Unsafe at Any TSA Checkpoint

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

Ralph Nader is pissed.

 

I’ll let him tell the story. Last week he posted on social media:

 

Today, the notoriously picky TSA at Bradley Airport in Connecticut confiscated a container of fresh hummus. “Hummus?! Why?” asked the traveler. “Hummus is not a mysterious liquid. It’s a nutritious popular vegetable!”

 

“Doesn’t matter,” was the rejoinder. “Either leave the line with it or it goes into the garbage.”

 

So now add hummus to the list of national security perils. Maybe ground broccoli will be next. Absurdity reigns! -R

 

Now, I should say, I think this was a well-written, quality tweet. It told a story with drama and panache. And, frankly, I think Nader signing off with his first initial was quaintly charming.

 

I’ll also say that I have some sympathy for his complaint. Our airport security system (which has gotten better, in my experience, under Trump, shutdowns notwithstanding) can be infuriating. That’s because we turned it over to a public sector bureaucracy with the instructions that it has to work at scale. That requires clear rules with little room for individual judgment. I am sure the Transportation Security Administration worker didn’t think the 92-year-old Nader was smuggling pasty plastic explosives in that hummus container. But a huge bureaucratic system that processes millions of passengers a week can’t leave such matters up to the discretion of each agent. Moreover, now that everything is videotaped and recorded, if the agent let Nader go through and it turned out that the hummus was an explosive or some kind of poison paste capable of being aerosolized, everyone would know that it was Ted, or Sue, at Bradley International Airport who bent the rules for this unlikely terrorist.

 

But here’s the thing. Ralph Nader, perhaps more than any other single individual in American history, has dedicated his life to empowering government functionaries to slow down government processes, inconvenience consumers, and ruthlessly enforce regulations in the name of public safety.

 

And I think it’s hilarious that he’s angry about such things when they inconvenience him.

 

I’ll skip a long dive into Nader, Naderism, Naderites, and the generations of trial lawyers and other disciples who worship all three. Instead, I want to illustrate the point by talking about John Nestor.

 

Nestoring resentments.

 

Nestor was most famous—or infamous—for his driving practices. Specifically, what he loved to do is get in the passing lane on D.C.’s highways and switch on cruise control at the 55 mph speed limit. He infuriated Beltway drivers. They’d flash their headlights at him, honk their horns, tailgate, and make all the usual gestures. You could be trying to get to the hospital because of a medical emergency or to your kid’s school for a play. He didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

 

Here’s how he put it in a letter to the Washington Post:

 

On divided highways I drive in the left lane with my cruise control set at the speed limit of 55 miles per hour because it is usually the smoothest lane. I avoid slower traffic coming in and out from the right, and I avoid resetting the cruise control with every lane change.

 

Why should I inconvenience myself for someone who wants to speed?

 

What he didn’t say in his letter, but comes across quietly clearly in this sympathetic Post profile, is that one of his primary motivations was simply that he enjoyed arousing anger in truckers and others stacked up behind him. Their anger was a feature, not a bug. And he was disappointed when he didn’t piss people off.

 

Nestor’s fans called themselves Nestorians, but everyone else used his name pejoratively, as a verb, “Nestoring.”

 

My wife and I have a term for the people who oppose all economic development or any other kind of loosening of the rules to make life more enjoyable, efficient, or entertaining in the nation’s capital: “The Coalition Against Everything.” A neighborhood restaurant wants outside seating? We can’t have that. Some kids want to sell lemonade on the sidewalk? Without a permit? Are you kidding me? How about live music on Saturday nights at the local bar? What? Without years of hearings and impact statements?

 

Nestor was a hero of the Coalition Against Everything, a paladin of precaution, a knight of “No!” He hassled developers in his neighborhood, he harassed public officials to require extensive medical screenings of fast-food employees unnecessarily. Unmarried and childless, he had lots of time to do that in his off hours.

 

But that was also his job. He worked as a regulator at the Food and Drug Administration. He worked in the cardio-renal-pulmonary unit, and on his watch his department approved no new drugs from 1968 to 1972. The FDA transferred him, because while on the road to work he would lock in at 55 mph, but when he got to the office he put everything in park.

 

That made him a hero to Ralph Nader and the Naderites. They helped him sue to get his position back. Nader’s Public Citizen Health Research Group wanted him back on the job because he “had an unassailable record of protecting the public from harmful drugs.” One HRG doctor called him "sort of the ideal public servant.” At the time, the Naderites  left out the fact that Nestor spent his days leaking FDA reports to them, so they kind of owed him (the Washington Post profile quoted him bragging about leaking to the Nader people, Congress, and the media. It also had him describing the American public as “sheep.”).

 

Now, I am sure Nestor stopped some bad things from happening. In that sense, you can say his record of “protecting the public from harmful drugs” was, indeed, unassailable. But maybe, just maybe, he also “protected” the public from drugs that might have saved lives. 

 

Given his driving habits, he might also have prevented some car accidents caused by speeders. But he also may have created traffic that delayed an ambulance’s arrival at the hospital or caused someone to speed even more once they got past the Nestoring-induced traffic jams.

 

Nestor and the Naderites undoubtedly did some things that saved lives. Seatbelts, all in all, are a good innovation. It is just as obvious to me that some of the things they did cost lives. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sam Kazman made this point (about drugs and about Nestor) a long time ago. We see the victims of bad drug approvals, but “victims of incorrect FDA delays or denials are practically invisible.”

 

I’ve heard Nader boast about how his groups helped stop the construction of nuclear power plants in the United States for decades. He thought he was stopping more Three Mile Islands—though it’s worth noting that the reactor’s partial meltdown killed no one and scientists are still debating whether there were any notable health effects at all. What that mishap did do is set back nuclear power in this country for a generation, because it gave political ammunition to the anti-nuke branch of the Coalition Against Everything.

 

If you take seriously everything the Naderites, or public health experts generally, say about the dangers of burning coal—air pollution, asthma, lost life expectancy, and, of course, climate change—it seems entirely plausible that the blanket opposition to nuclear power harmed a lot more people, and the planet, than judicious support of nuclear power would have.

 

Until now, I’ve avoided invoking Frédéric Bastiat’s essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” He wrote: “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.” In his famous parable of the broken window, he tells the story of the onlooker who sees a broken window and says (I’m paraphrasing), that’s too bad, but such things keep the window makers in business. Bastiat notes that that’s true, but the money used to replace the window could have been spent on something more productive. The only place I might quibble with Bastiat is that some effects cannot be foreseen. The invention that is never invented lies outside our imagination.

 

This is a “news”letter about Nestors and Naderites, but it’s at least worth noting that the failure to appreciate the unseen is not solely a failure of the left. As Kevin Williamson and John McCormack have detailed, the victims of Trump’s tariffs aren’t just the people who pay them.  They also include the people who don’t get hired because businesses can’t risk expansion. The costs are heaped on the vendors they don’t use because it’s too risky when revenues are shrinking. They fall on the people who don’t get bonuses or raises, or on the parents who have to work extra hours to cover higher prices and their children who see their parents less.

 

Anyway, back to the Nestors. The Trial Lawyer Industrial Project, whether well-intentioned or not, has deterred economic growth by impeding innovation and business formation. They make hiring harder because they make firing riskier. They make starting new factories more expensive by larding on rules and regulations that make suing easier and economic productivity harder.  My friend David Bahnsen estimates that the legal headwinds against business formation and economic development amount to a full percentage point of economic growth. That’s trillions of dollars over the last two decades—or the next two—we leave on the table because we focus on the seen rather than bet on the unseen.

 

It’s a shame that Ralph Nader was denied the simple pleasure of eating hummus on a plane by an inflexible bureaucrat’s dedication to rules based on fear about a very real threat to public safety. That was Nestor’s rationale for saying no to everything. You can’t have a bad new drug if you don’t approve any new drugs. But Nader was asked to pay a very small price in service to the common good, at least compared to the prices he’s helped inflict on the entire country. More’s the pita he can’t see it.