Feeling Optimistic About 2025

I was in Vermont right before Christmas, where I hosted the debut screening of a remastered “Director’s Cut” of Off the Grid with Thomas Massie at the Liberty Food Fest. Off the Grid has become a wildly popular cult classic, helping turn Congressman Massie into a major influencer with a national voice that far surpasses the power of his single vote in the House of Representatives. It also anticipated the core values and passions of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) coalition, credited for much of Donald Trump’s margin of victory this November. So, it was the perfect film for the group that had gathered at Liberty Food Fest, an energized community of activists, thinkers, and farmers. Philosophers and ploughmen, as the song goes.

Just about everyone there would have once identified with the left, politically speaking. But they now find themselves in a very different place. They are liberty curious. After the film, I had an on-stage conversation with food freedom guru Joel Salatin, where many attendees shared their personal stories of how faceless government bureaucrats have constantly and arbitrarily undermined the goals and values they cherish: independence, hard work, healthy living, responsible stewardship of natural resources, bottom-up localism, and community-building based on mutual respect. These homespun American values, and those who embrace them, have become newly politically potent, like the persecuted Amish farmers of Pennsylvania who voted Republican for the very first time in their battleground state.

But they’re not really Republicans. They’re just fed up, and searching for something better than the top-down authoritarianism that chased them out of the Democratic Party. They are part of the very audience—the liberty curious—that Free the People has been pursuing since our founding eight years ago.

Underneath all the noise and chaos of electoral politics, there’s something really interesting going on. The conversation has changed and there’s a realignment happening that’s been years in the making, catalyzed by the uncaring chaos of lockdowns. Beyond MAHA, there are other core elements in the winning 2024 presidential coalition that very much reflect the ideas that Free the People has been cultivating. Shocked out of complacency by an unprecedented power grab, old school Democrats like RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Bret Weinstein, Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald and countless others are waking up, joining the battle against the uniparty, and calling themselves “The Resistance.”

The issues that unite this oddball coalition? They all happen to be quite libertarian. They include opposition to endless war, defense of free speech, belief in bodily autonomy, and the rejection of the kind of government-corporate collusion that gives the rich and politically connected undue leverage over the rest of us. These are almost precisely the same issues that Free the People has worked on for all these years, putting us right in the center of the action starting January 20th.

As you’ve probably noticed, I have been obsessed with what fatally conceited governors, bureaucrats, and other petty tyrants tried to get away with during the pandemic. I’ve devoted much of my energy over the past year into documenting and exposing the lies, deceptions, and attempts to conceal wrongdoing on the part of Dr. Fauci and his cronies. Free the People’s ongoing series The Coverup, distributed by BlazeTV, takes a deep dive into the bad science, bad incentives, and bad intentions that led to the worst public health disaster in living memory.

Not coincidentally, the first Covid dissident we featured, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has now been nominated by Donald Trump to lead the National Institutes of Health, where he will take charge of the very agency that demonized him as a “fringe epidemiologist” for his opposition to destructive policies like lockdowns.

Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul, who is featured in the second episode of The Coverup (and numerous other Free the People videos) is set to chair the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where he will finally have the gavel, and the subpoena authority, to fully pursue justice against Dr. Fauci and the other bureaucrats who lied to Congress about funding dangerous experiments that likely caused the deaths of millions.

Other Trump cabinet picks, while admittedly also including some real stinkers, give me more reason for hope. Tulsi Gabbard, who has been a regular on Kibbe on Liberty, has been nominated for National Security Advisor. She represents an important voice for foreign policy realism and peace, and against unwarranted domestic surveillance.

Paul Atkins, whose Kibbe on Liberty interview has been widely quoted in the financial press, has been selected to run the SEC, promising an end to the regulatory persecution of Bitcoin and new cryptocurrency enterprises. President Trump himself, sending another important signal that the administrative state’s war on crypto is ending, has promised to commute the outrageously unjust sentence of crypto entrepreneur Ross Ulbricht. Working with his mom Lyn Ulbricht, Free the People has produced a number of videos amplifying Ross’s story over the years. On Kibbe on Liberty, Vivek Ramaswamy was the first presidential candidate to endorse the commutation of Ross’s sentence and has been appointed by President Trump to join Elon Musk in co-chairing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Both tech entrepreneurs have been openly advocating for the elimination of entire government departments, with an initial goal of cutting two trillion dollars from the federal budget. We have already started production on a new video series about the wasteful and destructive government programs that will be targeted by DOGE. Our goal is to increase public support for bold reforms and debunk fear mongering by incumbent special interests.

So yes, I’m cautiously optimistic. It’s wonderful that libertarian ideas are being discussed openly during the Trump transition. That’s a big win in and of itself. But it’s important to remember that Donald Trump is a pragmatist and a populist, not a libertarian idealogue. His approach to governance is fundamentally transactional, like almost every politician. If we hope to force entrenched politicians and bureaucrats to do the right thing, we will need to drive popular opinion through what is trending on social media and in the news. Politics is always downstream of culture.

This is why it’s important not only to maintain pressure in political discourse, but also to contribute to a popular culture that celebrates personal freedom over authoritarianism. That’s been Free the People’s market position from day one. As I’ve observed many times before, many of the “first responders” in this new anti-authoritarian coalition were comedians, not politicians. In 2024, Free the People continued to produce comedy sketches with Lou Perez and an expanded team of comedic talent, including viral bits lampooning British speech police (Censorship Royale), rigged “democratic” presidential primaries (How They Pick the President), and the silly fringes of identity politics (The LatinX-Files). And we have big things in store for 2025.

I’m proud that, in a year with so much competition for attention, and so many distractions and hot air, Free the People has expanded into new and bigger audiences once again. With the help of Digital Marketing Manager Sara Higdon, we’ve increased our followers on all major social media platforms, accumulating more views than ever. In a particularly surprising milestone, one clip of Thomas Massie talking about the national debt went viral, amassing 2.7 million views on YouTube.

I want to thank you for your ongoing support of our work at Free the People, and your willingness to invest in a long-term strategy to reach beyond the true believers in the front pews, to the liberty curious who drive culture and swing elections. Driving a narrative to celebrate quintessentially American ideals once again—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is not a one and done campaign. It’s a lifelong commitment. We just couldn’t do it without you. We are planning to double down on our efforts for the new year, and I hope that you will consider doubling down on your support of us.