Consequential Actions Podcast

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 11B Learning Resources v. Trump, Section 122, and the 1689 Bill of Rights: How the Taxing Power Left Congress At one minute past midnight on July 24, 2026, a tax on most of what Americans buy from abroad stopped existing. No bill passed either chamber. No president signed anything. In the same minute a different tax took its place, at roughly the same rate,...

Victor Davis Hanson is one of my favorite historians and commentators. I have read and listened to his words for years. He is also wrong about third parties when he said they do harm. In this episode, I will explain in detail why that is. On August 11, 2026, Victor Davis Hanson sat down with Jack Fowler and made two arguments about the ten-point platform that came out of the gathering at Tucker Ca...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 11 The Invasion England Decided to Call a Revolution 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...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10i A Prosecutor Would Give Up Every Institution but One 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 sea...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10B Six Officers Searched His Home Over a Tweet 26 People Saw In November of 2023, six police officers arrived at the door of a seventy-one-year-old retired special constable in Gillingham, Kent, and handcuffed him in his own home. Body-worn camera footage records them remarking on his bookcase — Douglas Murray, The Spectator, very Brexity things — and exam...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10 They Executed Him for a Book Nobody Had Read On the twenty-first of November, 1683, a sixty-year-old man stood at the bar of the Court of King’s Bench charged with high treason, without counsel, because English law did not permit a man accused of treason to have any. The crown had one witness, and the law required two. So the prosecution reached for an u...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9i A Justice Wrote a Warning Into His Own Ruling. Alabama Ignored It. In October of 2023, in a small town on the Alabama–Florida line, a newspaper publisher and one of her reporters were arrested and charged with felonies over a story about how federal COVID relief money had been spent at the local school system. Four centuries after the fight this week is...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9B The Pardon Meant to Shield Fauci Is Why He Faces Contempt On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times. On August 6, the committee voted 8 to 5 along party lines to hold him in contempt of Congress, and Chairman Rand Paul sent the refer...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9 The Constitution England Wrote in 1647 — and Never Adopted In April of 1638 a twenty-three-year-old named John Lilburne was tied to the back of an ox cart and whipped two miles through London, then locked in a pillory at Westminster. He had been convicted of no crime. His offense was refusing to swear an oath that would have bound him to answer whatever t...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 8i His Opponent Ran Unopposed — So He Needed Double the Signatures A game warden walks onto a Pennsylvania farm. No warrant, no complaint, no reason given. For nineteen years, Pennsylvania’s own Supreme Court held that the Commonwealth’s constitution permitted exactly that. On July 21, 2026, that court reversed itself, unanimously. Brian Peltier, the Libert...

78 Days, No Warrant — and Every Bit of It Was Legal A Pennsylvania game warden named Mark Gritzer walked onto 4,400 acres of posted private ground in Clearfield County — signs at the road, purple paint on the boundary trees, locked gates — and fixed a trail camera to a tree. He had no warrant and no probable cause. Developing probable cause was the point of the camera. It stayed there for 78 days....

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 8 Sir Edward Coke Explained: The Common Law, Bonham’s Case & the Petition of Right | Self-Evident Ep. 8 Sometime around 1608, in a chamber at Whitehall, the King of England lost his temper with a judge. James the First held that his judges were merely his delegates — that he, the sovereign, possessed reason enough to pull any case into his own hands and...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Companion Episode How a Crown That Could Not Tax Became a Parliament That Could Tax Without Limit A teaching companion, whiteboard and all. 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 wh...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 7i A Mile of Signatures by Hand — Just to Get on the Ballot 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,...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 7B Who Decides When America Goes to War? The Constitution Has a Plain Answer In a single month this summer, two of the narrow seas on which the world’s commerce depends were choked by force from two directions — the Strait of Hormuz nearly silenced, and the Bab al-Mandab under a declared embargo. Four hundred years ago, a young Dutch lawyer wrote down the p...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 7 The Freest Country in Europe Had No King — and Nobody Planned It That Way On the tenth of July, 1584, in the city of Delft, an assassin climbed a staircase with two pistols hidden beneath his cloak and shot William the Silent — the man the Dutch called the Father of the Fatherland, and for two decades the one figure holding the revolt against Spain togeth...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 6i This is the Thursday interview closing Week 6 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — the week we asked when, if ever, it is lawful to resist an unjust ruler. All week the story ran through the Calvinists: through Beza, through the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, through the Dutch. In this conversation, John Thomas walks the story back further — to a Lutheran tow...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 6B A Rule Changed Your Life — and Nobody Voted for It Somewhere in the last year, a rule changed the terms of your life. You can name the agency that wrote it. You cannot name a single person who voted for it. The efficiency standard on your water heater, the disclosure format on your mortgage, the warning on your prescription — Congress passed a statute, y...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 6 A Massacre Forced One Question — and the Answer Reached 1776 Before dawn on the twenty-fourth of August, 1572, the killing began in Paris. Thousands of French Calvinists — the Huguenots — were murdered in the streets over days, thousands more across France in the weeks that followed. Until that morning, the Calvinists had been a people of obedience, preac...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 5BThe Quiet Censorship You've Already Felt — and Never Noticed Picture an ordinary person in the spring of 2021 — a nurse, an engineer, a teacher — with a reasonable question forming in their mind. And picture them swallowing it, unasked, not because a censor stopped them, but because they had learned that asking it would mark them as the wrong kind of...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 5 One Monk Said No to a Pope and an Emperor — and Broke Europe On the eighteenth of April, 1521, a thirty-seven-year-old excommunicated monk stood alone in a crowded hall at Worms and refused an order backed by the two highest powers on earth — the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Posterity gave him a ringing phrase he almost certainly never said. What Mart...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 4B I Built Surveillance Systems for a Living. This Should Scare You Four scenes, four machines, one thing missing from all of them. A man held on a London street because a camera misread his face. An American officer using a police camera network to track an ex-partner. A man in China arranging his expression for a lens that reads emotion. And a small boat...

What is due process, and what happens to it when the machinery of the state slips free of the law built to bind it? This contemporary-application episode takes the single medieval sentence at the heart of Saturday’s episode — clause 39 of Magna Carta, the principle that the state may not seize, imprison, destroy, or otherwise deprive a person except by the judgment of his peers or the law of the l...

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 4 A Lying King Sealed It. It Outlived Him by 800 Years. In June 1215, in a wet meadow called Runnymede, a defeated King John pressed his seal to a document he had no intention of honoring. Within ten weeks he had the Pope declare it void. The charter was dead before the wax cooled — a failed peace treaty between a faithless king and a self-interested aristo...

This is the episode where the inheritance stops being philosophy and starts becoming politics — and the episode that closes the first arc of the series. It opens at Runnymede in 1215, where a defeated King John sealed a charter he meant to break and broke within ten weeks, and which nonetheless outlived him by eight centuries to become a foundation stone of the principle that even the highest powe...