Bradley J. Birzer

1 month ago | lawliberty.org | Veronique de Rugy |Daniel Klein |Zena Hitz |Bradley J. Birzer

When COVID-19 emerged in early 2020, policymakers across the world scrambled to respond. Their instincts failed them—and us. They locked economies, confined healthy people with sick ones, and closed schools, leaving children with learning deficits from which they might never recover. Every government threw gobs of money out windows as if this largesse were costless. It was as shortsighted and destructive as government responses usually are.

1 month ago | lawliberty.org | Bradley J. Birzer |South Dakota |Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale

One of the most important but largely unsung heroes of the Reagan Era was movie-maker John Hughes. A close friend of P. J. O’Rourke, Hughes wrote, directed, and/or produced a whole slew of movies, including Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, to name a few. Born in Lansing, Michigan, and raised during his teenage years in a suburb of northern Chicago, Hughes’s career began with writing jokes for famous comedians as well as writing regularly for National Lampoon.

Jan 11, 2025 | theimaginativeconservative.org | Bradley J. Birzer

Poland’s reforms and constitution, Edmund Burke thought, offered real meaning, much closer to the experience of the American Revolution than that of the French Revolution. In significant ways, the Polish king succeeded because he embraced the laws of nature and “the array of Justice” without forcing anything of his own will upon his people. Stanislaw Augustus (1732-1798) was the last Polish king. Not without controversy, he was one of the greatest patrons of the arts and sciences in his day.

Jan 7, 2025 | theimaginativeconservative.org | Bradley J. Birzer

D.G. Hart perceptively notes that Benjamin Franklin was not a Deist, as popular memory claims, but rather a “cultural Protestant.” As such, he “applied much of what Protestants taught about work and study in the secular world without accepting all that the churches taught about the world to come.” Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant (270 pages, Oxford University Press, 2021) Several times at The Imaginative Conservative, I’ve had the chance to reflect on my early reading habits and loves...

Jan 7, 2025 | lawliberty.org | Austin Raynor |Alex J. Pollock |Daniel Mahoney |Bradley J. Birzer

On April 7, 2024, Mitchell West was arrested for handing out free burritos to the hungry. While West and other members of a local charity distributed food to impoverished community members in the courthouse square in Dayton, Ohio, a police officer approached and told them to stop. West doled out one last burrito. The officer placed him in handcuffs. In Dayton, no one can share food with the hungry without the government’s permission.