This contemporary application episode examines how the founders’ key insight—that foreign policy and domestic liberty are intimately connected—plays out in a current case study. We trace the chain from America’s ongoing undeclared war in Somalia (over 100 airstrikes in 2025 alone) to the refugee crisis it has fueled to the fraud scandal now dominating headlines in Minnesota. The founders warned that entanglements abroad would have consequences at home. This is what those consequences look like.

Content Note:This episode discusses politically sensitive topics including immigration, fraud allegations, and US military operations. The analysis is intended to be fair-minded and non-partisan, applying the founders’ analytical framework to current events.

This episode establishes the baseline of American foreign policy as the founders envisioned it. We examine the lessons of the Revolutionary War and the French Alliance, the classical republican tradition's warnings about standing armies, and the constitutional provisions designed to prevent military adventurism. We explore the foundational texts—Washington's Farewell Address, Jefferson's First Inaugural, and Madison's "Political Observations"—in depth and in the founders' own words.

We trace how the early republic tested these principles in the Quasi-War, the Barbary Wars, the War of 1812, and the Monroe Doctrine. Finally, we address the interventionist objection and explain why the founders' wisdom remains relevant for a global superpower.

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 did a republic founded on principles of non-intervention become an empire with military bases in eighty countries? How did a nation that once warned against “entangling alliances” come to maintain alliance commitments that span the globe? And here is the question that matters most: How have these choices abroad shaped liberty at home?

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”…