Ironically, it took a happy hoard of World Cup superfans from around the globe to remind us all how special the idea of America, and the abundance that idea produces, really is. Maybe you’ve read about the Scottish Tartan Army, or Freddy from Germany, and how eagerly they imbibe in unchecked American flourishing. They are all seeing my home with fresh eyes, and I’m loving it. They marvel at the size of an average American home—bigger than most houses they’ve ever seen—our air conditioning, and the vast quantities of ice for beverages. Appropriately, visiting soccer superfans eventually discovered Buc-ee’s in Texas, where 120 separate gas pumps, great Lone Star brisket, and a 40-ounce beverage turn a simple idea—freedom—into transcendent happiness. If you haven’t been to one of these Texas-sized “fuel stations” yet, they run bigger than many of the villages we’ve been to in Europe.

Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to remind us how extraordinary America really is. We live in a place so prosperous, innovative, and free that we’ve become accustomed to the very things that astonish much of the world.

Of course, America has its problems. Or, more accurately, our government creates new problems for Americans every day. It has grown too big, and wages too many wars both foreign and domestic. Our national debt is staggering, and inflation steals the purchasing power of the working class. Too many people in positions of power seem eager to manage our lives, and line their pockets, rather than trust free people to make their own decisions.

Matt and I are unabashedly patriotic. We love America. But we don’t trust the government. Because we love America.

These self-evident truths animate one of my favorite Free the People documentaries: The Free Life: Portrait of Artist. In it, Carlos Luna tells his hero’s journey, sacrificing everything to come to America to find his free life. He sees what I see in America, but through the fresh eyes of someone who grew up under the tyranny of government-induced poverty: “I believe this is a free country. I never felt free until I lived here. I understand the country has problems. What country doesn’t? But if you ask me what other country should I live, I reply, USA. This is my home.”

At Free the People, that’s the story we’re committed to telling. We reach people who may never read a policy paper or attend a political event, but who can still be inspired by the enduring power of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Matt and I just braved the 100-degree heat to walk down to the Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Lots of happy people, despite the weather. Matt was wearing his brand new Free the People-designed ‘America F**k Yeah!’ shirt and got tons of compliments. He even sold one on the spot! You can get yours here. Wear it, loud and proud, like an American.

Happy 250th, America!

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We visited dear friends and supporters in Boise, listened to country music at a honky-tonk in Emigrant, Montana, dodged a very large bison in Yellowstone National Park, and met a wonderful woman working the deli counter at an Albertsons, her hair dyed stars and stripes, red, white, and blue. Take that, blue-haired Libs! We drank perfect double IPAs in Decorah, Iowa at the same brewery Matt drove to in the Spring of 2020 in defiance of lockdown orders. And we passed through four midwestern states of endless cornfields, none as high as an elephant’s eye, at least not yet.

As we crossed into Iowa, the sign acknowledging the state line seemed to capture the spirit of it all perfectly: “Freedom to Flourish.” This is modern shorthand, it turns out, for Iowa’s official motto, adopted in 1847: “Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain.”

Liberty, and perseverance. Sounds about right.

Despite our never-ending challenges, America remains the greatest nation on Earth. Nowhere else offers such opportunity to shape your own destiny and pursue your own happiness. If you are lucky enough to be an American, you can rise above your circumstances, work hard, innovate, fail, pick yourself up, and build a life of purpose and joy.

It’s a beautiful story, one we love to tell at Free the People. Our work is about inspiring people with these prized American values built on liberty—the ideas that let us flourish.

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But Anthem is just one piece of the puzzle at FreedomFest, where we connect with the liberty movement’s brightest minds and curious newcomers. Our team lit up the stage: Matt Kibbe, Lou Perez, and executive producer Matt Battaglia screened more of our comedy shorts, to roars of laughter. Our digital marketing maven, Sara Higdon, tackled the thorny topic of gender politics, offering libertarians a playbook for navigating the stupefying essence of postmodernism. Topping off the conference, Matt Kibbe hosted a powerhouse panel, Libertarianism 2.0, featuring Dr. Bret Weinstein. This was a dry-run for a series of deeper conversations we are planning with Bret for a new video series of the same name.

Matt almost talked his face off, recording nine new Kibbe on Liberty podcast episodes with heavyweights like Steve Forbes, Michael Malice, Bret Weinstein, and my favorite, Chef Andrew Gruel. I half-expected him to lose his voice, but he’s a machine! Keep an eye out for these episodes dropping soon.

As I write this, our team’s busy at PorcFest in the Free State of New Hampshire, where libertarians have gathered to celebrate the freeing of Ross Ulbricht, whose unjust imprisonment became a battle cry for the “Porcupines” here over a decade ago. More on Ross, and his relentless advocate mom, Lyn Ulbricht, coming soon.

Here’s to more laughs, more wins, and more freedom.

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We started our Comedy is Murder series, featuring comedian Lou Perez, because we believe that humor is the best way to challenge assumptions, expose contradictions and make difficult ideas more accessible. Comedy reaches across ideological divides, using satire and wit to critique power structures while entertaining at the same time. By making people laugh you create an emotional connection that makes the message more impactful, subtly shifting cultural norms over time. Politics is downstream of culture, and most culture is galvanized with a good laugh.

The timing of this couldn’t be better.

We’ve just finished production of a series of videos about DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—chaired by Elon Musk. He’s the driving force highlighting wasteful, mismanaged, and downright destructive government agencies in serious need of reform, cuts, or even abolition. We aim to teach people about what their government really does when they are not looking, and to dispel some of the popular myths about what reforming these agencies would really mean. For example, there seems to be a large number of people who think eliminating the Department of Education, as both President Donald Trump and Elon have suggested, would mean the end of all schooling. But of course, that’s not the case.

We plan to release this series, called Project DOGE, within the next week or so, and now that we are on Elon Musk’s radar, there is a real chance that he will see and even promote the videos when they are released. Fingers crossed. That would give an incredible boost to our audience, and to our ability to impact public opinion about the Department of Government Efficiency and its goals.

So much of what is considered and implemented in this new Administration seems to start on social media, particularly X, really giving teeth to the idea of crowd-sourced democracy. This is precisely the cultural dynamic Free the People has embraced since we first started engaging the “liberty curious” online 8 years ago.

Be on the lookout for the Project DOGE series when it drops, and be sure to go on X to tell Elon Musk about all our other projects promoting the ideas of liberty that he has embraced.

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But back to my mom, and the book Crossing. I was having a bit of an uncomfortable crossing myself because my mom was a conservative Irish Catholic, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into the politics of transgenderism with her. I briefly debated floating a little white lie, and mentioning some silly romantic fiction instead, but the vestiges of Catholic guilt gripped me. It was Mom, and I couldn’t lie. I took a deep breath and told her about the book, slightly dreading where the conversation might go, but also recognizing the importance of it. Dierdre had transitioned in 1995 at the age of 53. She (or rather Donald) had been married for 30 years and had two children. It is a wild understatement to say it wasn’t easy to do this in 1995. Her sister had her institutionalized a couple of times. And to this day, her ex-wife and children don’t speak to her, although she has since reconciled with her sister. Soldiering on, I told my mom her story, how Matt (my husband) studied under Donald in the 1980s at George Mason University, and how I became friends with Dierdre as we traveled across Europe as speakers on the Free Market Road Show. There is, it turns out, no greater bonding experience than driving through unknown regions of Croatia in the middle of the night. I told Mom that story, and what Dierdre went through to make her crossing. How she had to travel to Amsterdam for surgeries (some of which didn’t go so well), how her family fought against her, and about everything she lost. But also, about what she gained. Before she transitioned, she’d had a horrible stutter, but after she made her decision, it greatly improved. She became comfortable in her own skin. My mom asked a few pointed questions, was quiet for a little bit and then said, “Well, it must have meant everything to her if she was willing to give up so much.” This conversation remains especially poignant for me because my mom died shortly afterward. This was the last conversation I had with her.

Why do I share that story? It’s incredibly personal and I still struggle with tears when I think about it. But I went there because that moment with my mom taught me everything about the importance of storytelling—of making things personal and relatable. This conversation became the basis for everything that Free the People does. My mom accepted Dierdre because she was my friend, not some political football or an intellectual abstraction. It was intimate, Dierdre was now a person she knew a little bit, and she could in some way relate.

It was that moment that led me to the realization that we humans reach each other through storytelling and relatable experiences, our most deeply held values and emotions. That’s why movies, art, and music connect with people on a very personal level. Can we say the same thing about a perfectly reasoned white paper? Probably not. Most people shut down when confronted with economic logic, data, and graphs. Ben Shapiro, a famous conservative influencer loves to say: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” But he’s got it backwards. When it comes to the art of persuasion: Feelings don’t care about your facts. Downward sloping demand curves and quotes by dead economists aren’t going to change people’s minds. I gave a talk at a university in July on how to communicate the ideas of liberty, and communication was a hot topic. One speaker, Eszter, talked about how authoritarians use fear to change people’s minds. And another, Nils, recognized that we can do so much better in how we communicate, saying “It’s not enough to say that we have serious arguments.” And so I propose something better—how about reaching hearts first, with beautiful stories about freedom and liberty? That’s how we change people’s minds. Our ideas need to be portrayed in art, music, and culture.

At Free the People, we tell stories, we produce comedy, and we make videos that reach outside of our bubble, all sorts of content that can appeal to people who have never heard of Hayek or Mises. Stories that either tell of the devastating human consequences of authoritarianism, or the beautiful things that can happen when you are free to live your own life as you see fit, so long as you don’t hurt people or take their stuff.

Our most recent documentary, The Free Life: Portrait of an Artist, tells the story of Carlos Luna, a Cuban-born artist who left Cuba and found his way to Miami so that he could create his art and live his free life. Carlos gave up everything to come to America, and he can’t go back to Cuba. He couldn’t see his father ever again. We made this film to reach 2nd and 3rd generation Latin American immigrants who are now embracing the so-called “democratic” socialism being peddled by politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Many Latino Americans have forgotten what their families before them fled from—everything they gave up—to find freedom.

We premiered this film last December in Miami during Art Basel to a sold-out crowd of 120 people. At the beginning of the evening, I realized that this was a new audience for our work. I literally knew just 10 people in the room. The audience was made up of the greater Miami Latino community, art collectors, and art dealers. Needless to say, the Art Basel community leans far to the left. No one was quoting Atlas Shrugged. But that was a good thing. The fact that I didn’t know anyone at the beginning of the evening made this one of our most successful events. We had reached people outside of our bubble, exposing and inspiring them with our ideas of freedom and liberty. All of this, by telling an emotional story, beautifully.

In 1964, Fidel Castro banned The Beatles because he viewed them as the epitome of vulgar consumerism and Western capitalism, and he didn’t want the Cubans under his thumb exposed to those values. He also banned The Village People for promoting “violence,” Tina Turner for “sex,” and Kiss for “neofascism.” Seriously. But Castro wasn’t wrong in fearing the unstoppable power of music.

In 1989, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia was unwittingly started by a band, Plastic People of the Universe. Inspired by Frank Zappa, Plastic People formed in the late 60s and were initially licensed by the communist government to play (that’s right, you needed government approval to play music live)—but only cover songs that were approved by the Party. Being musicians, Plastic People immediately started playing their own music, and lost their license to play. They also continued playing at private events and unsanctioned clubs and concerts. Eventually the band and many of their fans were beaten and arrested, interrogated, and some were sent to jail.

In the wake of these events, in 1975, one of the band members, Jirous, while in exile, wrote a manifesto, A Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival and in it he said, “One of the highest aims of art has been the creation of unrest. The aim of the underground here in Bohemia is the creation of a second culture, a culture that will not be dependent on the official channels of communication, social recognition, and the hierarchy of values laid down by the establishment.”

Inspired by Plastic People of the Universe, playwright Vaclav Havel sent an open letter to the general secretary of the Czech Communist party, referencing “the hidden intentions of life that cannot be stopped by neutralising the creative riptides that cut beneath society.”

The rest, as they say, is history. In 1989, Vaclav Havel the playwright turned political dissident was elected the new president of liberated Czechoslovakia.

And, as Castro himself had feared, music continues to inspire the people of Cuba to fight its violent, repressive government. In July of 2021, the song Patria y Vida led to hundreds of thousands of people rising up in protest against the Cuban government. Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life) is an inversion of the communist slogan, Patria o Muerte (Homeland or Death). Some of the artists who performed this song are still in jail along with hundreds of others. And it led to one of the biggest migrations of young people from Cuba.

There’s storytelling, there’s music, and then there’s comedy. Negin Farsad, an Iranian American Social Justice Comedian (yes, that’s a thing), said “What makes comedy so effective is that if you’re making them laugh along the way, they’re going to listen to the deeper cut stuff.” She also said, “It’s funny but sneaky. Like you could be hearing an interesting treatise on income inequality that’s encased in a really sophisticated poop joke.”

We may not always agree with her politics or policies, but her points are valid. Comedy is a way to challenge the status quo or talk about unpopular ideas in a way that can make people think about things differently and that isn’t threatening. And at Free the People we are now exploring this medium for social change. We’ve produced comedy sketches such as Just Stop Oil where we point out the hypocrisy of the movement where rich elites fly around the world in their private jets, lecturing people on how to live a more environmentally-correct life. But we do it while making people laugh.

Since you are reading this, you probably already believe in freedom over government coercion; you are part of our audience already. But it is Free the People’s job to reach people outside of our bubble and make sure that more and more people are exposed to our ideas.

And since you are not the target audience, I’m going to break all of my rules, and actually quote a dead economist. FA Hayek, of course. In The Constitution of Liberty, he told us:

Hayek, of course, got it exactly right. We must always adapt our communication methods to reach new audiences. The message is always the same, but the means evolve over time. My mom taught me the importance of storytelling and it is through your support that Free the People is able to do what Mom taught me—to reach new audiences with stories about the beautiful things that can happen when you are free to live your own life as you see fit, so long as you don’t hurt people or take their stuff.

Just imagine what the world would be like today if Hayek had had a Twitter account, or a podcast on Spotify. Who knows, he might have told a poop joke that was really a scathing critique of the concept of social justice.

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Here is a clip where Matt talks Will Cain off the ledge of “good” government limits on social media.

Also, here is a short interview with Tulsi Gabbard where they discuss the TikTok ban as an extension of the Security State’s ongoing crackdown on free speech in America.

If you’re interested, here is the full conversation on Fox. It’s about a half hour long and Matt also discusses the thoughtful libertarian approach to immigration and border security.

At Free the People, we believe that there is a thoughtful libertarian take on even thorny issues, and we’re always ready to engage the debate on the left, and on the right.

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As you can imagine, planning this event in Miami was a little nerve wracking. It’s not exactly our home turf, and we were competing with countless other prestigious events. But we knew we had a cool venue, an amazing movie, a beautiful art exhibit, great Mezcal, and even a pop-up fashion show. Now we just had to get the right people to show up. But show up they did! We were oversold for what turned out to be a fabulous evening under the stars.

It was a new crowd for us—We barely knew anyone at the beginning of the evening, but we had local art collectors, prestigious members of the Miami Cuban community, and even a few anti-Castro dissidents. One couple showed up because they had been told about the premiere from a local art gallery owner. They left inspired and motivated.

We’ve always strived to help drive the cultural conversation; a conversation typically dominated by wannabe authoritarians and their bad ideas. That night in Miami was affirmation of what is possible when you take some (slightly terrifying) risks.

My favorite comment after the film: “No one told me I should bring Kleenex.” And he was right, there were few dry eyes in the house because our film is an emotional rollercoaster that follows artist Carlos Luna’s Hero’s Journey from Communist Cuba to his free, flourishing life in the United States. You’ve heard us say this a thousand times: You must reach people through their emotions, breaking through preconceived biases, before they will consider new ways of thinking about individual freedom and the toxic nature of government power.

You can watch a short recap of the evening here.

We’re working to bring the full documentary to a broader audience soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer for the film here.

It’s such an honor to have produced this film illustrating the universal values of personal achievement and artistic freedom. Telling stories like Carlos’ is why we started Free the People, and it’s what motivates us to keep fighting to create a better, freer world for everyone. And it’s your support that makes this all possible.

Sign up here for more announcements about The Free Life, as well as many other projects currently in development and production. 2024 is going to be a productive, inspiring (and slightly terrifying) year for all of us!

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