Month: May 2019

Last Thursday, federal district judge Robert Pitman released a lengthy opinion invalidating on First Amendment grounds a Texas law that requires state contractors to certify that they don’t boycott Israel-related products. The opinion is a mess. I’m not going to point out all of the problems it has, but instead will note the two most serious.

First, the opinion misstates the holding of NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware as “recognizing that the First Amendment protects political boycotts.” As Eugene V. has explained on this blog, the case actually holds that there is a First Amendment right to advocate economic boycotts, not engage in them. If there were a First Amendment right to boycott for political reasons, then anyone politically opposed to integration, gay rights, and so on would have a First Amendment right to “boycott” minority groups protected by civil rights laws. That’s in fact the implication of Judge Pitman’s opinion, and it’s hard to believe he means it. It’s even harder to believe the Supreme Court would endorse his opinion given this implication.

Second, Judge Pitman botches his discussion of a key precedent, Rumsfeld v.  FAIR. In that case, the Court held that the law school plaintiffs had no First Amendment right to boycott military recruiters in the face of a federal statute barring recipients of federal funds from discriminating against those recruiters.

Pitman’s attempt to distinguish FAIR comes down to the fact that the Court never used the word “boycott” in the opinion:

Claiborne deals with political boycotts; FAIR, in contrast, is not about boycotts at all. The Supreme Court did not treat the FAIR plaintiffs’ conduct as a boycott: the word “boycott” appears nowhere in the opinion, the decision to withhold patronage is no implicated, and Claiborne, the key decision recognizing that the First Amendment protects political boycotts, is not discussed.

The reason Claiborne is not discussed is FAIR is because, again, Claiborne deals only with the right to advocate a boycott (speech), not to engage in one (economic action) and it’s therefore irrelevant. It’s true that the word “boycott” does not appear in FAIR, but it’s also true that (a) what the law school plaintiffs were doing was clearly within the definition of the word boycott; and (b) the law school plaintiffs, in their Supreme Court brief, themselves described what they were doing as a boycott. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the brief.

Moreover, the Association of American Law Schools, acting as an amicus and representing the interests of American law school membership, also described the actions of the law schools as a “boycott.”

So the notion that FAIR “is not about boycotts at all” is both contrary to the ordinary meaning of the word “boycott” and contrary to the way the case was presented to the Supreme Court by the law schools challenging the federal law at issue

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The Washington, D.C., chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) for searching a resident’s property without a warrant while in the middle of a legal battle over her son’s death.

As Reason previously reported, a resident named Jeffrey Price was killed on his illegal dirt bike in a police-involved crash. MPD told Price’s family that he was speeding and driving on the wrong side of the road. Witnesses and video from the scene appeared to indicate that an officer named Michael Pearson had actually attempted to use his police SUV to cut Price off on the road. Not only are Pearson’s alleged actions the suspected cause of Price’s death, but they are also in violation of MPD policy.

Last summer, two officers, identified as Whitehead and Gupton, descended upon a home belonging to Price’s mother and conducted a questionable search. The home was in the Deanwood neighborhood on the north side of Ward 7, which is predominately black. This was videotaped by Price’s uncle, Jay Brown. The officers told the family that they were searching for a gun that was dumped in the area. They did not produce a warrant when asked. The family has since argued that MPD’s search, which occurred in the middle of their legal battle, was a tactic to intimidate Price’s family. Brown accused the officers of “conducting themselves like a lawless gang with no supervision” at the time of the incident.

The ACLU issued a press release on Monday stating they sued one of the officers, Joseph Gupton, and the city for violating the Fourth Amendment.

“Safeguarding the home from unjustified police intrusions goes to the core of the Fourth Amendment’s purpose,” they wrote in the release. “Officer Gupton’s warrantless entry violated that guarantee, causing Ms. Price to feel increased anxiety and less safe in her home in light of the fact that officers from the same police department responsible for her son’s death apparently feel free to enter her property at any time.”

The ACLU previously asked MPD representatives to forgo attendance at a community public safety meeting where residents were expected to voice concerns about the department. The meeting was originally scheduled in response to the search.

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When Napoleon Bonaparte led the Army of the Orient into Egypt in 1798, he expected the Egyptians to welcome him as a liberator. They had, after all, endured centuries of chaotic rule by the Mamluks, an undisciplined army of slave descendants who had seized political power during the Crusades. Napoleon, meanwhile, promised order, religious tolerance, and admission to France’s enlightened empire.

But it was not to be. As The Age of Napoleon podcast explains in compelling detail, Bonaparte, much like modern imperialists, tried to impose his order at saber point. The residents of Cairo balked, and by 1801 the French had retreated from Egypt.

Bonaparte’s rise to power is one of the great sagas of modern history, and The Age of Napoleon chronicles it with Tolkienesque detail. Each episode focuses on a seminal period or battle in the Corsican’s life, providing plenty of context for those unfamiliar with 18th century European geopolitics.

The Age of Napoleon is scripted, precise, and relatively modest in its episode-to-episode ambitions. The leisurely pace crescendos every so often with a truly thrilling event; in particular, the rebuff of a royalist uprising that nearly toppled France’s revolutionary government is edge-of-your-seat stuff. Yet despite the show’s biographical focus, it never lets Napoleon off the hook for using liberationist rhetoric to justify his imperial ends.

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In a sense, it’s no surprise that Green Book—a feel-good dramedy about a mob–adjacent family man (Viggo Mortensen) who takes a job as chauffeur and bodyguard for a black concert pianist (Mahershala Ali) on tour in the 1960s South—won this year’s best-picture Oscar. After all, Driving Miss Daisy charmed audiences and the Academy of Motion Pictures with a similar plot involving a driver and a passenger from different backgrounds getting to know and like each other.

But that movie, released in 1989, came at a moment when Americans were apparently eager to celebrate long decades of racial progress. In 2019, the kumbaya ethos seems decidedly less prevalent. For many in U.S. politics today, clashes between worldviews—along the lines of race, class, gender, or partisan affiliation—have taken on new existential importance.

Thus, some critics reacted to Green Book with neither pleasure at a tale of improbable friendship nor eye rolling at its predictable story formula but with charges that, as Vanity Fair put it, “a film written and directed solely by white people has no business even referencing something as central to the African-American experience as The Negro Motorist Green Book, the guide to restaurants and hotels that served blacks during the Jim Crow era.” The movie’s irony is that it has made unmistakably clear how divided we still are.

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Defense Distributed launched in 2012 with the goal of making a usable plastic handgun with a 3D printer. Founder Cody Wilson fired the first of those weapons, which he dubbed The Liberator, in front of reporters in May 2013. The company and its mediagenic leader soon became the living symbol of—depending on your perspective—either the possibilities for human liberation or the threat of violent chaos inherent in the rise of affordable home 3D printing and the unstoppable spread of computer files.

For Paloma Heindorff, who took over as head of the company last year after stints as director of development and vice president of operations, these innovations are an important part of keeping the powerful in check. “We’ve got to be developing technologies in the independent sector to be able to counterbalance the enormous control that the government has and the enormous access to information that corporations have,” she says.

From the fragile plastic of the original 3D-printed pistol, Defense Distributed soon expanded into metal weapons. Its current leading product is the Ghost Gunner, a home-use computer numerical control (CNC) mill that allows anyone to turn an “80 percent lower”—a gun part that the federal government does not legally require to be stamped with a serial number—into an essentially untraceable working firearm.

The company has always deliberately tweaked the powers that be, and the powers have often tweaked it back. Days after Defense Distributed published the software files needed to make its plastic gun, the federal government insisted that distributing such data was illegal, tantamount to exporting arms without a license. The firm obeyed a demand from the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Control Compliance to take the files off its website. It then sued, insisting its code was First Amendment–protected speech.

The company should be free, it argued, to distribute its files just as all Americans are free to distribute a book, magazine, or pamphlet that discusses how to make a gun. Besides, whatever public safety benefit the government thought it was furthering was already moot: As is inevitable in the internet age, the files had already spread ’round the world and were widely available to anyone who cared—just no longer directly from Defense Distributed.

After many twists and turns, the federal government settled the case in July 2018. Defense Distributed regained the legal ability to publish its gun-making files—but not for long. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia quickly sued to prevent the settlement from going into effect, claiming among other things that the government’s concession violated an arcane aspect of the Administrative Procedure Act. A preliminary injunction in that case forced the company to again take down its data files, something Josh Blackman, a lawyer for Defense Distributed, insisted was “a prior restraint of constitutionally protected speech that is already in the public domain.”

That ongoing lawsuit is only part of Defense Distributed’s legal troubles. Last year, New Jersey passed a law barring the distribution of digital gun-making files to anyone who is not a licensed gun manufacturer. The state’s attorney general made it explicit that the intent of the legislation was to “to stop the next Cody Wilson, to fight the ghost gun industry.” Defense Distributed is now suing to overturn the prohibition.

Amid the legal fights, the company lost its charismatic founder. In September, Wilson was arrested in Taiwan and deported to the U.S. to face charges of sexual assault of an underage escort. (The law under which he was charged treats sexual contact with a minor as assault even if it was consensual; the website Wilson allegedly used certified that its escorts were of age.) He is awaiting formal arraignment.

“I watched [Cody Wilson’s] videos and I was like, ‘Holy shit. He just completely took my legs out from under me on that argument.’ I really enjoyed that experience of having to be confronted with a new reality.”

After Wilson’s arrest, control of Defense Distributed shifted to Heindorff, who had kept a low media profile during her three years at the company to that point. The 30-year-old London native sat down with Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller in January—her very first media interview after taking the reins—to discuss her intellectual development, how firearm manufacturing specs are like a pizza recipe, and what’s next for Defense Distributed.

Reason: You’re a bit of a mystery. You’re British, but you somehow ended up in Austin, Texas, running this controversial weapons-information company. How exactly did that happen?

Heindorff: I grew up in central London and moved to New York about five years ago. For the first 10 years of my professional life I ran a lot of events, I managed a lot of bars, and then I became an office manager for a media company [called Flavorpill]. I’d always explored alternative politics and philosophy; my mother was an actress and my father is an artist, so I was raised in a very creative household. I didn’t even realize until I was 18 that people did jobs that they didn’t love.

Once I was ranting in the back of a cab going over the Brooklyn Bridge about how irritated I was with people trying to just increase legislation and think that that’s a way to protect themselves—just relinquishing personal responsibility, diverting blame. My friend James said, “Hey, you should really check out Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed.” I did, and about three days later my flatmate told me that I should probably leave the house, because I’d been in this wormhole of discovering the work of Defense Distributed.

Then I just popped Cody an email. I told him I was going to move to Austin and he was going to give me a job. He said, “You should come and check us out first.” I think everyone was a bit confused by me to begin with. I’ve got family in Austin, and they were very excited to hear I was moving here and then became very confused when they found out why. But it’s super interesting to me.

What grabbed you about Defense Distributed?

I had an inherited opinion about guns and gun control, but I wasn’t particularly passionate about it. I wasn’t in the streets raving about how much I thought guns were awful. But I’ve learned a lot. I read one thing where someone was like, “She didn’t even shoot a gun until 2015!” They also got upset that I didn’t own a gun. I was like, “It would have been incredibly irresponsible of me to have not shot a gun and bought one.” I think that’s a very strange thing to expect me to have done. I learned how to shoot the gun and then I bought myself a gun.

A lot of people want to reject violence as part of the human condition. Push it away. It doesn’t exist. I’ve always thought that’s an odd way to approach such a fundamental human action. I’m not saying that I think violence is awesome. I think it exists, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that it doesn’t.

It was interesting to be in New York and have these kinds of natural assumptions—guns are bad—and then to [realize], like Cody often says, that however I feel about that is irrelevant now [because people will be making guns whether I like it or not]. I’m not so emotionally motivated that I watched his videos and was like, “Oh my God, this is so bad. Get it away from me. Someone needs to legislate this because I don’t want to have to think about this potential future world.” That’s lazy, that’s apathetic, and that’s a relinquishing of one’s own responsibility.

So I watched these videos and I was like, “Holy shit. He just completely took my legs out from under me on that argument.” I really enjoyed that experience of having to be confronted with a new reality. Then I met with Cody and I was like, this is an impressive group of people doing some of the most impressive and elegant activism. It has a genuine effect and forces an interesting conversation.

It’s difficult for a business like ours to move around in the traditional commercial space. You experience it firsthand as someone who’s actually trying to do business operations and sales, and the obstacles encountered doing that job for this company are very interesting. I’ve become more and more passionate over the past years because I see example after example of what I believe to be gross mistreatment of a group of people who are perfectly within their rights to do what we were doing. So now I’m just really extreme.

Defense Distributed forced a conversation about the fact that producing a gun from the comfort of your home is now a technical reality, and it’s going to become increasingly hard, if not impossible, for governments to stop people from doing it.

We can move into a new space where we’re thinking differently about the way we relate to other people on a global scale. Bitcoin as well. It’s running in tandem, these developments or technologies that empower the individual in a way that we’ve never really seen before. It’s so interesting that this happens at the same time that we’re also seeing control of the individual like we’ve never seen before—control of access to information.

Like, here’s the internet. You can have everything you want, but actually, you’ll go to Facebook, you’ll go to YouTube, and you won’t actually get real information—they’re curating it for you. We’ve got to be developing technologies in the independent sector to be able to counterbalance the enormous control that the government has and the enormous access to information that corporations have.

So this has moved beyond just the conversation about guns, and maybe it always has been about more than that. You seem to be saying that this is about information itself, and you’re trying to safeguard people’s ability to access it.

What’s happening with New Jersey—it’s not regulating an action. It’s regulating the transfer of information, the offering of information, even. Then you’ve got corporate censorship, and that just makes us react more aggressively. There was something said in the hearing yesterday [regarding the New Jersey lawsuit] comparing us to Amazon, as if we’re just sending out guns. But [what we’re doing is actually] the equivalent of Amazon sending out a pizza recipe book. That isn’t doing pizza delivery. It doesn’t make sense to give a narrative where there is no step that indicates human involvement from the information access to the use of information to create a physical article. To completely ignore the human component in that is super odd.

It’s called Defense Distributed. We want to distribute the means of production into as many hands as possible. And this New Jersey law is really fighting against that. They want only these licensed firearm manufacturers in their state to [access the] code. They’re completely removing any human interaction from the acquisition of the code to the development of the firearm. It’s really the information that they’re trying to stifle.

You’re in a huge ongoing fight with the government on multiple fronts. But you’re also fighting against other forces. You mentioned corporations. Just getting information out seems to be becoming increasingly challenging, especially for a group like you that is on the edge of what’s socially acceptable.

We’ve experienced things that we even were shocked by. YouTube took down a lot of our videos, but even more than that, Facebook won’t allow anyone to share any links to our products and any links to our pages. We’re trying to protect speech that we should be entitled to make. I can’t even talk about those rights being infringed without that then being censored, which is insane. These corporations are saying that this knowledge is too dangerous for people to have. The plans for this gun were downloaded like a million times five years ago, but apparently the knowledge that this even exists is too dangerous to talk about.

How disrespectful to not trust [people] with information—to say, “You the general populace cannot be trusted with this information.” That alone is gross to me. And if we’re not allowed to discuss these things, what’s next for us to not be allowed to discuss? We’re experiencing this all over the place, Facebook and YouTube and Shopify, and you can only see this certain kind of content, and there are no competitors [for many of these sites].

I think that’s really scary. Where do we go as a society? What’s the road, other than monotonous and increasingly narrow? The future should never be narrowed. If people can’t be trusted with information, we have a really big problem.

I want to talk about the elephant in the room: Cody Wilson, who is no longer with Defense Distributed. He was indicted for hiring someone through a sex work app. How has his departure affected the company?

Certainly it wasn’t a happy occasion for anyone. I was really proud of my staff during that period.

I think Cody’s departure has affected us less than people might think. I understand why people would think that it would be chaos, because he was an incredibly powerful figurehead. But there are quite a bit of us working back there. The company’s doing just fine. I think people miss him as a friend of ours, and I know for a fact that he’s already greatly missed as a public voice.

How did you become the replacement?

I built out a lot of the day-to-day operations in the company. So from that perspective, it just made sense. I had the most connection with our remote people and vendors. I was the second most visible after Cody, internally. Anyone involved with the company would know it made a lot of sense. It’s just to the outside world, who didn’t know me before, that it probably is a little bit confusing.

How would you compare and contrast your leadership style with his?

I smile a lot more, but I’m a lot meaner. I guess you’d probably have to ask a staff member, but we’re very different. Cody is way more comfortable in front of the camera than I am. I like business. I like managing people. Cody liked getting into the ideas and the ideology behind everything. I’m extremely passionate about ideas too, but it’s more of a group discussion with me. I’m bringing people in from our community to help brainstorm. So it’s more of a communal act at this point.

“How disrespectful to not trust [people] with information.…And if we’re not allowed to discuss these things, what’s next for us to not be allowed to discuss?”

In terms of management, I’m more of a hands-on manager when it comes to the day-to-day business running. There’ll be a noticeable difference in the way the company is operating for sure. Less intimidating, and hopefully I’ll get out more regular content to keep people informed. I’m less likely to do one-on-one interviews as much, but I do hope to push out blog posts and stuff like that. But the aim of the company and the goal, our mission, is not altered at all. We already had a roadmap for 2019, so nothing I’m planning on is not something spoken about previously.

There’s a new product that you’re helping to launch?

We’ve got our latest platform added to Ghost Gunner: a Glock 19–compatible frame able to be made [into a working gun] in 30 minutes. People have been waiting a long time for that. It’s the first time we’ve done a polymer frame rather than an aluminum one. So it’s moving into a new space. It’s also the first time we’ve involved the community in our [research and development] flow. I believe it’s going to lead to quicker product rollouts than we’ve seen in the past.

Making Glock-style weapons available to be essentially manufactured at home in half an hour seems likely to spark a whole new shitstorm. Does it make you nervous to be releasing a product like this when you’re under attack from multiple angles?

Most of our lawsuits are centered around DefCad [the now—dormant software-sharing part of the business, distinct from the Ghost Gunner machine]. Still, everything makes you nervous. You know, Shopify kicked us off without notice over the summer. A lot of random stuff happens to us, which makes me lose sleep. I don’t mind the problems that I see coming, but we’ll see.

When New Jersey passed its law targeting Defense Distributed, the governor referenced the National Rifle Association (NRA). What’s your relationship to that group, and what do you make of the focus that’s always on them?

There’s a lot of things to say about that, but I don’t want to throw everyone under the bus in my first interview opportunity. I will say I’m surprised that we haven’t gotten more funding and more support from organizations that announce themselves to be pro–Second Amendment. The Second Amendment Foundation, who’s been with us through all of our lawsuits, has been incredible in that regard, and we’re incredibly grateful to them. But yeah, NRA, where you at?

A lot of these gun-control laws come on the heels of mass shootings, and the argument they make is that you’re enabling more of those because you’re putting unregistered firearms in the hands of could-be-anybody. How do you react to those charges?

It’s an emotional argument. It’s not a fun subject to talk about, but just because it’s not fun to talk about it doesn’t mean we can just decide not to talk about it. Do I think that we massively increase the likelihood of school shootings? No, I don’t. That’s my response to that.

Coming into the gun world as a novice, something very interesting that one realizes is that a lot of the anti-gun or gun-control rhetoric is completely wrong. There’s this narrative of the gun’s gonna pick itself up and shoot itself, right? Like there’s no human involvement needed. And it’s funny. When you see a firearm, there’s a natural reaction to it, like, “It shoots. It’s dangerous.” But you need to understand that a gun is a machine.

Cody was committed to the idea of “crypto-anarchy.” Is that something that motivates you as well?

That’s definitely a motivation for me. There always seems to be a little bit of a narrative of destruction [around crypto-anarchy], right? It’s [seen as this] raw chaos of decentralized weapons. I really see it as something quite positive, an opportunity. [Wilson and I] were both going in the same direction, but I was skipping with sunshine and rainbows and he’s like, rawr, and obviously that’s a complete exaggeration of our personality types…but it’s the same motivation. It just comes out differently because I really do see it as a beautiful opportunity for people to feel empowered and be able to exercise their own abilities and grow as an individual.

You had this high point when the federal government settled with you, and then immediately the states stepped in to sue you. How has that affected your business?

DefCad is shut down now because of the law that New Jersey is imposing. DefCad is a file-sharing website. It’s always been stop-start—we’ll get it up for a short period of time, and then it gets taken down again. That’s still a project that’s very much alive. But it can’t go anywhere until we get some [legal] relief. It’s a huge drain on our resources. It’s a weird thing when you’re working in a business mindset to have to factor in another cost like that.

I’ve been given a lot of advice of how it’s time for us to get out of the lawsuits and concentrate on making money. And, you know, they get a middle finger. Because my entire staff would leave if we abandoned the philosophy of this company. So it’s just not an option, [even though the legal fights are] a huge expense. So when we do fundraising drives, every bit helps. I really hope that out of respect for the work that [Wilson has] done in the past years people don’t withdraw their support just because there’s not an entertaining Twitter account to follow, you know? I really hope they realize there’s a group of people here that are really trying to protect our rights, and that hasn’t changed.

New Jersey would argue they have a right to control the production of firearms in their state, and Defense Distributed is undermining their ability to do that. They would say they are totally justified in passing this law. Why is that not acceptable in your mind?

I just don’t think it’s acceptable to say that people can’t speak about things, that information is so dangerous that it can’t even be spoken about. I think it’s dangerous for one state to be able to say that our company, in a different state, is not allowed to use the internet for offerings of products.

It’s natural, these emotional reactions. But this is important to say: There’s a huge problem with people following emotional reactions rather than rational, logical arguments. I think it’s natural, I think it’s human, but I do think it needs to be addressed.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. For a video version, visit reason.com.

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The short-lived teen soap opera Roswell, which debuted in 1999 and launched Katherine Heigl’s career, put a weird and fun twist on the boy-meets-girl high school love story. It was no X-Files, but it wasn’t bad. In the show, which hopped from the WB to UPN over its three seasons, the boy was secretly an extraterrestrial—one of three that had been hiding in plain sight as perpetual teenagers since their flying saucer crashed in 1947.

The rebooted series, which premiered in January on The CW Network and is now titled Roswell, New Mexico, heightens the drama by taking the characters out of high school and adding a timely twist. The girl, Liz (Jeanine Mason), is now the daughter of illegal immigrants, and the boy-who’s-really-an-alien, Max (Nathan Parsons), is a deputy sheriff. As in the original, there are shadowy government agents about, threatening to expose the secret at the center of their relationship. This time, though, the secrets cut both ways. It’s still no X-Files, but it interestingly reimagines what it means to be “alien” in our troubled Trump times.

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After pushing pale ales to the edge of bearable bitterness, brewers are starting to get hopped up on the new hot thing in the world of beer: cannabis. Craft breweries around the country are experimenting with drinks that look and taste like beer but use tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) or cannabidiol (CBD), not alcohol, as their intoxicating ingredient.

In January, Flying Dog Brewery and Green Leaf Medical Cannabis, both of Frederick, Maryland, announced plans to release a joint beer called Hop Chronic. To avoid tangling with federal regulators, Flying Dog CEO Jim Caruso in February told Reason‘s Eric Boehm that the brewing and cannabis-infusion processes will be kept separate. He also spoke about the government shutdown’s deleterious effect on seasonal beer releases and how excessive regulation of alcohol labels hurts one of America’s most robust domestic industries.

Q: Where did the idea for Hop Chronic beer come from?

A: The idea came from getting to know our new neighbors, Green Leaf Medical, a cannabis grower within walking distance of the brewery. We learned from Phil Goldberg, the CEO and founder, and the other people over there about how it’s processed and the various routes of delivery for people who want to experience the therapeutic benefits. They began operations after Maryland legalized medical marijuana [in 2017]. Everything is fairly new in this state—it’s just been a couple years.

We liked the guys; they liked us. They’ve been over to the tasting room to try some of our beers and, of course, the conversation led to whether we could make a nonalcoholic beer that they could infuse with marijuana.

Q: How do you make a beer that’s nonalcoholic and that mixes well with weed?

A: It’s interesting, because we have never brewed, for commercial purposes, a nonalcoholic beer before. But that market seems to be increasing, and cannabis and hops are literally related in terms of their DNA, so we’re very confident we can come up with an IPA that blends well with the flavor of cannabis.

Q: Is marijuana part of the brewing process or something that’s added after the beer is finished?

A: Because of the law, it is strictly prohibited for us to have cannabis here at the brewery. We do not have that license. I wouldn’t say that we literally take it next door, but sort of. We will be brewing the non-alcoholic beer, and then it goes to Green Leaf Medical for them to infuse, produce, package, and distribute through their network and their retail stores.

Q: Is there a real market for this sort of cannabis-beer product that goes beyond people just wanting to say they’ve tried it?

A: There’s certainly a bit of gimmicky element anytime you do something new, but I have noticed a trend toward what some people call “mindful drinking.” That includes low-alcohol or nonalcoholic beers. I think that is a real market.

As I’ve gotten to know more about the marijuana industry and the people who really do want this for the therapeutic benefits, it does seem to me that they shouldn’t be forced into smoking, or using creams or edibles, when they want to experience the benefits through a beverage. If you enjoy the taste of beer, then that would be a very appropriate method for experiencing the benefits of CBD.

Q: How did the government shutdown, which extended to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, affect beer makers?

A: It’s a big problem. Most breweries, like Flying Dog, do special releases for the spring and summer. In this case, we will either miss that window—so we will sell less beer—or it will be a shortened season.

If you’re doing a spring beer, you need the approval [for the label] in the winter. You’re not going to go out there and produce hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of packaging and not know whether you have to tweak the label a little bit. So we’re stuck, and we’ll have a couple special releases that we can’t sell anywhere.

I’d like to see this whole thing go away. What they should do is say, “Hey, you have to say this on the label in this size font, and if we see it in the market otherwise, we’re going to fine you.” There’s no reason for them to have to look at 200,000 labels every year.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

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There’s a persistent American fantasy of a CEO president: a corporate Cincinnatus uncorrupted by elected experience who steps in to right the ship of state through sheer executive will. In the 1980s, the chatter centered around Chrysler chief Lee Iacocca, who polled well but refused to run. In the ’90s, it was Electronic Data Systems founder Ross Perot, who actually entered the ring. Our current president is also a businessman, and a lot of his fans seem to imagine him as the hyper-competent executive he played on The Apprentice rather than the bankruptcy-court regular he was in real life.

You might expect Donald Trump’s performance in office to have taken the luster off the CEO-savior fantasy, if not universally then at least among Trump’s critics. But at least one guy thinks we merely picked the wrong boss. Howard Schultz, having run Starbucks and the Seattle SuperSonics, is now flirting with the idea of adding America to his portfolio.

The most interesting member of that plutocratic quartet is surely Perot. That’s partly because he picked the most interesting time to run. His initial campaign came in 1992, the first post-Cold War election. In that politically scrambled setting, the Texas independent quickly rose in the polls. By June he was firmly in the lead: According to Gallup, 39 percent of registered voters supported him, with 31 percent favoring Republican incumbent George H.W. Bush and just 25 percent backing Democratic nominee Bill Clinton.

Perot blew his chances when he petulantly pulled out of the race in July and then re-entered it in October, blaming his withdrawal on a hazily sketched GOP plot against him. After that, he seemed less like a competent manager ready to stabilize the nation and more like an erratic uncle with a collection of grievances. But he still got a respectable 19 percent of the popular vote, outperforming Clinton in Utah and Bush in Maine. When he ran again four years later, he got a bit more than 8 percent—substantially lower than his previous total, but still better than any other independent or third-party presidential candidate of the last half-century.

Folk memory vaguely recalls Perot’s platforms and persona as “conservative,” but in fact they were more of a mix. He was a protectionist, a deficit hawk, a foreign-policy dove (or at least more dovish than the two guys who beat him), and socially tolerant in a mind-your-own-business way. He had a strong technocratic streak too, which he would put on display when asked about issues where he didn’t have a fully formed position: Striking a post-ideological pose, he’d promise to get “the best experts” in a room and let them hash out an answer. In his more small-d democratic moments, he would expand the number of advisers: He speculated about holding national referendums and participatory “electronic town halls.”

I didn’t vote for him. I have no love for either protectionism or technocracy, and I’ve never bought into the idea that the skills of a successful businessman would work miracles in the rather different institutional context of the federal government. Still, I’ve often wondered if we’d be better off if Perot had won in ’92.

The case for being glad he lost largely comes down to Perot’s views on trade. There are plenty of places where I disagreed with the guy, from taxes to the drug war, but most of those involved issues where the other candidates were hardly better. Trade is another matter.

Clinton’s policies in this area weren’t spectacular. The man who did win in 1992 gave us managed-trade agreements weighed down with unnecessary rules, including some measures (particularly the ones involving intellectual property) that made trade less rather than more free. But that’s not why Perot criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement or the World Trade Organization. He attacked them for the ways they did liberalize markets, and he wanted to move in the opposite direction. His trade policies would almost certainly have been far more restrictionist than what we got instead.

That isn’t just a minor issue. The last quarter-century has seen a dramatic leap in much of the world’s standard of living, and one reason for that is lower barriers to global exchange. There are other reasons too, of course, from the advent of new technologies to various countries’ domestic reforms—forces that are entangled with global trade but also have other sources. Still, the most optimistic prospect for a Perot-style trade order is one where the Third World developed but not as quickly and not as well.

On the other hand, we would’ve been a lot better off with the nontrade portions of Perot’s foreign policy. We might even have avoided the war on terror.

Unlike Bill Clinton, Perot opposed the first Gulf War—and he continued to criticize it after the U.S. won. He went on to oppose Clinton’s interventions in Haiti and the Balkans. His deficit reduction plan included deep cuts in military spending, going $40 billion beyond the post–Cold War trims backed by Bush. Perot was especially aggravated by how much the U.S. spent defending Europe, declaring it “very important for us to let them assume more and more of the burden and for us to bring that money back here and rebuild our infrastructure.” He wasn’t wild about Washington’s defense commitments in Asia either.

At the risk of getting too speculative, it’s not hard to imagine him bringing home the U.S. troops that stayed in Saudi Arabia at the end of the first Iraq conflict. Put differently, it’s not hard to imagine him pre-empting Osama bin Laden’s chief grievance against the United States.

If that’s taking the thought experiment too far, we can certainly say this much: The U.S. had an opportunity in the 1990s to roll back the empire it built during the Cold War. Bush and Clinton preferred to preserve it, and in the process they paved the way for the post-9/11 imperium. There’s at least a fair chance that Perot would have gone in a different direction.

Until a couple of years ago, that was how things seemed to stand: President Perot would have been worse when it came to trading with other nations and better when it came to not bombing them. But lately there’s been an additional factor to consider. It involves another CEO who got involved in politics, who even spent a little time in Perot’s Reform Party, one whose views are similar to Perot’s when it comes to trade but rather different when it comes to debt. After two years of Donald Trump in the White House, I can’t help thinking: If we were going to get a nationalist business executive as president, Perot would’ve been a hell of a lot more benign.

The area where Trump has done the most to expand intrusive government was barely on Perot’s radar screen: The Texas businessman wasn’t particularly pro-immigration, but he wasn’t especially opposed to it either. He certainly had no interest in the xenophobic fear-mongering that runs through Trump’s rhetoric. (When Perot’s critics searched for an excuse to call him a bigot, the best they could come up with was the fact that he had awkwardly used the phrase “you people” in a speech to the NAACP.) And while Trump and Perot may agree on some foreign policy questions—the cost of Europe’s defense, for instance—President Perot seems less likely to have amped up the aerial bombardment of the Middle East, or to have put Elliott Abrams in charge of Venezuela policy, or to have ruminated about deliberately targeting terrorists’ families.

Unlike Trump, Perot actually cared about cutting federal spending—including the modern GOP’s great untouchable, the Pentagon budget. And unlike Trump, he clearly had a functioning head on his shoulders. Bad as Perot’s trade policy might have been, it would not have had the random-synapses-firing quality of the Trump trade wars. At least Perot understood how tariffs work.

The business Cincinnatus is a daydream for people more smitten with corporate hierarchies than with the open markets that can lay such hierarchies to waste. President Perot wouldn’t have saved the country, no more than President Trump did or President Schultz will. But he could have taken us down a different path in the 1990s, one with less trade-fueled wealth but also with fewer foreign wars. And he certainly would have been preferable to the much more flamboyant executive who entered the Oval Office in January 2017. The super-capable CEO president is a fantasy, but some fantasy CEOs are worse than others.

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