PODCAST · news
Consequential Actions Podcast
by Jeff Kellick
Our standard is simple: we evaluate every policy, every leader, every turning point by asking the founders’ question updated for our time—Did this leave people more free or more governed?
Episodes
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The Mayflower Compact to the Town Meeting: How Colonial New England Governed Itself. “Self-Government Before Theory”
The Mayflower Compact to the Town Meeting: How Colonial New England Governed Itself In November 1620, the Mayflower dropped anchor far outside the only patent its passengers held. Before anyone went ashore, forty-one men promised to make just and equal laws and to obey them. The paper named no...
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The Houthis vs. Saudi Arabia: Who Can End Yemen’s War?
The Houthis vs. Saudi Arabia: Who Can End Yemen's War? On Saturday a Houthi missile struck Riyadh's airport and killed thirteen people, one of them an American. In Yemen, tribal mediators have spent the whole war bringing the dead home to their families before anyone speaks of terms. Episode 16B...
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Did the Iroquois Shape the Constitution? The Great Law of Peace
Did the Iroquois Shape the Constitution? The Great Law of Peace In 1744 an Onondaga speaker told three English colonies to unite as his forefathers had. Franklin printed the speech. When the colonists designed a union, they did not copy it. This is Episode 16 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776…
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Peter McPhee on the French Revolution: Robespierre, the King's Trial, and the Terror
Who Decides When the Emergency Ends? Peter McPhee on the French Revolution In 1793, France gave sweeping emergency powers to a few committees. Historian Peter McPhee explains why, and why ending them became a deadly question. This is the interview episode for Week 15 of Self-Evident: The Road to...
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The Draft Was Never Repealed. Here Is What Changes in December
Automatic Draft Registration (Dec. 2026) and the History of the American Draft This December, Selective Service registration becomes automatic. The duty to sign up moves from the man to the government, and the agency that has to run it withdrew its implementing rules in July without ever…
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Does Majority Consent Make You Free? Voltaire, Rousseau & the General Will
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Ep. 15 Voltaire vs. Rousseau: Toleration, Consent & the General Will In 1762 a Protestant cloth merchant was broken on the wheel in Toulouse for a murder that never happened. Voltaire spent three years getting the verdict overturned, and the case became the…
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What Did Your Straight Ticket Buy? Both Parties' Platforms, Graded
What Did Your Straight Ticket Buy? Both Parties' Platforms, Graded. A Contemporary Bonus Episode to the series: Parties, Ideologies, and Systems. A party-line vote is a vote for a party, and the one formal statement a party adopts of what it stands for is its convention platform. Almost nobody...
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Humboldt County's Cannabis Fines & the Civil Jury | Jared McClain, Institute for Justice
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 14i Prosecutor One Day, Judge the Next: Inside America's In-House Courts | Jared McClain Montesquieu wrote that there is no liberty if the power of judging is joined to the power of carrying out the law. Jared McClain, a senior attorney at the Institute…
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Massie, Hegseth & the Epstein Petition: Why Congress Stopped Checking
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 14B The House Didn’t Vote No. It Just Went Home. On September 15, 2026, Rep. Thomas Massie read eight articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on the House floor and gave notice of them as a question of the privileges of the House…
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Everyone Quotes Montesquieu Almost Nobody Reads Past the First Page
Montesquieu and the Separation of Powers: The Spirit of the Laws Explained In 1748, a retired French magistrate published The Spirit of the Laws anonymously. Within three years, the Church banned it; within forty, Americans on both sides of the constitutional ratification fight relied on it to…
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Socialist Calculation Debate Explained: Menger, Mises, Hayek and "I, Pencil" in 2026
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 13B Nobody Knows How to Make a Pencil. So What Is a Price Actually Telling You? In December 1958, Leonard Read published an essay in the voice of a pencil, and its claim still holds. Not one person in the pencil’s global supply chain knows how to make one,...
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Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson: The Wealth of Nations, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, and the Militia Question
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 13 Adam Smith Made the Case for the Free Market. Then, in the Same Book, He Wrote the Strongest Objection to It. Two men were born in Scotland in 1723, a county apart. They joined the same Edinburgh club, kept the same friends, and worked from the same...
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David Evans of Sentiero Ventures on Artificial Intelligence, Lyapunov Time, and the Knowledge Problem | Self-Evident Week 12
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 12i I Asked an AI Investor Whether a Machine Could Set Every Rent in New York. He Said It Absolutely Could. David Evans is the founder and managing partner of Sentiero Ventures, an early-stage venture fund outside Dallas that invests in business software...
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NYC Municipal Grocery Stores, the Rent Freeze, and Federal Equity Stakes: Hume's Knowledge Problem in 2026
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 12B A City Promised Groceries 30% Below Retail. Somebody Still Has to Decide 30% Below What. In July, New York City published a request for proposals for five publicly funded, privately operated grocery stores. A core basket sells at thirty percent below...
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Hutcheson, Hume, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Undesigned Order Before It Had a Name
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 12 The Country That Made David Hume Refused to Hire Him In the spring of 1745 a man of thirty-four sat down in Edinburgh to defend himself anonymously against charges of atheism and skepticism, because a chair had come open at the university in his own…
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James Ostrowski on the 1689 Arms Clause, the NY SAFE Act Reversal, and Government Takes 80%
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 11i I Asked a Forty-Year Appellate Lawyer What a Court Is For. He Said It Is a Bureaucracy. James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer in Buffalo, New York, in his forty-second year of practice. He took degrees from SUNY Buffalo and Brooklyn Law…
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A Tax Expired at Midnight. Another Took Its Place in the Same Minute.
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...
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In the Age of Trump and Biden, Victor Davis Hanson Is Wrong About Third Parties
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...
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The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the English Bill of Rights
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...
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Dr. Thomas Laehn, LP Candidate for US Senate — On Locke, Eminent Domain, and Jury Nullification
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...
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Scribere Est Agere: When a Government Turns Your Writing Into an Act
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...
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Algernon Sidney and John Locke: How Two Men Answered Filmer and Armed a Revolution
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…
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Brendan Kirby, FOX10 News Investigative Reporter, on Grand Jury Secrecy, Body Camera Records, and Alabama's Open Records Act
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…
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Fauci Contempt Vote Explained: The Fifth Amendment, the Pardon, and the Lois Lerner Precedent
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...
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The Levellers
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…
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Brian Peltier, Libertarian for PA House District 60: Open Fields, Defend the Guard, and Ballot Access
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...
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The Golden Metwand, Some Powers Were Never the Vote's to Give Away
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...
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The Common Law Will Control
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...
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English Monarchs Explained: Henry VIII to George III — Coke, Charles I, the Glorious Revolution & 1776
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…
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Jamie Frost Remmey — Libertarian for U.S. House, PA-01 — On Ballot Access, Defend the Guard & War Powers
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...
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Grotius, the Free Sea & the War Powers Debate: Hormuz, Bab al-Mandab & Article I
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…
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The Dutch Republic Explained: William the Silent, Toleration, the VOC & Grotius
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…
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John Thomas, LP Candidate for PA Lieutenant Governor — On Resistance, Romans 13 & School Choice
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…
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Who Actually Writes the Laws You Live Under? (It Isn't Congress)
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,...
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The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the Birth of Resistance Theory
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…
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Censorship, the Printing Press, and Free Speech: Luther's Inheritance Today
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...
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Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521): Conscience, the Reformation, and the Birth of Resistance
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…
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Flock, Palantir & the Caribbean Boat Strikes: Due Process in 2026
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…
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Magna Carta & Aquinas: The Medieval Roots of "The King Is Under the Law"
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...
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Ellsberg, Snowden, Assange & the Espionage Act of 1917
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 3B They Used a 1917 Spy Law on the Men Who Told the Truth In April, the Secretary of Defense told the Senate the American people supported the war in Iran. He was wrong — not arguably, but as a matter of arithmetic. By June it was the most unpopular war in...
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How Baghdad Saved Aristotle for the West | House of Wisdom
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 3 They Paid the Weight of Each Book in Gold In ninth-century Baghdad, the caliph's agents scoured the known world for Greek manuscripts — Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen — and the translators who carried them into Arabic were paid, by the accounts that...
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Why the House Has 435 Members: The 1929 Cap Explained
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 2B Your Congressman Represents 765,000 People. That’s Broken. The district I live in, holds 765,403 people — all represented by one member of the “people’s house.” Now measure that against the men who built it. On the final day of the Constitutional...
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The Law Above the Law: Cicero, Natural Rights & 1776
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 2 They Nailed His Hands to the Podium He Spoke FromOn December 7, 43 BC, an old man ordered his servants to set down his litter, faced the soldiers sent to kill him, and offered them his neck. His name was Cicero. They took his head — and, because he had...
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Flemming v. Nestor: Why You Have No Right to Social Security
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 1B The Supreme Court Ruled Your Social Security Isn’t Yours You have watched FICA leave your paycheck for decades. You were told it was your contribution, building toward your benefit. So when a senator promises to make Social Security solvent by “asking…
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The Golden Thread
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 1 "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Every American has heard the words until they became wallpaper. But listen again — a document announcing revolution stops to appeal not to custom, not to tradition, but to truth. Where did those truths come…
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Republic or Empire — Where Do We Go From Here?
Empire of Liberty — Episode 20 Is America's Decline a Choice — or a Sentence? There is a sequence, often attributed to Alexander Tytler, that describes the life cycle of a free people: from bondage to faith to courage to liberty to abundance — and then the long descent through complacency…
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Libertarians Being Libertarian: After Kentucky
Originally planned as a companion piece to our written article, this episode has adjusted into coverage of the Kentucky 4th district US House race featuring Thomas Massie. We go into a day after analysis and look at the numbers and the history of this race. Get full access to Consequential…
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The Aristocracy of Pull — From Smedley Butler to the Equity State
Empire of Liberty — Episode 19B This contemporary application episode is the libertarian corrective to ninety years of misnamed critique of American foreign policy. Opening with Major General Smedley Butler’s 1933 confession revisited from Episode 19, the episode performs the vocabulary repair...
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“The Monroe Doctrine Inverted” — Venezuela and the Ongoing Interventions
Empire of Liberty — Episode 19 Monroe Doctrine to Venezuela: 200 Years of Intervention In 1933 a retired Marine major general — one of only nineteen men ever awarded the Medal of Honor twice — stood in front of a veterans’ audience and said he had spent thirty-three years as “a gangster for...
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The Adjective and the Noun
Piece 1 of a three-part feature on libertarianism and the 2026 Libertarian National Convention. The episode separates the libertarian idea — the lowercase-l, a tradition reaching back roughly twenty-five centuries — from the Libertarian Party — the capital-L, a coalition organized in a…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Our standard is simple: we evaluate every policy, every leader, every turning point by asking the founders’ question updated for our time—Did this leave people more free or more governed?
HOSTED BY
Jeff Kellick
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How many episodes does Consequential Actions Podcast have?
Consequential Actions Podcast currently has 96 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Consequential Actions Podcast about?
Our standard is simple: we evaluate every policy, every leader, every turning point by asking the founders’ question updated for our time—Did this leave people more free or more governed?
How often does Consequential Actions Podcast release new episodes?
Consequential Actions Podcast has 96 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Who hosts Consequential Actions Podcast?
Consequential Actions Podcast is created and hosted by Jeff Kellick.
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