Reason.TV host Nick Gillespie points out that 2013 was in many ways a terrible year for libertarians and limited government. So what does 2014 have in store for us? Gillespie gives us three reasons why 2014 might be the most libertarian year ever.
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Host Nick Gillespie and TV personality Mike Rowe discuss the “Hidden Cost of Compliance” in this edition of Reason TV. Says Rowe, who is best known as the longtime host of Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs,” “There are an army of angry acronyms out there and they each have a very specific agenda. None of them are there to make your life easier. They are there to make you more compliant.”
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Lou Rossetto, who co-founded Wired magazine, expounds his theories on the death of the mega-state and continuing digital revolution. Rossetto tells Nick Gillespie, of Reason TV, “We came out and said there was a digital revolution happening and it was going to change everything. And that it wasn’t the priests, the pundits, the politicians and the generals who were creating positive change.” Listen in as Rossetto tells Gillespie who is responsible for the change and what he foresees for future generations.
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As the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination approaches, political operative and Nixon confidant Roger Stone has an interesting take on what happened on November 22, 1963. In the vein of conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination, Stone believes Lyndon Baines Johnson was responsible for the murder. “I think Lyndon Johnson had unique motive, means and opportunity to kill John Kennedy, and I think he participated in a plot to do so,” he says. Stone spells out his case in his soon-to-be-released book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, and in this interview with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie.
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As President Obama sets his sights on Syria, Reason TV editor Nick Gillespie makes a strong case for avoiding another war in the Middle East.
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Was Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of JFK, RFK and Teddy Kennedy, a bootlegger? Was he anti-Semitic or a Nazi sympathizer? How did he make his millions? David Nasaw examines the legends and exposes the many myths surrounding the Kennedy patriarch. Nasaw is a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and also the author of the best-selling biography The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.
To the disappointment of Kennedy haters everywhere, Nasaw debunks the myth that Joe made a fortune via bootlegging during Prohibition. In fact, those stories about Kennedy Sr., who passed multiple security checks by the FBI while serving multiple presidents, only surfaced in the late ’60s when JFK assassination buffs tried to tie the family to the mob.
Nasaw discusses his book with Nick Gillespie from Reason TV.
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“The…idea that if you just let people talk, it will be this pit of racist pandemonium…is sort of childish and it oversimplifies. But it is a great justification for having a lot of power over speech,” says Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
Lukianoff spoke with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie about his new book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, where he details the slow and steady withering of free expression on America’s college campuses.
In some ways, the modern on-campus free-speech movement dates back to 1993’s “water buffalo incident” at the University of Pennsylvania, where a student was brought up on racial harassment charges for using the term “water buffalo” as an insult. That case led directly to the founding of FIRE, which “defends free speech, due process and basic rights on campus.”
A Stanford Law-trained liberal who blogs at the Huffington Post, Lukianoff insists that by restricting controversial or potentially offensive speech, “you’re putting people into echo chambers” where they only interact with people with whom they already agree. That sort of groupthink is dangerous to a free society, says Lukianoff, but it’s particularly appalling to see it instituted at the nation’s colleges and universities, where the free exchange of ideas is supposed to be the whole point of higher education.
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Of all the institutions within our society, education has been perhaps the most resistant to change. By and large, public schools still model their curricula after guidelines established in 1892. Salman Khan, founder of the online Khan Academy, says radical reform is long overdue.
Originally conceived to help his 12-year-old cousin learn math, Khan Academy now offers free online lectures and video tutorials to more than 6 million students each month. Videos covering topics as diverse as mathematics, physics, history and economics have garnered more than 200 million views and generated significant funding from both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google.
Reason.TV’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Khan to discuss how to fundamentally transform American education, why technology is never the solution reformers expect and how massive amounts of money go missing every day in conventional public schools.
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