included classifying Internet companies as "telecommunications services" under Title II of the 1934 Telecommunications Act instead of as "information services" under Title I, were intended by advocates to be a bulwark against private companies discriminating against disfavored service or content providers. In practice, Pai asserted today in a statement, net neutrality "depressed investment in building and expanding broadband networks and deterred innovation," and amounted to "the federal government…micromanaging the Internet." The measure will be voted on next month.
Pai, appointed to the chairmanship by President Donald Trump after serving as a commissioner since 2012, is a longtime opponent of Net Neutrality, memorably describing it in a February 2015 interview with Nick Gillespie as a "solution that won't work to a problem that doesn't exist." The commissioner foreshadowed today's move in an April 2017 interview with Gillespie, arguing that the Title II reclassification amounted to "a panoply of heavy-handed economic regulations that were developed in the Great Depression to handle Ma Bell." Today's move is already being hailed by free-market advocates and slammed by many in the online activist community.
Pai came on the latest installment of the Fifth Column podcast to explain and debate the announcement with Kmele Foster and myself. You can listen to the whole conversation here:
Partial edited transcript, which includes Pai's views on today's free-speech climate and this month's social-media hearings on Capitol Hill, after the jump:
Foster: As all of you listeners know, because you're weird stalkers, I have a deep background in telecommunication, so I'm actually happy to be chatting with you today, Ajit. And I think you also are announcing some things, and we should perhaps start with the news that you are making.
Pai: Sure, so I'm proposing to my fellow commissioners at the FCC to return to the bipartisan consensus on how to think about the Internet. And so instead of putting the government in control of how it operates and how it's managed, we're going to return to the light-touch framework that was established during the Clinton administration, one that served the Internet economy through the Bush administration and the first six years of the Obama administration. And we'll be voting on this order on December 14th at the FCC's monthly meeting. […]
Essentially, we are returning to the original classification of the Internet.
So, for many, many years, starting with the commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s all the way until 2015, we thought of Internet access as what's called an "information service." And as boring as the phrase is, it actually had significant import: It meant that the FCC would not micromanage how it developed, how it operated. We would let the market develop, and then take targeted action if necessary to protect consumers.
In 2015, that changed, and we switched to calling it a "telecommunication service," essentially treating every Internet Service Provider in the country, from the big ones all the way down to the mom-and-pop fixed wireless providers in Montana, as anti-competitive monopolists to be regulated under 1934 rules that were developed for Ma Bell, the old telephone monopoly. And so we are simply returning that classification back to the information-service one that started under President Clinton. And additionally, we are getting rid of some of the regulations that were adopted under that so-called Title II "common carrier" classification, in terms of the various…rules that were adopted back in 2015.
Welch: So give us a tangible sense of what are things, regulations, that were already happening under this classification, or ones that could be or were in the pipeline, at least until you got in, and how they would impact people's experiences or impact the market in a way that you would think is negative.
Pai: To me, the most pernicious one was something the FCC adopted called the "general conduct" standard. And under this, the FCC didn't specify what conduct was exactly prohibited, they said we'll take a look at any practice by any Internet Service Provider; we'll decide if it is violative of any number of different things, such as free expression online or the like, and we might take unspecified actions to stop it.
Welch: So just to be clear, the FCC had zero authority to discuss or consider the contents of free speech online before 2015. This opened the door to the FCC caring about whether Kmele's dropping F-bombs or whether you're giving a space to people who are cheering on Islamic terrorists or something like that.
Pai: Well, certainly I think that Kmele was safe, and would be safe, I would hope. But what wasn't safe, however…was indicated by my predecessor's comments when he was asked, "Well, how would this Internet conduct standard be applied?" He literally said, "We don't know, we'll have to see where things go." And in the subsequent months, what happened was the FCC initiated an investigation into free data offerings by wireless companies. So if T-Mobile, for instance, said, "You know what…you can watch as much video as you want, exempt from any data limits that might be on your plan." The FCC said, "No, you know what, that free data offering is something that could violate this Internet conduct standard. We're going to investigate it." And they initiated investigations into several other free-data offerings.
And that's the kind of thing that, last time I checked, consumers seem to like the offerings from the service providers, and that's the kind of thing that the FCC was starting to meddle in. And that's one of things that we are getting rid of, is that Internet conduct standard that essentially gave bureaucrats a free rein to second-guess, I think, a lot of pro-consumer and pro-competitive offerings
Foster: Let's let's try to take this from the standpoint of separating the access portion of the conversation and the content portion of the conversation. Because I think for a lot of people, when they hear about the FCC—and we should actually talk about some of the news that the FCC has been involved in throughout the first year of the Trump administration: There were the privacy guidelines that were done away with at the very beginning of the year, at least some rules that, as I believe, had not yet gone into effect. So this is, again, on the content side. We had, actually, the president, who has sent out a couple of tweets. This is your boss, so I'm not necessarily asking you to speak ill of him, but I won't stop you if you wanted to, but he has suggested on some occasions that "some people" are saying, or "a lot of people" are saying, maybe it was "many" people…whatever the phrase is, I think it generally just means that he is saying that there ought to be equal time, for example. So again, another content-related thing that networks ought to be giving equal time to both sides because he felt he was being treated unfairly by network television comedians.
So with respect to the content side, with respect to treating content on the Internet both equally and making certain that it is sufficiently pure, that people's information is being protected by the ISPs who are collecting it, and by various other people who are collecting it online, could we talk a little bit about how the rules that are being introduced or proposed at any rate are affecting that, and what your own thinking is about the way that the FCC should actually be shepherding content on the Internet when it comes to both the privacy of users and giving their data to other people, and when it comes to the things that they're actually consuming online?
Pai: So that last factor is pretty easy for me. I come to the table as a firm believer in the First Amendment, and I think the digital era has only enhanced the potential for free speech and free expression. And to me, at least, the Internet is one of the greatest platforms I think we've ever seen in history, to be honest, for allowing people who, in a previous age, might only finds their views expressed in a letter to the editor, or if they happened to get onto a TV station for an interview. It's given them a platform to be able to speak without that intermediary. That's a great thing. And so that's why the FCC doesn't get involved in deciding what kind of content goes on the Internet, who is going to be allowed to speak, and all the rest.
In terms of privacy, Congress and the president made a decision earlier this year to rescind some the FCC's privacy regulations that were adopted last year.
Foster: And this was like right before the last administration went out, I believe like in December of last year.
Pai: Correct, late last year and in early this year, the current Congress decided to rescind those rules. And so that's why, I think that's one of the questions that we are confronting is, what to do about privacy? And I've long said that previous to these Title II common-carrier regulations, the privacy practices of every online player, whether it was an edge provider like Google or Facebook, an Internet Service Provider like Verizon or Comcast—the FTC applied a consistent privacy frameworks to all those players.
Welch: The FTC.
Pai: Federal Trade Commission, yes. By classifying ISPs, however, as common carriers, the FCC, my agency, created a void. And the reason is because the FTC under the law cannot regulate common carriers, and so that's why late last year, the FCC adopted very onerous regulations for ISPs in terms of privacy. So you had two different agencies adopting two different sets of rules for digital players in the online economy.
Foster: What was onerous about those rules, from your standpoint?
Pai: So, a variety of things. First and foremost, I think it didn't reflect the basic consumer expectation. Consumers have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and so if their information is sensitive as the FTC has long believed, they want to have an opt-in approach. If their information is less sensitive, they're more comfortable sharing it, an opt-out approach, if you will. And the FCC essentially just jettisoned all of that. It ignored the fact of that basic consumer expectation, and it also said that regardless of the fact that 85 percent of Internet traffic is encrypted, it's the HTTPS, nonetheless, we are going to treat it as if the ISPs had uniquely pervasive insight in what consumers were doing.
Foster: And to make it accessible, the way it's generally talked about is: My browsing history, the preferred sites that I visit on a regular basis, what I'm searching for on Google. In some way, shape, or form, the person I buy my Internet connection from has that information. And they might do something with that information, like, say, for example, sell it to marketers, in the nicest, most generous way, sell it to marketers so that they can advertise things to me that I'm interested in. Or to put it in a more nefarious way, they get all of my naughty pornography habits, and they are selling access to that information. […]
But in either case, you're suggesting that before these rules were introduced, there was a void—that ISPs could have been doing this thing, which it's interesting to ask whether or not they had been doing it, and even today there is still a void; effectively those rules never went into force. It has always been the case that ISPs could technically sell that information. Had they—
Pai: Currently, they cannot.
Foster: They can't now?
Pai: No, they can't, because currently they are Title II….So once we remove that Title II classification, the FTC will once again have comprehensive jurisdiction over both ISPs and online content providers, so they'll apply that similar framework to everybody.
Foster: […] So before the rules were adopted, were there restrictions then as well? Those would've come from the FTC?
Pai: Exactly, yes. The Federal Trade Commission would and did apply them consistently to everybody in the online space.
Foster: And were there violations of those norms? What was the reason for reaching for a stricter standard from the FCC standpoint?
Pai: Honestly it was just a power grab. I think the agency didn't really do a reasoned analysis of what it was that Internet Service Providers were doing that would justify those particular regulations. It didn't do, I don't think, at least an intellectually honest assessment of how the Internet operates. Just the mere fact, for example, that every time if you're on your computer, you see "HTTPS," that means your ISP can only see your domain name. They can't see the particular pages that you're on, and also—
Foster: But it could matter. The domain name might matter, if it's HotMoms.com or something, which I don't know that that's a thing; we're not advertising for that.
Welch: No, certainly not.
Foster: I'm going to find out if it's a thing right now. Please keep talking. […]
Pai: And if you think about how a lot of people use the Internet—for example, if you're surfing on your smartphone at home, you're probably using Wi-Fi, so you're—
Foster: It's not a thing, by the way. Go ahead.
Pai: So you're on your home network. But then, as you're driving to work, you might be on your cellular network, which might be a different provider. And when you get to work or go to a coffee shop or your office, you're probably on a third network. And so you use a number of different Internet Service Providers over the course of the day, so no one of them most likely would have pervasive insight into what you were doing on the Internet. And so the simple point I've made is simply just uniform expectations of privacy: The consumers expect that whoever has control over their information, whether it's an ISP or an online edge provider, they should protect that information if it's sensitive. And so that's one of things we're returning to the Federal Trade Commission, would be the comprehensive regulation of everybody who holds online consumers' information.
Welch: Now, the reason that Boing Boing hates you is the two-word phrase—which is loaded, and I think misleading—net neutrality, which you're against. You described it memorably for Reason in an interview, and I'm going to botch it, so I probably won't even try to—
Pai: I remember it.
Welch: Can you render it?
Pai: Back then, I think I called it "a solution that won't work, to address a problem that doesn't exist."
Welch: Yes. Very good.
But surely you understand the motivation for this, and this affects the Title II conversation and everything else, which is that people have a genuine anxiety that the freedom that they have known on the Internet is potentially imperiled, even if it's not now. Even if the problem doesn't exist right now, we don't know what will happen 10 years from now. My God, a lot of things didn't exist 10 years ago that exist now and exert a lot of control. So people are worried that a small number of powerful companies are going to start privileging some content or privileging some other businesses, and kind of start discriminating against others. Is that a problem? Is that something to worry about in an era where we have four companies that everyone, particularly, is obsessing about right now; it's all on the social media, it's Facebook and Google, I guess Apple, and fill-in-the blank on the fourth? There are amalgamations of power that have a disproportionate influence there. So do they not have a point to be concerned about, and are you concerned about that kind of accumulation of power among tech companies here?
Pai: I completely understand that concern, and I would have two responses; one drawing from the past, and one about the future.
With us back to the past, prior to the imposition of these rules in 2015, we had a free and open Internet. We were not living in some digital dystopia in which that kind of anti-consumer behavior happens. There was no market failure, in other words, for the government to solve. Going forward, the question then is, what should the regulations be? Now as you said, there could be some kind of anti-competitive conduct by one or a couple players. And to me, at least, the question is, how do you want to address that? Do you want to have preemptive regulation based on rules that were generated in the Great Depression to regulate this dynamic space, or do you want to take targeted action against the bad apples as they pop up?
And to me, at least, the targeted action is the better approach, for a couple different reasons. Number one, preemptive regulation comes at significant cost. Treating every single Internet Service Provider as a monopolist, an anti-competitive monopolist that has to be regulated with common-carrier regulation, is a pretty…that's a sledgehammer kind of tool. And so that has significant impacts, and we've seen some of those impacts in terms of less investment in broadband networks going forward.
But secondly, I think it also obscures the fact that we want to preserve a vibrant open Internet with more competition. And so to the extent you impose these heavy-handed regulations, ironically enough, you might be cementing in the very lack of competition, as you see it, that you want to address.
And so my argument has been, let's introduce more competition into the marketplace in order to solve that problem. We've been doing that by improving more satellite companies, getting more spectrum out there for wireless companies, incentivizing smaller fiber providers in cities like Detroit, to be able install infrastructure. That is the way to solve that problem. Not preemptively saying, "We are going to impose these rules on everybody, regardless of whether there is an actual harm right now."
Foster: And you said before 2015 there weren't really violations of this standard, and the standard we're talking about here, this is primarily a conversation about access. So it's whether you're using your cell phone to get to websites using the Internet that way, or using your cable Internet provider at home, which oftentimes you only have one of those. The question is whether or not they're prioritizing some traffic versus other traffic, or maybe even just blocking you from getting to certain services, services that they don't make a profit off of your using.
In general, I think it's true that there wasn't a lot of that happening before. But even back in 2015, AT&T was throttling bandwidth on its unlimited data plan. So they're selling you an unlimited data plan, but once you get above say 25 MB, you've downloaded a couple songs, they start to actually scale back the rate of speed with which you can access the Internet. And there's been a fair amount of this throttling going on, and I think part of what a number of people who are concerned about net neutrality regulations want, is, one, they want to know that they can access all of the things at essentially the same rate, that there isn't any prioritization going on, which is a weird thing to want, because from a technical standpoint, there's always some kind of prioritization going on, but that's a separate point. But there is increasing concern, I think, especially as people get much more powerful mobile devices, to have their wireless connection also not be throttled in the way the AT&T was doing. And we still see a fair number of data caps, although they'll talk about them a bit more explicitly now. I believe AT&T was fined for some of that throttling back in 2015.
So there's at least some potential issue here, because there are, in many cases, only a few carriers that you can actually go to to get some of these services. So wireless in New York City, you can get one of, say several: T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon. Most places, they all have their own networks, for the most part. Everybody else is leasing stuff from those guys. But when it comes to Internet service in New York, if you want cable, you talk to Optimum. Or if you want fiber you talk to Verizon Fios. Those are your only two options. And in many places you've got fewer than those two. In a few places you've got more, say, if Google fiber is in your neighborhood or something. In places like that, Net Neutrality could potentially be a real issue for people. So I wanted to be sure to place it in that frame. I am similarly skeptical of the need for it, but I wanted to at least introduce that complexity for you to respond to.
Pai: Absolutely, and this is why what the one rule that we are preserving relates to transparency. I think that consumers, when they purchase a service, should have the right to know from the service provider, this is how we are providing the service, and the terms on which we are providing it, and so they have to disclose that. Additionally, the Federal Trade Commission has authority over unfair and deceptive trade practices, as do state attorneys general, for instance, and other authorities. And so those authorities still remain. If a company is not living up to what they say they're going to do, and they have to disclose that again, under the FCC's framework as I conceive it, then they'll be accountable for that. And so that's the kind of thing that will empower consumers, I think, to understand what exactly it is that an ISP is doing in terms of business practice, and there will be authority still to take care of that problem.
Welch: We've talked a lot on this program over the last several weeks in particular, as there's been hearings on Capitol Hill dragging the social media companies up, and it's kind of tied up with the Russia investigation and all of this. I think we've all at some point characterized this moment as a bit of a "panic." It feels like there is a Capitol Hill regulatory…sort of existential panic about the power of social media companies, and also about the way in which people are worried that Facebook, in particular, could be manipulated by hostile forces. You …don't really work on the generating or commenting on legislation, but just watching this, do you have a bad feeling in your gut about where this is going? And if it went anywhere, if Dianne Feinstein or anyone else was going to write up some new kind of regulation, maybe on political advertising on Facebook or some kind of transparency rules, is that going to fall on your lap, and are you worried about it, and do you feel like taking any sort of preventive shots across the bow?
Pai: Well, generally speaking, I don't take preemptive shots across the bow with Congress.
Welch: I don't know why.
Pai: But I do think that it speaks to the transformative impact the Internet has had. This entire conversation would've been nonsensical to somebody 20 years ago, that you would think the Internet played such a large role in our daily lives. And not just in terms of ordering a coffee or reserving the table at a restaurant, as you said, even the core functions of our electoral process—
Welch: This conversation that we're having on a podcast that people are listening to on their phone.
Pai: Yeah, yeah, exactly right.
Welch: In a subway.
Pai: And that's why I think there's been the impulse in some quarters, and we heard it at last week I believe it was, or maybe two weeks ago, from Senator Franken when he said that I think these net neutrality regulations should apply to Facebook, they should apply to Google, they should applied to Amazon, to all these other online companies. And to me, at least, I think that's a dangerous road to cross.
One of things that's made the Internet the greatest free-market innovation in history, I think, is the fact that policymakers of both parties decided in the 1990s, "You know what, we're not going to treat this like the water company. We're not to treat it like the electric company. We're not going to treat it like Ma Bell. We'll let it evolve and see where it goes." And where it's gone is incredible. Trillions of dollars of value for consumers, trillions of dollars of investments across the country that wouldn't have existed had we treated it like the subway system here in New York. And so, to me at least, I wanted a level playing field for all of these online players, but I wanted it to be a light touch, a market-based playing field, as opposed to the government-knows-best playing field, in which online providers of all stripes have to come on bended knee to Washington and say, "Mother may I?" before we execute on our business.
Foster: Interestingly, I think that's the thing though—when you describe water, power, transportation in New York, the subway is the lifeblood of the city. When it's not working, it's a problem, which is frequent. But for most people, they think to themselves, "No actually, that's precisely how I want my Internet service to work. I want it to be a price that I understand from this provider that I know, with rules that are completely well-known," and in many cases that's the expectation from an economic standpoint, and they use this phrase "natural monopoly." The expectation that there can only be one player eventually. That in order for competition to actually exist, it would be more expensive than having one player actually be dominant in this marketplace. There's an expectation that telecom services which require this really expensive investment in infrastructure are in fact natural monopolies. And as a consequence of that, they've been regulated as such.
So your reference to Ma Bell is something that some people might not appreciate straightaway. It's important to acknowledge that the reason there are so few providers in a lot of these places to begin with is a consequence of proactive, preemptive regulation that helped to create these telecom monopolies in the first place. It created the monopoly with Time Warner in this particular region of the country, where they were the only broadband access provider for a time, and in various other places where Verizon for example, has come in to spend money, to build their own network, to compete to introduce another carrier, the incumbent has been able to actually make it challenging for them by appealing to local officials, which I think is worth mentioning. […]
Welch: I wanted you to a kind of chew on a bit of a paradox that I think you live through, and we all do in a way, which is that legally I don't think, or jurisprudentially, we haven't been in a better moment for free speech that I can think of. The Supreme Court, in particular, is very strong on free speech cases, they just took another three or four this past week….I mean, now…the First Amendment's starting to crowd out other amendments almost in the way that they're judging things. So we have this pretty great bedrock happening.
Culturally it feels like we haven't been as backslid like this in a really long time. Again, this is something we've talked a lot about. I know a couple weeks before the president started talking about equal time and this kind of stuff in his Twitter feed, you made some comments about just how the FCC is on the receiving end of a lot of like, "Hey, these people are either fake news or they're bad, we should look at this and we should…." Complaints about the political content of speech. How do you observe this? Do you feel like we're in a more politically oriented sense of we need to do something, and departing away from the free speech traditions that America has had, even at a time that we've never been more kind of legally free?
Pai: I think you frame the paradox pretty well, from a doctrinal perspective at least. The First Amendment is alive and well, if you look at some of these court decisions. But the problem, as you pointed out, is that there's a culture that is required to keep that promise of free speech alive, and especially if you look on college campuses it's…from Evergreen State to Yale, virtually every week it seems like there's another case in which somebody who just doesn't want to hear different point of view wants to and does in fact shut it down. And I think that's pretty disturbing for what it means for the future of free speech.
Welch: And how does this affect your work?
Pai: Oh, it affects it, I can tell you, just about every day I get multiple emails saying you suck at your job because you're not taking this network off the air. Sometimes it's somebody who hates, say Fox News, sometimes it's somebody who hates MSNBC. You name it. I read this article in my local paper, how on earth can they print something like this?
And look, that's sort of the core of what free press is all about. And so I know it's not going to make me popular, probably among anybody, but I'm going to consistently say that so long as I have the privilege of occupying this position, my ally's going to be the First Amendment. I trust in the marketplace of ideas, and I don't want to be in the business of deciding who gets to speak, and who gets to print, and who gets to think, and who gets to express. That's something for the American people to decide for themselves.
Welch: But don't functionally you have to respond to at least some…I don't know what it is, a process, like a petition, or look into this thing that happens?
Foster: Like if someone says cock-holster on television, like a late-night television host?
Welch: Yeah. Like you have to do something, and spend some minor amount of resources in this, right?
Pai: Well, if there's, say, a broadcast license renewal application somebody can always file what's called a "petition to deny." They'll say you should deny the renewal of this broadcast license for these reasons, and one of the reasons could theoretically be, "I didn't like the content of this broadcast," and the like. And that's kind of thing the FCC traditionally has not countenanced. It's one thing if they're actually violating a rule, but if it's just simply they're broadcasting something you don't like, the political tint of a newscast or whatever, we don't get involved in that sort of thing.
The post Ajit Pai: 'We Are Returning to the Original Classification of the Internet' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>By every account I've seen, including his own, Robert Mariani got a bum deal from the Daily Caller, the conservative website that relieved Mariani of his opinion-editor duties after he solicited a column from controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos about Kevin Spacey. So we invited the freshly unemployed young man onto The Fifth Column, the weekly podcast (and Sirius XM POTUS program) featuring Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan and myself, to talk about this specific experience, ruminate on the potential pitfalls of skirting up to the acceptability edges of opinion journalism, and reflect on the values (or lack thereof) of publishing Milo and similar outrage-inducers in the first place.
It was on the latter point that things went pear-shaped. Moynihan asked Mariani what useful perspective Yiannopoulos brings, Mariani asserted that it was worthwhile to note that in "the '70s and '80s, there were NAMBLA floats at every single gay-pride parade," Moynihan disputed that assertion with some vigor, and we were off to the races. Here's the whole clip; fireworks are teased near the top, but the exchange really gets started around the 12-minute mark:
Some related reading:
* Me, on trolls vs. velvet-ropers
* Robby Soave, on Milo's "Sad, Aborted Free Speech Week Disaster at Berkeley"
* Elliot Kaufman, in National Review, on how "Campus Conservatives Gave the Alt-Right a Platform."
And here's Moynihan doing a Vice News piece on the fading provocateur himself:
The post Here's What Happens When You Accuse Michael Moynihan of Being in Denial About NAMBLA Because Maybe He's Gay appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>So the "Unsafe Space" campus speaking tour sponsored by Spiked (and hosted at least once so far in an emergency backup way by Reason) continues to generate interesting collisions between libertarian commentators and the angry campus progressives who seek to shout them down. One recent incident, while not coming close to a Berkeley-style riot, or a "Cocks Not Glocks" dildo-waving protest of gun-right speaker Katie Pavlich, or even the latest Charles Murray kerfuffle, nonetheless caught my attention because it involved old pal Kmele Foster, and my favorite piece of writing by Martin Luther King.
Foster (see video below) had just sat through a series of emotional audience harangues defending identity politics and speech-sensitivity as necessary pushbacks against a racist power structure, when he attempted to make a case familiar to Reason readers—that free-speech protections are crucial precisely for minority populations' struggles against the majority:
For so many years in this country, and I'm pointing to the 1960s in particular, speech protections were used by minority groups who were fighting for civil rights, and it was essential for them to be able to secure those rights, in order to advocate. The reason why Martin Luther King, for example, wrote his Letter from a Birmingham Jail from a Birmingham jail was because he was imprisoned for effectively violating speech codes—handing out flyers in the wrong spot, all of these various things. I think this is something that we don't necessarily understand.
It was at that precise moment—the whole speech-codes-hurt-comparatively-powerless-black-people moment—when activists started shouting "Black lives matter! Black lives matter! Black lives matter!" as if, uh, there was any suggestion to the contrary? Thus began several minutes of barky audience non-sequiturs such as "WHO controls the facts? WHO controls the facts? It's the system!" Eventually Foster was able to complete his point. You can read more about it over at Campus Reform (with a corrective follow-up tweet from Kmele) and watch the exchange below:
The incident also came up during our most recent Fifth Column podcast, beginning at around the 7:40 mark:
I had the weird experience of being part of an event that is being protested, where there are police officers, there 's a gauntlet of security guards who are checking bags, who are doing all of these things….Within 15 minutes kids are standing on their chairs screaming "Black lives matter!" They are standing up, disrupting the entire event. They ask for questions from the audience—rather than raise your hand and be called, since no one's hand rushed up right away, and you would have been either first or second, you just wait until we select someone, hand them a mic, and you run up in front of the room and say, "I'm just gonna stop this right here!" […]
At some point we were able to reel it in, and I suspect that my pigment was helpful in allowing me to calm the storm a little bit….I was a little flustered, because there's something really unsettling about being in a place like that.
You can listen to the whole episode, which covers a lot of free-speech ground, here:
Listen to Kmele Foster interview DeRay McKesson here, and recount a street run-in he had with BLM activists here.
The post Kmele Foster Gets Shouted Down by Black Lives Matter Activists After Pointing out That MLK Used Free Speech Protections—Wait, What? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Who has 10 weirdly long fingers and wants to argue with Kmele Foster about the propriety of using race as a way to talk about criminal injustice? Not this guy, but rather that gal: Reason's own beloved Editor in Chief, Katherine Mangu-Ward.
KMW filled in this week for the ever-elusive Michael C. Moynihan on The Fifth Column, your favorite non-Reason podcast. Discussion, unsurprisingly, touched on a number of pieces published here, including the "listicle" "9 Lessons from the Trump/NFL Anthem Wars," "Health Care Costs Are the Reason You're Not Getting a Raise," "We Need to Talk About Black Students Being Accused of Rape Under Title IX," "Debt Denialists," and much more. Along the way we also tackle tech panics, tax reform, and Go-Go music, not necessarily in that order. You can listen to the whole caboodle here:
Don't forget that on Saturdays you can listen to an hour-long version of The Fifth Column on Sirius XM POTUS (channel 124) at 11 a.m. ET and then again at midnight. More also available at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Katherine Mangu-Ward: Using Race to Drum up Criminal Justice Outrage Is A-OK appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How exhausted is the genre of #hottake outrage at allegedly transgressive white-people activity? This exhausted: Last week, The New Republic wrapped an entire piece around the impropriety of Reason throwing a party for Lionel Shriver featuring paper dolls of the author and various cultural costumes.
The headline, subhed, and opening sentence of this Josephine Livingstone article should not be read without first swallowing your coffee:
Does the Right Really Think a Sombrero is just a "Straw Hat"?
At a recent party for the libertarian magazine "Reason," guests were given a paper doll of Lionel Shriver to dress up in outfits from different cultures.
If the right believes that cultural appropriation is not offensive, why are they making paper dolls that ridicule other cultures?
It's kind of hard to know where to begin. Is Reason or Lionel Shriver a stand-in for "the right"? In Shriver's own words, "my views…qualify as left-wing or right-wing only on the basis of 'eeny meeny miny moe'"—a description very familiar to libertarians (and to the writers for this magazine). Is it really a puzzle to understand why someone who rejects the notion of cultural appropriation would cheerfully engage in symbolic cultural appropriation as a way of making that particular point? And are those scare-quotes around our name? (Drink!)
There is no joy in this attempted shaming exercise, just an overwhelming atmosphere of fatigue:
There's a difference between sharing in another culture and making use of it in a condescending way. The paper outfits, which are in some cases strongly marked ethnically, reduce identity down to costuming. The figures are headless. The illustration is lighthearted, but this gesture of reduction—of complex peoples and histories to empty and headless outfits, interchangeable and undifferentiated—makes the joke feel clumsy and shallow. A culture is not something that you can shrug on and off like a jacket. People are not dresses. People are not hats.
Thankfully, Shriver herself shows up at the end of the article, injecting some spirit into the final paragraph:
As for the paper doll illustration, Shriver told the New Republic: "I thought it was utterly charming—inventive, playful, and funny. The event on Monday night was a hoot, and it was a relief for me to find that there are other people out there who still have a sense of humor, do not want to impose their version of righteousness on others, and have some feeling for a 'free country' as something more palpable than an empty slogan. The term 'libertarian' has been much tarnished by association with some rather strange people, but these folks were sensible and sane (if by the end a little tipsy)."
Read Katherine Mangu-Ward's interview with Shriver here.
For those actually interested in the complex cultural significance of the sombrero, I highly recommend a Southern Foodways Alliance piece by Gustavo Arellano of "Ask a Mexican" fame, titled "Sombreros Over The South." Here's a taste:
In los Estados Unidos, Americans have warped them into something quite different. Here, sombreros are exclusively happy hats: permission for the wearer to transform into a one-person party. Fans of Mexico's soccer team flaunt them during international matches. Costume stores can barely keep them in stock during Halloween or Cinco de Mayo. Late-night hosts wear sombreros for comedy sketches, tipping their you-know-what to the buffoonery to come.
Here's the funny thing, though: Stateside, I rarely see a Mexican wear one. Outside of folkloric dance performances, soccer stadiums, or mariachi shows, we favor tejanas (Stetsons) for everyday wear. We give the sombrero the respect it deserves. It's headgear for a certain place and time—like revolutions, for instance, or to serenade a señorita in the moonlight.
Arellano, as fate would have it, is author of a 2012 Reason cover story, adapted from his book of the same title, called "Taco USA: How Mexican food became more American than apple pie." It's a master class in exploring and celebrating how cultures collide, mix, and mutate into glorious new creations of their own. "Food is a natural conduit of change, evolution, and innovation," he writes. "Wishing for a foodstuff to remain static, uncorrupted by outside influence—especially in these United States—is as ludicrous an idea as barring new immigrants from entering the country. Yet for more than a century, both sides of the political spectrum have fought to keep Mexican food in a ghetto."
If the accompanying whimsical cover art looks similar to the allegedly offensive Shriver dolls, that's no accident—both were designed by Reason's current art director, Joanna Andreasson, herself a hopelessly bastardized mix of influences and cultures. (She's a Swede raised in Ireland who lives in Brooklyn and likes taxidermied squirrels, for starters.) The thing uniting these various mutts who participate unhesitatingly in the glorious flotsam of global culture is that, quite unlike their critics, they're having fun.
Speaking of which, we had a bit of fun at The New Republic's expense on last week's episode of The Fifth Column. There is a semi-regular segment there called "Some Idiot Wrote This," and though the candidate was obvious, Michael Moynihan's dramatic reading and finely splattered bile is worth your attention. Starts at around the 1:24 mark:
The post Us Silly Right-Wingers and Our #Problematic Sombreros! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Longtime commenters around these parts know David "Dave" Weigel as the ex-Reasoner they love to roast most. Most others recognize him as the shrewd coverer of national politics for the Washington Post, where lately he's been writing a lot about the increasingly successful attempts by Bernie Sanders to make universal health care a mainstream Democratic Party position.
It is on that topic (which you should also read Peter Suderman on) where we begin the conversation with Weigel on this week's episode of The Fifth Column, the podcast I co-host with Kmele Foster and Michael C. Moynihan. We also get to President Donald Trump's big DACA heel-turn, Hillary Clinton's controversial new memoir, and whether Pink Floyd should be considered progressive rock. You can listen to the whole here:
Also check out Nick Gillespie's Reason Podcast interview with Weigel in June about his new book, The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock.
Reminder: On Saturdays you can listen to an hour-long version of The Fifth Column on Sirius XM POTUS (channel 124) at 11 a.m. ET and then again at midnight (which is technically Sunday, but you get the drift). More also available at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Dave Weigel on the Democrats' Bernienomics, Trump's DACA Switcheroo, and Hillary's Surprising Book appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After having pulverized islands such as St. Martin and Cuba, Hurricane Irma is now pummeling South Florida. As happens every time a large natural catastrophe hits the United States, the media is filled with assertions that the calamity's magnitude is attributable to climate change:
Al Gore warned climate change would make hurricanes worse, so why didn't we listen? https://t.co/MavZ1JRzO2 pic.twitter.com/bhhOZveNYd
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) September 10, 2017
But as Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey noted in a links-rich piece on Aug. 29 in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, while there is a widely shared hypothesis that a warming climate will cause more intense hurricanes, so far that theory has yet to show up in the available data. Two days later, as Irma was gathering energy in the Atlantic, The Fifth Column podcast had Ron on for 40 minutes to further explore the connection between climate change and hurricanes, and also between federal policy and natural disasters.
You can listen to the whole show at this link, and at the bottom of this post. Below is an abridged transcript of our conversation, with some hyperlinks added. Make sure to also check out Nick Gillespie's Reason Podcast conversation about Harvey-related policy with Ray Lehmann of R Street.
I started by asking Ron to "walk us through the relationship between climate science and hurricanes, because people talk a lot of bollocks."
Bailey: It is the case that the climate computer models are all more or less projecting that as the planet warms there should be at least more intense hurricanes—probably fewer, but more intense over time. The question is, are we seeing that in the data now?
I've talked to a bunch of different scientists, I've read through a whole bunch of different aspects of the peer-reviewed literature, and they say frankly say, "No, we can't find it there yet. We don't see any intensification going on in the Atlantic region at all. We don't see [that] the number of hurricanes is increasing or decreasing over time." Basically they're saying that the models tell us this will eventually happen, but we don't see it [yet].
There's something called the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, which, making it short, is basically a way to add up all the power of all the hurricanes that occur in a particular area. And that one's been going down 10 years in the Atlantic area. So it's not there.
It may be there, we'll see if the models are right, but so far there is no particular evidence that says Harvey or Katrina or Sandy were exacerbated by climate change. They may have been, but the data is so noisy that it's impossible to say for sure. And of course what's happened in politicized science is, any time a catastrophe occurs, somebody is going to stand up and say "Well it's consistent with climate change." Well it's consistent also with no climate change….
There are a lot of people working on what you'd call attribution of extreme weather events, trying to figure out how much of a weather event we could attribute to climate change, how much worse it is because of climate change. But very specifically in the case of floods and hurricanes there's really little data on it at this point. We just don't have enough information.
Kmele Foster: We have seen this theme come up a bunch of times….Isn't it true that these are happening more frequently?
Bailey: Not in the current data, at all. In fact there were more hurricanes back in the middle of the 20th century then has occurred lately. There was an uptick at the beginning of the 21st century in the Atlantic again, and then it's gone down. It's very hard to predict these things.
Part of it has to do with things like the Atlantic Ocean has a 40 to 50 year period where the water is warmer or colder. At the moment it's flipped to a warm phase, and some thought it would soon flip to the cool phase, which means there will be even fewer hurricanes if the models are right.
So again, there are a lot of people working on this, and we may get to that point—"we" meaning the people I'll be quoting as scientists some day—will get to the point of being able to say, "Yes, we can definitely find trends in the data." But the trends in the data don't exist yet.
Welch: Just to dumb this down so I can understand it: The theory, which has not yet been data-fied, relies on "Hey look the globe's getting warmer, the water's getting warmer, stuff that used to be ice is melting. Therefore, that means there's going to be more material for hurricanes to use." Is that right?
Bailey: Right. Basically…hurricanes spin up when the temperature of the water is over 79 degrees Fahrenheit. You have to have that as a threshold in order to get a hurricane. There's a lot of other things you'll need, but assuming that's going on then, yes, you'll likely have more hurricanes, though there's other ways around that. The other thing, of course, is a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so when you do have a hurricane you're probably going to have more rain. These are all very good theoretical projections, but the data have not yet supported that.
Welch: In terms of policy here, the things I'm seeing the Trump administration getting knocked for is that they have lessened the Obama administration's emphasis on thinking [about] or causing people to consider climate change when they're looking at something from a national defense perspective, perhaps some infrastructure things as well. You wrote a great piece—and we…do this perennially at Reason, talking about the super perverse incentives, federal incentives particularly, having to do with home insurance in flood areas. This is also true for fire areas, like in southern California and Malibu and places like that. As you look at the applied policies that exist here, what sticks out at you as something that could, that should, change, in order to create a world that's less vulnerable to big-ass storms?
Bailey: Well, don't build on a floodplain, don't build on a coastal area where hurricanes come in. The problem is that in 1968 the federal government decided that they were going to create the federal flood insurance program: It's 25 billion dollars in the red now, and there's no way for it to get out of it without taxpayers bailing it out; there's simply no way to do it. Now that Houston has occurred it's probably going to go through its 30 billion dollar debt ceiling that it has.
So it's simply a failed government program. What it does is that it subsidizes people with cheap insurance to build expensive houses and businesses in flood plains and on coastal areas. Why are we doing that? The market wasn't broken in 1968. The insurance market was telling people, don't build there, because we're not going to insure you. If you build there your stuff is going to get washed away and you'll lose your business and your house, and instead the government said "Nah, we're going supply you with some cash, go ahead build there." So what we've ended up doing is encouraging people to live in areas where they put their lives and their property at risk, increasingly, and it's just stupid.
So what we need to do is change the flood insurance program to a system that's rational, where people will actually pay the premiums for the risk that they're bearing instead of imposing it on taxpayers.
Foster: There's a related issue. We have, in fact, seen disasters be more costly—that is not necessarily a consequence of more severe storms, but has a lot to do with the incentives that we're creating for folks with programs like this.
Bailey: Right, but it's not only that, though. As a procedure, if you normalize things, if you try to figure out what storms in the past would've destroyed if the amount of property currently existing at least were there then, what we find is that in fact the damages have not been increasing as a percentage of the GDP. What's happened is that we're putting more property in harm's way.
Welch: And also talk briefly about lives lost as a percentage according to these natural catastrophes
Bailey: They've been going down dramatically over time. Unfortunately because the screwups of all kinds of things, there were 1,800 people who lost their lives at Katrina. But the basic trend in the United States has been for decades for fewer and fewer people to die in floods and hurricanes. Post-Katrina has been about [five] people a year, and unfortunately it's ticking up here in Houston apparently. But again it's going way, way down.
Why? Because people have much better infrastructure, we have much better response systems, people get more warnings, everything is better, because we're wealthier and have more information at our fingertips….This kind of information infrastructure is allowing people to take care of themselves without the government getting in the way much more easily now, and we should let more of that happen. […]
Welch: Of course you're right about this, of course we're right about this in talking about it, it makes rational sense. And there are people who are trapped in their attic as we speak, underwater in Beaumont, Texas and greater Houston, in an area that's larger than the state of Connecticut or some damn thing, where all the water is, and are you seriously going to lecture them about how "You're getting too many subsidies here from the federal government"? It's very, very difficult, people pay attention to these stories precisely when there's a catastrophe, and that's when their appetite for hearing about preserving perverse incentives and government waste is at its all-time lowest.
Bailey: What we should take away from this—and the flood insurance program, by the way, is coming up for reauthorization at the end of September—what should be taken away from this is, fine, it's terrible that you people were encouraged to build in these areas; you probably didn't even know that that was what was going on. But here's what the deal is: You'll get bailed out this time, but you don't get to rebuild on a floodplain. Here's the money, your house is paid for, go somewhere else where you don't get inundated in the future.
I think you're right, there's no way to basically say "tough luck" to our fellow citizens. That would be cruel and unusual, since they got duped into moving to these places in the first place. But certainly don't allow people to rebuild in areas that flood like this. You're endangering them, and you're obviously wasting a lot of money on property that's not going to be sustained.
Welch: To be clear: They can build there, you're fine with that, as long as they pay the risk premium
Bailey: Absolutely, it's fine if you would like to do that; that's not a problem with me. I just don't think that the rest of us should have to pay for that. […]
Foster: There are the Naomi Kleins of the world that are saying this is the moment—this is when we ought to be talking about climate change, right now. I mean, Ron, I'll ask the question straight out, perhaps I should have asked at the front end so people know whether or not they should trust you: Are you a climate change denier?
Bailey: By no means. I believe that humanity is in fact changing the climate by burning fossil fuels and filling up the atmosphere with extra carbon dioxide, and in the long run if we keep doing it it'll become a significant problem for humanity, so we should be doing something about it. That being said, then we have to get into the policy details of what that something should be, and that's of course where the fight comes.
What I love about Naomi Klein is that she puts it right out there in her book, This Changes Everything, [that] the great thing about climate change is that is gives us an excuse to enact a progressive agenda that we've been wanting for decades. And she just flatly says that— "We can finally put capitalism in the grave." Well that's one policy response, I have a different one I think. I think we can utilize markets and human ingenuity to solve the problem over the course of this century.
The post 'So Far There Is No Particular Evidence That Says Harvey or Katrina or Sandy Were Exacerbated by Climate Change' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Have you checked out the revamped website of The Fifth Column, your very favorite non-Reason podcast, starring Michael C. Moynihan, Kmele Foster, and me? Episode links—such as last week's, featuring Thaddeus Russell and Radley Balko—now include topic breakouts, relevant book links, and other helpful information. Check it out!
This week's episode is so hot off the presses that even I haven't listened to the featured scrum at the end, when Kmele sits down with blue-vested Black Lives Matter activist and Campaign Zero co-founder DeRay McKesson for a frank exchange of views on race, policing, and "dangerous" ideas. (Read Reason's interview with McKesson from 14 months ago.) The conversation before that is mostly an extended argument over President Donald Trump's reactions to Charlottesville, with me talking about the ideological/comportmental aspects that Trumpism, the alt-right, and a big chunk of the broader right has in common; Kmele giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, and Moynihan spitting fire about LARPing tiki-Nazis. You can listen here:
Reminder: Over the weekend you can listen to an hour-long version of The Fifth Column on Sirius XM POTUS (channel 124) Saturdays at 11 a.m. ET then Sundays at 1 a.m. and 3 p.m. And you can always find more Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Kmele vs. DeRay, and Trump's Cherished History: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week on HBO's Vice News, former Reasoner and current Vice person Michael C. Moynihan, one-third of the weekly podcast (and Sirius XM radio show) The Fifth Column, let a series of doctors probe his sensitive areas while he attempted to ask them questions about costs, paperwork, and distortions in the medical market. The results are amusing and interesting, and you can watch them here:
We talk about that experience, in the context of Obamacare repeal's latest failures, on this week's episode of the podcast. Other topics include Vegas trips of yore, involving a singer named "Cheese."
* Jeff Sessions and his many problems.
* An immigration report card six months in to Donald Trump's presidency.
* Advancements in and structural impediments to forensic science, and reforms thereof.
* The acclaimed new doc, LA 92.
Listen right here:
Reminder: Over the weekend you can listen to an hour-long version of The Fifth Column on Sirius XM POTUS (channel 124) Saturdays at 11 a.m. ET then Sundays at 1 a.m. and 3 p.m. And you can always find more Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Sessions Problems, Real Medical Costs, <em>LA 92</em> and O.J.'s Juice: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On July 21, Vice News is premiering on HBO a new feature length documentary on U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, titled A World in Disarray, based on a new book of the same name by former George H.W. Bush Middle East advisor and current Council of Foreign Relations poobah Richard Haass. The doc's main narrator and interlocutor (of such former leaders as Tony Blair, George Schultz, and Condoleezza Rice) is former Reasoner and current Vicer Michael C. Moynihan, one-third of the weekly podcast (and Sirius XM radio show!) The Fifth Column. Here's a preview:
We spend a good chunk of this week's podcast chewing over the mixed-up status of the United States' role in global affairs, the elusive Goldilocks test for interventionism in the Middle East, and the existential angst of relinquishing control over events, with the help of Bloomberg View foreign policy columnist Eli Lake. And as you would expect, there's plenty of debate over the there-there of Donald Trump, Jr.'s dealing with Russians, and the administration's slippery relationship with the truth. Without spoiling too much, some of the phrases uttered include "dick descript," "lesbodians and 9/11," "the Bernard Henri-Levy of stupidity," and "Congratulations, Eli, on being such a spectacular Jew." Listen to the whole thing here:
Reminder: Over the weekend you can listen to an hour-long version of The Fifth Column on Sirius XM POTUS (channel 124) Saturdays at 11 a.m. ET then Sundays at 1 a.m. and 3 p.m. And you can always find more Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post On Trump, Jr., Governments Lying, and <em>A World in Disarray</em>: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This morning I am sitting in the guest-host chair for Stand UP! with Pete Dominick on Sirius XM Insight (channel 121) from 9-12 am ET. The guests are scheduled to include:
* James Kirchick, author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, who will talk about President Donald Trump's trip to Europe last week.
* Nina Khrushcheva, author of The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey Into the Gulag of the Russian Mind. She will talk about Vladimir Putin and the continuum of Russian political leadership.
* Sen Mike Lee (R-Utah), author of Written Out of History: The Forgotten Founders Who Fought Big Government, who will talk about that book and also the prospects for Obamacare reform.
* Denny Dressman, author of Heard but not Seen: Richard Nixon, Frank Robinson and The All-Star Game's Most Debated Play. We will discuss Pete Rose knocking the shit out of Ray Fosse in 1970.
* Kmele Foster, impresario of FreeThink Media and The Fifth Column podcast (speaking of which, here's last week's, including a memorable lil' 4th of July rant from Kmele). We'll talk about, I dunno, race, media…maybe a little Austin Petersen.
Please call the show at any time, but especially in the Kmele hour: 1-877-974-7487.
The post Matt Welch Interviews Sen. Mike Lee, Kmele Foster, James Kirchick and More from 9-12 AM ET appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Would the world be better served without having televised White House press briefings? Former press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Mike McCurry seem to think so, and so did Michael Moynihan and Kmele Foster…until I got all shouty about it near the end of the latest episode of The Fifth Column podcast. The three of us also dissect the Jake Tapper approach to factfulness in the Trump era, the president's war on Morning Joe, the dishonesty-riddled Nancy MacLean book Democracy in Chains, the effects of whiskey on Kmele's eye color, and John McEnroe's #problematic decision to answer a question about Serena Williams honestly. It's a fine episode, and you can listen to it right here:
Reminder: Over the weekend you can listen to an hour-long version of The Fifth Column on Sirius XM POTUS (channel 124) Saturdays at 11 a.m. ET then Sundays at 1 a.m. and 3 p.m. And you can always find more Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Trump-Media Wars, Nancy MacLean's Smear, and the People vs. John McEnroe: New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you haven't seen the Vice News segment on the insane race politics at Evergreen State College, click on this YouTube link to fix it. The correspondent, former Reasoner Michael Moynihan, spends the opening segment of our latest Fifth Column podcast, dishing about the story behind the story, and the juicy parts that ended up on the cutting room floor. You can listen to the whole episode here:
Also in the episode: Kmele Foster and I get into it over the Philando Castile verdict and politics thereof, Moynihan goes on a tasty rant against those who had accused Otto Warmbier of abusing his white privilege and allegedly violating the laws of a totalitarian state, and the three of us bitch generally about the New York subway.
Access more Fifth Column stuff is availabile at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post What You Didn't See in That Shocking Evergreen Segment: Michael Moynihan Dishes in <em>The Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I'm a little behind in notifications here about the doings of The Fifth Column, the weekly podcast I co-host with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan, which airs (in adapted form) on Sirius XM POTUS (channel 124) Saturdays at 11 a.m. ET then Sundays at 1 a.m. and 3 p.m.
On June 8, as I was mucking about with Rand Paul, my co-conspirators recorded an episode with Timothy D. Snyder, author of the hot new book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. You can listen to that serious conversation here. Then for those who prefer a little more ssslur in the letter "s," we followed that up with a group effort the next day, influenced by some State of Jefferson rum, covering the UK election, Trump/Comey semiotics, plus an extended and worthwhile rant from Kmele Foster about Bill Maher's apology tour.
Our latest effort, recorded Wednesday night, tackled that day's congressional baseball shooting, particularly the contested question about the links between political rhetoric and violence. We also throw some shade at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, engage in a series of questionable Bill Cosby impersonations, and look at the Alex Jones/Megyn Kelly controversy through the lens of Moynihan's open jealousy that his own recent interview with Mr. InfoWars failed to generate talks of boycotts and journalistic malpractice. You can listen to the whole episode here:
And you can watch Moynihan's Vice News segment with Jones below:
More Fifth Column stuff is availabile at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Does Rhetoric Influence Violence? <em>The Fifth Column</em> Debates appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hey, will you be listening to Sirius XM after church on Sunday? Tune into Channel 124, a.k.a. POTUS, at 3 p.m. tomorrow, and you'll hear the hour-long broadcast version of The Fifth Column podcast, co-hosted by Kmele "Never Fly Coach" Foster, Michael "Hollywood" Moynihan and the author of this blog post. Or you can hear the whole unspooled straight-to-yr-headphones biz right here:
Topics include foolish paternal attempts to play soccer, controversial if telegraphed decisions to pull out of unenforceable non-treaty climate agreements, racist anti-LeBron James vandalism, Russkies galore, and so on.
Not enough for ya? OK, here's an entertaining, NSFW episode of the great Brilliant Idiots podcast starring DJ Charlamagne Tha God and Reason-loving comedian Andrew Shulz, in which I come on at the 1:14 mark to spool out my working theory on the Russia/Trump story:
More Fifth Column stuff is availabile at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Paris Pullout, Russia Reboots, and LeBron Hate Crimes: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Some news: The Fifth Column, the 13-month-old, occasionally bleary-eyed politics/media/bad-accents podcast co-hosted by Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan and myself, is expanding to Sirius XM's POTUS (stands for "Politics of the United States") channel, beginning this weekend. You can find POTUS, which bills itself as "Non-Partisan Political Talk," at number 124 on your channel-thingie. The hour-long broadcasts will sometimes be edited versions of the longer podcasts, bonus interview sessions, or live call-in shows. Here's how we're described on the site:
From their enclave in midtown Manhattan, hosts Michael Moynihan, Matt Welch, and Kmele Foster dissect the news, interrogate guests, and question just about everything. The topics are broad, the insights are deep, and the jokes are off color.
Tune in Saturday, May 27, at 11 a.m. ET; and Sunday, May 28, at 1 a.m. ET & again at 3 p.m.
You can listen to an expanded version of what you'll hear there right the hell here. Recorded on Wednesday morning, this show is perhaps blissfully free of all things Bodyslamgate, and instead focuses on the Manchester terrorist attack, debates over "root causes," President Donald Trump's Mideast swing, commemorative drug paraphernalia, #MAGA-hashtag Twitter feeds, the mesmerizing lure of Jewish holidays, and the even more tempting prospects of shotgunning Negro Modelos in the morning. It's all here:
In addition to LISTENING TO US ON SIRIUS XM POTUS CHANNEL 124, you can fulfill your bonus Fifth Column needs at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post <em>The Fifth Column</em> Branches Out to Sirius XM POTUS! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It is an established thing that beloved Reason-family commentators Michael C. Moynihan and Thaddeus Russell do not exactly agree on issues of foreign policy, and are generally not go-along-to-get-along types. And so, after some understandable crowing over Kmele Foster's crushing victory at this week's Soho Forum debate on campus racism, The Fifth Column podcast pivoted into some meta-snarling over whether we're all just adding to the stupid and diverting attention from more important issues by yakking nonstop on all things Trump, Comey, and Russia. Along the way we get into some fruitful discussion on post-Trump Trumpism, the potency of anti-media sentiment, and (of course!) NATO expansion. You can listen to the teetotaling irritability here:
Need moar Fifth Column? Consult iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Should We Even <em>Care</em> About Trump Scandals and Russia? Michael Moynihan and Thad Russell Duke it Out on <em>The Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>What's worse, anti-anti-Trumpism, or Kmele Foster singing James Taylor? Or is that just an Obamaesque false choice? These are just some of the questions explored in this week's edition of The Fifth Column podcast, also featuring myself and Michael C. Moynihan. We of course dive into President Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director Jim Comey, and the media reaction thereof, as well as the likelihood of Congress exerting oversight.
Also receiving extended examination is top U.S. law enforcement assertion that Julian Assange is not a "journalist," and the fundamental boringness of libertarians vociferously agreeing with one another. Receiving additional mentions: Augustus Sol Invictus, Reason commenters, Jamie Kirchick, Milo Yiannopoulos, and this great Reason TV video. Listen up:
Reminder: Kmele Foster will be debating Lawrence Ross at the Soho Forum May 16 on whether America's colleges have fostered a racist environment that makes them a hostile space for black students. And as mentioned on the podcat, I'll be on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher tomorrow night.
Get more Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Comey, Assange, and Libertarian Purity Tests: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The backslapping in the White House rose garden had only just ceased up when Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and I broke out the Sam Adams and top-shelf listener-whiskey for some insta-analysis of the latest Affordable Health Care Act. (Speaking of which, read Reasontastic takes on such from Peter Suderman, me, Eric Boehm, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown.) We also get into this week's GOP-led federal spending increase, the uncommon threads attempting to link a spate of recent police-abuse stories, and how President Donald Trump may be negotiating from a position of strength with Republican lawmakers.
In addition, The Fifth Column welcomed to its airwaves James "Jamie" Kirchick, author of the new book The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. We talked French elections, Brexit, the decline of institutional democratic socialism, the mechanics of Russian infiltration into Central Europe, and what a Kirchickian foreign policy would look like vis-à-vis Estonia. Listen to the whole sprawl here:
And make sure to check out Nick Gillespie's interview with Kirchick last month on the Reason podcast.
You can locate Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Congress's Big Bad Week and Europe's Continued Decline: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After some technical-competence issues concerning yours truly, The Fifth Column, that almost-weekly podcast of Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and myself, is back with 100 minutes on the first 100 days of the Donald Trump presidency. We get into Trump's tax plan, his reversion to foreign-policy interventionism, his persistent trouble with the courts, non-softening toward Russia, serial policy-reversals, and ongoing discovery that policy making is more difficult than bumper-sticker slogans. We also chew at considerable length on the implications and applications of Jack Shafer's fascinating new Politico Magazine piece "The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think." Which becomes another reason to emphasize the curiosity that Reason is almost all alone out there when it comes to disclosing how our journalists vote. Check 'er out:
Among the many fine Reason articles I reference:
* "The New GOP Health Care Bill Shows Republicans Have Given Up on Fully Repealing Obamacare," by Peter Suderman
* "Broken Science," by Ron Bailey
* "You Know Less Than You Think About Guns," by Brian Doherty
You can find The Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Media Bubbles and Trump's 100-Day Scorecard: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Michael Weiss, editor in chief of the Russia-watching Interpreter magazine, and author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, has long been one of the most knowledgeable observers of Great Game international politics. Last night, after one of the most eventful weeks in modern foreign policy history, what with President Donald Trump's showy switcheroos on Syria, Russia, China, and NATO, and his noisy belligerence toward North Korea, Weiss joined for 45 minutes of a 133-minute (!) version of The Fifth Column, the weekly podcast of Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and myself. You can listen right here:
Also earning mentions: Masshole marathoners, "Black Ron Paul," the Maple Syrup Mafia, and much more. You can further service your Fifth Column needs at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
BONUS ANNOUNCEMENT: I am scheduled to appear on tonight's All in With Chris Hayes on MSNBC with guest-host Joy-Ann Reid at 8 pm ET, to talk about our coming conflict with North Korea.
The post Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Switcheroos: The New <em>Fifth Column</em>, With Michael Weiss appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As referenced earlier today, last night The Fifth Column invited to its podcast-waves Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of the most libertarian members of Congress, and a man well-known to Reason readers (you can consume our previous interviews with congressman from June 2013, March 2016, and May 2016; watch him eat a hemp bar on The Independents, and read what he's written for us).
With the Ryancare debacle (in which Massie was a firm "Hell no") still fresh in the memory tubes, and with the Trump administration collaborating with the existing GOP establishment to marginalize the crazies in the Massie-friendly House Freedom Caucus, the triumvirate of Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and myself wanted to know how the Obamcare-reboot failure looked like from the inside ("this was a big game of chicken"), where Congress goes from here on swamp-draining, and whether there's any meaningful overlap between Trump/Steve Bannon economic nationalism and Tea Party-flavored libertarianism (in mutual opposition to the World Trade Organization, he suggested). Along the way Massie spelled out the virtues (and limitations) of his bill to abolish the Department of Education, ruminated on whether the HFC's intransigence has allowed libertarian-leaners to retake the lunatic lead from Donald Trump, and busted Moynihan's chops for being a diva.
You can listen to the whole thing here; Massie in the first 37 minutes:
After the jump a quickie edited transcript, thanks to Lindsay Marchello:
Welch: Give us a bit of a snapshot of what it was like there in the final 24 hours in that push.
Massie: Oh my gosh, this thing was like a rocket whose fins had fallen off. It started off in the wrong trajectory 18 days before…and there in the last few days it was traveling erratically, and I said on Thursday—obviously they pulled the bill on Friday from consideration—but on Thursday I said "This rocket has gone crazy. The best we can hope for is it lands in the ocean and sinks."
Welch: Now I should just interject here that you are an MIT graduate, so you are only capable of speaking in rocket metaphors.
Massie: I'm an electric engineer, I'm not a rocket scientist, but I like to pretend I'm one when I'm in Congress.
You know, I did a lot of media last week; I probably went on TV more last week than I've been on TV in my life. And I was trying to get the message out there that this was a big game of chicken, and that reality…is going to come crashing down on Thursday. They were able to avoid reality for one day by postponing the vote, but then reality came crashing down. And I also predicted that they would claim they had the votes right up until they pulled the bill, which is also what happened.
The speaker did Congress a great disservice by going on TV for literally the entire week leading up to the debacle of the bill being pulled and saying that they had the votes, so I felt compelled to go on TV and say they don't have the votes. And then, on I believe it was Thursday or Wednesday, Mick Mulvaney came—he's a former Freedom Caucus member who is now the OMB director—he came to our Republican conference, and he was carrying a message from Trump. He said "I've got a message from my boss. He's rather remarkable; he's not like most of us politicians, and he wants you to know that number one, he's done negotiating. There will be no changes to this bill. And number two, the vote is going to happen tomorrow, and he doesn't care if it passes or fails. We are going to have a vote and he's going to find out who is on his side and who's not." And then the third thing he said is, "If this fails, we are done with health care. You're done with health care, we are moving on."
Foster: Wow.
Massie: They asked me, "What do you make of all that?" And I said it's all a big bluff.
Foster: Did you say that before or after you pissed yourself?
Massie: Just shaking. I was terrified. In fact I sent out a tweet that said, if the executive branch tells the legislative branch what to vote on, when to vote, how they are going to vote, and what he's going to allow them to do if the vote fails, is that a republic? And that got a little coverage. […]
Moynihan: Congressman, this is Michael Moynihan, I'm the one who is fashionably late—I like to make a grand, rather dramatic entrance….When you are dealing on an issue like health care, and you are dealing with a president who is nominally—and I mean to underline that word a few times—of your party, I was trying to pull up the quote from a debate in which Donald Trump was asked, you know, "15 years ago you called yourself a liberal on healthcare and you praised the Canadian system." This is a point in which the soon-to-be president would maybe pivot and say "You know my ideas have evolved on the issue," but he responded that "As far as a single payer, it works in Canada, it works incredibly well in Scotland"…. I mean we have a president, don't we, who has been pretty clear about his ideas and visions about health care?
Massie: Let me be clear: I am still operating under the assumption that this president wants to accomplish those things he campaigned on. And I'm not saying that ironically or sarcastically. I think that he got bad advice from Paul Ryan; I am not laying the blame for this at Donald Trump's feet. He's a big-picture guy, and when he picks the right sub-contractor, good things happen. So he went to—here's an example—he went to Heritage and he went to the Federalist [Society] and he asked them for a list of Supreme Court nominees, and they gave him a lot of good candidates, and he picked one of those, and he's a hero for it right now; there are very few if any Republicans who are upset with that choice. Contrast that to the way he went shopping for a health care plan. He came to the swamp and asked the folks in the swamp to write him a health care plan, and then adopted this swamp creature, and I think that's where he went wrong, frankly.
I do think he wants—he's not concerned with the particulars of what repeal or replace means, he just wants a good repeal and a good replacement. And I think he just latched on to the first thing that came along, and it was the worst thing that came along.
Welch: You brought up Paul Ryan—you were part of the group that defenestrated his predecessor John Boehner…
Massie: I'm going to have to look that up. […]
Welch: You chucked him out of the window in 16th century Prague. I'm pretty sure I heard you say in close proximity to me at some point that "Ah well, you know what? We will give Paul Ryan a year. We'll see how he does, we'll see if he goes through the kind of procedural reforms of 'Hey, if you are going to pass a bill, do it this way.'" So can you talk about how you see his role in terms of fulfilling that little aspect that you were asking for—that he do things in a new and better way that's pleasing to you regardless of what the content of the bill was at the end?
Massie: You know, he has clamped down on the process more than John Boehner did…. Every year that I was here under John Boehner, he always allowed an open-amendment process on the appropriations bills, and I was able to offer some wonderful amendments on industrial hemp…rolling back firearm regulations in D.C., and they passed, and these were great things. But then when Paul Ryan came along he would not allow the very same gun amendment that John Boehner allowed me to get a vote on….So in that regard he's doing worse.
And something else that I want to talk about is that…Congress, I think, always worked this way: You basically got your committee assignments in December, you know November-December, so that when the Congress started in January you could hit the ground running. We didn't have committees established in January. We didn't even have committee chairman established in January after Trump was elected. One of the reasons we got off to such a slow start…was, we didn't have committees, because Paul Ryan wouldn't give anybody a committee assignment, much less a chairmanship, until he won the vote on the floor on January 3rd for speaker. So…that was a little more Machiavellian than even John Boehner.
Foster: You mentioned that phrase "repeal and replace," a phrase that has been with us since March of 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was actually passed….Why isn't there a Republican proposal? Like, a sound one?…It's been a really long time, and what I saw happen was just this dog's breakfast of bad ideas, and I don't know that this would have been much better if any other Republican had been elected president, because the president didn't have any ideas, but it didn't seem like there was a real, concrete idea among Republicans more broadly.
Massie: Well I can tell you what if we had elected Rand Paul we wouldn't be in this malaise right now with regards to health care. I mean, he's a doctor and he understands what's broken. […] And I co-sponsored his offer here in the House to reform health care, or health insurance.
But let me say there are a lot of members on the Hill here who are walking around as if somebody shot their dog. They look so depressed—and it's just a few of them, I'm not going to name their names—borderline in tears, because they have come to the realization that we don't really have 218 conservatives here in the House that meant what they said when they said they wanted to repeal Obamacare root and branch. That's sort of the terrifying thing here….There is this sense, this coming to grips with reality, that it's going to be hard to get anything done that resembles what we campaigned on, given the lack of a moral constitution among our colleagues here. And some of that is pressure from lobbyists, from the health insurance industry, some of that is just fear of not getting re-elected. But they really have sort of lost their constitution here.
Moynihan: […] You saw this tweet where [President Trump is] attacking the Freedom Caucus, attacking Heritage and Club for Growth, and the Freedom Caucus is something that was created with ideology in mind, with ideological principles. You have a president who seems to be rather shaky on what his own ideological principles are. Steve Bannon, obviously, as you well know, is a populist and somebody who hates trade….As a person like you, a congressman like you, when you are in the Freedom Caucus, when you're lined up ideologically, and you have a president that is like this, what is it like for governing, and what is your hope like for the future?
Massie: Well, I'm still hopeful, okay? There are moments when populism lines up with libertarianism. But let me tell you about a realization that I came to when I was in Iowa campaigning for Senator Rand Paul to be president.
You see in 2012, his dad did very well in Iowa, got like a quarter of the vote and a quarter of the vote in New Hampshire, and did very well in Nevada. I ran in 2012 on the same sort of libertarian ideas. Senator Rand Paul had blown a hole through the establishment Republican Party in Kentucky in 2010 on libertarian/republican ideas, and so I thought the libertarian ideology within the Republican party was really catching on, that it was popular. But then when I went to Iowa I saw that the same people that had voted for Ron Paul weren't voting for Rand Paul, they were voting for Donald Trump. And the same thing happened in Kentucky, the people who were my voters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the primary. And so I was in a funk because how could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren't voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage. […]
Welch: That leads to a follow-up, which is that right now we are in this weird position where after the Friday vote, Trump's original comments were kind of magnanimous, he blamed Democrats halfheartedly, he said they are going to come and eventually realize that they need to help write the bill. But as the weekend progressed you saw a lot of Trumpworld going after the House Freedom Caucus pretty strenuously. And so isn't it so that perhaps in this moment, 30 of you people—and again, I realize you're not in the Freedom Caucus, but you are next to them—you guys are once again the craziest people in the room, you are crazier than Trump? Trump is now collaborating with Paul Ryan, he's getting like plaudits from the Marc Thiessens of the world, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, all of these kind of institutional sellouts are sitting there and saying "It's all you crazy people over there who are the problem." So maybe you guys can get some of your lunatic mojo back?
Massie: You know, Donald Trump campaigned on draining the swamp. If he gets up here and hops in and thinks it's a hot tub, like the rest of these guys, we're going to be in trouble. This was my great fear. You know, I joked about ideology and why Trump was elected, but I think when people looked at 16 candidates on the stage they said "That's the guy that doesn't owe anybody in Washington, D.C. anything, and that's the guy least likely to fall in league with the rest of them when he gets there, and the guy most likely to get us some change." And that's why they voted for him.
The biggest risk of this is going to be if he comes here and he doesn't do what he said, and if he becomes establishment, then the next revolution is not going to be at the ballot box. I mean they are literally going to be here with pitchforks and torches if electing Donald Trump didn't change anything. What the hell is going to change anything? That's what I think may be the next step.
But I'm still hopeful. I think he'll realize—hopefully, because he has lashed out at the Freedom Caucus, but I think he's lashed out at everybody over this—I'm hoping when it all settles that he'll see that we did him a favor, that conservatives in the House did him a favor by showing him that this next real estate purchase had a bad foundation.
Foster: Well the rumblings out of Washington now suggest that with the debacle of this health care reform effort in the rearview mirror that we are moving quickly toward potentially some sort of tax reform. You talked a moment ago, you suggested that there were some parallels, some similarities, some points of overlap between sort of economic nationalism, populism in other words, and libertarianism. Where are those points and how do they come into play here? I mean Paul Ryan is a guy who has traditionally been about balanced budgets and reducing taxes and all those traditional conservative things…but more recently he's talking about this border tax that's been floated around, and there's nothing particularly free market about that. That is populist as all hell…. [So] where are these points of agreement? How do you see things breaking down when it comes to the tax proposal that is yet to materialize, but seems to be developing? […]
Massie: Where I thought that populism and libertarianism might overlap is the fact that we are sick and tired of paying for the defense of other countries, and sick and tired of all these wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. That seems to be a populist thing, and I was hopeful that Trump would get here and follow through on that…
Welch: I appreciate the past tense there.
Foster: He seems to be disappointing on that score.
Massie: Yeah, well, I didn't say I'm no longer hopeful….
Also the concept that we are a sovereign country. Now…libertarians may disagree on this, maybe they like the World Trade Organization, but I can tell you Ron Paul was never a fan and I'm not a fan either for the same reason: that we are giving up sovereignty to them. And so that's sort of a populist notion that overlaps at least with my flavor of libertarianism.
Taxes are bad, okay? All taxes are bad. But the border adjustment tax is similar in effect, or at least economically, to the economic distribution of a Fair Tax, which is a very popular notion. The libertarian concept is that you have no tax, I guess, but you have to collect a tax somewhere, and the economic result of a Fair Tax is very similar to the border adjustment tax.
Moynihan: […] To the point you were saying about foreign policy: Lindsey Graham—and talk about people who have been denounced by Donald Trump, though I guess everybody has at this point—Lindsey Graham today was talking to Hugh Hewitt, and he said, "You know, I talked to Donald Trump on the phone today and it was a lovely conversation." Hugh Hewitt said "He's taking shots at you."
"He takes shots at everyone! Now we are pals, and here's why we're pals." And he said "Look, you know, Donald Trump said to me on the phone today"—and this was today on Hugh Hewitt's show—"the military that you want is the one that I'm going to build, don't you worry about it for one second." And of course we see this with this idea of, you know, a 300-ship Navy, and expanding military spending greatly, and of course what we've seen already is not only the failed raid in Yemen, a strike in Mosul that appears to have had the largest civilian casualty count since America pulled out of Iraq, apparently an attack in Aleppo that killed a lot of civilians too. And Lindsey Graham was saying that "I have nothing but the utmost faith in Donald Trump that his military so far and his military actions have made me happier than anything in the past eight years." I'm paraphrasing, but that's what he said….
You know, it strikes me that there is a lot that we can't really trust him on this. I know there was some excitement among anti-war libertarians, or sort of more inward looking—I don't want to say isolationist—libertarians. Does the feeling that you get is that Donald Trump is going to be swallowed by the machine or be stewing in—your words—in the hot tub swamp of Washington, D.C., and just become like Obama, like George W. Bush before him? Is that something that concerns you?
Massie: […] It's too early to tell. Really, it's too early to tell.
Moynihan: But trending in a bad direction?
Massie: Well, you know, I hate to keep saying "I was hopeful," but I was hopeful when he hired Mick Mulvaney to be the head of OMB, because Mulvaney was always the guy that would offer amendments on the DoD appropriations bills to cut money here or there, spending that the generals and admirals didn't want but the congressmen did. Like there's a law—there is literally a law—that says they have to, regardless of what the admirals want, the Navy has to keep I think it's 11 aircraft carriers, regardless of whether that's really what they believe is best. And this probably has to do with the people that supply parts to the aircraft carriers and put them in dry docks and whatnot. But Mulvaney offered the amendment every year to reduce the minimum requirement from 11 to 10, and it was one of those things the Heritage organization always scored against. And I like those guys at Heritage, but you know, they're definitely not against global involvement and a very large military. […]
In any case, what we've seen from the budget is actually probably the dream of the neocons for military spending. And it's spending-neutral, I guess: They cut as much as they add to the military, they cut elsewhere in domestic spending. But I would have loved to see them put that toward deficit reduction.
Welch: Quick question on the spending: They basically traded I think it's $60 billion dollars of money for military, Department of Homeland Security and Veteran's Affairs in return for $63 billion in cuts to agencies like the EPA and whatnot, 31 percent. I'm not going to accuse you of hanging out with Democrats all day long, however, what is your sense of the…realistic possibilities that any Congress that you are familiar with is going to cut 31 percent out of the Environmental Protection Agency this year?
Massie: You want me to give you odds?
Welch: Yeah I do, MIT.
Massie: I'm going with five percent odds.
Welch: So we are going to get those military boosts, because Paul Ryan and everybody else there not named you or Justin Amash has been bitching and moaning about the sequestration cuts forever, we've never seen a military so cut to the bone as what we have right now. So they are going to jump all over that, and then they are not going to make all these steep agency cuts that [are] the only way that the Trump budget is going to be maintain the same levels of spending as the Obama budget.
Massie: I didn't say they wouldn't, I said there was a five percent chance they would. I'm an optimist! […]
Here's the problem. I didn't realize this until I got to Congress, and I serve on three different committees. The EPA is in somebody's committee. There's a chairman of a committee that has jurisdiction over the EPA, and all the chairmen are Republican chairmen, and they have got, everybody's got a castle, and they are always trying to fortify it. Every chairman thinks it's his job to make sure all the money keeps flowing into his committee, and they really don't want to give up money. It's like we've spent $100 billion dollars in Afghanistan rebuilding their infrastructure and we are on the hook to spend another $10 billion. Now, 90 percent of America would like to take that $10 billion and put it down toward our own infrastructure, but there's a chairman of the committee somewhere that's saying "By God, you are not touching my money that I'm giving to Afghanistan!" And he's Republican, and that's the problem. […]
Welch: Let me throw one last question before we let you go here. You have authored a terrific one-sentence bill to get rid of the Department of Education by 2018, if I have it correctly. So I was just working on a feature for Reason about the possibilities for deregulation during the Trump presidency, which are actually pretty great; they are interesting to watch. And one skeptic about your bill said eliminating the Department of Education actually doesn't do very much because the underlying legislation dates from 1965 and it authorizes the federal government to throw a bunch of money into local education systems, school systems, and until you go after the underlying legislation, there's got to be some agency out there that's overseeing the program and spending the money. So what is your response to this critique, sir?
Massie: It's a fair charge. I had to decide whether to write a one-sentence bill that I could get a lot of people to agree with, or a very involved bill that talks about what happens to all that funding, and then people start disagreeing. But I thought, let's cut the head off the beast first and then we will figure out how to distribute its parts. […] My bill says "The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31st, 2018." Eight words and two numbers, that's it, that's the whole bill. And I thought if I keep it short I can get some of these guys to read the bill. And I still get people coming up to me asking me "What's your bill say? What's it do?" […]
So I've said there are three things you could do after you eliminate the Department of Education. By the way, what I'm eliminating is Betsy DeVos' job, which is what the liberals wanted me to do; I introduced the bill the day the Senate confirmed her, literally while they were voting on her. But it eliminates 4,500 other jobs in Washington, D.C., that are an average salary of a $105,000 dollars apiece, so you are talking about half a billion dollars in salaries that it would get rid of. Okay, that, unequivocally, the bill does, but what to do with the grants and whatnot?
You could either send things like Pell grants to the Treasury to administer for instance, and student loans to the Treasury. Head Start is already administered by Health and Human Services and the School Lunch Program is already administered by the USDA. You could either assign those programs to other departments and totally eliminate this department, which gets you back to about where you were before Jimmy Carter put the department in place, or you could block-grant this stuff back to the states. Every state has a Department of Education and they can do a better job administering these programs. Or third option, my favorite, is get rid of the funding for these programs and let the states fund the program so that the states collect the money and distribute the money within their states, because there's no magic about sending the money to Washington, D.C., and then begging to get it back, and then agreeing to jump through hoops in order to qualify for that money. Just let the states collect it and distribute it and that would be the constitutional thing.
Foster: Well Congressman Massie I appreciate you joining us, we will not hold you any longer sir. Thank you for playing ball and for chopping it up.
Massie: Thanks for having me here. Michael can you show up on time next time please?
Moynihan: No, I can't. I'm usually late for congressmen, just to show my contempt for the process in Washington, D.C. But you are one of the good ones so I admit to an error this time.
Massie: The contempt is warranted, trust me.
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]]>In a post yesterday about President Donald Trump's record number of Congressional Review Act-enabled repeals of regulations, I tacked on a bullet-pointed list of other Trumpian moves to roll back the regulatory state. Not included was his proposed budget, despite the fact that it features impressive year-over-year cuts to the executive branch—30.4 percent from the Environmental Protection Agency, 20.7 percent from the Departments of Labor and Agriculture, and so on. So why didn't I include Trump's proposed deconstruction of the administrative state? Because presidents don't pass budgets, and congressional Republicans don't want to cut spending.
Last night, in an episode of The Fifth Column, I asked the great libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to assess the realistic possibilities that Congress this year will approve such budgetary measures as a 30-plus percent cut in the EPA. "You want me to give you odds?" Massie said. "I'd go with five percent odds."
To be clear, Massie is in the lonely minority that would delight in taking a machete to the regulatory state—the man did, after all, propose a one-sentence bill last month to abolish the Department of Education. But as we lurch from the Ryancare debacle to yet another self-inflicted government shutdown deadline of April 28, congressional Republicans are already going on the record as saying Trump's cuts, as predicted in this space, ain't happening.
"We just voted to plus up the N.I.H.," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), complained to The New York Times, referencing Trump's proposed $1.2 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health. "It would be difficult to get the votes to then cut it."
Also balking at the N.I.H. cuts are Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) ("It's penny-wise but pound-foolish") and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who told the Washington Examiner that "You don't pretend to balance the budget by cutting life-saving biomedical research when the real cause of the federal debt is runaway entitlement spending."
More GOP objections, as reported by the NYT:
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, was more blunt. "I think it is too late for this year," she said about the proposed cuts, echoing several Republican colleagues. As for a border wall, which is not well supported by American voters, "that debate belongs in the next fiscal year," she said. […]
"I'm not going to spend a lot of money on a wall," said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "I'm not going to support a big cut to the N.I.H. I'm not going to support big cuts to the State Department."
Recall, too, that Robert Draper of The New York Times Magazine quoted a "top House Republican staff member" on Trump's agency cuts thusly: "even the cabinet secretaries at the E.P.A. and Interior are saying these cuts aren't going to happen."
So these are your politics for the next calendar month: The media and various activist/constituency groups will sound a never-ending alarm about the terrible effects of Trump's heartless budget cuts, while a unified Republican Congress that cannot even pass a budget anymore blunders along toward another artificial government-funding deadline that will likely result in some kind of spending deal that does not, in fact, cut spending. Good work, America!
The post Turns Out Congressional Republicans Don't Really Want to Cut Spending appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A couple of hours after Ryancare went down to a dusty death on Friday, The Fifth Column, your weekly podcast troika of Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and me, popped open some Flying Dog and Johnnie Walker and let 'er rip. You can listen right here:
Among the cud chewed: President Donald Trump's possible post-Ryancare pivots, Republican confusion on Obamacare, this article by Peter Suderman, the Israeli anti-JCC bomb-threat caller, media susceptibility to hoaxes, Moynihan's forthcoming HBO documentary on American foreign policy post-"New World Order" speech, Kmele's weird experiences in New York real estate, some Masshole named Steve, and much more.
Consume and interact with The Fifth Column on at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
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]]>After an unseemly hiatus, The Fifth Column, your usually-weekly podcast threesome of Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and moi, has come back with a nearly two-hour episode that begins with a lengthy reaction to President Donald Trump's speech to Congress Tuesday night. Sub-themes include:
* His Obama-like, laughably unrealistic grandiosity.
* His economic illiteracy and budget-busting.
* His excellent approach toward the Food and Drug Administration, and potentially other aspects of regulatory reform.
* His insanely bad idea that a border wall will end illegal drug use.
* His cynical and fact-challenged ideas about illegal-immigrant criminality.
* His military re-bloating.
* His Berniesque trade populism.
* And his ballyhooed yet still factually dubious section on Yemen.
Along the way there are analyses of Sweden's refugee/immigration issues, Trump's stupidly controversial photo-up with representatives of historically black colleges, and, of course, Moynihan's Jesse Jackcent. Whole episode here:
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The post Trump's Over-Praised State of the Union: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On the previous episode of The Fifth Column, your weekly three-headed podcast helmed by Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan made the brave prediction that Mike Flynn was a goner. So proud was Kmele that Hollywood finally got something right that he gave him his very own certificate of merit (pictured).
This week's version drills into more of the Flynn fallout—the deep state anxieties, surveillance/leaking hypocrisy, and this absolutely hysterical column from Simpleton Thomas L. "Suck. On. This." Friedman. We also talk about the stupid media preening and self-delusion about banning Kellyanne Conway from cable news shows, the fecklessness of Republicans on Capitol Hill, and the comparative arguments for covering Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Richard Spencer. Listen to the whole beeswax here:
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The post Fables of the DeFlynnestration: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Is there no political controversy that can't be responded to by pointing out the bias of journalists and hyperventilating of opponents? On the latest edition of The Fifth Column, the weekly podcast I co-host with Kmele Foster and Michael "Hollywood" Moynihan, we tangle over that question and so much more with Moynihan substitute Kevin Williamson of National Review. Williamson comes out in favor of explicitly restricting Muslim immigration, due to concerns of terrorism and assimilation; I argue differently, and Kmele is just asking questions, including What role did U.S. foreign policy play in creating the refugee mess?
It's a lively discussion, including some rare Welchian criticism of Reason commenters, and you can listen to the whole biscuit here:
Oh yeah, neglected to link to last week's episode—that's here.
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The post Have Media-Bias Hunters Lost the Plot of Government Malfeasance? The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Didja watch President Barack Obama's final press conference Wednesday? It was a remarkable exercise in group therapy and un-self-aware filter-bubbling, in which basically each of the eight multi-part questions (and please do read all of them) could be boiled down to, Sir, um…are we gonna be all right??
Obama, who is one of the all-time great ref-workers when it comes to the media, managed to blow the perfect amount of smoke up the Fourth Estate's nether regions:
So it was that the president who set records for Espionage Act prosecutions and reporter- subpoenaing and Freedom of Information Act stonewalling was able to say with a straight face, without anyone in the press room openly snickering, that one of the issues that will bring him off the sidelines and into the fray during his post-presidency is whether there are "Institutional efforts to silence dissent."
We have some spirited discussion about the media's sudden rediscovery of the virtues of hating on the American president in the latest episode of The Fifth Column, the weekly podcast I co-host with Kmele Foster and Michael "Hollywood" Moynihan. The latter was off reporting on the Inauguration festivities last night, so we supplanted him with beloved serial Reason contributor and renegade historian Thaddeus Russell, author most recently of a wonderful February-issue essay on the progressive roots of mass incarceration. Bad Thad talks about that piece, the conspiracy theorizing of civil rights hero John Lewis, Obama's commutation of Chelsea Manning's sentence, the problems with sovereignty-busting drone warfare, and, of course, Hamilton, which he had seen for the first time hours before. He also goes full Choom Gang with a discussion about how there is no such thing as "objective reality," and I'm pretty sure by the end Kmele caught the fumes. Listen:
For more places to get your Fifth Column on, check out iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post The Media's Obama-Sycophancy and Disinterest in Robot Wars: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Life comes at you fast, particularly if you're trying to follow the news this week. Late yesterday afternoon, CNN broke the serious news that four senior U.S. intelligence chiefs briefed both President Barack Obama and President-Elect Donald Trump about "allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump." On the subway ride over to record The Fifth Column, the weekly podcast I co-host with Kmele Foster and Michael C. Moynihan, Buzzfeed made the more questionable decision to release an uncorroborated report from an anonymous self-described intelligence source that included, among other allegations, that Trump hired Russian prostitutes to urinate on a Moscow hotel bed one slept in by Obama. And at the moment we stopped recording, the outgoing president delivered his farewell address.
So obviously the podcast spent the first 15 minutes talking about Costa Rica beaches and British holiday barfing habits. But THEN we get into the nitty gritty, including sober policy talk about Obamacare, the government-aggrandizing senatorial hysteria during Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions' confirmation hearings, and, yes, the peeing story. The news cycle has since thundered on, but you can listen to the snapshot reaction here:
Interact more with The Fifth Column check out iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Sessions, Speeches, and Showers: <em>The Fifth Column</em> Reacts appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>December is always a fun month after party-changing presidential elections. Take a cross-section from the political commentary of December 2008, 2000, 1992, 1980, 1976, 1968, 1960 on backward, and you are certain to capture hypocrites, opportunists, self-identified pragmatists, and everyday voters in mid-transformation between yesterday's deeply held conviction and tomorrow's opposite positioning.
As I write in today's L.A. Times, such moments are fine occasions to reflect on the underrated virtues of political ideology, as well as to point and laugh. Excerpt:
Republican public opinion on Vladimir Putin has been jerked like a needle across vinyl. Since July 2016, when Trump was coronated as leader of the GOP, Putin's net favorability among Republicans has increased by a stunning 56 percentage points, according to an Economist/YouGov poll released this month. […]
Remember when Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president"? Democrats claimed that was just about the most egregious example of premeditated obstructionism they'd ever heard — until they found themselves bereft of executive power. According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.): "Past is present, and what goes around comes around." Also, same to you, but more of it.
It really wasn't that long ago, to cite another rapidly changing value, that liberals thought bigotry lurked behind state-government opposition to federal mandates. As a February 2016 Vox headline informed us, the term "states' rights" is part of the "sneaky language today's politicians use to get away with racism and sexism." Yet that same website this month exulted that: "We're about to see states' rights used defensively against Trump."
Read the whole thing, including shout-outs to the libertarian-flavored pushback to proposed Trumpian overreach, here.
I discussed political shapeshifting season, among many other topics, on this week's episode of The Fifth Column podcast, which you can listen to here:
The post It's Political Spot-Changing Season! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Do you miss The Independents? Ever wonder what it would have sounded like as a no-holds-barred podcast, only with Michael C. Moynihan hogging all the oxygen? WELL WONDER NO LONGER. America's favorite libertarian TV hostess and stalwart friend o' Reason Kennedy dropped by The Fifth Column last night for a wide-ranging conversation about Rex Tillerson, Russkies, internal cable news feeds, MDMA therapy, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest meditation on Barack Obama and American racism, among other topics.
It's a rollicking good time and you can listen to the whole thing here:
You can experience The Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Independents Reassemble! Kennedy Does <em>The Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>So what is all this "fake news" talk about anyway? That's what they wanted to ask me Thursday on KABC 790 AM's Dr. Drew Midday Live program. I'm on the first 20 or so minutes right here:
Later that day, vanquished presidential candidate Hillary Clinton issued her awful if predictable call for Congress to act "quickly" on the fake news "epidemic," which became (along with assessing the true scope/importance of the Alt Right) a main topic of discussion that night on The Fifth Column. You can listen to the whole podcast, with guests Jimmy Failla and Jacob Siegel, below:
I also talked about the Hillary Clinton angle more on The Blaze Radio's Buck Sexton Show, which you can listen to at this link:
The post Dissecting 'Fake News' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This isn't strictly a Webathon post, but how cool is it that Reason's TV and movie critics are, respectively, the man who by acclamation wrote the very best obituary of Fidel Castro, and, well, Kurt freaking Loder? Kinda hard to believe our annual fundraising drive has fallen off the pace here close to the halfway point, with around one-third of the target money coughed up by roughly one-quarter the number of donors we had last year. C'mon, Scrooges!
THIS IS THE DONATE BUTTON. HIT IT.
As mentioned in our inaugural 2016 Webathon post, part of what we've done since last year is make new types of media for you to enjoy. One such example is The Fifth Column, a weekly podcast helmed by beloved anarcho-whatever Kmele Foster, and co-hosted by former Reasoner Michael C. Moynihan and myself. We unpack the week's news there with a combination of off-kilter analysis, media criticism and alcoholism; feature such regular bits as Some Idiot Wrote This and #Kmele2020, and bring on guests like Gary Johnson, Virginia Postrel, Anthony Fisher, Thaddeus Russell, Kat Timpf, Charles C.W. Cooke, Michael Malice, Buck Sexton and more. It's been one of the more successful political podcasts inaugurated in 2016, and I've heard multiple reports that it has a strong following among the non-libertarian spouses of libertarians.
This week The Fifth Column was proud to welcome the aforementioned Glenn Garvin, who is one of the better journalists working the English language.
This superb obit is why I still admire @glenngarvin despite the fact he talks smack about me. https://t.co/aLXlaFz4rs
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) November 26, 2016
As readers around these parts know, Garvin has written some masterful pieces for Reason on Castro's favorite journalist/propagandist and his dead-ender fans academia. He's also continuing to churn out valuable post-death stuff like such as a great piece today attempting to tally up the precise number of Castro's victims. Listen to the whole podcast, which also includes discussion of Donald Trump's tweets and Kmele Foster's distaste for democracy, here:
You can catch the podcast at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
AND YOU CAN DAMN WELL DONATE TO REASON RIGHT THE HELL NOW!
The post Castro Obituarist and Reason Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin Truth-Bombs <em>The Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Has it really been three weeks since we've recorded a new episode of The Fifth Column, your very favorite podcast that stars Kmele Foster, Hollywood Mike Moynihan and yours truly? Ha ha, no, I just wanted to reward those who have already subscribed, which is Latin for sorry pal too busy you don't know the half of it. In fact we did a post-election bit Nov. 11 with comedian Andrew Schulz, and then a pretty slurry one Nov. 18 with Kat Timpf, after which, as I explain in this week's installment, we learned about a case of reverse-Broadway discrimination that will blow your mind. Or at least make you feverishly Google through my terrible attempts to mask the drinking establishment in question….
Other topics include the lousy record of likely Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Kanye West's ongoing breakdown, and the great Saturday Night Live commercial for "The Bubble," which you should just probably watch right now:
Here is the whole Fifth Column episode:
URLs at which you can download, interact with, recommend to your friends about, and write reviews of, The Fifth Column include: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Happy Broadway-Boycott Thanksgiving From <em>The Fifth Column</em>! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Such is Kmele Foster's dedication to the craft of podcasting that the would-be 2020 candidate called into this week's edition of The Fifth Column via cell phone from Easter freaking Island, where he engaged in (surprise!) apologetics for Donald Trump's handling of David Duke's enthusiasm for his campaign. (In fairness, this was recorded before Trump's crappier son Eric said that Duke "deserves a bullet.")
Other topics of conversation in this, the last Sedition before the Sweet Meteor of Death delivers us all eternal release: Bill Weld's defense of the statist president-to-probably-be, whether any other Libertarian Party configuration could have produced better results, the human SJW centipede devouring Amy Schumer, and the preponderance in broadcast media of people who pretend to know subjects they are utterly unfamiliar with. Listen up here:
URLs at which you can download, interact with, recommend to your friends about, and write reviews of, The Fifth Column include: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Weld's Bells and Other Late Campaign Hits: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One of my very favorite comedians on the Red Eye circuit is Andrew Schulz, co-conspirator of The Brilliant Idiots podcast. In the continued truancy of Hollywood Mike Moynihan, Schulz filled out the Triangle of Truthiness in the latest edition of The Fifth Column. He talked about getting turfed by Jerry Seinfeld, comedying about race as a New York white boy, and getting jumped on the Upper East Side back before the Big Apple was the safest big city in America.
Other questions addressed this week: Did Gary Johnson blow his chance? Why and when did the black vote go 90 percent Democratic? Is it possible to talk for 15 minutes about a racism documentary I've never seen? Will Kmele Foster find some way to criticize that ballyhooed Saturday Night Live sketch? I also do some ranting about James O'Keefe's latest duck video, Schulz disputes the pharmacological sameness of meth and Adderall, and various swear words are uttered and pondered. Listen heah:
Here are the locations at which you can download, interact with, recommend to your friends about, and write reviews of, The Fifth Column: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Black Votes Matter: The New <em>Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Though he is too "busy" to find it online for me, former Reasoner Michael C. Moynihan had a segment on Vice News last night in which he attended a JFK conspiracy conference and interviewed an attending Roger Stone, author of (among many other curiosities) The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ. Of course, Stone is no marginalized questions-asker in Election 2016: He has been among the closest advisers to Donald Trump throughout. (Read Anthony Fisher's mini-interview with sharp-dressed man at the Republican National Convention.) Which makes his frequently suggestive observations that much more newsworthy:
At meeting of JFK conspiracy buffs today, Roger Stone says "internal workings" of Media Matters will be "exposed to the public" next week
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) October 17, 2016
With Donald Trump's post-Billy Bush pivot to Full Metal Deplorable, it is, I contend, a Roger Stone finish to an already pretty Stonetastic Trump campaign. The second presidential debate was ripped right out of the pages of his most recent book, The Clintons' War on Women, and God only knows what fresh hell awaits us tonight.
That, more or less, is the topic of this week's rambling, conspiratorial edition of The Fifth Column, your very favorite weekly libertarian podcast. Mentioned along the way: Jesse Walker on voter fraud, James O'Keefe's latest revelations, Hit & Run commenters, Moynihan's terrible accent, the re-re-re-retaking of Mosul, my secret Al Gore 2000 conspiracy, PEN America's attempt to find a Third Way on campus free speech, Kmele Foster's ongoing 2020 presidential campaign, and so very much more. Take a listen:
Here are the locations at which you can download, interact with, recommend to your friends about, and write reviews of, The Fifth Column: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post The Roger Stone Home Stretch of Election 2016 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In fairness, this latest episode of The Fifth Column, the weekly three-headed podcast of "analysis, commentary, sedition," was recorded last night just as the world was discovering a rash of new sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump. So Kmele Foster's qualified defense may not be aging as well this morning….Still, we soldier on, R-rated, through the crazy political news of this week, including but not limited to Wikileaks revelations about Hillary Clinton, the Red Menace allegedly behind them, the Mormon-led GOP revolt against Donald Trump, Michael C. Moynihan's fancy new Vice News job and interviews with Glenn Beck and Evan McMullin, and the disingenuousness of some of our never-Libertarian conservative pals complaining that Gary Johnson isn't libertarian enough.
Come for the Michael McDonald impressions, stay for the Cold War onanism:
Here are the places where you can download, interact with, recommend to your friends about, and write reviews of, The Fifth Column: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Locker-Room Talk With <em>The Fifth Column</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Since Michael C. Moynihan's "train didn't work," The Fifth Column, your very favorite libertarian-friendly podcast, found itself down a man for the first half of this week's show. Then we saw this guy (pictured) muttering to himself near Times Square…and the rest is political/broadcast history!
Among the topics you may expect: Kmele challenged Johnson's emphasis on the racial disparities of crime statistics, I asked him whether there was any truth to the Boston Globe's disputed reporting that he angrily rebuffed attempts by Weld strategists to see whether the L.P. ticket could be flipped (answer: no), and we managed to channel Moynihan enough to talk about the potentially worrisome mix between foreign-policy ignorance and the imperatives of the presidency. Among the topics you may not expect was whether Kmele should run for president in 2020, and would Johnson agree to be his vice president?
Moynihan joins for the second half of the show, and many idiots are shamed. Listen to the whole thing here:
Here are the places where you can download, interact with, recommend to your friends about, and write glowing reviews of, The Fifth Column: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
* Bonus quiz: Which will be the "news" outlet to run with this endorsement as evidence of further "tension in the L.P. ticket"? And how long will it take?
The post Gary Johnson Endorses* Kmele Foster for 2020: <em>The Fifth Column</em> Goes Presidential appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ex-Reasoner Michael C. Moynihan, the third wheel (heel?) of The Fifth Column, pronounced at the close of this latest (and longest!) episode of the world's greatest podcast that it was our "best ever." Then again, he was drunk, and had spent much of the time just cold rambling about porn.
No really, good stuff here, on topics including:
* Gary Johnson's latest "Aleppo moment."
* Hillary Clinton's off-puttingness even when standing next to Donald Trump.
* The risible notion that a vote for not-Hillary is a vote for war, because Al Gore or something.
* California's ridiculous put-condoms-on-porn-dicks ballot initiative.
* Kmele Foster getting called "coon," "Uncle Tom," and worse for not jumping to conclusions about officer-involved shootings.
* Ayn Rand's great writing on racism and collectivism.
* Kmele's new Yeezys (pictured).
Go ahead and give it a listen:
Now, here are the places you can download, interact with, recommend to your friends about, write glowing reviews of, and submit your fan-art to, The Fifth Column: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.
The post Basket of Aleppos, Moynihan's Porn, and Uncle Tom's Yeezys: It's the Best <em>Fifth Column</em> Ever! appeared first on Reason.com.
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