Safety--Or Freedom? | Today at 5pm EST

If you go to the airport, of course all of us now are so acclimated to it, it seems normal. But the idea that everybody just so dutifully takes off their shoes and takes off their belt—it's a kind of petty authoritarianism. No one's being imprisoned for it; no one's being shot. But what it is, is it's almost more insidious because of that.

Because exactly as you say, it started conditioning people that in the name of safety, we need to unquestioningly obey authority. Kind of submit to whatever humiliations, whatever orders we're told to do. And to watch the American conservative movement that was so steadfast in their opposition to the idea of federal government power in the 1990s, immediately turn around and start meekly taking off their shoes at airports and doing everything that they were told, and going through these machines in the name of safety, I think was quite transformative.

I do think it started training Americans to accept the kinds of infringements on their autonomy in the name of safety that even just a couple of years earlier would have been unthinkable.