Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. You're with Give the People What They Want, brought to you by People's Dispatch, that's Zoe and Prashant. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter, coming to you every week. This is our 134th episode. As usual, laser focused our eyes on the question of world hunger. Every time the United Nations brings out a report on the question of hunger, we are right there. People's Dispatch, Globetrotter, not trying to ever obfuscate the fact that people are getting hungrier and hungrier. Prashant, this report, one in ten, I know that the numbers are obviously not as high in these reports as reality, but the trend line is pretty startling. Right, I mean, I think there are two things.  And also the fact that when we talk about something like hunger, these official reports often carry categories. The numbers that I mentioned here, people falling into various categories. So we're not talking about hunger versus a good diet or hunger versus good health, for that matter. We're talking about various levels of hunger which is why the numbers are in that way really staggering as well in their own respects. So I think the latest report, and this report is by, of course, five organizations, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund, all of them sort of compiling this report and which says that 691 million and 783 million anywhere between this is the total number of people who are facing hunger. Mind you, this is not the people who have access to a good diet will come to that later. Or don't have access to a good diet will come to that later. And I think two important trends that we need to capture because we're looking at this number like I said between 691 million and 783 million people. And if you take, say, the mid-level number that's around 730 or 720 million, this is still a huge increase from pre-pandemic levels. So over the past few years, you know, we often, people often said that, okay, the pandemic is the reason why things are bad now people are saying the Ukraine war is the reason why, you know, things are a bit bad, et cetera, et cetera. But one thing to notice is that even if the pandemic had not been considered and now this is 2023, we can't really use an excuse anymore. The fact is that we are still massively, far more people are hungry when compared to the pre-pandemic years. And I think the numbers are again, 9.2% of the world's population faces chronic hunger in 2022 as opposed to 7.9% in 2019. And I think this is interesting also to sort of look at in the context, the most important question is that is the problem one of food production itself? And the answer is that clearly it's not because, you know, there is enough food for I think to almost feed the world's population twice or almost. So definitely if close to a billion people of some 730 million people are facing chronic hunger clearly it's not an issue of availability of food or the production of food. It's basically a question of how food is distributed, how the world economy structure itself which gives rise to this crisis. But if you go a bit more into the details there are some other numbers which are almost as shocking as well, which is that if you look at the number of people who do not have access to, say, safe, nutritious and sufficient food that's around nearly 30% of the world's population. So you see that is an incredible number 2.4 billion people facing moderate or severe food insecurity. And that I think is more than enough evidence of the fact that there is definitely a problem and you cannot blame this on the pandemic, you cannot blame this on the war because the report itself says so which is the fact that if the pandemic had not happened, if the you know if the war had not happened we still would not be in a position to meet our goals for 2030 which is to eliminate hunger. This is one of the sustainable development goals that the United Nations had put forward that by 2030 we should eliminate hunger. So even if there was no pandemic even if there was no war, we were nowhere close to meeting the kind of target and I believe even if these two were not there there would still be hundreds of millions of people who were hungry and the report makes it very clear. Of course the report also goes more into the impact of urbanization. It talks about you know the impact of stunting how children and women are especially affected by this crisis all that very much in focus and I think the larger numbers which are really which really make you question what is it about how the world is structured right now in this context also just recently went through the tricontinatal dossier on you know a different development model and I think it stresses some of the very similar set of points it's capitalism itself and the kind of development model it has brought across the world it's accessible for this glaring lack of you know equality among people and the fact that millions and hundreds of millions of people are remaining hungry in 2023 at a time when we are producing enough food to almost feed the world twice over. It's a really important story we're going to keep following this of course but let's move on now to another interesting development in Brussels the organization which represents Latin American Caribbean states is meeting alongside the European Union Zoe I was interested to see human rights watch writes a letter to the heads of governments about Nicaragua saying that there are human rights violations in Nicaragua why is Nicaragua participating it's very interesting I looked at the details on incarceration Nicaragua incarcerates 332 people for 100,000 of population United States incarcerates 164 people for 100,000 population double the incarceration rate I didn't see human rights watch write a report about the United States to the NATO members we're going to come back to the NATO summit what's going on in Brussels I mean you could even say how are any of the European countries having the moral ground to even participate in any international space if we're going to put limits on countries but yes they are meeting Monday and Tuesday in Brussels heads of state from CELAC heads of state from European Union an important bilateral meeting by regional meeting sorry that is the first in eight years quite an interesting moment we're seeing that CELAC which is of course a platform of regional integration of Latin American the Caribbean which for a couple of years had sort of fallen into the background as the organization of American states was attempting to resurrect itself but that has once again proved not possible for the OAS has now kind of just been relegated to this figure of ridicule and distress and CELAC has really emerged as the primary platform for economic cooperation for trade for medical cooperation and all sorts of pressing discussions within Latin American the Caribbean and it is the primary partner in these sort of bi-regional dialogues and so they're going to Brussels Monday and Tuesday but this meeting has not been without its difficulties and so in this week leading up to the summit several Latin American authorities and civil society organizations have been raising the alarms about the attitude of the European Union regarding the summit it would appear that Europe is still trapped in this sort of colonial mentality where it thinks that it can dictate who comes to the table what they discuss and what sort of positions they're going to take and so specifically with the war in Ukraine the European Union wanted to invite Glomir Zelensky to participate in the summit despite the fact that the countries of Latin American the Caribbean have really maintained the majority of them a position of neutrality a position of non-involvement of non-alignment of refusing to send weapons of refusing to kind of take this strong position that EU and the US and North American countries have taken they also the EU also in their draft declaration that was circulated to CELAC before in this week it also included a clause that sharply condemned Russia that expressed support behind Ukraine this was also rejected by Latin American leaders who again have had this position of non-alignment and finally of course the EU has continued to attack countries including Nicaragua including Venezuela and they even passed a resolution in the European Parliament days of course in an attempt to intimidate against Cuba saying that Cuba was a violator of human rights and that Diaz Kenneth who is currently in Europe who traveled to Europe for the summit should be sanctioned by the EU so these are clear acts of I mean in some ways the resolution against Cuba is an act of intimidation they also said that authoritarian leaders should not participate in the CELAC EU summit nevertheless Latin American leaders are determined to make this summit a success the cooperation between these two regions is crucial especially in the area of development and especially in the area of the environment where Latin America of course is a region where many different European countries different companies operate where they extract and exploit the natural resources of Latin America as well so it's very important that there is dialogue between these two regions that they can come to agreements that they can engage in a space that's of equal respect and I think that's really what the Latin American leaders have called for well in Brussels you had this place called the NATO headquarters down the road from where CELAC and the European Union will be meeting just down the road in Brussels in Belgium this time the NATO summit was not held in Brussels it was the continent it was held in Lithuania in Vilnius on the 11th and 12th of July now that's interesting Lithuania is one of the first countries that was in the USSR to join NATO it joined NATO in 2004 Lithuania is also interesting because prior to the Russian entry beyond the Donbas line into Ukraine on the 24th of February Lithuania was already supplying weapons to Ukraine it has a very long history of links to this Ukrainian government and there was some expectation from Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine that at this NATO meeting in Vilnius Lithuania Ukraine would be given as it were a clear path into NATO membership this issue of NATO membership is interesting neither the United States nor Germany were happy to allow a full scale entry of Ukraine into NATO at the Vilnius summit principally because they worried that this would immediately trigger Article 5 of the Washington Treaty which set up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 Article 5 of the Washington Treaty says that if one member of a NATO state is attacked then others must respond in kind it's a collective quote-unquote defense agreement that was the articulated hesitancy coming from Washington and from Berlin well okay but on the other hand of the 28 countries that have been arming Ukraine 25 of them are NATO countries and in fact NATO has been in the lead here providing not only diplomatic support to the Ukrainian government but also military assistance and aid of different kinds now Ukrainian forces are training in many NATO countries often at bases which are used by NATO so it's very difficult for NATO to say that Ukraine has not been to some extent brought in but this hesitancy by the United States and by Germany did disappoint Mr. Zelinsky who at a public rally in Vilnius directly and frontally welcomed these countries for not absorbing Ukraine into NATO immediately there is a suggestion in Washington that Mr. Zelinsky is being a little petulant with some of his comments after all NATO is doing everything it possibly can and in fact a close reading of the Vilnius communicate demonstrates that effectively the United States and Germany have said that Ukraine is going to enter NATO with an inevitability it's simply a matter of having the hostilities either suspended with some sort of ceasefire or the end of this conflict after which NATO will absorb Ukraine I think that was very clear in the Vilnius statement equally interesting was the situation of Sweden Sweden had applied to join NATO Swedish membership had been blocked by Turkey and Hungary well Turkey said that the problem with Sweden is that Sweden is a refuge for anti-Turkish Kurdish militants and others and also that Sweden allows people to go off and burn the Quran in public well the Swedes have tightened up some of their laws to try to placate Mr. Erdogan and as well Sweden deported some of the anti-Turkish radicals who are in Sweden this was a step also Sweden said that it would help Turkey drive the agenda to bring Turkey into the European Union you got to imagine that Mr. Erdogan a real bizarre politician was able to get a lot of concessions for withdrawing Turkey's veto on allowing Sweden to enter NATO's looks now that with a vote in the Turkish parliament it looks now that the road for Sweden's entry is pretty much guaranteed interesting the first section of the Vilnius communique talked about NATO as a defensive alliance this is a interesting position that NATO has taken since 1949 talked about collective defence and so on on the other hand article 5 and its usage demonstrates that it's really difficult to think of it as a strictly defensive alliance firstly NATO spends vastly more than half the world's military budget and secondly as NATO pledges to go up to 2% of national budgets for defence as they go up to that threshold the NATO countries are going to be about 75 to 80% of world military spending it's very hard to see that as defensive its own history entering into Yugoslavia to destroy that country in 1999 entering to Afghanistan in 2003 and the destruction of Libya in 2011 that history itself does not really allow NATO to sit back and say very defensive alliance looks pretty aggressive to me as far as things go but we shall see this was the NATO summit it's an annual summit this summit seemed to be the most clear return by NATO to the cold war agenda the very clearest return to the cold war there is no hesitancy any longer you're listening to give the people what they want brought to you by People's Dispatch that's Zoe and Prashant the co-editors of People's Dispatch I'm Vijay from Globetrotter happy to be with you this week as every week Prashant we're going to go back to Kenya you know it's interesting People's Dispatch one of the few places to give global coverage to countries like Kenya and you just don't seem to want to withdraw from that position of covering important countries in the global south in Kenya quite momentous developments in a few hours we'll have a very detailed copy that lists what's happened here but also over the past few months been regularly covering the situation in Kenya Kenyan President William Ruto recently gained quite a bit of in western circles not right in other circles a lot of interest by his very strong comments against the global financial order but actually if you look at some of his performance ever since coming to power he's pretty much accepted the playbook of course one can argue that he is very little choice but he's accepted the playbook of the IMF and implemented policies which pretty much reflect that and over the past 10 days or so we have seen massive protests and unhappiness in Kenya this is building up for months by the way and a lot of it has to do with the fact that Ruto has sort of while he came to power last year winning an election which is of course as often is the case in Kenya quite controversial but nonetheless he came to power with a very pro pro agenda talking about uplifting the poor but the policies he's sort of he brought in as part of his finance package involved actually substantially raising costs for the poor in the name of what do you call generating revenue for the government and I think one of the most problematic aspects of the for many Kenyans is the fact that there was a proposal to double the value added taxes on fuel petroleum products which would basically mean that there would be a huge hit on the finances of ordinary Kenyans and then there was also this aspect of say cutting from people's salary in the name of adding to a housing fund which the communist party of Kenya many other force on the left said that would actually not benefit the people although it is ostensibly supposed to benefit the people so this has been in the news for many many months now and they have been massive protests and unhappiness about it the unions have taken a very strong stand towards it this is of course taking place at a time when sorry this is of course taking place at a time when you know the cost of living in Kenya is very high as a result of various factors Kenya is dealing with a huge crisis of debt and you know I think up to 60% of its GDP that's the rate in which it's debt lies and in the midst of all this we have this proposal which is you know what you would call a very classic neoliberal proposal so to speak right so the supreme court actually overturned or decided against this finance will operate as fast and to celebrate as a victory for the people but then president decided to implement those policies anyway which is what sparked the massive amount of protests and these protests have been quite deadly the official claims themselves are that six people have been killed and certain reports saying that it could be as many as 12 or 15 people as well and there a lot of reports of even children facing tear gas for instance massive attacks on hundreds of arrests taking place so Kenya going definitely through a very difficult situation at this point of time and at the core of it I think is a situation which many countries are facing in the global south which is that there is a huge restriction on how they can raise revenues and most of these countries are forced by bodies like international monetary fund to actually increase taxes in various ways or privatize public services in order to raise revenues for even basic functioning and there is such a huge focus on this kind of raising revenue that ultimately it is actually the people who suffer the most whereas there is actually very little provision for say in the case of Kenya it might be limited to space but there is very little provision for say imposing taxes on the rich or other forms of say obtaining credit as well and I think this is a larger question which the global community has to see which is what multilateral financial institutions have to see we know there is a BRICS meeting coming up in August does this give the possibility of countries like Kenya for instance benefitting from loans which do not come with so many conditionalities all these are of course larger and long-term questions but right now very a difficult situation on the streets of Kenya Streets of Kenya elections IMF all these things a soup that you have been covering over the past couple of years same in Guatemala you know Zoe it is hard to unravel what is going on there election results first round validated party thrown out what is going on it is a bit of a tangled web and I think that is exactly what they are trying to do is take a lot of different moves make a lot of decisions that kind of obscure what is happening obscure this democratic process and we have been covering the Guatemala electoral process now for the past several weeks since it took place on June 25 I will try to summarize it in a few words so it does not get lost people go to the polls on June 25 they are not able to vote for all of the candidates because some of the candidates were already disqualified by the courts in Guatemala which had been previously condemned they were disqualified on technicalities despite being heavily favored in the opinion polls so people go to the polls on June 25 the initial results indicate that Sandra Torres the former first lady would go to the second round and it is important to state that these elections saw pretty low participation and many many blank ballots cast so she only received for example 15% and Bernardo around 11% so these initial results indicate that they will be going to the second round days later right wing parties that did not make it to the second round lodge a formal complaint and say that there was fraud and that there needs to be a recount and the official results which had not been released yet should be suspended so the court says we are going to suspend the release of these results and we are going to do a bit of a recount and assess these complaints this process takes place and Wednesday, July 12 the supreme electoral court releases the final results affirming that Sandra Torres and Bernardo Arevalo are going to the second round of elections on August 20 an hour later a different court in Guatemala suspends the semiya party says that it suspends the legal character of this party saying that when they were collecting signatures for these elections about 5000 of them were done allegedly illegally however according to the Guatemalan constitution we are going to suspend the legal representative of one of the parties that is actively participating in these elections so the courts are at sort of this impasse where you have the electoral court saying that this party is going to the second round you have another court, the constitutional court saying that the semiya party is suspended and essentially you have people taking to the streets to say this process, these elections have already been undermined there is already a process of undermining the democratic participation of all the different parties and now that we voted they are once again trying to undermine the vote and trying to undermine the full participation of parties that do not pertain to this traditional ruling class in Guatemala the semiya party is a sort of center left party anti-corruption a little more progressive than the other parties in the traditional politics and specifically has spoken out very strongly against the previous governments that have dismantled the corruption investigations have dismantled anti-corruption laws this is one of their big platforms of semiya so right now you have a situation where there is sort of this inter-institutional conflict Bernardo Arrivalo and semiya have gone on the offensive they said this is an attack on democracy this is an attack on all people in Guatemala they have large legal complaints with different courts in Guatemala they say they are going to participate in the second round and will defend the vote of the people so it is a developing situation yesterday people were on the streets rallying, accompanying semiya party there has been a lot of different statements coming from embassies, coming from international human rights organizations saying that democracy is under attack in Guatemala will definitely be following this story as I said every hour it is a new development they have essentially contested the suspension of the party on constitutional grounds so we will see how that turns out but most likely we are going to see a second round August 20 between a semiya and one and anything besides that will be a serious setback in what has already taken place in this sort of convoluted electoral process you will be watching that there has been so much oil prices a few months ago the international monetary funds head of the Arab world made a statement saying that if oil prices don't go about 80 dollars a barrel there is going to be a problem for Saudi Arabia's exchequer Saudi Arabia had been squeezed by its war in Yemen Saudi Arabia had been squeezed by major infrastructural projects such as NIMO the Red Sea Islands project and the IMF said look declining oil prices are simply not going to assist Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia can't pump its way out of this crisis just a quick reminder to people in 2012 oil prices were well above $100 a barrel $111.63 was where it had sat then it plummeted to $43 a barrel in 2016 that decline was precipitous decline is what moved Saudi Arabia to welcome Russia into a new process called OPEC Plus where they would sit around the OPEC countries and countries like Russia which had emerged as a major energy supplier to a lot of the world for them to basically coordinate prices and volumes of oil OPEC Plus now has about 40% of the world's energy providers natural gas inside this grouping it's a very considerable grouping but by no means has the creation of OPEC Plus been easy over the course of the period since 2016 the Saudis and the Russians in particular have been really at each other's throats around volume cuts and who is selling to whom one of the big places of contest is Russia's sales to India and China now Russia is the largest seller of energy to Russia to India and Russia is emerging as the largest seller of energy to China this has been a real dent for the Saudis the Saudis have used the approach of cutting back on the volumes of barrels produced of oil per month by about a million barrels of oil a month they're bringing this down even further they believe that cutting volume is going to help prices except of course that the Russians in this period since the war have been not only upping their energy sales to countries like India and China but also offering discounted prices this is creating a real tension between Russia and Saudi Arabia it's important to focus a little bit on that tension however and by the way it's because of OPEC Plus that in 2022 oil prices were able to rise above $100 a barrel now they're again inching upwards as northern countries enter deeply into their summer of oil the United States have been buying oil in the spring to fill up their reserves in order for all the people in the summertime who drive to go visit family and friends and so on oil price you know often goes up at this time so the United States had basically filled their reserves now prices above $80 a barrel more coordination between Russia and Saudi Arabia at the last OPEC Plus meeting it would be interesting to see what happens as Russia continues to be a dominant seller of energy to India and China and how Saudi Arabia is going to react to this one reason on the table why Saudi Arabia accepted the deal with Iran brokered by China is that Saudi Arabia is eager to continue to be one of the largest energy sellers to China we shall see this is a tangled web between politics and economics can't look at one without the other you've been with give the people what they want brought to you by People's Dispatch that's Zoe and Prashant I'm Vijay from Globetrotter very happy to be with you see you next week


Every week brings another flurry of people being censured, fired, or pushed to resign for some purported instance of racism, sexism, or wrong-think. Harper's Magazine published a controversial letter signed by over 150 people, including Salman Rushdie, J.K. Rowling, and Noam Chomsky, warning that the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. One of the signatories of the letter was Camille Foster. He's the co-founder of FreeThink, a media company that showcases social and technological innovations, a co-host of the fifth column podcast, and an outspoken libertarian critic of Black Lives Matter, cancel culture, and political orthodoxy. In this wide-ranging interview, Foster explains why he signed the letter on cancel culture, why he thinks that racism is not the primary factor for most African-Americans' success or failure, and why libertarians need to be pushing individualism now more than ever. Camille Foster, thanks for talking to The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Have I mentioned I'm Nick Gillespie? Okay, thank you. So I wanted to talk with you for a while about a lot of stuff, and part of this is you are a Black man who does not identify as Black, and we're going to talk more about that in a minute. But I was thinking, I guess it was late last year I interviewed Thomas Chatterton-Williams about his fantastic recent book, Self-Portrait in Black and White, and I was happy, although not surprised to see you pop up in the pages of that book as somebody. Chatterton-Williams is, I think, in a bold move that both is prescient and kind of ignored in the current moment where he was talking about leaving Blackness as a category behind, and embracing a kind of liberal in the classical sense, and also kind of a contemporary sense of liberal individualism. And that's the only way to get rid of racial strife, in a way, is to deny it as a building, a foundational block of our society. And of course, you came up in that conversation where you had an impact on him.  This letter appeared in Harper's, Matt Welch has written about it memorably at Reason. Can you talk, Camille, about what's the point of the letter and why did you sign it? Well, first, thank you again, Nick. It's always a pleasure to chat with you. This letter came to me a couple iterations before the one that actually ended up getting released. And initially, it was a bit more explicit in suggesting that this was a dispatch from people who identify as liberals. I actually identify as a libertarian. So it's a bit of a difference there. And I didn't want to be a problem. That's why you're talking to me. We're going to talk about libertarianism in a little bit, but please continue. But ultimately, the reason I signed it and my suspicion is to the reason all of the other signatories signed it, most of whom I do not know personally, is because I have grown increasingly concerned about the climate that exists in the United States today. I perhaps have noticed that most in media, I know a lot of people in newsrooms all over the place and have heard a lot about the sensorious attitude and atmosphere, the sense that there are all kinds of things that simply cannot be said anymore. I hesitate to use the word totalitarian in some instances, but I don't really anymore with this. There's a somewhat totalitarian feeling about the desire to force people to either conform to a particular point of view or endorse it. It's not enough to simply disagree quietly. Well, silence equals consent or violence. Okay. So and you know, one of the people who was a co-signatory was Mary Weiss of the New York Times, and we're recording this on Tuesday, July 14th. Weiss has just, who we both know, has just announced her resignation from the New York Times opinion page saying that the atmosphere there is so toxic and poisonous that she's done. That's what you're talking about, right? And I think we need to be clear here, because there's an interesting argument, a counter argument that I'll get to in a second, but that it's not that you can't say what you want. It's that the minute you say something that kind of goes against a far left, really a kind of narrow consideration of what is considered an acceptable viewpoint, you will be attacked on Twitter. You will be attacked on the pages of the internet, the infinite pages of the internet for being racist, sexist, anti-trans, all sorts of things. So it's not quite right to say that you can't say these things, and the people who are pushing for cancel culture say, we're participating in free speech. All we're doing, we are voices that have not been heard before. We were locked out in the battle days of three TV networks and a couple of radio, national radio stations and things like that. And now we have a voice and we are coming for you, Camille Foster, Barry Weiss, Salman Rushdie, another signatory of the letter NJK Rowling when you say things that we think are reactionary and awful. Tell me this then, because I'm on your side and Matt Welch and I have talked a lot about this in reason context, that it's not enough to simply say we believe in free speech, but we also believe that Twitter, YouTube, etc., they're private platforms, so they have the right to say, get off, I just saw that Rush V, the Roosh or whatever, the pickup artist guy was bounced from YouTube and was crying about it on Twitter. I don't have a lot of love for him or his material, but I do believe that it's a bad thing when platforms start to narrowly restrict everything. We need a climate of free speech. I guess I'm asking, this is a wind-up to say, what is wrong with the argument advanced by some of your critics, critics of the letter, who say, you know, cancel culture is a phantasm, it doesn't exist.  Yeah, a little bit of housekeeping here, because I think some background is necessary. I'm someone who's arrived at a place where I feel comfortable signing a letter like this, somewhat reluctantly and fairly recently actually. I've long thought that there have always been things that you can't say in polite society and there have always been consequences to be visited upon people who say those things. What are those things? In the past, it could be any number of things. In the past, to simply advocate for racial equality, for example, was a dangerous idea to say that it is no great peril for people to be involved in interracial relationships was a dangerous idea. Just as a side point, this that Florida, and I remember going through this when Obama was first running for president, when he was born in the late 50s, early 60s, about 2% of Americans, according to Gallup, approved of interracial relationships, it only passed the majority in like the mid-80s. And now it's in the high 80s, 90s, and it's the dominant by far hegemonic that nobody, Bats and I, much less says anything publicly about any kind of interracial, however you define that relationship. But within my lifetime anyway, this is a big change. Yeah, yeah. And look, the fact that there are some headwinds to be fought by people who are advocating for important but unpopular ideas is not something that I am too concerned with. I have, however, arrived at a place where I am deeply concerned about the scope of things that are becoming dangerous to say. And the degree to which there is an obvious appetite for censorship and speech and thought policing, not just on the left, but on the left and the right. There is no consensus in terms of the kinds of things that each side hates necessarily. But there is a general attitude and a sensibility that says there are some things that are either too dangerous for you to hear or too dangerous for anyone to be allowed to say. What is, what's exemplary? And that scope and category of things is increasing in a way that makes me very nervous. And I think the authoritarian potential that exists in a climate like that, especially in the midst of a pandemic when, and I don't think this is crazy to suggest, it is very likely that over the course of the next decade, we'll have more government, not less. And it's very likely. I think that's the safest bet you could make.  And greater entitlement spending and entitlement programs. So we're talking about a government that's more powerful and an atmosphere that is already inclined towards censorship. That is an incredibly dangerous combination. And the right to speak freely is the most fundamental right that we have. And when you get sort of official challenges to that right, you probably have to have a culture that's a bit pliable. And to the extent that we're already seeing things, and I can tell you, Nick, I get notes from people, and I'd be interested if you do as well, I get notes from people almost every day in every walk of life who are expressing a great deal of concern and consternation about the degree to which they see things changing, their encountering speech policing, and really kind of cultural programming in context that shocked them in a way that doesn't allow them any opportunity to push back. I'm concerned about that. What are some of the instances that exemplify this on the left and on the right for you? Because again, it's technically and meaningfully true to say that you can say whatever you want pretty much. And if you can't do it on Twitter, you go to Parler, if you can't do it on YouTube, you can create your own streaming, stuff like that. But what are you talking about? And also, I want to drill down a little bit. You are not making an equivalency between what's going on, say, with Donald Trump and what's going on on the left, are you? No, but I guess we'd have to drill down and talk about what specific things the left or Donald Trump are doing that aren't equivalent. When you were signing the letter and you're like, okay, I'm going to sign this note from people, and you are kind of an outlier because you're a libertarian as opposed to a kind of mainstream liberal or even kind of progressive. I mean, somebody like Salman Rushdie or J.K. Rowling, for instance, and Barry Weiss, they are kind of you know, centrist liberals, modern contemporary liberals, you're not that, but what did you have in mind when you were like, I got to sign this letter? Well, first, that diversity of perspective that you just underscored was a principal reason for me to sign the letter. I mean, Noam Chomsky is also a signer to that letter. Noam and I disagree on virtually everything, but what we agree on is the importance of a culture that is generally inclined towards allowing, being permissive and giving folks an opportunity to make mistakes and the specter of their being genuine formal challenges to speech protections. I know that folks like Donald Trump and conservatives constantly bang on about the prospect of their speech being censored on Facebook or other social media platforms and the need for laws to fix this problem. Yeah. And in a different sort of fashion, I know that polling has consistently found that younger Americans think it is appropriate to outlaw certain kinds of speech because it might be offensive to minorities. In both instances, I think these impulses are understandable in the sense that they're discernible, but they're wrong. And I think that, again, to the extent that the cultural things occur first and they are perhaps presaging what may happen in our political lives, then it seems very important to draw line in the sand. The Supreme Court reads the newspapers, right? And the Supreme Court has been phenomenal over the past 10 or 20 years on free speech issues, but it's a lagging indicator, right? So if the culture gets very kind of repressive, suppressive, restricted, kind of constipated, one assumes the Supreme Court and laws will follow suit. Do you believe that conservatives are systematically kind of that their audiences are shriveled up on platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or do you think they're kind of off in cuckoo land with that? I'd say that places like Twitter, at least in the way that I interact with it, and it's important to note that our experiences on these platforms are very tailored to us. And I have cultivated a particular kind of experience and it leans left without a doubt. And the voices on the left are the most prominent ones in my Twitter ecosystem. I do have a lot of libertarian-ish friends and followers, and I get a lot of that as well, but the things that are most likely to be amplified are the outrages that are coming from the left. So it's hard to say in any sort of formal sense, but what seems important to me is, as you mentioned, conservatives have any number of ways to communicate with the public. And the President of the United States certainly doesn't have any trouble telling the public what he thinks and leveraging Twitter. Did you just that? I am far from concerned about any peril posed by Twitter and Facebook, generally speaking, kind of dealing with their platform as they please in order to sort of regulate how people utilize that platform. There have been some things that make me slightly nervous. I think the instinct to have Twitter and Facebook serve as the arbiters of what is true and factual, I think is a real problem and has all sorts of dangers that people are probably not aware of. I think that the impulse to outsource our critical thinking and the requirement that we evaluate the truth and accuracy of the things that we encounter is a really bad instinct. And I know that it's hard to figure out what's true that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it. You're always responsible for that. You can't wait for someone to vox explain things to you. Most of the things that are important are going to take a little bit of effort on your part. They're going to be non-obvious. So speaking of Vox, one of the other signatories, and I guess this gets to kind of the climate that we're talking about here, which is short of the the cop showing up at your door and forcing you to the camps or anything like that, one of the co-signatories of the letter was Mataglasius of Vox. And then a colleague of his who is a trans writer, tweeted part of a letter that was that they wrote to the Vox bigwigs and Mataglasius is one of the co-founders of the organization. I don't know what active role he has in the management of it, saying that they did not want a glazes to be fired or reprimanded in any way, but they wanted to make the management know that they felt unsafe as a result of the letter. Is that a bad thing? Or is that a way of applying pressure which is broadly within the realm of using free speech to kind of nudge and push and work the refs in your direction for the kind of world and the kind of discourse you want? And I guess in another way, what is wrong with that kind of... I could call it passive aggressive, I don't know. I don't want anything bad to happen to this person, but I want the world to know that as a result of a guy I work with signing a letter in a different publication, I feel less safe at work. People ought to have the ability to go to their employers and talk about the fact that they feel unsafe. I think what matters here isn't so much that it happens at all. It's the scope of things for which it happens and it's generally a culture and a climate that suggests that even trying to evaluate the quality of these concerns and the substance of these concerns is somehow problematic in and of itself. And I think that that is ridiculous. I think it is obviously true that the letter that was written is not at all transphobic. One of the principal complaints that I've saw targeted at the signatories is that somehow or another, because this diverse group of people with very different ideas all signed this document, that they are not only endorsing the contents of the letter, which is pretty benign frankly and deliberately so, that they are somehow endorsing all of one another's positions, which is just absurd. And you have on that Rowling, of course, who is now probably more famous for being a turf, a trans exclusionary radical feminist. According to some, yes. Then the Harry Potter books, but also Jirda McCloskey, a longtime contributing editor to Reason Magazine, who has been a contributing editor from the time she was Donald McCloskey. And who in other contexts is held up as somebody who attacks people, who question the kind of naturalness of being trans. So it's, yeah, I mean, we get into deep kind of waters pretty quickly. Do you think, you know, I mean, would you say that like the idea that that letter would make anybody feel unsafe is, I mean, you have trouble understanding the kind of legitimacy, not the fact of that concern, but like what's going on in the same way that Black staffers at the New York Times had publishing Tom Cotton's op-ed about, you know, bringing the troops into police, the cities for riots that have not really taken place, or civil unrest that has abated.  I mean, are you saying like these are not so concerns, and we should be pushing back against that type of hyper-exaggerated fear? Generally, yeah, I think it's appropriate to be critical of those concerns to ask people to substantiate their complaints. There is nothing inappropriate about that. In fact, I think it is the ultimate sign of respect to say that I will treat you as I would anyone else, and I respect your right to bring these allegations. I would only ask that you substantiate them. What do you mean makes them unsafe? In what way does it make them unsafe? In what way does this letter make you feel unsafe? Ultimately, employers, people in positions of authority, have to make determinations about whether or not they'll respond to some claims. Otherwise, you get into this arms race of competing concerns, and in a universe where we're discovering an infinite number of protected classes of citizens. We seem to manufacture these things quite quickly now. The universe of things that you will not be able to say because protected person X has made a claim against you, which you're unable to challenge, is just going to create a world that is not only boring and uninteresting, but actually kind of savage and dangerous. From a libertarian perspective, this is something I somewhat disagree with some of my colleagues at Reason. I don't want to overstate that or misstate it, but isn't that kind of a libertarian world where we have endlessly competing private firms and platforms and voluntary organizations, which might be workplaces or online communities, where you're constantly writing your own law, you're writing your own rules.  Go out on the prairie and start your own. Is that actually libertarian to kind of turn every workplace, every meeting place into this horrifying struggle session where it's constant purification? If that is consistent with libertarian ideology, are we doing something wrong?  Right. Interestingly, I don't think I arrive here because of my libertarian beliefs. The fundamental libertarian value is this belief and a right to speech. But it is libertarianism isn't necessarily a philosophy from which you can derive all of your other values. And it seems to me that a culture that is generally permissive is one in which rights to free speech are best protected. So that is why I place a particular value on that and think other people ought to as well. So I advocate for it in much the same way. I think you own your dog.  Libertarianism doesn't suggest otherwise. Are you working in a product placement or taking care of him? Are you going to work in a product placement now? No, no, I won't be in the brand. Thank you. I won't do it. I miss the old you are too. How old are you? Camille, if I'm not sure. I'm 39 now. You are older than I expected, but you miss the. Yeah, I'm in extraordinary shape. And you are. You know what? I want to say perhaps not as useful as you, but I too, I'm youthful or so. That's true. I don't get the letters of people saying I am being handed out of work for slightly being off of center. I get, you know, like you're looking pretty good considering you're ancient. I'm almost 20 years older now, which is a nightmare to think about. But I was going to say there was a period in sitcom, I guess, a TV history where for whatever reason, the networks wouldn't show actual brands. And so like on all in the family, Archie Bunker would drink cans of yellow can that said beer on it rather than like a Budweiser or anything. I don't know what happened if it was an FCC change or the networks realized they could do product placement or something. But so if you do want to do product placement, this is a privately owned and operated platform podcast. So you can go ahead and we'll talk about free think media anyway, which so you'll get to promote, you'll get to do a little bit of business later.  You know, first off, what can I ask you, you have a kind of idiosyncratic and I think complicated and interesting. I'm not sure I buy into it completely, a kind of description of race or of the fictitiousness of race. Can you do a summary of where you're coming from when you think about categories of Blackness and Whiteness? I can try and I'd be interested in knowing where you where you depart from me. To begin, biologically and genetically, race is not a thing. There are populations, geneticists often talk about that, and there are subpopulations, et cetera, et cetera. But the notion of there being races in the conventional sense, the way that we generally talk about them, Blackness and Whiteness of me being half Black and half white, for example, or Asian, whatever the hell that means. Yeah. And Asian, by the way, is the weirdest or not the weirdest thing, but I mean, just to underscore the kind of social construction of these identities, used to mean something in an American context now, which mostly meant people from China or from East Asia, now it includes South Asians, so Pakistanis and Indians are Asian as well. And it's kind of like, that's kind of a headscratcher if you went back to the Korean war period or something. But the notion of Blackness isn't much better. I mean, the abundance of genetic and cultural diversity that is subsumed under the label of Black in a way, and we toss it around, as if it's informative, is mind-boggling. So I begin there, and I begin with an understanding that Blackness and Whiteness are things that are born out of a historical context. And these are ideas that were designed to separate and categorize human populations largely for the purpose of subjugation. And this is where Chinese and Indians face the same kind of governmental rules. Essentially, it was until relatively recently, after World War II, it was technically illegal for these groups to really become citizens as immigrants to America and legally gain citizenship. So as a person comfortably sitting, so to speak, from the vantage point of 2020, it was a little more comfortable in 2019 if I admit it. But comfortably sitting from the vantage point of 2020, I can say candidly that I've been able to live a privileged life in which my race has not been an obstacle in a professional or official sense with respect to the laws of this land, that I don't think I have any sort of obligation to identify on the basis of what many might presume about me with respect to my identity on account of my immutable characteristics. And I don't think that it's terribly valuable for most people, from me to actually regard them in that way, because we are at bottom all individuals. So race being phony baloney science, race having this, all of this political and cultural baggage, and in a contemporary very context being largely a matter of like individual choice, the question comes to me Camille, what are you? What do you choose to be? How do you self identify? I see no reason whatsoever to self identify on the basis of race and a great many shortcomings and drawbacks associated with reifying and propagating the notion of racial identity and racial difference as a profound signifier of great importance about the substance or quality or nature of any individual person. Who are your heroes though in coming to that? And do you, I mean, are you saying, you know, the cartoon version of that would be that you have a and listening to you, I'm hearing echoes of earlier thoughts by African American writers and SAS, not just Thomas Chatterton Williams, who's your contemporary, but people like Richard Wright and to a certain degree, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, you know, famously moved to France, the author of Native Son, because he felt freer in a foreign country and was an existentialist to a certain degree.  And you're kind of saying no, no to race in a way that race may not be saying no to you. But so first, first question. Who are the people who helped you get to, you know, your articulation of kind of this breathtaking, really, individual choice of self-composition? Well, I'd say that James Baldwin is certainly one of those people and James can be read in a number of different ways, which is why both TNC and myself both sort of hold him up as someone who is incredibly influential and important to their thinking. Then TNC being Ta-Nehisi Coates. Correct. You don't agree with on very many things. Would you say that? That's correct. Yeah, I would say that. And Zora Neale Hurston is another person who's a real iconoclast and has had some very important things to say about race and race pride and the degree to which these are limited ideas that are probably harmful to us. Would you say with somebody like Zora Neale Hurston, though, who's best known now, mostly rescued by Alice Walker in many ways, another black writer who you share very little with, I would suspect, other than a belief in lizard Illuminati. But Zora Neale Hurston. Not true. Fake news. Zora Neale Hurston. Her life was circumscribed by race, don't you think, in many She also referred to herself as a member of the Nicarati, if I'm not mistaken. I concur that I've sort of taken parts of ideas from different people and not because I am so remarkable, but I've kind of cobbled together my own philosophy around this and I've been delighted to discover that other people have come to similar conclusions. Really brilliant people like Barbara Fields at Columbia University who wrote a brilliant book called Racecraft, which definitely comes at this from a different political perspective, but reaches many of the same conclusions about the perils of race and the degree to which we manufacture and reinforce notions of race every single day. And I think that the general thing, if one only takes one thing away from this, is that what people need to bear in mind is the degree to which race divides us and obscures the truth. And the last part of the trifecta is generally ruins everything. There are lots of important conversations that get hopelessly bogged down in all of the political and cultural awfulness that accompanies a conversation about race. And that awfulness, unfortunately, isn't going away in the present moment. Can I ask though, and this is kind of a falter and I'm going to mess up his quote, but how falter in one of his later works actually, I think it's a requiem for a none, comes the famous line in the south, the past isn't dead, it's not even past. Is that true about race? And I guess we were talking about the racial grievances that are really kind of energizing a lot of the conversations about cancel culture and whatnot. And Black Lives Matter is a kind of ascendant broad-based movement, partly because of the police killing of George Floyd. But can we just, I guess, what I'm asking is how do we pay homage and pay the debt of a racially horrifying society in history without necessarily perpetuating it going forward in the name of expiating the crimes of the past? Does that make sense or I can rephrase that? How do we take account of the way that racism, institutional racism, de jure and de facto racism are absolutely part of American society without then simultaneously maintaining that in the name of getting past it? Yeah, well, I think there's something I've said, which maybe I'll get in trouble for saying again here, but racism isn't special. Racism isn't special. The fact of the matter is to the extent racism has been a force for evil in our society, it is often been weaponized by state and by concentrations of power. And the fact of the matter is that both in the United States and around the world, power has been used to disempower and take advantage of and dispossess various minority populations for ever and ever and ever. And there is an infinite laundry list of historical injuries that one could try to adjudicate. And I'm not saying that that's necessarily a bad project, but I do think that there is another project that ought to be considered. And it's really sort of the MLK project, this notion of pursuing a situation in which we actually fulfill the promise of guaranteeing equal protection under the law, where we're primarily concerned with that as our most essential value and we're not necessarily primarily concerned about overturning the meritocratic ideal that we're seeking and in favor of trying to redress all past grievances. So I think that there's something important about recognizing the degree to which the contemporary disparities that we live with, that we're surrounded with, and that we face on a regular basis, have their historical component, it's perhaps more important from my standpoint to recognize that when we actually want to address and remedy these problems, the answers are generally not race specific. And the answers will likely not require us to do much in the way of sort of bringing in race or protracted conversations about several hundred years of oppression. If the real problem, just to take one example, is public schools that are failing many, many American children of all backgrounds, even if it's predominantly failing young black students, then the solution is what exactly? Can we unblock them? Can we actually wave a wand and redress all of these historical injuries? We can't, but we can hopefully create a more innovative and dynamic school system that better serves and meets their needs. And I think those conversations actually just become fraught and a lot more difficult when the only thing that we can talk about is systemic racism and this generally convoluted conversation around white supremacy and again historical grievances. I just don't think it's terribly productive. I think it generally fires people up. It gets the emotions and the passions flowing, but it isn't obvious to me that it is a pathway to actually fixing these problems. And I do think that it threatens that other project of, you know, equal protection under the law, which I think is not just a good goal. It's not just a sufficient goal. It is a remarkable achievement that most people throughout most of history have not had the privilege of enjoying. Do you think George Floyd, you know, already he is kind of fading as a, you know, as the focus of energizing outrage and things like that. Did George Floyd have equal protection under the law or do black men in general, you know, and we can talk about, you know, the crime rate among black men is elevated in certain ways. But then in others, for instance, in things like, you know, blacks and whites essentially use marijuana in relatively similar numbers. But if you're black, you're much more likely to be arrested and go to go to prison for using or possessing marijuana. So are we, you know, are we in a place where we have achieved equality under the law or are we 90% there? And, you know, when you when you see a case like George Floyd, you know, for the since people started counting these numbers of police deaths, you know, going back to around 2014, 2013, we see about 1000 killings by police a year. Blacks are overrepresented, but the majority are whites who are killed by police. But, you know, are we are we seeing a, is there a radically different law enforcement system for blacks versus whites that we need to attend to in the same way that school outcomes are so different? Yeah, so to take that example specifically, I mean, there are definitely disparate impacts. And it can be said that in some context, it is obviously true that black people and members of some other minority communities have worse outcomes than, say, their white counterparts. But it's also true that this is complicated. And it's complicated by a lot of different factors. People live in different places. We're actually talking about specific age groups of black people and specific genders of black people and even specific communities of black people. When you actually parse, say, native born versus Caribbean black populations in different parts of Brooklyn, you get different economic outcomes and different crime rates and different arrest data. So these things become very, very complicated once you take the top off. And it does seem to me that with policing, police reform and police involved shootings or injuries, the key question here is about our key questions here are about transparency and accountability and policy. And a lot of the conversation around, well, is it racism? Call it racism? I think that's that's fine. If that's the sort of thing that you're into, for me, I arrive at it's complicated. And more to the point, like, what can we actually do to fix this? To the extent we're fixing it, we're actually fixing it for everyone. And I will say about George Floyd briefly. And this makes some people uncomfortable. And I think it's all the more reason to say it. George Floyd's death is an awful and seemingly completely avoidable and unnecessary tragedy. I say that seemingly because this hasn't been adjudicated in the court of the law yet, and it's not enough to watch a video and, you know, make an appraisal. What we want is a justice system that operates for police the same way it operates for us. Like, you'll get into court, we'll have this out, and we will address the facts and you'll be punished accordingly. But it should be said that people have died in similar circumstances who are not in fact black. And it's not obvious to me that we know with certainty that if George Floyd were something other than black that he might not have died in an identical fashion. And that seems to me incredibly important and worth keeping in mind the assumption and assertion that race and racism are the fact motivating factor in these situations. I think can obscure the degree to which this is a real police involved shooting and police abuses of powers are generally real problems that all Americans ought to take very seriously. And it also, I think, blunts some of the more hysterical concern that's been expressed in certain sectors by people like Benjamin Crump, who's this attorney who always shows up at these events and who's written books recently about the campaign of genocide against black Americans. It's absurd. It's hysterical. It isn't fact based. And I don't see how it does anything, but animate concern without giving us a real sort of mooring in facts and reality. And I think that that matters. Your kind of antagonism towards black lives matters. Can you talk about that? And there are two broad kind of things that we might call black lives matters, right? There's an official group or a semi official group. And then there is a larger kind of cultural current that says that blacks have gotten a raw deal and that until their lives are equal to, you know, treated equally as whites, you know, there's a problem.  Well, yeah, well, I mean, I think for reasons that we've already gotten into, you know, I've got manifold concerns about something like black lives matter. I think injecting race into certain conversations where it isn't necessarily illuminating is a problem. I think exaggerated over concern about a particular imagined problem is something that we ought to be concerned about. And I think generally, you know, as a political movement, what black lives matter represents as a libertarian, like there are certain ideals there and values that are antithetical to my own. It is increasing. Yeah, let's talk about that because one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you now was Joe Jurgensen, who is the Libertarian party presidential nominee tweeted recently saying, you know, it's not enough to be kind of colorblind, like we need to be we must be anti racist in our thinking. And you responded critically to that. What was wrong with her with her sentiments that that you bristled that so much? Well, she she both made that remark about the requirement, the obligation that we must be anti racist. And then she finished that tweet with hashtag black lives matter. And it's important to note that in 2020, the mantra black lives matter exists in a political context and is rated with connotations. And much the same thing can be said about the notion of anti racism. When you ask someone what anti racism is, they may not really know what you're talking about. I imagine the average person thinks, oh, that's a that's a pleasant idea. Of course, I'm anti racist. I don't like racism. But it matters if you are aware of the program. And for someone like Ibram Kendi, who wrote how to be an anti racist or white fragility, which was written by Robin D'Angelo, the notion in these books, there's all kinds of fundamental things that one must accept to believe in and to abide by the principles of anti racism. You must believe that all racial disparities are a function of racism.  And these are sort of inescapable, inexorable qualities of who we are. And I think that's a that's a lot of, if I can be frank, bullshit. And it's possible that Joe was unaware of that context. And I do know that she she had a subsequent tweet hours later after a number of people got animated about this. But, you know, while Black Lives Matter seems like, you know, a fairly benign statement, and perhaps in the minds of many people, just a very objectively good thing. I care about racial injustice and I want to do something like it. So I'm going to put this Black Lives Matter sign in my window. But there is more to the program than that. And to the extent it it and anti racism are part of a broader program that is hostile towards free markets and capitalism, that is hostile towards notions of individualism and the scientific method, then these are things we need to be on guard against. And it is entirely possible for libertarians to build coalitions with people they disagree with to focus on specific policy goals. And hopefully to attract people who care about those things, especially in an environment where Democrats are only paying lip service to these issues like qualified immunity, which if you read Reason, you know that Joe Biden has said he does not plan to do anything about qualified immunity. I want to I want Joe to appeal to people who care about Black Lives Matter on that basis. I do not, however, want Joe to confuse or conflate the libertarian values with what is, you know, a hodgepodge of philosophical bad ideas by commingling the libertarian brand with Black Lives Matter.  You know, one of the critiques. So are you for, I mean, in a very real sense. Yeah, yeah. Now, you know what, but not sociologically. And I can point you to the update at 23 and me. I had about 1% unexplained of African, North African. That's a whole nother conversation. Yeah, you know. That's not telling you what they think they would be, what you think they're telling you. Excuse me.  And the Italians do worse than I, you are Caribbean descent, right? You're West Indian or Jamaican. First generation, first generation American family is Jamaican. This is actually, you know, the original beef when Dan Hayes, your your colleague and co-founder of Free Think Media, who was working at Reason TV at the time, he was like employee number three of Reason TV. He had met you and he said, yeah, I met this fascinating guy who is Black, but he doesn't identify as Black. He says he's an individual.  Because I had encountered that multiple times. And it's kind of an interesting exceptionalism. But it is true that West Indians, as a subgroup of people of Americans, do phenomenally well in New York in a way that, you know, if we talk about Latinos or Hispanics without breaking it down into Cubans and Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and Dominicans, or if we talk about whites and we don't talk about Italian Americans, who to this day, at least in the New York area, have persistently lower educational outcomes than other ethnic groups. I mean, this is what you're getting at, right? The parsing can go on forever, Nick. You can literally follow it all the way down. And you should, because the unit that ultimately matters is the individual and not these contrivances.  And, you know, that in the end, when you're talking about social analysis, it's the individual is the fundamental unit of analysis, not the group, because those are transitory.  Why has the libertarian movement, which, you know, when I think about it, and I came to this, you know, basically through reading reason as a high schooler and a college student, and then as a grad student. And finally, you know, I finally got with the program when they hired Banser to giving me a paycheck many years ago. But, you know, it seems to me that, like the libertarian program of individualism, of capitalism, of getting rid of regulations, like occupational licensing, getting rid of, excuse me, de jure segregation, things like school choice, ending the drug war, these are all things that should appeal massively to minority populations, however you want to define it. But the fact of the matter is, is there aren't many Black libertarians. Why do you think that is? Because part of, you know, part of what Jorgensen, and I think people who are, she was quoting Jonathan Blanks, who had worked in Cato, who's African American, who had been a reason intern, and people like Radley Balco also now have to watch in a post-former reason, staffer, who say, you know, the libertarian movement is pretty lily white. And, you know, that's a problem. You know, why aren't there more Black libertarians? I guess that's what I'm asking. Well, first and foremost, you know, I think an evaluation of a group that begins with, you know, an assessment of whether or not the phenotypic traits of that group are sufficiently representative, and then makes a determination that, you know, oh, there might be a problem here. Or there is definitely a problem here. I don't, I don't really truck with that. The reality is that libertarians have, generally speaking, fairly low purchase across the populace, and that Black voters tend to not vote for libertarians, but they also tend to not vote for Republicans. They tend to vote for Democrats, and they've done so pretty consistently for years. The uniformity there and the rigidness of that support is an important thing to take into consideration. And I don't know that it says much about the specific challenges associated with libertarianism. I will say that I do think that there's a, you know, an attempt to take a bit of a shortcut to try and get to and achieve sort of a massive support amongst Black voters by, you know, hopping on the bandwagon when it comes to these particular concerns about systemic racism and things like Black Lives Matter. And one, I don't think the project will work is the important thing. And look, we're trying the experiment now. I don't think it will work. I think that you can appeal to people on the basis of individualism. And it certainly worked for me. And I think that there is a certain amount of respect and dignity that you are awarding to the people you're trying to persuade when you don't presume that the only way to get through to them is by adopting, you know, these mantras that also happen to include all of this racial essentialist claptrap. Do you think any of it, I mean, because we're really talking about, we're certainly not talking about biology. We're talking more about sociology and historiography, maybe. And, you know, one of the main figures in a kind of political libertarianism, and most of the stuff I think we would agree, we're talking about small libertarians, we're not really, I mean, the libertarian party is part of that, but it's a subgroup of it.  He had voted for every civil rights law up until he was running for president, and he voted against the Civil Rights Act. And he didn't just do that.  And in fact, in his public policies, did a lot to integrate public schools in Arizona when he could and the Air National Guard of Arizona and things like that. But he hung out with actual segregationists. He gave them, you know, aid and comfort. Isn't that part of the reason and a lot of libertarians, you'll talk about Barry Goldwater is my idea of a great presidential candidate.   I think that that's, that's an interesting proposition. And I've certainly heard that argument leveled. Definitely saw blanks and probably Radley as well, making some pretty loud protestations that it seems very telling that libertarians are upset about Black Lives Matter being endorsed by their presidential nominee. Well, I don't think it's terribly telling, except for what I just outlined, which has nothing to do with race. And I would, I would posit that most Americans and most Black Americans included have no idea who Barry Goldwater is. I wish it were otherwise, but it is so. And the general notion that people perceive libertarians, perceive of libertarians as sort of broadly supporting the Confederacy or endorsing white nationalist sentiment, it's a smear that I encounter frequently. But I would certainly suggest that most Americans don't have any experience with either of those strains of, you know, retrograde libertarian heresy. I think that to the extent they've experienced any libertarianism in their lifetime, it's in hearing, you know, someone like Ron Paul, and not in reading those dodgy letters, but experiencing him on the on the presidential debate speech stage and hearing him give both, you know, incredible articulation of what the ideas were in that context, and specifically condemning things like racism. And I think libertarians have a very compelling program, both in terms of its potential benefit to society at large and its respect for the individual and people. And it's its interest in dismantling regulatory regimes that make it hard for small businesses to operate, which is something that lots of black people have. And I think it's fair to appeal to people on those terms and to have an expectation that you can make progress. Identity politics is is a thing. And libertarians can, if they are so inclined to try to play that game. But it's a compromise that I'm not willing to make, right? Like Joe, Joe has long odds of making it as president of the United States. You're breaking my heart. However, the party will be around for a while. And our ideas will endure. And the degree to which we're interested in diluting them, and corrupting them, or hitching them to, you know, some new fad, like, I think that matters. And I'm concerned about that. And I'm not, you know, I don't want to be a Puritan for the sake of Puritanism and ride this horse into the ground. But I also think that the ideas are sufficiently important that someone ought to be defending them vigorously at the margins if need be. And I think that's what the Libertarian Party does. And look, we've made progress on important issues that are core to libertarians. And I know that because you've helped me to understand that through your own work, Nick. Thank you. We own a lot of social issues, right? We were there before the liberals got there. For sure. Yeah, for sure. And of course, Ronald Reagan could say, there's no limit to what we can do if we don't care who takes credit because he got all the credit. I've always, when people say there's no I in teamwork, but there is me. So it's like, I don't know, but libertarians, it's somewhat frustrating, particularly in terms of things like criminal justice reform and police reform. We've been talking about these things. Yeah. And also, you know, welfare, if I could just go off on one of my hobby horses, you know, welfare reform, I can remember driving my liberal friends insane when I would say, you know what, the state, I don't I don't know if you might be more hardcore than me. I don't mind the state giving, you know, making transfer payments to people who need help. But I said to my liberal friends, like get rid of stuff like Section 8 vouchers and healthcare, your Medicaid, and food stamps and just give poor people unrestricted cash grants to spend as they see fit. And they would be like, you're insane. You're insane. Like, how could you do that? And now we have people talking about a guaranteed minimum income or a UBI and whatnot. So, yeah, libertarians, obviously, are always and everywhere. We're clean smelling, we're beautiful, we're wonderful. And we're so far ahead of the curve that we get left behind. And we end up arguing against things that we were in favor of when nobody was in favor of them. Having said all of that, let me bring it back. The phrase you're looking for is clean and articulate. Yes, that's right. Clean and articulate. As clean and articulate. I get that all the time. Yeah. As Paul's grandfather in Hard Day's Night as well. He's an old man who's very clean. Why do blacks vote so overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party then? Or is that a meaningful vote to be talking about? And if I'm doing my history right here, and I'm probably misremembering some things, but Eisenhower and Nixon, both in the 50s up through the 60 election, I think Nixon polled like 35% of the black vote or maybe even a little bit more. Reagan cracked in 84, cracked double digits since then. I mean, Trump actually has done better than Mitt Romney or John McCain did. And I think George Bush as well. But over the past 50 years, and certainly since the Goldwater years, where Jackie Robinson voted for Nixon, campaigned for Nixon in 1960, campaigned against him in 68. Why do blacks vote for Democrats so consistently in the 90% plus range? And does that matter in the way that you think about politics or power in society? I don't know how much it matters in terms of the way I think about politics and power. I think, one, it's safe to assume that they generally agree with them on many things. I think two, it's hard for me to deny what I observe. And that is that amongst the various racial groups that we have in America, no group seems to me more determined in its effort to kind of police in group behavior and norms than blacks. For me, personally, I get a lot of Uncle Tom and house nigga and all sorts of other nasty names because I depart from orthodoxy. And you're not even in the house, right? You're not wearing a bow tie. I don't want to play for the team. Yeah, you're not wearing a bow tie and campaigning for Trump or anything or public No, none of that. Yeah. Yeah, but certainly to do that, you know, we'll get you all sorts of nasty behavior. So, you know, the fact that there is a lot of conformity there, perhaps a little a little unsurprising for me. And I think about folks like Michael Steele, who was the lieutenant governor of Maryland before he became an MSNBC contributor, and I believe RNC chairman at one point in the past, there's an account of him visiting like Morgan State University and being pelted with Oreos. It's possible that that's somewhat apocryphal, but it isn't hard for me to believe that they were high drops. They were high drops cookies, actually. Completely different. So, yeah, and we see that in Chance the Rapper a couple of years ago when Kanye West was flirting with Trumpism and said, you know, that black should not black should not necessarily vote for Democrats. And Chance the Rapper a protégé of Kanye talked about his experiences on Twitter, which is where real life happens now. It's kind of strange that we have, you know, this empty planet, but we're we're all crowding into Twitter. But he said, you know, his experience of growing up in Chicago was that the cops were terrible and the schools were awful and the city thought nobody cared about his neighborhoods.  He ended up recanting those sentiments. That's what you're talking about, right? Although he's recently as recently as yesterday, in fact, endorsed this Kanye West campaign. Would you vote for President Kanye? I'll say this. It's a possibility. But I do want to talk to you, Kim and Kanye, about this run for president. I think I can be helpful. And to the extent we can have a conversation, I not only would they win my support, I'm confident I could help you garner additional support. I don't even think you could deliver your full family vote. I don't know. I mean, I'd be curious. I could. It depends on how you're talking about my family and my wife. Like my wife is going to vote for a ticket that includes me, even a White House in which I'm likely to serve as chief of staff. I mean, I think that's my minimal requirement, which I think is fairly modest and responsible. So when we talk about presidential risk, because you have you have also on the fifth column, the podcast, what is that like weekly? And you have a Patreon account where you're pulling in Bukku Bucks now. So you have all kinds of special. It's not enough. Never enough. Yeah, no. Okay.  Do you think Donald Trump gaining a second term? Would that be preferable to Joe Biden getting his likely only term? I mean, Joe Biden has William Henry Harrison written all over him. He's going to catch cold, you know, at his inauguration or something and died 90 days later. This he is he's a frail man. But Trump versus Biden, what do you see as preferable from a specifically libertarian view? Yeah, well, you asked a particular question, did I vote for Donald Trump? And the answer to that question is no, would I vote for Donald Trump? I'll answer in this way. I generally don't vote.  And it's hard to imagine that Donald Trump would be able to muster the sort of miracle that would be required for me to go out and what would be what would he have to do? Would he have to again, I probably have to personally chief of staff, I probably have to be I'd probably have to be involved in a way that I couldn't be fired. Yeah, in a way that I couldn't be quickly fired. Okay, so because because I'd at least have an opportunity to change things. But yeah, it's probably a no. But I will say, you know, in terms of the evaluating the benefits of a Trump presidency versus a Biden presidency, and even my somewhat notorious reputation for being someone who's willing to articulate the perspective that Donald Trump is miserable and awful. But he's not all of the worst things that you imagine. And in many respects, he like actually possesses qualities that make him about as bad as some of our other recent presidents. Would you say Trump? I think that's a defense. Trump versus Obama. Much of a defense. I mean, would you say I mean, would you grant that all of the 21st century presidents have been awful so far? Generally, in important respects. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So what what is it about Trump that you think he's not so awful? And what is it about Biden that worries you? Well, when I say not so awful, it's more so not as bad as you imagine. For example, I don't think he's a covert Russian agent.  And I don't believe that racial grievance is what motivates the coalition that put him in office. But again, these are these are somewhat heterodox perspectives, but I think they can be substantiated. But to the specific question of, you know, Biden versus Trump and what the value proposition is, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with Yasha Monk, who is the founder of a new publication persuasion and contributed to the Atlantic and other August publications before that. But we were talking specifically about, you know, cancel culture, a phrase that I'm I don't love. I don't think it catches enough that has too much of a mean girls feel to it is easily caricatured. But the notion that the left is sort of the force that is animating that or at least that's created a circumstance where people like Yasha feel the need to leave where they are and start something new, essentially, generally formalized this new center that seems to be emerging. And Yasha took great pains to express a specific concern about the threat from the populist right. And it just seemed a bit at odds to me to note that we're concerned about this wave of sort of censorship and speech policing from the left, because they've managed to, it seems, capture a lot of the elite institutions and to change the atmosphere in a lot of media organizations. But then we still take great pains to talk about what is happening on the right.  But in a future where the left owns both the culture and the presidency, that actually seems like something that might give one pause. And I don't have a great answer to that. I don't know what it is. I will say that Donald Trump of all of his qualities, the worst quality is probably the degree to which he seems to be able to break people's brains. And the degree to which the scrambling of norms, like I'd hoped that having someone who was as sort of palpably awful and kind of grotesque as Donald Trump in the White House might turn people off to like executive power and make them say, you know what, we can't trust government to do all that. That was a wonderful 15 minutes when he was being sworn in and we saw in the New York Times and elsewhere like, hey, maybe we were went too far in glorifying executive power and privilege under Obama because now it's in the hands of the grubby hands of this, you know, reality TV show star. So that is a real concern. One of one of your answers and to kind of move into concluding, I would love to talk with you through the election continuously so that I don't have to pay attention to it. But last something, the memory of real life intervenes. But one of one of your answers, both with the fifth column, as well as with your the organization you form with Dan Hayes, former reason TV videographer, free think media, one of the things you did, you know, when you say like you worry about the left or anybody owning both political power and cultural power is that you created platforms to speak. Can you talk a little bit about free think media, what it is and where you're at with it now and why, why it's important.  Yeah, well, free think, and we just go by free think now is a media brand that is about the things that are likely to matter a hundred years from now, a century, several centuries from now, the remarkable innovations and ideas that are likely to change the world for the better. And we still believe that this is a remarkable, incredible time to be alive and that there's all sorts of amazing opportunities and amazing people trying to achieve great things. And we want to highlight that and celebrate innovation and talk about how we fix big problems. I think there is a tendency to see innovative new approaches and especially amongst the mainstream media, it's regarded as serious if you are critical and perhaps even a little bit cynical of these new things. But I think that what are some of what are some of the innovation specific, you know, that you talked about in your website, as well as in the videos, which I think are for me or what are most memorable about. Yeah, we specialize in video and I appreciate that. AI, I think is a great example. I think in popular culture, you know, we're all familiar with the Terminator and various other dystopian films about how miserable this innovation is going to be or how potentially dangerous it is. But I think there's a phenomenal and super compelling story to be told about all of the promise and possibility associated with AI, the possibilities for medical breakthroughs, for breakthroughs in computing technology, and the many, many people who are doing their best to mitigate what many people imagine to be the risks of AI. And that's a productive way to look at that, even the sort of problematic side of this incredible new technology that is coming, whether we like it or not. Yeah, yeah. Well, that I mean is, you know, it might be the ultimate point, really, is that this stuff happens, whether we like it or not, whether we sniff at it or embrace it. Why do you think people are so afraid of the future, particularly technological innovations? And does that fear, you know, is it related to what you're talking about in the culture of people wanting to kind of strangle, you know, different opinions and anything that expects of heterodoxy rather than some kind of new orthodoxy? Yeah, that's a hard question. I suspect there are lots of reasons. I mean, I certainly think that with respect to computers and artificial intelligence, one of the chief concerns there is jobs. And, you know, the possibility that change is going to disrupt the situation that we're comfortable with in ways that we cannot control and do not understand. And I think that uncertainty alone is perhaps enough to put a rather pessimistic negative gloss on anything. So this is the idea that oh my god, self-driving cars, it means I'm not going to be a truck driver or my children alone. I mean, you know, when you were saying that, I was starting to think like maybe the reason why I tend to be and maybe maybe overly optimistic or uncritical interested in new innovation and whatnot is because, god, I mean, up through my grandparents, all of my, on the Gillespie side, my father's side, the Guida side, Irish and Italian, these people for thousands of years were yoked to the land because they were peasant farmers and fishermen.  And the kind of glamour of that shift, which was totally because of mechanization and industrialization, hasn't worn off yet. Yeah. What about the fifth column? What do you, what is success? You guys have a wonderful podcast. You have a... Thank you. You know, if you were a band, it would be, you know, you have fans that are like fans of the Velvet Underground or maybe the Grateful Dead, but you're getting bigger. I mean, people who just follow you everywhere, even onto Patreon, a gated community that kicks people off for things that they do and say that have nothing to do with Patreon, but you're willing to play that game. We're certainly aware of that. But what, what would success, what is success for the fifth column? Well, I mean, I think it is, it's quite an achievement that folks actually like listening to, you know, the three of us and our array of guests. And I don't think you've been one yet. I have not. Well, that's, well, you know, I keep hearing that, but my invitation, I feel I'm up here like Cinderella up at my, you know, I'm too busy cleaning the house. But, you know, I think the fact that we've attracted an audience at all is something I'm enormously proud of and honored by. I think what we attempt to do is both, you know, exercise our own demons, have a little bit of fun in the process, and take a, take sharp aim at the media and the news cycle and try to help people understand, you know, how the sausage gets made, why it gets made in a particular way, and bring people in who can help us contextualize stories or explore the perspective that they were recently talking about and do it in a way that is honest, in some cases forceful, but welcoming. And I think, like, genuinely model what good discourse looks like. And that doesn't mean that we don't have sharp criticisms and rebukes for people because we do. And I think that that's totally fair. But it does mean that, you know, if you're willing to come and have a conversation with us, like, we'll have a beer with you and or a gin and tonic or something else. What about non-alcoholic beverage? I'm not drinking. Yeah, you can have no duels. You can have a no duels. That's fine. But you'll make fun of me for having a no duels. No, well, yes, no one is, no one and nothing is safe. So you will, you will be made fun of. But we also make fun of each other. But I think that there's something, something really great about being able to cultivate a platform like that where people can know they're going to get, you know, honest, unvarnished opinions where we'll, you know, take, take some risks occasionally in terms of being honest and forthright, especially in a climate that is become accustomed to punishing people for straying from, is it a right to use the word reservation? I think it is. I'm using it anyway, straying from the reservation. And, you know, adopting perspectives that are a bit more heterodox or even just asking questions that are completely legitimate, if generally regarded as out of bounds. So we want to have a healthy, innovative, complicated and funny and spontaneous environment. And I think that's one of the things to keep in mind about like speech protections, you know, part of what you try to do with speech protections and speech codes is make the whole world safe and rip all of the spontaneity out of it. And I don't know, it just seems like such an awful, barren wasteland. I don't know why you would want to live in a place like that. You need a little bit of jostling from time to time. And you need people who are willing to traffic in dangerous ideas and to articulate radical perspectives, which may eventually win the day, you know, so much about our current society, the things that we accept as like received wisdom, notions of equality that we used to seemingly universally celebrate are things that were promoted by radicals. And I don't want to lose those people because I don't think we've protect perfected humanity or society yet. Okay, we're going to leave it there. We have been talking with Camille Foster. He is the co-founder of Free Think Media and the co-founder of the fifth column podcast. He is the future chief of staff in the second or third Kanye West administration. This has been the reason interview with Nick Gillespie. Please subscribe to this podcast at Apple, Google, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts or go to reason.com slash podcast and check out not just the reason interview, but the reason roundtable and the SOHO forum debates. Thanks so much for listening.