Atlas Network Liberty Forum Side Event

Nick Gillespie is editor at large of Reason, the libertarian magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets." The two sites draw over 4 million visits per month and have been named among the nation's best political sites by Playboy, Washingtonian, National Journal, and others. Gillespie is co-author, with his Reason colleague Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, published in 2011 by Public Affairs (an updated paperback edition was published in 2012).

The Daily Beast, where he now writes a column, named Gillespie one of "The Right's Top 25 Journalists," calling him "clear-headed, brainy...[and] among the foremost libertarians in America." He is a two-time finalist for digital National Magazine Awards for his work on "UPS vs. FEDEX: Ultimate Whiteboard Mix" and the documentary series Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey: How to Fix the Mistake on the Lake and Other Once-Great American Cities.

Gillespie served as Reason magazine's editor in chief from 2000 to 2008. Under his direction, Reason won the 2005 Western Publications Association "Maggie" Award for Best Political Magazine. Gillespie originally joined Reason's staff in 1993 as an assistant editor and ascended to the top slot in 2000. In 2004, Gillespie edited the book Choice: The Best of Reason, an anthology of the magazine's best articles. The Washington Post featured Gillespie's tenure at Reason magazine, asking, "Which monthly magazine editor argues that the spread of pornography is a victory for free expression? And that drugs from marijuana to heroin should not only be legalized, but using them occasionally is just fine? And is also quite comfortable with gay marriage? The answer is Nick Gillespie, libertarian and doctor of literature, who...is injecting [Reason magazine] with a pop-culture sensibility."

Gillespie's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Slate, Salon, Time.com, Marketplace, and numerous other publications. He was a regular contributor to the late, lamented satire site, Suck, where he wrote under the name Mr. Mxyzptlk.

He is a frequent commentator on radio and television networks such as National Public Radio, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox Business, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and PBS. He has worked as a reporter for several New Jersey newspapers and as an editor at several Manhattan-based music, movie, and teen magazines. He is almost certainly the only journalist to have interviewed both Ozzy Osbourne and Nobel laureates in economics such as Milton Friedman and Vernon Smith.

In 1996, Gillespie received his Ph.D. in English literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also holds an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from Temple University and a B.A. in English and Psychology from Rutgers University. Gillespie, the father of two sons, lives in Washington, DC, and Oxford, Ohio.

Magatte Wade is an entrepreneur and advocate for African dignity and prosperity.  Her TED talk, "Why it is too hard to start a business in Africa - and how to change it" has been seen by more than 600K people. She is a Forbes “20 Youngest Power Women in Africa”, a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum at Davos, a TED Global Africa Fellow, and "Leading Woman in Wellness” award winner by the Global Wellness Summit. In 2014 she was featured on the cover of Forbes Afrique for being the person in Francophone Africa having the greatest positive impact on the future.

She serves as the Director of the Atlas Network's Center for African Prosperity. Wade is a member of the board of Directors of Conscious Capitalism Inc and a member of the John Templeton Foundation Board of Trustees. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Whole Planet Foundation, of Whole Foods Market. She has written for The Guardian, HuffingtonPost.com, and Barron’s, and has been profiled by the NYT.  She has spoken at numerous high profile venues including the U.N., The Clinton Global Initiative, the Aspen Institute, TED, Conscious Capitalism, and many dozens of universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, MIT, UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, and the Wharton School of Business.

Throughout her career, she has created successful high-end retail brands inspired by diverse African traditions, most recently SkinIsSkin.com.

Wade believes that the “cheetah generation,” a new cohort of dynamic African entrepreneurs and professionals identified by Ghanian economist George Ayittey, will create local pathways for change that will shape the future of African prosperity. “Perhaps the most unique challenge we face is that the world has come to perceive that Africans themselves are not capable of creating prosperity—and require charity in order to survive,” she said. “This simply isn’t true. The combination of negative perceptions of Africans, combined with widespread ignorance regarding the need for economic freedom is a toxic combination.”

Lorenzo Montanari is Vice President of International Affairs at the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) & Tholos Foundation, and Executive Director of the Property Rights Alliance (PRA), an advocacy group affiliated with Tholos Foundation for the protection of physical and intellectual property rights, both domestically and internationally. As VP of International Affairs, Mr. Montanari co-founded and organized the International Coalition Meeting (ICM) in partnership with Acton Institute. He organized training workshops in Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

On the international stage, PRA works closely with famed property rights champion and President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru, Hernando de Soto and more than 125 think tanks.  At Property Rights Alliance, he is in charge of publishing the International Property Rights Index, an international comparative study, focused on intellectual and physical property rights, as well as the Trade Barrier Index. From 2004-2008 he served as a Private Chair at the International Relations Task Force at the Americans Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and he was National Review Fellow in the 2018.

Previously, Montanari worked for a public affairs firm and for the international department of the GSPM/George Washington University in Washington, DC as well as a political analyst and electoral observer in Latin America. Montanari holds a BA in Political Science, an MA in International Relations from the University of Bologna, and an MA in Political Management from George Washington University. He collaborates with Forbes. He is a co-founder of Institute Mercatus, a board member of the European Conservative Magazine, and serves on the Board of Trustees of the International Freedom Education Foundation.

Magnús Örn Gunnarsson is CEO of the Center for Social and Economic Research (RSE), in Reykjavik, Iceland. RSE is an independent research centre which seeks to further the understanding of property rights and free trade in a free and democratic society. RSE is a non-profit organization in accordance with the Icelandic legal statue no. 19/1988. Previously, Magnús spent several years with Students for Liberty, and has worked on a variety of student and political campaigns. He has several university and professional degrees and certifications, and is fluent or proficient in five languages.

Magnús Örn Gunnarsson, Center for Social and Economic Research, Iceland - bio and photo

Rod Richardson serves as President of the Grace Richardson Fund (GRF), which pioneers new free market solutions to critical issues in gridlock.  Notably, GRF has helped pioneer a broad range of environmental proposals such as Clean Free Market Policy, Clean Tax Cuts, and Clean Free Trade, which remove tax, trade and anti-competitive barriers to emerging clean solutions. As a hybrid private foundation / think tank, GRF follows a strategy of collaborative policy innovation.  It convenes scores of fellow think tanks and hundreds of scholars and experts, to brainstorm and develop new freedom-expanding solutions to the pressing problems of our time.

This strategy of collaborative policy innovation led Rod to co-found both the Clean Capitalist Leadership Council, a group of clean capitalists, conservation conservatives and environmental donors lending advice and support in this work, as well as the Clean Capitalist Coalition, a group of think tanks and scholars exploring new laissez-faire policy solutions to accelerate innovation and deployment for clean free enterprise.

In Green Market Revolution, published in June 2020 by the Austrian Economics Center and the British Conservation Alliance, Rod elaborates on the concepts of Clean Tax Cuts and Clean Free Market Policy, which can be especially useful during this age of coronavirus.

As a columnist for The American Spectator, Rod makes the case that clean capitalism and basic economic freedoms go hand-in-hand, and can best be expanded, together, side by side. These new concepts and proposals have been developed collaboratively by transpartisan expert-level “charrette” working groups and teams, convening, more than 300 scholars and experts to advance these policy design discussions.

Since 2016, such policy design discussions have been co-convened by a variety of groups, including: Living Room Conversations; The Jack Kemp Foundation; Rocky Mountain Institute; The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia University; R Street Institute, American Sustainable Business Council, The Nature Conservancy, EarthX, American Renewable Energy Institute, ASU LightWorks, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy; Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions Forum; American Council for Capital Formation; Atlas Network, Center for Latin America; and MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (MIT CEEPR).