Jane Coaston – Meet The New York Times' Libertarian Podcaster

Jane Coaston on the polarization of everything

- By Nick Gillespie

JANE COASTON IS the new host of The Argument, a massively popular New York Times podcast that seeks to showcase civil and informed discussions about the most pressing issues of the day. A 33-year-old Cincinnati native, Coaston has worked at Vox, MTV, and the Human Rights Campaign, among other places. She is the daughter of a black father and a white mother, was raised Catholic, and identifies as queer. She’s also a registered Libertarian who is “especially distrustful of efforts by the state to get people to do things.” As she puts it, “at some point, a regulation or a law with the absolute best of intentions will be wielded by people who may not have the absolute best of intentions.”

Coaston says growing up in a liberal household in a conservative part of the country made her reluctant to give the authorities a lot of power. Adding to that was an experience of being isolated because of her race and sexuality. “My libertarian sensibilities really came from a sense of: I know what it is like politically to always lose,” she says.

One of Coaston’s goals for The Argument is to bring in a lot of new voices—partly to hear different perspectives but also to model true pluralism. She says she is sick of performative politics in which people act out predetermined roles rather than actually engage with one another, and she aims to change that in her new role.

In April, Reason’s Nick Gillespie spoke with Coaston via Zoom about how her libertarianism came to be and what she sees as the defining issues of the current era.