Brian Doherty, a longtime Reason senior editor and the leading historian of the libertarian movement, was found dead Friday morning after a fall the night before in Battery Yates park along the San Francisco Bay. He was 57.

Doherty, who began working at Reason in 1994, was the author of six books, most notably the definitive 2007 study, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg called Radicals an "extraordinary accomplishment"; libertarian economist Bryan Caplan dubbed it a "remarkable labor of love."

Doherty's other book-length treatments of libertarian phenomena included Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle Over the Second Amendment (2008), Ron Paul's rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired (2012), and Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States (2025).

"Brian was the historian of the libertarian movement," says Reason Foundation President David Nott. "He lovingly and comprehensively portrayed the colorful characters in the libertarian world."

Born in Brooklyn and raised mostly in Florida, Doherty first caught the libertarian bug at age 12 by gobbling up the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

"One of the specific purposes of that work, according to Wilson, was to do to the state what Voltaire did to the church—that is, reduce it to an object of contempt for all thoughtful people," he recalled in 2018. "I wound up mail ordering a copy of the Principia Discordia, the founding religious document of the Discordian Church discussed in Illuminatus! I tracked down this volume in the rich, fascinating, and frightening catalog of the bookseller Loompanics. Afterward I delved deeper into its offerings of forbidden or hated ideas, eventually ordering a copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. That book's version of economics matched the ethical conclusion that felt undeniable to me after reading Illuminatus!: that shaping the human social order primarily by granting one set of people working under an institutional cover the poorly restricted right to rob, assault, and kill others at their will seemed like a bad idea."

Hazlitt led to Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and above all Murray Rothbard, the latter of whom, fittingly, was the subject of Doherty's last piece published before his death, "100 Years of Murray Rothbard."

While majoring in journalism at the University of Florida, Doherty "met some congenial and hilarious people manning a booth for the…College Libertarians in the autumn of 1987," and was off to the races, mixing intense philosophical curiosity with an equally deep interest and participation in the more animal spirits of DIY music and expressive freedom.

Relocating to Los Angeles in the mid-'90s, he fell in with "a gang of arty pranksters you've likely never heard of" called the Cacophony Society, who "inspired or created phenomenon ranging from the novel/movie Fight Club to urban exploration, billboard alteration, the Yes Men, flash mobs, and 'Santa Rampages.'"

Cacophony's most lasting stunt was the one that evolved into the annual temporary art festival in Nevada called Burning Man. "I thought my deskbound, magazine-reporter, bedroom record label–running self would be destroyed by the pitiless desert," Doherty would later recall. "So I didn't go in '94. By 1995, I had heard so much about Black Rock City's functional anarchy that I had to go—anarchy being one of my primary intellectual interests."

Those words can be found in the prologue of Doherty's first book, 2004's This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground, which grew out of a 2000 Reason cover story. He never stopped going to Burning Man, nor participating wholeheartedly in obscure art/music happenings that some of his bemused work colleagues would find almost as inscrutable as some of his counterculture pals viewed libertarianism.

"Brian's contributions to the art scenes in L.A. and San Francisco were monumental," says his best friend, the showman/experience designer Chicken John Renaldi. "His passing leaves so many people and so many systems impoverished."

Doherty's knowledge of pop culture, rock music, and comic books was encyclopedic, as evidenced not just by his heroically cluttered workspaces but by his 2022 book, Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix.

"Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility. Brian embodied both," Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward recalls. "His weird, colorful life—filled with comics and festivals and music and books—was a model of life lived freely and openly. And in his thinking, reporting, and editing, he was one of the most conscientious and responsible people I have ever met. A libertarian hero in every sense."

Spelunking in subcultures both libertarian and whimsical led to a lot of early discoveries that the normies only sussed out later. Doherty profiled New Hampshire's Free State Project way back in 2004, caught Seasteaders on their then-rise in 2009, and started covering Bitcoin in 2013. Though, as he ruefully admitted later, he knew about the groundbreaking crypto currency as early as July 2010 yet somehow neglected to cash in.

"Had I shelled out, say, $2,000 on this innovative, anti-inflationary currency even a lazy six weeks after I was introduced to it," he wrote, "today I would be sitting on 28,571 bitcoins, the equivalent at press time of over $212 million in cash." More like $2 billion now, but who's counting?

After news of his death broke, Doherty's work colleagues filled up a long Slack thread with fond memories of his deep-seated sense of tolerance, his garrulous laugh, his fury at personal technology, his sometimes elliptical prose style. A staffer once made a T-shirt from a typically verbose Dohertian Slack message: "I try not to assume that because crazy people with crazy beliefs believe or used to believe the things I believe for what I think are right and sane reasons, that that is a sign that I am crazy. But it's getting harder and harder I confess."

Doherty in recent years had suffered from a series of physical ailments and setbacks that left him walking with a cane. It is likely that condition contributed to his deadly tumble Thursday, as he took a stroll away from—of course!—an art gathering atop an abandoned World War 2 gun battery. More details are expected to emerge next week, though the (terrible) news remains the same.

What we're left with is a sui generis body of work. Explorations of "the hippie capitalism of the Grateful Dead." Massive oral histories of the Libertarian Party and Reason. A full-throated libertarian critique/condemnation of a man many of his fellow Rothbardians took a flier on, Donald Trump.

"He and his work will be missed," former Reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie tweeted Saturday. "And more important, remembered."

The post Brian Doherty, Historian of the Libertarian Movement, Dead at 57 appeared first on Reason.com.

The truth of course is that ‘Net Zero’ is an article of faith. A state religion masquerading as a moral crusade despite the evidence it is expensive, ineffective, and generally regressive.

Low carbon subsidies transfer wealth from the general population to landowners and corporations. It’s state socialism delivering a caricature of pre-Corn Laws Toryism.

– Andy Mayer

The response to the Iran-Hezbollah drone attack on Britain’s Royal Air Force Base in Cyprus earlier this month has been revealing. For the first time since 1980, Britain had no warships in the eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defences were effectively absent. The UK’s main carrier strike group was still en route to Greenland. Britain ended up having to rely on Greece and France to help secure its own military base. That is not evidence of foreign capture. It is evidence of institutional incompetence.

– Jacob Reynolds

Ill fares the land. Ominous tidings abound, such as MPs giving ministers powers to restrict the entire internet, World War III breaking out, and Winston Churchill being replaced by a badger.

But who could fail to feel hope stir in their bosom when the headline “Zack Polanski repeated claim hypnosis can increase breast size, BBC interview reveals” is a serious and genuinely consequential piece of political news?

Polanski the politician can be judged by the fact that he wants to arrest the president of Israel and build a relationship with Vladimir Putin. It becomes ever-clearer that before Polanski was a charlatan in politics he was simply a charlatan. But I am not convinced that his claim to have inflated women’s breasts by mesmerism is truly culpable. He seems to have half-believed it himself, alongside a more plausible theory that what he was actually doing was increasing the women’s self-confidence. There do not seem to have been many complaints from his customers. At some level I expect they understood that what they were buying from him was an hour with someone who would listen to them and then say soothing words. He should have stuck with his previous, more honourable profession. “With my help you can wish your boobs bigger” is less of a lie than “This time, rent control will work”.

The Daily Mail features this story about a pro-Palestinian activist:

Thomas Bourne, 39, an Islamic convert who uses the social media handle ‘White British Muslim’, approached the Jewish comedian, 51, last month after spotting him on an escalator.

He said: ‘I was going up the escalator and looked to my side and saw someone giving me an uncomfortable even hostile look and I realised it was Matt Lucas.

‘My instant reaction – as anyone’s would be who was going to confront someone – was to pull out my camera phone and shout “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”

‘As a result of that video and a subsequent Daily Mail article I actually lost my job.’

As commenter “MoleUK” says on the UKPolitics subreddit,

Sounds like a totally normal thing a normal person would do. Normally.

Bellend acts like a bellend and suffers repurcussions.

Every personal interaction a chance to show one’s virtues, just gotta make sure it’s captured on camera and uploaded to social media immediately. What a miserable way to live.

The interview with Mr Bourne at the PoliticsJOE podcast, from which the Mail took the story, can be seen here. The section quoted by the Mail is excerpted right at the beginning, and the video Mr Bourne himself made is shown at 8:07 and can be seen here. The interviewer, Seán Hickey, sympathetically introduces Mr Bourne with the words, “We’re going to be talking today about an incident that you found yourself involved in” as if Mr Bourne had no choice about initially accosting Matt Lucas, filming him while shouting “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”, confronting him further at the top of the escalator (while making a point of loudly repeating his name so everyone would know it was someone famous), continuing to follow him and argue with him despite Lucas’s non-confrontational answers, and then putting the resulting video on social media.

I do not know if London Transport has any rules against shouting at strangers you think are looking at you funny, filming them, and putting the video on social media without their consent. If it does have such rules, they were not enforced on this occasion. Mr Bourne was not punished by London Transport. Nor was he punished by the law. This is not a free speech issue. The only bad result he suffered was that his employer no longer wished to have him on their roster of fundraising consultants. I can see why Mr Bourne might not be an asset for an organisation trying to raise funds.