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Victor Davis Hanson asked a question this month that he intended as rhetorical. Speaking with Jack Fowler about the gathering at Tucker Carlson’s home in Maine and the ten-point platform that followed it, he said that these were supposedly learned people, and that they should ask themselves when a third party ever got elected, and when a third party ever did anything other than harm the party most akin to it.

On the afternoon of 5 November 1688, the people of a Devon fishing village looked out at Tor Bay and could not see the water for ships. Something like four hundred and sixty of them, carrying fifteen thousand professional soldiers, their horses, their siege guns, and a printing press. It was the largest fleet to reach English shores since 1066, it had sailed the length of the Channel unopposed, and it belonged to a foreign head of state. Fourteen months later that same kingdo

Dr. Thomas Laehn taught constitutional law and political philosophy to undergraduates before he ever charged anyone with a crime. He is now the County Attorney for Greene County, Iowa, the first Libertarian ever elected to partisan office in that state, and a candidate for the United States Senate seat Joni Ernst is leaving open. He is also, by his own description paradoxically, a proponent of jury nullification.

This hour names a British government, a Chinese government, and an American administration, and applies the same standard to each. It also declines the easy version of its own argument. The British non-crime hate incident regime was found unlawful by Britain’s own Court of Appeal in 2021, abandoned for investigation by the Metropolitan Police in October 2025, and the statutory basis for it was repealed by an Act of Parliament that received Royal Assent this April. The reform

The phrase they used for what they feared was not absolutism or tyranny in the abstract. It was popery and arbitrary power, spoken as one linked idea, and it appears in exactly that form in the statute they eventually wrote. To them the halves were a single thing: a Catholic king would rule without Parliament, and a king who ruled without Parliament would restore Catholicism. That is prejudice and constitutional argument at once, sincerely both, and translating it into secula

This episode states Filmer’s case at full strength before answering it, because an argument answered in its weakest form has not been answered at all — and his hard question has never entirely gone away. When, exactly, did you consent? Where is this original agreement? Produce it. You were born into a country, under laws written before you existed, enforced by a government you never chose, and you did not sign anything.

This is the Thursday conversation that closes week nine of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Sunday brought the written article. Saturday told the history of the Levellers, the printers and pamphleteers who wanted the limits on power written down and published without anyone’s permission. Tuesday carried it into the present. Today we close the week with a living voice — because rather than theorize about the distance between a document and its enforcement, it seemed better to a

This hour costs something. It defends a man I hold responsible for real harm, it criticizes Senator Rand Paul, who is on most days the best friend the Bill of Rights has in the Senate, and it turns on the movement and on me before it turns anywhere else. That is the point. The test this series always comes back to: did this leave us more free, or more governed?

A man was killed for what he had written in private and never published. It is worth truly considering that fact still for a moment, because it tells us something about the stakes of the ideas this article concerns. These were not abstractions to be debated at leisure. In the England of the 1680s, the proposition that no king could derive an unanswerable title from Adam — and that legitimate power rested instead on law, the public good, and some form of consent — was dangerou

Episode 9 traces the Levellers, the print-and-petition network of London radicals and army agitators who took Sir Edward Coke’s defense of English liberty and moved its foundation out from under it.

Brian Peltier is the Libertarian candidate for Pennsylvania’s 60th House District, covering Armstrong and Westmoreland counties. He spent 24 and a half years in the Navy, worked as a regulatory agent at Naval Reactors, and after twelve moves decided to stop moving and raise cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and turkeys outside Leechburg.

This is Episode 8B of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — the Tuesday contemporary-application episode of Week 8, following Saturday’s Episode 8, “The Common Law Will Control,” on Sir Edward Coke and the Stuart struggle. Every episode of this series asks the same question of every consequential action: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

The war that ended in 1647 had begun five years earlier as a quarrel over exactly the questions the previous article left unresolved: whether the king’s power ran only as far as the law allowed, or whether the crown held reserves of authority above the reach of Parliament and the courts.

This is Episode 8, the opening of Arc III — English Liberty — and the first of the series to turn from the question of how to govern without a king to the harder English question of how to bind a king who very much remains on his throne. It is the story of Sir Edward Coke and the idea he did more than any single man to forge: that the law stands above the crown. We trace what the common law actually was — a law its own practitioners claimed no one had made, found rather than

This is a companion episode — a teaching hour, whiteboard and all — built to sit beside the middle stretch of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. The arguments of Articles 8 through 15 each follow a mind: a lawyer insisting the common law bounds the king, a regiment debating the vote in a church at Putney, a philosopher justifying revolution, a generation of Scots and Frenchmen asking what a free society requires...

Articles 8 through 15 follow arguments. They follow a lawyer insisting that the common law bounds the King, a regiment debating the franchise in a Putney church, a philosopher justifying revolution, and a generation of Scots and Frenchmen asking what a free society requires. What those articles do not do, because they cannot do it without losing their subjects, is keep a running account of who held the throne while the arguments were made, and what that person was doing.

This is the Thursday interview closing Week 7 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — the week we traced the Dutch Republic, the first modern commercial republic, which grew prosperous not by concentrating power but by refusing to. All week the argument was that liberty and prosperity travel together, and that power held far from the people tends to be power misused. This conversation puts a living face on it: a candidate standing in the middle of the machinery, who can tell you

Twenty-three months separate those two dates. A country supposedly enraged past all endurance somehow contained itself for almost two years — and then went to war anyway. So what actually changed in between? These are the top five reasons the United States entered World War One, ranked not by drama but by depth: from the reason everybody names first, up to the condition underneath all of them. At every single item, the case for war is given at full strength before one word

This is the contemporary-application episode for Week 7 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, and it takes Grotius off the page and holds him against our own moment — then follows the free-sea question to a harder one, closer to home. When the sea is contested and America turns to military force over it, who decides that we fight? The Constitution begins with a plain answer: Article I, Section 8 gives the power to declare war to Congress, not the President. This hour measures ou

To understand why that sentence was revolutionary, and why the man who spoke it is widely regarded as one of the most important legal minds the English common-law tradition has produced, we have to understand what the common law was, what the Stuart kings claimed, and why the collision between them shaped the constitutional inheritance that the American colonists would one day take up as their own.