Category: reason

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos today criticized the previous administration’s approach to campus sexual assault, accusing it of imposing a “broken system” that mistreats both accused students and rape survivors.

The Obama-era Office for Civil Rights compelled universities to design sexual assault adjudication policies that have deprived students of due process rights and weakened protections for freedom of expression. In a speech this afternoon, DeVos said her department would revise its existing guidance for complying with Title IX, the federal statute at the center of the effort.

DeVos cited several examples of colleges putting students through Kafkaesque quasi-judicial procedures. I promise you they are real. We’ve written about them at Reason.

Here’s a list of some of DeVos’s examples, with links to our articles about them.

1. Stony Brook University

“The current failed system left one student to fend for herself at a university disciplinary hearing,” said Devos. “She told her university that another student sexually assaulted her in her dorm room. In turn, her university told her she would have to prosecute the case herself. Without any legal training whatsoever, she had to prepare an opening statement, fix exhibits and find witnesses.”

I covered that case here: “College Rape Trials Are Unfair to Men and Women. Here’s Why.“

2. The University of Southern California

“You may have recently read about a disturbing case in California,” said DeVos. “It’s the story of an athlete, his girlfriend, and the failed system. The couple was described as ‘playfully roughhousing,’ but a witness thought otherwise and the incident was reported to the university’s Title IX coordinator. The young woman repeatedly assured campus officials she had not been abused nor had any misconduct occurred. But because of the failed system, university administrators told her they knew better. They dismissed the young man, her boyfriend, from the football team and expelled him from school. ‘When I told the truth,’ the young woman said, ‘I was stereotyped and was told I must be a ‘battered’ woman, and that made me feel demeaned and absurdly profiled.'”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote about that one here: “Star-Crossed Student Athletes Torn Apart By Title IX Witchhunt at USC.”

3. George Mason University

“Another student at a different school saw her rapist go free,” said Devos. “He was found responsible by the school, but in doing so, the failed system denied him due process. He sued the school, and after several appeals in civil court, he walked free.”

There are a few different cases that arguably meet this description; I wrote about one of them here: “Students Had BDSM Sex. Male Says He Obeyed Safe Word. GMU Agreed, Expelled Him Anyway.“

4. The University of Tennessee

“A student on another campus is under a Title IX investigation for a wrong answer on a quiz,” said DeVos. “The question asked the name of the class Lab instructor. The student didn’t know the instructor’s name, so he made one up—Sarah Jackson—which unbeknownst to him turned out to be the name of a model. He was given a zero and told that his answer was ‘inappropriate’ because it allegedly objectified the female instructor. He was informed that his answer ‘meets the Title IX definition of sexual harassment.’ His university opened an investigation without any complainants.”

That can’t be true. It’s just too crazy, right? Wrong. It happened, and I wrote about it here: “Tennessee Student Accused of Sexual Harassment Because He Wrote Instructor’s Name Wrong.” And I posted a follow-up here: “UT Student Now Being Investigated for Sexual Harassment After Writing His Instructor’s Name Wrong.”

5. various colleges

“Too many cases involve students and faculty who have faced investigation and punishment simply for speaking their minds or teaching their classes,” said DeVos.

Consider the case of Northwestern University’s Laura Kipnis, whose skepticism about rules forbidding sexual relationships between students and professors led to her being investigated under Title IX: “This Prof Dared to Challenge Her Students’ Views on Sex. Here’s How They Retaliated.“

Or the case of Louisiana State University’s Teresa Buchanan: “LSU Professor Fired for Telling Jokes Is Latest Victim of College Anti-Sex Hysteria.”

Or a case at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where residence advisors claimed that making jokes about Harambe, the dead gorilla and internet meme, could constitute a violation of Title IX: “UMass-Amherst: Harambe Jokes Are Racist Microaggressions, Violate Title IX.”

Then there are some Title IX cases DeVos neither mentioned nor implied, but could have easily served as examples of the sort of mania that has taken hold on campuses:

6. Amherst College

A male student was expelled for sexual assault, he even though he had credible evidence that his accuser had assaulted him: “Amherst Student Was Expelled for Rape. But He Was Raped, Evidence Shows.“

7. Brandeis University

A gay male student accused his ex-boyfriend of sexual assault. Even though the alleged infractions—a stolen glance in the shower, a wake-up kiss—were incredibly silly, the investigator found the accused responsible for sexual misconduct: “Judge Sides with Gay Brandeis Student Guilty of ‘Serious Sexual Transgression’ for Kissing Sleeping Boyfriend.”

8. Colorado State University-Pueblo

An athlete of color, Grant Neal, was accused of sexually assaulting a female trainer—but not by her. When questioned, the trainer said, “I’m fine and I wasn’t raped.” University officials pointed out that according to Title IX, they got to be the judge of that, not her. Neal was deemed guilty and expelled: “Female Student Said, ‘I’m Fine and I Wasn’t Raped.’ University Investigated, Expelled Boyfriend Anyway.“

9. University of Texas-Arlington

A gay male student claimed a classmate, Thomas Klocke, told him to “consider killing himself.” The classmate denied ever saying such a thing; according to his version of events, the accuser came on to him and didn’t appreciate being rejected. The gay student filed a Title IX sexual harassment complaint against Klocke, who was found responsible. He then committed suicide: “Lawsuit: Male Student Accused of Sexual Harassment for Rejecting Gay Advances Commits Suicide After Title IX Verdict.”

Critics of DeVos will say that her plan to reform Title IX is some kind of giveaway to rapists. But it’s not. Today, DeVos recognized a basic and obvious truth that every objective chronicler of the college rape crisis already knows: The Obama-era modifications to Title IX utterly failed to bring justice to campuses.

The first surgeon general’s report on e-cigarettes, published last December, could have highlighted the enormous harm-reducing potential of products that simulate smoking but do not contain tobacco or burn anything. Instead Surgeon General Vivek Murthy sounded the alarm about adolescent vaping, which he called “a major public health concern.” A critique of Murthy’s report, published online yesterday by Harm Reduction Journal, shows how dangerously misguided his concerns were.

“The majority of e-cigarette use among US youth is infrequent and experimental, and minimal among never-smoking youth,” note Italian internist and tobacco researcher Riccardo Polosa and his co-authors. “Additionally, the majority of the very small proportion of US youth who do use an e-cigarette frequently are actually using e-cigarettes that do not contain nicotine.” Polosa et al. also point out that “the increasing prevalence of e-cigarette use between 2010 and 2015 has coincided with the sharpest declines in the smoking rate among US youth and young adults on record.”

Murthy, who was removed from his post in April but has not been permanently replaced yet, focused on the share of teenagers who report using an e-cigarette in the previous month, which rose “an astounding 900 percent” (from 1.5 percent to 16 percent) between 2011 and 2015, as measured by the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS). Digging more deeply into the survey data, Polosa et al. show that relatively few teenagers vape frequently and almost all of those who do are current or former smokers. In the 2015 NYTS, for example, just 0.6 percent of middle school students and 2.5 percent of high school students reported vaping on 20 or more days in the previous month. According to the 2014 Monitoring the Future Study (MTF), less than 1 percent of teenagers who vape that often are never-smokers.

The MTF data also indicate that most adolescents who vape use nicotine-free e-liquids, which makes Murthy’s fear that they will get hooked on the drug and later graduate to smoking seem even more fanciful. On the face of it, nothing like that seems to be happening. As Polosa and his colleagues point out, “the increasing rate of ever-use of e-cigarettes among US youth has coincided with the sharpest declines in youth smoking rates in many decades.” That is true for young adults as well as teenagers.

The coincidence of these opposing trends does not necessarily mean that e-cigarettes have hastened the decline in smoking. But it is a plausible possibility that should not be overlooked by public health officials who want to reduce smoking-related morbidity and mortality, since e-cigarettes are far less hazardous than the conventional kind. Even in the rare instances where teenagers who have never tried tobacco take up vaping, they are far better off in terms of health risks if they otherwise would be smoking. As Polosa et al. note, “e-cigarettes may have the potential to reduce the likelihood of smoking initiation among youth who may be especially at risk for initiating smoking in the absence of e-cigarettes.”

The studies that Murthy cited as evidence that vaping leads to smoking show only that teenagers who try the former are more likely to try the latter. “There was no evidence that adolescents were regular e-cigarette users at baseline,” Polosa et al. note, “and no evidence that they were smoking cigarettes regularly at follow-up.” Even if some teenagers go through a vaping phase before becoming regular smokers, that does not necessarily mean the experience of vaping makes them more inclined to smoke. An attraction to both forms of nicotine consumption could be a function of personality and circumstance.

If e-cigarettes are a gateway to the real thing, that gateway is so tiny that its impact cannot be seen in smoking trends. “At the very least,” Polosa et al. observe, “available data appear reassuring that e-cigarettes are not decelerating, let alone reversing, declining rates of youth smoking.”

Although Murthy conceded that vaping is less hazardous than smoking, he obscured the magnitude of the difference, partly by hyping the potential hazards of e-cigarettes (such as formaldehyde produced by unrealistic overheating). You would never guess from the surgeon general’s report that “the risk posed by long-term inhalation of aerosol produced by properly manufactured e-cigarettes is unlikely to exceed 5% of the risk associated with long-term inhalation of cigarette smoke,” as Polosa and his co-authors summarize the evidence.

In light of that huge difference in risk, the danger of fixating on adolescent vaping is clear. Policies aimed at preventing teenagers from using e-cigarettes may also deter smokers from switching, with potentially deadly results.

Murthy, for example, suggested that restrictions on e-liquid flavors are worth considering as a way of making e-cigarettes less appealing to teenagers. But as Polosa and his colleagues note, “flavors appear to play an important role in perceived satisfaction and self-reported effectiveness of e-cigarettes among adults who have used e-cigarettes to stop smoking.” Surveys find that “adult smokers appear to prefer tobacco flavor when they start using e-cigarette, but as e-cigarette use develops, preferences appear to dimish for tobacco flavor and grow for sweet and fruit flavors.” The availability of those varieties may “help the e-cigarette user to sustain abstinence from smoking, since such flavors should be less likely than tobacco flavor to cue smoking as a conditioned response.”

Details like that don’t matter to officials who are so focused on the minor problem of adolescent experimentation with e-cigarettes that they overlook the lifesaving potential of these products. But they matter to anyone who believes smokers should have the option of consuming nicotine in a way that is much less likely to kill them.

Some of America’s largest cities are ratcheting minimum wage up, while progressive luminaries are calling to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Only evil people would oppose this, right?

Unless…That’s what the robots want us to think?

When the government uses minimum wage laws to abolish cheap labor, it makes employees more expensive. Intentions aside, this compels businesses to reduce hours, lay off employees, or automate them to save on costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that raising the minimum wage to a mere $10.10 per hour would result in half a million people losing their jobs.

In the latest Mostly Weekly Andrew Heaton explores the minimum wage, and why the feel-good legislation comes with disastrous effects.

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California lawmakers are close to passing a bill allowing a handful of counties to experiment with safe injection sites, facilities where people addicted to drugs can safely get high with professional oversight.

Seattle is trying to become the first community in the United States to do this, but opponents have launched a battle at the ballot box.

If AB 186 is passed and signed by the governor, eight California counties or the cities within them may approve or establish safe drug consumption areas. Los Angeles and San Francisco are among the approved areas. The authorization to operate the facilities sunsets on Jan. 1, 2022.

The bill neither mandates these communities allow these facilities, nor does it provide any funding for them. Citizens in Bakersfield, for example, will not be paying taxes to operate a facility in the Bay Area. If citizens and local officials in Humboldt County (one of the counties authorized in the bill) decide they don’t want a safe injection facility, they’re under no obligation to provide one.

The bill authorizes communities that so choose to create drug consumption spaces where people can consume drugs under the watch of health care professionals. Facilities will not provide drugs, but professionals can provide sterile needles (and dispose of them), prevent fatal overdoses, provide references to addiction treatment services, and educate participants about HIV and hepatitis.

Neither clients nor employees at these drug consumption sites will not be subject to arrest under state law. The bill, however, comes into conflict with federal law, as the state Senate’s Public Safety Committee analysis notes. The people who own and operate the facility could face federal arrest and charges, not just the users.

If AB 186 passes, it seems likely that the Department of Justice might have something to say about it, given Attorney General Jeff Sessions desire to fight the drug war by maximizing federal criminal sentences for drug crimes and cracking down on doctors who prescribe opioids.

The bill passed the state’s Assembly in June by a vote of 41-33. It has made it through both the Senate’s Health Committee and Public Safety Committee and awaits a full Senate vote by next week.

If it passes, San Francisco is likely poised to be the first community to consider it. San Francisco put together a task force in April to develop recommendations for creating safe injection facilities.

Assembly member Susan Eggman, a Democrat who represents Stockton and other parts of San Joaquin County, introduced AB 186. Logan Hess, a legislative aide for Eggman, tells Reason these pilot communities were picked because they already have a history of using naloxone as a way of reversing opioid overdoses, and data shows, like many other communities, they’re nevertheless struggling with the problem.

That AB 186 was written pretty loosely was a deliberate choice, Hess explains. It does not tie these communities to a particular model of operation. It doesn’t tell cities or counties that it must be a non-profit organization, or a hospital, or operated by a public health agency. Participants will make that call.

“One of the reasons we didn’t want to be too prescriptive is that certain models might not make as much sense,” Hess says. While the injection site in Vancouver, British Columbia, tends to be touted as a role model—it’s currently the only site in North American and is Seattle’s inspiration—Hess notes that there are other types of operations out there that might be better suited for particular communities.

But that matters only if the law gets past the Senate. The bill is opposed by the California Police Chiefs Association, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, and the California District Attorneys Association (along with several other smaller law enforcement organizations and unions).

David Stammerjohan, Eggman’s chief of staff, notes that they face a close fight in the Senate. Given the Democratic Party domination of California’s government, the Assembly vote should be seen as close, and they’re not certain whether Gov. Jerry Brown will even sign the bill into law should it pass.

Zoltan Istvan isn’t just one of the world’s leading transhumanists. He’s one of its most unapologetic when it comes to using science and technology to improving and augmenting humanity.

“If I could cut off my arm right now, to put on a stronger robotic arm because it’s more functional, I would do it,” he tells Nick Gillespie in the latest Reason Podcast. “My wife might not like it, but I would do it because it will help me to climb Mount Everest or help me to throw a football or whatever, or even just work and build houses….I think all of us will start merging with machines…I think even religious people will say, ‘You know, becoming machines is part of our destiny.'”

At 18, Istvan got busted for selling pot, and he still simmers with outrage over drug prohibition and the way he and others are treated by the legal system. He traveled the world as a journalist for National Geographic, made a fortune selling real estate, and published the best-selling and award-winning novel The Transhumanist Wager in 2013 (he wants it to become the Atlas Shrugged of transhumanism). He’s run for president on a transhumanist platform and now he’s running for governor of California as a Libertarian and wants to transform his home state into a showplace for radical technology that will extend and enrich human life, reduce taxes, and replace bureaucrats, road-builders, and even teachers with cheaper and more-efficient robots.

“It’s very natural to want to innovate,” he explains, “to want to see these amazing technologies and scientific discoveries come about and change the human race and apply this libertarian morphological freedom to everything. And, if you get there, then you’re gonna really find a future that I think combines the best worlds of libertarianism as well as transhumanism.”

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This is a rush transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Hi, I’m Nick Gillespie, and this is the Reason podcast. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you’re there.

Today, we are talking with Zoltan Istvan. He wrote a novel in 2013 called “The Transhumanist Wager.” He’s run for president, or tried to run for president to get to the candidacy of the Libertarian Party. He is a futurist, a transhumanist, and he is a candidate for governor of California on the Libertarian Party ticket.

Zoltan, thanks for talking to Reason and the Reason podcast.

Zoltan Istvan: Thank you so much for having me.

Gillespie: In a recent article in The American Conservative, which is available online, you wrote that whether we like it or not, transhumanism has arrived. How do you define transhumanism and how do we know that it’s arrived?

Istvan: Transhumanism is now a social movement of a few million people around the world, perhaps more, and they want to use science and radical technology to change the human being, and also to change the human being’s experience of the world, of the universe, of everything. Generally, it can be anything from exoskeleton suits to give to disabled people, out of wheelchairs, it can be things like telepathy and brainwave headsets. It can even be things just like driverless cars, but it’s essentially radical science and technology, and I think, just look around and check out the news, there’s so much of this science technology already hitting us and impacting us.

Gillespie: What are some of the examples… I have a pet theory that the future is always kind of fantastic in the abstract but then when it arrives, it almost becomes banal to us and we take it for granted. So, the Dick Tracy comic books in the ’40s or ’50s or Dick Tracy comics would be talking about two-way video phones that you would carry on your wrists and that seems really cool but then when you get a cell phone and a smartphone where you can actually do that, or Skype where you can talk for free to anybody on the planet, we’re like, “Eh, we’ve had … why is this so special?” What are some of the examples of transhumanist reality that is going on right now that we’ve lost the sense of wonder about?

Istvan: Well, I mean we’ve lost the sense of wonder about many things in technology. We take it for granted we can fly 30,000 feet up in the air in a jet airplane and things like that, but you know some of the technologies that are now just … that are actually, we already have but are probably gonna be commercially available in four or five years, for example is the neural lace or a neural prosthetic. Some of the Wall Street companies are already starting to fire people, employees because they’re replacing people that would be trading with artificial intelligence. So, people like Elon Musk and other entrepreneurs now creating companies, so we can either have essentially brain implants or headsets that allow our brains to tie directly into the cloud or into the internet or into artificial intelligence, so that we can be competitive against these artificial intelligences that are coming or these robots or whatnot. This is kind of like, wow, you’re thinking about brainwave headsets connected to the internet with your thought, this is something that is truly science fiction and yet, there’s already hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into it. They’ve already had a moderate amount of success with telepathy.

Gillespie: I am hoping that Apple and other cloud providers have better security because if, as embarrassing as it would be to have your nude photos leaked en masse, I’m only thinking that if you had the actual contents of your brain available to hackers, that would be particularly embarrassing, don’t you?

Istvan: Oh, absolutely. You know and when young kids come to me and say, “What job should I do in the future?” I almost always say security, cyber security because this is the big challenge of our future, especially if you’re a Libertarian and very worried about it, is how can you take all this amazing technology and still remain like a private individual, somebody who likes their liberties, somebody who likes their sense of privacy. Increasingly it becomes very difficult to do that, yet, if there are people that are working on the security angle of things, I think we’re gonna have a great future and one that’ll be still protecting all our rights.

Gillespie: Right, so it’s partly kind of like the way that internet culture has expanded over the past 20 or 25 years. You want all of the benefits and as few of the liabilities as possible, or you want a user controlled experience, and you think that that’s possible in a transhumanist future?

Istvan: Well, I guess I should be a little careful because I don’t think it’s entirely possible anymore. I actually, and this is where I get myself in trouble with Libertarians, I recently wrote an article saying that perhaps freedom can best be served by actually giving up some of our privacy. I think privacy is something that will not necessarily die like the dinosaurs, but certainly transform itself. We’re gonna become much more okay with letting a lot of our lives online and in the public domain.

Now, what you mentioned though, somebody hacking into your brain and actually uncovering your deepest, darkest thoughts, all those skeletons, I mean, every single one of us would be like, that would not only be the most embarrassing thing ever but you know it could really ruin lives. So, there are obviously gonna be some things that are always gonna have to be very, very protected.

Gillespie: Well, and it seems so also, thinking about a couple of years ago when there was both the Sony hack, which didn’t just release product that the Sony movies had been working on and record label, but also internal memos and stuff, but then there also the hacks of Apple Photo clouds and stuff like that of celebrities and nude pictures or selfies. But, it does seem that people give, in a world where that kind of thing happens more often, people kind of learn how to give people more grace, a wider grace period in a world where everybody is kind of out there, you’re willing to cut people a break because you know your dirty laundry is gonna get out there too. So, there seems to be a kind of homeostasis or maybe that’s the wrong term, an equilibrium gets reached pretty quickly if we’re in a less private world where people don’t get bent out of shape by private misstatements.

Istvan: No, in fact, that is the most important idea there, and really what a lot of my article was about when I wrote about privacy recently, is that if the entire world is open, a lot of people that might have had hangups, whether they’re conservative or whatever, just let them go because it’s too difficult to actually get along when everybody is judging all the time. It’s much easier to have much more Libertarian world where everyone’s like, do your own thing, we love you for who you are, we like you for who you are, that kind of thing. So, I actually think that’s why freedom is better served by giving up some of our privacy through technology.

Gillespie: Well, you know, this may be an East Coast, West Coast thing, and although Reason is headquartered on the West Coast as you are, and I’ve lived in L.A. for three years, I was gonna say that libertarianism may be, for me as I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New Jersey, but libertarianism’s creed may be less about we love you for who you are, it’s that we hate you for who you are. But, it’s all kind of the same thing, I think. Where we evaluate each person individually and come to some kind of individualistic conclusion. Your piece in The American Conservative, which is a great magazine, I don’t agree with it on everything, but it’s really provocative in the fact that they had you there and you were talking about libertarianism and transhumanism. What is the essential connection between transhumanism and libertarianism in your kind of discussion of these topics?

Istvan: Well, the basic, most core tenet of transhumanism is this concept of morphological freedom, which is you have the right to do with your body whatever you want to do, as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody else. You know, that’s a great platform to have is kind of the core tenet of transhumanism. Of course, that’s incredibly libertarian too. It’s like, yeah, leave me alone, hands off, let me do what I want to do, as long as I’m not hurting you there’s no reason to intrude. So, in that sense, transhumanism and libertarianism are completely linked. So it’s very natural to want to innovate, to want to see these amazing technologies and scientific discoveries come about and change the human race and apply this libertarian morphological freedom to everything. And, if you get there, then you’re gonna really find a future that I think both combines the best worlds of libertarianism, as well as transhumanism.

Gillespie: About a week after your piece appeared in The American Conservative, they had a response from a more conservative thinker who also claimed to be a libertarian and at one point he quoted as a kind of critique of you. He said, “As Ludwig von Mises wrote sarcastically, the socialist paradise will be the kingdom of perfection, populated by completely happy supermen.” That’s something that Ludwig von Mises said decades ago, but how do you respond to critics who say that transhumanism is ultimately a mix of eugenics and utopianism and that it’s doomed to either replicate the worst elements of both or just be a complete mishmash and a failure?

Istvan: Well, I like to say, for me transhumanism is just another facet of evolution. We’ve been evolving for millions of years, and I think what happens is we now have the tools to make that evolution quicker, and a lot of the basis of transhumanism is, let’s live longer, let’s make it so our children or our parents don’t have to die from so many diseases, let’s make it so life is easier, we have driverless cars so we don’t get stuck in traffic all the time, maybe then we could read newspapers. I mean, transhumanism is about making the world better. So, when people talk about it in some kind of anti way, it really is surprising to me.

Actually, usually, what I find is that people are either very religious because one of the main tenets of transhumanism is we do want to overcome death with science and technology. Of course, if you’re religious you’re like, “Wait a sec, that completely conflicts with not only, you know, the Bible, or the word of God and these kinds of things,” and that’s where I think you find a lot of people that are against transhumanism. They’re not against what it can do for their lives, they’re against some of those core ideas that we can for example, become gods ourselves, and I subscribe to that idea. I’m an atheist or a secular person, so I’m not worried about any kind of afterlife or breaking any rules, I want to use transhumanism to go as far as I can, become as intelligent of an entity as I can. I’m not sure what that means, it might mean becoming a machine, might becoming a much more sophisticated biological entity, but I think it’s gonna be super exciting. I want to be that super human. I want to be that Nietzschean uber man.

Gillespie: Well, you raise Nietzsche and that conjures up a lot of negative connotations for sure, and in 2014 in an article for Wired, you argued for having the state license parents. Let me quote from it and then I want to get your response to it, but you wrote, “If you can’t feed a child, you probably shouldn’t have one. Licensing would have restricted many of those births until the parents were more able to deal with the challenges of procreation, which is undoubtedly the most intense and serious long-term responsibility most humans will face in their lives.” How does that kind of idea of the state of all things, licensing parents and saying, “Well, you can’t have a kid yet because you haven’t jumped through this hurdle or you haven’t passed this test or you don’t have enough money in the bank.” To be honest, I’m not sure, I have two sons, I’m not sure that my first one, if the state had looked at my balance sheet they would been like, “What the fuck are you thinking? You really can’t afford this kid.” But, how does the idea of licensing parents square with your libertarianism? I kind of see with transhumanism, but even then, it’s kind of like, why shouldn’t individuals be free to figure out when they want to have kids and how many and things like that, or not to have them at all?

Istvan: Sure, well, let me just also clarify one thing that I never said it should be done by the state. I definitely wouldn’t say that, I said it should be done potentially by non-profit of some sort and basically could be community-based things, also, this is definitely not a part of my … any kind of official platform. This was before I did any kind of political running, so this was a philosophical article I wrote for Wired trying to say there are 8,000, this is a fact, there are 8,000 kids that starve to death or essentially die from malnutrition every single day on planet Earth. So, that’s 8,000 yesterday, that’s 8,000 today, 8,000 tomorrow. If you look at it in the 20th century, that’s about 70 million kids have starved to death.

So, one of the things you have to ask yourself is, “Well, what were the parents doing of those 70 million kids and why were they having children?” Even in America, about 13 million kids go to bed hungry at night or don’t have enough nutrition in the way they’re supposed to. This is America. We have a problem where there’s a huge amount of people, millions of people that are having children when they probably should be waiting a few years to get some more financial strength under their feet. Besides the fact that we have homeless people that might have children, we have crack addicts that might have children, so I think there’s a very strong humanitarian argument to be made on some type of community coming together and saying, you know, it would be great if we could just have the majority of people have children and those that aren’t ready to have them yet, because they can’t feed them, they’re using state funds or whatnot, we should give them a little bit of a break.

Now, again, I want to point out, this is not a policy of mine in any official capacity, this is simply a philosophical discussion and I definitely would never say that the government should be responsible for licensing things. Also, I was thinking the licensing thing would be very simple, cost no money, something very simple. I mean, you go out to buy a house, one of the largest and most challenging investments you can get and you go through a month of paperwork, a month of this, and they look at every single angle and yet, to have a child, you just … you can get drunk and have sex and, all the sudden, it comes out. Then for 20 years you gotta feed this thing and if you don’t it can die, it can drown in the bathtub. I mean, we have 10 million people that have enough mental issues that they might accidentally leave a child in the bathtub to drown so there is … Many states actually have quite a bit of laws regarding some of this stuff already because they also are worried about children that are not being tended to properly. Like I said, if 70 million kids have died in the 20th century something more should be done. I’m not saying it’s licensing, it has to be, but, the discussion is good.

Gillespie: Well, you know, you’re running for governor of California and Arnold Schwarzenegger is, you know it would have been great if he had to be licensed to have kids because I think it would have clarified a big issue in his former marriage or estranged marriage to Maria Shriver. The Kennedy family in general probably should have been licensed to have kids, but let’s talk about your gubernatorial run. What is your platform and what are the key issues for you? Now that we have definitively taken off licensing parents off the table.

Istvan: Yes, please take that off.

Gillespie: Yes.

Istvan: No, I have a pretty straight forward libertarian plan. The only difference is that I’m really trying to emphasize science and technology in that gubernatorial run. So, some of the things I’m essentially trying to say is we can use a lot more technology in government to shrink it, and thereby shrinking it, we won’t need to pay such high taxes and this is something that a lot of people don’t look at. They’re like, we have to reduce taxes by reducing it from people, well, maybe we can reduce it by shrinking the government. That can be anything from all sorts of different types of robots taking peoples jobs, government jobs, to just different types of technologies that might shrink it in itself, all the bureaucracy. Of course-

Gillespie: Can you be a little bit specific on that. What are some jobs that are currently being done by state employees that could be transferred to make it cheaper and more efficient, one would expect to robots or automated processes?

Istvan: Well, let’s just look at some of the basic things that are coming right down the pipeline. We essentially already have road-building technology, driverless technology, just are redoing infrastructure projects where we can have half the employees. If we were just to take some of that money and two years to develop, go out to Google or go to some of driverless car companies and say, “From this point forward, we’re gonna build all roads without essentially paying human beings, at least not as many.” We just have to take that step. It’s very controversial because there are unions and people want their jobs and stuff like that, but that’s just a very simple way of getting around it. I think another way, we could use some of the blockchain technology to potentially do a much better job when we come to titling or when we come to even maybe the way we tax people. There are a lot of different ways that we might be able to just save I guess just pennies here, but when you’re talking about everybody paying such high property taxes, if you could just get a little bit of blockchain stuff into this system, you could really save essentially billions of dollars. There’s a lot of different avenues for this kind of stuff, but a lot of it’s going to be very difficult in an ethical perspective because it requires removing human workers and they’re not gonna go away easily.

Gillespie: I guess, going back to that idea of when the future arrives, it seems banal is not quite the right word, I mean it just is normal when you think of things like toll roads. Toll roads are shifting overwhelmingly to automatic transponders so that you don’t need toll takers anymore. There are all sorts of things like that and we tend to just take in stride all of these great technological advances that actually make our lives so much easier. Then we keep asking where our jet pack is without kind of fully acknowledging how things have changed for the better.

Istvan: The taking away toll personnel is actually a really good idea because we also then get to take away their pensions. You know, things that are really literally bankrupting California. Of course, the same thing can be applied for teachers. I don’t want to get myself in too much trouble with the teachers union but the reality is there’s a lot of educational opportunity with technology just through online learning and also thought automation robots teaching kids and this is the kind of stuff that over the next couple years you’re going to see regardless because companies want to use this and governments gonna have to use it some point as well just to save money. But, my biggest plan, and this is quite controversial to a lot of libertarians is that I support a libertarian version of a basic income, which I call a federal land dividend. For your listeners, about 45% or about 45 million acres of California is federal land, most of it is unused and I have suggested that we start monetizing that federal land and paying people a basic income, at least of some sort, that way about 40% of Californians, or 19 million people are living at, below or right above the poverty line of about $24,000 for a family of four.

So, the inequality in California is striking, it’s incredible. So, this federal land dividend could actually provide a lot more money. The good news though about it, is that it would swallow things like Social Security, it would swallow things like Medicare, it could swallow things Medi-Cal, could swallow things like the different types of government bureaucracies that California has right now. Government ones, where we spend a lot of money to keep people essentially living, where if we just leased out our land or sold our federal land, we might be able to shrink the government dramatically, shrink the need for taxes and still get people out of poverty. It seems like a win-win solution.

Gillespie: So, with that you would … and boy, you talk about you want to take out the unions, when you take on the federal government, that’s something, but you would basically take the land and sell it off or lease it off to whoever wanted it and then use the proceeds to pay guaranteed income or a social safety net for poor people.

Istvan: No, definitely not for poor people, but for every single person.

Gillespie: Everybody, I see.

Istvan: No, I would insist on that because I want it myself. If you take … apparently they say this, they say there’s around 150 trillion dollars of federal land out there in the United States, if you divide 150 trillion dollars by 325 million American citizens, you get around 450,000, which means every single citizen, including the babies in America, have about a half million dollars coming to them, or at least have a half million dollars in equity in federal land. I feel like, with so much poverty happening, and issues like Houston happening, isn’t it time we take some of that beautiful federal land and start monetizing it so people can live better lives. I understand the environmental perspective but I’m much more concerned with people eating right, with people being able to afford healthcare. If you have a federal land dividend or a basic income, there’s not gonna be a question on single payer healthcare system or not anymore. It’s gonna be a question of, well, everybody can afford private insurance because they have enough money now, so let capitalism thrive.

Gillespie: You talk a lot about using technology to replace human workers with robots or with blockchain technology or AI or something, explain to people who are a little bit worried about this, how automating more parts of our life are not gonna cause more people to be underemployed or unemployed, and this is one of the great themes, of course, of your novel “The Transhumanist Wager,” which I think everybody would find interesting if you’re at all curious about this. But, does technology just put people out of work or how does it work to create a richer planet for everybody on average?

Istvan: I think in the past, technology has always created more jobs and I think that’s an argument a lot of people make now, but I think we’re coming to a point when artificial intelligence, in 10 or 15 years according to most experts believe that a machine will be smarter than a human being. So, there’s just no reason to have engineers, stock traders, architects, doctors. You know, my wife’s a doctor and they’ve told her, they said be prepared in 15 or 20 years there’s going to be robots that deliver babies better than you and they can do 24 hours a day, with zero liability to the hospital, or at least zero liability in the sense that the robot could sue the hospital. That makes a better worker than my wife, even if she trained for 19 years and has school debt. This transition is going to be happening to every single person, I would say most people are going to be losing their jobs, including journalists because robots will be able to tap in and ask any question and do a great job in interviews and writing articles. We’re all challenged-

Gillespie: I look forward to a world where robots are my readers, rather than the apparent flesh and blood people who are calling me a sack of shit out on a minute by minute basis. So, get back to me when you’ve created robotic readers, as well as journalists.

Istvan: Yeah, we’ll have them commenting on social media and Facebook and we’ll have robot trolls, in fact, they already have them but the reality is that this is a very challenging world because I can’t imagine that human beings are gonna be competitive in 10 or 15 or 20 years. You’re already seeing McDonald’s get rid of its employees to put on a kiosk and whatnot.

Gillespie: Wait, okay. So, now wait, you’ve been called by various publications that you are kind of like the California dream of a transhumanist and of a libertarian. You’re a good looking blonde guy. You’ve got a beautiful family. You made a mint in real estate and got out before the market tanked and you are painting a truly dire or at least pessimistic or gray-skied vision of the future. You’re saying like, “Yeah, robots are gonna take over everything and the jobs aren’t coming back.” What’s in it for people to go with you on this trip?

Istvan: Well, I think for starters, I think this is why a huge part of my platform is this federal land dividend or this basic income. We need to be able to, when people lose their jobs, and they can no longer retrain for them because robots will take those new jobs too, we need to be able to give them kind of a buffer zone so that the American dream is different. It’s not work nine to five and buy a house, the American dream can be something quite different. Maybe we’ll become a country of artists, maybe people will just watch TV all day, it’ll be like the movie Wall-E, I don’t know. It’s not for me to decide what people do. As somebody who’s running for office, it’s for me to help make that transition as smooth as possible and to understand that that’s where capitalism is going and I’m a believer of capitalism and I think it’ll be better if people don’t have to show up for a job every day. They’ll find ambitions and satisfaction in other different places. Like I said, I think we could become a world of artists.

But, I think one really quick thing, going back to what we discussed earlier with the neural prosthetic is if we come up with these brain implants, which we will and we are able to connect directly to the cloud, that might push back this robot revolution for decades as we now compete directly with robots. Of course, we might be augmenting our limbs, we’ll be like some of those war veterans that come back and they get robotic arms, because in probably five to eight years, a robotic limb will be able to out throw a football from a human limb if it’s attached properly to your neural system and to your skeletal structure. So, we might start seriously upgrading ourselves to become competitive in a new kind of environment. So, this whole idea of robots taking over, might never actually happen because we’ve sort of become at least half robot.

Gillespie: I gotta tell you, right now, when you were talking about Americans not having to show up for work every day from nine to five, I think I’ve got a bunch of early adopters of that on my recent staff, but we’ll let that go for now. I think you’re probably … I mean, would you agree that the most likely outcome of all of this is transhumanism is that it isn’t gonna be like a robot world and a human world, but it’s gonna be this kind of hybridizing of what it means to be human, just as the meaning of privacy changes, or the meaning of work changes over time?

Istvan: Oh, 100%. This idea that robots will take over and there’ll be two different species, this is not it at all. We’re going to merge as quickly as possible, I mean if I could cut off my arm right now, to put on a stronger robotic arm because it’s more functional, I would do it. My wife might not like it, but I would do it because it will help me to climb Mount Everest or help me to throw a football or whatever, or even just work and build houses. So I think all of us will start merging with machines, even if people like in The American Conservative argue against it. I think even religious people will say, “You know, becoming machines is part of our destiny.”

Gillespie: You wrote a piece on Reason.com recently, which was pretty fascinating. It was about your experience, you were arrested at age 18 for selling pot, a small amount of pot. What happened to you and why are you calling attention to your arrest now, and the fallout from that?

Istvan: Well, strangely enough, I went through my entire presidential campaign and nobody, even though I had quite a lot of publicity, nobody mentioned it. Then I did an interview for the Los Angeles Times about my California gubernatorial run and I got, boom, they just nailed me on it. I’ve had my two felonies expunged about 12 years afterwards, but expunged is kind of a funny word, it doesn’t mean it’s … I still sometimes get stuck at airports where people say, “Oh, he has a drug felony. Let’s do an extra thing where cops will have access to it when something like a traffic thing happens,” but the reality of the story is that even in addition to spending 30 days in jail, I think I even mention in my articles, I was actually sentenced to two years in federal prison. I mean, this is ridiculous for selling a couple joints, especially now that America is starting to enjoy joints and say, “You know what? This is great. Pot’s great. We’re gonna make a lot of money on it and a lot of people are gonna be a lot happier.”

It really upsets me that they stole my Jeep Comanche. I never saw my Jeep again. They took my motorcycle away. I actually bought my motorcycle back at exactly face value for what it was worth, but it was ridiculous that they would do that to me when I’m 18 and I have a real life ahead of me. Then for years I couldn’t get a job. I had to carry around this badge of dishonor. Well, now it’s a badge of honor. Now I want to stick it in the government’s face and say, “Hey, you’re gonna have to pay for this somehow. I’m not gonna let this go.” The silver anniversary is happening this year and just because you’re legalizing it doesn’t make me feel better about it. You took away something from me a long time ago and I want some compensation for that now.”

Gillespie: Well, in the Reason article, you hint at the idea that people who have been arrested or convicted of pot possession, pot selling, that they are owed reparations by the government or some kind of compensation. Is that part of your gubernatorial race? Would you pardon all non-violent drug offenders? Would you end the sentences or remand the sentences to time served for people who are in the prison system now?

Istvan: Yes, 100%. They would all be pardoned immediately, the sentences completely finished, let them out of jail that day. Just so you know, I have a legalize all drug policy. This could be heroin, could be cocaine, could be anything. I like the way Portugal’s going about it. They’re spending the money, instead of on a war on drugs, they’re spending money on rehabilitation for addicts and things like that. Frankly, according to Cato Institute and other studies, this has been working. This is exactly what a normal society would do, if they have some problem drug people, let’s help those people, we don’t put these people in prison. So, yeah I would, especially minor offenders and marijuana offenders, yeah. But, day one if I was office I’d say-

Gillespie: What about prescription drugs? Do you think we should have different regimes for recreational drugs caffeine, liquor, whatnot, then a kind of prescription regime for pharmaceutical drugs or should it all be wide open and let people inform themselves and make their own decisions on that?

Istvan: When it comes to things like this, I think it should be left wide open. If anything, I think doctors should be more responsible for how they allow people to essentially take these drugs and give them prescriptions. But, I just generally think that a person can make a proper informed decision on what to take. And a lot of times if they’re doing something wrong, they should be able to help them. That’s where I think if the government’s gonna come in, it should be just there to help, but it shouldn’t be there to make decisions. It just doesn’t know what’s right or wrong in this case.

Gillespie: Give our listeners the thumbnail biography. You were arrested for pot when you were 18, you worked for National Geographic and traveled the globe seeing different parts of the world, including getting scared enough where you came back to the U.S. after seeing some bad shit, became a real estate magnet. Give a quick summary of where you came from, how you became a libertarian and whether or not your kids hate you yet.

Istvan: Well, I think one of the key things is I read Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” when I was on my sail trip. I was around 18 years old and I found it just an incredibly important book. I then went on to read it 13 more times.

Gillespie: I’m sorry, you were on your what trip?

Istvan: So, I took a sail trip when I was 21 years old, but I’ve been a big sailing person for a long time. This is one of the ways I got into National Geographic is I was on a boat covering multiple stories, from multiple different countries along this trip. But, what’s most important to me, and I rarely talk about this is that I read a lot of Ayn Rand’s work. You can’t read that and not sort of think libertarian thoughts, but it wasn’t until I actually finished. I had been doing a lot of war zones for National Geographic. I did Kashmir, I did also conflict zones in Columbia, whatnot. I came back and started a real estate business and anyone that has been in real estate, if you’re in real estate, you are ultimately gonna come down to libertarian thoughts because they want to make it so difficult to erect even the simplest of houses. Given that this is something that everybody has, it really made me realize how bad the government can be when they get in the way of things.

So, I combined a lot of different things including this sense of being a libertarian, this sense of loving a lot of Ayn Rand’s work, as well as my National Geographic writing and I decided to write a novel about transhumanism. That novel is “The Transhumanist Wager” and it did so well, I got very lucky that it kind of launched me as a public person in the transumanist movement. From there, it’s sort of like, wow, what can I do next? I decided to run for the presidency in 2016 because it was an excellent platform to spread knowledge of transhumanism, which at the time was still kind of not that well known and now I’m running as a Libertarian. While I’m running as a Libertarian, everyone knows I’m still running, pushing a very strong transhumanist agenda to bring science and technology and artificial intelligence and genetic engineering to our state and, to make sure that we’re the world leaders in it.

So, that’s sort of the run down of how that happened, but I think because it’s a Reason podcast, I feel like I wanted to talk a little bit about having read Ayn Rand at an early age, because a lot of people always say, “Well, why did you become a libertarian?” They think I don’t have that many libertarian thoughts, but the truth is I have been thinking libertarian thoughts for two decades.

Gillespie: What’s your favorite Rand novel, or Rand writing actually?

Istvan: It’s “The Fountainhead,” but I have read everything of hers many, many times. In fact, I took an independent course at Columbia University on Objectivism. I went to school in New York and so I studied a lot of Ayn Rand in college as well. My novel, “The Transhumanist Wager,” is sort of a modern version in many ways of “Atlas Shrugged,” except instead of worrying so much about what happened in the 1950s and ’60s, this is really what’s happening in the 2020s.

Gillespie: Where do you … It’s an interesting comparison to make, where do you see the main enemies of progress, as you define it, and the future because it’s obviously it’s not the Soviet Union anymore. But, where are the, and even big business has changed, which isn’t to say that companies like Google and Amazon or Apple or Microsoft, which do immense amounts of positive things but also have a huge amount of power, but they’re not the IBMs and the Xeroxes or the AT&Ts of the 1950s. Where are the big threats that you identify to a kind of broad vision of progress in a libertarian future?

Istvan: Well, let me tell you what I think is the largest threat on the market. And just so your listeners know, I’ve been doing some consulting, United States Navy, so I’m a little bit up to speed on some of the more technical things. But genetic engineering is perhaps the most important science of the 21st century. This ability, to literally remake our flesh, remake our biology and turn ourselves into different types of things including augmenting our intelligence. Well, China is leading the way right now because they don’t have the ethical boundaries that America has. You know, we have a conservative government, conservative Congress, conservative Supreme Court, we’re kind of bound by various regulations here, where China might become the very first nation to, on a wide scale, start augmenting their children’s intelligence so an entire generation of Chinese kids are literally, literally 10, 15, 25% smarter than us. That will have dramatic effects in terms of global politics down the road. In terms of things that make a huge difference in how militaries develop and who can create the most sophisticated military.

It’s imperative that America gets over its regulation hurdles because if they don’t, this time around, it’s not fun to have another country, especially a competitor, where everybody’s smarter than you. We have to keep up. That’s gonna mean giving up some of our religious boundaries and saying, you know, for the sake of remaining competitive in the world market, let’s also augment our intelligence, let’s also do these radical things with genetic editing so that we can remain competitive and remain a world leader.

Gillespie: So, are you a big fan of the movie “Gattaca”? If so, do you think it always ends up though that the real human ends up getting the girl and winning?

Istvan: I 100% do not think that. This is crazy. It’s amazing that they, you know, Disney and all these other people have made it so we have fairy tales of what technology is or it’s some great dystopia. Let’s be very clear, the person who merges with machines is gonna end up the winner. In probably 10 years, a quadriplegic is gonna be the very fastest runner on the planet because of either genetic engineering or exoskeleton technology. So, we’re talking about fundamental changes in the human being now because of how quickly technology is innovating. I think, everyone thinks is gonna happen is gonna be much more dramatic than that.

Gillespie: So, do you think that in the future the robot-human hybrids will erect statues to Oscar Pistorius and say, “You know, his murder charges, those were … that was a small part of what he did for humanity.”

Istvan: Well, you know, that’s a complicated case and they’ll probably tear down the statue at some point as well as I guess cultural evolution goes, but I think at the same time we are going to say, wow, some of the technologists and some of the scientists that were working on these technologies are the true heroes of the day, are the true people that have really moved us forward. I wouldn’t be surprised if they erect statues to things like Siri some day because, as crazy as it sounds, we take it as a joke, in 5 or 10 years Siri might be more intelligent than our 18-year-old.

Gillespie: I can guarantee that. As the father of a 23-year-old and a 16-year-old, yes, Siri is already more intelligent than most children I know personally. We will leave it there. Thank you so much Zoltan. We have been talking to Zoltan Istvan, he is a libertarian, he is a futurist and he is a transhumanist and he is running for governor of California on the Libertarian Party ticket. Thanks again so much and let me also put in one more plug for “The Transhumanist Wager,” your novel from 2013. Thanks so much for talking to us Zoltan.

Istvan: Thank you so much for having me Nick. I appreciate it.

Gillespie: This has been the Reason podcast, I’m Nick Gillespie. Thanks for listening. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and while you’re there, rate and review us and tell us how we’re doing, until next time.

The Trump-Russia conspiracy hunt is scraping the bottom of the barrel—Facebook ads.

The New York Times reports Facebook “identified more than $100,000 worth of divisive ads on hot-button issues purchased by a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin.” More than 3,000 ads were identified, although most of them did not refer to specific candidates.

That company, the Internet Research Agency, was reported by the New York Times in 2015 to be a troll farm. Now The Times insists that Facebook’s disclosure “adds to the evidence of the broad scope of the Russian influence campaign,” but admits that as of yet “there has been no evidence proving collusion in the hacking or other Russian activities.”

Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, said the company had shared its findings with Robert Mueller, the former FBI director appointed special counsel on the Trump Russia investigation, and would continue to work with him “as necessary.”

What is all that supposed to mean? In a country founded on the idea of free and open speech, how concerned should we be that foreign companies make ad buys on Facebook? The “marketplace of ideas” is robust enough to handle it. Ideas succeed and fail on their merits. Advertisements can get ideas in front of people, but they can’t get those people to accept or act on those ideas.

To begin with, $100,000 in Facebook ads is not a lot of ads (the company had more than $9 billion in ad revenue in the last fiscal quarter alone. For the most part, Facebook ads are pretty ineffective.

Even if the Russian company had purchased ten or even a hundred times as many ads, it’s no big deal. There is little evidence political ads sway voters. The idea that a relatively small ad buy on a relatively ineffective platform interfered with the presidential election is ludicrous.

Free speech works because any idea is absorbed and subjected to the pressures of a marketplace. More voices only make the marketplace richer and give free participants in that marketplace more information with which to make decisions.

The most unseemly part of the Trump Russia conspiracy mongering has been the contorting of free speech in a free country to appear shadowy, devious, sophisticated and overly influential.

Back in January, when the intelligence community released an unclassified version of its report on Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, the bulk of it focused on the operation of Russia Today (a network I’ve appeared on a few times), and their coverage of third-party candidates and of issues like police brutality, drone bombings, and mass surveillances. The spooks argued such coverage undermined American democracy. Precisely the opposite is true—increased coverage of third-party candidates and of issues often under-reported by the mainstream media can only improve decision making in a democracy.

The Trump-Russia witch hunt focuses disturbingly on political speech, and smacks of quashing it based on perceptions of the source. This “kill the messenger” premise offers the government the opportunity to suppress messages it doesn’t like.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a top congressional Trump-Russia conspiracy theorist, has already suggested Facebook should do more to monitor where its ads are coming from and shut down foreign ones.

“Clearly Facebook doesn’t want to become the arbiter of what’s true and what’s not true,” Schiff told The Times. “But they do have a civil responsibility to do the best they can to inform their users of when they’re being manipulated by a foreign actor.”

The true manipulation comes from those who think the age-old American tradition of free speech and free press is manipulative, sinister and ought to be abridged.

Yesterday the House Rules Committee blocked a floor vote on an amendment barring the Justice Department from interfering with state laws allowing medical use of marijuana. The amendment, which was first enacted in 2014 and has been renewed twice since then, could still be included in the final spending bill, since it has been approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee. Any differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill will be worked out by a bicameral conference committee.

“By blocking our amendment, Committee leadership is putting at risk the millions of patients who rely on medical marijuana for treatment, as well as the clinics and businesses that support them,” said the amendment’s current sponsors, Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). “This decision goes against the will of the American people, who overwhelmingly oppose federal interference with state marijuana laws. These critical protections are supported by a majority of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle. There’s no question: If a vote were allowed, our amendment would pass on the House floor, as it has several times before.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions urged Congress to block the Rohrabacher-Bluemnauer amendment last May, arguing that “it would be unwise to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime.” Exactly what medical marijuana had to do with any of that was unclear, but the Justice Department generally opposes limits on its prosecutorial discretion, and Sessions’ anti-pot prejudices are well-known.

In a Washington Post op-ed piece this week, Rohrabacher rebutted Sessions’ clumsy attempt to blame medical marijuana for recent increases in opioid use and opioid-related deaths. To the contrary, he said, marijuana is a safer alternative to opioids. “The drug-war apparatus will not give ground without a fight,” he wrote, “even if it deprives Americans of medical alternatives and inadvertently creates more dependency on opioids. When its existence depends on asset seizures and other affronts to our Constitution, why should anti-medical-marijuana forces care if they’ve contributed inadvertently to a vast market, both legal and illegal, for opioids?”

Unlike Sessions, Donald Trump has repeatedly said he supports medical marijuana and thinks states should be free to allow it. So even if the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer amendment is not renewed for the next fiscal year, it is not clear that Sessions will try to shut down state-licensed medical marijuana suppliers. The amendment does not cover state-legal marijuana merchants serving the recreational market, who nevertheless have escaped prosecution so far, even though they are openly committing federal felonies every day.

A cannabis crackdown would not be popular. In the most recent Quinnipiac University poll, 61 percent of registered voters said marijuana should be legal for recreational use, while a whopping 94 percent said medical use should be allowed. Seventy-five percent opposed enforcement of the federal ban in states that have legalized marijuana for either purpose.

“When an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose federal interference in state medical marijuana programs, it is unconscionable not to let their representatives vote on whether to continue this policy,” said Don Murphy, director of conservative outreach at the Marijuana Policy Project. “Unless Congress chooses the Senate budget version, millions of seriously ill patients and the legitimate businesses that provide them with safe access to their medicine will be at risk of prosecution. This vote is a slap in the face of patients, their families, their elected representatives, and the 10th Amendment.”

In the sprawling suburbs west of Houston, the newest coliseum to America’s favorite sport hosted its first game last week.

Legacy Stadium seats more than 12,000 people in two decks of bleachers that wrap around the side of a gridiron. An HD video board for replays of the action cost $2 million by itself. The final price tag for the whole project was more than $70 million. The most surprising thing of all, perhaps, is that it’s not a professional stadium. It’s not a college stadium either.

It’s the most expensive high school football field in the nation, and it was paid for—every last dime—by the taxpayers of the Katy Independent School District, who approved the stadium as part of a bond package in 2014.

Football is big business in America—from youth and high school levels all the way up to the pros in the National Football League—but the sport benefits from taxpayer subsidies at every level. State and local governments have spent billions of dollars in recent years to build stadiums for pro teams with billionaire owners, and untold millions on stadiums for high school and college teams too. Not all subsidies are so obvious, though, and the feeder system for the NFL relies on a system of high school and college programs that are built largely on the backs of taxpayers.

Taxpayers should not have to support recreational activities of any kind—whether the participants are 17-years-old or earning $17 million a year (an amount some top quarterbacks and wide receivers can command in the NFL)—but they certainly should not be supporting a recreational pursuit that is proven to put young men at risk of serious health problems. There is no longer much doubt that football does that. Just a month before the new Legacy Stadium opened, the most damning evidence linking football to brain damage was published by a researcher at Boston University.

Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist, and a team of researchers at Boston University examined the brains of 111 former NFL players, and found 110 of them had signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a degenerative brain disease thought to be caused by repetitive head trauma. It can affect “behavior, mood, and cognitive symptoms” and can cause dementia, according to the researchers.

Now that we know more about the health consequences of playing football, there’s an urgent need to reassess the role that governments play in propping up a sport that, even though it remains wildly popular, is undoubtedly causing real harm to many of the young men who play it.

School districts should stop subsiding brain damage in the name of athletics.

—

The new NFL season will begin Thursday night at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, when the defending Super Bowl champion New England Patriots host the Kansas City Chiefs. The season is scheduled to end on the first Sunday in February 2018 at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, the newly built home of the Minnesota Vikings, with the playing of Super Bowl 52.

The two locales are a study in contrasts for how Americans subsidize football. Gillette Stadium opened in 2002 and cost about $412 million. The $325 million stadium was built entirely with private money, financed by Patriot’s owner Robert Kraft, while the state of Massachusetts kicked in about $72 million for pay for infrastructure upgrades necessary for the construction and operation of the Patriots’ home.

In Minneapolis, local and state taxpayers got soaked for more than $500 million of the $1.1 billion price tag on the Vikings new home, which opened last season. Voters didn’t get a referendum on whether they wanted to help team owner Zygi Wilf (estimated net worth: $5.3 billion) pay for the stadium, and the local officials who did vote on the new plan got special access to luxury box seats for all events hosted there.

Gregg Easterbook, author of The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America and a longtime critic of taxpayer subsidies for the sport, says taxpayers have covered more than 70 percent of the total cost of NFL stadiums built in the past two decades. There, the tide may be turning. Officials in Oakland, San Diego, and St. Louis have held the line against demands for new, publicly funded stadiums and have watched professional teams leave town in recent years.

Stadium construction costs are the most expensive, most egregious way that taxpayers are forced to subsidize football, but others have also come under scrutiny in recent years. One of the biggest backdoor subsidies for football—the special loophole in the federal tax code that allowed the National Football League, but not any of its smaller competitors, to avoid federal taxes—was eliminated in 2015. A U.S. Senate investigation in 2015 revealed that the Pentagon had paid $5.4 million to NFL teams for so-called “displays of patriotism” during games between 2011 and 2014.

Professional football could survive without those subsidies. Billionaire team owners could afford to pay for their own stadiums—like the Patriot’s Robert Kraft did—and other subsidies like the Pentagon’s patriotism theater are little more than a rounding error in the NFL’s annual revenue stream.

High school football, though, likely would struggle to survive without taxpayer support. Unlike baseball, which relies in part on a system of private youth baseball programs ranging from Little League to American Legion-sponsored teams for older players, or basketball, in which promising young players often play on Amatuer Athletic Union (AAU) teams, football is inextricably tied to America’s public school system. That is largely because of the size of teams required for the sport and because of the more expensive overhead in terms of equipment and, increasingly, insurance costs.

How much do taxpayers across America pay each year to support high school football? There is no definitive figure, but Easterbrook, perhaps the foremost authority on the ways in which the public subsidizes football, estimates that the total could be as high as $10 billion.

“If there are 20,000 public and private high schools of which 95% field football teams with a marginal cost of $100,000 per team per season, that’s $1.9 billion per year for high school football — plus insurance, a number that’s rising fast,” Easterbrook wrote in an email to Reason this week. “Add tax subsidies to the private prep schools that exist on the dole, and $3 billion per annum seems reasonable. Add lifetime health harm to teens and educational harm to the 98% of players who receiving no recruiting boost to college (1 in 50 prep player gets a college boost), then poor educational results for the many thousands are distracted from the classroom and don’t reach college as a result, and high school football soars into the $5 billion to $10 billion harm per year.”

At a time when there is rising skepticism about whether the NFL should continue to be subsidized by taxpayers, that spending deserves scrutiny too. (This doesn’t even account for college football, which operates on an entirely different—though also often heavily subsidized—model, depending on the size of the school and the value of its football team.)

If you subsidize something, you get more of it, but even $5 billion to $10 billion annually may not be enough to save football at the high school level.

McKee’s research at Boston College is the most damning link yet revealed between playing football and CTE. While 110 out of 111 former NFL brains had evidence of CTE, her research also looked at brains of football players who didn’t make it to the NFL, with equally scary results.

Researchers found evidence of CTE in 88 percent of the 202 deceased former football players’ brains reviewed for the study, which was published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Three out of 14 who had played only in high school had CTE, while 48 out of 53 college players had the disease.

Even before the newest research was made public, U.S.A. Football, a national governing body for youth football, seemed to acknowledge the link. In January, the organization issued new guidelines for how kids should play the sport, emphasizing safety by having younger children play flag football instead of the full-contact version.

That decline is starting to trickle up to high school.

The National Federation of State High School Associations reports that enrollment in high school football dropped by more than 25,000 between the 2015-16 school year and the 2016-17 school year, even as the overall enrollment in high school sports reached record highs last year.

Although it remains the most popular high school sport for boys, football’s decline looks practically inevitable as risk-averse parents become more aware of the medical risks associated with the game and it becomes more expensive for schools to insure the players on the field. The numbers are bleaker for youth football programs, which have seen a 30 percent drop in the number of players since 2008, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association.

The decline is concentrated at schools in the Midwest and Northeast, which “are shedding high school football programs at a significant rate,” The Washington Post reported this month. In just five years, 57 schools in Michigan have dropped the sport. Missouri has lost 24 high school football teams, while Pennsylvania has lost 12. Still, football’s popularity is only growing in the South and West, where the number of teams has actually increased in recent years.

Sports can be an important component of childhood development. In an era when children and teenagers are less likely to leave home for recreational activities and when parents are ready to swoop-in at the slightest suggestion of any danger, organized sports league remain critical to the physical development of young bodies and minds.

And in places like Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, high school football helps bind communities together. Even that $70 million stadium in Katy, Texas, is about more than just football.

“I see it as an instructional facility where you have athletes competing for sure, but you have our bands, cheerleaders and drill teams performing,” Lance Hindt, superintendent of the Katy Independent School District, told the Houston Business Journal earlier this year. “In fact, there are more fine arts kids who will perform there than football players. Our telecommunications students will be operating the digital video board.”

It certainly makes sense for the district to get as much use as possible out of a $70 million investment, but it’s still hard to see a stadium like that getting built without football. Even if a fair bit of the annual subsidies for football are sunk costs—stadiums, sure, but also teachers doubling as coaches, or other athletic resources like locker rooms that would be used by other teams even if football went away—taxpayers should question whether public schools should be supporting a sport that causes serious health problems and has a shrinking population of players.

Even if high school football ended, Easterbrook says, there would be still be plenty of young men willing to risk their health for the chance at fame, glory, and a big paycheck in the NFL. But it wouldn’t be the same. “The difference without high school football would be that the many millions of parents, relatives and friends who today attend prep games—far more Americans actually attend high school football than NFL contests—wouldn’t go, and wouldn’t think of football as something important to their communities.”

“That,” he says, “would clobber the NFL.”

In a major speech assailing the deprivation of due process protections under the Obama administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will vow to rein in the federal guidance compelling colleges to adjudicate sexual assault disputes between students.

Reason has obtained excerpts from her prepared remarks, which DeVos will deliver at George Mason University this afternoon.

No one could accuse DeVos of pulling punches. Her speech accuses her predecessors of “weaponizing” federal regulations and turning them against students.

“The era of ‘rule by letter’ is over,” her speech says, referencing the Obama-era Education Department’s infamous “Dear Colleague” letter, which fundamentally changed the way schools handle sexual misconduct issues. “Through intimidation and coercion, the failed system has clearly pushed schools to overreach.”

The Dear Colleague letter was released on April 4, 2011, by the Office for Civil Rights, an Education Department sub-agency charged with ensuring that federally funded schools comply with Title IX, which mandates equality between the sexes. The letter holds that sexual harassment and sexual violence are forms of gender inequality, and that it is thus the responsibility of colleges to vigorously investigate and adjudicate rape disputes rather than leaving such matters to the criminal justice system.

The new guidance encourages—and in some cases requires—university administrators to neglect the rights of accused students. It specifies, for instance, that colleges should use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard for determining guilt; officials need only be 51 percent sure an accusation is credible to expel an accused perpetrator. It also discourages officials from allowing students to cross-examine each other, because that might be too traumatizing for a survivor of sexual assault. Never mind that cross-examination is one of the best ways for an objective jury to determine who is telling the truth.

“The notion that a school must diminish due process rights to better serve the ‘victim’ only creates more victims,” DeVos’ speech says.

The problems with the Obama-era Title IX guidance are essentially threefold. First, it isn’t obvious that Title IX—a one-sentence statute—could or should be read as having anything to do with violent crimes.

Secondly, the guidance raises constitutional questions, since it appears to many civil libertarians that a federal agency was instructing public institutions to violate the due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment. That isn’t the only way the guidance is legally suspect: The Office for Civil Rights never subjected it to public notice and comment—a process required by the Administrative Procedure Act—and so it was always unclear whether the letter’s dictates actually carried the force of law, even though dozens of universities rewrote their sexual misconduct policies to get the feds off their backs.

Finally, since the guidance is legally dicey, it led to lawsuits left and right. Many students who were found responsible for sexual misconduct under the new guidelines have filed suit against their universities, and a nontrivial number of them have prevailed in court. On that front, DeVos couldn’t have picked a better campus to deliver her speech: A GMU student, “John Doe,” was expelled for engaging in BDSM sex that the university judged nonconsensual. He later sued GMU and won, since it was obvious to a Virginia district court that the administration’s investigation was biased against Doe and had deprived him of his due process rights.

It has become apparent to many fair-minded legal experts—the American Association of University Professors, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and several members of the Harvard University Law faculty (including President Obama’s personal mentor, Charles Ogletree)—that the current situation is morally, legally, and practically untenable. Thankfully, DeVos’ speech signals that she intends to do what the Education Department should have done in the first place, six and a half years ago: subject its guidance to public scrutiny.

“We will seek public feedback and combine institutional knowledge, professional expertise and the experiences of students to replace the current approach with a workable, effective and fair system,” the speech says.

Alcohol-fueled sexual assault is certainly a problem on college campuses, though misleading statistics disguise the fact that many drunken encounters are much messier than some would like to believe. But the existing legal regime, however well-intentioned it may be, just doesn’t deliver justice. In her speech, DeVos plans to highlight the case of a woman who accused someone of rape and was then required to play the role of the prosecutor at the hearing to determine whether he had indeed assaulted her.

“The current failed system left one student to fend for herself at a university disciplinary hearing,” the speech says. “Without any legal training whatsoever, she had to prepare an opening statement, fix exhibits and find witnesses.”

That sounds crazy, but it happened. I wrote about it. The case is a perfect illustration of the problems that stem from adjudicating rape in campus kangaroo courts. We owe it to victims and to the accused to provide a fairer system that actually achieves a measure of justice for all involved.

She’ll no doubt take flak for it, but DeVos is right to criticize the Obama administration’s approach to college sexual assault, and she’s right to reform an utterly dysfunctional system.

A husband and wife who conspired to get her (safely) paid for sex were arrested. She was charged with a misdemeanor. He’s facing a human-trafficking charge and decades in prison.

The case perfectly encapsulates how harsh laws against human trafficking are used to target sex workers’ families, friends, and colleagues who so much as drive them to meet a client. It also showcases the sexism at work in enforcement of prostitution and trafficking laws. While it’s unjustified to punish either one of these people for this attempt at private sexual activity with another consenting adult, it’s especially egregious that the man here is facing a much more severe charge.

On September 1, Washington County District Court Judge Robert Wilcox ordered the man, 35-year-old Jason Hicks, to be held without bail until the case is resolved. As a reason for denying bail, Wilcox (who retired in 2010 but works as a freelance judge a few days a week) cited Hicks’ history of arrests on minor, nonviolent, non-sex-related charges.

Neither Hicks nor his wife Heather, 33, were involved in anything the average person would think of as sex trafficking; this was just an old-fashioned vice sting. Police in Hagerstown, Maryland, responded to online “escort” ads last October and arrested the women who showed up to meet undercover cops at a local motel.

But Heather hadn’t arrived alone. Her husband had dropped her off and was waiting in the parking lot with the couple’s two young children until Heather texted to say she was OK.

When his wife never texted, Hicks knocked on the door of the motel room she had entered and was greeted by an undercover cop. Hicks—who may have had every reason to believe the cop was just some “john” who had harmed his wife—took a swing at the officer and was “taken to the ground,” according to local news.

Both Heather and Jason were taken into custody. She was eventually booked on one count of prostitution, a charge that can come with up to one year in prison or a fine of up to $500. Her trial is set for November 7.

Meanwhile, Jason Hicks was charged with one count of human trafficking, one count of second-degree assault, and two counts of neglect of a minor.

Prosecutors say Hicks is guilty of “human trafficking” because he did “take or cause another to be taken to any place for prostitution.” If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000. The assault and child neglect charges could cost an additional 20 years in prison and $10,000 in fines.

How saddling the mother of two young boys with a criminal record and imprisoning the children’s father for decades (and labeling him a sex trafficker) will help anyone is unclear here.

But restoration and justice aren’t the true aims of vice laws. The point is keeping cops busy, giving them a chance to play hero, and letting them seize all the assets they can. These days, sadly, that’s often true of trafficking laws too.