This week on The Score – Was the Apollo 11 moon landing a hoax? How can we apply market-based solutions to urban problems? Who is the newest candidate for the Virginia General Assembly and who is he running against?
http://bearingdrift.com/wp-content/uploads/TheScore-July27-FullHour.mp3 [1]Market Urbanism
This week we return to the topic of last week’s special commemorative episode, the Apollo moon landings, but that will come later in the program.
First, we talk to Scott Beyer, a journalist and founder of the Market Urbanism Report [2]. A resident of Charlottesville, as Scott explains in our conversation, in the fall of 2015, he began a three-year cross-country trip, during which he lived in 30 cities for a month each. He observed how each city addressed issues like traffic, transportation, housing, and homelessness. His articles and commentaries have appeared in The Atlantic, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, City Journal, and Reason magazine. An article he wrote for Governing titled “In Defense of Foreign Investment in U.S. Housing [3]” had caught my eye and led to this interview.
I met him on Charlottesville’s downtown mall (near the free speech memorial wall) and asked him about the nation’s housing shortage, homelessness, and other topics.
You can follow Market Urbanism Report and Scott Beyer on Twitter at @sbcrosscountry [4].
Elliott Harding Throws His Hat In
Virginia’s elections heated up just a bit more this past week when the newest candidate for the State Senate stepped forward [5]. Charlottesville attorney Elliott Harding, who has previously been a guest on The Score to talk about policy issues [6], the Second Amendment [7], and the Supreme Court [8], is running for the seat currently held by Creigh Deeds in a district that stretches west from Charlottesville to the West Virginia border.
While I am certain we will have an opportunity to talk with Harding’s 25th Senate District opponent on The Score between now and November, I dug out a couple of previous interviews with state Senator Creigh Deeds when he was running for his third term in 2011. The first segment, recorded over the Fourth of July weekend, focuses on the question of redistricting. The second segment was recorded just before a candidate debate in October 2011; in that interview, he characterized libertarians [9] as “Republicans with guts.” (Deeds previously appeared on The Score in April [10] and December [11] 2018.
Elliott Harding is on Twitter as @Harding4VA [12].
Moon Landing Hoax?
Every Monday I participate in a round table panel discussion about the week’s news on WPVC-FM in Charlottesville [13]. One of my fellow panelists is Stefan Friedman, who serves as the show’s science correspondent.
He is also an entrepreneur and owner of a popular restaurant called the Draft Tap Room on Charlottesville’s downtown mall, where guests can serve themselves any of dozens of different ales, beers, and ciders. (Try the pork sausage sandwich as an alternative to the hot dog.) That’s where we met to talk about the bizarre theory that the Apollo moon landings were an elaborate hoax.
While we’re on the topic of conspiracy theories, a few years ago I spoke to author Jesse Walker about his book, The United States of Paranoia [14], which explores the history of conspiracy theories. We met at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2013. Among the topics were Obama birtherism, 9/11 trutherism, and the prevalence of anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism among conspiracy theories.
Harding on Double Jeopardy
Earlier in the program, I talked to freshly minted state senate candidate Elliott Harding about his campaign. Last September, he and I spoke about a case before the United States Supreme Court which involved the question of dual sovereignties and double jeopardy.
Harding had written a friend of the court brief arguing that it was time to abandon the dual sovereignty doctrine in order to protect Americans from double jeopardy. You can hear the whole interview on The Score’s episode from September 22 [8], 2018.