D.C.’s Rising Libertarian Star?

 The Washington Post is profiling Jane Coaston as a "rising libertarian star."

In a profile titled, "D.C.’s rising libertarian star, with her ‘healthy skepticism of state power,’ secures an influential podcast," the Post explains:

Coaston’s own individuality should be unmistakable, particularly among her left-leaning media peers in heavily Democratic D.C. The former political reporter for Vox and MTV is a registered Libertarian who got her start in right-leaning college media and professes “a healthy skepticism of state power.” She also happens to be a happily married queer person, a former speechwriter for the Human Rights Campaign, a churchgoing Christian and a fitness buff who works out roughly twice a day. In November, she joined the New York Times, where she hosts the paper’s relaunched opinion podcast “The Argument.”

In her new role, Coaston says she aims to “add a lot of external viewpoints that maybe haven’t been as well represented on the show, because it has been very much about the left, right and center perspectives that are featured at the Times largely.”

You have to be suspicious of anyone the Bezos rag and The New York Times are promoting as a libertarian rising star so we will have to see. Gazing through her Twitter feed, there does not seem to be a lot that is distinctly libertarian.

Though, in a retweet, Coaston does take a nasty swipe at Naomi Wolf, who has been heroic in her battle against COVID vaccine passports. She posted a link to an old hit piece on a past Wolf book. Quite the thing for a "libertarian" to do when Wolf is one of the few from the left who has the courage to stand up to the "Passport, please!" brigade.

She just doesn't seem to take libertarian angles from what I can tell. In a long essay on Colin  Kaepernick, it is difficult to understand her point. She wrote in her article:

The idea that sports should be a "safe space," so to speak, is a popular one. Millions of Americans believe that sports can remain, or perhaps become for the first time, a venue free of politics. Sports has never been apolitical, to be sure, and yet we believe that it could be, and moreover that it should be. Sports is where we find joy, sports is where we find hope, sports is where we find something beyond and above ourselves, and can do so together with people with whom we have virtually nothing in common.

But for Kaepernick, the football field was, and is, his own safe space...

The questions that Colin Kaepernick raised in his protest were too big, or too scary, for us to answer. Questions about whose lives actually do matter. Questions about what a sport primarily played by black men has to say about the lives of black men. Questions some of us believe have no place in sports.

And so Colin Kaepernick remains in limbo. Ten years after winning the starting job in college, one year after sitting during the national anthem, Colin Kaepernick is still looking for work in the NFL. All because he asked America a question, and we simply had no good answer.

I have just read about a half dozen other articles she has written and nothing in them provides any sense of any libertarian streak. At best, she seems to be ambiguously anti-woke but that is a generous interpretation of her writing.

But, hey, at least she is not a straight, white male.

Let's see what kind of topics and arguments she brings to "The Argument."

If it doesn't work, she can always go into United Airlines pilot training.

I would like to see her do an episode on the cultural meaning of that.

  -RW