Show notes
Earlier this year, The Washington Post's owner, Jeff Bezos, announced that the opinions section of his paper would be "writing every day in support and defense of…personal liberties and free markets." Today's guest is the person Bezos hired to execute that mission. He's Adam O'Neal, a 33-year-old Southern California native whose resume includes stints at The Economist, The Dispatch, The Wall Street Journal, Real Clear Politics, and covering the Vatican for Rome Reports. O'Neal tells Gillespie his goal is to build a nonpartisan editorial section rooted in core American values of free expression,free enterprise, and limited government. That means taking on MAGA and the Trump administration, insurgent Democratic Socialists, and censors and statists in both parties. "It's small L libertarian…classical liberal," says O'Neal of the section he's building. "It's non-partisan and free markets and personal liberties are the North Star." O'Neal talks about the challenges in bringing a classical liberal sensibility to mostly left-of-center readers, how growing up in California informs his thinking, what he thinks of Pope Francis' and his American successor Pope Leo's attitudes toward capitalism, and why newspapers shouldn't endorse candidates. The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and journalists who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by challenging worn-out ideas and orthodoxies. 0:00—Introduction 1:39—Writing in defense of free markets and personal liberties 7:40—Government threats to free speech 14:01—The Washington Post's editorial decisions 18:59—The state of free markets in America 21:52—Is the opinion section becoming libertarian? 34:09—O'Neal's origin story 40:46—Pope Francis and capitalism 45:17—Experiences at The Dispatch and The Economist 52:59—The culture of The Washington Post's opinions team 55:38—Generational change in politics and culture 59:04—The Washington Post ends candidate endorsements Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: Adam O'Neal of The Washington Post opinion section, thanks for talking to Reason. Adam O'Neal: Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to talk about free markets and personal liberties with Reason, which knows a little bit about those subjects, certainly. Yeah, that's right. Our longtime tagline has been "Free Minds and Free Markets." So I guess I'll start there. All of us at Reason were excited earlier this year when Jeff Bezos announced on Twitter that the opinion section is going—and I'm quoting him here—he said, "We're going to be writing every day in support of personal liberties and free markets." And then you got hired a couple months later to help execute that kind of defense. Let's start with personal liberties and free markets—maybe start with free markets. What does it mean to be writing every day in support of those things? Right. There's the textbook definition of prices and wages being set by competition and not the government. That's a free market, right? We all know that. But within that system—and certainly the United States is very far from being a free-market economy, more so than Europe, maybe less so than some examples you could point to elsewhere in the world. And when we're writing in defense of it, it's those prudential questions that come in—where we are on that scale. Because we're not going back to the pre-industrial economy, right? But at the same time, you think that— I live in New York, so we'll see come January. Yeah, I mean, certainly decline is a possibility. And it's often a choice that societies make. Maybe New York is doing that right now. I think we'll see how he governs, right? But what we're writing about every day and we're one as an editorial board writing about these prudential questions. Right? I know you've written about abolishing the FCC [Federal Communications Commission]. I think that's an interesting question to explore. Or if it's: Does the current configuration of the federal government, these different departments, does make sense? Should air traffic control be privatized—moving that particular service in a free-market direction? We're both staking out a position and developing a voice as an editorial board, as our staff writers, but also hosting that debate with people whose North Star is wanting to move toward a more free and open economy. But may have differences of opinion about how far you go in that direction one way or the other. What about personal liberties? You've got a piece that went up a couple of days ago—and we're talking, just for people, because this may change—we're talking on November 6th, a couple of days after, 2 days, after Zohran Mamdani won the mayor race in New York City, etc. But personal liberties—you recently had posted a piece by Leana Wen, who is a doctor, one of your contributors, who was saying like, "Hey, forget Tylenol. Pregnant women shouldn't be smoking weed when they're pregnant," right? Personal liberties, how do you define that? That's a big topic. I think this is less of a textbook definition than I gave you on free markets, but it's doing what you want as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's personal liberties and their freedom. And the same way of thinking it applies of the United States—it's a quite free country. I lived in Europe for five years, and there were certain freedoms I didn't have there. One of my parents grew up in an authoritarian country. We're certainly much more free. But you can't do anything you want anytime in the United States, and it's hosting those debates. Sometimes I'll agree with the contributor; sometimes I won't. But there's a spectrum, right? You could talk about Tylenol or drug usage, right? Or should heroin be legal? That's one question. Should you be able to smoke heroin on the street in front of a— Yeah, or do direct-to-consumer advertising on television. And the FCC should be abolished. We could go down a whole lot of different mine shafts with all this kind of stuff. What are the personal liberties that you think matter most? And I'm not asking you to kind of read Jeff Bezos' mind, but it's kind of amazing that the owner—since 2013—of one of the very most influential newspapers in America and the world said, "Hey, we're scrapping the old kind of general, you know, we are a newspaper that's going to talk about a lot of different stuff," and "We're going to focus—not exclusively—but we are going to focus mostly on personal liberties and free markets." What are the personal liberties that you think are most under attack in the United States? I think—well, so that's a different question. What's most important to me and what's most attacked? I'll start with what's important to me, which—I'm a bit biased here because I've spent my career in journalism—but freedom of speech is under attack, I think. It certainly perpetuates from the dawn of the country. There've always been questions about how far you go with speech. But I'm always horrified when I see a politician—and I'll see them in the Republican or Democratic Party—it feels like it pops up: "Hate speech is not free speech." That's an easy one, guys. Yes, it is, right? We can dislike it, but that's free speech. And it's remarkably important. As someone now in a position of power to welcome voices, give them a boost inside of a major newspaper, it's something I think a lot about, because you want a robust debate. You want an interesting debate. And you want to feel uncomfortable sometimes with positions that people are taking. And it's a matter of finding out where that works. And I think—and I always go back to Europe because I lived there, right? They're a much darker place on free speech than we are. But we'll see flashes of European-style thinking on speech. And that's nothing compared to the Chinese Communist Party or what might be in a country like Iran. But we should compare ourselves probably more to England, right—or the U.K.—which is currently arresting tens of thousands of people a year for tweets and things like that. And we had—I mean, I guess, let's sharpen this a little bit, talking about free speech—because we went through an era when Joe Biden was in the White House where, you know, we learned later that Biden administration officials were jawboning all kinds of social media platforms, who oftentimes—I don't want to say in their defense or in Biden's defense—but they were also asking for guidance from the White House: "Is this hate speech? Is this COVID wrong-thinking?"—things like that. And working in cahoots to clamp down on stuff. A lot of—if not legal—actions against speech, then really pushing a social envelope—that is a bad phrase—but pushing people to ostracize anybody who dared think outside of a very narrow range. Now we have people in office in the Trump administration—including Trump's FCC head, including Trump himself—saying certain late-night comedians, "who really nobody's watching, should be fired. They're no talent. The FCC should do something about that." Pam Bondi, the attorney general, actually recently, in recent memory said, "Hate speech is not protected speech," briefly—things like that. Are we in a worse place with free speech under the current administration and climate of opinion than we were under Biden? Or is it just, you know, it just keeps getting worse? I think we're in a spiral, and it's a bad one. I was talking to one of our editorial writers the other day, and he's telling me, "You know, we're definitely a democracy, but it's like we're becoming a democracy where you vote for which censors you want to be in charge." Pick your censor, and those will be the people who bully the big media companies into behaving a certain way, right? Whether it's one of the streamers on COVID, right, as you said, or a comedian that a lot of people weren't paying a lot of attention to until he was being bullied by the government. And it's one of the things that concerns me. I think about how we can get out of that spiral. And maybe that takes a politician with a forward-looking view who can kind of declare a truce. But I'm generally very optimistic about America in general, our ability to move on. When you read enough American history, we've been here before. That's certainly something that's happened. But we're clearly in one of those waves—or in one of those spirals; I don't want to mix up my metaphors—where we're escalating. It's the censorship questions, but there's also lawfare, right? You don't want to end up in a position where you're a country like Pakistan or South Korea, where there's a very good chance you go to prison after you're done being in charge of the country—and the opposition comes in. How we get out of that spiral is something that we're grappling with as a group of journalists working together to come up with a voice. Yeah, do you feel like journalists are part of the problem? And, you know, I guess we always want to be part of the problem, because then at least maybe we won't have our jobs replaced as quickly. But I mean, there seem to be so many people in the media who are very quick to be like, "You've got to shut down this person's speech." "Like, of course, I won't be touched by it." Or, "Now that I'm in power, we're going to go after these people who kind of screwed with me later." I mean, I was just talking with somebody the other day about journalism shield laws. And I can remember when these were a thing—I would talk to kind of student journalism groups, and I'd be like, you know, "If the government is going to say, ok, if you're an accredited journalist, then you get certain protections, that's a really bad thing." Because it means the government gets to say, "You're a journalist and you're protected. You're not a journalist," and somehow you get lesser rights. And I feel like we haven't gotten out of that yet. It seems very strange to me that more journalists are not just rock-solid in favor of massive First Amendment rights all over the place for everybody. Right. And you get into a lot of gray areas and nuances when it comes to that. And I think that's also where it becomes very dangerous. There's a big controversy this week—I don't know when this airs. It'll be like that was a million years ago. Like, "Oh, woolly mammoths were seen in Bethesda," or something, yeah. Right. And I think you want to be very careful to not be policing the way that people think. Right? At the same time, you also need to recognize the way that William F. Buckley did when he was running National Review. "You know, we don't want lunatics in our movement." And National Review—it's a smaller magazine—but when he stood up to the John Birch Society, I think that's something that decades later… now, there's some debate about how far did he go in standing up to them? That's right, yeah. But the general concept of: it's ok to say when there's something that's clearly out of bounds that, "This is not what we're associated with." But it shouldn't be that you should go to prison, or you should be fined, or you should be banished from society. It should be: you can go write somewhere else, because this is our movement, and this is what we're trying to do. I think any publication—you have your sets of norms, your boundaries, and what you're advocating for. And that's a separate thing than government coercion. What troubles me is when I see journalists who advocate for government coercion and this sort of thing. People who think…I think it just has to be short-term thinking of: "My team will always be in charge and will never lose power." And it's a nice thing—one of my favorite things about America is that power changes pretty frequently, actually. And sometimes the new team does some things I like, I don't like. But it's a comforting thought—instead of living in an authoritarian state or even a place like Japan, where the LDP is just sort of perpetually in power and different factions trade off. So, if we can go to today's page, I think—and this is kind of just to get a sense of your sensibility, because you mentioned National Review and I appreciate you saying there are questions about how far did Bill Buckley go in really reaming out the John Birch Society. I'm with Matthew Dallek, who wrote a great book, a biography of the John Birch Society a couple of years ago, where he says, "you know, that's more Buckley's version of things than reality." But that's neither here nor there, because my point is National Review is a viewpoint magazine, or a viewpoint platform—same as Reason, same as The Nation. We have thought about newspapers—with the possible exception of The Wall Street Journal—as kind of being bigger tents than that. Right? So like you are going to be supporting personal liberties or defending personal liberties and free markets every day, but you're not, you know, you're not a movement newsletter, r…
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