Why did Donald Trump win? Trump is back. Back again. He's secured the Electoral College majority needed to become America's 47th president and looks on track for a popular vote majority—the first Republican to pull that off in more than 20 years. A New York Times breakdown shows that across just about every type of county—urban, suburban, older pop…

Is this the most important election ever? And who should win? Just asking questions. Next week, America decides: elect the 78-year-old criminally indicted, twice-impeached ex-president who's pledged to impose a universal tariff of 20 percent and embark on the largest mass deportation in American history; or his opponent, the vice president, swapped…

What's the agenda of the World Economic Forum? And what was The Great Reset? Just asking questions. Every year, there's a big gathering of global elites in Davos, Switzerland: world leaders, titans of industry, Hollywood celebrities. It all started in 1971, thanks to Klaus Schwab—a German economist and business professor who launched what was then …

What should the federal government do in a disaster? Two major hurricanes made landfall within two weeks, devastating the southeast. Hurricane Helene has killed more than 200 people, and more than 90 are still missing in North Carolina, where overflowing rivers and tributaries flooded the western part of the state. More than 9,000 remain without po…

How do immigrants change American culture? Just asking questions. While the economy ranks as voters' top concern as of a Wednesday Gallup poll, immigration remains "extremely" or "very" important to 72 percent of registered U.S. voters. As with most issues, there's a large partisan divide, with 63 percent of Republicans responding that immigration …

Who's most to blame for the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021? How much does it matter for the election in November 2024? We all remember the events of January 6, which resulted in unforgettable images, an evacuation of the Capitol, several deaths, $2.7 billion in costs, more than 1,200 criminal charges, an impeachment, and decades in pris…

How well-protected is Donald Trump? On July 13, Trump became the first U.S. president to be shot in more than 40 years, and the first to be shot during a campaign since 1912. Then, incredibly, the Secret Service stopped a second would-be assassin who was stationed with a rifle on the perimeter of Trump's golf course as the former president was one …

What are the schools really teaching our kids? It's back-to-school season, which means the curriculum wars are back on the agenda. The right has accused activist infiltrators of "indoctrinating" the next generation with woke struggle sessions, confusing kids about their gender and sexuality, and turning K-12 campuses into war zones by replacing dis…

Why is the Brazilian government afraid of X? Judge Alexandre de Moraes has blocked the site formerly known as Twitter in Brazil, where an estimated 40 million people access the site each month. Circumventing the ban on X with a VPN could get you fined about $9,000 a day, around the average per capita income in Brazil. It happened after Musk reinsta…

How bad is the national debt? Just asking questions. Our national debt—measured as federal debt held by the public—is over $27 trillion. That's approaching 100 percent of annual gross domestic product, which is higher than it's been since the end of World War II. So, are we screwed? Or are those of us who worry about numbers like this totally misun…

How's the economy actually doing? In 2022, economists forecasted that we'd be in a recession by now. Did it ever actually happen, though? Prices got higher, interest rates ticked up, but mass layoffs never really happened and gross domestic product growth chugged on. People mostly weathered the turbulence. Joining us today to talk about all that an…

How do Democrats define "freedom"? Just asking questions. It's Democratic National Convention week, so we wanted to talk about what's been unfolding there so far: the rhetoric, the thematic choices, and what it all reveals about the Democrats' 2024 agenda. How should we state-power skeptics and liberty appreciators view that agenda? We invited Jane…

What's really happening in Venezuela? Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in Venezuela's presidential election last month, but much of the rest of the world isn't buying it. Neither are many Venezuelans, who've taken to the streets to protest what they say is a fraudulent election in the face of increasingly violent crackdowns and menacing threats from …

How likely is a Kamala Harris presidency? Just asking questions. Join Zach Weissmueller, Reason senior producer, and Liz Wolfe, Reason associate editor, at 12:30 p.m. ET for a live discussion on their show Just Asking Questions with Nate Silver, statistician and author of the new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Silver founded the r…

Is the future of the GOP more libertarian, nationalist, or, somehow, both? Joining us today is Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, author, and former presidential candidate. He's been making a hard pitch for what he's called a "libertarian-nationalist alliance" for the past several months. He was at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention where he trie…

The past month has been one of the most tumultuous in modern American political history: a devastating face-plant in a televised presidential debate, an attempted assassination of an ex-president favored in the polls to win reelection, a COVID-19 infection of the sitting president and his subsequent exit from the race, and an endorsement and loads …

Where does former President Donald Trump want to take this country? As the Republican Party coronates Trump as its presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, there will be a lot of talk about Trump's vice presidential pick, his dominance in the polls, and the decline of President Joe Biden. But what about policy? What …

What if President Joe Biden drops out? Just asking questions. Biden is facing increasing pressure from his own side to drop out of the 2024 race, which nearly every poll taken since his disaster debate performance last week shows him losing. The latest RealClearPolitics average has him down by about 3.5 percentage points nationally. Several Democra…

Are the boys okay? For much of history, parents have preferred boys, perceiving them as the providers, the family legacy, the heirs to the throne. A dark consequence of China's 36-year-long one-child policy was a 120 boy to 100 girl birth ratio. But in 21st-century America, the script seems to have been flipped. The New York Times has run headlines…

Can a Catholic be a socialist? Can a libertarian be a Catholic? Just asking questions. Today's guest, Trent Horn, is an apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers and a defender of capitalism. He hosts The Counsel of Trent podcast and has authored several books on Catholicism, including Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? In this episode, we discuss the…

How's it going in Javier Milei's Argentina? Milei, Argentina's self-described libertarian president, notched his first legislative victory last week. Argentina's Senate passed a major omnibus bill, also known as the "Bases Law", that's been debated since February. It would further deregulate the labor market, privatize national industries, cut taxe…

Are embryos people? And are there downsides to designer babies? Earlier this year, Alabama's Supreme Court handed down a controversial decision declaring that frozen embryos should be treated as children, and therefore their destruction treated legally as wrongful deaths, leaving in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics with a big problem. Less than a …

Can San Francisco be saved? San Francisco, the beautiful city on the bay, has become a national punchline. During his debate with Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis displayed a map of citywide poop sightings, which were apparently reported to 311 more than 35,000 times in 2023, according to the S…

Who, exactly, is Chase Oliver? And what does he really stand for? Oliver is the Libertarian Party's 2024 presidential nominee, selected after six rounds of voting at a contentious party convention in Washington, D.C., this weekend, which featured speeches from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and former President Donald Trump, who suggested …

How bad is climate change? People are freaked out by climate change, especially young people. Scientists for Nature conducted a survey of 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 2021 and found that 59 percent of them were extremely worried or very worried about climate change, and large majorities reported that climate change made them feel sad, anxious, and…

How much do billionaires really pay in taxes? "Today, the superrich control a greater share of America's wealth than during the Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers," said Gabriel Zucman in a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled, "It's Time to Tax the Billionaires." Zucman is an economist at the Paris School of Economics and the Univers…

What should colleges do about pro-Palestinian encampments? College students across America are camping out to demand their universities divest all investments with Israeli-linked companies that they claim profit from the occupation and oppression of Palestine. It's gone on for weeks, and even administrators at schools known as bastions of progressi…

Should kids medically transition between genders? The number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria has surged in recent years. In America, diagnoses have almost tripled from about 15,000 to more than 42,000 from 2017 to 2021. In the United Kingdom, the number of minors referred to the national Gender Identity Development Service grew from 51 in 2…

Why has President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dark side been hidden? Scholars consistently rank FDR as one of America's greatest presidents. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey ranked him number two, below Lincoln, and respondents to the Siena College Research Institute studies have ranked him number one in six out of seven survey…

Is war with Iran coming? Last Saturday, Iran launched hundreds of armed drones and missiles to attack Israel in retaliation for an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, including a general. Israel and the U.S. report that they intercepted most of the drones, and the sole known casua…

At least 40 U.S. colleges still require a COVID vaccine, according to nocollegemandates.com, an initiative that tracks and opposes the mandates. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine and biostatistician who lost his job at Harvard for refusing the vaccine even though he'd already survived a COVID infection, says such mandates are "unscientific"…

"I discovered something remarkably similar to an alien co-intelligence," wrote Ethan Mollick in his new book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, describing the "sleepless nights" he experienced upon first encountering ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022. Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of th…

Immigration ranks as the second-most important issue among registered U.S. voters and the top issue for Republican voters, according to a Marist Poll/PBS NewsHour/NPR poll released last month. Perhaps that's because of the 3.2 million border encounters documented by Border Patrol in 2023—a new record high that's so far being outpaced this year. Tex…

Are American cities crime-ridden hellscapes right now? Have cities rebounded from pandemic-era homicide spikes? Why do subway shootings in New York and carjackings in D.C. keep making the news? "I think a lot of this has to be disaggregated: There is a public order problem, and there is a violent crime problem, and they're not necessarily the same …

Writer and podcast host Coleman Hughes published a column in The Free Press in January entitled, "What Really Happened to George Floyd?" in which he analyzes a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis, which has racked up more than 6 million views on YouTube and Rumble. The documentary makes the case that former Minneapolis police officer Derek C…

In a special edition of Just Asking Questions recorded before a live audience on the Honduran island of Roatán, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe talk with Mark Lutter, founder of the Charter Cities Institute, and Patri Friedman, founder and board member of Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in charter cities. The conversa…

Bryan Johnson made his fortune when he sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million, netting about $300 million for himself. He spends about $2 million a year creating a system to reverse his "biological age." He's 46 years old, chronologically, but claims he's de-aged himself following a program he's branded "the Blueprint protocol." "I w…

"One of the ways you understand a society is through its infrastructure," said Tucker Carlson as he stood in front of a Moscow subway station in a video he posted after his two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In contrast to America's public transit, Moscow's "is perfectly clean and orderly," explained Carlson. "How do you expl…

"The greatest risk of a Republican administration is a war with Iran, and the greatest risk of a Democratic administration is a war with Russia," says Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, a magazine for the types of conservatives who are skeptical of foreign military intervention. Mills joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and …

"We're in dark and uncertain times, but we've made it through worse," writes Peter Meijer in a November 6 announcement that he's running for a Senate seat in Michigan soon to be vacated by Democrat Debbie Stabenow. Meijer is a former Republican representative for Michigan's third Congressional district—a position once held by Justin Amash, the Repu…

A recently published document reveals "smoking gun" evidence of COVID-19's lab-based origin, according to Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers and one of the earliest proponents of the lab leak hypothesis. Ebright is referring to an invoice that shows an order for a particular enzyme that he believes scientists used to stitch together the g…

Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina's Fundación Libertad, and podcast host, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to watch and analyze Argentine President Javier Milei's speech at the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. They also disc…

Matt Welch, editor-at-large for Reason and podcaster on The Reason Roundtable and The Fifth Column with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss the recent Iowa caucus results and talk about what it means for the 2024 election going forward. They also…

Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, whose work has been widely credited for exposing the plagiarism of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz …

"To be a sane and happy parent, you need to be counter-cultural in our family-unfriendly culture," writes Tim Carney in his forthcoming book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. Carney, senior columnist at the Washington Examiner, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the father of …

When Russ Roberts, an economist and host of the podcast EconTalk, received a job offer to become president of Jerusalem's Shalem University, it seemed like "a no-brainer," he wrote in his 2022 book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Giving up his ability to work from his home in America on whatever interested him intellectually…

Julian Assange was arrested outside England's Ecuadorian embassy after Ecuador's president revoked his political asylum. The U.S. unsealed an extradition request outlining Espionage Act charges, and U.K. authorities moved him to London's Belmarsh Prison in April 2019, a maximum security facility where inmates are held in small single cells. Amnesty…

"I have a history of being the only vote that was a 'no,'" says Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). "I've developed some trust with my constituents on those lone votes." In the second episode of Just Asking Questions, Massie joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe to talk about his recent votes against aid to Ukraine and Israel, as well as a controv…

In this inaugural episode of Just Asking Questions, podcaster Dave Smith joins the show to tackle a fundamental question: "What is a libertarian?" Smith spearheaded the Mises Caucus takeover of the Libertarian Party (L.P.), telling Reason's Nick Gillespie at the party convention in 2022 that the new L.P. needs "a game changer," someone capable of "…

For the past several months, Reason Associate Editor Liz Wolfe and Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller have co-hosted a show on Reason's YouTube channel and on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie podcast feed called The Reason Livestream. The show has featured discussions with economist Russ Roberts about life in Israel after October 7, Rand Pau…