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Dispatches from a World Turned Upside Down

  • McConnell: “Arming Ukraine is the Number One Priority of Most Republicans.” Is it?

    The oracle has spoken, the top priority of Republicans across America is sending munitions and dollars to Ukraine. McConnell has clearly been in Washington for too long and no longer has any conception of what his voters want most, as it is certainly not fighting a quasi-war with the Russians.

  • Must We Go Abroad Searching for Monsters to Destroy?

    On Independence Day, 1821, President John Quincy Adams gave a timeless speech where he laid out the foreign policy a nation conceived should pursue: “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of…

  • Leading by Example vs The Sword: The US in the World

    Hundreds of military bases abroad. Thousands of planes. Hundreds of ships of war. Millions of men at arms. The United States commands an empire, the likes of which has never before been imagined, let alone made reality. Having surpassed the institutionalized glory of Rome, though not yet weeping for lack of nations left to conquer,…

  • The US Military, the Republican Party, and Statism

    The raising, deploying, and maintaining of standing armies is the most injurious possible development for liberty. Republicans effectively remodeled the image of our standing army to be nationalistic, pro-family, and an all-around good to camouflage the inherent negatives of large militaries. How should the libertarian and the conservative toe the line between respecting the soldiery…

  • Why Did American Conservatism Become Statist?

    Sometimes bad things happen to good ideas, such is the story of American conservatism, which got all wrapped up in statism as a result of a quirk of history which was never fixed. This quirk must be fixed, and conservatism reimagined as a fundamentally different idea committed to tradition and liberty, not to the state.

“As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual’s mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail.”

— Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism The Classical Tradition