Are the online speech wars over? Just asking questions. Award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi joins Reason 's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on Just Asking Questions today to help analyze Vice President J.D. Vance's blistering speech at the Munich Security Conference, where Vance called on Europe's leaders to stop suppressing speech, banning populist political parties, and annulling elections . Taibbi predicts Vance's speech will be "remembered as a moment of grave importance," as it signals the...
Feb 27, 2025•1 hr 22 min
How legal is Trump's governing agenda? Just asking questions. Today's guest is Randy Barnett, a Georgetown constitutional law professor who has argued before the Supreme Court, was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of Obamacare, is a contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy blog hosted at Reason, and is the author of several books, most recently the memoir A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist . In this week's episode, Barnett discusses the legality of th...
Feb 20, 2025•1 hr 17 min
Is the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement over? Just asking questions. Aaron Sibarium is a good, old-fashioned muckraking journalist over at the Washington Free Beacon who exposes things the left would probably rather hide. He joins the show today to discuss President Donald Trump's executive orders relating to DEI programs. Sources Referenced: Executive order: Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing " HHS Spends Hundreds of Millions Spreading DEI Throug...
Feb 13, 2025•1 hr 23 min
Will President Donald Trump and Elon Musk actually cut the government down to size and pull us back from the fiscal cliff? Just asking questions. John Cochrane is joining Just Asking Questions today to talk about what it would actually take to get government spending under control permanently and discuss a few of the staggering number of government reforms either underway or being floated. He is an economist at the Hoover Institution and a professor of economics and finance at Stanford Graduate ...
Feb 06, 2025•1 hr 10 min
What happens if President Donald Trump " seals the border "? Among Trump's Day 1 executive orders is one called Securing Our Borders , which promises to build the wall, detain and deport immigrants who violate federal or state law, prosecute illegal border crossers, and obtain "complete operational control" of the border. He also declared a state of emergency and ordered the military to "seal the border" and repel an "invasion." Perhaps most controversial of all, another order claims to end birt...
Jan 30, 2025•1 hr 19 min
Today's bonus episode of Just Asking Questions is a conversation with Libertarian Party National Chair Angela McArdle about the role the party played in securing a presidential pardon for Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web marketplace Silk Road. Ulbricht, who entered prison at age 29 and walked out at age 40, had served 11 years of a double life sentence with no possibility of parole. Ulbricht started Silk Road as an idealistic libertarian experiment, describing on his LinkedIn profile h...
Jan 22, 2025•20 min
How will the second Donald Trump presidential term transform America? Just asking questions. It's officially the Trump 2.0 era. One New York Times columnist called his inaugural address "American Carnage 2," while Trump promised a new American "golden age" in his speech. So how excited, hopeful, or anxious should we be as we enter these next four years? Journalist Mike Pesca, host of the popular daily news podcast The Gist , joined Reason Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller and Associate Editor Li...
Jan 21, 2025•1 hr 23 min
What have the wildfires done to southern California and the people who live there? And could any of this destruction have been prevented? Just asking questions. The wildfires breaking out across Greater Los Angeles have so far killed at least 25 people and damaged or destroyed over 12,000 structures, according to the Los Angeles Times . Today's guest lost her home in a fire that started in the Eaton Valley of the San Gabriel Mountains. "This is what's left of my house," she wrote on X . "Every h...
Jan 16, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Why are we forgetting history's lessons? We're told in school that we study history so as not to repeat its mistakes. But what if those lessons aren't sticking? Today's guest regularly invokes what he calls The Great Forgetting . The striking thing about this collective amnesia is that it doesn't apply only to distant, ancient history, but hard lessons learned only a few decades ago—lessons about inflation, price controls, and crime. Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at...
Jan 10, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Is it time for the nuclear option? Just asking questions. A nuclear renaissance may be afoot. The partial reactor meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant in 1979 invigorated an anti-nuclear movement that forced the industry to a grinding halt for decades. But in 2023, the first reactor built from scratch since 1974 began operating. Big investments are being made in so-called "advanced nuclear," which promises to deliver smaller, less costly, and less risky reactors. And the AI boom ha...
Jan 04, 2025•1 hr 12 min
How do we escape stagnation and accelerate progress? What if bubbles are actually good? Just asking questions. "They promised us flying cars. All we got was one hundred forty characters." Those were the words of Peter Thiel over a decade ago, lamenting technological stagnation. The character limit has since increased, but his point remains the same: Innovation in the software world of "bits" has accelerated, but progress in the material world of "atoms" has been stubbornly slow, at least in his ...
Dec 26, 2024•1 hr 18 min
Must we accelerate AI innovation? You've probably heard of " effective altruism ," but how about " effective accelerationism ," or e/acc? "You claim to be building an artificial god in the human image. We're building the conduit for the thermodynamic god that created us. We are not the same." Those are the words of Based Beff Jezos , a pseudonymous X account devoted to spreading the e/acc message far and wide, once described by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen as a "patron saint of techno-opti...
Dec 19, 2024•1 hr 28 min
About 0.5 percent of U.S. adults identify as transgender, according to a 2022 UCLA study. Among 13- to 17-year-olds, the figure has grown to about 1.4 percent. That uptick in the youth might help explain why trans issues are playing a growing role in American politics. Registered voters told Gallup pollsters that transgender issues ranked among the least important political issues they considered when weighing their presidential vote—just below climate change. Yet, the Trump campaign spent $65 m...
Dec 12, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Was bitcoin the winner of the 2024 election? Just asking questions. Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to protect bitcoin and the entire crypto economy. Major endorsements from the industry followed, including from the Winklevoss twins , who each made a $1 million bitcoin donation to a pro-Trump PAC. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called Trump's win the "dawn of a new crypto era." Bitcoin has hit new all-time highs , since the election. Today's guest has been writing and speaking on these topics...
Dec 05, 2024•1 hr 9 min
What does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. get right and wrong about science, vaccines, and health? Just asking questions. President-elect Donald Trump announced Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would be his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Adminstration, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, and several other health-related federal agencies. Trump wrote on X that "for too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex...
Nov 25, 2024•1 hr 25 min
Is Trumpism America's new governing ideology? Just asking questions. Trump won decisively by modern standards, meaning for the first time in several cycles nobody is seriously disputing the results, but did he really win bigly ? Does he have a governing mandate? Today's guest says, not really. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs . He co-authored a paper published just before the electi...
Nov 21, 2024•1 hr
Subscribe to the new Just Asking Questions Youtube channel here! Donald Trump won the presidential election decisively, taking every single battleground state, and as we discussed last week with Patrick Ruffini , winning over new voters across all sorts of racial, age, and gender demographics. He's, once again, remade the electoral map, with Republicans capturing the Senate and the House . What should Democrats learn from this loss? Lee Fang is an independent journalist and political commentator...
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 20 min
Why did Donald Trump win? Trump is back. Back again. He's secured the Electoral College majority needed to become America's 47th president and looks on track for a popular vote majority—the first Republican to pull that off in more than 20 years. A New York Times breakdown shows that across just about every type of county—urban, suburban, older population, younger, white, black, Latino—Trump improved his numbers. Surprising to many was Trump's large improvement among Latinos of all kinds, despit...
Nov 07, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Is this the most important election ever? And who should win? Just asking questions. Next week, America decides: elect the 78-year-old criminally indicted, twice-impeached ex-president who's pledged to impose a universal tariff of 20 percent and embark on the largest mass deportation in American history; or his opponent, the vice president, swapped in for a malfunctioning Joe Biden, whose first major policy proposal was to cap grocery store prices to fight inflation, and who has trouble explaini...
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr 51 min
What's the agenda of the World Economic Forum? And what was The Great Reset? Just asking questions. Every year, there's a big gathering of global elites in Davos, Switzerland: world leaders, titans of industry, Hollywood celebrities. It all started in 1971, thanks to Klaus Schwab—a German economist and business professor who launched what was then called the European Economic Forum as a place to discuss best business practices and promote a theory he'd developed called "stakeholder capitalism," ...
Oct 24, 2024•1 hr 2 min
What should the federal government do in a disaster? Two major hurricanes made landfall within two weeks, devastating the southeast. Hurricane Helene has killed more than 200 people , and more than 90 are still missing in North Carolina, where overflowing rivers and tributaries flooded the western part of the state. More than 9,000 remain without power. Hurricane Milton grew to Category 5 status in the Gulf before hitting Florida's west coast just south of Tampa Bay as a Category 3. It caused at...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 13 min
How do immigrants change American culture? Just asking questions. While the economy ranks as voters' top concern as of a Wednesday Gallup poll , immigration remains "extremely" or "very" important to 72 percent of registered U.S. voters. As with most issues, there's a large partisan divide, with 63 percent of Republicans responding that immigration is an "extremely" important election year issue, and only 23 percent of Democrats answering the same. Gallup found this summer that more than 55 perc...
Oct 10, 2024•1 hr 30 min
Who's most to blame for the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021? How much does it matter for the election in November 2024? We all remember the events of January 6, which resulted in unforgettable images, an evacuation of the Capitol, several deaths, $2.7 billion in costs, more than 1,200 criminal charges, an impeachment, and decades in prison for many involved. Today's guest was there during the lead-up to January 6—not as a participant, but as a chronicler. Ford Fischer is a documentary...
Oct 03, 2024•1 hr 18 min
How well-protected is Donald Trump? On July 13, Trump became the first U.S. president to be shot in more than 40 years, and the first to be shot during a campaign since 1912. Then, incredibly, the Secret Service stopped a second would-be assassin who was stationed with a rifle on the perimeter of Trump's golf course as the former president was one hole away: two unnervingly close calls in about two months. What's going on? Some Republican lawmakers say Trump is under-protected and accuse the Bid...
Sep 26, 2024•1 hr 16 min
What are the schools really teaching our kids? It's back-to-school season, which means the curriculum wars are back on the agenda. The right has accused activist infiltrators of "indoctrinating" the next generation with woke struggle sessions, confusing kids about their gender and sexuality, and turning K-12 campuses into war zones by replacing discipline with pseudoscientific therapy. The left has accused the right of authoritarian book bans, whitewashing history, and discriminating against LGB...
Sep 19, 2024•1 hr 22 min
Why is the Brazilian government afraid of X? Judge Alexandre de Moraes has blocked the site formerly known as Twitter in Brazil, where an estimated 40 million people access the site each month. Circumventing the ban on X with a VPN could get you fined about $9,000 a day, around the average per capita income in Brazil. It happened after Musk reinstated accounts that the Brazilian state had accused of being part of "digital militias" undermining Brazil's democracy. X's owner Elon Musk has accused ...
Sep 12, 2024•1 hr 6 min
How bad is the national debt? Just asking questions. Our national debt—measured as federal debt held by the public—is over $27 trillion . That's approaching 100 percent of annual gross domestic product , which is higher than it's been since the end of World War II. So, are we screwed? Or are those of us who worry about numbers like this totally misunderstanding the nature of government debt? There's a school of thought called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that says economists should stop worrying...
Sep 05, 2024•1 hr 15 min
How's the economy actually doing? In 2022, economists forecasted that we'd be in a recession by now. Did it ever actually happen, though? Prices got higher, interest rates ticked up, but mass layoffs never really happened and gross domestic product growth chugged on. People mostly weathered the turbulence. Joining us today to talk about all that and to speculate on what effects former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris' proposals might have on the economy is Kyla Scanlon . S...
Aug 29, 2024•1 hr 15 min
How do Democrats define "freedom"? Just asking questions. It's Democratic National Convention week, so we wanted to talk about what's been unfolding there so far: the rhetoric, the thematic choices, and what it all reveals about the Democrats' 2024 agenda. How should we state-power skeptics and liberty appreciators view that agenda? We invited Jane Coaston to discuss all that with us this week. She's a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times and a former politics reporter at Vox , and ...
Aug 22, 2024•1 hr 20 min
What's really happening in Venezuela? Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in Venezuela's presidential election last month, but much of the rest of the world isn't buying it. Neither are many Venezuelans, who've taken to the streets to protest what they say is a fraudulent election in the face of increasingly violent crackdowns and menacing threats from the Maduro regime. The opposition says its tallies show it won 67 percent of the vote. Official statements from the European Union and U.S. State Depa...
Aug 15, 2024•1 hr 9 min
