REASON – Free Minds & Free Markets | This, That and The Other

This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's admission that "Woke 1 was crazy" and whether the Democratic Socialists of America's (DSA) new focus on affordability represents a genuine break from the politics of 2020. They debate whether progressives have actually moved on from the excesses of the pandemic era, whether the DSA's economic agenda is any more workable, and why affordability has become such a potent message on the left. The editors also examine how the cost of living is driving infighting on the right, from the online battle over $20 burritos to the larger splits over tariffs, immigration, and the Iran war. They discuss President Donald Trump's latest attempt to end birthright citizenship and what the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal at Cambridge University says about academia's lingering ideological problems. Finally, a listener asks whether enormous CEO pay packages and widespread layoffs undermine the case for capitalism.   0:00—Ocasio-Cortez says "Woke 1 was crazy" 15:19—Conservatives debate the cost of burritos 28:49—Trump's birthright citizenship order 33:12—Listener question on capitalism 46:08—Arday scandal and resignation 55:54—Weekly cultural recommendations   Upcoming events: Nick Gillespie discusses THC, INC., on Tuesday, August 11, in New York City. Tickets are free but must be reserved.   Mentioned in the podcast: "The Socialist Surge Revives Failed and Hateful Ideas," by J.D. Tuccille "The 'Affordability' Agenda That Taxes Your Dinner," by C. Jarrett Dieterle "Can You Imagine a Future Where Adults Don't Believe in Socialism?" by Steven Greenhut "Socialist Moment," by Peter Suderman "Abdul El-Sayed Says He's Not a Socialist. His Policy Agenda Says Otherwise," by Robby Soave "Socialists Are Trying To Take Hold of the Democratic Party—and They're Winning," by Zach Weissmueller "The GOP Is Warning About Socialism While Quietly Embracing It," by Veronique de Rugy "Francesca Hong's Hateful Holidays, Burrito Prices, and Woke 1.0," by Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi "A Burrito Costs How Much?" by Eric Boehm "A Viral Tweet Set Off a Discourse on $20 Burritos. Here's the Truth About Inflation," by Reem Ibrahim "Trump's New Birthright Citizenship Executive Orders Are Mostly Theater," by Billy Binion "Trump Issues Another Unconstitutional Executive Order Targeting Birthright Citizenship," by Ilya Somin "The Trump Administration Promises the 'Largest Denaturalization Effort Ever,'" by Billy Binion "Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business," by Milton Friedman, John Mackey, and T.J. Rodgers "Milton Friedman Accused of Making Corporations Greedy," by Brian Doherty "Phil Magness: Holding Leftists and Libertarians… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Second Annual Aspiring Free Speech Scholars Workshop jointly sponsored by the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law (ASU) and the Hoover Institution (Stanford University) Because of a technical problem, any submissions before June 4, 2026 were lost; please resubmit (or submit for the first time) at the new URL listed below, https://tinyurl.com/aspiring-free-speech-scholars Are you a law student, judicial law clerk, lawyer, or beginning academic hoping to publish a journal article on free speech law? Would you like the opportunity to get advice about your draft from leading free speech scholars? If so, send us your draft by Sunday, August 16, 2026. (This should still be a draft article, not an article that's already published or expected to be published within six months.) Don't worry if the article draft isn't fully polished, or even if some portions are incomplete; we're reviewing drafts, not finished products. We plan to select the submissions that we think are particularly promising, and invite their authors to a workshop where they can present their papers and get helpful feedback on them. The workshop will be Saturday, October 24, 2026 (with dinner the night before) at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law in Phoenix. We will inform the selected authors by Tuesday, September 8, 2026. We have funds to pay for transportation and lodging for the selected authors' trips. Eligibility is limited to people who have so far published three or fewer law-related journal articles. We also plan to officially recognize zero to three of the top articles among those we review. If the authors wish, they can also have their articles reviewed for publication in the Journal of Free Speech Law (http://JournalOfFreeSpeechLaw.org), presumably after they revise the articles in light of the workshop feedback. If you're interested, please submit your draft at http://tinyurl.com/aspiring-free-speech-scholars (Google logon required). Please single-space, and format the article nicely, so we can more easily read it. Please do not include your name or law school affiliation in the document or document filename, and please do not include an author's note thanking your advisors and others. Please make your filename be the title of your article (or some recognizable subset of the article title). We want to review the article drafts without knowing the authors' identities. If you have questions, please check http://tinyurl.com/aspiring-free-speech-faq; if your question isn't answered there, please e-mail volokh@stanford.edu. Many thanks to the Stanton Foundation for its generous support. *… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) raised eyebrows this weekend when she merely shrugged off her previous enthusiasm for electorally toxic far-left cultural positions. "I have a local city councilman who has this saying: 'Woke 1 was crazy,'" said AOC with a laugh. She was referencing a tweet by Chi Ossé, a New York City councilman, who similarly uttered this line in an attempt to explain why he had previously said a "white man should not be the next speaker" of the City Council. Simply put, this attitude is far too blasé. While it's encouraging that so many progressives have backed away from some (though by no means all) of their really terrible ideas, no one should be so naive as to accept these conversions at face value. Moreover, it's quite deflective of them to act as if "Woke 1" was something bad that just sort of happened—like a hurricane or an earthquake—and they passively accepted it because what else could they do? In fact, AOC and Ossé sound a bit like Anchorman's Ron Burgundy issuing his well-quoted lamentation about his team's outrageously violent, murder-fueled battle royale—"that escalated quickly"—while nonchalantly sipping a beer. Perhaps Woke 1 involved nothing quite so absurd as Steve Carell killing a guy with a trident, but it was still a fairly crazy time, and importantly, political figures such as AOC did absolutely nothing to try to stop it. She was more than complicit in it. In 2019, AOC posted a video criticizing New Yorkers who wanted to grow cauliflower instead of yuca in their community gardens as complicit in colonization. (Neither cauliflower nor yuca is indigenous to New York.) In 2022, she weighed in on the fight over the gender neutral term Latinx, taking fellow Democrats to task for being too quick to abandon their attempts at inclusivity, despite polls consistently showing that large shares of Latin people did not like the term very much and would be less likely to vote for Democrats who used it. And she said that it was offensive for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to claim cowboy culture originated in Spain; AOC instead credited "African enslaved peoples" with this contribution. That was five months ago. Those are just a few colorful examples of AOC willfully participating in wokeness discourse and militating in favor of the more ridiculous position. It's true that broader debates about the excesses of wokeness… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Last week, the Trump administration teased a deal with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz closed by war. President Donald Trump said on August 4 that the deal "could happen tomorrow or the next day." Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said the same day that "we may have a deal today or tomorrow to open the strait and move towards a more normalized position." It is now August 10, and no deal is in sight. Iran's Supreme National Security Council secretary declared on Saturday that it would only allow the Strait of Hormuz to reopen with a permanent end to the war, an end to the U.S. blockade and financial sanctions on Iran, and financial compensation. (The first two points were also part of the June peace memorandum that both countries signed, and the third is a new demand.) Trump told Axios on Sunday that he is now "only semi-negotiating" with Iran and that the situation will just "work out" on its own. Meanwhile, the situation in the strait itself is the same as it's been for the past few months. Iran is insisting that it has the right to route shipping through an Iranian-controlled corridor and is shooting at ships that don't comply. The U.S. is guiding convoys of oil tankers, with their radio transponders turned off, through a corridor in Omani waters. Oil flows were at around 5 million barrels on Friday, down from 20 million barrels per day before the war, according to the market research service Commodity Context. Kpler, another data firm, reports only 32 ships transited the strait over the weekend, 17 of which used the Iranian corridor. Rory Johnson, founder of Commodity Context, wrote that even the current level of U.S.-backed "dark transits" is "unsustainable," simply because not enough empty tankers are entering the Persian Gulf. The U.S.-Israel surprise attack on February 28 was supposed to bring Iran to heel within a matter of days or weeks, according to its architects. Instead, it created a whole new headache. The Iranian government quickly discovered that it had an opportunity to throttle the world economy in order to punish the countries attacking it, extract ransom from merchants, and, eventually, to leverage more concessions out of a peace deal. A war that was supposed to reshape the Middle East in Washington's favor instead became a struggle to get back to the status quo ante.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Some excerpts from today's long opinion by Judge Joseph Dawson, III (D.S.C.) in Lemoine v. Horry Georgetown Tech. Coll.: On September 5, 2024, while off campus, Lemoine [a cosmetology student at HGTC] sent a message in a Snapchat group that included some HGTC students. The message concerned an off-campus interaction involving Lemoine's boyfriend's roommate, who was not an HGTC student or employee. Lemoine wrote: "But naw I was trying to be nice but f[**]k that some random ugly ass in bread looking f[**]k dude called me a bitch he needa get blasted." [Expurgation in the court decision. -EV] … [In a meeting with school officials on September 11, 2024,] Lemoine denied that "blasted" referred to physical harm and explained that she meant the roommate should be called out or held accountable for his behavior. Lemoine also stated that neither she nor her parents owned guns. Defendants contend that Lemoine's statements suggested a broader disassociation from firearms. Plaintiff disputes that characterization and contends she did not state that she had never fired a gun, had no experience with guns, or had no association with anyone who possessed firearms. The record reflects that, at the conclusion of the September 11 meeting, HGTC accepted Lemoine's explanation of the Snapchat comment. The September 20 conduct decision later recounted that Lemoine had been told there was then no evidence to find her in violation of the Student Code and that the College had accepted her explanation for the Snapchat comment. Plaintiff further contends that Sawyer communicated internally that there had been "no direct threat to others," and that Batten and Sawyer reached the same conclusion after speaking with students. Defendants contend the matter remained under review and that HGTC was required to continue assessing safety and disruption concerns…. On September 13, 2024, HGTC discovered a video posted to Lemoine's Instagram account about a year earlier, in which Lemoine fired a handgun at a target while wearing western-style attire. Plaintiff contends the video predated her enrollment at HGTC, was taken on private property, did not involve HGTC, and did not refer to any HGTC student, employee, or campus. Defendants contend the video caused them to question Lemoine's prior explanation of the Snapchat message and her statements concerning firearms. Batten requested authorization from Fore for an interim suspension. Fore authorized the interim suspension. Plaintiff contends that, before authorizing the interim suspension, Fore was presented with… [TheTopNews] Read More.