Fall in New England is like stepping into a painting—one that refuses to fade no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Crisp mornings. Golden light. Nature ablaze in radiant beauty. Last week, this Floridian packed a few sweaters and happily indulged—thanks to the good folks at New England College who invited me to spend the day with them. The audience wasn’t huge, but the conversation was real. That’s New Hampshire for you. And I can’t help but love it.
The invite came from Professor Nathan Shrader—one of those mythic creatures Gen Xers occasionally reference—a man who’s worked for politicians on both sides of the aisle and still remembers when we were humans first, Americans second, and partisans a distant third. His is simply a love of the game. And, I suppose, of the system and the country that allows for it.
There are a great many things to admire about Nate . . . an infectious personality, curiosity, and an ever-growing sticker and memorabilia collection . . . but here’s the one that struck me most: he’s a real teacher in an era that’s all-too-often forgotten what that looks like.
You see, Nate and I likely don’t agree on much politically. But you wouldn’t have known that for the twelve plus hours we happily spent together. Not only did he assign my book as required reading for his students, he went out of his way to ensure they had every opportunity to speak with me directly, to engage—and to wrestle—with the ideas I present.
In a world that trains students on what to think, this is a professor who’s instead confidently teaching them how to think.
And giving them the tools.
I’ll state the obvious: the world needs more Nathan Shraders.
And I have a sneaky feeling that, if the faculty I met is any indication, Henniker New Hampshire is hiding a whole bunch of them.
Of course, Nate and I do share a mutual understanding of something that matters far more than politics: the foundational human realities—moral, spiritual, and relational—that exist and shape us before any government or ideology gets a say. In other words, the pre-political.
Anyone who knows me knows that my interest lies in the timeless over the temporal. And I’m increasingly encouraged by a new generation beginning to feel the same.
Below is the talk I gave to the students at NEC—riffing off the state motto. Live Free or Die is certainly ripe for the taking, but I chose it because longtime radio host and all-around solid human, Jeff Chidester, was also there. For Jeff, Live Free or Die isn’t a slogan—it’s an orientation. A refusal to trade truth for comfort, or liberty for illusion.
Jeff and I speak often on-air—most recently, about how America can heal. You can listen to that conversation here.
Live Free or Die.
Most people stop there. But, of course, John Stark’s full line, written in 1809, was: Live free or die: death is not the worst of evils. He sent it as a toast to his fellow soldiers, who knew all too well what he meant.
Do we?
You’ve been told your generation is the freest in history. You can say anything, study anything, be anything. You can sleep with anyone, travel anywhere, and make money any way you want. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: almost everything sold as freedom has actually stripped away your liberty. Your sovereignty.
You want to know why it feels as though there’s no longer a path towards the ownership of anything, never mind your futures? It’s because you’re not as free as you think. Not because of some shadowy cabal or dystopian conspiracy—though, hey, those exist too—but because of something sneakier: the inversions we allow to permeate our society.
Whether we’re talking about politics, culture, or daily life, the world doesn’t make sense—because it’s no longer built on truth. We’ve replaced natural law with legal fictions, replaced virtue with identity, and replaced reason with control. We’ve stopped acknowledging that liberty comes from personal sovereignty and that it’s about more than just rights. So often, it’s the freedom to do what we should.
In an inverted world, truth is seen as heretical. Clarity is rebellion. Sanity, somehow subversive.
Today, the entire definition—the meaning of the individual—has become perverted. Inverted. How many times have you heard people talk about individual extremism? It now seems to stand for the height of personal indulgence in a way that none dare speak against, while simultaneously reclassifying the individual into collective groups based on traits: trans, black, female, and so on.
But, of course, the individual is something very different. Something more.
We understand the paradoxical beauty of the individual as the smallest minority, made in the image of its creator, and endowed with unalienable rights, responsibilities, and opportunities. And finding fulfillment in communion. In sacrificial service—both to humanity and to that which transcends it. Ultimately, to God.
And if we’re comfortable with this paradoxical nature of the individual, we don’t need to fall prey to the current lies and inversion of its true nature.
We can instead reflect on the wisdom that’s come before us and recognize the voluntary embrace of discipline as the path to authentic freedom. Liberty. Personal sovereignty.
Why do I talk about personal sovereignty? Freedom typically refers to the absence of external constraints, but personal sovereignty goes further—it emphasizes the additional importance of self-mastery and responsibility. It’s the conscious exercise of our power to make values-aligned choices, rather than being swayed by societal expectations or external pressures.
Personal sovereignty is, of course, only experienced through that which is good—through doing that which is good. Acquiescing to our own desires is the very definition of slavery.
We humans used to know this.
I talk a lot in my book about words and their inversions. About the importance of words. Let me give you an example that’s not in my book, but that goes to the very heart of our discussion: passion.
In its most ancient philosophical sense, the term “passion” derives from the Greek pathos, which means “suffering,” “what is suffered,” or “that which happens to one.” And it’s worth noting that, etymologically, pathos evokes passivity—a state of being acted upon, undergone, or afflicted, rather than active agency.
This is a far cry from the modern connotation of ownership of our enthusiasm or zeal.
Plato knew this as the soul’s battlefield: desires, fears, angers, and pleasures that arise involuntarily and which our rational self must contend with before we can ever achieve virtue and harmony. Forget liberation, unchecked pathos enslaves, turning freedom into subjugation to impulse. Passion is our struggle against our lower nature, and its subordination frees the soul from devolving into tyranny by its own appetites.
That was Plato.
Aristotle attempted to soften the edges, but agreed wholeheartedly that the freedom to do anything was slavery. The Stoics, likewise, echoed these themes. And the Christian Church defines passions theologically as the disordered and sinful inclinations of the soul—distortions of natural desires caused by the Fall—that enslave us to uncontrolled impulses and vices, pulling the person away from union with God and true freedom in virtue.
So, how about today in our inverted world? In our world, passion has been sanitized into a feel-good buzzword: those electric, often erotic surges of emotion we’re told to chase like a personal North Star, all upside and no warning label. It’s the emotional equivalent of a sugar rush—intense, validating, and culturally sanctified as the path to authenticity and success.
How often have you heard the advice of discovering and pursuing your passions?
When was the last time you chased a passion and woke up a little emptier?
It’s a glossy rebrand that, like all inversions, flips the script—and plays to our base desires for instant gratification and taking the easy way out.
Well, guess what? There is no easy way out from where we are today.
The world is sick. It’s in need of salvation.
Do you know what the original Greek meaning of the word salvation is? It’s a restoration to health, wholeness, and well-being.
It’s not meant to be a get-into-heaven-free card; a one and done.
It’s a continuous process of pulling us from brokenness back into health and integrated harmony. And our society is in desperate need of it. We haven’t just broken God’s laws, we’ve broken their diminutive that our country was built on—nature’s laws.
Let’s go back to that original list so you can see it in your own life.
You’re told you can say anything. But, can you?
Cancel culture is real.
Universities across the land set up “safe spaces” where certain views can be expressed that might not be well received.
Algorithms continue to censor and deplatform us.
We’re still emerging from an age crafted by our own governments of information terrorism, where mis-, dis-, and mal-information were classified by the US Department of Homeland Security as forms of terrorism and earning those who peddle them the classification of “domestic threat actors.” Mal-information, by the way, is defined as true—just not used in an approved manner.
Land of the free.
After years of the right attempting to teach the left about how there is no such thing under our American constitution as “hate speech”, the current Attorney General recently said that there is. Does she know better? Of course she does. But in our inverted world, those in power always seek to silence those who disagree with them.
We don’t get to codify our own beliefs. That’s not America.
Real freedom—real liberty—is understanding that the speech that’s most worth protecting is that which we hate the most.
If we lose free discourse, dialogue, and intellectual engagement, well, I’m not sure what we have. But it’s not worth defending.
We sit here today in a college—a special place filled with old books and fresh ambition. I said you could study anything. But, can you?
How many of you selected your major because it’s most likely to lead to a good job. How many of you took certain courses because you felt like you had to?
Education is the intellectual foundation for who we are as human beings. Education isn’t preparation for life. It is life. And it doesn’t end with a diploma. It’s a lifelong posture of humility before the mystery of existence.
James Madison taught that the advancement and diffusion of knowledge was the only guardian of true liberty. Why? Liberty is not possible without knowledge, because freedom requires judgment—and judgment requires understanding.
Sadly, education has long transitioned from its formative and foundational role to mere skills training—and woefully inefficient skills training at that.
How many of you have paths of study dictated by AI? Trying to outrun it.
If a machine can take your job on day one, is that a tech problem or an education problem? Are the humans at the helm of today’s companies thinking from first principles? From any principles?
As a society, we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that the goal of education is to make our kids fit for the world, when really it should be ensuring their ability to stand apart from it—especially when the world loses its mind.
A person who is not formed will be con-formed. Formation is not optional—only who does the forming is.
When we can’t reason clearly, read widely, or think deeply, we become easy to manipulate. Education, of course, is the long defeat of propaganda. An interior anchoring—so we can remain steady when everything external shifts.
We’ve lost the basics: logic, literacy, and civic awareness. And that’s why the world feels so upside-down: not only do we struggle to understand it, but we lack the tools—and the confidence—to fix it. To do the requisite hard work of active citizenship in a society built on liberty.
AI doesn’t fix this. It compounds it.
In the coming era, education is likely to become a luxury of desire rather than means. Are we instilling the philosophical hunger to pursue it? Do we have it ourselves?
Of course, it’s not merely about the recitation of facts; it’s about learning how to think, how to see. True education reveals the structure, beauty, and order of the world—and our place in it.
Goethe said only fools ask questions wise men answered long ago.
Let’s go back to our friend, Plato. This time from his dialogue, Phaedrus, where Socrates is recounting an ancient Egyptian myth. Theuth, the god of invention, is presenting his discoveries to King Thamus, who is evaluating them—praising some, critiquing others for their potential harms.
Now, Theuth had a pretty good track record. According to the myths, he was the inventor of arithmetic, calculation, geometry, and astronomy, just to name a few.
But when he presented the king with the written word, telling him it would aid in memory and would make the Egyptians wiser, it was the king who had the real wisdom.
Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Sound familiar?
Education is how a society remembers. Without it, we are cut off from the accumulated wisdom—and mistakes—of those who came before. We become amnesiacs, doomed to rediscover truths the hard way.
Going back to our list, how about be anything? Are you free to be anything? Yeah, that’s a hard no. And I won’t even touch on the absurdities of gender.
Who here has tried to start a small business or side gig only to be stymied by credential gatekeeping? Or by regulations?
“Do you have your papers?”
In many states you need hundreds or thousands of hours of government-approved training just to braid hair, paint nails, or cut grass. Freedom of enterprise exists in theory, but in practice, you need permission slips.
So, you can’t run a business without a permission slip—I’m sorry, license—from the government. But, you can sleep with anyone.
That one is actually true. But comes at one hell of a price.
It felt like liberation from old taboos. Free, instant gratification. No applications. No bureaucracy.
But also no depth. No meaning. No societal cohesion.
Today, only half of US adults are married. And that matters. It’s no coincidence that the destruction of the family was a significant plank of the communist manifesto.
When you destroy the family, you don’t just shatter homes—you dismantle the last line of self-rule. Capable of standing alone. Strong. Sovereign.
And in that void? Power doesn’t scatter. It consolidates—at the feet of the state, dolling out scraps to keep us compliant.
How about the freedom to travel anywhere? With papers, sure.
Courts have ruled that the governments have a right to restrict your right to travel, as long as they leave you with an alternative means, like a bus. You take a lot of cross-country busses lately?
Today, our federal government is enforcing the Real ID Act, which establishes federal standards for state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards—under the guise of preventing terrorism and fraud (as if those are sufficient reasons to strip our natural rights).
Have a star on your license? That’s RealID: your friendly neighborhood de facto national identification system, enabling widespread government tracking and data sharing. Available soon as a convenient phone app—don’t leave home without it.
All of this is done under the guise of protecting us. Not what government is for.
But it does bring us to the last one on our list: the freedom to make money any way you want.
You already know this one’s not true.
Let’s start with the paternalistic protection that dictates that only qualified investors—meaning those with a net worth over $1 million dollars or meeting other similar criteria—are free to invest in private securities. The president has signed an Executive Order directing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor to look into remedying that fact, but today it stands.
And even if it is remedied for investors, try starting a business where you want to take in investment. It’s cost prohibitive, thanks to burdensome regulation.
We can’t talk money without at least touching on Bretton Woods.
The world that we’ve all grown up, lived and operated under our whole lives has been a product of the post-WWII Bretton Woods conference, right here in New Hampshire. And there are two things that are really important to understand about Bretton Woods, because they contributed to everything you’re feeling about money today.
The first is that Bretton Woods didn’t just make the dollar dominant—it made trust in U.S. governance the new gold standard. Other nations didn’t hold gold. They held claims on American promises. That’s a subtle, but massive shift—from intrinsic value to geopolitical leverage.
The second is that governments have since operated under the assumption they have the right—and the ability—to continually engineer their domestic economies.
Of course, it hasn’t gone well. Because what we really did was reintroduce central planning—just with a Western face. Anytime the few try to engineer value for the many, distortions are inevitable. And those distortions don’t go away. They accumulate.
No one alive today has ever seen a free market. No one.
No one alive today has ever seen true capitalism. Which likely contributes to the monster that today bears capitalism’s name having a mere 54% favorability rating according to Gallup.
Wealth inequality is off the charts.
According to Federal Reserve data, the top 1% of Americans hold 30.8% of total net worth, and the top 10% own two-thirds (approximately 66%). Skip down to the bottom 50%, and, well, they collectively hold just 2.5% of total net worth.
The U.S. is now experiencing wealth inequality levels that we haven’t seen since the 1920s—not a period of history worth repeating.
How about debt? Americans hold staggering amounts of debt for many reasons, not least because of the circular logic we teach: take on debt to build credit, build credit to qualify for essentials like houses and cars. But this assumes debt is the only path to creditworthiness and asset ownership, which isn’t true. This mindset gains even more traction when the ultra-wealthy tout debt as a tool for leverage, and lower-income earners try to mimic their strategy. Don’t get me wrong, debt can be a powerful tool. But only if you control it, not the other way around. If you couldn’t pay cash tomorrow, you shouldn’t be borrowing today. That’s not leverage—that’s a liability.
In a fiat system, debt becomes the primary form of wealth. What we call growth is often just expansion of debt. And we do it all in some twisted pursuit of GDP.
Student loans? GDP boost. Housing bubble? GDP savior. Corporate bloat? GDP godsend.
Today’s society isn’t just broke—it’s broken. You can’t have a functioning society where people can’t buy homes, send their kids to school, start them off in life without massive debt. It’s been reported that the average young person in Gen Z has over $94 thousand dollars in debt already.
This is unsustainable. But then, so is a country that sits $37 trillion dollars in debt.
We’ve mistaken access for ownership, and it’s not just dangerous—it’s inverted, turning citizens into renters of their own future and playing into the feudalization of everything that now surrounds us.
It’s one thing to realize this as an adult, but quite another to realize it in your youth. Unemployment among recent college graduates has surged to over 5.5% or higher this year, outpacing the national average for the first time in decades.
It’s heartbreaking. But more importantly, it’s dangerous. If we don’t fix this, society won’t like what comes next. But, you already know that.
So, how do we fix this polycrisis we find ourselves mired in? How do we really fix it? Not just put a Band-Aid on it.
I have a feeling everyone here is fed up with platitudes and false promises.
So, let’s talk truth. Timeless truth.
Because that’s what matters. It’s the way out of today’s tribalism—today’s polycrisis.
Take natural law.
Natural law is the simple but profound belief that there is a Creator behind the universe, and that this divine being has set an immutable moral order into the fabric of reality. It means there’s a right and wrong that transcends time, culture, or government decree—an objective moral law that we can discern through reason and conscience.
It’s grounded in our innate human capacity for truth and common sense. Natural law isn’t elitist or academic. It doesn’t require advanced study. It’s self-evident. Accessible to everyone. And it forms the moral foundation for any society that hopes to remain free.
Natural law goes hand-in-hand with something called public virtue.
Public virtue is the idea that a free society can only work if individuals voluntarily do the right thing—not because they’re told to, but because they choose to. It’s the basic understanding that a selfish and corrupt people are incapable of self-government.
The freedom to do what you should.
See, the thing about virtue is that it can’t be mandated or forced. It must come from our free will. We must voluntarily sacrifice our own perceived best interests at times for the good of others.
Passing laws requiring good behavior or punishing the bad doesn’t do it – it simply invites more laws and regs followed by the bureaucrats necessary to enforce them. Fast forward a few generations, and what you’re left with isn’t freedom at all. It’s the tangled web of protections we find ourselves with today – protecting us from each other instead of the government merely protecting our rights because we as strong, sovereign individuals are capable of the rest ourselves.
Public virtue is why we separate church and state, but not religion and state.
Religion and state are very much intertwined. To understand this, we have to first properly define religion in the context of civics.
Religion can be thought of in this context as a fundamental system of beliefs concerning man’s origin and relationship to the cosmic universe as well as his relationship to his fellowmen. This is different than morality, which can be thought of as a standard of behavior distinguishing right from wrong.
Religion is a step up from basic morality and makes us better citizens because it instills in us the virtue required for freedom to prosper, and it secures our standing above any government.
This is why we call them negative liberties—the government can’t justly grant or control our life (think food, energy, health), liberty (that’s money, transacting, speech, privacy), and the pursuit of happiness (that’s historically seen as a mixture of property and integrity). They are undeniably and inescapably ours.
You come with rights. And don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
Even the powers ceded to government in the US Constitution are merely to protect these innate rights from infringement by other men. Hence, the moment that government is no longer serving its people by protecting our unalienable rights, it’s ripe for disruption.
Recognizing the role of religion in civics is an acknowledgment that if you believe these things to be true, not just understand that the system is predicated upon them, you will more jealously guard your unalienable rights as your own—making you a better citizen.
A transcendent moral order is foundational to any free society. Without it, we no longer understand where our rights come from. If rights don’t come from a Creator, they come from men. And men can chip away at them. Can take them away.
That’s how you lose a republic.
It’s also how we lose our basic humanity. After all, what is it that makes us equal? Take one walk out in nature and it’s pretty clear things are hierarchical. It doesn’t have anything to do with equality of outcomes, or equity—that’s socialism. And it’s not equal opportunity, as it’s often mis-conveyed.
So how did we get to this notion of equality?
Natural law—a diminutive of capital-t Truth.
Our equality is in terms of our humanity.
It’s the idea that no matter who I am and no matter who you are, we can see each other as of equal worth. That we inherently value each other as fellow humans—each made in the image of our Creator.
The ability to recognize the inherent value of your fellow citizens is key to a stable society. But when’s the last time you looked at everyone that way? At those you disagreed with that way?
You really want to fix this mess we’re in? Start by recognizing the inherent goodness and sovereignty of everyone around you. Everything else falls into place.
These things aren’t nice ideas that worked for a while at various points in the past but now it’s time to move on. Timeless truth is called that for a reason. And it’s high time we gave it an actual try.
But make no mistake, it is a threat to those who seek control.
Being independent is a threat. Choosing political freedom so that you have the space to live according to God’s rules, not man’s is a threat.
Understanding that money is similarly rightly governed by natural law is a threat. Because it becomes incredibly apparent that the system we’re living under isn’t just broken—it’s designed this way.
When we’re talking about money, what we’re really talking about is your time, your labor, your future—and who owns it.
Money is a reflection and a store of our economic energy—our mental and physical labor. Natural law tells us that not only do we have the right to that money as fruits of our labor—as our well-earned private property—but that likewise no man and no government has a right to steal it from us.
Without sound, scarce money, we break both time and truth. Inflation quietly steals the past by eroding the value of our saved labor and it distorts the future because we can’t trust the money we’re using to store value or make decisions.
When’s the last time you saw sound, scarce money?
As I always say, this is more than economic inconvenience—it’s civilizational rot. A society that lies about value is also lying about effort, outcomes, and even reality itself. These lies place everything downstream of power rather than truth. It’s a pattern you start to notice everywhere—not just with our money.
Today, we sit at a precipitous moment, as if atop a roller coaster in that last moment of suspense before the fall. The last time the world faced this choice was at the end of World War II.
We didn’t choose natural law. We didn’t choose freedom. Didn’t choose sovereignty.
High on victory, we chose empire. Wealth. Power.
The world we’ve all grown up in and operated under is known as the post-War era, and it’s complex. One-part American power and global dominance, which neocons seek to preserve, and one-part international institutional entrenchment, which globalists seek to preserve. These facets are distinct, yet we often find them overlapping with aligned interests. They’re two parts of the post-WWII American-led world whole.
This is the real uniparty many have been unable to put their finger on—it’s the post-WWII American hegemony and the systemic defense of our associated “democratic institutions” (the Blob, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, NGOs, even mainstream media are all seen as democratic institutions).
It’s the perpetuation of money and power—ultimately, at the expense of your liberty. Some of it is ideological. Globalists and neocons exist on both the left and the right. But some of it is purely convenience. It is folks realizing that their job, their wealth, their power only exist if the institutions they’re associated with exist and maintain their controlling positions.
The coming end of this American-led post-War global order has been openly acknowledged by all sides for some time. It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that America has been overseeing an economic slow liquidation and a political managed decline—both of herself and of the broader West. None would dare pretend that the current state of affairs can continue.
And so we find ourself atop that roller coaster. World War Three is at our doorstep—likely accompanied by civil wars within the Western world. Whatever form the ensuing escalation of conflict takes, there will be conflict. We’re simply at that point in history.
And we’re the generation—we’re the people—that gets to decide what’s on the other side. The next era of humanity.
These inversions need not be your inheritance. Instead, make them your inflection point. Any student of history knows: the darkest depths bring the most radiant births.
It’s time to decide. What will we choose? More importantly, who will we be?
Live free or die: death is not the worst of evils.