So, what happens when voters wholeheartedly hold beliefs which are simply not true? The savvy politician knows that it would be political suicide to try to correct the public’s misapprehensions. No one likes being told “you’re wrong”, after all. All the incentives instead push politicians towards the soothing position of “the customer is always right”, even when that’s objectively not the case.

This is not a new problem, but it is one that we are now seeing play out on a scale that I, at least, have not witnessed before. If you frequent online spaces where young people hang out, you will hear one sentiment repeated over and over again, ad nauseam, like a piece of religious dogma that cannot be questioned. Gen Z has it worse than any previous generation. The American dream is dead, we’ll never own a home, and it’s all the Boomers’ fault.

Now, before you angrily click away, let me concede a couple of points to the doomer crowd. Affordability is a real problem. Housing prices are far too high, inflation is unacceptably bad, and America’s health care system is a disaster. I don’t dispute any of that, and it’s the kernel of truth that underlies any convincing falsehood. All these problems should be addressed, and the government’s refusal to do so is yet another indictment of the immeasurable malice and incompetence of our elected officials. All this, I grant.

But, the idea that life in 2026 America is worse than it was for previous generations is simply ridiculous. We live in the wealthiest country in the world at the wealthiest time in human history. The standard of living for the average 25 year old would make ancient kings and pharaohs gasp with wonder. To name just a few of the luxuries of modern life, we enjoy hot and cold running water (clean, drinkable water, mind you); indoor plumbing and sewage services (no chamber pots or outhouses necessary); state of the art automobiles in every garage and public transportation in most cities; a handheld supercomputer in every pocket, loaded with the entirety of the accumulated knowledge of mankind; air conditioning (as World Cup tourists discovered to their amazement); more music, movies, games, books, and other entertainment than we could explore in a hundred lifetimes. It’s possible to travel the globe in a matter of hours, not weeks, and be in instant communication with anyone no matter how far away they are. People are making good money, not by toiling all day in dangerous factories or mines, but by sending emails from the comfort of an office building, playing video games for an audience, or taking photos of themselves in their underwear. And if enjoying all that luxury tires you out, you can have food from every cuisine on Earth delivered straight to your door. In fact, food is so abundant that the biggest health risk faced by our poorest citizens is obesity rather than starvation.

And yet, in spite of all this, people have never been more convinced that life is a raw deal and that they’ve been cheated out of some imaginary birthright. Young people are forgoing having children because they believe that raising them is too expensive or, worse, that the world is so awful that it would be crime to drag another life into this miserable place. Disgruntled youngsters are romanticizing the life of a feudal peasant, believing that the grueling and uncertain labor of subsistence agriculture for the benefit of a tyrannical lord to be preferable to spending an hour in a Zoom meeting. These are the same people seething with envy at their grandparents who lived through the Great Depression or were drafted to fight, and potentially die, in World War II.

The preceding is not merely the “when I was your age” ranting of an elderly curmudgeon; the delusion of Gen Z oppression is perfectly demonstrable with data. Despite the widespread belief that it’s impossible for young people to buy houses, Americans in their 20s are actually outpacing previous generations in terms of homeownership. And in defiance of their self-perception as a perpetually, institutionally impoverished class, Gen Z is on pace to become the wealthiest generation ever.

I could present more data, but there’s little point, because no amount of studies or spreadsheets will change how people feel, and right now people feel poor. Why they feel that way is a bit of a mystery to me. I suspect it is from a combination of ignorance of history (if you want to feel good about your situation in life, try reading about the Anglo-Saxons) and a deliberate propaganda effort by elite institutions like universities and the media. Whatever the case, statistics are no match for emotions, or in the parlance of today, “lived experience.”

Some people in politics have tried to draw attention to this disconnect between belief and reality. In a stunning lack of political tact, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Gen Z of being born with silver spoons in their mouths. The fact that this point may have some truth to it is irrelevant to those who want to be told that their struggles are indeed unprecedented and that their feelings are “valid” (whatever that means.)

Meanwhile, smarter politicians are finding ways to capitalize on the pessimism of youth. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani ran a brilliant campaign based on telling people that nothing is their fault, and that the government will fix everything for them. Never mind that his half-baked socialist solutions have repeatedly failed in the past. He listened to voters and then repeated their own opinions back at them, which is really all anyone can ask for. The fact that more politicians are not emulating this strategy is frankly surprising, but as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ramps up for a potential 2028 run at the presidency, I think we can expect to see a lot more agreement that, yes, Gen Z are in fact the innocent victims of their evil predecessors.

It’s a cynical play coming from the Party who spent the last few years desperately trying to shut down “misinformation” online, but what else can we expect from politics but cynicism? It turns out it’s only misinformation if it helps get the other guy elected. Otherwise it’s simply “your truth” (as distinct from “the truth”).

There’s no place for brutal honesty or tough love in politics. If you want the support of the public, you have to tell them what they want to hear, even if what they want to hear is a big fat lie.

The post There’s No Place for Tough Love in Politics appeared first on Free the People.

Author and political commentator Michael Malice is fond of pointing out that most people do not use a true/false filter to evaluate claims, but rather an us/them filter, meaning that whether a given proposition is accepted has more to do with the tribal loyalties of the speakers and listeners than with any objective appraisal of evidence. This is true enough as far as it goes, but I think it neglects the important role that stories play in our thought processes. Most of us have stories that run along in our heads, narratives we tell ourselves about how the world works. When we encounter a new fact, we check it against our internal stories to see if it fits. If it does, we incorporate the fact into our story. If it doesn’t, we tend to disregard or disbelieve it.

This is not news. The term “confirmation bias” is used to describe how people are more willing to seek out and accept information that supports what they already believe, and are more skeptical of things that point in the opposite direction. We usually don’t realize that we are doing this, but we are, and it’s something we are all susceptible to, even educated people who are well aware of the phenomenon.

Less frequently discussed, however, is what happens when a fact confirms one set of beliefs, but contradicts another. A moment’s thought will make it fairly obvious that we do not have just one story running through our heads, but many, and that sometimes these stories conflict with each other. How is the subconscious to cope with the cognitive dissonance that comes when two competing stories collide?

To answer that question, we need only look at the latest outrage perpetrated by everybody’s favorite supervilllain, Donald Trump. Prior to the USA’s crucial Round of 16 match against Belgium in the World Cup, Trump told a reporter that he asked the tournament’s organizing body, FIFA, to review a controversial suspension of one the American team’s best players. Had this suspension been allowed to stand, the US would have entered its next match at a distinct disadvantage. Ultimately, for reasons known only to themselves, FIFA opted to allow the suspended player, Folarin Balogun, to play.

This decision prompted outrage, with soccer fans from around the world taking to X to accuse the US of cheating, and that Trump’s influence resulted in preferential treatment for the country hosting the World Cup for the first time.

It’s hardly surprising that something Trump said should make everyone angry—that’s been the pattern for much of the last decade. But what is slightly odd is the apparent willingness to take him at his word. After all, Trump is widely known to be a braggart who can’t resist any opportunity to make grandiose claims about his own importance and influence. In 2018, Sam Harris, one of the President’s most outspoken critics, said that Trump “lies more than any person has ever lied in human history.” This claim, though hyperbolic and difficult to support empirically, seems to capture the feelings of many people around the world regarding the braggadocio of the 47th president.

So, if Trump always lies, why are people so quick to believe that he really did interfere with the World Cup, something that seems as unlikely as it is the kind of thing Trump would ordinarily lie about? The answer, I think, is that what we are witnessing is a hierarchy of stories people tell themselves, each one battling the others for supremacy. One story says that Trump is a compulsive liar, that you can’t believe a word he says, and that he has nothing but contempt for the truth. This is a powerful story for people who hate Trump because it casts him in a consistently bad light while allowing the easy dismissal of anything good he might have inadvertently accomplished during his time in office. If Trump says the economy is doing well, we know it must really be in trouble. If he says that we’re winning the war in Iran, we must actually be losing. Very convenient for those whose primary motivation is criticism rather than analysis.

However, there is another, even more powerful story that is especially persuasive to non-Americans such as the general audience for the World Cup. That story claims that America is an evil, corrupt, backwards, and stupid place that must always be in the wrong even when it isn’t. This story has been brought to the forefront of the European mind over the last month due to a confluence of factors. First, the World Cup being held on American soil proved particularly infuriating due to Americans’ historical indifference to the sport of soccer (I mean football! Sorry, Europe!) As well as their general ignorance regarding its rules and traditions. It’s understandable how a constant chorus of “what is the off sides rule? Oh, that’s stupid, they should change it” would be irritating to those for whom association football rises to the level of a national pastime.

This attitude of resentment has not been helped by the flood of World Cup tourists discovering firsthand that America is not such a bad place, and that the European media has been lying to them for decades about the arrogant, ignorant, gun-toting, obese yanks. For those lacking the means or inclination for international travel, this wave of positivity has only made them double down on their defensiveness about European superiority.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, The United States is also currently celebrating its 250th birthday, resulting in levels of public patriotism that the typical European finds gauche, jingoistic, and generally repulsive. All this is to say, this July has seen Europe sweltering not only under a blistering heat wave (for which they blame America) but also in a particularly crabby and anti-American mood.

So, then. The opportunity arose to accuse the USA of cheating at one of Europe’s most sacred traditions, and to personally blame Donald Trump for the wrongdoing, you can see how the temptation would be all but irresistible. The slightly less urgent belief that Trump is an inveterate liar, though not abandoned, was temporarily placed on the back burner in favor of a more satisfying narrative.

Personally, I suspect that Trump had nothing to do with the overturned penalty, and that his bragging about it is merely typical of his self-serving bluster. But it’s been fascinating to watch people who yesterday refused to believe a word the President said suddenly adamant that he would never lie about bullying FIFA into compliance.

If there’s a lesson here (something more broadly applicable than “Europeans hate America more than they distrust Trump”, it may be that the best way to reach people with new information is to present it in a way that not only fits in with their preconceived notions about the world, but which they can incorporate as a coherent part of their favorite and most cherished stories. If only we could find a way of demonstrating that the World Cup embodies capitalism, individualism, and freedom, we might make some progress with the soccer-obsessed rest of the world.

The post Is Trump a Liar or a Cheat? Critics Can’t Make Up Their Minds appeared first on Free the People.

In this novella-length thought experiment, Teague imagines Thomas Paine, one of the most influential political thinkers of the 18th century and a major contributor to our nation’s founding, returned from the grave to offer a series of ghostly pronouncements on the state of the country in the 21st century. The text alternates between excerpts from Paine’s most famous work, Common Sense, and applications of these passages to the political climate of today.

Why attempt to step into the shoes of a long-dead polemicist for contemporary political insight? There are several promising reasons. First, the past is replete with great thinkers from whose wisdom moderns we could undoubtedly benefit from if only we had access to it. Indeed, this constitutes much of the argument for reading and engaging with the classics in the first place: the ability to apply mankind’s earlier insights to new problems. Second, if we consider America as something more than a mere piece of land, as an idea that sprang from the minds and pens of its founders, an experiment in self-government and an opportunity to form a more perfect union of states and citizens, then it makes sense to return, on occasion, to the words of its designers and see whether we are living up to the example they set two and a half centuries ago.

As valuable as this exercise may be, attempting to put words in the mouths of the dead is a perilous business, fraught with pitfalls. But by hewing as closely to the original text, and juxtaposing his own writing directly with Paine’s, Teague deftly manages to avoid a great many of these (although I do think he is overly presumptuous in having his modern narrator repudiate Paine’s critique of Christianity, The Age of Reason). This allows the logic of Paine’s arguments to be applied to today’s society with a minimal amount of overt speculation.

The original Common Sense was largely an attack on the principles of monarchy, especially as applied by the English crown to its colonies in North America. While that situation has admittedly changed since 1776, it is striking how many of Paine’s critiques continue to apply to our supposedly democratic government. The increased power of the executive, excessive taxation, overregulation, the invasion of privacy, and the general disregard for the sovereignty of the individual all continue to trouble the American people in ways not dissimilar from the complaints of the 18th century colonists; complaints which ultimately led them to war a war for independence.

If Americans wish to preserve the kind of free and prosperous society their ancestors fought for, it is necessary first that they understand why the American project was begun in the first place, and what the founders hoped to achieve by breaking free from British rule. The next step is that the people be roused from complacency, having been lulled by years of comfort into accepting the numberless abuse of government authority as normal and tolerable. Revisiting the writings of Thomas Paine, as well as Teague’s updated analysis, is a valuable first step in that process.

Thomas Paine Returns with Common Sense is available from Histria Books, and more of Teague’s writing can be found at Free the People.

The post WWTPD: What Would Thomas Paine Do? appeared first on Free the People.

“I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that,” Weir said.

It’s understandable why this quote would attract attention and praise from moviegoers. In an era where politics is seemingly shoved down our throats at every opportunity, it’s refreshing to be permitted to enjoy entertainment for its own sake. Still, critics of Weir are quick to scoff, dismissing such attitudes as shallow and banal. Given the near-limitless set of problems faced by society, and indeed the world, the “all art is political” crowd find it lazy and irresponsible for artists to forsake their duty to serve as a mouthpiece for justice, tolerance, or whatever the cause du jour happens to be.

Weir’s point is well taken, and he’s basically right, but perhaps he could have phrased it a little better to avoid snobbish accusations of cretinism (assuming it’s even possible to avoid such things). By falling back on “I just want to be entertained” he’s opening himself up to criticism, as well as doing a disservice to the art form for which he has become so well known.

The fact is that there is rarely such a thing as “just” entertainment. While Weir’s comments may evoke images of slobbering couch potatoes mindlessly guffawing over an endless procession of garish colors and cartoon sound effects (at least in the minds of the self-appointed elite) this is not a fair characterization of quality entertainment or its effects on the viewer. Good books teach without being didactic; good shows have morals without being moralistic; good movies have something to say about society without bludgeoning the audience with political slogans. In short, social commentary need not be propagandistic.

The conflation of these two ideas seems to drive much of the discourse around modern mass media. One group of viewers complains that they dislike being lectured at, while the other group dismisses their concerns with accusations of stupidity, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. They imagine that the only reason someone could dislike TV shows whose only message is “girls rule and boys drool” must be an innate hatred of women, and the only reason not to want a superhero movie to turn into a PowerPoint presentation about global warming must be an attitude of anti-intellectualism. The mistake here is assuming that the only way to insert social commentary into a script is to do so in as condescending and ham-fisted a manner as possible.

What, then, is the difference between social commentary and propaganda? I would argue that the former contains universal truths that can be applied by the viewer to a variety of situations in the real world, while the latter imposes the author’s opinion rigidly onto the story, and demands that the audience accept this point of view in order to enjoy the work. I’m reminded of the words of author J.R.R. Tolkien in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, in which he complains about critics attempting to reduce his fantasy world to a narrow commentary on the atomic bomb, communism, or other real-world boogeymen.

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

Of course, there are thousands of ways in which The Lord of the Rings can be understood as relating to the society of Tolkien’s day, or to any society for that matter, but that’s precisely because he as author didn’t force the story to be about one thing and one thing only.

A simple example will, I think, illustrate the point. Imagine a story about a hungry mouse who, spotting a hunk of delicious-smelling cheese, rushes over to it only to find himself caught in a mousetrap. This may not be a very interesting story, but already it contains a general lesson that can be applied to an enormous variety of real-world situations. Not all that glitters is gold; beware of things that appear too good to be true, for they probably are; don’t let your base appetites overwhelm your caution or higher reasoning; look before you leap, etc. Already we can see how these lessons can be used to protect the safety of children, to give religious instruction, to warn against Nigerian princes, to give dating advice, to comment on the trustworthiness of politicians who promise the moon, and so on in a list we could continue indefinitely. The story is not about any of these individual things; it is about a mouse and some cheese, designed for entertainment rather than instruction. But it can be about any or all of these things depending on the reader’s imagination or individual outlook on life.

Now imagine that the author of this story, with all the subtlety of a political cartoon, slaps labels onto each of the story’s elements. The mouse, we’re told, represents the American worker; the cheese represents capitalism; and the trap represents the wealthy industrialists who exploit the labor of others for their own gain. Suddenly, the story is transformed from a timeless fable to a Marxist harangue which, unless you already agree with the author’s conclusions, will offer nothing of value to the reader.

This is the difference between social commentary and propaganda. To an extent, I agree with Weir’s critics that great stories are never “just” entertainment: they always have something more to teach us. Fight Club, The Matrix, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Aliens, Terminator, and any number of other universally-beloved movies contain plenty of social commentary, without ever being preachy. The lessons in these films are not taught through self-righteous lectures about the evil of Republicans or the original sin of being born a white man. Instead, we learn from stories that are honest about the human condition. A good book or film will necessarily contain a healthy dose of the author’s wisdom, accumulated through the sheer act of living, and that wisdom will be passed along to the audience as an often unconscious byproduct of entertaining them. But when authors treat their audiences like schoolchildren, held captive to passively receive the heavy-handed instruction of their superiors, they will succeed at neither educating nor entertaining, and will earn only resentment in return.

The post Good Entertainment Contains Wisdom, Not Propaganda appeared first on Free the People.

I don’t wish to dwell on the hypocrisy; lack of political principle has become so commonplace as to be unworthy of comment. Nor do I wish to litigate the rights and wrongs of the actions of protestors or ICE agents by meticulously analyzing slowed down video footage. I’ll leave that to other, more qualified sleuths (and ideally to the actual justice system should any of these cases ever be brought to trial). What I find more interesting is the apparent inability of many online commentators and Twitter warriors to even understand where the other side is coming from.

In psychology, the term “theory of mind” refers to our understanding that other people have similar brains to ourselves, and that they have thoughts and emotions in much the same way we do. As we grow from infants into more rational adults, we gradually stop viewing other people as mere automatons in a universe designed for our benefit, and start to realize that every individual has an interior existence all of his own. This is a key component in developing an ethical framework, as we understand that the pain that others feel is no less real or unpleasant than our own pain, and that we should therefore treat others as we would wish to be treated. This is the so-called Golden Rule that underlies most, if not all, of western moral thought.

Yet, it would seem that all too many people lack a theory of mind, at least when it comes to people from a different political tribe. I’ve been appalled to see people who claim to oppose tyranny jeering and mocking the Minnesota protestors, even declaring that the ones who were killed deserved what they got. At this point, conservative readers will be quick to object that the actions of ICE agents are not tyrannical, but simply the appropriate enforcement of immigration laws. And that may be the case, but that’s not how the protestors see it.

In order to make sense of the protestors’ actions, you have to understand what they are hearing from their news sources and what they believe to be true.

From their perspective, ICE is a militarized, masked force, invading their communities and hauling away peaceful people who only came to America in search of a better life for themselves and their families. They’ve been told that ICE has carelessly deported American citizens, and sent legal residents to El Salvadoran gulags. They’ve been told that ICE is violently abducting people who have lived here their whole lives, who have never known another home, and who speak no language other than English. Some of these claims may be true and some of them may be false, but this is what protestors believe and those beliefs are what motivate their actions.

For the Minneapolis leftist, this is Germany in the 1930s. The SS is going door to door rounding up jews and threatening anyone who dares to harbor them. These enforcers are backed by the laws imposed by their government. They can charge you with obstructing justice and resisting arrest if you fail to comply. They can label you a domestic terrorist for failing to meekly submit to their demands. And while the cowards say “Well, it’s the law. We have to do what they say,” the courageous stand up to injustice, even at the cost of their own lives. No one wants to be a sniveling weakling, turning a blind eye to the evils of tyranny out of fear or convenience. Everyone likes to imagine himself as a hero. To the Minnesota protestors, Renee Good and Alex Pretti are such heroes, and those who support ICE’s actions, even at their most brutal, are Nazi sympathizers.

This should not be a difficult concept for conservatives to get their minds around. It was only a few years ago when the shoe was on the other foot. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government prevented people from going to work, seeing their families, visiting dying loved ones in the hospital, going to church, and even enjoying nature in solitude, as harmless swimmers were chased down and dragged from the beach by armed enforcers. There were many, myself included, who considered this to be an unacceptable breach of our rights and freedoms. Disobedience to draconian lockdowns was not only justifiable, it was the duty of every free American. At the time, those on the Left shook their heads, wondering why we were being so unreasonably stubborn, and why our disinclination to temporarily wear a mask was more important than saving millions of lives. They lacked the theory of mind to understand that for us, this was a red line in the same way that mass deportations is for them.

Personally, I happen to think that the way ICE is conducting itself is reckless, unprofessional, overly violent, and at times criminal. You don’t have to agree with me on this. You can dispute all the facts surrounding the two shootings and argue that the agents acted in justifiable self-defense. You can refuse to believe any of the stories about wrongful or illegal deportations. You can think all the protestors are stupid and misguided, as they thought Covid protestors were. That’s fine. But even the most zealous ICE defender should be able to acknowledge that the people being killed are bravely standing up for what they think is right. They are attempting to avoid being collaborators in what history may one day view as an atrocity. They are doing what we encourage every American—from the founding revolutionaries to the abolitionists—to do when faced with a government that no longer represents them. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, they are refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. That, at least, deserves some respect.

The post Theory of Mind for Minnesota Protestors appeared first on Free the People.

There’s something ridiculous about a sitting president, who campaigned on a slogan of putting America first, taking to social media to hurl childish insults at two of the most patriotic Members of Congress, while giving a pass to opportunistic career politicians without a principled bone in their body. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

But that’s who Trump is. It’s who he’s always been. No surprises there. What’s more troubling has been the response from those who should be the first to defend Massie and Paul against accusations of being third-rate grandstanders, Democrat shills, or “nasty liddle guys.” Siding with Massie and Paul on this should be a no brainer for anyone who cares about liberty, but instead we’re seeing a wave of skepticism, and even open hostility, against the only men in Washington brave enough to vote their consciences rather than fall in line behind special interests and naked partisanship. It’s a sad reflection of the direction the liberty movement has taken over the last few years.

There was a time when the liberty movement was divided broadly into two camps. On one side, anarchists and agorists, influenced by 19th century individualists like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, argued that the pursuit of political power was inherently corrupting and could therefore never be an effective method for advancing freedom. Against them was the more pragmatic wing of paleo-conservatives and paleo-libertarians led by Murray Rothbard, who thought it was important to recognize the reality of political institutions and hoped to change them from within. Today, in the era of Donald Trump, the pragmatists have pretty definitively taken over the liberty movement, having achieved what they perceive to be a political win and developed a taste for it. As much as I love Murray Rothbard and respect his contributions to human freedom, I think he got this one wrong, and we’re currently reaping the poisonous fruits of the pragmatist strategy.

Libertarians had a lot of hope for Donald Trump, and it’s not hard to see why. He courted the Libertarian Party at their convention with the promise of freeing the unjustly imprisoned folk hero Ross Ulbricht, ending foreign wars, and dramatically downsizing the federal government with the help of Elon Musk. He called out the neocons and warmongers, he pledged to return education to the states, and most importantly (for some), he drove progressive socialists into apoplectic conniption fits that were admittedly amusing.

Some libertarians—like me—were wary of supporting a Republican who spent the vast majority of his adult life as a New York Democrat, and who seemed to have no real ideology apart from whatever personally benefits him in the moment. For raising these concerns, we were decried as useless and utopian dreamers too obsessed with philosophical purity to ever achieve even incremental wins. The pragmatists sneered at our naivety, claimed we didn’t understand politics, and accused us of standing in the way of real progress. At the time, I was willing to consider that maybe they had a point. Well, now we’ve had some time to see how their “mature and realistic” political strategy is working out, and I can confidently say that the results are nothing to brag about.

After campaigning on free speech, Trump quickly reversed himself and threatened to throw protesters in prison for burning the American flag, an activity protected by the First Amendment. With no regard for due process, Trump is blowing up ships that are allegedly bringing drugs into the United States. These are the kinds of extra-judicial killings that libertarians savaged Barack Obama for engaging in during his tenure as president. Economically, Trump is waging a mercantilist trade war against the whole world at once, increasing taxes on Americans in the form of tariffs and higher prices for foreign goods and services. Meanwhile, inflation continues to raise domestic prices, with Trump making no effort to rein in the out of control Federal Reserve. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was a bust. All the savings they found were either not reflected in the GOP’s budget, or else redirected into increased military spending. The war in Ukraine continues to rage (supported by American tax dollars) and the peace process in Gaza (where more American dollars are funneled into weapons) is steadily and predictably falling apart, and the supposedly peaceful president has already dropped bombs on Iran and Yemen after less than a year in office. To Trump’s credit, he did follow through on his promise to free Ross Ulbricht, and I want to be clear that I couldn’t be happier for Ross and his family. But at the same time, Trump’s immigration policies have thrown who knows how many peaceful people into El Salvadoran prisons where they will rot with no champions to argue for their release.

In the past, it would fall to libertarians to push back against an imperial president who so blatantly disrespected the Constitution, who was so committed to increasing the national debt, and who seemed determined to wreck the economy. In today’s environment, however, the expected outcry is strangely muted. The reason for this is the pragmatists.

The fundamental claim made by the pragmatists is that political power is necessary to create change. If you believe this, it follows that one’s personal values and principles should be subordinate to whatever it takes to win elections. Without the power to act on them, the pragmatists argue, principles amount to nothing more than empty naval gazing. To actually advance liberty, we have to be willing to compromise, to play the game, in order to get into a position to enact a liberty agenda.

But the logic of pragmatism doesn’t end there. Even if a libertarian succeeds in getting elected, he is still only one person. Politics is a team sport, and cooperation is necessary to get anything done in Washington. The lone libertarian must, therefore, set aside his personal principles and go along with party leadership, to keep playing the game. To do otherwise is to risk being labeled, at best, a useless obstructionist or, at worst, a traitor. This is why you will see Republicans accusing Massie of being secretly loyal to the Democrats (a ludicrous assertion if you know anything about his voting record). The pragmatists smugly scoff at these men of principle as being naive and not understanding how to get things done in Washington.

Anyone entering Congress with this mindset will cherish a faint hope of a distant future—a future that will never arrive—in which they can stop bending the knee and actually stand up for what they believe in. This hope allows them to rationalize every concession, every bad vote, and every broken campaign promise as in service of a noble goal. Meanwhile, the state grows ever larger and more powerful, while the movement best poised to vocally resist tyranny has been convinced that discretion is the better part of valor. They are content to keep their powder dry, staying silent or cheering on authoritarians all while patting themselves on the back for practicing a smart and savvy political strategy.

Libertarianism need not be an all-or-nothing proposition; there’s nothing wrong with incrementalism as long as that incremental progress is moving in the right direction.

But the pragmatists fail to draw a distinction between making things marginally better and making things worse at a slightly slower rate than the status quo. Increasing government spending by $1 trillion instead of $2 trillion is not a win for liberty, and the idea that libertarians should accept, or even support, such a disastrous proposal is contrary to everything we claim to believe in.

I understand that many people in the movement are desperate for a win; libertarians have been losing for a long time and losing is no fun. But if the cost of “winning” is to betray everything we believe in, that is no victory at all. Trump and his allies say they want Massie and Paul to act more like Lindsey Graham, but in no world does a Congress full of Lindsey Grahams result in a society that is more prosperous or more free. Some of the pragmatists, embittered casualties of the culture war, have become so obsessed with “owning the libs” that they are willing to abandon even the pretense of freedom if it means hurting their enemies.

A liberty movement that will turn its back on Thomas Massie and Rand Paul in the hopes of being thrown a few scraps from Donald Trump’s table is not worth the name. The best and brightest warriors for human freedom—the Ron Pauls, Margaret Thatchers, and Javier Mileis of the world—were bold, radical, and principled. They succeeded by repudiating political pragmatism, not by succumbing to it. If we want liberty to win in the future, we have to follow their examples, not that of Lindsey Graham.

The post The Pragmatists Are Bad for Liberty appeared first on Free the People.

Jordan Peterson once said: “If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”

At a time when much of the nation is focussed on cracking down on violent crime, we owe it to ourselves to ask what turns people violent in the first place. Conventional wisdom holds that violence comes from big, strong men who view their muscles as a substitute for their brains. Decades of feminist teaching has given us the term “toxic masculinity,” implying that there’s something inherently wrong with being manly. The armed services are having trouble finding enough virile young men capable of doing any serious fighting. In schools, boys are increasingly expected to behave like girls: to sit still and pay attention, to be quiet, to do as they’re told. Boys who refuse to conform to these expectations are often diagnosed with one or more psychiatric disorders and given tranquilizing drugs to quell their masculine urges.

Yet, for all this effort put into taming men, society seems to be as violent as ever. Mass shootings in schools, churches, and other locations are so common that it’s difficult even to notice them anymore. The President, after being nearly assassinated twice, is insisting that violent crime has gotten so bad in major cities that the National Guard is needed to straighten things out. We’re simultaneously told that men’s testosterone levels have never been lower, and that it’s no longer safe to walk the streets around our homes and businesses. It’s true that the vast majority of violent criminals are male, but in an increasingly feminized society where unprecedented numbers of young men identify as gay or transgender, it’s hard to see how masculinity can be the culprit.

Just look at photos of any recent mass shooter. They tend to be short, skinny, and slight of build. They look like the kind of kids more likely to be bullied than to bully others. It turns out, there may be a reason for that. Dr. James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who has spent his whole career working with violent criminals in maximum security prisons, has written several books trying to understand the kinds of things that could drive someone to commit some of the most heinous murders on record. In Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic he identifies several factors common to these kinds of crimes.

One common motivator is shame; society’s most brutal killers often feel that they are being ridiculed and laughed at behind their backs. They kill their victims to, symbolically or actually, silence accusations that they are weak, pathetic, unworthy, or in some way inadequate. Often, acts of violence are an expression of control in an otherwise uncontrollable world. A serial killer may be a failure in his career, in his love life, in his education, or any other aspirations he may have, but he can at least exert control over his victims. Through violence, he asserts himself as an active participant in life.

I’ve long believed that this explains the motivation behind most school shootings.

Schools are unique in that they are inescapable, a feature not found in any other civil institution apart from prisons. A child may find his academic failures humiliating, his classmates merciless and cruel, his teachers condescending, and his coursework stressful, but he is forced to go back day after day, year after year. In the workplace, at least, an adult who finds his situation intolerable can quit and look for another job. The child trapped in an unhappy school environment has no such option. Nor, for many kids, is there much of a respite at home. I routinely see young people marvelling with disbelief, and a little fear, when told that previous generations were allowed to run around outside unsupervised for hours at a time, their parents often not knowing where they were until the street lights came on and it was time for dinner. Such childhood freedom is unheard of today. Is it any wonder that, like a cornered animal, some kids choose to lash out, just as a way of regaining some agency in their lives?

Similarly, the recent shootings we’ve seen targeting executives at United Healthcare and Blackstone, the attack on the CDC, and even the assassination attempts against Donald Trump are understandable if we view them as outpourings of frustration against systems—political, medical, and corporate—where people feel they have no options and no way of affecting change. The fact that Luigi Mangione received such widespread praise and support for his violent actions shows that this sentiment is disturbingly common among Americans.

Progressives believe that violence is the result of poverty, and that if the government would only provide food, housing, health care, and a basic income to every citizen, no one would have any reason to kill or steal. But several of the killers in Gilligan’s books were completely cared for by wives, mothers, and other family members, at the times of their crimes. Prisons are among the most violent places in the world, despite the fact that the inmates don’t have to worry about feeding or housing themselves. It is the situation of being humiliatingly dependent on others that leads to shame and, ultimately, violence.

Violence, at least not the kind of horrific murders that rise far above the level of petty theft, is not caused by poverty, but rather by a feeling of helplessness, a lack of agency, and a perceived inability to affect the world in any way. The kind of socialist utopia progressives dream of where everyone is cared for and the government is in charge of every decision will only worsen the problem by stripping citizens of their independence.

One of my favorite quotes comes from libertarian Thomas Szasz: “The proverb warns, don’t bite the hand that feeds you. But perhaps you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.”

I would suggest that not only should people rebel against an authority that takes away their autonomy, but that they inevitably will. Those who feel that their life has become a cage will sooner or later attempt to break open the bars, and when they do it is liable to be in the bloodiest way imaginable.

Instead of trying to build a society in which everyone is comfortable at all times, what we should be striving for is to empower individuals to take control of their own destinies, to make their own choices, to take risks, in short, to be the masters of their own lives. Of course, not everyone will succeed, but the freedom to try and, when unsuccessful, try again will give life a sense of purpose that it’s impossible to recreate from the safety of your couch. If we want to reduce violence in America, the answer is not armed stormtroopers on every corner. It’s reminding young people—especially young men—that life is still worth living and that, in the words of John Connor, there’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.

The post Lack of Agency Leads to Violence appeared first on Free the People.

The topic of discussion was how to make libertarian ideas attractive to those not already in the movement, those who Kibbe calls the Liberty Curious, not just through words but through actions. This is an important subject because libertarians are notoriously esoteric in their communication styles and prone to counterproductive infighting. While the other panelists have been active participants in the liberty movement for many years, Dr. Weinstein is a relatively new voice speaking out in favor of freedom, and therefore represents a good test case for how our messaging can either attract or alienate others who might be sympathetic to our cause.

A self-described progressive who spent most of his life highly skeptical of libertarianism, Weinstein now charitably admits that he was a little rash in this judgment, and that there is more value in the ideology than he initially supposed. He’s not exactly a convert, not yet, but he’s Liberty Curious enough to have conversations with prominent libertarian thinkers and explore the ideas with an open mind. For this, I have tremendous respect for him.

During the panel, Weinstein challenged the other speakers as being too rigid in their opposition to government regulations. He agreed that most world governments, including that of the United States, are malignant and need to be drastically reformed, but he argued that governments can be good insofar as their rules expand freedom rather than restrict it. To make this point, he gave the example of the regulation that requires drivers to drive on the right side of the road. By imposing a uniform standard on roads, traffic flows more smoothly, more quickly, and more safely, expanding the individual’s freedom to travel in ways that easily trump the hypothetical right to drive on whichever side of the road you want. The other panelists enthusiastically agreed with this point, and it’s not hard to see why. Libertarians do not oppose order, organization, governance (as opposed to government) or even regulation (in the sense of “to make regular”). They merely oppose the coercive force of the state to accomplish these things.

Having secured the support of the panel, Weinstein then extrapolated from his point about roads that libertarians ought to be united in championing any policies that maximize liberty, even if they come from the government, and be willing to make common cause with anyone who does the same.

Here, I think Weinstein is making a slight error. I confess that I find it hard to disagree with his point about driving on the right side of the road (although in an ideal world I would prefer that road rules be determined by market competition, which has the potential to yield better and more efficient results than a top-down imposition from the state). But the word “maximize” started to set off alarm bells in my economist brain. Of course, it seems obvious that anyone calling himself a libertarian should want to maximize liberty, right? Not so fast. Like many things that sound good, this statement runs into some problems when put under scrutiny.

In order to maximize anything, you have to have a way to measure it. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing whether a particular policy moves you closer to or further from your goal. But there is no unit of measurement for liberty. You can’t plug freedom into an equation and determine whether the sums on either side of the equals sign add up. So while Weinstein’s driving example seems pretty clear, you do not have to go far for the waters to get very murky indeed. For example, keeping with the theme of roads, it would be easy to use Weinstein’s logic to argue that government should build and maintain highways. The existence of these highways greatly expands liberty by allowing easy, fast, and efficient travel for individuals, and for goods to be transported from all over the world. However, highways are financed by taxation, which involves the government taking people’s money without their consent (what would be called theft in any other context), which somewhat reduces their liberty. How do we balance these two competing effects? The amount of money each individual has to personally pay for a highway is small, while the benefit he receives is large, but can we definitively say that one outweighs the other? Without a common unit of account, I don’t think it’s possible. Such a cost-benefit analysis also ignores the possibility that privatized roads have the potential to yield the same benefits at a lower cost, both financially and in terms of the coercion used in taxation.

This has always seemed to me the core problem with utilitarianism. The goal of maximizing utility is doomed to fail since it is not possible to compare one person’s utility function with another’s. In short, because there’s no such thing as a “util”. More importantly, utilitarianism makes it possible to justify seemingly unjustifiable things, like the famous example in which a doctor is asked to kill one healthy person and distribute his organs to save the lives of five sick patients. If five lives are worth more than one, it’s hard to see how such a ghoulish practice could be opposed from a utilitarian standpoint.

The same problem manifests in Weinstein’s liberty maximization framework. Would a policy that enslaves one person to increase the freedom of five, or ten, or a hundred others be justified? How do we measure the lost freedom of the slave against the gained freedoms of others? I worry that this approach has the potential to trap libertarians into supporting some very unlibertarian things. If, on the other hand, one has a deontological stance that slavery is always wrong, the problem no longer exists. It doesn’t matter how beneficial the work of the slave may be to others. No ends can justify the means of enslavement.

After the panel, I asked Dr. Weinstein whether he considers himself a utilitarian and prompted him to think about this problem. He answered that he was not, but that in most situations he tended to behave like one. He then acknowledged the validity of my objection, but said that maximizing liberty should be aspirational with the recognition that it cannot always be perfectly applied in the real world. I appreciate the answer and accept that sometimes reality forces you to make compromises, but I do not think Weinstein has yet fully grappled with the drawbacks of a utilitarian approach to libertarianism.

I have been a fan of Dr. Weinstein for some time, and am thrilled that he is approaching our movement with an open mind, and so none of what I’ve said is meant to be a rebuke. Nor am I imposing a purity test on Weinstein in order to determine whether he is worthy to join with libertarians. I merely wish to point out the flaws with a liberty-maximizing conception of policy, and how I believe this mental framework is one of the hurdles preventing Weinstein from fully understanding or accepting the libertarian worldview. The panel concluded with a somewhat humorous discussion of what constitutes a “real” libertarian, a mythical beast nearly impossible to spot in the wild. I find it somewhat ironic that Weinstein’s criteria as outlined above, though seemingly logical and uncontroversial, would exclude me from that category.

The post Libertarianism 2.0: Should We Attempt to Maximize Liberty? appeared first on Free the People.

For the past week or so, much of our nation’s political discussion has centered around two issues: the bombing of the Houthis in Yemen and ICE’s detention and deportation of students accused of supporting the terrorist organization Hamas. From a libertarian perspective, there are good objections to both these policies. Trump was elected largely on a platform of America First, meaning no more Middle East interventionism and endless foreign wars, among other things. The latest strikes in Yemen have targeted buildings in residential neighborhoods and have killed more than fifty people so far, including children and other civilians.

Now, call me old fashioned, but I still think that the deliberate targeting of civilians, raining down death and destruction on women and children who have nothing to do with any shipping disputes, is pretty evil. When that kind of thing happens on American soil, we use words like “murder” and “terrorism” to describe such acts. But today, when I or other libertarians voice these concerns, they are invariably met with a dismissive sneer from Trump loyalists who refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing on the part of their fearless leader. “It’s war,” they tell me. “People die in war. Get over it.”

It's called collateral damage. War is hell.

— AvoidTheVoid (@AvoidTheeVoid) March 28, 2025

Yes it would be valid as an act of war if you can kill the enemy you do it. Did you think firebombing Dresden or Tokyo was only getting soilders? War isn't a game last I checked.

— WhiskeyJack (@AnasurimborKell) March 28, 2025

How can you be a grown up man and still be surprised about how war works

— Bag Holder (@Btico19) March 28, 2025

I suppose the most obvious retort to this kind of talk is that the government’s military action in Yemen is not war. Wars have to be declared by Congress, pursuant to Article I of the United States Constitution. Since no such declaration has been made, then unilateral executive action to bomb buildings overseas does not meet the legal definition of a war. I can understand, however, how this could be considered needless pedantry on my part. After all, Congress has not formally declared a war since the 1940s, instead preferring to rely on more nebulous Authorizations for the Use of Military Force for military conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

But even supposing I grant the premise that we are at war with Yemen, what then? Do the rules of morality, of decency, of humanity, no longer apply? Does using the word “war” somehow change the killing of children from an unforgivable criminal act into an acceptable means of achieving a military end? It would appear that, at least in the minds of many Americans, this is indeed the case. And if uttering a single word can miraculously render an otherwise criminal act morally justified, that must make “war” the most potent magical incantation since “abracadabra.”

Similarly, many libertarians are troubled by the lack of due process in the recent wave of deportations targeting immigrants who have expressed views critical of Israel and its treatment of Gaza. Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year old Ph.D. student living in the U.S. legally, was picked up by plainclothes policemen, her visa status revoked, and is currently being detained in an ICE facility in Louisiana. She has not been charged with any crime, and while Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims she has been involved with disruptive activity in support of Hamas terrorists, without any kind of due process no evidence has been presented to support these allegations. All we know for sure is that she wrote an op-ed critical of the Israeli government, an activity apparently no longer protected under the First Amendment. This comes shortly after the deportation of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil for similarly unproven accusations of terrorist sympathies.

Of course, no sensible person would oppose removing violent terrorists from our country, but without due process there is no way to actually know whether any of these people have actually done what they are being accused of. They might be bad people, as Rubio claims, but as long as the government is allowed to simply make people disappear at will, we’ll never know. What’s more, there’s no limiting principle that would prevent Rubio or other government officials from using the same tactics on any immigrant. If an accusation without evidence is enough to justify deportation, then no one is safe, and I for one don’t trust the Feds to always tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Here again, however, when libertarians make this point they are met with indignant cries of “there’s no time for due process when we’re at war!” It’s unclear what war people who make this sort of claim are referring to. Some seem to be under the impression that we are at war with Hamas, making the all too common mistake of confusing the American and Israeli governments as a single entity. Others try to frame immigration itself (both legal and illegal) as an “invasion,” employing military language as an attempt to justify drastic action. Then again, maybe this is all part of the vaguely-defined War on Terror that the U.S. has apparently been fighting since 2001. Is that still going on? Is there any way to tell?

Flexing its supernatural abilities again, the word “war” has magically made one of the most cherished American rights go poof! It has also made a worrying number of “rule of law” conservatives comfortable with unilateral action by federal agents to detain, indefinitely hold, and eventually deport legal residents without demonstrating any kind of wrongdoing whatsoever.

We’ve spent the last 4 years talking about what was seen as a literal invasion. Literally, not figuratively. Due process does not apply. This is not Law & Order. This is War.

— Sonza the Gnome (@Sonza_the_Gnome) March 28, 2025

Perhaps this ability to suspend morality, the law, and even the Constitution is why the term “war” is so frequently employed by presidents eager to expand their powers. LBJ had the War on Poverty and the War on Crime, Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs, and of course George W. Bush gave us the War on Terror. These wars are convenient because they require no formal declarations, have no victory conditions, and can go on indefinitely all while providing a rationalization for any number of deplorable and extra-constitutional actions.

In reality, however, just calling something a war doesn’t change anything. This is evident if we try to apply the standards government sets for itself to individual actions. If I declare war on my neighbors, that doesn’t give me the right to blow up their house or kill their children. The excuse “but it was war” would go no further in a court of law than when delusional people try to claim sovereign citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes. That’s because we all recognize, even if we pretend not to, that inflicting death and destruction on others is wrong, no matter what label we apply to it.

“War” is not actually a magic word, and employing it has no real effect on the rights and wrongs of any given situation. What it does have, however, is the ability to hypnotize voters into no longer caring about the lives or basic rights of their fellow human beings.

The post “War”—The Magic Word that Justifies Anything appeared first on Free the People.

Both of these viewpoints overlook the fact that, for many around the world, America is still synonymous with self-determination. It is of course true that the United States is far from perfect, but contrasted with many of the socialist and fascist regimes that still exist around the world, it should come as no surprise that the country is still viewed as a beacon of hope for those struggling under the yoke of tyranny and despotism. For these people—and they are plentiful—America is not a place to collect welfare checks, traffic drugs or, heaven forbid, eat people’s pets. It’s a place to live and work in freedom, to live a life that they choose instead of one that is chosen for them.

Free the People’s film The Free Life: Portrait of an Artist tells the story of one such immigrant, the celebrated painter Carlos Luna who was forced to flee his home in Cuba or else face brutal repercussions from the censorious Castro regime. Luna was unable to keep his views about his government to himself, expressing his opinions in passionate and vivid colors the way all good artists should. Yet, for the crime of speaking his mind, he had to run for his life.

Carlos came to America not just for economic opportunity, although he has certainly found plenty of that, but because he wanted to live in a country where he would be free to paint whatever he wished. In today’s world of oversaturated consumerism, it’s easy to forget how precious, and how rare, that fundamental freedom is. Indeed, for most of history, artists put themselves at risk by daring to express views in conflict with those of their rulers, and even today there is no shortage of would-be totalitarians censoring art, music, and literature that doesn’t support their narratives.

Carlos’s story shows that the American Dream is alive and well, as he and his wife Claudia have found in America not only a place to exist, but a place to thrive. It’s an inspirational tale that we hope will make you rethink some of your preconceptions, however you feel about immigration and social mobility in the United States today.

Previously only seen at film festivals or in private screenings, The Free Life is now available for anyone to watch at watch.freethepeople.org. For a one-time fee of $9.99 (less than the price of a movie ticket) you’ll be able to watch the emotional story of a talented and passionate man building a better life for himself, his family, and his art. By watching this film, you’ll also be helping Free the People continue to document and promote stories like Carlos’, reaching out to the liberty curious and reminding the next generation that, despite what the election season ads might say, there is still plenty of hope and optimism left in this great country.

The post The Free Life: Rehabilitating the American Dream appeared first on Free the People.