On February 17, I’ll be speaking in Milwaukee. I’m honored to be part of Wisconsin Forum’s line-up for the 2021-2022 season. My question will be: The economic, political, and historical evidence for the superiority of free societies is substantial — yet so many are suspicious or outright hostile, and often authoritarian policies prevail over genuinely […]

“The View” host Whoopi Goldberg said that the Holocaust was “not about race” but about “man’s inhumanity to other man” and that it involved “two white groups of people.” ABC News responded by suspending her for two weeks. As cancellations go, that is mild — yet it still is a cancel-culture reaction. A healthier liberal

I received this email on February 1, 2022:Hi Prof. Hicks, I saw your Facebook post about Jordan Peterson’s resignation and noticed XX’s comment. While I’m uncomfortable speaking up publicly about it for fear of retaliation against me from my faculty peers, I did want to note that I recently had a chair of a search

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, was a student-led initiative to increase and enhance the free-speech rights of students. Long-time political activist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Albert Lepawsky, said this: “The main task we face is preserving the university not merely as a free political community but primarily as an institution that is privileged

From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Why? “In an ever-changing,

I was interviewed by Carter of Unsafe Spaces. Our theme was “The Seeds of Woke Culture.” Timestamps: 00:00 The Rise of Woke Culture 01:24 Introduction of Stephen Hicks 02:22 Describing woke culture 09:50 Assumptions of liberal culture 13:40 Let’s look at the Enlightenment 18:58 The Counter-Enlightenment and Rousseau 26:08 Immanuel Kant. Enlightenment Thinker? 31:00 Divorce

A good, careful discussion of their work. Professors Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl are joint authors of many works, including The Realist Turn, Norms of Liberty, and The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand.