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We couldn't find any negative review of physicist Steven Koonin's 'Unsettled' that disputed its claims directly or even described them accurately. https://reason.com/video/2023/02/13/the-shameless-attack-on-a-climate-change-dissenter/ ---------------------- In 2021, the physicist and NYU Professor Steven E. Koonin, who served as Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration's Energy Department, published the bestselling 'Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.' The book attracted extremely negative reviews filled with ad hominem attacks, such as a short statement appearing in Scientific American signed by 12 academics, that instead of substantively rebutting Koonin's arguments, calls him "a crank who's only taken seriously by far-right disinformation peddlers hungry for anything they can use to score political points" and "just another denier trying to sell a book." When dissenting scientists are implicitly compared to Holocaust deniers, or their ideas are considered too dangerous to be carefully considered, it undermines public respect for the field and can lead to catastrophic policy mistakes. It's human nature to favor evidence that confirms our biases and leads to simple conclusions. But for science to advance it's essential that moral certainty not override objective discussion, and that personal attacks not replace rational consideration of empirical evidence. In a review of 'Unsettled' in Scientific American, Gary Yohe, an emeritus professor at Wesleyan University, gives the impression that he didn't read past the first few pages. The book has nine chapters filled with examples of exaggerations and outright falsehoods in both scientific and popular accounts. Yohe mentions just four claims taken from the first two pages, plus one from a chapter subtitle, and manages to refute none of them. Yohee attacks Koonin's assertion that "[h]eat waves in the U.S. are now no more common than they were in 1900," claiming that "[t]his is a questionable statement depending on the definition of 'heat wave,' and so it is really uninformative. Heat waves are poor indicators of heat stress." "If Yohe had read the book carefully, he would have found the official heat wave index used and why it matters. He offers no evidence that "heat stress"—something even less well-defined and hence less informative than "heat wave"—is greater than in 1900. Koonin has been attacked by others for not being a climate scientist by trade. In most dogmatic religions, only the anointed are granted the authority to speak. But science is supposed to be a discipline that's open to anyone who can interpret relevant material. After Koonin wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "Greenland's Melting Ice Is No Cause for Climate-Change Panic" in February 2022, an organization called Climate Feedback, which calls itself "a worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in climate change media coverage," published a response. It labeled Koonin's article: "Cherry-picking, Flawed reasoning, Lack of context, Misleading." While Greenland is losing ice, the main driver cannot be anthropogenic climate change because there is no steady increase in line with either human CO2 emissions or atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Carbon dioxide emissions and warming may be important but other factors were clearly more important in the past. How is it "cherry-picking" to show all the data? The graph published in the op-ed clearly shows the data since 1900 and addresses all of it. Ironically, the Climate Feedback review is guilty of cherry-picking. It claims to rebut Koonin by stating that a 2015 article in Nature "found that ice loss between 2003 and 2010 'not only more than doubled relative to the 1983–2003 period, but also relative to the net mass loss rate throughout the twentieth century'." In other words, Climate Feedback picked the fastest eight-year increase over the 121 years span shown on the chart and compared it to the lowest 21 years. That's the definition of cherry-picking. Why does it matter that Koonin's critics don't want to bother responding to his arguments? Substantive debate is how science advances. If climate science is just an echo chamber, we may make perverse short-term overreactions to the data that have large costs and possibly even negative environmental effects. Many historical policy disasters have been caused by people claiming they shouldn't have to engage with informed critics. 'Unsettled' is about more than just climate policy—it seeks to free science from the shackles of organized dogma, the sole domain of an anointed elite, who feel justified calling their critics "cranks," "deniers," and "disinformation peddlers." Why engage with a heretic when he can be banished from the church altogether? Edited by John Osterhoudt; camera by Luis Gutierrez; art by Nathalie Walker; additional editing by Danielle Thompson.

Joey Mucha wanted to convert his warehouse into a restaurant, bar, and arcade. Then community activists intervened. ------------------ Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/ReasonTV?sub_confirmation=1 Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts: https://goo.gl/az3a7a Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won't get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines. ---------------- Joey Mucha is a three-time Skee-Ball national champion and the owner of Joey the Cat, an arcade rental, repair, and events company that he started in 2010 from his one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. After winning some prize money, Mucha was able to purchase his own fleet of Skee-Ball machines and other arcade games. In 2014, he purchased a former car repair shop and turned it a private event space and a place for fixing broken arcade games. In April of 2019, he decided to convert his space into a restaurant, bar, and arcade. His property was already zoned for this use, but despite following all applicable codes and regulations, Mucha still had to argue his case at a public Planning Commission hearing in November. His project was jeopardized by a process known as discretionary review, in which any member of the public, in exchange for a $600 fee, can ask San Francisco's Planning Commission to hold a hearing to review building permits. So far in 2019, the commission has publicly heard 91 requests for discretionary review. Since every building permit in the city is subject to this process, it can add significantly to the construction costs. "Commissioners are empowered to reject most any permit, regardless of whether it satisfies the underlying zoning code," wrote Reason's Christian Britschgi in a piece about Mucha's fight. While Mucha did end up getting permission to move forward with his renovations, the story of how the project was nearly stopped, and what Mucha endured in order to prevail, underscores how even the most benign land-use changes in San Francisco can be hampered by red tape. Produced by John Osterhoudt. Additional camera by James Marsh and Zach Weissmueller. Music Credit: Sadstorm by MADGOHAPPY Fiona Ma Photo Credit: Randy Pench/ZUMA Press/Newscom

"Direct primary care is about as close to a free market in healthcare as you've ever seen in our country," says Dr. Lee Gross. ------------------ Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/ReasonTV?sub_​... Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magaz​... Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason​ Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won't get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines. ---------------- Full Text and Links: https://reason.com/video/2021/03/03/These-Doctors-Exemplify-the-Virtues-of-Free-Market-Medicine The patients of doctors William Crouch and Lee Gross know exactly what services will cost before they receive them—a radical concept only in health care. They don't have to deal with benefit packages, coverage denials, hidden costs, in network vs. out of network, or any surprises whatsoever. Instead, their patients buy the medical equivalent of a Netflix subscription. At $75 per month for adults, "We make it cheaper than a cell phone," says Dr. Gross. "If you can afford a cell phone, you can afford the most basic aspect of healthcare delivery in the United States." Doctors Crouch and Gross are pioneers in a growing national movement called direct primary care. Tired of dealing with insurance companies when it comes to routine medical services, physicians around the country have exited the traditional system and are saying they can provide better care at a lower price by charging their patients a nominal monthly fee directly. They're demonstrating that making American healthcare flexible and affordable requires abandoning the use of third-party insurance for routine care and adopting a market-based approach. "Direct primary care is about as close to a free market in healthcare as you've ever seen in our country," says Dr. Gross, who also serves on the Florida Medical Association's Council on Medical Economics and Practice Innovation. "We have never tried a true marketplace in healthcare. We have competition, but we have competition in a price fixed system with very opaque prices." When Crouch and Gross converted to direct primary care in 2010, they estimate that there were fewer than a dozen practices using this model. Today there are approximately 1,400 independent Direct Primary Care practices in 49 states. Virtually all of them charge a subscription fee that's between $50 and $100 monthly to consult with the doctor at any time in-person or from home. Not only does this model result in lower prices, but the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that direct primary care is more flexible as well. According to a survey conducted in July, 78 percent of physicians had seen a decline in patient volume because of COVID-19. In March, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a temporary waiver stating that Medicare would pay the same rate for certain kinds of video telemedicine visits as in-person ones. But the types of visits it would cover changed over the course of the year and are still changing. Whether insurance companies and the government continue covering online visits after the pandemic has no bearing on Crouch and Gross. And they didn't have to wait for insurance companies and the government to OK telemedicine in the first place. "We didn't need to wait for BlueCross to convene a committee to pay for telemedicine services," Gross says. "I didn't need to wait two months or three months for Medicare to create a new billing code in order for me to provide technology visits for a patient…Instantly from in-person practice, we were an online practice. We were a parking lot practice. We were a house call practice. We did whatever we had to do in order to get the patient the proper care at the proper time." Gross adds that "for what Medicare pays for a single technology visit, I provide two to three months of unlimited technology visits, unlimited office visits, unlimited home visits, unlimited email visits. And so now the model is, again, pandemic tested. It's proven that it's actually a superior model because we have the built-in flexibility to do what we need at the time we need it." Thirty-two states and D.C. have passed laws requiring insurance companies to reimburse doctors at the same rate for telemedicine visits as they do for comparable in-person visits. Dr. Gross says that shouldn't be decided by lobbyists, lawmakers, or government administrators. Prices should be set through market competition. "The myth is that profit by its mere definition does not belong in the American healthcare system. And it's evil and creates perverse incentives…The key to making that profit work is, again, the elimination of that third party in the middle of that profit, which just drives up costs, but adds no value." Produced by John Osterhoudt. Production support from Regan Taylor and Ian Keyser.

Conservative state legislators are taking a page from the playbook of pro-immigration activists and the marijuana legalization movement. Full text and links: https://reason.com/video/2021/04/14/More-Than-A-Dozen-States-Are-Trying-To-Nullify-Federal-Gun-Control/ ------------------ Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/ReasonTV?sub_​​​​... Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magaz​​​​... Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason​​​​ Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won't get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines. ---------------- With President Joe Biden issuing a flurry of executive actions last week to strengthen federal gun laws, state representatives across the country are working in the opposite direction, taking a page from the playbook of immigration activists by advancing legislation that would make their enforcement illegal. On April 6, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed the first gun control nullification bill into law. "Nullifying unconstitutional, federal laws is both legal and it's also the right thing to do," says Anthony Sabatini, a Republican lawmaker and member of the Florida House of Representatives. "It's silly to sit around and wait for something you know is unconstitutional," he tells Reason. "It's time to stand up and fight back. And the methods that we need to use are the ones already being used by the left." In 1987, Oregon passed a law prohibiting state and local law enforcement from using public resources to arrest or detain people whose only crime was being in the country illegally. Since then, hundreds of other jurisdictions have passed similar laws, becoming so-called sanctuary cities. Conservative activists are employing the same strategy. While Arizona is the only state where such a bill has become law, elected officials have introduced similar bills in more than a dozen statehouses. "We know this stuff has been working and the right can continue to complain about the things that the left is successful at, or they can look at it, learn from it, and replicate it," Michael Boldin, the founder and executive director of the Tenth Amendment Center, tells Reason. Sabatini is cosponsoring a bill in Florida called the "Second Amendment Preservation Act" that would prohibit any employee of the state of Florida from enforcing, or attempting to enforce "any federal act, law, executive order, administrative order, court order, rule, regulation, statute, or ordinance infringing on the right to keep and bear arms ensured by the Second Amendment." Defying federal law is something that a majority of states already do in one way or another, by becoming immigration sanctuaries or through the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs that federal law still deems illegal. "In terms of the method it's identical," says Sabatini. In sanctuary cities, "they stopped reporting to or dealing with I.C.E., and that's basically what we're doing." Boldin says that for the nullification movement to succeed against gun control laws and beyond, more Americans will have to recognize that the most effective way to oppose federal policies that violate their rights is at the local level. "The whole idea of federalism is so important because it's the only way you can have a country with a few hundred million people living together with a wide range of social, economic, political viewpoints together in peace. What's right for people in California is probably not right for people in South Carolina and vice versa. And when we see things that come down from a one-size-fits-all centralized solution, I don't think anyone really ever gets what they want." Because 36 states have nullified federal marijuana prohibition, Boldin argues, there's mounting pressure for the federal government to follow suit. "I think we can replicate that on other issues and learn that localism is really the way forward for liberty." Produced by John Osterhoudt, additional camera by Zach Weissmueller, color correction by Regan Taylor, additional graphics by Isaac Reese Photos: Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; Nicole Neri/Reuters/Newscom; The Mises Institute; Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom.

How did the Castro regime's propaganda machine manage to fool so many for so long? reason.com/video/2022-04-18/The-Myth-of-Cuban-Health-Care ---------------- "If there's one thing they do right in Cuba, it's health care," said Michael Moore in a 2007 interview. "Cuba has the best health care system in the entire area," according to Angela Davis, "and in many respects much better than the U.S." "One thing that's well established in the global health community is the strength of the Cuban national health system," said Clare Wenham, a professor at the London School of Economics. Claims like these have appeared in hundreds of documentaries, newspaper articles, and magazine features over the years celebrating the supposed marvel of Cuba's health care system. It's a testament to the effectiveness of the Castro regime's propaganda apparatus that this myth, so deeply at odds with reality, has persisted for so long. "The Cuban health care system is destroyed," Rotceh Rios Molina, a Cuban doctor who escaped the country's medical mission while stationed in Mexico, tells Reason in Spanish. "The doctor's offices are in very bad shape." "People are dying in the hallways," says José Angel Sánchez, another Cuban doctor who defected from the medical mission in Venezuela, tells Reason in Spanish. According to Rios, Sánchez, and others with firsthand experience practicing medicine in Cuba, the island nation's health care system is a catastrophe. It's exactly what you'd expect in a country impoverished by communism. In the 15 years since the release of Michael Moore's 'Sicko,' which celebrated Cuban health care, everyday citizens have been armed with smartphones and social media, empowering them to tell the truth about what it's really like in Cuban hospitals. So how did the Castro regime's propaganda machine manage to fool so many for so long? According to Maria Werlau, executive director of the Cuba Archive, the answer lies with Cuba's foreign medical missions, which are teams of health care professionals dispatched to provide emergency and routine care to foreign countries. Rios participated in the medical mission in Sierra Leone in 2013, where health care specialists from around the world came to help contain the Ebola epidemic. The members of the mission were told that when they returned to Cuba, they would be received as heroes. Rios says that, while he did receive a stipend that went to cover his living expenses, medical personnel from other countries were generously compensated. In a 2020 report, Human Rights Watch said the Cuban medical missions "violate [doctors'] fundamental rights," including "the right to privacy, freedom of expression and association, liberty, and movement, among others." It noted that "many doctors feel pressured to participate in the missions and fear retaliation if they do not..." After the mission in Sierra Leone, Rios was redeployed to a military base in Mexico. One day, he was sent with a group of doctors to buy some phone cards so they could connect with their relatives back home. He decided to make his escape. Rios found a job at a Mexican pharmacy and started saving money to pay a coyote to bring him into the U.S. He was picked up by border officials, and taken to an immigrant detention center for 42 days. After his release, he could join his family in Miami. The medical missions are primarily a way of selling Cuban health care services abroad. So what's health care like for those living on the island? Julio Cesar Alfonso is the president of the Miami-based Solidarity Without Borders, which helps Cuban doctors who have escaped. He says that there are two health care systems in Cuba—one that is used by the majority of regular citizens, and another that is reserved for tourists and the Cuban elite. Sánchez thinks that, as the Castros' health care myth crumbles, ordinary Cubans are beginning to realize that they are not threatened by foreign enemies, as the regime propaganda machine has claimed for decades. "The only enemy of the Cuban people," he says, "is the Cuban government." Written and hosted by Daniel Raisbeck and Jim Epstein; narrated by Daniel Raisbeck; edited by John Osterhoudt; camera by Epstein, Osterhoudt, Isaac Reese, and Meredith Bragg; graphic design by Nathalie Walker; animations by Reese and Osterhoudt; additional editing support by Regan Taylor; ; additional research by Alexandra De Caires; translation assistance by María Jose Inojosa Salina; English subtitles by Caitlin Peters.

Ignore the hype: Latin American immigration is (still) the city’s greatest strength. ------------------ Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/ReasonTV Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magaz... Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won't get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines. ---------------- When the venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov suggested on Twitter last December that the tech industry should migrate from Silicon Valley to Miami, Mayor Francis Suarez (R) responded, "How can I help?" He also set up a billboard in San Francisco. "Thinking of moving to Miami?," it read. "DM me." Suarez's bold, roll-out-the-red-carpet approach to luring away Silicon Valley's tech elite has gotten so much attention, in part, because of how it contrasts with that of California's ultra-left political class. Take San Diego Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D), who's best known for her failed effort to stop Uber and Lyft from using contract labor in California to benefit labor unions. Gonzalez tweeted "Fuck Elon Musk" back in May of 2020. "Message Received," replied Musk. In Miami, on the other hand, Mayor Suarez has embraced Musk's idea of building a $30 million tunnel for electric vehicles to ease congestion. Suarez's publicity stunts, including fashioning himself an avid bitcoin enthusiast, have no doubt contributed to the city's momentum. He wants to turn Miami into a "confluence of capital," as he told Reason. "We have the entire financial sector from New York," Suarez said. "We're going to see is a confluence of capital from New York and from Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco. That confluence of capital, we've never seen merge anywhere in the history of humanity." But billionaires buying waterfront mansions won't shape the future of Miami. Immigration will. Latin American ex-pats don't garner headlines or donate much to political campaigns, but they have grit and talent that was largely wasted in the socialist countries from which they fled—not to mention their cultural aversion to big government liberalism and the woke ideology now prevalent in the Bay Area. Miami's ascendence in the 21st Century hinges on whether it can continue to fulfill its role as the greatest city in Latin America that just happens to be located in the United States. Written and narrated by Daniel Raisbeck; shot and edited by John Osterhoudt; opening edited by Paul Detrick; graphic design by Nathalie Walker; animation by NODEHAUS, and Isaac Reese; color correction by Regan Taylor; additional audio production by Ian Keyser. Photos: Brian Solis/Wikimedia/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic; Illustration 107693289 © Realcallahan | Dreamstime.com;ID 55131105 © Vadymvdrobot | Dreamstime.com; Photo 6613609 © Rachwal | Dreamstime.com; Photo 37552835 © Asafta | Dreamstime.com; Photo 56569948 © Fotopoly | Dreamstime.com; Photo 181915347 © Coatchristophe | Dreamstime.com; Photo 91505069 © Asafta | Dreamstime.com; Photo 12385033 © Jodielee | Dreamstime.com; Photo 54358909 © Stefanocapra | Dreamstime.com;Illustration 881755 © Steven Wright | Dreamstime.com; Photo 181915347 © Coatchristophe | Dreamstime.com; Photo 134786561 © Kmiragaya | Dreamstime.com; Photo 88609881 © Viocara | Dreamstime.com; Photo 201768295 © mikechapazzo | Dreamstime.com; Photo 134786323 © Kmiragaya | Dreamstime.com; Photo 176647322 © Meunierd | Dreamstime.com; Photo 180601283 © Nednae | Dreamstime.com; Photo 54605132 © Eagleflying | Dreamstime.com; Photo 195269738 © Photovs | Dreamstime.com; Monica Herndon/ZUMA Press/Newscom 024371; Jim Tuten/ZUMA Press/Newscom 87952; Keystone Pictures USA / ZUMA Press/Newscom 232139; Tim Chapman /KRT/Newscom 169568; Lou Toman/KRT/Newscom 064539; KRT/Newscom 000688; St Petersburg Times/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom 833549; Giorgio Viera/EFE/Newscom; Aronovsky/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom

The student-produced documentary covers Ball State University’s history since it was founded in 1918 in Muncie, Indiana. Set to a faculty-composed musical score performed by the Ball State Symphony Orchestra, the film details the University’s early days as a teachers college and its evolution into a world-class institution with highly respected programs in education, architecture, business, communications, fine arts, sciences and humanities, and the health professions. Interviews include past Ball State presidents, faculty members, government leaders, and alumnus David Letterman. For more information about Ball State’s Centennial, visit www.bsu.edu/100.

Bitcoin educator and author Jimmy Song on higher education, the morality of money, and why he thinks bitcoin complements Christian theology ---------- Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/ReasonTV?sub_confirmation=1 Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won't get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines. ---------- "When you have the federal reserve, you have something that's not auditable, right? It's a monetary system that is completely opaque to everybody," says Jimmy Song, an author, podcaster, and computer programmer who runs two-day seminars all over the world training coders to work in the bitcoin industry. "With bitcoin, you have the ability to actually go audit this stuff yourself, and this is what I'm teaching to my students." Song's course, Programming Blockchain, is a 16-hour seminar consisting of lectures and hands-on exercises. He used to teach the same material as part of a semester-long course at the University of Texas at Austin. "When I was teaching that one semester, I had some pretty brilliant…grad students in electrical engineering, computer science, and business," he says. But they didn't have the same drive and motivation as his seminar students, who are paying out of pocket just to learn. The UT-Austin students "cared very much about their grades and…getting the right credential." New Zealand native Rigel Walshe took Song's seminar in Australia in 2018 when he was changing careers. An ex-cop, he got interested in bitcoin thanks to the Silk Road, the "dark web" e-commerce site that allowed users to buy drugs, or pretty much anything else, until it was shut down in 2014. Silk Road users paid for their black market goods with bitcoin, and the website was essential in bootstrapping the bitcoin network in its early years. The Silk Road "operated for over two years, right under the noses of American law enforcement agencies, and there wasn't anything they could do about it," Walshe says. "I just don't think most people really comprehended just how big of a deal that was." Today Walshe works as a software developer at the online exchange Swan Bitcoin, which he describes as a "dream job." In addition to teaching and writing, Song contributes to "Bitcoin Core," an open-source project for researching, testing, and upgrading the software that people all over the world use to connect to this decentralized monetary network. Anyone can participate in the process of submitting and reviewing new code, no matter who they are, where they live, or what degrees they hold. Since bitcoin is open-source software, the rules governing how it functions are also fully transparent. Walshe and Song say that this spirit of radical transparency and emphasis on demonstrated skill over credentialism are central to what they love about bitcoin. "Anyone can create anything," Walshe says. "All the code and all the information you need is there for free online, [and] anyone anywhere in the world can read that and participate." Reason sat down with Jimmy Song in October at the 2021 Oslo Freedom Forum, which brought the human rights community together with the bitcoin community for a two-day conference in Miami. We talked about his recent book, Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money, about his disdain for traditional education, and the ways he thinks bitcoin complements Christian theology. Written, shot, and produced by John Osterhoudt. Additional Graphics by Lex Villena.

Satirical articles from humor site have now been fact-checked by Snopes more than 30 times. --------- Subscribe to our YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magaz... Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts: https://goo.gl/az3a7a Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won't get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines. _____ Since its founding in 2016, Christian satire site The Babylon Bee has been regularly making fun of Christians, the left, the right, Trump, and various cultural fads. The site has steadily grown in popularity and now boasts about 10 million monthly page views. In addition to making poignant jokes, Kyle Mann, the site's editor in chief, aims to use satire as a weapon to separate truth from fiction. But less than five months after its inception, The Babylon Bee found itself being labeled as a "fake news site" by the prominent online fact-checker Snopes. Satirical articles from The Bee have now been fact-checked by Snopes more than 30 times. Some of the more outlandish fact-checks include headlines such as "Democrats Demand Kavanaugh Submit To DNA Test To Prove He's Not Actually Hitler," "Ocasio-Cortez Appears On 'The Price Is Right,' Guesses Everything Is Free," and "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication." In an effort to justify fact-checking satire, Snopes republished an article from the academic commentary and analysis site The Conversation arguing that "too many people think satirical news is real." While he's not inherently opposed to fact-checking satire, Kyle Mann says that the original study was meant to observe the effects of satire in general, but when tweeting out their link of the study, Snopes specifically targeted The Babylon Bee. What's more, the study's methodology was questionable: Instead of showing participants articles as they appeared online, satirical headlines were stripped of both context and comedy. For example, the Babylon Bee headline "CNN: 'God Allowed the Mueller Report to Test Our Shakeable Faith in Collusion.'" was presented to participants as "CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper said his belief that Trump colluded with Russia is unshakable; it will not change regardless of statements or evidence to the contrary." Reason's John Osterhoudt sat down with Mann to discuss the Snopes criticism, his aspirations for the Bee, and why he believes that satire can divide what's important from what's not, revealing important truths about the world. Produced by John Osterhoudt Photo of Laptop: ID 40609660 © Michał Rojek | Dreamstime.com