The Friends of Freedom are getting beaten like a rented mule in Washington. At least that’s my view from the trenches. I debated this topic with my old friends Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling of the Future of Freedom Foundation. The podcast should be good for some laughs, maybe.
Here are a few of my comments from the podcast (edited lightly):
“We are constantly falling further back as we’re fighting for freedom. If you look at the battle lines we had in the mid-1990s at the time Future of Freedom Foundation was created, we were fighting things like asset forfeiture, the minimum wage, some of the trade regulations.
“And since then, we’ve had to fight against things like torture and the US government completely destroying foreign nations and just a vast increase in surveillance and intrusion here and the near total destruction of the 4th Amendment.
“All three of us have been looking for defensive lines that we can hold to kind of at least slow the onslaught of a Leviathan, but I don’t think we’ve found them.”
Richard Ebeling replied that people should retain confidence in the eventual triumph of pro-freedom ideas.
I replied: “I enjoyed your recent piece on John Maynard Keynes and how his General Theory book was received. There were great criticisms by some of the top economists in the world, but that failed to stop Keynes’ very bad book from becoming orthodoxy for the entire Western world. It may be the ideas that drive things, but it seems like in the case of Keynes and his general theory, there was nothing to side-rail incredibly bad ideas that have been failing for thousands of years because those ideas were profitable for politicians.”
“You turn back the clock 35 years, and there was so much more open support for individual liberty and peace in the nation’s editorial pages and in leading pundits than there is nowadays. Even in the last 10 years, the prevailing values among the columnists and opinion makers have shifted further against freedom. We have to go back till 1980 before there was a major party presidential candidate who promised to revive American freedom. Donald Trump never did that. He said he’d make America great again, which I guess the important thing is to name everything after Trump…. So much of what has driven the outlets for, editorial pages, stuff like that, has been foreign policy and support for foreign conflicts and support for foreign governments that are aggressors.”
Discussing the scant backlash on Capitol Hill against Trump’s war on Iran, I said: “Members of Congress are not a good moral proxy for the nation because they tend to be bought and depraved. Most of them don’t read, literally don’t read anything. And, they’re just waiting, they’re like a whore on the street corner waiting for the highest bidder.”
Jacob mentioned that things were not going well but that they could “turn on a dime.”
I said, “Yes, like they turned on a dime and got far worse six years ago with the COVID lockdowns. And then with the vaccine mandates for the experimental vaccines and all the other restrictions and shutting down schools and businesses and most of American life that were complete BS. And the government was lying up and down. And now Covid Czar Tony Fauci got a pardon. It’s good that Trump’s people are trying to dig out some of the [Covid policy abuses] facts on this, but it’s amazing how much BS the government got away from. And so many people were comforted by that. I’ve talked before about my experience [during the lockdowns] when I was walking out on the C&O Canal towpath. People would be screaming at me because I wasn’t wearing a face mask. I said to them: ‘Tell it to your therapist.'”
On the bright side, Jacob, Richard, and I continue fighting on the same side of the battle lines. And there are many other fine folks and organizations also fighting back against Leviathan.
screenshot from the video: 
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