Democrats are gearing up for the 2028 election and preparing a list of policy priorities—dubbed "Project 2029"—should they retake the White House. The first Project 2029 proposal is not about affordability, healthcare, or foreign policy. No, the Democrats' first proposal concerns children's online safety: the issue fueling lawmakers' bipartisan push to impose greater government control over the internet.

Semafor's Nicholas Wu first reported on the "Kids Over Clicks" proposal on Monday. The proposal, Wu wrote, advocates for "narrowing protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that shield platforms from some liability," banning social media accounts for kids under 16, "designing safer internet platforms," and more.

Supporters of the proposal include the author and social scientist Jonathan Haidt, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.), and New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill, according to the outlet. Sherrill's involvement comes as no surprise, as she has made online safety a main focus of her gubernatorial agenda. The first-term governor has proposed creating both an Office of Youth Online Mental Health Safety and a Social Media Research Center in New Jersey. The Kids Over Clicks proposal was written by Rishi Bharwani, the U.S. director of Reset Tech, a group dedicated to "countering digital threats to society." Bharwani previously co-chaired Sherrill's children's online safety policy team and led Booker's tech policy team.

The proposal claims that America is witnessing a "tobacco moment," this time for social media and AI companies, and the government must intervene as it did with the tobacco industry to prevent harm. But this is a fraught comparison, as Reason has pointed out, because tobacco is a physical product with measurable side effects, and social media is a vehicle for speech. The distinction matters because any policy regulating speech should be evaluated based on First Amendment grounds, not on its potential to reduce harm.

The Kids Over Clicks proposal's call to impose age restrictions on social media sites presents a particularly chilling threat to free speech. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned, age verification laws "violate all internet users' rights to access information, impinge on people's right to anonymity, and exacerbate their data and security risks." In the U.K., the Online Safety Act has exposed the problems with age verification, as users must fork over their data when they want to view age-restricted content, effectively censoring wide swaths of the internet for children and adults. The censorship implications have not deterred the U.K. government from imposing more regulations, as the country prepares to implement a social media ban for teens, which will likely take effect next year. It appears that Project 2029's authors are eager to import similar policies from abroad, citing Australia's social media ban—which many teens have been able to skirt—as a successful case study in online safety.

It may seem odd that Project 2029 is making its debut by advocating for censorship policies, but Semafor reported that the project authors "wanted to start with kids safety because it's among the least politically polarizing topics." 

This sentiment is, unfortunately, correct. Children's online safety has become a bipartisan issue that lawmakers have used to crack down on personal freedom. Red states, including Texas and Florida, have enacted online safety laws in the name of protecting children. And on Monday night, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, a bundle of online safety bills that includes a version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). The House's version of KOSA does not include a duty of care provision, making it slightly less restrictive than the Senate's KOSA bill. Still, digital rights groups such as Reclaim the Net warn the KIDS Act raises significant concerns "about government overreach, privacy erosion, and the expansion of online surveillance." If passed, the KIDS Act would also allow states to enact their own laws regulating social media and AI companies, according to the bill's co-author, Rep. Frank Pallone (D–N.J.).

Democrats may be fractured internally, but the party is certainly uniting over a winning position in Washington: advocating for more government control over the internet. As Monday night's vote demonstrated, they will find Republican allies who want to regulate the internet, too. If this pro-censorship coalition works diligently enough, it may achieve the goals of the Project 2029 proposal well before the next election.

The post Democrats' First 'Project 2029' Proposal: More Government Control Over Social Media appeared first on Reason.com.

When the 14th Amendment was introduced in the U.S. Senate in 1866, the first senator to speak out in opposition to it was a Pennsylvania Republican named Edgar Cowan. He objected in part because the Citizenship Clause of the proposed amendment would make American citizens out of the U.S.-born children of unwelcome immigrants. "Is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race?" Cowan asked. And what about the "Gypsies" that he claimed were present in his own state? "These people live in the country and are born in the country. They infest society," he declared. Yet the 14th Amendment's grant of birthright citizenship would cover them, too. "If the mere fact of being born in the country confers that right," Cowan said, "then they will have it; and I think it will be mischievous."

Cowan's objections were answered by another Republican senator, John Conness of California. "I beg my honorable friend from Pennsylvania to give himself no further trouble on account of the Chinese in California or on the Pacific coast," Conness said. "We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others."

In a 5–4 decision issued on Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the original understanding of the Citizenship Clause that was voiced by Conness.

"At issue in this case," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Trump v. Barbara, "is whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States." The Court rightly held that the Constitution does indeed guarantee birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of such parents.

This result has been a long time coming. Eleven years ago, I wrote about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump's attack on birthright citizenship under the headline, "Trump vs. the Constitution." "If the courts follow the Constitution," I argued, Trump's efforts to undermine the 14th Amendment "will surely fail."

Trump v. Barbara makes the failure official. "Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to 'every free-born person in this land,'" the Court held in Barbara. "We keep that promise today."

Writing in dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the 14th Amendment should be read narrowly to guarantee birthright citizenship only to those newborns whose parents are "subject to the jurisdiction of the government of his domicile." But that is not what the text requires. The text of the 14th Amendment says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

To be "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States" means to be subject to the laws and authority of the United States. This meaning was well settled at the time of the 14th Amendment's drafting and ratification. For instance, the 1865 edition of Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language defined jurisdiction, in the context of a government, as meaning the "power of governing or legislating," "the right of making or enforcing laws," and "the power or right of exercising authority."

Both illegal immigrants and lawful temporary visitors are "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States" under this original meaning because the U.S. government has "the right of making or enforcing laws" that apply against such persons when they are present on U.S. soil. Such persons may be arrested and prosecuted under our laws when they are here. That makes their U.S.-born children birthright citizens under the original meaning of the constitutional text. The majority in Trump v. Barbara was therefore right to reject the nontextualist and unhistorical reading promoted by Thomas and others.

The Supreme Court does not always get it right in cases of such magnitude. This time it did.

The post Supreme Court Affirms Original Meaning of Birthright Citizenship, Strikes Down Trump's Executive Order appeared first on Reason.com.

In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously stopped President Franklin Roosevelt from firing a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for purely political reasons. The FTC "cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive," the Court declared in Humphrey's Executor v. United States.

On Monday, by a vote of 6–3, the Supreme Court overturned Humphrey's Executor and allowed President Donald Trump to fire FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter at will. In other words, a theory of broad executive power that was once championed by a progressive president has just been successfully resurrected by a conservative one.

Why did the Supreme Court rule the way that it did?

"The FTC unquestionably exercises executive power, and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive, in whom such power is vested," declared Chief Justice John Roberts in Trump v. Slaughter. "It follows, then, that Slaughter served as the President's subordinate at the FTC—and that the President was entitled to cut her tenure short."

But is the matter really as simple as that? Consider what else Roberts had to say about the FTC in the same opinion:

Since its creation in 1914, the FTC has accumulated vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory powers under more than 80 statutes. Not only does it promulgate rules that carry the force of law, but it also enforces those rules against private parties, collecting civil penalties in the billions of dollars. [Emphasis added.]

To make or promulgate rules in this context basically means to make new federal laws. Yet the federal lawmaking power does not properly belong to the executive. Rather, it belongs to Congress under Article I of the Constitution. Yet now, as a direct result of Trump v. Slaughter, the federal lawmaking power that the FTC and other "independent" federal agencies have long wielded is suddenly resting in the sole hands of the president.

Doesn't that upset the constitutional separation of powers?

Notably, one of the six justices who voted for Trump in this case spelled out that very objection in a separate concurrence.

Writing alone, Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with Roberts that independent federal agencies should be brought under the control of a unitary executive when those agencies exercise executive-like powers. But "today, independent agencies do not just exercise executive law-enforcement powers," Gorsuch wrote. "Congress has also delegated to them vast legislative and judicial powers, effectively allowing these agencies to make laws and decide disputes under them. And, after today's decision, the President can effectively exercise all those powers too."

As Gorsuch notes, this outcome raises a number of troubling new questions:

Would Congress have delegated so much power, including legislative and judicial power, to independent agencies had it known that the President would come to control them? How will Congress respond now—if realistically it can? And what, if anything, will this Court do about it?

It bears repeating that Gorsuch did not write those words of warning in dissent. Rather, he wrote them in concurrence after fully joining the very opinion whose "implications" he is so understandably worried about.

Here's how I read Gorsuch's concurrence: He is inviting new cases to be filed against Trump and future presidents if/when those presidents try to wield unconstitutional lawmaking power via their new control over the federal bureaucracy.

But will the Supreme Court actually stop Trump or any other president from doing the unlawful lawmaking that today's decision enables the president to do?

Gorsuch seems nervous about the answer to that question. Perhaps we should be nervous too.

The post Gorsuch Warns About Executive Overreach While Expanding Trump's Power appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past year and a half, Trump administration officials have gone after protestors—and even apps—critical of the government's immigration policies. Now, federal agents are targeting individuals for constitutionally protected speech on social media.

Last week, Syracuse resident Paigelynne Gonyea was approached by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at her workplace and given a warning to remove a social media post on an Instagram account the agents believed was hers. In a letter given to Gonyea, the ICE agents say the post may have broken federal law, as reported by Syracuse.com.

"YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW," the document she shared on Instagram reads. "OPR (ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility) has identified an Instagram post handle 'TURNDAPAIGEOFFICAL', which it has reason to believe may constitute a violation of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. Accordingly, OPR is requesting that you promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior."

Under Section 115 of Title 18, it is illegal to threaten to assault, kidnap, or murder a federal official, federal law enforcement officer, or their immediate family member when the threat is intended to impede, intimidate, interfere with, or retaliate against that official for doing their job. A threat made in violation of this statute could carry up to 10 years in prison. Section 119, meanwhile, prohibits knowingly publishing "restricted personal information" about protected people, but only when it is done with the intent to threaten, intimidate, or incite a crime of violence, or with the knowledge that the information will be used for that purpose. Therefore, the laws do not criminalize criticizing or naming a federal officer, but prohibit threats and doxing carried out with a specific unlawful intent.

Gonyea, who posts about immigration on her social media frequently, says the post at issue named the ICE agent who shot protester Renée Good in Minnesota, and who had already been identified in public reporting. "BREAKING: The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in broad daylight has been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune. I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted!" the post says.

The post, as described, appears to fall short of breaking the statutes cited in the warning. It did not include Ross' address, phone number, Social Security number, or other personal information, nor did she threaten to assault him. It merely named a federal agent who had already been identified in news reports and expressed the view that he should be indicted.

Gonyea denies threatening anyone or publishing private information. "I didn't dox his personal information, such as address, phone number," she told Syracuse.com. She has contacted the attorney general's office, her local congressman, Syracuse Mayor Sharon Owens, and the New York Civil Liberties Union. She has no plans to delete the post.

"For ICE to come to me over a social media post just feels very 1984 to me…They definitely should have known better to not go into a polling place, even if I said it was OK," she told the outlet.

Armed federal agents showing up at a poll worker's workplace to pressure her to delete a political Instagram post without charging her, obtaining a court order, or clearly identifying the supposedly unlawful language raises obvious concerns about government officials using intimidation to silence critics.

Notably, the document doesn't give Gonyea a practical way to challenge or clarify the warning. It tells her to contact "the undersigned Special Agent who served you with this Warning Notice to the local OPR field office" if she wishes to discuss it further, but, as the photo of the document on her Instagram shows, the section where the agent's name and contact details are supposed to be added is blank.

Gonyea is not the first American to face scrutiny from law enforcement over a social media post. In October, Larry Bushart, a 61-year-old former police officer in Tennessee, was arrested and held on a $2 million bond after posting a Facebook meme about President Donald Trump. Both Bushart's case and Gonyea's illustrate how quickly officials can treat political speech as a criminal threat, even when the likelihood of actual violence is speculative at best.

"A free America doesn't dispatch federal law enforcement agents to intimidate someone for an Instagram post of publicly available information," said Adam Steinbaugh, senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), regarding Gonyea's case. "Free speech is the bedrock of a free society, and the First Amendment squarely prohibits ICE agents from intimidating Americans for nothing more than repeating information from a newspaper report. As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence from England, where police now hassle residents over social media posts, let's not follow their lead."

Gonyea's encounter occurs at a moment when Americans are increasingly worried that free speech is under threat. According to a FIRE poll from November 2025, a record 74 percent of Americans believe free speech in the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. The poll found that 53 percent of Americans are "very" or "extremely" concerned about government officials pressuring social media companies to remove content based on the ideology expressed.

Federal officials showing up at a woman's workplace to pressure her to delete a political social media post certainly makes fears about threats to free speech in America feel far less abstract.

The post ICE Warns Syracuse Poll Worker To Delete a Political Instagram Post appeared first on Reason.com.

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued a far-reaching decision on the constitutionality of a law enforcement tool that allows police to access the location histories of millions of cell phone users. In a welcome result for civil libertarians, the Court ruled on Monday that "geofence warrants" count as a "search" under the Constitution and therefore trigger the Fourth Amendment's safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The geofence warrant at issue in this case, Chatrie v. United States, was issued to Google. It told the tech company to search the location histories of every one of its users in order to determine which ones were present in the vicinity of a bank robbery. That information ultimately led to the arrest of Okello Chatrie.

Chatrie's lawyers argued that this police tactic amounted to "an unconstitutional general warrant [that] compelled Google to conduct a fishing expedition through millions of Google accounts, without any basis for believing that any one of them would contain incriminating evidence," the very sort of sweeping assault on civil liberties that the Fourth Amendment was originally enshrined to protect. "The Fourth Amendment was born of the Founders' revulsion for general warrants and writs of assistance—instruments that allowed the government to search first and develop suspicions later," Chatrie's lawyers told the Court.

Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan sided with Chatrie. "The police conducted a search when they gained access to Location History data," Kagan wrote. "An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone's location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company."

Kagan's opinion was joined in full by Chief Justice John Roberts and by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Writing alone in concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed that Chatrie deserved to win but argued for a different legal rationale. "As I see it, Mr. Chatrie's Location History data qualifies as his personal property," Gorsuch wrote, which would place it among his "effects," a specific category that is listed in the Fourth Amendment itself. And "just as the First Amendment protects speech over the internet today no less than it did speech delivered in the town square in 1791," Gorsuch argued, "it should hardly come as a surprise that the Fourth Amendment might protect as personal 'effects' electronic diaries of one's travels as it always has more traditional ones."

With Gorsuch thus voting in favor of Chatrie, the final result of the case was 5–1–3 on the legal reasoning and 6–3 on the result.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the principal dissent, joined in full by Justice Clarence Thomas and joined mostly by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. According to Alito, the Court's "pose as a great champion of privacy in the digital age" will only "unleash" an "upheaval in Fourth Amendment law." Alito said, "I cannot support this irresponsible escapade."

Here's a little rule of thumb for Fourth Amendment cases: Whenever you find Gorsuch and Alito on opposite sides, you may safely bet on the likelihood that civil libertarians will be cheering Gorsuch and jeering Alito. That's certainly the upshot of today's decision.

The post In Big Win for Fourth Amendment Advocates, the Supreme Court Says 'Geofence Warrants' Count as a 'Search' appeared first on Reason.com.

On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it's worth asking: What was the American Revolution actually about?

We all remember the broad strokes we learned in school: Independence from the British crown. Taxes on tea. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But on a deeper level, the American Revolution was—and is—a revolution in political theory, reimagining what a legitimate government is and what its relationship to its citizens should be.

Washington's troops won the ground war 245 years ago at Yorktown, but the ideological battle continues against forces on both the left and the right who are pursuing a ruthless assault on America's core values. The American Revolution isn't over.

Inscribed inside the dome of the Jefferson Memorial are the words: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Thomas Jefferson wrote that in an 1800 letter, but that feeling of hostility toward the tyranny of a distant monarch is what drove him and his fellow revolutionaries in 1776.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch summarized the Declaration's core ideas in an interview with Reason: "The Declaration of Independence had three great ideas in it. That all of us are equal. That each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not government. And that we have the right to rule ourselves."

That's why Jefferson declared that a legitimate government requires the "consent of the governed." Thomas Paine put it more scathingly in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, writing that "government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens." Monarchy was the Devil's most effective and enduring form of "idolatry."

We don't fret over tyrannical kings in today's America. Only ceremonial vestiges of hereditary monarchy remain in the modern world. The Revolution achieved a complete victory in that sense.

Yet a counterrevolution is underway, one that views the American Revolution and the republic it birthed as a failed liberal regime that has outlived its usefulness. And these counterrevolutionaries sit remarkably close to the levers of power.

Self-Rule Under Threat

Three years before he became vice president, J.D. Vance told podcaster Jack Murphy that America had reached a point of no return. "We are in the late republican period," he said. "If we're going to push back against it we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. Indeed, among some of my circle the phrase 'extra-constitutional' has come up quite a bit."

Vance regularly cites and associates with a group of so-called "postliberals." He appeared on a panel with one of this movement's leading intellectuals, Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame political science professor and the author of Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, in 2023.

Deneen believes there is an unbridgeable divide between the "elite" and "ordinary" people. "What is needed," he writes in the book, "in short, is regime change—the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class," which will be replaced by a more virtuous one. He envisions the kind of aristocratic government favored by the ancients like Plato and Aristotle, endorsing "aristopopulism," where an elite class works to further the interests of the masses.

"The replacement of the current elites in our society ought to be more closely aligned to the interests of ordinary people," Deneen said at the panel.

He invokes a "premodern conception of liberty—expressed in the pages of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible," where institutions like the family, the church, and the state worked together to impose "guardrails" protecting individuals from becoming "slaves" to their own desires.

My colleague Stephanie Slade writes about the postliberal right for Reason magazine.

"He says people like [himself] should just be in charge of our government. That's what he means by regime change," Slade says. "[That] we should replace the current elites."

She notes that postliberals are willing to frame the entire American Founding as a mistake: "They might say, yeah, America did have a liberal founding and that's why it was a mistake. Actually, this whole experiment was a mistake, and it maybe took a couple hundred years for that mistake to play out….We now can see that it doesn't lead to good conservative outcomes."

In his book Common Good Constitutionalism, Adrian Vermeule, a postliberal Harvard Law professor and appointee to President Donald Trump's Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, wrote that "the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to 'protect liberty' as an end in itself." That's a rejection of the spirit of 1776. Paine saw the existence of government as a necessary evil because of "the inability of moral virtue to govern the world." A minimal state, in his view, should be restricted to supplying "freedom and security."

As Gorsuch put it in the same Reason interview: "If you think of the Declaration as kind of our mission statement, our ideals, and the Constitution is the how-to manual—well, the Constitution is all about dividing power. Madison realized men are not angels and that their aspirations for power need to be checked and checked and checked again."

The "regime change" Deneen and Vermeule call for isn't explicitly violent. Deneen describes "Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends." The strategy manifests as a steady expansion of presidential authority, as we've seen under Donald Trump's second term: the 143 executive orders he signed in just his first 100 days, more than any other president in history; his decision to send troops to American cities without permission from local authorities; his declaring of 21 national emergencies while in office; and his decision to send illegal immigrants to overseas prisons in defiance of the judicial branch.

Incidentally, one of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence was King George III's penchant for shipping the accused "beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses."

Before he became vice president, Vance encouraged Trump to emulate Andrew Jackson and dare the Supreme Court to try enforcing its rulings against him. "If I was giving him one piece of advice," Vance said, "fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.'"

"That's a really dangerous idea to be even casually trotting out there, let alone for somebody who is now the sitting vice president to be on the record," Slade says. "He said it a number of years ago when he was just a candidate for office, but I've never seen anything from him since he's been in office that makes me think that he doesn't ultimately believe in that sort of approach to politics."

Some postliberals call for measures far more dramatic than the steady erosion of constitutional restraints currently underway. Michael Anton, who worked in Trump's State Department over two terms, wrote in his book The Stakes about the prospect of a "Red Caesar"—a right-wing dictator who would rise from the ashes of the fallen republic. "Caesar's word replaces constitutionalism and even, in the final analysis, law," he wrote.

In a podcast conversation with pro-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin, Anton discussed what that might look like. "Caesarism is a form of monarchy, but that follows a nonfunctioning republic, a republic that doesn't work anymore," Anton said. Yarvin proposed that the path to power would begin with declaring a state of emergency in an inaugural address, "taking direct control over all law enforcement authorities….Basically like Caesar, you're using all of the force available to you." 

"There is just clearly much more of a sense that government power is meant to be used to advance our side in the face of our enemies," Slade says. "And the enemies are the left, the political left, and anyone on the right who isn't going to line up with [them]. [They believe] political power should be used to reward our friends and punish our enemies, and that to me is a clear violation of one of the core principles of rule of law, which is equal treatment for everyone under law."

In the COVID era, President Joe Biden imposed national mandates by executive fiat, and his administration tried to suppress dissent by pressuring tech companies to censor critics.

The Democratic Party has also flirted with the idea of packing the Supreme Court to get its way, which is not a new impulse for the party. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to pack the Court in 1937, it cost him the support of progressives who had previously backed the New Deal.

FDR is revered by progressives and cited by Yarvin as a prototype for an American Caesar. "Was FDR a dictator? What does it mean to be a dictator? What does this pejorative word mean?" Yarvin asks. "A dictator is somebody who rules alone. And that, I think, is a beautiful thing."

The Revolution was, first and foremost, about self-rule: We would no longer abide by a diktat from an overseas king. From the very beginning of the republic, power-seeking men have tried to undermine that vision. In its earliest days, there was a plot to install a Prussian prince as king of a new American monarchy.

Jefferson accused John Adams and Alexander Hamilton of being monarchists, recounting in horror a dinner conversation in which Hamilton told him "the greatest man…that ever lived was Julius Caesar."

But monarchy is seductive because strongmen promise order in chaotic times. In the wake of Shays' Rebellion, a post-Revolution farmer's uprising, Jefferson worried the Constitution's drafters were overreacting by creating a powerful presidency that would devolve into a monarchy. "What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?" he wrote. And then, famously: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Hopefully, patriots won't be shedding blood anytime soon. But Jefferson's point stands: Preserving the promises of the Revolution will always be an ongoing battle.

Self-rule was one of those promises. Another was self-ownership, which includes the right to do what you want with your own property.

The Rise of 'Right-Wing Progressivism'

The Declaration accused the king of "cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world."

The American colonies experienced unprecedented economic growth, a topic of keen interest to the laissez faire economist Adam Smith, whose book The Wealth of Nations also turns 250 this year.

Smith was fascinated by the American colonies, observing that their "progress has been more rapid than that of the English in North America. Plenty of good land, and liberty to manage their own affairs their own way, seem to be the two great causes of the prosperity."

Other imperial powers, such as the Spanish and Portuguese, mandated that their colonists trade only through state-created monopolies. Smith pointed out that because American colonists could export lumber to the wider European market, they were incentivized to clear and improve land. Low taxes enabled them to reinvest their profits.

Smith criticized England's Navigation Acts for prohibiting colonists from buying from other countries and for discouraging manufacturing to protect domestic competitors. Although England's "mercantile spirit" hampered the economy, Smith believed that in virtually every other respect the liberty of the English colonists "to manage their own affairs their own way is complete," concluding that both England and the colonies would be better off with an independent America that traded freely with England.

Like the American revolutionaries, Smith described economic freedom as not just smart policy, but as a natural right. "To prohibit a great people…from making all that they can of every part of their own produce," he wrote, "is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind."

That revolutionary understanding is still under attack today from both the left and the right. Socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani talk about individual profits as if they are the property of the collective. And Trump has the same mercantilist instincts toward trade that Smith argued against 250 years ago. "I love tariffs. Most beautiful word," Trump said in September 2025. "I said my favorite word in the English dictionary is the word tariff." 

The postliberal right argues that laissez faire economics has undermined the working class. "Conservatives have outsourced our economic and domestic policy thinking to libertarians," Vance said at a 2019 National Conservatism Conference. "Do we serve pure unfettered commercial freedom, do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good, or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things?"

"It is really important to recognize that what the postliberal right is pushing in terms of economics is progressivism," Slade says. "It's not conservatism."

Tucker Carlson made the point in 2019 when he praised Elizabeth Warren's "economic patriotism" platform, noting it "sounds like Donald Trump at his best."

What the so-called "economic patriots" of the left and right are converging on is a rejection of the spirit of 1776 and an embrace of monarchy. In the 18th century, many colonists could trade only through state-licensed monopolies. Warren has proposed remarrying corporations and the state through "stakeholder capitalism," in which political appointees sit on corporate boards to steer them in the right direction. Trump took a major step toward the corporatist approach in 2025 when directing the federal government to take a 10 percent stake in Intel. Before him, President Barack Obama took stakes in GM and Chrysler as part of a bailout package.

"I don't think it's really a sustainable political equilibrium to have two parties that are both economically leftist," Slade says. "The American people are not on board with that. That is the horseshoe in action. And it's part of why I think there is an opportunity for old-school Reagan-style free-market conservatism to make a comeback."

The slow abandonment of the revolutionary ideas of self-rule and private property that American patriots fought for in the late 18th century is downstream of a third, fundamental aspect of the American Revolution that is also under attack: freedom of conscience.

Remarrying Church and State

The postliberal right wants to tear down the wall between church and state. "They want to integrate church and state instead of separating them," Slade says.

In some cases, it's Catholic integralists like Harvard's Vermeule, who has described a strategy of turning the government Catholic by "strategically locat[ing]" integralists "within liberal institutions…to undo the liberalism of the state from within." Deneen has suggested passing "blue laws" that would ban pornography, online gambling, and operating businesses on Sundays.

A Protestant variety of Christian nationalism is embodied by pastor Doug Wilson—a spiritual mentor to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who invited Wilson to lead a prayer at the Pentagon. In a recent interview, Wilson said the "governing authorities should recognize formally that Jesus rose from the dead" and that "the basis of law would have to be Christian, and I would want it to be Protestant."

Most of the revolutionaries were Christian Protestants, but they insisted on separating church and state to avoid the horrific religious wars that had ravaged Europe. "Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world" to end religious discord by establishing state churches, wrote James Madison in opposition to taxes that would have funded an official church of Virginia.

An even deeper problem for these devout believers in divine providence was that marrying religion to the state removed the very freedom to choose faith that God desires. In his opposition to the Virginia law, Jefferson wrote that "Almighty God hath created the mind free" and that "all attempts" to force religious belief "are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion." Madison argued historically that Christianity reached its "greatest lustre" in the times before it incorporated with the state, and that religious laws would counterproductively discourage nonbelievers from entering a region he hoped would become a beacon of Christianity. "Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man."

Slade draws on her own Catholic faith in making the case. "I am a libertarian because I'm a Catholic, because I believe that every person was created in the image of God," she says. "I just think it's morally wrong from a Catholic or Christian perspective to try to use the coercive, violent power of the state to make people live a certain way. Even if the way that these guys would like to make people live—going to church on Sunday, praying, investing in your community and your family, self-sacrifice—all these good Christian values. They're good Christian values, but they can't be coerced or imposed from the top down. It's wrong and morally offensive from a Christian perspective."

Slade says she understands the despair postliberals feel about the collapse of faith and virtue in contemporary America and that they have a point about the progressive capture of institutions. "What they're channeling is a really influential belief, which isn't totally wrong, that the left made a very concerted effort to make what is often referred to as a 'long march through the institutions' and to capture so many of our elite institutions—both at the governmental level but also at the cultural level: higher education, Hollywood, the mainstream media."

Critics of the progressive agenda—or "wokeness"—often describe it as its own kind of religion. Linguist and social critic John McWhorter has argued that it has "slowly transmogrified into a kind of replacement for Protestant Christianity" among its adherents.

Whether religious or not, progressives have imposed their social values on Americans through public school curricula, federal policy, and civil rights law. They have violated the freedom of conscience that Jefferson and Madison wrote about in a way very similar to how mandating religion would. Postliberalism is part of the political backlash.

A poll conducted in early 2021 of people who voted for Trump in 2020 didn't find agreement on nationalist economic policies—tariffs, industrial policy, any of that—but found near-universal agreement on a sense of cultural siege. About 90 percent agreed with statements like "the mainstream media has become just an arm of the Democratic Party" or "Christianity is under attack today."

"This sense that the culture has been captured by people who are hostile to people like me and who hate me and want to drive me out of the public square has created so much resentment and so much of a backlash that's driving this postliberal right-wing politics," Slade says. "I don't think it's possible to understand what's going on on the right without looking at what's been going on on the left, definitely ramping up during the period referred to as the great awakening."

Slade's new book argues that the remedy to this postliberal moment is a rediscovery of "fusionism"—the reintegration of liberty and virtue. "A good society needs to be both free and virtuous. And the Founders certainly believed this," she says.

John Adams wrote just 13 days before the signing of the Declaration that "the only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People…they will not obtain a lasting Liberty."

"What he's saying is, we can have a limited government in a free society, but if the people aren't naturally virtuous, if they don't trust each other, if they aren't good to each other—that [the Republic] is going to end up succumbing to tyranny and to a strongman government," Slade says.

His fellow revolutionary and intellectual adversary Jefferson flipped the equation by writing that liberty "is the great parent…of virtue."

Balancing liberty and virtue means reconstructing some of the civic "guardrails" that Deneen laments having lost in modernity—but not handing the power to regulate our conscience to the government.

"What we're seeing a lot is people who are focused either on liberty but don't spend a lot of time thinking about how do we cultivate virtue, or who say, forget your liberty, we want virtue at the point of a gun," Slade says. "Government's job is to protect our basic rights and liberties. It should be prioritizing the protection of liberty."

"That doesn't mean that virtue isn't important. In fact, it's the highest, most important thing in life—to pursue a virtuous life," Slade continues. "But it's not OK to expect government to do that for us. Government protects our freedom and we use that freedom to pursue virtue."

The solution, Slade argues, has to be ground-up. She invokes Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed when he came to America in the 1830s that Americans excel at coming together and creating voluntary community solutions to social problems.

"We should have some muscle memory here. We should be able to get back to that idea of thinking of ourselves as being on the front lines of solving problems, building new civil society institutions, nongovernmental institutions that can try to solve the problems we see in our society," Slade says. "Good policy can make this easier. And bad policy can crowd it out and make it a lot harder."

The Declaration of Independence is 250 years old, but the Revolution it started is as vital as ever.

During the final days of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was famously asked what kind of government they were in the process of designing. "A Republic," he said, "if you can keep it."

Photo Credits: Horst Galuschka/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom/ Dennis Flaherty / Jaynes Gallery / DanitaDelimont.com / Danita Delimont/ Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom/
 TIA DUFOUR/UPI/Newscom/Antonio Perez/TNS/Newscom/ Aaron Schwartz - Pool via CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom/ Ron Adar / SOPA/ Images/Sipa USA/Newscom/ JT Vintage/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom/ AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom/ Hugh Rooney / Eye Ubiquitous/Newscom/ Bonnie Cash - Pool via CNP/CNP / Polaris/Newscom/AdMedia/Newscom/ Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom/ Polaris/Newscom; Eric Lee - Pool via CNP/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Department of Defense

The post The American Revolution Isn't Over appeared first on Reason.com.

President Donald Trump has the power to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission but cannot give the boot to members of the Federal Reserve. So said the Supreme Court on Monday, in a pair of related decisions about the scope of executive power.

The court ruled 6–3 in favor of the president in Trump v. Slaughter, which challenged his decision to fire Rebecca Slaughter from her position as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). But in Trump v. Cook, the court sided with Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve's board of governors he had sought to fire. The decision in that case was 5–4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices to form a somewhat unusual majority.

With the two decisions, the Supreme Court seems to have strengthened the president's control over the executive branch while underscoring the Federal Reserve's distinctive role, an approach the court had emphasized in previous rulings.

The Federal Reserve's "unique historical status and role" means that it is shielded from presidential powers in ways that other federal entities are not, Roberts wrote in the Cook opinion. Even though presidents are authorized to remove members of the Federal Reserve's board "for cause," the majority found that Trump's attempt to fire Cook lacked the "procedural protections" to which she is entitled.

In plain English, the president can't fire a member of the Federal Reserve board simply because wants to. He must first prove that the target is guilty of some violation, and the target must be given time to respond to the allegations.

"Without such constraints in place, any perceived or alleged misstep (past or present) could provide a ready pretext for a Governor's removal—a fact that he would surely know," wrote Roberts. "Nothing could be more corrosive of the independence that Congress sought to preserve."

On the other hand, the Court says presidents do have the power to fire members of executive branch agencies at any time and for any reason—even if they work for so-called "independent agencies," such as the FTC. In doing so, the court overturned a 1935 decision, Humphrey's Executor v. United States, that said then-President Franklin Roosevelt exceeded his authority when he tried to fire an FTC commissioner. Lower courts had leaned on the Humphrey's Executor precedent when they ordered the Trump administration to reinstate Slaughter to the FTC.

Roberts, who also delivered the opinion in the Slaughter case, wrote that "subordinates who exercise the President's power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people."

That ruling is a "major victory for proponents of the 'unitary executive' theory—the idea that the president should have complete control over the executive branch," writes Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog. "Under this theory, the president should be able to fire any member of the executive branch, and laws—like the one that the court struck down—that restrict his ability to do so violate the separation of powers."

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the court's majority had discarded democracy "in favor of one that distorts the structure of Government" and gives the president "far greater power than ever before."

There's no doubt the second part of that is true. Monday's ruling clears the way for Trump and future presidents to more directly assert their control over the full length and breadth of the executive branch. But the idea of placing some executive branch officials beyond the president's control (and therefore unaccountable to voters, once they are appointed), as Sotomayor seems to prefer, seems more than a bit anti-democratic and thus potentially problematic too.

As always, the best way to limit the abuses of executive power is to reduce executive power. The president's power to hire and fire who he wants would matter a lot less if the FTC and its ilk did less—or if they didn't exist in the first place.

The post Can the President Fire Anyone He Wants? Yes, Unless the Target Is Part of the Federal Reserve. appeared first on Reason.com.

0:00–The resurgence of democratic socialism
2:17–President Donald Trump's promise of "no new wars"
6:03–The economic impact of tariffs and deportations
8:32–Thomas Massie and libertarian views
11:53–The political establishment and two-party system
17:26–J.D. Vance and the future of the Republican party
21:41–Does Marjorie Taylor Greene miss Congress?
23:17–Generational wealth and entitlement programs
24:51–Why octogenarians refuse to leave Congress

Producers: Paul Alexander & Natalie Dowzicky

Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Robby Soave: Welcome to Free Media. I'm Robby Soave, and today I am joined by former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's lovely to see you. Thank you for being here.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Well, I want to start with some news from last week. The democratic socialists are doing really well in New York City, winning some primaries there. This is coming at a time when I think the rank and file in both parties are so frustrated with the establishment, whether it's the Democratic establishment on that side or the Trump administration on the Republican side. You've been a vocal critic of Trump, and we'll get to that. But first I wanted to ask you, what do you make of this rising tide of far-left policies on the socialist side?

I'm not surprised by it at all. As a matter of fact, I had been saying for several years that this was coming, that that was the direction of more younger-generation Democrat voters. And so it doesn't surprise me at all, but I also see the same thing on the right. There's a sort of like a new direction happening, and it's happened in the past year, where many people, many Republican voters who voted for Trump, voted for Republicans, considered themselves MAGA or were MAHA, or just actually voted in that election for the first time, have been so disappointed that they're fractured off as well. And it's a lot of the younger-generation people on the right who are just fed up. So I think it's on both sides that you're seeing many people are fed up with the establishment of both parties, Republicans and Democrats. And the establishment, honestly, after serving in Congress, they're very much the same. There is a center of Republicans and Democrats in Congress and in the Senate that will pretty much vote yes together on a lot of the key funding bills and will never change, no matter how they campaign. They just stick together and keep the machine moving forward. And so it doesn't surprise me that you're seeing that on the left and the right.

Part of the key pitch I think that Trump made to young voters, new voters, people he reached through podcasts in the 2024 election, was the no-new-wars guarantee. Last year, this year, doesn't seem like we've been a no-new-wars administration. What do you think happened? Was that a lie? Did he change his mind? Has he been convinced by people who don't agree with that aspect of MAGA? What is going on?

That's a deep question, not easily answered. So that was one of the things that I loved early on about Donald Trump. Back in 2016, when he came out on the debate stage and he was willing to talk about how Iraq was a major mistake and criticize people in Washington for supporting that war. And that was always one of the things that I personally loved about Donald Trump, is he seemed to be and constantly spoke out against no more foreign wars, not supporting foreign wars, regime change. And that's exactly what so many of us are sick and tired of. Now, what changed? We saw a radical change after he became president. I spoke out. I think I was the only Republican, probably me and Thomas Massie. I'm sure we were the only two. And last year, in June 2025, when he first bombed Iran, I spoke out against it. I'm sure Thomas Massie did, Charlie Kirk did, Tucker Carlson did, but we were a very small percentage that were willing to criticize the president. That's one of the worst things you can do in MAGA is dare criticize the president.

So what do I think changed? I think President Trump has been under massive pressure since he has become president, and that's come through Israel, that's come through major donors of his, that comes from people like Mark Levin, Lindsey Graham, you name it. The whole entire pro-Israel or Zionist caucus has pushed for that, and it's always a push in Washington. See, that's another thing people need to understand: No matter who the person is that becomes president, they are going to be lobbied with massive pressure to engage in war or to support another country in war. And the reason why is it is one of the biggest businesses in America. People talk about the military-industrial complex. That is a real thing. And so these are many companies all over our country that are funded annually from Washington, and they rely on defense contracts in order to continue to build weapons, to make the latest, greatest weapons that they can't wait to sell to the Pentagon, can't wait to show lawmakers and show off and say, "Hey, here's what we need for our military." They make it very patriotic to support.

And there's even a massive pressure campaign, and I've first-hand witnessed this as a member of Congress, as they come to you and they say, "Hey, if you don't vote and support the [National Defense Authorization Act], there's a couple of defense contractors, companies, very important companies in your district. And without these contracts, without this funding, there's going to be thousands of people that are your constituents, they'll lose their jobs." And so they even pressure you in that way and imply that you'll probably lose your election if people are losing their jobs because you're not voting for this funding.

I remember you giving interviews to Tim Dillon and some other people, saying that you are actually listening to people. You were listening to the people in your district saying, "Hey, I'm a small-business owner. These tariffs are really hurting me. Hey, I want to do something about illegal immigration, but if we're rounding up every single person, including people who are working and not committing other crimes, it impacts my business in a negative way." Do your former colleagues listen to the people in their district on some of these pretty basic economic issues, where what the administration was doing was just destroying their bottom line?

So what I was saying, and I still say it, is this is what my actual constituents are saying. Here's their real words. These are the real concerns of Americans. But most members of Congress, they live in the silo of the two-party system, whether it's Republican or Democrat, and they will not openly and publicly step outside those boundaries. So whether they listen to them or not, you are not going to see—and I'm sure it's something you can observe—you're not going to see Republicans and Democrats hardly ever step outside their party. Because if they step out and they actually start telling the truth, like, "Hey, Americans really don't support whatever it may be," they're going to get it when they go back to Washington. You'll hear it.

So I used to get it all the time from our leaders, whether it was the speaker, the majority leader, whether it was different leaders in our conference. If I was taking a certain position that was not the GOP position, I got a backlash for those things. And that affects people's fundraising. But I didn't ever have to rely on the party fundraising. Over 95 percent of my donations were small-dollar donors. So I never felt threatened in that way. It wasn't the cocktail party fundraisers in Washington that funded my campaign. So I was just willing to be outspoken and honest about this is what's hurting people.

Can you speak a little bit about your ideological evolution? You came to Washington as a fervent backer of MAGA, of Trump, a supporter of MAHA, and you have ended your time in Washington very ideologically and personally close with Thomas Massie, who got taken out, targeted by Trump for many of the same reasons you became at odds with the administration. Thomas Massie is someone who has thought of himself as a libertarian or friendly to libertarianism, which is the ideology of Reason. Have you developed more interest in the project of— I'm not trying to say you were against freedom to begin with. I know that was important, a view of yours as well. But have you felt more kinship with Massie and with the ideology and the movement he's involved in?

That's actually a misconception. Literally my entire time in Congress, I was aligned with Thomas Massie and our voting records are very similar. As a matter of fact, he was one of my best allies and best friends the entire time I served there. And we worked together on many issues, and that was before Trump was elected in 2024. So I stood, sort of, in both camps, I would say.

And I never was a big Republican Party person. As a matter of fact, I never was elected before I won in 2020 for Congress, and I never even went to my county GOP meetings. Like I didn't know anybody. I didn't know them. I was actually angry at Republicans when I ran for Congress, and I attacked them constantly. And I didn't align with Democrats at all, so I attacked them as well.

And I would say, if I describe myself best, I was very naive to the entire political process, because I had no experience in it. But I was angry, just completely angry at the government, just totally outraged by the government. So when I became a member of Congress—so imagine yourself becoming a member of Congress—and I actually went in there, I spent five years of my life the most pissed off I could ever be because I hated all of it. I hated every bit of it.

And I would say I was very much fooled, like many. I was also a rallygoer, like a Trump rally–goer. So I believed his speeches. I believed his words when he talked about no more foreign wars and draining the swamp and "lock her up" and we're going to hold them accountable. He said, "I am your retribution." You know, I believed all of that because I believed in crashing the system. And so I thought that Trump would be the vehicle to do it, and boy, was I wrong. And so I spent five years in Washington trying every way possible to find success in stopping everything that I felt was ruining America. But it's virtually unstoppable.

The two-party system is so brutal, right? 

Yeah.

Because you're frustrated and I'm frustrated that the administration, the Trump administration, is not prioritizing some of the things they ran on, is not trying to make it easier to start a business or build a house or prosper in America, is very focused on foreign conflicts. But what you know that if you withdraw support for that party and it helps the other party, they're going down a socialist direction. Or even someone like Gavin Newsom and his backers, who want to massively confiscate the wealth of our most productive tech entrepreneurs, the people who are trying to make my life easier, who are trying to grow the economy in that way, and they're going to embrace ideas that are totally shutting all of that down. So it's like you just have bad choices no matter what you do.

That's right. It's government overreach on both sides and in all different directions. And so there are no choices anymore. I call it the political-industrial complex. The Republican and Democrat two-party system is the political-industrial complex. And right now, as it stands, you can't beat it. I tried. I literally tried to beat it. I got in it and thought, "Hey, hold them accountable." I wanted to hold Republicans accountable for what they promised on the campaign trail, and I wanted to defeat Democrats on the threats that I thought they were threatening against us as well. But no, as it stands right now, it is such a strong system. 

Well, no, let me take it back. It's beatable. It just requires the American people fully getting engaged. And the American people just aren't fully engaged.

And it's a system that is not working for so many people in America, so many young people. I know you've spoken many times about the difficulties of young people trying to obtain health care or afford a house, and I don't think big government is the solution to any of those problems, because the more money the government puts into fixing those problems, the more expensive those things seem to get, the more out of reach they seem to get. But does the left have an easier or more appealing answer when the right doesn't seem to have any answer, or doesn't articulate how they're going to clear the red tape, allow market solutions to fix those problems? You don't hear enough of that, do you?

No, and the Republican Party doesn't really mean it. They might try to talk that way, and they do now. They have reduced some regulations. I mean, there are really some great things that they have done that I appreciate. I certainly love the border security. I think that's been a success from the Trump administration. However, no, no. What the Democrats do is they offer solutions, and they're good at making their solutions sound fantastic. But when you analyze their solution and you look at the outcome, you can quickly realize, no, they may have a solution, but it's going to make things worse.

I mean, Obamacare was the perfect example of that. They sold it, and it sounded really, really great, but the outcome has been many insurance companies pulled out of the health insurance market. Then the competition decreased massively every year. Premiums increased, and health care costs went up, and the government funding of it helped it. So it propped it up, and then their solution is more government health care, and we can't afford that.

Social Security is about to be completely insolvent in 2032. And so all of us that have been paying, you've been paying Social Security your entire life. If you're a business owner, you're paying 12.2 percent. If you have an employer, you are paying 6.1 percent. Well, very soon, in just a matter of years, most Americans are going to find out that you really have been paying a tax the entire time, and it's very unlikely you'll ever see a Social Security check paying you back any of the so-called benefits that you paid in. So much of this turns out to be a scam.

While at the same time, both parties have plunged us all into nearly $40 trillion in debt. So no one's really bringing real solutions in. And my frustration remains that, at large, the American people, and I'm not talking about you, but at large, the American population just is completely not engaged. They're just not. You want to know why? They're not suffering yet. A population of people have to truly suffer before they're willing to engage.

And right now, even though inflation has made the cost of living extremely difficult, even though health care and health insurance is absolutely absurdly expensive— I mean, we could even talk about car insurance. That's one of my pet peeves.

Even though all of this cost keeps rising and credit card debt increases, the American people are still getting along, living their lives, able to go on vacations, able to enjoy their hobbies and do things. They're being stretched tighter, but they're still enjoying pretty much their American life. So they're not suffering. Therefore, they're not engaging. And they'll engage when it's probably too late.

Do you see any of this changing once Trump is no longer in office and we move to, I guess, J.D. Vance likely pursuing the presidency? How do you feel about him and what he might run on? In some ways, he sounds more committed to no new wars, America first, etc. But of course, right now, he's on a kind of tour defending what the administration has done, because he can't say that he disagrees with it, because when you tell Trump you disagree with him, you get yourself in trouble. That happened to you. 

Exactly.

Do you know deep down he's just kind of biding his time and there would be no new wars if he took over? Or would he face the same pressures that you're describing, and it's not even worth rooting for?

Well, I know J.D., and I like him. I was the first Republican member of Congress to endorse him when he was running for Senate. They were all pushing for another guy that was very pro-Israel. However, it was me, Charlie Kirk, Don Jr., Tucker. I think that was pretty much our coalition. We all got behind J.D. Vance and eventually persuaded President Trump to endorse him as well.

But here's where I'm at today. I strictly judge people by their actions, 100 percent. I can like someone or agree with their statements or say, "Wow, they gave a great speech. That sounds lovely." But I'm strictly on actions only. Love Joe Kent. He resigned because he was like, "I'm not going to be a part of this." I really appreciated Tulsi [Gabbard] releasing the information about COVID and the labs all over the world and the funding behind it, but she also did that on her last day in office, when we could no longer prosecute Fauci, as if that was ever really going to happen.

President Joe Biden, he loves Fauci. Well, yeah, but Trump also loves Fauci. I mean, and he loves the COVID vaccine, and he thinks he saved 100 million people because of the COVID vaccine, although I would argue millions of people died because of the COVID vaccine.

Do you think that?

Yeah, I do. I'm very much against the COVID vaccines. And I think—

I'm against mandatory vaccination. I think it should be people's choice. That's what I would say.

Yeah, it should be people's choice, but I served on the COVID Select Committee on Oversight, and this was an issue that I took a deep, deep dive in, on many levels. And there are known very, very bad things that are known about the vaccines, and they knew them early on, and the FDA still approved them, and they should have never been approved.

When it came to COVID, it was a horrible virus, but the people that were at risk, people that were obese or elderly people, people that had really sad health conditions to begin with, they were very vulnerable to it. So I believe that's the population of people we should have protected. We should have stayed open, kept working, kept school going, and I think herd immunity would have taken care of it. For the larger part of the population.

We had to rely on it anyway, because whatever one thinks about the vaccine, it certainly didn't prevent the spread of cases, as they suggested it would. It absolutely didn't do that. Everyone who did get it had the experience, if you get the COVID shot, of eventually getting COVID anyway. So that was an interesting prediction.

It seems like when people got the vaccine, they actually got the virus more often, versus those like, I never got the vaccine. I got COVID in March 2020, and I've never gotten it since.

So I got the vaccine probably four times, and I got COVID probably four times. So…

Wow.

There you go.

Yeah, that smashes my theory. But don't get it anymore. You don't need it.

I think we're moving on from that. Well, I know you said you'd have to go shortly, so we'll wrap with this. You're not going to be in Congress anymore. What do you want to do next? What does your life look like now? Do you miss being in Congress, and what are you hoping to accomplish?

I absolutely do not miss being in Congress. Imagine working every single day with the people that are destroying our country and with people that have no desire to fix it, and most of the people there are completely sold out. So I don't miss that at all. I love being back in what I call Normal People World, where everyone is just real and honest and you have to earn your living with an honest day's work. That's the world I came from, with a family construction business, and I'm very happy to be back in Normal People World.

So what I'm doing now is we're producing a new series called Life With MTG, where I'm just talking about the things that I find interesting, that I think most Americans are talking about, versus what Washington, D.C., or the national news is talking about. And it's new, so I'm going to be sharing stories that happened in Washington and also just knowledge that I learned. And I want to share that with people. I think you deserve to know it.

So, yeah, that's what I'm doing and enjoying. My kids are all in their 20s. That's why I'm always mad about health insurance and the cost of living and housing and all that. And so just enjoying a lot of good, normal life.

Have you heard the term total boomer luxury communism? That's what we have started describing, this system in America where young people, through taxes, are paying for everything and all the benefits are going to older and retired people, who also have the money that they've saved their whole lives. It's like they're getting all the benefits from the system, but also they're the ones with all the houses and all of the money, and it doesn't really make sense to do it that way.

Well, OK. So I give boomers a lot of grief. I do. I tear them up all the time, mostly because they just get spoon-fed information on Fox News all day long, or CNN or whatever they watch. And I can't stand Fox News. I think it's straight-up propaganda. So, yeah, I give the boomers a hard time. However, they earned their money. They own their homes. That is their wealth. So I'm never going to ever attack anybody for what they earned.

Yeah, I don't want to take that away from them. It's just also then the government benefits all go to them too.

Well, they paid for it, though. I mean, the problem—

Like you said, young people paying into it are never going to get it.

No, you're not going to get it. And you want to know why you're not going to get it? Because of the boomers that are in charge and refuse to let go of power. So, yes, we are being systematically destroyed by the boomers. So I blame the boomers for a lot of problems, but it's the boomers like the Mitch McConnells, the Nancy Pelosis, the Donald Trumps, the Joe Bidens, all these 70- and 80-year-olds. Who are…

Who all cling to power. Why do they love being in government so much? You say it's like being in hell, you prefer being with normal people. Nobody else seems to feel that way. They all want to die in office.

You want to know why they want to die in office? I'll tell you why. When they've been there for 30 to 40 years, that literally becomes their life. And so it's horrible. It's a miserable existence.

So imagine yourself being 80 years old, and your staff is your caretakers. They take you to the doctor. They drop off and pick up your dry cleaning. They help you get your groceries. They wheel these people around in their damn wheelchairs. I'm not kidding you. They wheel them all over the Capitol, all over the office buildings, to their committee hearings, to the House floor to vote, where once they're in front of the cameras, they stand their decrepit old selves up, and they walk into the House floor and they sit in a chair, they put their voting card in the machine, and they push green or red based on what their staff tells them to vote.

And then they come out and they give their occasional few-minute speech, or they read their speech and they read their talking points on their committee hearings. That's what these people are. The very sad, very lonely, horrible existence of many of these old members of Congress and senators is you're not seeing an old person that is living out the end of their life surrounded by their children and their grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren. No, you're seeing these old people wearing their old dumpy suits, or some of these women are—like Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi—some of these women are wearing extremely expensive, beautiful suits, wearing high heels that I don't know how their old feet can possibly walk around in those high heels.

But that's how they're spending their days. And they can't let go of the praise. Do you know what they love more than anything? "Oh, let me hold the door for you, Mr. Congressman," or "Yes, Your Honor. Your Honor, here. Oh, it's good to see you again, sir. Come on in." They are addicted to all of that. And so it's why they never give it up. They never give it up. And most of them, after they've been there so long, that's how they earn their paycheck. So what would they replace their paycheck with?

And that's really just a horrible, awful reality, but it's a reality that I wish so many times the American people could see. Could see that old, old person being wheeled around by their 25-year-old staffer to go in there and read the words that the other 20-year-olds wrote in their office and vote the way they've told them to vote. You're not being represented. You're not. I'm just telling you, you're not being represented.

Well, I can't think of anything more libertarian to do than decide you don't want to be a part of that. Marjorie Taylor Greene, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

The post Marjorie Taylor Greene: 'You're Not Being Represented!' appeared first on Reason.com.