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If you want a preview of just how lame
ideological mud-slinging is going to get over the next few years—or
decades, possibly—take a look at this pair of articles penned
by Mark Ames at Pando.com, a Bay Area-based website that, among
other things, aspires “to bring
more civility into the blogosophere.” The pieces
charge Reason with being not a
libertarian defender of “Free Minds and Free Markets” but a hotbed
for pro-apartheid Holocaust deniers who slavishly do the bidding of
David and Charles Koch (cue the monster-movie music,
maestro).

Yeah, seriously. A publication that just celebrated
“Marijuana on Main
Street: The long, hard road to safe, legal pot,”
covers the police brutality
beat like nobody’s business, and criticized George
W. Bush’s “disaster
socialism” for the entire eight awful years he was in the
White House, is really a stalking horse for reactionary politics
right out of The Turner
Diaries.

However ridiculous such attacks may be, they are a sign
that broadly libertarian ideas about fiscal responsibility and
social tolerance are gaining ground in all areas of politics and
culture. Indeed, as Ames frets, libertarianism is even making
“major inroads into the disaffected left.”

As the conservative right and progressive left feel
threatened by libertarianism, such attacks will multiply in number
and intensify in venom. The main purpose is not to actually engage
libertarian ideas—including once pie-in-the-sky beliefs that
governments should be financially sustainable, gay people should be
allowed to marry one another, and that more immigration is better
less immigration—but precisely to avoid discussing their
merits.

In his
response to the false idea
that Reason supported apartheid in
the 1970s, Reason’s Editor in Chief Matt
Welch noted that Ames is “the anti-libertarian conspiracy
theorist with a history of
generating apology
notes and speedy
take-downs among those journalistic outlets
still reckless
enough to publish him.” Click through on those links
to get a sense of just how reckless and inattentive a reader Ames
can be.

In the newer
post, Ames runs
through Reason’s February 1976 issue
that was billed as a “Special Revisionism Issue.” He has posted the
entire issue, which I had not read before, online
here (an incomplete online archive of Reason’s run
can be found here at the invaluable Unz.org site, which compiles hundreds of
titles). Ames is correct that some of the contributors to
that issue developed an interest in or were fellow travelers with
that most pathetic area of study known as Holocaust revisionism or
denialism. That scurrilous topic is not the focus of any of the
articles in the issue, but the inclusion of contributors such as
James J. Martin, who would go on to join the editorial board of the
contemptible denialist outfit the Institute of Historical Review,
is embarrassing. 

The “revisionism” under discussion in the special issue
refers to the movement that was popular especially among left-wing
critics of the Cold War such as University of
Wisconsin’s William
Appleman Williams. Rather than accepting the United
States’ self-justifying explanations for the wars it fought and the
domestic policies it pursued, revisionists typically focused on
less noble motives in ways that they believed illuminated
uncomfortable truths. In The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy, for instance, Williams argued that America’s
“Open Door” foreign policy was not about spreading democracy or
human rights but was actually a way for America’s leaders to escape
domestic issues caused by racial strife and  capitalism’s
“contradictions.” You can take or leave that particularl argument,
but there’s no question that Williams and other revisionists
brought a huge amount of energy to the fields of history and
political science.

In the Reason issue,
various authors discuss, among other things, what sort of
foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Franklin
Roosevelt may have had and how actors other than Nazi Germany bear
some responsibility for the start of World War Il. Some of the
material holds up, such as the observation from then-Senior Editor
Tibor Machan that “the Nazis were worse than the Americans or
allied nations, and…the Soviet Union is a more vicious
government, even in international affairs, than is the U.S.
government. This does not mean, emphatically, that I believe FDR to
have been an angel during World War II, or Wilson to have been the
paragon of diplomatic and political virtue in World War I.” Such a
view has become the baseline of virtually all contemporary
discussions on such topics.

Much of the material from the issue doesn’t hold up, which
is hardly surprising for a magazine issue published almost 40 years
ago. Even as the various writers warn explicitly against
uncritically accepting revisionist accounts out of inborn
contrarianism, there is a generally adolescent glee in being
iconoclastic that I find both uninteresting and unconvincing.
However, to characterize the issue as a “holocaust denial ‘special
issue,’” as Ames does, is an example of how quickly he can lose his
always-already weak grasp on reality.

As is his obsession, widely shared on the left and
increasingly among centrist Democrats, with fingering the Koch
brothers as the motive force in the decline of everything that is
good and decent in the world:

Reason isn’t just any magazine — since 1970,
Reason has been backed by the richest and most politically engaged
oligarchs alive, Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are almost
singlehandedly responsible for giving us libertarianism, a
radical-right version of neoliberalism that has steered the
Republican Party agenda for decades now, and has made major inroads
into the disaffected left as well. Reason is the respectable,
“educated” blue state face of the Kochs’ libertarian
network.

Not just any magazine?
Respectable and “educated”? We’ll
take compliments, even ones in scare quotes, when we get them. As I
wrote in The
Daily Beast after interviewing the author of
the critical new biography, Sons of Wichita: How
the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private
Dynasty, there’s no question that “one of the reasons
we’re having this conversation” about the size, scope, and spending
of government “is the Koch brothers.” David Koch has been been on
the board of trustees of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that
publishes Reason magazine,
Reason.com, and Reason TV, since the early 1990s and Charles Koch
has donated over the years.

None of this is secret or in any way scandalous. While
they play no role in our editorial process we appreciate their
support, which helps us generate the sort of journalism that took
home six prizes at the
56^th annual Southern California Awards
in June (among our winning entries were a feature-length
documentary critiquing drug prohibition, “America’s
Longest War“; Matt Welch’s brilliant
essay lauding Jackie Robinson’s incredible and
wrongly forgotten 1964 oral history of baseball’s integration; and
the short video “LA
County Sheriffs Hassle Photographer, Trample Constitution, Get
Lauded by Bosses”).

The audience and respect for our work are growing
precisely because of our willingness to engage in honest
conversation and analysis rather than fever-swamp ramblings and
unconvincing arguments ad funderam. Given the general
level of exhaustion with conventional right-wing and left-wing
ideology, with Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and
liberals, there’s a genuine interest in something different. To the
extent that we’re providing an alternative way to view politics and
culture, we’ll bug the hell out of folks who feel like we’re making
“major inroads” into what they took to be their own captive
audience. Suffering inaccurate, misleading, and over-the-top
attacks on our credibility and integrity is just part of the
landscape of the world in which we live. We’ll correct them when
they’re wrong and take it on the chin when they’re
right. Reason is happy to acknowledge missteps
and mistakes while also forcefully pushing back against blatant
misreadings of our past and current work. 

If you want a preview of just how lame
ideological mud-slinging is going to get over the next few years—or
decades, possibly—take a look at this pair of articles penned
by Mark Ames at Pando.com, a Bay Area-based website that, among
other things, aspires “to bring
more civility into the blogosophere.” The pieces
charge Reason with being not a
libertarian defender of “Free Minds and Free Markets” but a hotbed
for pro-apartheid Holocaust deniers who slavishly do the bidding of
David and Charles Koch (cue the monster-movie music,
maestro).

Yeah, seriously. A publication that just celebrated
“Marijuana on Main
Street: The long, hard road to safe, legal pot,”
covers the police brutality
beat like nobody’s business, and criticized George
W. Bush’s “disaster
socialism” for the entire eight awful years he was in the
White House, is really a stalking horse for reactionary politics
right out of The Turner
Diaries.

However ridiculous such attacks may be, they are a sign
that broadly libertarian ideas about fiscal responsibility and
social tolerance are gaining ground in all areas of politics and
culture. Indeed, as Ames frets, libertarianism is even making
“major inroads into the disaffected left.”

As the conservative right and progressive left feel
threatened by libertarianism, such attacks will multiply in number
and intensify in venom. The main purpose is not to actually engage
libertarian ideas—including once pie-in-the-sky beliefs that
governments should be financially sustainable, gay people should be
allowed to marry one another, and that more immigration is better
less immigration—but precisely to avoid discussing their
merits.

In his
response to the false idea
that Reason supported apartheid in
the 1970s, Reason’s Editor in Chief Matt
Welch noted that Ames is “the anti-libertarian conspiracy
theorist with a history of
generating apology
notes and speedy
take-downs among those journalistic outlets
still reckless
enough to publish him.” Click through on those links
to get a sense of just how reckless and inattentive a reader Ames
can be.

In the newer
post, Ames runs
through Reason’s February 1976 issue
that was billed as a “Special Revisionism Issue.” He has posted the
entire issue, which I had not read before, online
here (an incomplete online archive of Reason’s run
can be found here at the invaluable Unz.org site, which compiles hundreds of
titles). Ames is correct that some of the contributors to
that issue developed an interest in or were fellow travelers with
that most pathetic area of study known as Holocaust revisionism or
denialism. That scurrilous topic is not the focus of any of the
articles in the issue, but the inclusion of contributors such as
James J. Martin, who would go on to join the editorial board of the
contemptible denialist outfit the Institute of Historical Review,
is embarrassing. 

The “revisionism” under discussion in the special issue
refers to the movement that was popular especially among left-wing
critics of the Cold War such as University of
Wisconsin’s William
Appleman Williams. Rather than accepting the United
States’ self-justifying explanations for the wars it fought and the
domestic policies it pursued, revisionists typically focused on
less noble motives in ways that they believed illuminated
uncomfortable truths. In The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy, for instance, Williams argued that America’s
“Open Door” foreign policy was not about spreading democracy or
human rights but was actually a way for America’s leaders to escape
domestic issues caused by racial strife and  capitalism’s
“contradictions.” You can take or leave that particularl argument,
but there’s no question that Williams and other revisionists
brought a huge amount of energy to the fields of history and
political science.

In the Reason issue,
various authors discuss, among other things, what sort of
foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Franklin
Roosevelt may have had and how actors other than Nazi Germany bear
some responsibility for the start of World War Il. Some of the
material holds up, such as the observation from then-Senior Editor
Tibor Machan that “the Nazis were worse than the Americans or
allied nations, and…the Soviet Union is a more vicious
government, even in international affairs, than is the U.S.
government. This does not mean, emphatically, that I believe FDR to
have been an angel during World War II, or Wilson to have been the
paragon of diplomatic and political virtue in World War I.” Such a
view has become the baseline of virtually all contemporary
discussions on such topics.

Much of the material from the issue doesn’t hold up, which
is hardly surprising for a magazine issue published almost 40 years
ago. Even as the various writers warn explicitly against
uncritically accepting revisionist accounts out of inborn
contrarianism, there is a generally adolescent glee in being
iconoclastic that I find both uninteresting and unconvincing.
However, to characterize the issue as a “holocaust denial ‘special
issue,’” as Ames does, is an example of how quickly he can lose his
always-already weak grasp on reality.

As is his obsession, widely shared on the left and
increasingly among centrist Democrats, with fingering the Koch
brothers as the motive force in the decline of everything that is
good and decent in the world:

Reason isn’t just any magazine — since 1970,
Reason has been backed by the richest and most politically engaged
oligarchs alive, Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are almost
singlehandedly responsible for giving us libertarianism, a
radical-right version of neoliberalism that has steered the
Republican Party agenda for decades now, and has made major inroads
into the disaffected left as well. Reason is the respectable,
“educated” blue state face of the Kochs’ libertarian
network.

Not just any magazine?
Respectable and “educated”? We’ll
take compliments, even ones in scare quotes, when we get them. As I
wrote in The
Daily Beast after interviewing the author of
the critical new biography, Sons of Wichita: How
the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private
Dynasty, there’s no question that “one of the reasons
we’re having this conversation” about the size, scope, and spending
of government “is the Koch brothers.” David Koch has been been on
the board of trustees of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that
publishes Reason magazine,
Reason.com, and Reason TV, since the early 1990s and Charles Koch
has donated over the years.

None of this is secret or in any way scandalous. While
they play no role in our editorial process we appreciate their
support, which helps us generate the sort of journalism that took
home six prizes at the
56^th annual Southern California Awards
in June (among our winning entries were a feature-length
documentary critiquing drug prohibition, “America’s
Longest War“; Matt Welch’s brilliant
essay lauding Jackie Robinson’s incredible and
wrongly forgotten 1964 oral history of baseball’s integration; and
the short video “LA
County Sheriffs Hassle Photographer, Trample Constitution, Get
Lauded by Bosses”).

The audience and respect for our work are growing
precisely because of our willingness to engage in honest
conversation and analysis rather than fever-swamp ramblings and
unconvincing arguments ad funderam. Given the general
level of exhaustion with conventional right-wing and left-wing
ideology, with Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and
liberals, there’s a genuine interest in something different. To the
extent that we’re providing an alternative way to view politics and
culture, we’ll bug the hell out of folks who feel like we’re making
“major inroads” into what they took to be their own captive
audience. Suffering inaccurate, misleading, and over-the-top
attacks on our credibility and integrity is just part of the
landscape of the world in which we live. We’ll correct them when
they’re wrong and take it on the chin when they’re
right. Reason is happy to acknowledge missteps
and mistakes while also forcefully pushing back against blatant
misreadings of our past and current work. 

The July 16 decision by U.S. District Judge
Cormac J. Carney declaring California’s death penalty
unconstitutional offered a stark assessment of the Golden State’s
dysfunctional capital punishment system. Judge Carney noted only 13
of the more than 900 people sentenced to death since 1978 have
actually been executed—primarily because the average appeals
process in a capital case takes “25 years or more” to complete.

Judge Carney acknowledged “courts had thus far generally not
accepted the theory that extraordinary delay between sentencing and
execution violates the Eighth Amendment,” which prohibits “cruel
and unusual” punishment. But in accepting that theory now, writes
Skip Oliva, Judge Carney joined a substantial body of death penalty
jurisprudence from the British Commonwealth.

View this article.

First published on July 22, 2014. Original text
below:

“I was getting letters from Taliban, they were showing up at my
house and everywhere. They were telling me that they were going to
kill me or a member of my family, or kidnap my son,”
says Janis
Shinwari, a former Afghan interpreter for the American
military.

The U.S. military relies heavily on locals in Afghanistan and
Iraq to serve as interpreters. The Iraqi Refugee Assistance
Project estimates that 50,000
Iraqi and Afghan nationals served as U.S. military
interpreters over the past decade-plus.

Interpreters provide one of the most crucial roles in a military
unit—without them, service members would not be able to communicate
with local populations. It’s also one of the most dangerous roles.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban labels interpreters traitors and has no
compunction about killing them and their loved ones.

“Interpreters have become a very big target of the Taliban and
Al Queda,” says Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). “There’s been a lot
of beheadings of people that have worked with the West.” 

The U.S. was able to recruit interpreters by promising them
American visas when the war ended. “If we completely pull out of
Afghanistan and we don’t bring these interpreters back,” says
Kinzinger, “they’re going to be killed. Their families are being
killed too. Their houses are being burned down. It is very messy
over there.” 

An officer in the Air National Guard and a veteran of Iraq and
Afghanistan, Kinzinger is pushing Congress to extend
and amend the Afghan
Special Immigrant Visa Program. The program was established in
2009 to give visas to Afghan nationals who helped the U.S.
military. The program has been extremely inefficient and it
can take years for an application to be processed. From 2009
to 2013, Congress said 7,500 visas could be issued but the State
Department approved only 2,000. 

“A lot of it is because of bureaucratic wrangling,” says
Kinzinger. “While we do need to have good background checks and we
do need to be cautious about this, its been way too slow at this
point and a lot of translators have given their lives in the wait.”
 

The State Department has responded to the criticism by improving
the processing time. So far in 2014, approximately 2,300
Afghans received visas out of an allocation limit of
3,000. But State expects to run out of allocated visas within a few
weeks and the whole program expires in September, leaving
6,000 applicants in limbo. 

Secretary of State John Kerry has appealed
to Congress to extend the program and to grant more visas
for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends on September
30.

If left behind, many interpreters will die at the hands of the
Taliban. Janis Shinwari was able to escape that fate and moved to
Virginia in October with his wife and two children. His visa came
largely due to the efforts of Army Capt. Matt Zeller, whose life he
saved (Shinwari is credited with saving the lives of at least four
other American soldiers). In 2008, Zeller returned to the U.S.
while Shinwari stayed in Afghanistan to continue his work as an
interpreter.

“It was the hardest goodbye I’ve ever had in my life,” says
Zeller. “If he had been an American he would have been getting on
that plane with us. It didn’t feel right.”

Zeller relentlessly pressured the State Department to issue
Shinwari his visa. He eventually succeeded and now the two friends
are focused on not only bringing more interpreters to America but
also providing food, shelter, and job opportunities to them once
they arrive through Zeller’s nonprofit, No One Left Behind.

Increasing and extending the visa program is “the right thing to
do,” says Rep. Kinzinger, who stresses not just the promises the
U.S. made in the past but how abandoning local partners will affect
operations in future wars. ”America is going to find itself in
another war one day—it’s a reality. And then if we go in and we try
to bring the local population on our side, and they look at history
and look at all the promises we made in the past that we didn’t
follow through [on], that harms our national security because we
can’t convince them that America stands by its word.”

About 6 minutes.

Produced by Amanda Winkler. Camera by Joshua Swain, Tracy
Oppenheimer, and Winkler. Narrated by Todd Krainin.

Scroll below for downloadable versions and subscribe
to Reason TV’s
YouTube channel to receive automatic notifications when
new videos go live.

Music by The Abbasi Brothers.

Photos courtesy of Matt Zeller, Janis Shinwari, U.S. Army Staff
Sgt. Jason Epperson,  Staff Sgt. Christopher Allison, Staff
Sgt. Ezekiel R. Kitandwe, Cpl. Adam Leyendecker, Staff Sgt. Eric
James Estrada, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Cpl. John McCall,
 Lance Cpl. Bobby J. Gonzalez, Tech. Sgt. Kevin Wallace, Tech.
Sgt. Efren Lopez, and Niklas Bildhauer.

View this article.

“For two or
three generations, we’ve almost completely ignored the supply side”
of health care, warns Robert Graboyes, an
economist who specializes in health care issues. That’s especially
a big problem now that Obamacare is coming online. The whole point
of the program, after all, is to increase demand for medical
services. Yet even President Obama and his supporters acknowledge
the plan does next to nothing to generate more doctors and more
medical innovations.

Graboyes, a senior research analyst at George
Mason’s Mercatus Center,
sat down with Reason TV‘s Nick Gillespie to outline
immediate ways to grow the number of hospitals, doctors, and nurses
to serve millions of newly insured patients.

View this article.

The good news is that data show obesity levels
among K-12 students in Philadelphia fell by 4.7 percent from the
2006-2007 school year to the 2009-2010 school year. The caveat
there—and it’s a big one—is that the data doesn’t track individual
students.

This clear uncertainty, though, hasn’t stopped the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation from suggesting that policy changes it favors
are behind the change, according to Baylen Linnekin.

Cheering on mandatory calorie labeling is a constant RWJF
refrain. In a 2013 report listing four key strategies for reducing
obesity, for example, RWJF also credited four
states for “requiring chain restaurants to post nutrition
information.”

But, as Linnekin writes, laws requiring the posting of
calorie counts don’t work. In fact, research has shown they can
push people to ingest more calories, rather than
fewer.

View this article.