In its early years, the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons was famous for laughable characters who would shout, “WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!” at the drop of a hat, a smart parody of increasingly ubiquitous attempts to push political and cultural agendas by invoking society’s most vulnerable members. Only a few weeks ago, I wrote a Reason column about the show’s slow, sad embrace of just such an attitude regarding pater familias Homer’s cartoon violence toward his son Bart and other offenses to “enlightened” sensibilities.
But now, as we enter the weekend period of Reason‘s webathon—the one time a year we ask our readers, viewers, and listeners to make tax-deductible donations to fund our principled libertarian journalism—I unironically ask you TO THINK OF THE CHILDREN! (And while you’re doing that, go here to check out different giving levels and associated swag; and yes, we accept bitcoin, fiat currency, and almost anything short of live or dead animals.)
Give me a minute to explain.
Established in 1968 as a mimeographed magazine by Boston University student Lanny Friedlander (who died in 2011), Reason has over the ensuing decades become a full-fledged media juggernaut. Our monthly mag goes out to 52,000 subscribers, our podcasts are downloaded 530,000 times a month, our website pulls 3 million visits a month, and our videos generate on average 5.1 million views a month. We’ve got 43,500 Instagram followers; 282,000 Twitter (alright, X) followers; 363,000 daily email newsletter readers; 618,000 Facebook followers; and 868,000 YouTube subscribers. (All figures are from our Fiscal Year 2023, which ended in September.)
As our reach and visibility have grown, so has our readership among and influence on younger people, who are constantly being told in explicit and implicit ways that they are entering a world that is completely devoid of common decency and moral virtue, uniquely destructive to psychological and emotional health, and fundamentally unsustainable from environmental and economic perspectives. There are right- and left-wing variants to these metanarratives of doom and gloom, but they are absolutely everywhere you look: Don’t have kids because of the environment (or because they’re too expensive)! Gender fluidity must be eradicated from public life entirely and, besides, Atrazine is turning frogs and boys gay! There are too many flavors of deodorant to choose from, which is both psychologically demotivating and economically wasteful. School shooters, child molesters, stochastic terrorism, and unnaturally thin social media influencers have taken complete control of American life!
As psychologist and Generation Disaster: Coming of Age Post-9/11 author Karla Vermeulen told me in the video below, Millennials and Gen Zers have been bombarded since birth with messages that their world is utterly and totally doomed.
No wonder that across the board, Millennials and Gen Zers tend to report significantly higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression than Gen Xers and Boomers do. They’ve simply been attentive to what American Enterprise Institute sociologist Scott Winship calls “declension narratives,” or stories about how the past was better and the present and future really just kind of totally suck. Watch this short video for a discussion of “3 Myths About American Decline” and why they are misguided when not just totally false.
Reason stands athwart such toxic pessimism “yelling Stop,” as National Review long ago promised to do vis-à-vis history. But unlike conservatives, we aren’t constantly trying to breathe life into dead-but-with-us-still institutions, attitudes, and mindsets. We celebrate economic, cultural, and political creative destruction that allows societies to grow, innovate, and flourish while also maintaining continuity with the past. And we consistently take this piss out of the apocalypse du jour by showing younger people (and older ones, too!) that “Free Minds and Free Markets” are already making the world a better place—and could do even more if we were all given a little more freedom.
Younger people don’t need to be hectored about what might have worked in some supposed Golden Age past. They need to be given realistic analyses of today’s world and what sorts of policies might work in the future. We’ve been delivering the goods on that front, especially with short videos that whet the appetite for deeper dives on all sorts of policy areas. Consider this YouTube short featuring Andrew Heaton that talks about how housing policy has made it virtually impossible to build new apartment buildings in many major urban areas. The video has pulled 2 million views, and 57 percent of those watching are under 35 years old.
Or consider this TikTok featuring Reason‘s Billy Binion, which was similarly popular among younger people. In less than a minute, he deftly explains the looming threat of eminent domain abuse. Interested readers can comb through hundreds of articles about eminent domain by Christian Britschgi, C.J. Ciaramella, Joe Lancaster, and others.
Eminent domain allows the state to take someone’s property as long as they provide just compensation. Sometimes it’s for important utility projects, but often it’s for political pet projects like tourist attractions or an electric vehicle factory. #blacktiktok #property
♬ original sound—Reason Magazine
And if Millennials and Zoomers have been subjected to a steady stream of socialist propaganda in their K-12 and college years, Reason is robustly advancing the argument that it’s capitalism that has produced a historic reduction in global poverty. Cue Robby Soave:
Which is a roundabout way of answering the question in the subtitle of this post. Who’s thinking about the children, especially as they grow up and move out into the world? Reason is, and we’re offering persuasive counternarratives to the negative and false messages about the future being sent from the right and left.
When I started at Reason back in 1993, I’d say that the biggest sources of new libertarians were the works of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and maybe Robert Heinlein—writers and public figures who in very different but effective ways made the case for individualism, minimal government, and increasing freedom in all areas of human activity. Toward the end of the aughts, Ron Paul became a major factor, especially among younger people. So was the state of the world itself and the politicians who ran it. Endless elective wars, a financial crisis that was clearly the result of massive and disparate government interventions into all sorts of economic activity, and bald-faced lying about surveillance on the part of successive presidents and presidential candidates also played a huge role, too.
But so has Reason in all its permutations. I’ve talked about how Reason played the chief role in my own political awakening, and television legends such as Drew Carey and John Stossel have given credit where credit is due. In 2007, Carey told Time, “I never thought I was a libertarian until I picked up Reason magazine and realized I agree with everything they had printed.” And in 2011, Stossel told viewers of his Fox Business show:
I looked in The New York Times and the lefty press that we were reading and it was all about got to have much more government doing everything. And I turned to the conservative press and the conservative press was all upset about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. And upset about homosexuality, and it just didn’t make sense to me. I finally discovered Reason magazine….And that was an epiphany for me. It was like, wow, these people get it. Wow, they really get it, much better than I do.
Now more than ever, Reason is helping to create the next generation of libertarians by producing more and more content that finds Millennials and Gen Zers where they live and that speaks to the mix of idealism and exhaustion they evince. Without speaking down to them (or to anyone else, for that matter), we report on the real state of the world, what’s working and what’s not, and how to create a future in which more and more of us get to live how we want to live.
If you want to help create tomorrow’s libertarians, support Reason today with a tax-deductible donation. Your gift is currently being matched, meaning it goes twice as far when it comes to writing more articles, recording more podcasts, and producing more videos. Give now!
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