Consequential Actions Podcast

On January 3, 2026, the United States launched military strikes against Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro. This special episode—released alongside our series introduction—applies the founders’ framework to these events in real time. We examine the facts as currently known, compare the operation to historical precedents (Panama 1989, the Escobar manhunt), analyze the constitutional questions raised by unilateral executive military action, and ask what precedent has been set. While reserving judgment on the ultimate outcome, we argue that the process was inconsistent with constitutional design and the founders’ vision of republican foreign policy.

How a Republic Ends Up With Bases in 80 Countries

Military bases in roughly eighty countries. At war somewhere since 1941. Thirty-five trillion in debt. None of it was ever voted on as a whole.

James Madison said in 1795 that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare — not “might not,” not “would struggle to.” Could not. This introduction lays out the case that the surveillance state, the imperial presidency, and the permanent debt aren’t separate domestic problems with foreign policy attached. They’re the domestic bill for foreign policy choices. It also maps the twenty episodes ahead, from Washington’s Farewell Address to Ukraine.

This is the introduction to “Empire of Liberty: America’s Foreign Entanglements from the Founders to the Forever Wars,” a series tracing how a republic that warned against entangling alliances became a global military empire. It is Part 3 of the Consequential Actions historical series, following “From General Welfare to the Great Society” and “The New Leviathan.”

The question underneath all of it: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 - Introduction to the Consequential Actions Podcast

00:53 - James Madison’s Warning on War and Liberty

02:08 - How Previous Series Connect to Foreign Policy

03:20 - Introducing the “Empire of Liberty” Series

06:03 - How War Expands Government Power

07:51 - The Domestic Consequences of Foreign Interventions

10:15 - The Founders’ Clear Foreign Policy Vision

13:43 - Addressing the “Weak Nation” Objection

15:27 - Constitutional Constraints on War

16:49 - Previewing the 20-Part Journey Ahead

17:22 - Part 1: The Founders’ Republic

18:13 - Part 2: The Turn to Empire

19:08 - Part 3: The Interwar Period and WWII

19:50 - Part 4: The CIA and Covert Empire

20:51 - Part 5: The Special Relationships

21:32 - Part 6: The Forever Wars

22:21 - Part 7: Present and Future

22:54 - Five Thematic Trends of American Intervention

24:49 - Release Schedule: How to Follow the Series

28:40 - The Ultimate Question: Republic or Empire?

31:43 - Conclusion and Next Episode Preview

🎙️ Empire of Liberty — Ep 0: “Introducing Empire of Liberty — America’s Foreign Entanglements from the Founders to the Forever Wars”

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Consequential Actions is a libertarian, non-interventionist analysis of American constitutional and foreign policy. New episodes weekly.

#noninterventionism #foreverwars #militaryindustrialcomplex #constitution #empire

Throughout history, free people have faced concentrations of power and found ways to resist, reform, and restore. The question is not whether the New Leviathan exists—it does. The question is whether it can be constrained, rolled back, and ultimately dismantled.

This final episode asks that question. Not with naive optimism, but with clear-eyed assessment of the paths that remain open. Not with despair, but with the recognition that liberty has never been preserved by those who believed preservation impossible.

This episode examines what is being built—the infrastructure of digital control that will define the next generation’s relationship with government and commerce, tracing the convergence of financial surveillance, digital identity, and social scoring into a unified system.

COVID-19 would ultimately kill more than one million Americans. The elderly. The immunocompromised. There is no questioning the reality of the toll this virus inflicted on people with pain, suffering, and grief. Rather, this episode asks a different question—not whether the virus was dangerous, but whether the response was proportionate. Not whether government should have acted, but whether the actions taken were consistent with constitutional governance. Not whether emergency powers exist, but whether emergency ever ends.

As we enter a new year, I want to share some book recommendations—essential reading for anyone who has enjoyed our explorations of liberty, economics, and the proper limits of government power throughout 2025.

What happens when welfare and security fuse—when the databases designed to track benefits become interoperable with those designed to track threats. When the citizen who was once a recipient becomes a credential. When the bureaucracy that once served becomes the bureaucracy that manages.

A secret cabal flaunted in its own history pages of its website. A hybrid entity private in form, public in function. The evolution of the power to create money—to determine the value of every dollar in every pocket— from the halls of congress (elected representatives of the people) to the hands of unelected experts. A fiat money system, where there is no constraint, where the quantity of money is limited only by the decisions of those who control its creation. A system that promotes private gains and socializes losses for those deemed “too big to fail”…

After September 11, the national security apparatus discovered that Silicon Valley had already built something it could never have constructed on its own: a commercial surveillance infrastructure of unprecedented scope. The partnership that emerged—formalized through Section 702, PRISM, and informal coordination channels—erased the boundary between corporate database and government intelligence.

The compliance economy extended that surveillance to finance. Banks became informants. Every transaction became a potential report. Forty billion dollars in annual compliance costs created a system of perpetual financial monitoring that operates without warrants, without probable cause, and largely without public awareness.

And as platforms became central to public discourse, they became subject to government pressure—sometimes explicit, more often implicit—to moderate content in ways that serve administrative priorities. The First Amendment bars government censorship. It does not bar government from suggesting what private companies should censor on its behalf.

What happens when emergency becomes permanent? When the logic of exception becomes the logic of governance? When the state designed to manage poverty discovers it can also manage fear?

That is the story of the New Leviathan.

And it begins on a clear blue morning in September.