Free Media @reason + Rising @thehill + The Group Chat @2waytvapp. "Sought-after player in Beltway D&D circles, noted scooter anthropologist, baby Ryan Seacrest"
Washington DC
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Robby Soave retweeted
Trying to silence controversial speech can have the opposite effect.
@RobbySoave calls Macklemore’s removal from Ed Sheeran’s tour a prime example of the Streisand effect: Trying to suppress a message can end up drawing even more attention to it.
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This week on Freed Up: Mary Peltola’s latest scandal, the COVID-conscious lesbian bar, cult classic movies, and libertarianism is alive and well. reason.com/podcast/2026/09/2…
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Robby Soave retweeted
Rep. Harriet Hageman tells @robbysoave why she fears DSA-aligned candidates will try to undermine the Constitution if elected this November.
@RepHageman: “This election is about the difference between common sense and crazy. And some of them are crazy.”
“If the very foundation of the United States of America is something that they seek to not only undermine, but to destroy, how do they even take the oath of office?”
“[The Constitution] has unleashed a level of prosperity and freedom that no other civilization has ever been able to enjoy. And why they hate that, why they want to destroy that, is really beyond me.”
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I'm watching the scene and every time the Zuckerberg character rebuts some awful pro-censorship line from Bill Burr I'm muttering "based" and "even more based" and "yes this" and "exactly right, yes." I suspect I'm not alone.
First clip for Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in ‘THE SOCIAL RECKONING’.
In theaters on October 9.
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Robby Soave retweeted
The Flock Debate Is Over. They Lost.
- @realDailyWire
dailywire.com/news/the-flock…
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If I was a low level Dem staffer, I would simply feed the chameleon and not complain. In fact, I would volunteer the assignment. Happily. Chameleons are cool.
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"Her demands could be unusual, such as requiring aides to feed live crickets to her family’s pet chameleon, Meatball."
Call me crazy, but I do not think it's very objectionable for Mary Peltola, who commutes from Alaska to Washington DC, to ask a staffer to feed her pet. (Personally, I find these kinds of stories--in which people are granted blanket protection and anonymity to whine about their bosses--incredibly lame.)
SCOOP: Inside the tumult of Mary Peltola's Senate campaign in Alaska and her time on Capitol Hill.
Peltola is known publicly as kind and affable. But aides recall angry outbursts, slurs and a shove. (She also required staff to feed a pet chameleon.)
nytimes.com/2026/09/23/us/po…
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Just as Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon is doing excellent work exposing universities that continue to use race-based admissions (in defiance of the Supreme Court), rightwing race obsessives are coming out against merit and forfeiting the right's claim to this victory. Astonishing.
This comment from Ben Shapiro is incredibly simplistic and historically ignorant-- not just because it doesn't acknowledge that what he happens to think of as a "meritocracy" (a certain cleverness with words, spreadsheets, or computer programming-- which is how most of the really big fortunes are made today) is historically contingent-- as @romanhelmetguy famously pointed out in the tweet below (which was not directed at Shapiro, to be clear)
But Shapiro's comment is also wrong because there are many, many downsides to pure meritocracy, and there are many important cultural and historical values that pure meritocratic thinking erases. This may be "good" for clever folks situated like Ben, but it's not good for society as a whole. Inevitably the logic of of pure meritocracy leads to open borders, globalism, extreme wealth inequality, and cultural homogenization (even if Ben might nominally claim to oppose, say, open borders)
Ben seems blissfully unaware that the term "meritocracy" itself was popularized in sociologist Michael Dunlop Young's 1958 *dystopian* novel The Rise of The Meritocracy, which warned against just such a purely "meritocratic" society as proposed by Ben and ultimately ended with the overthrow of the "meritocrats" by populists.
Don't get me wrong-- merit is good-- and societies that don't ultimately recognize and reward merit according to reasonably objective standards will tend to fall behind those who do.
But there are many social values other than "merit" that any society should consider in making policy, and to champion some sort of bloodless "meritocracy" as the primary goal we should aiming towards shows an unfortunate degree of ethical and intellectual tunnel vision.
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Robby Soave retweeted
For all the panic about the far-right gaining ground in Germany, communists just won the Berlin state elections on the promise of stealing 225,000 private apartments reason.com/2026/09/23/the-fa…
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Yesterday I joined the @realDailyWire’s Wired In with @cabot_phillips and @robbysoave to talk about libertarian perspectives on Flock.
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My response to this "strange death" of libertarianism piece.
Libertarianism is clearly alive and well, and is impacting economists, policymakers, and tech CEOs at high levels of influence, which is why Americans arguably enjoy more freedom now than at any other point in human history. In his column, @ToryAnarchist does not even particularly disagree that this is the case, conceding over and over again that on everything from the rise of the internet to the spread of gambling to the legalization of gay marriage, the U.S. has become freer; his actual contention is merely that this is bad, rather than good. Indeed, the column is mostly just a screed against libertarianism—which McCarthy views as insufficient for satisfying the yearnings of man's soul—rather than an argument about libertarianism's allegedly diminishing impact.
To be absolutely clear, there are valid points to be made about whether dedicated adherents of a libertarian framework are making or losing ground in the context of electoral politics. I certainly think it's fair to look at the trajectory of American politics, in particular the trajectory of the Republican Party since 2010, and say that libertarians have not grown as an especially powerful faction over that time period.
If one is being fair about all this, the conclusion is really just that Trump is not a particularly ideological figure: He is certainly not a libertarian, and has indeed shifted the conservative consensus away from libertarians on some key issues, like support for free trade. No argument there! At the same time, Trump is also not particularly anti-libertarian: He has zero desire to outlaw porn or gambling or marijuana. And on tech and AI—arguably the defining issue of his second term given its outsized importance for the economy and for global stability—Trump has taken a radically libertarian stance that is perfectly in-keeping with these supposedly out-of-fashion Republican icons (Reagan, Hayek, Rothbard, etc.).
reason.com/2026/09/22/the-st…
Libertarians have disappeared from American politics. Their think tanks and magazines are richly endowed but irrelevant, their ideas exhausted. What happened to champions of free markets and free people?
✍️ @ToryAnarchist
Article | spectator.com/article/the-st…
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Robby Soave retweeted
I was on Rising this morning talking about my article on why you shouldn’t worry much about climate change.
Check it out here. piped.video/KicHcKQqS6I?is=ogRB…
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Robby Soave and Amber Duke discuss how the White House has restricted the press. reason.com/video/2026/09/22/…
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Nikole Hannah-Jones deserves some credit for admitting her daughter felt "betrayed" by her decision to muddle through a deficient public school system, but she misdiagnoses insufficient funding as the problem. It's not. Me and @ambermarieduke discuss on FREE MEDIA
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Robby Soave retweeted
Ep. 283: Robby Soave on Trump’s press ban, Macklemore, and free speech culture wars
The free speech culture wars look different than they did a decade ago.
@reason senior editor and @RisingTheHill host @robbysoave joins @TheFIREorg's @NicoPerrino to discuss the White House’s restrictions on media access, Macklemore getting dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour, and why efforts to suppress controversial speech so often backfire.
They also look back at how the free speech debate has changed since Robby and Nico began covering it — from campus censorship and cancel culture to social media moderation and the changing politics of free speech.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:46 How Robby prepares for Rising
03:35 How the media landscape has changed
10:43 Trump, the press, and censorship
20:25 Cancel culture
23:55 Macklemore, Ed Sheeran, and the Streisand Effect
30:30 Why should we defend the media?
36:57 Campus free speech
43:47 The changing politics of free speech
58:34 Outro
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This. The idea that the problems are due to underfunding is pervasive and untrue. I'm glad NHJ realizes her mistake, but she is still misdiagnosing the causes.
The Nikole Hannah-Jones is brave in some respects, and worth reading, but it still falls back on the claims that schools like PS 307 are underfunded and understaffed relative to other schools, which isn't true.
PS 307 has an average class size of 10 students and spends $52,349 per pupil. We don't know what school Hannah-Jones' daughter attends now, but Stuyvesant is a good example of the type. Stuyvesant spends $21,664 per pupil with an average class size of 29.
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