Libertarianism.org is an online project associated with the Cato Institute, described in the source excerpts as a publisher of libertarian writing and the home of a podcast. It appears in three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, in each case named by a guest or by Bob Zadek rather than examined as a subject in its own right.
Paul Matzko as contributor
In the 2021-02-14 episode on the Fairness Doctrine, Bob Zadek introduces historian Paul Matzko as the author of The Radio Right, described as a history of how a band of broadcasters took on the federal government and built the modern conservative movement. In the same introduction, Zadek identifies Matzko as a contributor to Libertarianism.org, which he describes as sponsored by Cato. Zadek also notes Matzko’s graduate training at Penn State and his PhD in history, and calls him a passionate student of recent American history The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021).
The episode’s framing is Zadek’s own: he opens by announcing the morning’s theme as “Beware of Fair,” arguing that “fair” is a word by which those holding political power hide, and that dressing a law up in fairness lets politicians sneak it past an unwitting public. He ties the discussion to recent news about censorship and Section 230, and to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, before turning to Matzko’s book. The excerpt of the episode ends as Zadek is about to hand the conversation to his guest, so the excerpts record the introduction and the site’s sponsorship relationship but not the substance of Matzko’s own remarks.
Trevor Burrus and Free Thoughts
The 2021-03-30 episode on rent control closes with Bob Zadek asking guest Trevor Burrus how listeners can follow his work at Cato and about the blog Burrus writes. Burrus directs listeners to cato.org and describes a weekly podcast he co-hosts called Free Thoughts, which he says comes from the Cato project libertarianism.org and covers libertarian history, philosophy and theory. Burrus states that the podcast has about 400 episodes and has been running for about eight years, and that it can be found at libertarianism.org or on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher Escaping the Statrix: Trevor Burrus’s Rent Control Red Pill (2021).
Asked by Zadek for information on Cato itself, Burrus describes it as a think tank in Washington, D.C., whose website covers public policy questions from trade to foreign policy to law and criminal justice, and which he characterizes as a one-stop shop for solutions focused on limited government, free markets and individual liberty. The exchange is the most detailed description of Libertarianism.org’s output anywhere in the excerpts, and it comes from Burrus rather than from Zadek.
Clark Neily and Visions of Liberty
In the 2022-07-04 judicial round-up, Zadek welcomes Clark Neily back to the show, identifying him as Vice President for Criminal Justice at Cato and a scholar of constitutional law, over-criminalization, civil forfeiture, police accountability and gun rights. In the course of that introduction Zadek notes that Neily contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty Judicial Round-Up with Clark Neily (2022).
The same introduction credits Neily, together with his colleague Jay Schweikert, with a piece published in the course of their work at Cato, aimed at both libertarians and non-libertarians, analyzing the constitutional law governing abortion before and after Dobbs. Zadek calls it better than anything else he has read on that analysis. The excerpt does not state where that piece appeared, and the Visions of Liberty contribution is mentioned only as a credential.
Across episodes
The topic is touched in three episodes — 2021-02-14, 2021-03-30 and 2022-07-04 — and the excerpts show no development between them: in each case Libertarianism.org is named only in passing, as the sponsor of a contributor, as the home of a podcast, or as the publisher of a volume to which a guest contributed. No guest discusses the site’s editorial positions, its founding, or its relationship to Cato beyond the sponsorship and project descriptions given above, and the later episodes do not revisit or revise what the earlier ones say.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when Libertarianism.org was founded, who runs it, or what its relationship to the Cato Institute is beyond Zadek’s description of Cato as its sponsor and Burrus’s description of it as a Cato project. They do not describe the site’s editorial scope, its funding, or any of its published work other than Visions of Liberty and the Free Thoughts podcast. Nothing in the excerpts indicates how the site is received, by whom it is read, or what its contributors argue in its pages. The 2022-07-08 episode repeats the same introduction material as the 2022-07-04 episode, including the reference to Neily’s Visions of Liberty chapter, but its excerpt breaks off before any further discussion Dobbs, the Democratization of Rights, and the Disaster of Qualified Immunity (2022).