Tag: news

“We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.” Nothing captures the attitude of the modern college activist as perfectly as this statement, made by Yale University students petitioning the English department for changes to the curriculum (they wanted to read fewer white male poets).

It’s the constant refrain of the far-left social justice student: Our minds are made up. The time for discussion is over. We aren’t here to be educated. We are here to educate you.

This sentiment was echoed by Jasmine Adams, a member of the Black Student Union at Oberlin College, who recently told a journalist: “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ‘hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”

Adams and her ilk reject the notion that the purpose of college is self-transformation. They haven’t come to campus to be changed—they see themselves as the only agents of change matter.

This has dire consequences for higher education. If a small but influential group of students on campus are there with the explicit goal of drowning out and shutting down other perspectives—often with the help of the administration—it’s going to make life miserable for students who do wish to learn, and professors who still think their job is to challenge young minds.

The dangers of this new campus reality are obvious in a new, short documentary released by Rob Montz, formerly of Reason TV. Returning to his alma mater, Brown University, Montz finds that campus has become a dangerous place for freethinkers. The film opens with footage from a confrontation between left-wing student activists and a pro-speech administrator. The admin tries to start a dialogue with the group, but the students shout him down, insisting that “heterosexual white males” have already done too much talking, historically speaking. When the administrator points out that he is gay, the student tells him “it don’t matter.”

I attended a screening of the film last week, and participated in a subsequent Q and A session about campus free speech issues with Montz and Ari Cohn of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Eduction. The Federalist wrote up my remarks:

This minority of far-left students hostile to free expression has always existed, said Robby Soave of Reason magazine. What’s changed is that in the last five years they’ve gained institutional power. 

“[Student activists] actually started getting guidance in 2011 from the Education Department that because of harassment law, because of the requirements of Title IX and aspects of the law that funds higher education, administrators have to take students’ demands seriously or the institution could lose its federal funding,” he noted.

I also elaborated on many of these themes during a recent appearance on the Free Thoughts podcast for Libertarianism.org. Listen here.

It’s popular to portray the GOP as the anti-science party and Democrats as the sane, “party of science” alternative.  And only 6 percent of scientists identified as Republicans, according to a 2009 Pew Research poll, which seems to be the most recent one on the topic. But the truth is that when science and politics meet, the result often isn’t pretty, regardless of partisan affiliation.

Reason TV asked locals in Venice, California about their thoughts on various scientific policy questions and compared their answers to public opinion poll data. We found that many people favored mandatory labeling of food that contains DNA, the stuff of life contained in just about every morsel of fruit, vegetable, grain, or meat humans consume. Yet a recent survey out of the University of Florida found that 80 percent of respondents favor mandatory DNA labeling, only slightly below the 85 percent that favor labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While Republicans are divided evenly on the GMO question, Democrats rate them unsafe by a 26-point margin, despite almost 2,000 studies spanning a decade saying otherwise. 

Republicans are more skeptical of the theory of evolution, though by a surprisingly slim margin with 39 percent of them rejecting it as compared to 30 percent of Republicans. When it comes to other scientific matters, the waters are even muddier. For instance, Democrats and Republicans believe in the false link between vaccines and autism at roughly equal levels.

And it’s largely liberal Democratic politicians pushing anti-vaping laws, despite public health agencies estimating e-cigarettes to be around 95% safer than conventional tobacco cigarettes and early evidence they help smokers quit. And vaping products don’t contain any tobacco or its resultant tar, yet the FDA still wants to treat them as tobacco products.

The big science policy issue of the day, though, seems to be global warming. Sixty-four percent of Democrats believe in man-made global warming, while only 22 percent of Republicans do. But when it comes to realistic solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Democrats still aren’t always science-minded.

Only 45 percent of Democrats support expanding the use of nuclear energy, as compared to 62 percent of Republicans, despite the fact that except for Chernobyl, not a single person, including nuclear workers, has ever died due to a commercial nuclear reactor accident.

Burning natural gas extracted through fracking is cleaner than oil or gasoline, and far more economically viable than non-nuclear renewable sources. And it emits half as much carbon dioxide, less than one-third the nitrogen oxides, and 1 percent as much sulfur oxides as coal combustion.

The ongoing switch from coal to natural gas to generate electricity is a primary driver of the reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by half a billion tons over the last decade, according to the EPA, which also has found no systemic evidence that fracking contaminates water tables. The U.S. Geological Survey found that fracking can cause “extremely small earthquakes, but they are almost always too small to be a safety concern,” though larger earthquakes can result when operations dispose of wastewater by injecting it deep into the ground. 

So maybe it’s not that Republicans are dumber than Democrats when it comes to science, or the other way around, but that both sides have blind spots when data-based evidence contradicts their political preferences.

Watch the full video above, or click the link below for downloadable version. Subscribe to Reason TV for daily content like this.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello. Additional graphics by Josh Swain. Music by Adam Selzer and Chris Zabriskie. Approximately 8 minutes.

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Donald Trump announced this morning that he has tapped Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate. Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie asked Andrew Napolitano, senior judicial analyst for Fox News, his thoughts on the VP pick.

Watch above or click the link below for full text and more.

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Donald Trump confirmed a week’s worth of speculation this morning by announcing that he had chosen Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his vice presidential candidate. He made the announcement on Twitter, of course. 

I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00 A.M.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2016

The announcement came less than a day after Trump said that he would delay the announcement until the weekend following the attack in Nice, France last night.

The decision to delay the move was widely criticized, which makes this morning’s announcement look like a response to that criticism.

The drama surrounding Vice Presidential selection process offers a window into Trump’s management and decision-making style: For weeks, he’s built up the reality show intrigue surrounding the pick, appearing with a number of different potential candidates, teasing a 60 Minutes special where he was set to first appear with his running mate, saying even as late as last night that he had not made his “final, final decision.” Trump, as always, is highly attuned to the drama of politics, but also comes across as flightly, indecisive, and thin-skinned.

Trump’s eventual selection, meanwhile, couldn’t be more underwhelming. Pence is a longtime Republican politician driven by a religiously inflected social conservatism. He’s sometimes described as a staunch fiscal conservative, but he’s also the sort of governor who counts shady deals with local industry as “free-market” policymaking, as he did when he expanded Medicaid under Obamacare in Indiana.

As Nick Gillespie wrote earlier this week, “Pence is not the worst of the Republican bunch but he’s not the best, especially from a libertarian perspective.” Instead, he’s essentially of generic Midwestern GOP politician whose defining quality is his embrace of party orthodoxy. He is remarkably unremarkable.

That’s probably why Trump picked Pence. Pence’s function on the GOP ticket will be to reassure anxious Republicans that Trump maintains some connection to the traditional party apparatus and its political class. Pence’s purpose, in other words, is to serve as an ornamental reminder of the party as it existed before Trump’s run. He’s there to give Trump cover for what amounts to a takeover of the GOP. Even with Pence on the ticket, it’s Trump’s party now.