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Nick Freitas: Is Trump quietly achieving what libertarians have wanted for decades?

The Blaze
3 days 23 hours ago


Libertarians have long called for a smaller American footprint overseas, and Austin Padgett is making the argument that Trump’s foreign policy is doing exactly that.

“The way I would generally describe libertarian foreign policy is ... it’s not isolationist, but it’s non-interventionist. It’s the idea that, you know, look, we’re happy to trade with people, but if it’s not directly affecting us or really signifying a significant threat to our security, we just don’t need to be involved,” BlazeTV host Nick Freitas says.

"A lot of times libertarians have a debate as if we’re questioning whether we should create a Federal Reserve, rather than having a debate in the context of the fact that we do have a Federal Reserve,” Padgett says.

“We’re not debating in 1913,” he says.

“It’s the same thing for the empire. The empire represents a dependency,” he continues. “It’s a security dependency. Security works like a market like anything else. If the government takes over that service or your government takes over in another government’s region to provide security services, then that creates a legitimate dependency.”

This is why in order to “accomplish actual libertarian goals,” a libertarian would “have to do something along the lines of what Trump is doing.”

And what Trump is doing is “getting our allies to invest in their own militaries.”

“Japan’s building their own military for the first time in forever. We’re getting Europe to fund their defense. We’re neutering Iran so that Israel and Saudi Arabia can manage the region effectively on their own,” Padgett explains.

“And we don’t have to get tied in there because could you imagine if Iran developed missile deterrence, had the clear to finish their nuclear program, and then could you imagine in that context trying to get the U.S. military out of the Middle East? They would have a reason for a permanent balance of power,” he says.

“The real question is, how do you create the conditions that actually allows you to pull back while still maintaining a stability in the region that does facilitate the positive interactions that libertarians want, which is generally trade,” Freitas comments.

“And even if Trump isn’t as libertarian as some people might want him to be, the fact that he’s engaging in reality makes him a better person to have in office to achieve libertarian goals than even the most libertarian person you could ever imagine,” he adds.

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BlazeTV Staff

Muslims organize openly. Why do Christians act like they can’t?

The Blaze
4 days ago


Muslim communities are organizing politically in America, and they are not apologizing for it. Mosques in North Texas have become voter-registration hubs. In Michigan, Muslim candidates and activists have demonstrated the power of an organized constituency. The state has just elected the nation’s first Muslim U.S. senator.

What American Christians should learn from these examples is not theology. It is confidence in bringing religious commitments into public life. American Christians should pay attention. They have spent decades hearing that faith belongs in church and that explicitly Christian political action is somehow improper. That convenient rule does not seem to apply to everyone.

Christendom shaped the West, including America’s laws, customs, and understanding of human dignity. If Christians believe that inheritance is worth defending, they must speak up.

Christians must learn to fight for their faith in public. The future belongs to communities that intend to preserve their way of life, not those that apologize for having one.

America was founded by a population overwhelmingly shaped by Anglo-Protestant Christianity. That tradition formed its customs, moral assumptions, and public institutions. Several founding-era states required officeholders to profess Protestant or Christian beliefs. Georgia and New Hampshire explicitly favored Protestants. Other states adopted broader religious tests.

The U.S. Constitution was different. Article VI prohibited religious tests for federal office from the beginning. The First Amendment barred Congress from establishing a religion and protected its free exercise. Those protections did not change the basic reality: American life remained saturated with Protestant Christianity.

Yet the central cultural fact remains: Protestant Christianity shaped the country’s public life so thoroughly that its adherents rarely needed to think of themselves as a political majority. A fish does not know it is wet. When a nation's schools, holidays, and moral vocabulary largely reflect one religious inheritance, political organization around that inheritance can seem unnecessary.

Immigration changed the balance. Catholics had been present since colonial times, as had Jews, but immigration from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe expanded the numbers and influence of religious minorities. The question was unavoidable: Could a culture built around Protestant assumptions absorb growing religious diversity without surrendering its own character?

In 1958, presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy published “A Nation of Immigrants” with the Anti-Defamation League. Its vision placed immigration at the center of the American story rather than treating Anglo-Protestant culture as the country’s defining feature. Kennedy’s election as the first Catholic president in 1960 marked another transformation in the nation’s religious imagination.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination, abolished the old national-origins quota system, radically changing who would be allowed to enter the country. Suddenly the floodgates to America were open.

Something else changed alongside the laws: the meaning Americans attached to religious liberty. Freedom of conscience, once defended in a society largely governed by Protestant assumptions, increasingly meant public institutions treating rival faiths on equal terms.

Courts extended constitutional limits on religious establishment to the states. The prohibition against establishing an official state church was now interpreted as a prohibition against favoring Christianity at all.

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Liberal mainline Protestant leaders embraced this transformation. Their participation in the civil rights movement brought a conviction that public Christianity, if too closely identified with the old social order, could become an obstacle to inclusion. Others accepted the proposition that politics should be conducted in a supposedly neutral language, with Christian commitments translated into secular terms before they could be heard.

The pitch to the churches was simple — and seductive. Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Christ rejected an earthly kingdom. Shouldn't Christians be content to preach the gospel and leave the business of government to professionals? Fear of being labeled backward or intolerant made retreat even easier.

But Christ did not tell His followers to pretend their convictions had no bearing on law, education, or the common good. The idea that Christians must be politically passive because the Constitution protects religious liberty turns that liberty into a gag order.

Conservatives helped sell this bargain. Reduce the power of government, they said, and stop trying to shape the culture through politics. Conveniently, their opponents had no intention of surrendering political power. The result was a right that treated withdrawal as principle while every competing movement treated political organization as common sense. In schools, public ceremonies, and debates over the family, that retreat handed the initiative to others.

For decades, the Christian political class has mistaken the rules of a plural society for an instruction to disappear. No secular activist interprets pluralism that way. No Muslim organizer needs to. They enter the political arena as people with convictions, constituencies, and interests. Christians should quit treating those facts of political life as a privilege reserved for everyone else.

The Moral Majority showed that Christians could act collectively. So have the religious conservative organizations that followed it. Yet too often their leaders have been content to defend yesterday's defeats rather than articulate a Christian vision of public life. They speak of “Western values” and “Western civilization” as though Christianity was an embarrassing family secret.

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Meanwhile, a spiritual vacuum does not stay empty. Secular humanism promised to supply moral purpose without religion. Wokeness took on the character of a rival creed, complete with its own saints, heresies, and rituals of public repentance. And now Muslim communities, confident in their religious identity, are also competing for influence in the public square.

Christians should stop acting surprised. Political power will not remain unclaimed simply because they refuse to reach for it. Nor will churches recover their cultural authority by pretending that doctrine has no public consequences.

Christendom shaped the West, including America’s laws, customs, and understanding of human dignity. If Christians believe that inheritance is worth defending, they must speak up. They must organize, argue, vote, and fight politically for the institutions and moral commitments they want their children to inherit.

The lie is that doing so violates the country’s principles. The truth is that religious liberty gives Christians the same right to organize that everyone else already exercises. A faith that refuses to defend its place in public life should not be astonished when others occupy the ground it abandoned.

Auron MacIntyre