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

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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, right? So that has got to be challenging for you, right? To figure out what you're going to emphasize.

And I just want to point—like you have on today's page, there's a— which I just had up and now I can't find it. You have an editorial up, "Elizabeth Warren Knows Better," and this is where you're attacking—this is from the house editorial of The Washington Post. Where Elizabeth Warren is basically bitching and moaning that YouTube TV did not carry a game on Monday Night Football. Can you explain what your basic case there is, why she's wrong, and how do you decide that's something that we're going to weigh in on?

I'll start by saying the editorial page—the opinion section—I've been here for four months, and we've made tremendous progress, tremendous change. It's still a work in progress. We're still recruiting people. And that's not a caveat to explain what that editorial—I actually quite like the editorial that we ran.

So Disney and YouTube are in a dispute—YouTube TV—they're in a dispute. Disney would like more money to air ESPN on YouTube TV. YouTube TV does not want to pay that much. And so it's a question about—it's a business dispute between two corporations who are having a negotiation, and things have gotten tough. And so on Monday, when I turned on Monday Night Football to watch, as I usually do—as tens of millions of other Americans—I couldn't find it on my YouTube TV.

And the senator from Massachusetts, what she argued was, "The problem is the companies have gotten too big and they can keep nice things from you because the companies are so big and they're very mean." And I don't think that's an unfair interpretation of the tweet.

We saw this—and we covered the bigger stories: the election results, different foreign policy issues. You can see the mixed ones in the editorials. But we think that when people who should know better, and this is a former law professor and adviser to corporations before she had her pitchfork-populist turn, also a contributor to something, I like to bring this up all the time—a contributor to something called the Pow Wow Chow cookbook, where she offered up her grandmother's variation on some kind of Native American dish. 

Right? I think she was 1/64th. Right?

Yeah, the troubling part about it was—so it's, you know, you want to beat up on corporations, that's fine. Free speech, go for it, senator. But then she said, "And Donald Trump is letting them." And I'm old enough to remember when Senator Warren was very concerned—maybe I'm sure she was—let me rephrase. I'm old enough to remember when a lot of Democrats, and I think principled Republicans, were worried that Donald Trump was getting too involved in television decisions and saying who should be on air and who shouldn't.

And so we just wanted to step out and inform our readers quickly—I just think it was 300, 350 words—and say, "Look, this is a business dispute. The last thing you need is government getting involved in it." And there's a never-ending supply of senators, congressmen, congresswomen, governors who make economically illiterate statements that might stir some populist passion. I don't like the word populist—I shouldn't say populist—because I don't know what populist means. But stir some passion in voters and fire up their base.

And I think that one value we can do—and it's not the core product by any means—but one way we can add value is by pointing it out, explaining what's really happening, and suggesting that maybe there's something else going on here. And our readers can be—

And you point out in the editorial that Disney, among other things, owns Hulu, which is a direct competitor of YouTube. And like nobody in contemporary America is suffering from a lack of stuff to watch, right?

Do you think that we—so that's one way that the government is kind of getting in people's business where it just doesn't need to be. It doesn't make any sense, almost from any perspective. How will you guys—and I think I know the answer to this, because I've already seen it on the editorial page, both from columnists or opinion guest writers or things—when Donald Trump starts to say, "OK, the American government needs to own a piece of corporations either as a condition of them getting a merger, or of them exporting things to China, or bringing things into the country with a special exemption." Do you see this all as like, if we're in a bad space, a bad time for free speech generally, we're also in a really bad time for free markets, it seems?

Absolutely. I think one tricky part of all of this is that no party's hands are clean when it comes to this. Now, traditionally the Democrats were the party that could kind of use state power, push the limits. And Republicans were supposed to be the grown-up party that said, "No, we'll be a little more prudent." One is the party of free stuff. One is the party of growth and opportunity. That's sort of the myth that a lot of Republicans tell themselves.

And I think there are many times in history where it was actually true. Donald Trump, who is a very talented politician and also not a very ideological person—as we all know—there are certain things he's really felt strongly about for a long time, like tariffs, but not a deeply ideological person. I think when he talked—I think it was about the Intel stake—he was asked about it. And he said, "Yeah, of course I'm going to try to get what I can get." That's how he sees these things.

I won't predict what he's thinking, but the end result of that is, ok, maybe you're able to do that now. And I don't know what benefit the U.S. gets from having a piece of Intel. Certainly it's a problem for Intel in the long run, even if there's some help or preferential treatment now.

But again, eventually Democrats will be in power again. And a lot of Republicans who are cheering this on are not going to be thrilled with what Democrats do when they take stakes in companies or which companies they're bullying. And that's just a bit of prudence that we're trying to share with our audience. And when they see this, they might think, "Oh, it's interesting," or "Things are changing. Let's not be free market fundamentalists." But there are really good long-run reasons why you want to avoid getting into this business when you're the government.

Do you see that broad kind of province or edict to support personal liberties and free markets—I mean, is it ultimately the bounds of what you're talking about is a kind of basic classical liberalism or libertarianism?

You know, and I'm thinking of other things that are coming up today where you're starting to see Republicans talk about, "Oh yeah, it would be great to get rid of the filibuster," because we wanna end this government shutdown on our terms—as if earlier this week they didn't get at least a little bit of a wake-up call to say, "Hey, you may not even be in control of Congress this time next year."

Or I saw one of the senators from Alabama—Senator Football from Alabama—talking about why it's great that we're about to go, apparently, gonna go in to teach Nigeria how to defend its people and things like that, In a way that this was the exact opposite of what Donald Trump was running on for a second term. I mean, are you essentially—is the opinion section essentially becoming broadly classical liberal or libertarian?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say, right, small-l libertarian, or a classical liberal, right? There's all kinds of nomenclature that you can use. I'd say fundamentally, it's a nonpartisan project. And that's something that's new. That's sort of our very clear attitude.

When I'm facilitating conversations with the editorial board, or if I'm meeting with the op-ed editors and we're thinking through stories, it's never about which party will be advantaged or which one we prefer in general. Right? So that's the baseline: it's nonpartisan. And free markets and personal liberties are the North Star.

So there may be ways that we agree with libertarians. It's funny—I covered the Libertarian Party convention last year, when I was still at The Economist, and I love Libertarian Party activists. I remember there was this table with buttons that you can steal—or not steal. So you could pick up—

…you could liberate. 

And there were just like different libertarian slogans. It was like, "Sell the Grand Canyon," "Legalize buying AR-15s from vending machines." It was just the most libertarian stuff possible.

So yeah, you know, I'm probably not that far. Like, I think the federal government probably has some role to play in preservation—things like the national parks. I'm not pure libertarian in the way that some of my friends I made at—

Some of the people on this interview may be, yes.

Yeah, so I would shy away from that particular label, but there are plenty of times where I'll agree a lot more with the libertarians than I do with the Republicans. I say "I," you know, but also institutionally in our room, it's a wide range. And I think of myself as facilitating a conversation and getting us to the best answers institutionally—and also the most interesting debate.

But yeah, classical liberal—I think that's a huge tent, by the way, under classical liberalism.

Oh, absolutely. And you know, it's interesting. In my experience over the years—and particularly over the past three or four years—the ranks of classical liberal people, which basically means people who believe in, you know, kind of most personal liberties and mostly free markets, that's starting to get filled up from a lot of people who would have, maybe a decade ago, would have considered themselves liberal or progressive.

And then, particularly after the reaction in America to October 7, a lot of free speech–kind of liberals started moving toward the center. Which they are not social conservatives; they're very libertarian—and all small-ls and things like that. So I think you're on to something with the idea that being classically liberal, or small very, very small-l libertarian, contains multitudes in a way that it didn't really 15 years ago.

How is the audience responding to this? 

I've read over the past couple of years there were various reports claiming that The Washington Post, between 2020 and the end of 2023, lost half of its readership. It went from 100 million unique visitors online in a given month or given day to 50. Part of that was seen across the news industry broadly—just that when Trump was kicked out of office after 2020, it's like ok nobody was interested in reading about politics anymore.

But I also—supposedly, and this was in The Washington Post—when The Washington Post refused to endorse a candidate—and obviously by that, meaning that it was expected to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024—it lost 250,000 subscribers.

I know part of what you have to do is build a new section that is pointed in this particular direction, but also you have to win over a new readership or win over the existing one. How are people responding to the changes since you've been at the helm of the opinion section?

We still have quite a lot of readers and subscribers. I'll say, I've worked at smaller places, and it's a robust audience. And you know, when you write something in The Post, someone notices it.

That said, it needs to get bigger. And the audience now is overwhelmingly left-leaning. Everybody knows that as the data is available.

And that's for the whole paper, not…

Yeah the entire paper. Probably the opinion section. I don't have the breakdowns in front of me. And we value those subscribers. A lot of them have been loyal subscribers for decades.

And we're not trying to push them away and make this a MAGA project where they'll be deeply offended by everything we write. At the same time, I don't think it's a great business model to have one sort of mono—it's not entirely monolithic—but one very similar audience. And so we're trying to continue to serve our existing subscribers, who we value, while also looking at people—I don't know, like my dad—who frankly never would have subscribed to The Washington Post, who just wouldn't have trusted it, and say, "Look, we're doing things different at the opinion section. There's going to be a lot of stuff you disagree with, but you ought to find it interesting. We'll challenge you and educate you. And there may be things that you find that you're agreeing with that you wouldn't have seen before. Or you might've seen here or there, but not as frequently."

And one thing I've noticed that's been very encouraging, when I break down the data, is that a lot of stories are doing particularly well with non-subscribers. There are people who were kind of looking past The Post in the past and now are giving it another look.

And this is a long process, right? It takes years. You're going to have to write editorials hundreds of times on different subjects where people start to realize, "Oh, this is interesting. This is something I'd actually pay for."

So we're not taking anything for granted—whether it's the people we need to win over or the people we want to keep and remain happy subscribers. And it's a tough balancing act. Where do you fit in? And some folks simply will see stuff that we're publishing now that I think is interesting and engaging, and they'll disagree with me, and they wanna leave.

But I think overwhelmingly, by having this big tent, hosting this robust debate, we're building a stronger audience. And some of the early returns—things I'm seeing in the data—leave me very optimistic. In the long run, that's a good move for us. I think for the country, for society, it's helpful to have an opinion section like this—but also for the business.

Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting because basically, there's The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. If we were talking 20 years ago, you might throw in the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune, but newspapers as places that everybody gathers are fading.

And in a way, you've got The Wall Street Journal is conservative—it's good for free markets—and they've been strongly critical of Trump. The New York Times editorial page has its token conservatives, occasional libertarians, but it's reliably liberal.

Do you think The Washington Post will kind of square that difference? You've been critical of Trump. If you look at the page today—and again it's November 6 as we're talking—there's a lot of criticism of MAGA. The leading piece is by Jeff Flake, the former senator who got chased out of office. I interviewed him only a couple of weeks ago; I was visiting his Institute of Politics at Arizona State. He got chased out of office by Donald Trump.

Do you think you will be the kind of libertarian place—and again, not in a doctrinaire way—that will, not split the difference between The Times and The Journal, but will offer up real, hardcore defense of personal liberties and free markets?

You could pick the precise language, but I do see an opportunity there. And we should separate out the philosophical and then also just a regional and sort of cultural space.

So philosophically, I think we can be genuinely nonpartisan. I think both The Times and The Journal do good—like you said, they'll run a mixture of voices—but I think we can really own that space in a way no one else does.

But at the same time, I'm not looking to just try to steal market share from other papers. I think that there are a lot of people in America—some of my colleagues joke, there's one example I always go to, I don't know where it came to me—I say "a dentist in Tucson." It's kind of a particular individual. I have some family in Tucson—they're not dentists—but you know—

And you've got to be careful, because a dentist from Arizona is Paul Gosar, the congressman who was MAGA before MAGA. I don't think you're ever going to win him over.

Does he represent Tucson though? 

I don't know if it's Tucson. It's somewhere close around, but…

Ok, well, a variety of professions, a variety of places that aren't on the coast. Folks who wouldn't necessarily be subscribing to a big newspaper. And part of that is just writing in plain language. When we write—let's call it lifestyle content, or more or less focused on politics or policy—but the other offerings that you can have in an opinion section, things that appeal to them, that they don't just think, "That's really weird," or "What is that?"

Reaching folks like that, who either are kind of turned off by news or maybe get some news from Instagram here or there, and finding ways to meet people where they are. I think that's our bigger opportunity. Rather than thinking, "Oh, where do we sort of triangulate ourselves between the other similar institutions?" "Where can we go that they're not going as aggressively as we are? And how can we serve that audience?" I think that's a big part of it.

And the nonpartisanship and the sort of general American values of, "Hey, leave me alone. I like free enterprise." A normal person doesn't wake up and say, "I support free enterprise," but they have that instinct of like, "No, I'd like to start a business and be left to my own devices."

Appealing to that kind of American instinct and that American tradition. That I think is a huge opportunity for us. And that's one place where we're looking and where we're pushing hard.

You know, that's a good segue. I like to talk to people about where they're from and how they kind of came to their beliefs. So I think that's a natural segue.

So you're from Pomona, California—famously smoggy Pomona. Or it used to be. Nothing is smoggy really in the way it used to be because of progress and whatnot. But you're from Pomona? What was it like growing up in Pomona, and how does being from California—which, you know, until Texas started eating its lunch, was the definition of the American dream… You went to U.C. Irvine as well, a great university in the premier state university system in America. The U.C. system was part of the postwar American dream that California represented. How does where you're from inform who you are today?

Well, it's funny you mention smog, because my father—he actually wrote about this once for a newspaper—he was an air quality regulator.

Oh, wow.

And he's an engineer, and that's what he did for, I think, a little less than 30 years. He worked at the air quality regulator.

So being in Pomona would be like being an actor on Broadway, right? It's like where you want to be.

And my parents moved there to be closer to his work, actually. Yeah, indeed. And I'd say, one, we had a middle-class upbringing. My parents were engineers. And it was a nice, pleasant place to grow up in Southern California.

You weren't totally shielded from life in the way that I think maybe Irvine is, where you'd have—there was crime and violence in Pomona. You know, not unimaginable…

So my father, in his career working at a regulator, it kind of made me skeptical of state power pretty early on. And I think it also made him skeptical of state power. From a young age, he was kind of teaching me the ways of classical liberalism. I don't think he would call it that, but there was a lot of reading in our house.

We subscribed to The L.A. Times when it was a really significant, meaty print product that you'd get, and you could spend hours reading it. And we also had a lot of magazines in the house. It was just a lot of print products—reading. And also things like National Review, right? Things like The Wall Street Journal. I'm not sure if The Post came across our direction very much back then, just being on the West Coast. And The Post was a very different paper in the '90s than it was now and in recent years.

But certainly had some interaction with columnists, right? Like George Will—still writing for us. Real gem. But that was kind of the intellectual and cultural ferment that I grew up in.

Did you go to—were you part of any kind of student networks or anything as you were moving through Irvine?

Yeah. So in Irvine—I mean, I barely attended Irvine. I went to classes, I almost flunked out because I got a job at a radio station. And you can imagine how my engineer parents felt when I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to switch out of biology and do something else." And, "Don't worry, I'll go into this radio station to make, you know, eight bucks an hour, nine bucks"—whatever it was. I don't remember exactly.

But that was the start of my journalism career—it when I was 19. I worked at KFI AM 640—"More Stimulating Talk Radio." And actually, there's a Reason connection there because Lisa Kennedy—who we all of course just call Kennedy, she was at KFI at the time. We overlapped and I got to know her a little bit when I was just a fill-in producer on different talk shows at KFI.

Yeah, I did that. But as a student, I did policy debate. I was in this Junior State of America, which was part Model U.N., part student government, part debate society. And I got to meet a lot of really interesting students—some of whom I'm still friends with to this day.

And that really shaped a lot of the kind of debate. And I don't want, "intellectual" is too generous to describe, you know, 15 year old me—but the kind of mental exercises I was engaging in, that started early with activities like that.

You, early on, you worked at RealClearPolitics, which is an interesting site—it's coded right, and I think for some legitimate reasons, but it does fantastic work across the board. And you were the Vatican correspondent for Rome Reports. You had mentioned living in Europe. You did that for The Wall Street Journal as well, right?

Yeah.

But what was Rome Reports and what was it like covering the Vatican?

Right. Well, I was working at RealClear, and I really liked it. Carl Cannon was a great mentor and editor and boss. He gave me my first shot in D.C.

But I started—I don't know, "wanderlust," I don't really like that word—but I knew I wanted to go out and like see the world. And so I found Rome Reports, a job posting for them on journalismjobs.com. I'd never heard of it. It's actually a Spanish news agency. They use it in English, but it's run by Spaniards based in Rome.

And so I had the great experience of learning how to speak Spanish while I was living in Italy—which is just endlessly confusing. Because in the office we would speak Spanish, and then I'd go out and try to… they're different languages. People always say, "Oh, they're very similar." They're different languages.

But covering the Vatican was a real…it was a real blessing.

What year? What was the range of time?

Most of 2015 and the beginning of 2016. It was a one-year contract. So Francis was established—he came in in March '13. So at that point, I think I covered his second-year anniversary. He'd kind of gotten comfortable as a pope, people were getting to know who he was.

And look, I was not like interviewing the pope or, you know, deep in Vatican intrigue. I was—

Yeah, you weren't during the—

You weren't doing the Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, Skullduggery. Are you Catholic, and does that inform what you do or what you think?

Yeah, I'm a Catholic. It's not a huge part of what I talk about, but of course, I was raised Catholic, confirmed Catholic, and I still identify as such.

I have five of seven Catholic sacraments, so I am lapsed, and so my education bears no responsibility for my failure to remain Catholic.

Somebody like Francis strikes me as an interesting figure, right, from this question of personal liberties and free markets. Because he was critical of personal liberties and free markets, but he was also deeply Christian in a way that it seems like he presented a challenge to a lot of, I think, really devout American Catholics.

And Catholicism is a weird thing to think about because traditionally it's not the American faith. The American faith, if anything, was kind of anti-Catholic. But now Catholics comprise the single largest religious group in America.

Is that—I'm not sure where I'm going with this—but like is that part of what makes America interesting but also complicated? Where your faith kind of dictates one thing, your ideology kind of dictates something else. And then it's kind of like, how do you sort these things out?

This is something that I've thought about since I was a Vatican reporter, really. And Francis is a particularly interesting case, because in addition to having covered the Vatican, I've spent a decent amount of time in Argentina. And I know you all are very interested in [Javier] Milei, and so am I.

Who's very Catholic—well, now is supposedly converting to Judaism—but has been quite Catholic.

I think he said—I can't remember the exact translation, so I might be getting it wrong—he said something like, "Well, I'm a Catholic, but sometimes I do Jewish things." Only the way Milei could say it, right?

So that means he would never be hired by the Heritage Foundation now, right?

Well, with Francis, I think his interpretation of what Catholicism is, is the kind of state capitalism or the very corrupt version of capitalism that defined Argentina for decades. And it's one way that the Peronists were able to have such political success.

He sort of equates capitalism with greed and theft and corruption in a way that—it's… I don't want to sound like a socialist saying, "Well, true capitalism hasn't really been tried." But it has been tried in a lot of very vibrant and successful societies—but not so much in Argentina, or at least not for a long time. And I think that distorted Francis' worldview a bit.

If you look at other popes, like Leo—who I find incredibly impressive—and I should say Francis, I didn't know him personally. I met him once, shook his hand, and we took a photo together. But they're all—like, to become pope, it's sort of de facto, you're an incredibly impressive and interesting person. A few centuries back, there were some really bad ones. But we've been on a good run for a while now.

But someone like JP2 or even Benedict were just such worldly…they were real, true scholars. And Francis very much was—you know, he studied in Germany briefly, didn't like it, got homesick, went back to Argentina. And he was very much in that world. And I think that limited his worldview in some ways, and it made him a more vociferous critic of capitalism than he ought to have been.

Now, that said, there can be complicated questions for politicians when it comes to their faith and exercise in public office. That's not a new debate. And if you're a Catholic, that should be the most important thing to you, and it should come before anything else. But that's not a politically viable thing to say, as JFK learned—and everyone else, every other Catholic we've had in office eventually encounters.

And you saw this when Francis came to the U.S., a lot of politicians didn't quite know what to do. I think that was about 10 years ago—I think it was November—it was in the fall or the winter of '15. And that's something that there are no firm or concrete or easy ways out of it. People will make judgments about how to reconcile those two.

But I think in some ways, Catholicism, sort of like classical liberalism, doesn't neatly imprint onto the American political spectrum. And that is something that frustrates people endlessly, especially politicians. Whoever.

And ideally—I think I believe this about libertarianism or classical liberalism, probably also about religion—it doesn't dictate your partisan, certainly not your partisan affiliations. It might inform them, but these are things that come before those things, which are worldly and crass and vulgar and maybe necessary.

You also worked at The Wall Street Journal, The Dispatch, which is—what was it like working at The Dispatch? And I know…

[Audio Cuts out]

…twin sides of The Weekly Standard. It's kind of like The Weekly Standard broke up into two bands that don't like each other very much anymore.

What was it like? Because The Dispatch is—they're anti-Trump, but they're maybe anti–anti-Trump at the same time. I don't know. What was your experience at The Dispatch like?

Yeah, these sort of anthropological dissections of conservatism—I certainly engage in them from time to time because I think it's interesting. When I talk to people who aren't in politics or journalism, sometimes they're sort of baffled at the level of detail we can go into.

But I would just say I have nothing but good things to say about The Dispatch. I was there for a year, before I went to The Economist. Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg—I have tremendous respect for. They treated me very well and gave me opportunities to be a manager.

But what I really admired about those two, and the general ethos of The Dispatch, was that they didn't let Trump change their policy views. Right?

There's a range of views about how—if you're a conservative—how do you treat Donald Trump, right? And how do you interact with him? I think a lot of people over the past decade have just changed their policy views and their view of the world—whether that was more to the left or more to the right—in response to Trump. And also, Trump has sort of scrambled left-right distinctions.

Totally, yeah. 

That gets more complicated. But I think Steve and Jonah—their views on policy, and the people who were working there, including me—we tried to keep them the same, regardless of what the president was saying on any given day.

So I had a great year there. I was the executive editor—so helping them—the boring stuff like workflow and editing process. I was helping them implement things like that.

But the broader project—I was very proud to be part of. And I should say, Jonah, Steve, and I—other folks who were working there, David French—we overlapped for a few months. There are times where I have disagreements with them on policy or on what exactly you'll make, but we're in the same galaxy in a helpful way.

And the person who succeeded me as executive editor, Declan Garvey—I think really highly of Declan. And I continue to read The Dispatch, and I think they're a real net positive contributor in a time when there's a lot of toxicity or unhelpful contributions to the discourse. 

The Dispatch still does a great job.

The Economist, how did you like working there? This is a publication which my colleague at Reason, Matt Welch, when he first came over to join Reason and I asked him, you know, "How do you define yourself?" He wouldn't call himself a libertarian—I think he does now—this was in the early 2000s. He called himself an Economist-style liberal, meaning a European liberal or a kind of classical liberal.

A lot of people think that The Economist has really kind of gone left over the past 20 years or so. What was your experience working there, and how does that inform what you're doing at The Washington Post?

So there's one thing I learned from The Economist…I learned a lot. I was there a little under two years, and I had no plans to leave. Then I came to this job because it was such an amazing opportunity.

But one thing I really liked about The Economist—and this is kind of a little more in the weeds, but it's something that I really took—is they do a great job. Zanny, the editor, and my boss came, John Prideaux, who I also really loved working for and respect. They do a great job of spotting talent—not just those two, but management in general.

"Oh, you're working at a think tank," or "Maybe you're an English teacher," or "You're a trader," "You work in an investment bank," and "You've got a little bit of talent for writing—we can train you up and teach you how to do journalism. But what we want is your understanding of the world and your knowledge." And there are no taboos about hiring people who didn't work in journalism and bringing them to this very prestigious publication with 182 years of history.

I think they and—yeah, it's like them and The Spectator, the British Spectator, maybe Scientific American—these are like the oldest magazines around.

Yeah. So that's just one thing now that I'm in a place where I'm thinking about: how do we build out our team? The Economist really had a great model for: Can you write well? And now I'm thinking, can you do a podcast well in addition to writing well? But what do you know about the world? What can I learn from you?

That's what I'm always thinking about when I'm seeking out talent to bring to The Post.

But The Economist, more broadly, and that as a project…The Economist has changed over the decades, right? It's still, I think, true to classical liberalism. It was founded in opposition to the Corn Laws in the 19th century. It's still very much opposed to protectionism.

But it goes up and down exactly on the details and the nuances of different economic policy. They'll endorse Democrats sometimes, sometimes they'll oppose Republicans.

But what I really also appreciated about working there was—people knew I came from The Journal and The Dispatch, which were traditionally viewed as center-right—and they valued the perspective that I had.

As a journalist, I was trying to write objectively with The Economist, with a little bit of flavor. Like when I covered the Libertarian convention for The Economist, getting those great details. It was a really fun piece.

They also had a really robust internal debate. When they'd go on editorial calls—I won't get into the details of any of them, because those are all off the record—but I could tell that the leaders there were trying to facilitate a conversation with this immense amount of expertise that was assembled at a really remarkable publication like that.

And at The Post, that's another lesson—when I'm leading the editorial board calls or meetings, sometimes I'll stake out a position that I don't really have, just to stress test it.

You know, we'll see what happens in the next two weeks, but it looks like al Qaeda might take over Mali. So I said, "You know guys, do we care if al Qaeda takes over Mali? Do the Malians want that?" And I'm pretty sure they don't. And I'm pretty sure it would be bad. But let's actually not take anything for granted.

Right. And that's also a separate question from what does that entail for America.

Exactly, exactly. And trying to bring out those conversations—And that was a skill in all the places I had sort of picked up, but The Economist really brought it into focus. And it's something that I think The Post can do very well. So we can learn from that particular publication.

You've hired a bunch of people—many of them will be known to readers of Reason, like Dominic Pino and Kate Andrews recently. You've shed people—Washington Post stalwarts left before you were announced or anything, including the editor of the section when Jeff Bezos publicly said he offered him to continue, David Shipley.

Karen Attiah, who was a columnist for The Washington Post, left not too long ago, basically saying that she got fired.

Are you firing people because they don't fit into the new framework or they don't go along with it?

I can't get into individual personnel matters, right? So I can't speak about any particular case.

I can say in general, when I look at the team that we have today, I'm very confident we're aligned. We're rowing in the same direction, and I'm quite happy. Every day I come into work, and I think we have a collegial atmosphere. We have rich debate, but also intellectual cohesion within that debate.

We hired Dominic, who I think—for my money—is the best writer on free markets under 30 in the country. We hired Kate Andrews from The Spectator in the U.K. Later this month—maybe by the time this comes out—Kareen Hattar from The Boston Globe is coming. There are more conversations.

So we're building out people who we think fit the culture that we're trying to build. Collegiality is hugely important to me as an editor.

And that, you don't mean just that they're not jerks in meetings—but also that they're interested in intellectual kind of debate and give and take to get to a better understanding of an issue.

Yeah, absolutely. I want this to be a place where people are excited about the direction—not resigned to it, but excited. And I think that's the team that we have now and the team that we're building. That's where we're at. And it makes coming into work every day an absolute joy.

There's a lot of laughter in our meetings, I'll say. Because people can have a very healthy push and pull. For more out libertarian people, it's like, "Oh, are we going to get rid of the FDA now?" You know? And it's like, not enough. You can kind of joke about that.

And it's just a great team, and it's going to be continuing to grow in the coming months.

Two quick things to finish up with. One, how old are you?

I'm 33.

Ok, so you are young. Thirty-three, it's a bad year for people. It's a tough year for people. Well, it was a good year for the country, because that's when Prohibition was repealed—1933.

Do you see a significant generational shift? I mean, I am—God, almost—I'm 29 years older than you. So, you know, I mean I know the boomers and the Xers are done. We're going to be around forever, but the sun is setting on our careers.

How does generational change fit into what you see happening in politics and culture in America?

It's an interesting question. I'll say first—you know, I suspect in the coming months, we'll be hiring some Gen Xers, and maybe a boomer or two, or maybe seven, right? Age is not something I think about when hiring. It's more about background, journalistic ability—that sort of thing.

But certainly, the millennials now are kind of coming into positions, of management positions. And it's interesting to see friends around my age now in Senate-confirmed positions—friends and acquaintances. 

I think it's a healthy thing.

If you look at the past 5 years, clearly there's an issue—particularly with elected officials—of hanging on too long. And I have a lot of admiration for the knowledge and expertise that people can bring with experience. Everybody ages differently. But also, I think that you get fresh perspectives.

And it's not just, "Oh, you need to get someone who's younger," right? But it's, what particularly about that experience do they bring in? And it's beyond age—it's regional, it's previous occupation, it's education or lack thereof that brings it in.

But I wouldn't say—it would be very shortsighted to just say, "Great, we're never going to hire someone over 30." Obviously, that wouldn't be the case. Because really, I want that mixture of ages and generational experience.

You want someone whose first formative experience was 9/11, and someone whose first formative experience was COVID. And another person's was the downfall of the Berlin Wall. Because they're going to think about government, about foreign policy, about the world in general in a very different way.

And I'm not sure that any generation has the right answer. So to the extent that we can bring those conversations together, I get very excited.

I mean, it's kind of amazing—George Will is like the Benjamin Button of journalists. He is getting younger and sprier in his mind, I think. When he was 33, he was talking about how blue jeans were a curse upon the land, and now he's pretty out there. It's wonderful to see that happening.

And then people like Elizabeth Warren—I don't think she was ever young. So yeah, age comes and goes in different ways.

Final thing. You mentioned it just in passing—The Washington Post chose not to endorse anybody in the 2024 election. And that was kind of seen, or it was widely read as, you know, that Jeff Bezos didn't want to piss off Donald Trump. I don't know that that entered into it at all.

I mean, it's fascinating—many newspapers have stopped endorsing candidates. Does anybody actually vote because the editorial board of the Huntsville Item, or the Car Recycler, or The Washington Post says to? No. But do you think you'll ever go back to that? And if not, make the positive case for why it's better that we live in a world where newspapers don't pretend to tell you who to vote for.

I can't predict the future, but I would be genuinely shocked if we ever made an endorsement again. Endorsements are a bizarre tradition, and I think a bit of an anachronism.

They made sense when you had partisan papers, right? Literal, explicit partisan papers.

Yeah, papers called The Democrat or The Republican.

The New Democrat, or what. But when you have papers like that, ok, maybe I can understand—especially if it's a party primary…

Then you don't even need to do the editorial, right? Like we know—if it's The Waterbury Republican, yeah, vote for the Republican.

Right. And so I think they were sort of an anachronism to begin with. That decision was made before I came here, but I would say, from my perch, when I was at The Economist and I saw that news, I said, "Well, that's smart."

So I don't have any interest in formally aligning a newspaper with a particular party or a politician. I think it's a fool's errand to hope that one politician will fulfill all of your wishes and everything will work out perfectly—and to line up with them.

Except for Gary Johnson in 2016. That was our one opportunity, and we'll never see it again.

You're more of a 2016 Johnson guy than a 2012. I'm a bit of a Gary Johnson hipster. You know, when I was in college, I interviewed him in 2012. And I had a voicemail on my phone—at the college radio station, the call didn't go through. And he's like, "Oh hey Adam, it's Gary Johnson." And I lost that voicemail. But it was like when I was 19, I was very proud of that.

Oh, that's a very good party trick, yeah.

Do you think you'll ever get rid of house editorials? Why not take it a step further? Because don't we want to know—it's a forceful editorial saying, "Hey, you know what? Today, we don't need the government telling YouTube TV that they have to cover Monday Night Football." Why not have the person who principally wrote that be responsible for it?

I'm a bit biased here because I spent most of my career without a byline. But I came to—whether it was at The Economist or…there's not a byline, and that's another fun party trick: being on a flight, and someone's reading it, and you're not going to believe who wrote that article."

But I do think that there's something to be said for the power that an institutional voice can have—not to endorse a politician, which I think is a foolish idea—but to…

You could put a byline in, I guess, but they're the product of a long conversation. A lot of eyes touch an editorial before it goes out. And it really is a group project—but unlike in college, everyone's actually contributing. Now, maybe one person writes the draft and has a heavier lift, but I do think there's something to be said for that.

We're still—it's a work in progress—and we're going to develop a distinct voice. And it's getting there. I can already kind of feel our voice coming together. But it'll be built up as we hire more interesting people.

I'm hoping a year from now, you'll read an editorial without even looking at the byline or seeing that it's labeled an editorial. You'll say, "Oh, this is a Post editorial." And if whoever wrote it also has a column, you'll be able to tell there's a real distinct style between when she writes a column and when she's writing the editorial.

I will admit that I used ChatGPT to help prepare for this. I'm a big fan of AI. ChatGPT has a lot to say about you, which should make you feel either worried or good—but it's always nice to be noticed.

One of the things it said was—it characterized your work, and I don't know the black box that goes on there—but it said that you were an institutionalist. And in our conversation, that seems to fit kind of right.

I'm not saying that you are talking about being a slave—you are not trying to just maintain whatever was because that's the way it is—but it seems like you have an interest not simply in, "OK, on this one issue, I'll just do this." It seems you keep coming back to certain kind of basic ideas, certain institutions, certain formulas or principles that are supposed to stay relatively constant.

Do you think that's a fair kind of description of how you think, and the editorial kind of acumen that you'll bring to The Washington Post opinion section?

Yeah, I think—I mean, great job, ChatGPT, saying nice things about me. Because I was worried a little bit before. It actually said, "You're more of a Mussolini type."

Might not have agreed with….

So I read a lot of institutional history of The Post before I came here. And you find out things like, you know, in the 19th century, The Post editorial board endorsed annexing Canada. Endorsements were really not something that The Post always did—that's relatively new. That started happening, I think, in the '70s.

Yeah, which is amazing that more people didn't take note of that. And the publisher's note about why they weren't endorsing somebody—he kind of mentioned in passing like, "Yeah, we only started doing this, I think in '76 or something." And it's like, yeah, why not get rid of it?

Sorry, I only bring up that history just to say—I do think that The Post is a valuable institution. I respect its history. And a big part of that history—like the United States more broadly—is reinvention, trying new things, challenging them, and also evolving with the time.

And in 50 years, will there be unsigned editorials? Maybe not. Maybe they'll just be unsigned TikToks, right? Or unsigned Instagrams, or whatever the social media technology is that doesn't exist yet. Maybe we'll be writing in that form.

It's something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I'm a writer—that's how I came up. But part of it's multimedia. Where do we reach people who prefer to watch videos, right?

And now there's the philosophical change, there's the actual product change—but you have to stay true to the North Star, which is good journalism, context and understanding, bringing people new information, making it reliable, knowing what they're getting.

I think those are things that have been true about The Post. That's something they've aspired to throughout its history. And that's something I think it's important we stay true to.

As part of that, yes, we'll continue to evolve, and yes, we'll change, like we always have. But it's a big job, and I take it very seriously. I want The Post to succeed, and I want it to last.

I mean, it's coming up on 150 years. And I'd like it to last well into the future beyond that. So in that sense, I'm certainly an institutionalist. But not one who thinks that you should just kind of rest on your laurels or the past glory or past history. 

You respect it, but you think about how you change for the future.

All right. Thank you. That's a great note to end on.

Adam O'Neal, the head of The Washington Post opinion section, which is going to be writing every day in support of personal liberties and free markets. Thanks so much for talking to Reason.

Hey, thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed it.

• Producer: Paul Alexander
• Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

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