Adapted from<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1440-super-tuesday-results-summarized-in-3-mins" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> “The Michael Knowles Show,”</a>  March 6, 2023.
There is a wild card in the presidential race, and that wild card is Bobby Kennedy Jr. — commonly known as, RFK. His father ran for president in 1968 and was assassinated while running, and his uncle was President John F. Kennedy, who was also assassinated. President Joe Biden, by the way, still will not give RFK Secret Service protection, which is just not a good look.
Originally, Bobby Kennedy Jr. was running in the Democratic primary, but he also appeals to some conservatives. He is an “ole timey” kind of Democrat, a 1960s kind who is still liberal, but the country has moved so far to the Left that some conservatives are now happy with 1960s liberalism. (I am not, but some people on the Right are.)
Being correct during COVID also helped Bobby Kennedy Jr. on the Right. Kennedy has focused on vaccines for decades now and has claimed them to not be particularly safe. During COVID, he was skeptical of Big Pharma and the medical industry, and he turned out to be proven correct in his skepticism. So, a lot of Right-wingers like him for that reason.
<div id="attachment_706969" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-706969" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-706969" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/GettyImages-1993689675-864x576.jpg" alt="GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN - FEBRUARY 10: Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poses with supporters during a meet and greet after a voter rally at St. Cecilia Music Center on February 10, 2024 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) launched billboards in Grand Rapids on Friday, hitting Kennedy Jr., alleging a Super PAC supporting him, American Values 2024, is receiving donations from a former mega-donor to former president Donald Trump. (Photo by Emily Elconin/Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/GettyImages-1993689675-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/GettyImages-1993689675-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/GettyImages-1993689675-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/GettyImages-1993689675.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Emily Elconin/Getty Images</div>
That said, he was going nowhere in the Democratic primary. He was polling 20%, but that seemed to be the ceiling, partly because the Democrat Party has much more control over its nomination process. They were not going to let him really advance, which is reminiscent of how they treated Bernie Sanders back in 2016 — except it was going to be ten times worse for Kennedy. So, Kennedy decided to run as an independent candidate because he was pulling so many Right-wing voters anyway.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1440-super-tuesday-results-summarized-in-3-mins" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h4>
Now, however, there are reports that Bobby Kennedy Jr. is considering becoming the Libertarian nominee for president. 
According to the 2012 and 2016 campaign manager for the Liberty Party presidential nominee, Ron Nielson, there is a lot of buzz going on. There is a lot of interest in Bobby Kennedy. And if he were to say he accepts the nomination of the Libertarian Party, that would probably turn a lot of heads. The Libertarian Party says there are people within the Libertarian movement who would like to help him.
So what does Kennedy say? According to <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4509804-rfk-jr-robert-f-kennedy-jr-libertarian/#:~:text=One%20source%20in%20Kennedy's%20orbit,system%2C%E2%80%9D%20the%20source%20added." target="_blank" rel="noopener">a source</a> close to Kennedy, “There is a willingness of people in the Liberty movement to consider Bobby for sure.” This particular source spoke on the condition of anonymity. The source went on to say, “He is a rogue punk rocker of the political system.” So it seems as though Kennedy is at least open to the prospect of being the Libertarian nominee.
But why would he do it? The Libertarian nominee for president is never going to win the presidency. At least if Bobby Kennedy is running this independent campaign without a political party behind him, it seems as though maybe he would have a chance — because it is unheard of and he is shaking things up. But if he is just going to become the Libertarian Party nominee, it seems as though he is just marginalizing himself.
The reason is that Kennedy wants to appear on ballots around the country, and in order to do that, he must have some party’s support — some kind of operation, a national apparatus — and he currently lacks that. The Libertarian Party is the one vehicle for him to do that, so I think it makes perfect sense for him to become the Libertarian nominee. He’s not going to run as the Green Party candidate, nor as some other party candidate. So, it seems like a natural fit.
He is, after all, a kind of libertarian. The 1960s liberals are generally libertarians today. Granted, libertarians are a very broad group. Some are neo-conservatives and others are more hardcore principled libertarians. It is a big tent. But it is a natural fit for Bobby Kennedy Jr. He is not going to be president anyway, so he might as well get as many votes as he can. Though it’s a losing proposition, I like it because I think he will pull more votes from Biden than he will from Trump.
That has been my contention the whole time, and the polls seem to have proven me correct. So, as much as I hate to say I told you so, I’m happy to do it. Good for the Libertarians, good for Bobby Kennedy, Jr., but most especially, good for the conservatives.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Makes Campaign Announcement

RFK Jr., The Presidential Race Wild Card

2024 Election

Libertarianism

Michael Knowles

Presidency

Readers Pass

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

U.S. Politics

Authorities in Germany confirmed last week that they had seized 1,700 bitcoin, currently valued at over $79 million, from a nefarious hacker. There’s only one problem: he won’t hand over the password required to access it.
The debacle raises some serious questions: How does Bitcoin encryption work? What can the police do to regulate cryptocurrency? And to what extent does digital cash render traditional governmental authority irrelevant? 
Where’s the password?
After serving a two year sentence for secretly installing malware and using other people’s  computers to “mine” bitcoin, the Bavarian cybercriminal is refusing to share his password with local authorities. Multiple attempts by police to crack the code have proven futile.
Bitcoin is stored in digital wallets, which are encrypted and entirely secure. Without a password, it is impossible to access contents, and repeated failed attempts can result in a wallet becoming irreversibly locked. “We asked him, but he didn’t say. Perhaps he doesn’t know,” Prosecutor Sebastian Murer told <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currency-germany-password/police-seize-60-million-of-bitcoin-now-wheres-the-password-idUSKBN2A511T">Reuters</a> on Friday.
With Bitcoin’s price at record highs, the wallet’s value has skyrocketed since the original arrest, only fueling the urgency of the search for its password and further demonstrating the strength of Bitcoin’s security. It also indicates the lack of power police and local authorities hold over cryptocurrency accounts.
Complete security comes with great risks
It’s not just Bavarian police who have been running into difficulties accessing digital cash. While Bitcoin’s encryption facilitates completely private and secure ownership, it can pose an enormous risk, even to its biggest holders.
Last month, Stefan Thomas, a German programmer living in San Francisco, made headlines as he closed in on the possibility of losing 7,002 bitcoin, valued at $327 million. Thomas’s wallet is locked by password, and he misplaced the paper he wrote it down on.
After eight failed attempts to log in, he only has two tries left. At ten attempts, the wallet will be inaccessible, forever. “I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Thomas <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html">told</a> the New York Times, “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”
Meanwhile in Wales, an IT engineer is in a dispute with local officials in an attempt to recover a hard drive containing over $350 million worth of bitcoin. While cleaning his home in 2013, James Howells accidentally threw the hard drive, which has since skyrocketed in value, into the trash.
 Bitcoin’s secure storage makes accessing a hard drive’s contents possible only with the physical drive in hand. Howells has been able to determine which garbage dump likely contains his hard drive, but he needs permission from the local council to excavate it. His multiple requests to the Newport City Council have all been rejected, citing environmental and funding concerns.
Howells has gone to extraordinary lengths to overturn the decision. He has secured his own funding for the excavation, with backing from a hedge fund, and is even offering to donate 25% of the hard drive’s contents to a Covid Relief Fund for his home city, but all to no avail. 
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html">According</a> to the New York Times, 20 percent of the world’s bitcoin is lost on drives or locked in wallets with lost passwords. Most appear to have been misplaced years ago when the value of Bitcoin was a fraction of what it is today. Although the stakes for recovering lost bitcoin are enormous, nothing can be done by police or Bitcoin users alike.
While Bitcoin’s privacy and security is appealing to many, Stephan Thomas <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html">warned</a> of the risk that total encryption poses: “This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put it this way: Do you make your own shoes? The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
The dangers of cryptocurrency
From its inception, Bitcoin was intended to curtail governmental oversight of private transactions by giving users complete control of their assets. No identity check is required to obtain the currency which is regulated by a decentralized network of computers rather than government power.
Anonymity, security, and decentralization have made Bitcoin popular with criminals. A 2019 <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dark-side-coin-extent-illegal-072631643.html">study</a> revealed that 28 million Bitcoin users, or about 25 percent, are primarily involved in illegal activity. It also found that about half of all Bitcoin transactions are criminal in nature. This has raised concerns among investors and policymakers alike.
In her January confirmation hearing, Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/janet-yellen-consider-limiting-cryptocurrency/">dubbed</a> blockchain-based financial networks “a particular threat,” and pledged to “examine ways in which we can curtail their use and make sure that [money laundering] does not occur through those channels.”
The nontraditional structure of cryptocurrency also makes it potentially dangerous to investors. Both the European Central Bank and Goldman Sachs <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-too-volatile-medium-exchange-goldman-sachs-says-1567705">say</a> Bitcoin is too volatile to be a medium of exchange. And, because it is not backed by any banks, they warn that investors should be prepared for the possibility of losing everything.
Cryptocurrency’s upside
Despite warnings from the financial establishment, bitcoin’s price had surged to a record $47,000 by early February. Part of that surge could be attributed to Tesla, which <a href="https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459021004599/tsla-10k_20201231.htm">purchased $1.5 billion</a> in bitcoin “to further diversify and maximize returns on [their] cash.” The company also announced its intention to accept Bitcoin as a payment method, further bolstering confidence in the currency’s legitimacy.
Public endorsements by celebrity figures from Gene Simmons to Snoop Dogg have also helped send the price soaring. Similarly, Elon Musk’s recent <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1357241340313141249">tweets</a> endorsing another cryptocurrency called Dogecoin prompted the coin to <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/tweets-from-elon-musk-and-celebrities-send-dogecoin-to-a-record-high.html">rally 37%</a> in just 24 hours. As a result, disruptive cryptocurrencies are becoming more and more mainstream.
Musk <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1357241340313141249">touted</a> Dogecoin as “the people’s crypto,” reflecting its ability to provide financial access to any individual. Gabriel Abed, an entrepreneur from Barbados echoes this sentiment. Though he found himself in a similar situation to Stephan Thomas when he lost 800 bitcoin in 2011, he is still an outspoken champion of cryptocurrency.
Before Bitcoin, most citizens of Barbados were unable to access even the most basic financial resources, such as bank accounts or credit cards. Cryptocurrency afforded locals the power to take control of their financial destiny — and even enabled Abed to buy a $25 million property on his home island. 
Abed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html">refuted</a> Thomas’ warnings about cryptocurrencies, telling The New York Times, “The risk of being my own bank comes with the reward of being able to freely access my money and be a citizen of the world — that is worth it.”
Some cryptocurrency figureheads have even sought to create a sovereign state on the foundation of a free market and libertarian ideals. The <a href="https://www.freesociety.com">Free Society Foundation</a>, founded by Olivier Janssens, is in the process of “purchasing sovereignty from a government to create the world’s first free society.&#8221;
But there are more tangible examples of how cryptocurrencies are already promoting civil liberties. For instance, Bitcoin has the power to financially liberate individuals living under authoritarian governments such as Venezuela and China, both of which wield the authority to seize assets held by citizens in traditional bank accounts.
Situations like the one in Bavaria serve as a reminder of Bitcoin’s power to disrupt traditional governmental authority. While cryptocurrencies may represent a volatile risk to investors today, they have the power to disrupt the very foundation of traditional finance. They may also hold the key to individual financial liberation, a true free market, and realization of the libertarian ideal.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

TOPSHOT-CANADA-ECONOMY-COMPUTER MINING-BITCOINS

20 Percent Of The World’s Bitcoin Is Inaccessible. Now, There’s A Race To Find It.

Bitcoin

&#8220;There are no libertarians in a global pandemic.&#8221; So goes the smug punchline of large-government advocates who point to the necessity of collective action in the face of an unprecedented global crisis. Without government, they say, we&#8217;d all be dead.
Few libertarians would disagree. The hardcore libertarians at Reason magazine aren&#8217;t spending their days fulminating over the evils of government-required lockdown orders in the face of a fast-spreading, deadly disease. That&#8217;s because they, like all other sentient human beings, recognize that collective action is sometimes necessary.
But here&#8217;s the dirty little secret: Institutional failures during this pandemic are more indicative of what our politics should be during nonpandemic situations, not the blunt-force ability of the government to shut down the global economy and force us all to stay home. The question isn&#8217;t whether government has power. Government is power. The question is how and when to apply that power. And what we&#8217;ve seen is that government sucks at everything, even the most basic things it is supposed to do well.
Democrats and the media like to pretend that government&#8217;s failures in this process aren&#8217;t endemic to government control. They like to blame such failures on Republicans, and on President Donald Trump specifically. But that&#8217;s just not the case. Human beings are fallible, stupid, gullible and self-interested. Human beings who have the power of government to back them are not less human for having that power. Their humanity just has direr consequences, which is why in nonemergency circumstances, checks and balances are absolutely necessary.
Take, for example, the early days of the pandemic. Democrats say Trump was slow to respond to the incipient threat. But so were Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently declared, &#8220;As Trump fiddles, people are dying,&#8221; but in late February, she was walking the streets of Chinatown, encouraging citizens to join her. New York Mayor Bill De Blasio has ripped Trump for his supposed downplaying of the virus, but De Blasio spent a month poo-pooing its threat. When confronted about that simple fact by CNN&#8217;s Jake Tapper, De Blasio conveniently suggested that we should stop looking backward.
Why should we trust these people, exactly?
Or take the roots of America&#8217;s inability to provide the health care resources necessary to hospitals across the country. While state and local governments were frittering away billions of dollars on useless government spending, they did precisely nothing to prepare for exactly the sort of black swan events for which governments were presumably invented.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent a month failing to produce useful tests and prevented physicians in Seattle from performing proper testing, even after President Trump issued a travel ban on China. For years in advance, members of the federal government of both parties had been warned about the need for ventilators and masks. No one produced or stockpiled them. The Food and Drug Administration&#8217;s red tape prevented the quick development of new measures to deal with the novel coronavirus.
Why should these people control our lives, when the threat of the red death isn&#8217;t hovering on our doorstep?
The government is a giant, lumbering idiot. Sometimes we need a giant, lumbering idiot. Almost always, we do not. And those who have used this pandemic response — one of the rare times we need a giant, lumbering idiot to intimidate people into preventing mass infection of one another, and to borrow the money necessary to redress the injuries thus incurred — as a rationale for a government-run &#8220;new politics&#8221; should have their heads examined.
More from Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro:<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/america-needs-a-formula-for-reopening-is-the-government-up-to-the-task">America Needs A Formula For Reopening. Is The Government Up To The Task?</a>

Nancy Pelosi

Stop Pretending Pandemic Politics Are The New Norm

Conservatism

COVID

Donald Trump

Tonight brings the year 2019 to a close. Please stay safe, everyone. And for you truly crazy masochists who will be packed like sardines tonight in New York City&#8217;s Times Square — well, as they say in the South, &#8220;bless your heart.&#8221;
This past year was an eventful one, from a political perspective. From the Covington Catholic High School media imbroglio back in January through the unveiling of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller&#8217;s much-anticipated eponymous report in April through a slew of horrific mass shootings over the dog days of the summer through House Democrats&#8217; (<a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1207731722995023872">kind of</a>/<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/us/trump-feldman-impeach.html">sort of</a>) formal impeachment of President Donald Trump, 2019 pretty much saw it all.
As we enter 2020, I have two main substantive political wishes to complement my <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-here-are-three-reasons-why-i-plan-vote-josh-hammer">electoral wish</a> that the president be <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-yes-any-moral-stain-trump-now-mostly-sunk-josh-hammer">re-elected</a>. We need less socialism and we need more law and order.
It is possible that, perhaps above all else in the broader political universe, the year 2019 will be remembered by historians as the year in which unvarnished socialism became truly ascendant on the American Left. Embodied by the harrowing all-freshman congresswoman <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-aocs-squad-will-destroy-democrats-2020-josh-hammer">&#8220;Squad&#8221;</a> of economically illiterate would-be despots, socialism has likely not been this popular since the fall of the Berlin Wall itself. According to <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/257639/four-americans-embrace-form-socialism.aspx">Gallup</a>, an eye-opening four in ten Americans now support some form of socialism. Perhaps even more terrifyingly, MarketWatch <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/for-millennials-socialism-and-communism-are-hot-capitalism-is-not-2019-10-28">reports</a> that more than a third of Millennials approve of communism itself.
It is impossible to overstate how grossly irresponsible this flirtatiousness is with the economic <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/09/capitalisms-triumph-michael-tanner/">fool&#8217;s errand</a> of socialism and the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-bernie-sanders-entire-worldview-grotesquely-josh-hammer">outright evil political totalitarianism</a> to which socialism inevitably leads: Communism. No ideology in human history has ever <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810">killed more human beings</a> than has communism. None. Alas, as it is said, those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. And as we enter 2020, a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/who-will-win-democratic-primary-latest-2020-josh-hammer">leading presidential candidate</a> for the Democratic Party, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Loonbag-VT), is a former Soviet Union-honeymooning, hammer and sickle flag-waving communist who sided with America&#8217;s existential geopolitical foes at the very height of the Cold War. This is utter moral idiocy. Hopefully 2020 sees a resurgence of traditional American skepticism of socialism.
A similarly immensely dispiriting trend, and one that unfortunately has more bipartisan support, is the rise of an all-encompassing culture of lawlessness. From weak-on-sentencing judges to the <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/accused-cop-killer-bragged-prior-releases-jail-offered-bail/">decline of bail</a> to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/09/us/first-step-act-release-alleged-murder/index.html">&#8220;First Step Act&#8221;</a>-style early prison release of violent felons to leftist/libertarian assaults on the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-in-defense-of-prosecutors">integrity of prosecutors</a> to the continued <a href="https://nypost.com/2017/05/07/fbi-confirms-the-deadly-costs-of-a-war-on-cops/">war on cops</a> to the misplaced calls for <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomangell/2019/09/19/beto-orourke-proposes-drug-war-reparations-funded-by-marijuana-taxes/">mass drug liberalization</a> to the neo-Confederate illegality of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-why-no-one-pointing-out-sanctuary-cities-josh-hammer">sanctuary jurisdictions</a>, 2019 was also marked by a general decline in pervasiveness of traditional American support for law and order.
The rule of law is an indispensable piece of the broader puzzle that is the American experiment. Without robust and diligent enforcement of the law, we are nothing. The bipartisan infatuation with mass jailbreak initiatives, the likes of which bamboozled Trump into signing the First Step Act federal <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/first-step-criminal-justice-reform-bill-whats-in-it/">legislative catastrophe</a> and which are locally responsible for recent high-profile criminals from <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/anti-semitic-terrorist-new-york-7-arrests-little-prison-time/">New York</a> to <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/texas-church-shooter-massive-rap-sheet-almost-no-prison-time/">Texas</a> being free to roam to streets and wreak havoc upon a vulnerable citizenry, simply must stop. The mentality of mollycoddling criminals and failing to stand for the victims of crime — most emphatically illegal alien crime, but certainly also crime committed from those American citizens who ought to be incarcerated — has long since moved from the realm of the merely pernicious to the realm of the full-on societally ruinous. Along with the<a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1373"> inherent lawlessness</a> of <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlevi">Supremacy Clause</a>-defying sanctuary cities, the totality of all these attacks on law enforcement and the rule of law is to inculcate a culture of sheer anarchy. Anarchy, much like socialism and communism, is complete moral idiocy. Hopefully 2020 sees a resurgence of traditional American support for law and order.
Surely that isn&#8217;t asking too much for our political environs in the year 2020. Is it?

2020 goals on notepad

HAMMER: A Political Wish For 2020: Less Socialism, More Law And Order

2020 Election

Capitalism

Crime

Jail

Law Enforcement

Leftism

Police

Prison

Socialism

The ushering in of the Trump presidency has caused many conservatives to pause and soberly reflect upon both the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">future of American conservatism</a> and <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/our-constitutional-order-prioritizes-justice-not-procedure/">what it even means</a> to be a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-national-conservatism-conference-josh-hammer">conservative</a>, in the first instance. The intramural conservative dialogue reached a crescendo earlier this year when New York Post Op-Ed Editor Sohrab Ahmari declared his opposition to pluralistic/values-neutral &#8220;<a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/against-david-french-ism">David French-ism</a>&#8221; and his preference, instead, to &#8220;fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.&#8221;
The recent hullabaloo on the Right over pornography regulation/banning, a dialogue that owes its elevation in no small part to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-first-things-porn-is-not-a-blessing-of-liberty">those of us</a> <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/knowles-the-porn-debate-isnt-really-about-porn">here</a> at <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-every-child-exposed-to-internet-pornography-is-an-abuse-victim-there-should-be-laws-protecting-them">The Daily Wire</a>, is a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-every-child-exposed-to-internet-pornography-is-an-abuse-victim-there-should-be-laws-protecting-them">proxy fight</a> that represents an apotheosis of the <a href="https://constudies.nd.edu/news-and-events/events/2019/09/13/trumpism-what-is-conservatism-in-the-age-of-trump/">ongoing</a> Ahmari/French dialectic. And that intellectual divide, which is multifaceted but might be simplified as pitting the centrality of classical liberal procedural norms (French) versus the centrality of a morally assertive vision of justice and the common good (Ahmari), is of course itself a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/david-french-sohrab-ahmari-and-the-battle-for-the-future-of-conservatism">proxy fight</a> for the future of conservatism.
On Friday, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro weighed in with an incisive <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/shapiro-the-problem-with-common-good-conservatism">essay</a>, &#8220;The Problem With &#8216;Common Good&#8217; Conservatism,&#8221; that bifurcates between &#8220;common good&#8221; conservatives and &#8220;rights-based&#8221; conservatives. Working within the framework of this dichotomy, Ben made a powerful argument in favor of the latter.
I&#8217;d like to offer a reply.
America&#8217;s negative rights-based framework of government takes its most recognizable form in the Declaration of Independence, wherein Thomas Jefferson famously <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript">asserted</a> (emphasis added) that &#8220;We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. &#8212; That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.&#8221; To be sure, the Declaration deserves much in the way of <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2809272">admiration</a> — for Abraham Lincoln, the greatest statesman in the history of the republic, <a href="https://online.hillsdale.edu/document.doc?id=279">it served</a> as the &#8220;apple of gold&#8221; for  which the Constitution merely served as the surrounding &#8220;picture of silver.&#8221; The Great Emancipator rhetorically invoked and substantively <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-salon-attacks-declaration-independence-josh-hammer">relied upon the Declaration</a> throughout his political career — culminating in his helping shepherd the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiii">13th Amendment</a> through Congress and his seeing through the Union to victory in the Civil War itself.
At the same time, Jefferson, who was undoubtedly influenced by Lockean theory and other Enlightenment ideals, held many deeply heterodox views that were in no small degree of tension with his contemporaries. The insatiable revolutionary who <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/105.html">thought</a> that &#8220;the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants&#8221; held an intensive disdain for Burkean-style epistemological humility and incrementalism. Jefferson disagreed with those, such as <a href="https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Adams%2C+John">John Adams</a>, who believed that America&#8217;s inheritance of the unique English common law system — a rich tradition of common law thinkers including William Blackstone, John Selden, and John Fortescue — was Americans&#8217; more tangible safeguard of their rights. Indeed, one need only take a cursory glance at the <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp">English Bill of Rights of 1689</a> to recognize just how strongly that charter came to influence our own Bill of Rights.
Alas, ever the Francophile and gallivanting off at the time in pre-revolutionary Paris, the author of the Declaration was actually not even present at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. And suffice it to say that the men who actually crafted the Constitution held slightly different viewpoints as to the reasons why governments are instituted among free men.
In perhaps the most famous Federalist Paper of them all, <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp">The Federalist No. 51</a>, Jefferson&#8217;s fellow Virginian James Madison quite bluntly stated (emphasis added): &#8220;Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society.&#8221; Similarly, in <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed57.asp">The Federalist No. 57</a>, Madison announced the Constitution&#8217;s ultimate intention with unmistakable clarity — and, in so doing, he directly used the phrase that has elicited so much recent consternation (emphasis added): &#8220;The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.&#8221; Similarly still, the <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/preamble">Constitution’s Preamble</a> enumerates the substantive purposes of &#8220;establish[ing] Justice&#8221; and &#8220;promot[ing] the general Welfare&#8221; before it asserts the goal of &#8220;secur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty.”
In other words, as I <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/our-constitutional-order-prioritizes-justice-not-procedure/">wrote</a> in September for the Claremont Institute&#8217;s American Mind online journal: &#8220;[T]he Founders did not put the procedural norms of English common law first. On the contrary, they built our regime directly on the foundation of the substantive political virtues: Justice, human flourishing, and the pursuit of the common good.&#8221;
The upshot is that America&#8217;s Founders did not view the governmental pursuit of justice, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/">Aristotelian human flourishing</a>, and the common good as in any way whatsoever being in conflict with the Declaration and Constitution&#8217;s over-arching procedural framework of securing negative rights. The two concepts are directly related to one another. As scholars Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George <a href="https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-baby-and-the-bathwater">wrote</a> in the most recent issue of National Affairs, there are &#8220;what Aristotelians call eudaimonistic (or human flourishing) grounds for the limitation of certain governmental powers — and, not unrelatedly, the protection of certain civil liberties. The judgment is that these limitations tend, overall and in the long run, to best protect integral human well-being.&#8221;
It is the pursuit of justice, not the promotion and excessive expansion of liberty above all else, that most animated the Constitution&#8217;s Framers. For the Framers, expansions of liberty beyond a bare-bones natural law threshold could generally <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/why-the-new-right-rises/the-american-founding-was-not-libertarian-liberalism/">only be justified</a> if they were conducive to the pursuit of justice and the common good. These men were familiar with Aristotle’s <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.3.three.html">wisdom</a> that &#8220;a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only&#8221; — and with Burke&#8217;s <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=2Tu3bScwKKAC&amp;pg=PA200&amp;lpg=PA200&amp;dq=men+are+qualified+for+civil+liberty,+in+exact+proportion+to+their+disposition+to+put+moral+chains+upon+their+own+appetites;+in+proportion+as+their+love+of+justice+is+above+their+rapacity.&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=xwTUBDS16s&amp;sig=ACfU3U3yIo4SPFCI5bOZVZ5ZPot2cxYPgA&amp;hl=en&amp;ppis=_c&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwitucuVhLvmAhXVLc0KHat9BoIQ6AEwBHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=men%20are%20qualified%20for%20civil%20liberty%2C%20in%20exact%20proportion%20to%20their%20disposition%20to%20put%20moral%20chains%20upon%20their%20own%20appetites%3B%20in%20proportion%20as%20their%20love%20of%20justice%20is%20above%20their%20rapacity.&amp;f=false">admonition</a> (emphasis added) that &#8220;men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity.&#8221;
Similarly, the Framers loathed licentiousness and were extraordinarily careful not to recklessly conflate liberty, properly understood, with licentiousness. They were invariably terrified of the possibility of liberty sliding toward licentiousness. George Washington himself <a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/circular-to-the-states/">warned</a> in 1783 that &#8220;arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to licentiousness.&#8221; And almost eerily foreshadowing today&#8217;s staunch libertarians who oppose even the most anodyne attempts to <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/11/how-to-regulate-pornography">regulate pornography</a>, Founding Father Oliver Ellsworth <a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-landholder-iii-connecticut-courant/">warned</a>: &#8220;It is not strange that the licentious should tell us a government of energy is inconsistent with liberty, for being inconsistent with their wishes and their vices, they would have us think it contrary to human happiness.&#8221;
But a more muscular and morally assertive form of government <a href="https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-baby-and-the-bathwater">can be consistent</a> with liberty, justice, and human flourishing alike. At the time of the American Founding, blasphemy and obscenity were generally jail-able offenses. And contra classical liberal/civil libertarian historical revisionism and the nostrums espoused in the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-conservative-network-claims-leftists-josh-hammer">erroneously decided</a> 1964 Supreme Court case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the <a href="https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/natural-rights-and-the-first-amendment">First Amendment is perfectly consonant</a> with the robust common law of defamation.
Jeffersonian idiosyncrasies aside, the Founding Fathers were therefore not overly inspired by Lockean classical liberalism and high-minded Enlightenment theorizing. They were Anglo-Saxon Christians who inherited a unique cultural and common law tradition from their English forebears and sought to incrementally improve, in distinctly <a href="https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/04/edmund-burke-and-the-american-revolution-the-whole-story.html">Burkean fashion</a>, upon the political work of those forebears. In so doing, they were not per se averse to prudential statesmen wielding the levers of governmental power to nudge the citizenry toward the pursuit of justice and the common good — especially, of course, within the <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed45.asp">police power ambits</a> of the various states.
In short, my reading of history is that America&#8217;s Founding Fathers would have been baffled by the notion that the pursuit of justice or the common good is a governmental priority in any substantial state of tension with a governmental priority of securing negative rights. Our political leaders were expected to pursue &#8220;the common good of the society,&#8221; as Madison framed it in <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed57.asp">The Federalist No. 57</a>, while also being sure to protect and secure the preexisting negative rights of a free citizenry.
Knee-jerk promotion and expansion of liberty run amok toward libertinism, which, much to the chagrin of Objectivists and strict libertarians, has never been the sole and exclusive political priority of any serious political thinker, was utterly rejected by the Founders as a preeminent goal whose pursuit and attainment justified the establishment of governments among men. Instead, it was justice and human flourishing that most animated them — and the pursuit of justice and human flourishing quite naturally fit within the Declaration and Constitution&#8217;s over-arching framework of negative liberty. In the specific context of the pornography debate, there is, of course, no natural or First Amendment <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/10/10998/">constitutional &#8220;right&#8221;</a> to smut.
The Founding Fathers were thus both &#8220;common good&#8221; conservatives and &#8220;rights-based&#8221; conservatives. Which is what we should want our political leaders today to be, as well.

School Of Athens By Raphael

HAMMER: Government Exists To Establish Justice, Not Promote Liberty

Constitution

Federal Government

Nationalism

Over the past two weeks, a fascinating intellectual conflict has broken out on the Right over pornography, of all things. The debate was prompted by a letter from four Republican congresspeople to Attorney General William Barr, calling on Barr to “declare the prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority.”
This, on its face, should be unobjectionable. There is no fundamental First Amendment right to pornography — it is not merely an aspect of free speech, as the Supreme Court has explicitly ruled, and as Founding-era philosophy makes clear — and there are clear externalities to certain aspects of pornography. So, for example, it’s hard to imagine why any conservative, even a conservative with libertarian leanings, would oppose banning the dissemination of pornography to minors, or the ability of local communities to bar the posting of pornographic images in public spaces, or a legal crackdown on sex trafficking (I’m not aware of many libertarians, even socially liberal libertarians, who oppose any of these things).
But the issue of pornography quickly morphed into a more general argument about the role of government in American life, the right to do wrong, and the differences between federal and local government. Those arguments have purchase far beyond the rather contained area of pornography — an area where, again, you could easily make the case for regulation of aspects of pornography without violating libertarian and small government precepts, and without redefining the nature of American government. The arguments articulated for generalized pornography regulation, however, have consequences for issues as far-ranging as free speech and economic regulation.
But here’s how the debate has broken down so far.
What Is Government Here To Do?
The conflict over pornography has highlighted a split between so-called “common good” conservatives and “rights-based” conservatives.
“Rights-based” conservatives articulate a vision of government that mirrors the language of the Declaration of Independence. According to the Founding vision, we have certain rights that pre-exist government. Those rights are negative rights — rights we have against all other human beings, including the right to speak and think freely, the right to engage in free market activity, and the right to defend our lives. Government was instituted, in Founding theory, in order to protect those rights; violation of those rights by government made the government fundamentally illegitimate.
“Common good” conservatives articulate a vision of government steeped in pre-Enlightenment tradition. In this view, government is there to promote virtue, justice, and the common good. Government plays the role of teacher. Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/11/how-to-regulate-pornography">argued</a> recently in First Things that “a new conservatism is being born — one less interested in managing our nation’s decline than in using political power to promote virtue, public morality, and the common good. &#8230; Conservatives need to overcome their fear of governing the nation that elected them.”
For rights-based conservatives, such language is anathema. Who defines the “common good?” What makes “common good” conservatives believe that in maximizing the power of government to be “teacher,” they will be the ones who wield that power, especially given the fact that the Left has both grown and wielded such governmental power for decades? By throwing rights out the window and instead focusing on the “common good,” the only question is who controls the government gun. “Rights-based” conservatives promote the idea that duty is to be provided by culture, and liberty is to be protected by government.
For “common good” conservatives, rights-based conservatism neglects the fact that power can be used to shape cultural mores. “Common good” conservatives believe that focus on rights rather than protection of tradition, including protection via government, leads to the degradation of rights into wrongs, and leads to the slide from liberty into libertinism. “Common good” conservatives promote the idea that duty is to be inculcated by government, even if that means the massive growth of government. “Common good” conservatives, in other words, do not harbor the grave mistrust of government the Founding Fathers did — or the grave mistrust of government they should, given that the Left has typically wielded government far more effectively, and with far more damaging effects, than the cultural Right.
The consequences of this difference are grave for a variety of issues. Take, for example, economics. It is no surprise that “rights-based” conservatives are increasingly wary of “common good” conservatives on free markets; “common good” conservatives have taken to using language more typical of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, suggesting that we must “make markets work for the American people” and “curb the excesses of the free market.” This isn’t the language of social fabric-building, but economic compulsion. “Common good” conservatives respond that free markets are actually immoral in many cases — many such conservatives have claimed that the government must prevent companies from shutting down production in certain areas of America in order to stop job loss, and thus social fabric loss, in those areas. This amounts to government compulsion of high order, and the brutalization of the economic freedom agenda that has historically characterized American conservatism.
The same holds true for freedom of speech. “Common good” conservatives have made “drag queen story hour” their cause celebre. These events are indeed morally perverse, and involve the inevitable sexualization of children. The question is whether libraries can be forced not to allow such events without allegations of child abuse. If the answer is yes, the question becomes why libraries can’t ban Bible events — and just as importantly, which is more likely in today&#8217;s culture, banning drag queen story hour or banning Bible events? The last several decades have shown us the answer to that question. Free speech can be abused. But at least free speech provides a guarantee of free speech.
What About Consent Of The Governed?
The “rights-based” conservatives and “common good” conservatives have significant disagreements about what sort of government control human beings consent to when they live in a society. “Rights-based” conservatives say that you consent only to the government defending your rights; you do not consent to a government cramming down its vision of virtue in contravention of your rights. Furthermore, your representation is required in order for government to act in all areas.
Neither aristocratic nor majority rule, in this view, is an ultimate good: Protection of rights is the ultimate good when it comes to government. Majorities are necessary in non-rights-based areas; no majority can override rights. This means that even when fundamental rights are not in question, a government acting without the consent of the governed can still threaten a separate fundamental right to representation.
This is why the Founders relied so heavily on the Montesquieu-backed notion of subsidiarity. Localities are more ideologically homogenous; they are also local, which means that if you don’t like their rules and regulations, you can leave. Consent is far more likely and government involvement more justifiable in areas in which fundamental rights are not infringed upon. Federal governments ought to be granted very narrow powers, and checks and balances ought to narrow those powers even further: There is no place to run if the feds point their gun at you.
What about “common good” conservatives, and the role of republicanism? “Common good” conservatives say you consent to be part of a society governed by historic law and tradition, and that your rights are defined only by that law and tradition. This leads to a far murkier relationship between individuals and the government. Can a majority redefine fundamental rights, since majorities routinely redefine tradition? It’s unclear. Is tradition formalized in any way, such that a majority cannot infringe upon it? It’s unclear. This leads to a sort of goalpost-shifting in governance philosophy in “common good” conservatism: “Whatever is necessary” becomes the standard. It’s actually rather easy to slide from the traditionalism of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk into the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes under this sort of logic. That doesn’t mean that “common good” conservatives have to go along with such a slide. But their philosophy certainly doesn’t forestall it. If you’re citing Plato’s definition of good government, you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself gradually drifting toward Plato’s Republic.
“Power is as power does” views of government are inherently immoral. A government big enough and unanswerable enough to do your bidding is also big enough and unanswerable enough to destroy you. When the government completely loses touch with those it represents, it becomes a tyranny — even if it’s a tyranny promoting policies you like or find moral. “Consent of the governed” is indeed a moral principle, not just a pragmatic stance in favor of republicanism.
Is Culture Upstream Of Politics? 
The question of the role of government, and the role of consent, quickly slides into a question about culture versus politics. “Rights-based” conservatives have made the case that culture is upstream of politics — that we must change the culture to change our politics. “Common good” conservatives make the case that politics is part of culture, and that politics can change culture. “Common good” conservatives aren’t wrong here — but their point is far less powerful than they believe. Terry Schilling writes, “Politics is a key part of culture, and often drives it. The law can serve as a teacher and a guide to encourage positive behaviors and discourage negative ones.” But the law cannot provide a bulwark against social change. Law can be used to deepen already-extant social movements; it cannot defeat burgeoning social movements. The history of the last century should have taught us at least that much. Marriage laws didn’t defeat the same-sex marriage movement; by the same token, liberalized abortion laws haven’t defeated the pro-life movement.
This means that the heavy work to be done must be done in the cultural sphere. But because conservatives have watched their chief cultural institution — church — wane in influence, and have provided no alternative methods of cultural purchase, abandoning Hollywood and the media in large measure, they are left with government as their only tool. This means that conservatives — who, it turns out, are quite good at elections — have become a hammer in search of a nail. The problem is that the nail, cultural change, isn’t actually a nail, it’s a thimble of nitroglycerin — and hitting it with a hammer will lead to an explosion. You can’t solve cultural change with politics.
But you can solve politics with cultural change. And this is where conservatives ought to be putting their focus: On minimizing the size of government, growth of which threatens both liberty and conservative culture, while simultaneously changing the cultural milieu through cultural engagement.
The Founders, at least with regard to the federal government, sought a society of Burke-ians ruled by a government of Mill-ians. Danger lies in a libertarian society of self-described Mill-ians who don’t understand the concept of social fabric, and make light of it; danger conversely lies in a society of self-described Burke-ians who don’t understand the concept of “rights-based” government. The happy medium was a moral and religious people with a limited government devoted to the protection of rights. The Founders weren’t wrong. Everyone else is.

Declaration of Independence

SHAPIRO: The Problem With ‘Common Good’ Conservatism

Economy

First Amendment

Supreme Court

Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer has the following piece today at <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/12/porn-is-not-a-blessing-of-liberty">First Things</a>, the conservative journal of religious and political thought. 
Last week, four Republican congressmen <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/exclusive-u-s-representatives-call-on-barr-to-prosecute-obscene-pornography/">sent</a> a <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12.6.2019-Obscenity-Letter-to-AG-Barr.pdf">missive</a> to U.S. Attorney General William Barr. This one-page letter beseeched Barr to actually enforce extant obscenity law as it applies to legally relevant hardcore pornography. It would be prudent for Barr to “declare the prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority,” the congressmen argued. Accordingly, Barr ought to urge federal prosecutors to “bring prosecutions against the major producers and distributors of such material.”
My colleague at The Daily Wire, Matt Walsh, wrote a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-a-group-of-republicans-want-the-government-to-start-fighting-hardcore-pornography-theyre-right-heres-why">column</a> arguing for regulating or banning pornography. “At some point conservatives decided that government should not be used to advance the common good,” my coworker <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1203797995805904900">tweeted</a>. “And at that point conservatism became limp, shallow, and ineffectual.”
For these grievous sins of calling for government to play a greater role in regulating a noxious industry complicit in human trafficking, retarding children’s sexual development, and destroying marriages, the libertarian mafia on Twitter went haywire. “If you don’t like porn, don’t watch it,” <a href="https://twitter.com/thecjpearson/status/1203424973630722049">tweeted</a> high school activist CJ Pearson. “Social conservatives need to realize that we can handle pornography and other social ills without turning America into a Christian version of Saudi Arabia,” <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-misguided-war-on-pornography-and-the-return-of-right-wing-puritanism">warned</a> Casey Given. “We must never let lazy moralizing force us to surrender our freedom to the government.” Only libertarians understand “how the Founders wanted our government to run,” the Libertarian party’s official Twitter account <a href="https://twitter.com/LPNational/status/1203802510693191683">hectored</a> yours truly.
What <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/why-the-new-right-rises/the-american-founding-was-not-libertarian-liberalism/">utter</a> <a href="https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/natural-rights-and-the-first-amendment">tripe</a>.
Once upon a time, opposition to the spread of pornography was a unifying political principle for self-described conservatives. Alas, it seems that in our increasingly liberalized conservative movement, such opposition is no longer unifying.
For those who erroneously conflate liberty with libertinism, it is easy to focus on the <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/preamble">Preamble’s</a> avowed dedication to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” to the exclusion of its equally clear vows to <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/our-constitutional-order-prioritizes-justice-not-procedure/">“establish Justice”</a> and “promote the general Welfare.” The result is that many on the so-called “right” now issue apologia for an industry whose lofty denizens were recently <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/girlsdoporn-owners-and-employees-charged-sex-trafficking-conspiracy">charged</a> by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California with “forc[ing women] to perform certain sexual acts they had declined to do, or they would not be paid or allowed to leave.” It is embarrassing just how far, in 2019, are the depths to which some wings of the conservative movement have plunged.
Knee-jerk classical liberal <a href="https://twitter.com/thecjpearson/status/1203424973630722049">urging</a> to merely “[<a href="https://twitter.com/thecjpearson/status/1203424973630722049">l]et parents do their job</a>” is sophomoric in the context of our pornography <a href="https://apnews.com/9c91cfd28a7b461b87948f36117a432e">public health crisis</a>. Rote sloganeering about rebuilding the culture from the ground up is an inadequate remedy for a systemic national emergency. The sheer ubiquity of and ease of access to pornography renders hollow meager pleas for civil society-centric solutions. Libertarians and classical liberals fail to recognize that using political power in the pursuit of national solidarity and wholesomeness can be both just and necessary.
<a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/12/porn-is-not-a-blessing-of-liberty">Read the rest here</a>.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-a-group-of-republicans-want-the-government-to-start-fighting-hardcore-pornography-theyre-right-heres-why">A Group Of Republicans Want The Government To Start Fighting Hardcore Pornography. They&#8217;re Right. Here&#8217;s Why.</a>

Close-Up Of Porn Text On Computer Monitor

Hammer At ‘First Things’: Porn Is Not A Blessing Of Liberty

Internet

Liberalism

Religion

On Wednesday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, who is a constitutional attorney by training, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvpfIAdvldI">joined</a> &#8220;Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler&#8221; on One America News Network to discuss freshman <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-aocs-squad-will-destroy-democrats-2020-josh-hammer">&#8220;Squad&#8221;</a> member Rep. Ayanna Pressley&#8217;s (D-MA) harrowing new &#8220;criminal justice reform&#8221; bill. As <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pressley-transgender-inmates-prison">reported</a> by Fox News, Pressley&#8217;s bill would &#8220;allow &#8216;transgender individuals to be housed in a facility that conforms with their gender identity&#8217; &#8230; [and] would also give incarcerated people the right to vote, repeal federal laws that criminalize illegal immigration, require inmates who are working to be paid no less than federal minimum wage, and increase support for inmates transitioning back into society.&#8221;
Hammer, who identifies as a traditional <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-dont-let-kim-kardashian-fool-you-america-josh-hammer">law-and-order</a> conservative with little in the way of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-in-defense-of-prosecutors">sympathy for criminals</a>, joined Wheeler to discusss Pressley&#8217;s far-reaching bill.
Wheeler began by asking Hammer whom, exactly, Pressley claims to represent when she says she wants to make our criminal justice system safer and more humane. Hammer responded by lamenting how there oftentimes seems to be strong bipartisan agreement to model criminal justice policy away from the victims of crime and toward the criminals themselves:
<blockquote>There is a bipartisan, across-the-political spectrum problem in our criminal justice political and legal discourse. We are always talking about that the victims of crime are the criminals — and not the victims. On the left, it speaks for itself — that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on here [with Pressley]. But on the Right, there&#8217;s a lot of libertarian, &#8220;criminal justice reform,&#8221; <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-dont-let-kim-kardashian-fool-you-america-josh-hammer">Kim Kardashian</a>-flirting about letting violent people out of prison.
You know, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) in 2016 was not very popular when he said this, but he was absolutely correct: We actually have an <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/tom-cotton-under-incarceration-223371">under-incarceration problem</a> in this country. We have a lot of people in prison, but you know what? We&#8217;re also a very violent society. Nineteen percent of property crimes in America, we actually find the perp. Forty-seven percent of violent crimes — less than half of violent crimes in America — law enforcement can identify the perp. So we actually really need to be locking up more people and not letting people out, but you know — right here. Ayanna Pressley, she&#8217;s the Ringo Starr of the &#8220;Squad,&#8221; I mean, she&#8217;s auditioning for the John Lennon Paul McCartney role, I guess.</blockquote>
Wheeler responded by pointing out the possibility that Pressley&#8217;s plan does not attempt to find a happy median in criminal justice policy; rather, &#8220;she just straight-up wants to release anybody who is in prison for any reason.&#8221; Hammer replied by pointing out how there has been a recent rise in violent crime, thus paring back the gains made during the Reagan and Clinton tough-on-crime decades:
<blockquote>[I]t&#8217;s just over the past, really two to three, maybe four, years that the FBI crime statistics are starting to show an increase again [in violent crime]. This is pretty harrowing. I mean, you know what, a lot of these people on the libertarian-leaning Right were talking about &#8220;criminal justice reform&#8221; three, four, or five years ago. Maybe it made a lot more sense then; the statistics today just tell a very different story.</blockquote>
WATCH:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Dems Want To Do Away With Life Sentences" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AvpfIAdvldI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-dont-let-kim-kardashian-fool-you-america-josh-hammer">Don&#8217;t Let Kim Kardashian Fool You. America Has An UNDER-Incarceration Problem.</a>

Hammer OANN screen grab 11.20.19

WATCH: Hammer on ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: Far-Left Democrats Love Criminals

Ayanna Pressley

Transgender

The &#8220;<a href="https://nationalconservatism.org">National Conservatism Conference</a>,&#8221; which I attended last week after having <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48154/hammer-national-conservatism-conference-2019s-most-josh-hammer">previously billed it</a> as &#8220;2019&#8217;s most important intellectual gathering,&#8221; came to a close last Tuesday. Organized by the <a href="https://burke.foundation/">Edmund Burke Foundation</a>, a new group <a href="https://burke.foundation/people/">led</a> by Yoram Hazony and David Brog, the Conference featured an <a href="https://nationalconservatism.org/conference-schedule/">ambitious agenda</a> that sought to build off Hazony&#8217;s <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?459062-1/isi-conservative-book-year-award">award-winning</a> 2018 <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Nationalism-Yoram-Hazony/dp/1541645375">tome</a> on nationalism and promulgate a forward-looking intellectual paradigm and substantive agenda for a rejuvenated, nationalist-inspired Right. The choice of the great British statesman Burke as the eponymous symbol of the Conference&#8217;s organizing Foundation was intentional: The <a href="https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/07/19/burke-and-the-nation/">conservatism advanced here</a> was of a distinctly traditionalist hue that put much of the post-1950s right-of-center American political consensus squarely in its crosshair.
The Conference received no shortage of media attention — representing the <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/national-conservatisms-time-has-come/">full</a> <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/07/55245/">gamut</a> of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/trump-nationalism-tucker-carlson.html">political</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/7/17/20696543/national-conservatism-conference-2019-trump">viewpoint</a>. And pushback from all the traditional targets of Hazony&#8217;s philosophical ire — be they leftists, libertarians, neoliberals, or neoconservatives — was certainly expected.
But by any measure, the Conference was markedly successful. And it is important to understand why.
The modern American conservative &#8220;three-legged stool&#8221; consensus of fiscal, social, and national security conservatism, forged out of the depths of Cold War necessity and expounded upon at the time by the likes of Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr., frayed during the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary. While it was always debatable whether Frank Meyer&#8217;s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusionism">&#8220;Fusionist&#8221;</a> paradigm of laissez-faire economics and traditionalist social mores was promulgated due more to intellectually compelling or to merely electorally convenient purposes, the undebatable reality is that the most authentically Fusionist candidate in 2016 — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) — was ultimately defeated by the far more populist Donald J. Trump.
The extent to which Trump&#8217;s primary victory over Cruz represented a watershed substantive moment for American conservatism, as compared with the extent to which it merely represented a triumph of brute force of personality and a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html">surfeit of free media</a>, remains an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42234/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">ongoing source of debate</a>. But a much-ballyhooed <a href="https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/political-divisions-in-2016-and-beyond">election postmortem</a> put forth in 2017 by <a href="https://www.voterstudygroup.org/participants/lee-drutman">Lee Drutman</a> and the <a href="https://www.voterstudygroup.org/about">Voter Study Group</a> provides some clues.
Drutman&#8217;s study attempted to analyze the specific substantive and attitudinal issues that divide voters for the two parties, and he charted out all data accumulated from the Voter Study Group&#8217;s underlying Views of the Electorate Research Survey into a convenient <a href="https://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/uploads/reports/Graphs-Charts/1101/figure2_drutman_e4aabc39aab12644609701bbacdff252.png">scatterplot</a>. The respondents&#8217; data agglomerated in the scatterplot can be separated into four quadrants, in a basic two-axis analysis:
<blockquote>We can break the electorate into four types, based on their position in the four quadrants of <a href="http://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/uploads/reports/Graphs-Charts/1101/figure2_drutman_e4aabc39aab12644609701bbacdff252.png">Figure 2</a>:
Liberal (44.6 percent): Lower left, liberal on both economic and identity issues 
Populist (28.9 percent): Upper left, liberal on economic issues, conservative on identity issues 
Conservative (22.7 percent): Upper right, conservative on both economic and identity issues 
Libertarian (3.8 percent): Lower right, conservative on economics, liberal on identity issues</blockquote>
Drutman&#8217;s study thus attempts to demonstrate that a whopping 73.5% of voters hold &#8220;liberal&#8221; views on economic issues, whereas only 26.5% are &#8220;conservative&#8221; on those same issues. In Drutman&#8217;s model, Hillary Clinton won overwhelmingly among &#8220;liberal&#8221; voters, Donald Trump won decisively among both &#8220;populist&#8221; and &#8220;conservative&#8221; voters, and the tiny minority of &#8220;libertarian&#8221; voters were almost perfectly split among Trump, Clinton, and &#8220;other.&#8221;
Drutman&#8217;s study ought to be an earth-shattering wake-up call for institutional movement conservatism — what some of the more populist/<a href="https://freebeacon.com/columns/making-sense-of-the-new-american-right/">paleoconservative</a> elements of the broader coalition have long derided as &#8220;<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/2009/07/23/conservative-inc/">Conservatism, Inc.</a>&#8221; It ought to finally put to rest the notion, advanced in the not-so-distant past in the form of the Republican National Committee&#8217;s post-2012 election &#8220;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/what-you-need-to-read-in-the-rnc-election-autopsy-report/274112/">autopsy</a>,&#8221; that moderating on social/cultural issues provides the best political/electoral path forward for the GOP — which is, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, America&#8217;s sole viable political organ representing something approximating conservatism.
Rather, it is libertarianism and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47839/hammer-limited-defense-sohrab-ahmaris-assault-josh-hammer">classical liberalism</a> — an innate hostility to government interventionism in any and all areas of life — that lack a core base of popular political support and electoral relevance. Though celebrated in many college dorm rooms and advocated by venerable right-of-center institutions such as The Wall Street Journal&#8217;s editorial page, it is increasingly clear that a morally ecumenical &#8220;live and let live&#8221; mentality that takes the form of a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47964/hammer-conservatives-must-make-their-arguments-josh-hammer">reflexively hands-off, value-neutral politics is unsuited</a> to America&#8217;s present social crisis of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Alienated-America-Places-Thrive-Collapse/dp/0062797107">despondency</a>, fractured communities, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49616/hammer-why-no-one-discussing-drug-trafficking-josh-hammer">drug overdose epidemics</a>, and decreasing church attendance.
Enter the National Conservatism Conference. In his opening remarks, Hazony — who has spent decades subscribing to the late Irving Kristol&#8217;s quip that &#8220;the three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth&#8221; — declared national conservatism&#8217;s &#8220;independence&#8221; from libertarianism, classical liberalism, neoliberalism, globalism, and neoconservatism. Yet Conference co-organizer Brog, in clarifying that the new national conservatism movement operates within the broader confines of the <a href="https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/07/19/burke-and-the-nation/">broader Anglo-American liberal tradition</a>, solemnly renounced <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Why-Liberalism-Failed-Politics-Culture/dp/0300223447">illiberalism</a> in his opening remarks.
So what exactly is this ascendant &#8220;national conservatism&#8221;? Numerous conference speakers and attendees with whom I spoke seemed to be grappling with this very question. One prominent conference speaker confided to me that &#8220;the policy piece of this&#8221; broader puzzle &#8220;will take a lot of time to flesh out.&#8221; And regarding Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the wunderkind conservative/populist senator who was the only elected official to speak at the Conference and who I have <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47899/hammer-senator-josh-hawley-most-important-freshman-josh-hammer">previously lauded</a> as the most important freshman conservative since Ted Cruz, National Review Editor Rich Lowry <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/07/22/the-left-smears-a-senator-for-calling-out-elite-ideology/">writes</a> that &#8220;filling out a plausible policy agenda to give expression to Hawley’s [anti-elitist] worldview is very much a work in progress.&#8221;
But as far as beginning to shift the intellectual paradigm as to what a forward-looking conservative agenda looks like, the Conference was an immensely important opening salvo. The Conference, held at the tony Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., featured a palpable sense of optimism resonating all throughout. Conservatives of a Burkean stripe tend to be natural pessimists, but the Conference seemed to buzz with cheeriness — both about the future of the conservative movement and, ultimately, about the American republic. The sense of attendees, many of whom were staunch supporters of President Trump, the thunderous nationalism that was 2016&#8217;s Brexit vote, and nationalist foreign leaders such as Viktor Orbán, was that the conservatism advanced at this Conference was the vanguard of a conservatism that can ultimately win.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">If I had one takeaway from the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NationalConservatismConference?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NationalConservatismConference</a>, it would be this: The vibe is very optimistic. Optimistic, that is, about the future of both conservatism and the future of the republic.
In short, the conservatism articulated here is a conservatism that can win.
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1150893420770148352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
National conservatism means a politics concretely focused on the mutually interdependent bonds of human loyalty upon which a society ultimately depends — as opposed to the atomization espoused by hyper-individualistic doctrinaire libertarianism. National conservatism means a politics focused on national solidarity and reinforcing the shared customs, traits, norms, and mores that establish America not merely as an idea but also as a tangible people — as opposed to the <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/defend-america-defeat-multiculturalism/">existential scourge of divisive multiculturalism</a>. National conservatism means viewing America as a nation-state with an economy — as opposed to viewing America as but one border-less abstraction within a globalized economy. National conservatism means the articulation and advancement of all domestic and foreign policy alike through the lens of national self-interest — as opposed to policy advancement based on transnational considerations or the needs of foreigners. National conservatism means a hardened immigration system that <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/was-amy-wax-speech-racist-immigration/">prioritizes cultural assimilation above all else</a> — as opposed to a laxer immigration system that prioritizes the cheap labor needs of the Fortune 500. National conservatism means a foreign affairs approach premised on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/45699/hammer-america-needs-re-think-its-global-alliances-josh-hammer">narrow alliances with like-minded, self-sufficient nations</a> who share America&#8217;s core national security concerns — as opposed to a foreign affairs approach premised on a tendentiously moralistic, sovereignty-undermining transnational agenda. National conservatism means a world order of sovereign nation-states — as opposed to the soft tyranny of the unelectable transnational bureaucrats in Turtle Bay and Brussels. National conservatism means a domestic affairs approach that, while undoubtedly market-oriented, resists the vestigial temptation to shirk the levers of political power as a means to advance the conservative cause in the realms of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49361/hammer-josh-hawleys-bill-taking-big-tech-josh-hammer">Big Tech</a>, higher education, and other private spheres that increasingly pose just as dire a threat to our way of life as does over-zealous Big Government itself. National conservatism means a conservatism that works for the American heartland and for all rungs of the economic ladder — as opposed to a purist anti-regulation agenda that merely speaks for the economic interests of the bi-coastal elite.
Sen. Hawley of Missouri, the only elected official to speak at the Conference, is perhaps positioned as the political figure most closely attuned to this political moment. Hawley is likely too infatuated with trust-busting President Theodore Roosevelt and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47141/hammer-blown-opportunity-justice-kavanaugh-quickly-josh-hammer">antitrust law</a> for my own taste, but he is a brilliant young statesman whose biography, <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/june-web-only/age-of-pelagius-joshua-hawley.html">substantive beliefs</a>, and approach to our national politics alike all position him perfectly to lead ascendant national conservatism on the home front. His <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49681/watch-josh-hawley-defends-americas-heartland-molly-prince">rousing Conference speech</a>, which was the final of four keynote presentations, is well worth watching in full:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DkIapXCfPGE" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
Hawley&#8217;s domestic platform, if coupled with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43151/hammer-ted-cruzs-non-interventionist-hawk-foreign-josh-hammer">Cruz&#8217;s signature &#8220;non-interventionist hawk&#8221; foreign policy approach</a>, would be one embodiment of the future of the conservative movement in America. As I <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42234/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">wrote</a> in January:
<blockquote>If conservatives can channel their &#8220;virtuous&#8221; fealty to nationalism and promote policies that galvanize a moral spark for a disaggregated citizenry that begin to heal the wounds of our bitterly fractious politics, that is one possible distillation of the future of the conservative movement. So long as we do so without <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1083555344989573120">throwing the free enterprise baby out with the surrounding bathwater</a>.</blockquote>
Organizers, speakers, and attendees alike left the Conference with no shortage of questions. Indeed, there are many, many unanswered questions as to the precise form that this upstart national conservative movement will take as applied to any number of issues. But conservatism is unquestionably healthier now than it was before the Conference began — we are moving the ball in the right direction. A paradigm shift has begun.

HAMMER: The ‘National Conservatism Conference’ Represented The Future Of Conservatism. Here’s Why.

Democracy

Republican Party

Yoram Hazony

In the aftermath of the election of nationalist/populist Donald Trump as President of the United States, the American conservative movement and Republican Party alike have been forced to confront the realities of a fundamentally transformed intellectual and political landscape. As such, we conservatives have been internally grappling with many profound questions.
What is the continuing intellectual vitality of the founding ethos of the modern, Cold War-era conservative movement &#8212; the <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/03/frank-meyer-fusionisms-impact-today/">&#8220;Fusionism&#8221;</a> between laissez-faire neoliberalism and traditional moral conservatism, as best personified by William F. Buckley, Jr. and National Review? What is the continuing political and pragmatic vitality of Reaganism&#8217;s &#8220;three-legged stool&#8221; of laissez-faire, social conservatism, and anti-Communist (subsequently rebirthed as anti-Islamist) hawkishness? To what extent should conservatives &#8212; and, indeed, partisan Republicans &#8212; consider &#8220;Fusionism&#8221;/Reaganism to be a <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/03/against-the-dead-consensus">&#8220;dead consensus&#8221;</a> that is intellectually and politically worth discarding as an atavistic remnant of a bygone era? To what extent should conservatives and Republicans rededicate themselves to the experience- and wisdom-centric insights of Edmund Burke and cease fealty to the rationalist, Lockean natural rights principles that undergirded Jefferson&#8217;s Declaration of Independence? Is the free market best viewed as an intrinsically moral good for which conservatives ought to brook minimal deviation, or as a purely instrumental means that may (or may not) assist the achievement of philosophically loftier ends &#8212; justice, greatness, and Aristotelian <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/">human flourishing</a>? Is <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/david-french-response-sohrab-ahmari/">classical liberalism capable</a> of forming a philosophical backbone for a durable political coalition, or is <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/against-david-french-ism">something else needed</a> to congeal solidarity and wield fortified social capital against an emboldened and hegemonic cultural Left?
These are but some of the probing queries that the election of Trump &#8212; to say nothing of similar movements all across the globe, such as Britain&#8217;s 2016 &#8220;Brexit&#8221; vote and the elections of nationalist figures as far as <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/aug/13/no-submission-to-islam/">Hungary</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/36117/7-things-you-need-know-about-trump-brazil-who-kassy-dillon">Brazil</a> &#8212; has necessitated. In January, Tucker Carlson issued a clarion on-air <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSuQ-AyiicA">populist call to action</a> heard &#8217;round the world &#8212; Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/tucker-carlson-populism-america-needs-virtue-before-prosperity/">responded in generally critical fashion</a>, and I <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42234/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">offered a compromise of sorts</a> wherein conservatives &#8220;channel their <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Nationalism-Yoram-Hazony-ebook/dp/B078WRX331">&#8216;virtuous&#8217;</a> fealty to nationalism and promote policies that galvanize a moral spark for a disaggregated citizenry that begin to heal the wounds of our bitterly fractious politics&#8221; so long &#8220;as we do so without throwing the free enterprise baby out with the surrounding bathwater.&#8221; These tensions within the broader right-of-center political and intellectual tent have only been accentuated by the recent intramural skirmish between conservative intellectuals <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/against-david-french-ism">Sohrab Ahmari</a> and <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/david-french-response-sohrab-ahmari/">David French</a> &#8212; an extended dialogue that has been somewhat disjointedly focused on an amalgamation of nationalism versus classical liberalism, Trumpism versus Reaganism, political <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/17662/stop-alinskyization-american-right-josh-hammer">means/ends justifications</a>, substance versus procedure, and brashness versus civility. Here at The Daily Wire, I offered <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47839/hammer-limited-defense-sohrab-ahmaris-assault-josh-hammer">multiple</a> nuanced <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47964/hammer-conservatives-must-make-their-arguments-josh-hammer">defenses</a> of the thrust of Ahmari&#8217;s more nationalistic and overtly moralistic prescription for the present intellectual moment on the Right.
Now, an exciting intellectual confab that promises to explore these themes in greater detail will be held next month in Washington, D.C. The <a href="https://nationalconservatism.org">&#8220;National Conservatism Conference,&#8221;</a> organized by the <a href="https://burke.foundation">Edmund Burke Foundation</a> and its <a href="https://burke.foundation/people/">leaders</a> Yoram Hazony and David Brog, will be held from July 14-16 in the nation&#8217;s capital. Keynote speakers include U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, Tucker Carlson, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. The Conference <a href="https://nationalconservatism.org/about/">describes</a> its role, in relevant part, as follows:
<blockquote>
The return of nationalism has created a much-discussed &#8220;crisis of conservatism&#8221; that may be unprecedented since modern Anglo-American conservatism was formulated by Russell Kirk, William Buckley, and their colleagues in the 1950s. At the heart of this crisis is a question: Is the new American and British nationalism a hostile usurper that has arrived on the scene to displace political conservatism? Or is nationalism an essential, if neglected, part of the Anglo-American conservative tradition at its best?
The conference on &#8220;National Conservatism&#8221; will bring together public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.
We see this public conference as the kick off for a protracted effort to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race. Our aim is to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.
</blockquote>
I am very excited for this gathering, and will be covering the Conference for The Daily Wire. It is my hope that committed activists and those who have given thought to the nature of the intellectual and political moment on the Right will consider <a href="https://nationalconservatism.org/registration/">registering</a> to attend.
In anticipation of the Conference, I have collected exclusive statements from numerous Conference organizers and speakers. Each statement reflects solely the views of the individual who has provided the statement. Here are the statements:
<ul>
<li>Yoram Hazony, Edmund Burke Foundation Chairman and Herzl Institute President: &#8220;The intellectual map on the political right consists of three main groupings: The dominant view for the last generation has been classical liberal or libertarian; on the far right, there is the rising power of white identitarian politics. In between these two groups, I believe we can see a clear coming together of a third camp &#8212; which we&#8217;re calling national conservatism. National conservatives are distinct from libertarians in that we recognize the centrality of the idea of the nation, both in the history of conservative thought and in the real political world. The purpose of national politics is to defend the independence, cultural inheritance, and interests of a particular nation. We believe in the unique historical identity of each nation, but we reject the idea that a nation can be reduced to the color of one&#8217;s skin. The nation is real people, sharing a unique cultural inheritance and bonds of mutual loyalty. We believe that at this moment, national conservatism can offer a realistic alternative and a way forward for the political right that these other alternatives cannot offer.&#8221;</li>
<li>David Brog, Edmund Burke Foundation President and Maccabee Task Force Executive Director: &#8220;The election of Donald Trump created an overdue opportunity to challenge the status quo that&#8217;s long dominated movement conservatism. We hope to seize this moment to reclaim and reassert the nationalist principles that have always been central to the conservative worldview. At a time when forces on the woke left and extreme right seek to divide us, we propose uniting Americans with an energized vision of our shared nationality. And at a time when too many glorify being left alone, we welcome shared sacrifice for the sake of giving every American a right to rise. This is a conservatism that can inspire. And this is a conservatism that can win.&#8221;</li>
<li>Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): &#8220;American conservatism is at an inflection point. After years litigating the battles we inherited from the 1980s &#8212; and losing them all too often &#8212; we have an opportunity to offer the country a new vision of America&#8217;s tomorrow. This conference is one of the most promising signs yet of our movement&#8217;s capacity for renewal, and I look forward to offering my own small contribution to that discussion.&#8221;</li>
<li>Rich Lowry, National Review Editor: &#8220;Nationalism is one of the most important trends of our time, and an indispensable aspect of American conservatism. Thinking through why that is so, and what concrete form American nationalism should take, deserves to be very high on the Trump-era Right&#8217;s to-do list.&#8221;</li>
<li>Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum President: &#8220;The conference organizers have dug deeper into the history of conservatism &#8212; back to the fifteenth century &#8212; than anyone else, thereby producing a more profound understanding of this intellectual current. I look forward to conference speakers applying those insights to today&#8217;s issues. That is what I hope to do in my overview of Europe.&#8221;</li>
<li>David Azerrad, Director, B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics and AWC Family Foundation Fellow, The Heritage Foundation: &#8220;The election of Trump shattered the reigning consensus on the Right. As a result, we conservatives have had to reconsider how we talk and think about the conservative project. [Yoram] Hazony has gathered an impressive array of conservatives to think through the big challenges of our time: The rise of China, identity politics, transnationalism and the atomization of Western society.&#8221;</li>
<li>Michael Doran, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow: &#8220;In the past, political movements tended to follow on after intellectual movements. In today&#8217;s world, nationalism has flowed directly out of the body politic without any preceding intellectual current. The conference seeks to begin filling the void.&#8221;</li>
<li>Rebeccah Heinrichs, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow: &#8220;What is the purpose of government? What is the unique purpose of the American government and how ought we as Americans orient our policies toward other nations? And what are the biggest external and internal threats facing America? Conservatives are grappling with these questions in a new and energetic way that is necessary and good. There is little consensus at this point and things are fluid. But that should be encouraging! Groupthink is the last thing we need. This conference will help us think through some of these questions so we can learn from one another and hopefully do good for conservatives and Americans, generally. It&#8217;s a start.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
I hope to see many of you next month in our nation&#8217;s capital to discuss these ideas that are so profoundly important for the future of our American republic, our Western civilization, and our common humanity alike.

HAMMER: The ‘National Conservatism Conference’ Is 2019’s Most Important Intellectual Gathering

On Wednesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” the host discusses the tragic death of a Dutch teen who was allowed to starve herself to death. Knowles slams the authorities in the Netherlands who refused to help the teenager in the name of “compassion.” Video and partial transcript below:
If all that matters is individual liberty, why is suicide wrong? Some of my libertarian friends have been talking about this over the last few days, they say that suicide should not be illegal. Does anybody really believe that though? I&#8217;ve heard many of my Libertarian friends say this, “Yeah, suicide is wrong, but it shouldn&#8217;t be illegal. The government should just stay out of it. If some guy wants to kill himself, let him kill himself. No business of mine.&#8221; It&#8217;s easy to say that, but do you really believe it?
Let&#8217;s say that there&#8217;s a cop and the cop is doing his nightly shift, and he drives up to a bridge and he sees a suicidal 18-year-old girl standing on that bridge about to kill herself. Does anybody really believe that the cop should not intervene? Because if suicide is illegal, as it is in much of the United States and in the civilized world, what the cop would do is say, &#8220;Don&#8217;t jump, don&#8217;t jump,&#8221; and he would do everything he could to come and grab her and pull her back from the edge. Then what he would do is get her the help that she needs, get her into a mental institution, get her into psychiatric counseling. It&#8217;s not that we are going to throw people in jail because they&#8217;re attempting suicide, but when there is a law against suicide, it allows the government to intervene.
That is what would happen if there is a law against suicide. If there&#8217;s no law against suicide, and it&#8217;s perfectly fine to kill yourself, when that cop pulls up on his nightly shift and sees the 18-year-old girl at the top of the bridge he can&#8217;t say, &#8220;don&#8217;t kill yourself.&#8221; How dare he; he&#8217;s infringing on her individual liberty. There is no law against it. How dare the government presume to come in and tell that 18-year-old girl what she is going to do with her body. Her body, her choice. In that case, it would be profoundly wrong of the cop to try to stop her. If anything, he should applaud her decision: &#8220;Oh how wonderful 18-year-old girl that you are exercising your liberty to kill yourself.&#8221; He&#8217;s the government, he&#8217;s the face of the government. Nobody really believes that. We all know on some basic level that suicide is profoundly wrong, and that if the fact of the government showed up, and some cop showed up and some young girl was going to kill herself, he should do everything he could do to stop her.
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This is not to say that individual liberty is a bad thing. Individual liberty is a great thing. Individual liberty is perhaps the most important instrument that we have in society. Under normal operating conditions, it is terrific. But, that&#8217;s not the be-all and end-all of government. We must also be able to say that certain things are simply wrong, intrinsically evil, contrary to civilization, contrary to society, contrary to law, contrary to liberty itself. Even if you just look at the argument from natural rights, we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You can&#8217;t pursue happiness without liberty, and you can&#8217;t have any liberty without life because if you take away life you take away liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Suicide is wrong. This is not a complicated discussion. The Left always does this and try to complicate simple moral statements. For instance, they&#8217;ll say, &#8220;well the suicide debate is really complicated. Some people are suffering.&#8221; Right, everybody suffers. That&#8217;s not a justification for killing yourself. Statistically, 100% of human beings who have ever lived have suffered. &#8220;Well, but it&#8217;s complicated.&#8221; No, it&#8217;s not. Suicide is wrong. &#8220;Illegal immigration, it&#8217;s so complicated.&#8221; No, it&#8217;s not, illegal immigration is illegal. Illegal is right there in the word. It&#8217;s not complicated. It&#8217;s actually the simplest issue that there is. Don&#8217;t do it and stop it from happening. Same thing with suicide. It is simply wrong. A healthy and vibrant culture knows that suicide is wrong. A washed-up psycho culture can&#8217;t explain why suicide is wrong and why that despicable member of parliament who visited that suicidal girl just before she died. He should have stopped her. He should have grabbed her and should have dragged her to a psychiatric clinic and got her the help that she needed.
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KNOWLES: The Case For Suicide Being Illegal

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Libertarian-leaning congressman Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), who made national headlines last weekend for smearing Attorney General William Barr in no uncertain terms and seeming to call for President Donald Trump&#8217;s impeachment, is now being urged by many to run for president in 2020 under the Libertarian Party partisan banner. 
The Hill <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/444835-amash-wont-rule-out-libertarian-challenge-to-trump">reports</a>:
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In interviews this year, Amash has toyed with the idea of switching parties and running for president. The Michigan Republican has described himself as the only Libertarian member of Congress and has been increasingly critical of the GOP, accusing the party of abandoning its conservative values in the age of Trump.
Libertarian National Committee Chairman Nicholas Sarwark told The Hill there&#8217;s a full-scale effort underway to convince Amash to register as a Libertarian and run for president against Trump.
&#8220;There are a lot of Libertarian Party members actively encouraging Rep. Amash to switch parties and seek the Libertarian nomination,&#8221; Sarwark said. &#8220;This is probably the most organized recruitment effort I&#8217;ve seen going back to 2012 when people were trying to recruit [former Texas Rep.] Ron Paul.&#8221;
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As The Hill also notes, many anti-Trump Republicans, including longtime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, have been actively courting a third-party challenger to Trump. These same Trump-critical Republicans have often praised Amash&#8217;s calling for impeachment, despite not always agreeing with Amash on his more libertarian-leaning stances on surveillance, security, and foreign policy issues.
&#8220;I say this as someone at odds with Amash on lots of issues important to me (and I think to him): All honor to Justin Amash, who has done so much today to set an example of constitutional responsibility and mature, civic discourse,&#8221; Kristol tweeted.
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I say this as someone at odds with Amash on lots of issues important to me (and I think to him): All honor to Justin Amash, who has done so much today to set an example of constitutional responsibility and mature, civic discourse.
&#8212; Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) <a href="https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1129881140255514625?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 18, 2019</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;If Trump&#8217;s the GOP nominee, I&#8217;d vote for [Justin Amash] as the [Libertarian Party] nominee in a heartbeat&#8221; added National Review&#8217;s David French.
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If Trump&#8217;s the GOP nominee, I&#8217;d vote for <a href="https://twitter.com/justinamash?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@justinamash</a> as the LP nominee in a heartbeat. <a href="https://t.co/UUMX4oZBUl">https://t.co/UUMX4oZBUl</a>
&#8212; David French (@DavidAFrench) <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1130272769705480199?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 20, 2019</a></blockquote>
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As Reason <a href="https://reason.com/2019/05/21/libertarians-and-never-trump-republicans-court-justin-amash-to-run-for-president/">points out</a>, Amash&#8217;s Michigander status would have huge political ramifications for Trump were he to enter the race. After all, Michigan was one of three Rust Belt states &#8212; including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin &#8212; that Trump very narrowly carried in 2016. If Trump loses all three of those states in 2020, his Electoral College path to re-election is exceedingly narrow. 
Amash set political Twitter on fire last weekend by tweeting, after reading the full report recently completed by special counsel Robert Mueller: &#8220;Here are my principal conclusions: 1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller&#8217;s report. 2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct. 3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances. 4. Few members of Congress have read the report.&#8221;
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Here are my principal conclusions: 
1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller&#8217;s report. 
2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct. 
3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances. 
4. Few members of Congress have read the report.
&#8212; Justin Amash (@justinamash) <a href="https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1129831615952236546?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 18, 2019</a></blockquote>
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In subsequent tweets as part of the same tweet thread, Amash also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47404/leftists-back-gop-rep-justin-amash-smearing-barr-ryan-saavedra">stated</a>:
<blockquote>
I offer these conclusions only after having read Mueller&#8217;s redacted report carefully and completely, having read or watched pertinent statements and testimony, and having discussed this matter with my staff, who thoroughly reviewed materials and provided me with further analysis.
In comparing Barr&#8217;s principal conclusions, congressional testimony, and other statements to Mueller&#8217;s report, it is clear that Barr intended to mislead the public about Special Counsel Robert Mueller&#8217;s analysis and findings.
Barr&#8217;s misrepresentations are significant but often subtle, frequently taking the form of sleight-of-hand qualifications or logical fallacies, which he hopes people will not notice.
Under our Constitution, the president &#8220;shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.&#8221; While &#8220;high Crimes and Misdemeanors&#8221; is not defined, the context implies conduct that violates the public trust.
Contrary to Barr&#8217;s portrayal, Mueller&#8217;s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment.
In fact, Mueller&#8217;s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.
Impeachment, which is a special form of indictment, does not even require probable cause that a crime (e.g., obstruction of justice) has been committed; it simply requires a finding that an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct.
While impeachment should be undertaken only in extraordinary circumstances, the risk we face in an environment of extreme partisanship is not that Congress will employ it as a remedy too often but rather that Congress will employ it so rarely that it cannot deter misconduct.
Our system of checks and balances relies on each branch&#8217;s jealously guarding its powers and upholding its duties under our Constitution. When loyalty to a political party or to an individual trumps loyalty to the Constitution, the Rule of Law&#8212;the foundation of liberty&#8212;crumbles.
We&#8217;ve witnessed members of Congress from both parties shift their views 180 degrees&#8212;on the importance of character, on the principles of obstruction of justice&#8212;depending on whether they&#8217;re discussing Bill Clinton or Donald Trump.
Few members of Congress even read Mueller&#8217;s report; their minds were made up based on partisan affiliation&#8212;and it showed, with representatives and senators from both parties issuing definitive statements on the 448-page report&#8217;s conclusions within just hours of its release.
America&#8217;s institutions depend on officials to uphold both the rules and spirit of our constitutional system even when to do so is personally inconvenient or yields a politically unfavorable outcome. Our Constitution is brilliant and awesome; it deserves a government to match it.
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Justin Amash Is Now Being Pressured To Run For President As A Libertarian

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