January 08, 2026
Imprimis | Articles
Interview with Jerry Leeman: Today we bring you a story about a handful of fishermen rallying against a billion-dollar green industrial project, shady foreign corporations, and our own federal and state government. All are conspiring to generate a cash cow for…
The following is adapted from a lecture prepared for delivery at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Kansas City, Missouri. Defending America and America’s friends and allies is expensive. If you add up the price tag—not even including secret programs or the cost of U.S. intelligence—our current defense expenses stand at $875 billion per
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 29, 2025, at Hillsdale College’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in Somers, Connecticut. Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared that he and his supporters were “the party of common sense.” In his Inaugural Address on January 20, Trump returned to this theme. With
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at a Hillsdale College luncheon in Anchorage, Alaska, on January 22, 2025. Just hours after his inauguration on January 20, President Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the events of January 6, 2021. He commuted the sentences of fourteen additional people whose
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on September 29, 2024, during a conference on “Christianity in America.” One of the most beautiful things written during the American Founding period is George Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. Washington had visited Newport in August of that
The following is adapted from remarks delivered on November 19, 2024, at a Hillsdale College reception in San Diego, California. The recent election is the product of a decades-long struggle in American politics that has intensified since 2016. The election produced a victory for the man who caused the intensification, Donald Trump. He caused it
The following is adapted from a talk delivered in Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College on October 23, 2024, as part of the Drummond Lectures in Christ Chapel series. The top-down, elitist brand of politics that has dominated the United States since the end of the Cold War—under Republican and Democratic administrations alike—has failed. Yes, we
*The First Issue of Imprimis—Updated for Today* Editor’s Note: The first issue of Imprimis, published in May 1972, featured an article titled “The Dangers of Price Controls” by Henry Hazlitt. The Federal Reserve back then was printing large amounts of money to fund massive government spending on Great Society programs launched during the presidency of
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on July 23, 2024, at Hillsdale College’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in Somers, Connecticut. In March of this year, Bryan Malinowski, the executive director of the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, Arkansas, was killed by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on April 18, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Bellevue, Washington. In the past two years, two competing groups of conservatives—National Conservatives or NatCons and Freedom Conservatives or FreeCons—have issued competing manifestos. These manifestos reflect a divergent understanding of the progressive challenge to the
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on April 17, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Bellevue, Washington. On April 6 this year, as the University of South Carolina and University of Iowa women’s basketball teams were preparing to play in the NCAA National Championship game, two press conferences were held
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on March 11, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The writers of our Constitution placed their faith not in specific guarantees of rights—those came later—but in
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on February 15, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Naples, Florida. The most consequential falsehood in American public policy today is the idea that any racial disparity in any institution is by definition the result of racial discrimination. If a cancer research lab, for
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 22, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. In 1960, the Eisenhower administration began counting the number of foreign nationals “apprehended” or “encountered” by what
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on November 1, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The Covid cover-up began in China. But in a way we make too big a deal of
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on the Regent Seven Seas Mariner on June 30, 2023, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise from Istanbul to Athens. Hillsdale is often called a conservative college, and in an important sense it is, although it is not a label we regard as fundamental. The word “conservative”
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 3, 2023, during a conference on “U.S. Intelligence: History and Controversies.” We need the CIA, but we also need to recognize the uncomfortable reality that the CIA is not performing at the level we require. It is not keeping us safe. It
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on the Regent Seven Seas Mariner on June 30, 2023, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise from Istanbul to Athens. The word “imperialism” comes from the Latin word imperium. It refers to a nation or a state implanting its rule on other states, treating them as subordinates
2023 Commencement Address The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 13, 2023, at Hillsdale College’s 171st Commencement Ceremony. Congratulations to the Hillsdale College Class of 2023. It is a thrill to be here at Hillsdale, which I have heard about for a long time. Last night I had a wonderful tour of
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on April 24, 2023, in Irving, Texas. In a recent survey of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries—i.e., all the rich countries in the world—about 60 percent of respondents said they believe that global warming will likely or very
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on February 22, 2023, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Indian Wells, California. Just about everybody on Wall Street knows, despite what you read in the financial press, that the Biden administration’s economic policies are driving our economy into a recessionary ditch. In a recent
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on March 5, 2023, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “Big Pharma.” I developed a serious cardiac arrhythmia, ventricular tachycardia, seven years ago. It worsened over the past summer and early fall, and over the past six weeks I’ve had several ambulance
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on February 7, 2023. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our
By Christopher Flannery Host, The American Story The following is adapted from an online presentation recorded at Hillsdale College on October 18, 2022. On the mezzanine floor of the Parker House Hotel in Boston hangs a mirror, still today. In the late fall of 1867,…
The following is adapted from remarks delivered on November 3, 2022, at a Hillsdale College reception in Santa Clara, California. If you want to see the problem with American education, look at a chart illustrating the comparative growth in the number of students, teachers, and district administrators in our public schools in the period between
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 20, 2022, sponsored by the student group Praxis. On April 15, 2020—a full month after President Trump’s fateful news conference that greenlighted lockdowns to be enacted by the states for “15 Days to Flatten the Curve”—the President had a revealing White House
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on November 7, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “The Great Reset.” Is the Great Reset a conspiracy theory imagining a vast left-wing plot to establish a totalitarian one-world government? No. Despite the fact that some people may have spun conspiracy
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on February 28, 2022, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. For several years prior to 2020, violent crime in America’s major cities was on the decline. But
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on February 24, 2022, in Naples, Florida. When I was researching my biography of economist Thomas Sowell, I kept coming across Sowell’s own descriptions of scholars he admired, and I was often struck by how well those descriptions applied to
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on April 5, 2022, during a two-week teaching residency at Hillsdale as a Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism. Why do I say that we need to lay siege to our institutions? Because of what has happened to our institutions since the 1960s. The
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on July 20, 2022, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. Complaints by veteran soldiers about younger generations who lack discipline and traditional values are as old as
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on September 16, 2022, in Washington, D.C., at Hillsdale College’s Constitution Day Celebration. The seal of the U.S. Department of Justice reads, “Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur”—“Who prosecutes for Lady Justice.” Depictions of Lady Justice are as familiar as they are instructive: she stands blindfolded while holding
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 4, 2022, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on the topic of Russia. According to what we hear from the White House and from the television networks, the issues at stake in the Ukraine War are simple. They concern the evil
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on September 20, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “Critical American Elections.” Sixteen years ago, in 2005, the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform issued a report that proposed a uniform system of requiring a photo ID in order to vote
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College reception in Overland Park, Kansas, on November 18, 2021. Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening?
Inflation is an economic concept that refers to the overall increase in prices of goods and services in an economy. It is usually measured as an annual percentage change. Inflation can be caused by various factors, including excess money supply, high government spending, and production bottlenecks.