Consequential Actions Podcast

Jeff Kellick
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Our overall goal is to help ourselves and the audience understand the rationale behind the actions of our collective past in order to learn from and address (effectively) the consequences of our present, and of our future. Help others understand what preceded us in various disciplines of study so that we will not waste our efforts reinventing what is already working, or by repeating and perpetuating our faults; but rather to refine the successes and correct the failures. We should learn from others, in their own words, to understand their motivations and determine their effectiveness over time. We live in a time of accountability and merit. Empathize with, and encourage, those who make mistakes and learn from them. Critique those who repeat the failures of the past, or aim to manipulate outcomes and obfuscate intentions. jeffkellick.substack.com

  1. 4d ago

    The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the English Bill of Rights

    The Invasion England Decided to Call a Revolution On the afternoon of 5 November 1688, the people of a Devon fishing village looked out at Tor Bay and could not see the water for ships. Something like four hundred and sixty of them, carrying fifteen thousand professional soldiers, their horses, their siege guns, and a printing press. It was the largest fleet to reach English shores since 1066, it had sailed the length of the Channel unopposed, and it belonged to a foreign head of state. Fourteen months later that same kingdom produced a document an American can read today and recognize in his bones. Both of those things happened. The ships and the statute. This episode puts the ships first. James II did not lose his throne because he was Catholic. England had done the arithmetic and decided to wait him out. He lost it because he claimed a power to suspend acts of Parliament altogether, made a test case of it in Godden v. Hales by dismissing six of the twelve judges of England until he had a bench that would rule the way he needed, and then, in June 1688, produced a Catholic son. This episode walks through the dispensing power, the seven bishops in the Tower, the letter seven men wrote in cipher that would have hanged every one of them, and the legal fiction the Convention built in January 1689 to remove a king it had no lawful means of removing. James had fled a foreign army at night. Parliament resolved that he had abdicated, and both the men who believed in divine right and the men who believed in consent voted for the same words for opposite reasons. What followed was real. The crown could no longer suspend a statute, dispense with one, tax without a grant, keep an army in peacetime without consent, prosecute a man for petitioning, or dismiss a judge for a verdict. None of it has been seriously reclaimed since. But the settlement that chained the crown also built the most formidable state in Europe. Within six months England was at war with France, and by 1694 a permanent funded national debt, a bank chartered to service it, and an excise administered by professional bureaucracy were extracting on a scale James II could only have dreamed about. Binding the king is precisely what made the state creditworthy. The chains on the crown were the collateral. And the word bloodless describes one kingdom out of three. Scotland got Killiecrankie and Glencoe. Ireland got a three-year war, and at Aughrim on 12 July 1691 something near seven thousand men died in a single afternoon, followed by a penal code aimed at Catholic land, inheritance, education, arms, office, and the vote. The episode gives three objections their full strength before answering any of them, including the sharpest one: that the colonists who claimed the rights of 1689 were not that revolution’s heirs but its rebels, since the settlement had secured those rights by making Parliament supreme, and Parliament was the body they were resisting. This is Episode 11 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, a twenty-two episode series tracing the intellectual origins of American liberty from ancient Greece to the Bill of Rights. The question underneath all of it: did this leave people more free, or more governed? ⏱️ CHAPTERS00:00 - Introduction: The Invasion of Tor Bay in 168802:22 - Episode Welcome & Housekeeping Notes04:10 - James II: The Cold Arithmetic of a Catholic Monarchy06:39 - Royal Overreach: The Suspending and Dispensing Powers09:11 - The Declaration of Indulgence & The Threat of Absolutism12:23 - Crisis Arrives: A Catholic Heir & The Trial of the Seven Bishops15:18 - The Immortal Seven Invite William of Orange17:34 - William’s Continental Strategy & The Declaration of Reasons21:35 - Defection, Desertion, and the Flight of James II24:37 - The Convention at Westminster & The Fiction of Abdication31:05 - The Declaration of Right: Offering the Crown at Whitehall33:03 - The Cost of Conscience: The Non-Juring Clergy35:10 - The English Bill of Rights: Ancient Liberties Declared39:51 - The Act of Toleration & The Strict Boundaries of Religious Freedom41:45 - The Fiscal-Military State: A Bound Crown & A Standing Army47:41 - The “Bloodless” Myth: Conquest in Scotland and Ireland53:44 - The Reckoning: Exclusion, Oligarchy, and Permanent Limits on Power57:13 - Three Objections: Foreign Coup, Aristocracy, and the American Claim01:06:38 - The Liberty Test: Are You More Free or More Governed?01:11:59 - Conclusion, Substack Details, & Episode 12 Preview 📚 Companion article — “1688: Triumph and Warning”: The Glorious Revolution and Its Limits, with full citations for the Declaration of Right, the Bill of Rights clauses, and the Irish settlement. https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/1688-triumph-and-warning-the-glorious-revolution-and-its-limits 🎓 New to the House of Stuart? Our whiteboard primer on the Stuart monarchs — who reigned, when, and how each of them came to the throne or lost it — is on the channel: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/english-monarchs-explained-henry-viii-to-george-iii-self-evident-companion-reference 🎙️ Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 11. Next Saturday brings Episode 12, The Scottish Alternative: Hume, Smith, and the Men Who Found Liberty in a Place No Lawyer Had Thought to Look. #gloriousrevolution #1688 #englishbillofrights #jamesii #williamofpartorange #constitutionalhistory #libertarian #naturalrights #selfevident #consequentialactions This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

    The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the English Bill of Rights

  2. Aug 19

    Dr. Thomas Laehn, LP Candidate for US Senate — On Locke, Eminent Domain, and Jury Nullification

    A Prosecutor Would Give Up Every Institution but One Dr. Thomas Laehn taught constitutional law and political philosophy to undergraduates before he ever charged anyone with a crime. He is now the County Attorney for Greene County, Iowa, the first Libertarian ever elected to partisan office in that state, and a candidate for the United States Senate seat Joni Ernst is leaving open. He is also, by his own description paradoxically, a proponent of jury nullification. This conversation closes Week 10 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Sunday’s article and Saturday’s history took up Algernon Sidney and John Locke, the martyr and the philosopher. Tuesday carried the argument into the present, into what a government may do about what its citizens write and say. Thursday puts a living voice on all of it, and the voice belongs to a man who taught these texts for a living and now works inside the machinery those arguments built. Two threads run through the hour. The first is property. Laehn defends Locke’s state of nature not as history but as a model, built the way a scientist builds one, by stripping away everything that does not bear on the question being asked, and he gives Sir Robert Filmer his due along the way. The second is the question Saturday ended on and Tuesday could not close: when a government exceeds the power its people could have handed it, who decides, before force decides it? His answer is the amendment process, the ballot, and twelve people in a jury box. He says he would surrender every other institution of government before he surrendered the jury. Then the argument comes home. Iowa’s Utilities Commission vested a private company with the power of eminent domain along the route of a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline, and families along that route have refused to sell. Laehn walks through Kelo v. City of New London, the 2005 decision that read the Fifth Amendment’s requirement of public use to mean public purpose, and through the bill he drafted at legislators’ request to stop the taking in Iowa, which passed both chambers with added language and was vetoed by the governor. The closing monologue runs the Liberty Test on the machinery underneath that fight rather than on the fight itself, states the strongest case for the taking power before answering it, and concedes what the jury cannot do before praising what it can. This is Episode 10i of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, a twenty-two episode series tracing the intellectual origins of American liberty from ancient Greece to the Bill of Rights. The question underneath all of it: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed? Recorded August 17, 2026. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 - Introduction: The Execution of Algernon Sidney00:46 - Welcome to Week 10: The Martyr and the Philosopher02:22 - Setting the Stage: Introducing Dr. Thomas Laehn03:37 - Interview Begins: Dr. Laehn’s Background and Campaign06:03 - From Political Philosophy Professor to Rural Prosecutor10:54 - Perspectives on an Article V Convention13:11 - Dr. Laehn’s Forthcoming Book on Western Constitutionalism14:26 - John Locke, Human Dignity, and the State of Nature22:28 - Rebutting the Historical Criticisms of Locke26:22 - Modern Property Rights: The Iowa Carbon Pipeline Controversy34:18 - Eminent Domain, Kelo v. New London, and the Supreme Court40:50 - When Government Overreaches: The Right to Revolution44:21 - The Power of the Jury and Jury Nullification47:56 - Challenging the Duopoly: Running for U.S. Senate as a Libertarian53:30 - The Case for Congressional Term Limits58:16 - Where to Follow Dr. Laehn’s Campaign59:20 - Post-Interview Analysis: Locke’s Models and Filmer’s Reality01:00:48 - The Verdict: More Free or More Governed?01:03:20 - The Umpire of the Constitution and the Jury Box01:05:53 - Next Week’s Preview: The Glorious Revolution of 1688 📚 Companion article — “The Martyr and the Philosopher”: Sidney’s manuscript trial and the doctrine that to write is to act, Locke’s answer to Filmer, and the reckoning both men are owed. Cites the State Trials report of Sidney’s 1683 trial, John Evelyn’s diary of the scaffold, Peter Laslett’s edition of the Two Treatises, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, and Jefferson’s own naming of Locke and Sidney in his 1825 letter to Henry Lee. https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-martyr-and-the-philosopher-algernon-sidney-and-john-locke 🗳️ Dr. Laehn’s campaign: https://laehn4iowa.org This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

    Dr. Thomas Laehn, LP Candidate for US Senate — On Locke, Eminent Domain, and Jury Nullification

  3. Aug 18

    Scribere Est Agere: When a Government Turns Your Writing Into an Act

    Six Officers Searched His Home Over a Tweet 26 People Saw In November of 2023, six police officers arrived at the door of a seventy-one-year-old retired special constable in Gillingham, Kent, and handcuffed him in his own home. They searched the house for an hour. Body-worn camera footage later obtained by a newspaper records them going through his belongings and remarking on his bookcase — Douglas Murray, The Spectator, very Brexity things — and examining a shopping list for bleach, tin foil, and gloves that had been written by his wife, who is a hairdresser. They held Julian Foulkes in a cell for eight hours and interviewed him under the Malicious Communications Act. He accepted a caution because he was afraid a continuing investigation would stop him travelling to Australia to see his surviving daughter. He had replied to a stranger on X, warning that Britain was one step away from people storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals. The reply had been seen twenty-six times. Three hundred and forty years earlier, other officers went through another Englishman’s study and carried away his papers. Saturday’s episode covered what happened to Algernon Sidney and the three words of Latin that made it possible. Scribere est agere. To write is to act. This episode traces that rule into the present, and the mechanics matter more than the outrage. The framers knew the Sidney case. Article III of the Constitution defines treason and then makes it hard to prove — two witnesses to the same overt act, and confession only in open court. They wrote a specific rule against a specific abuse, and the rule was real, and it covered exactly one crime. Three forms follow. The punishment of non-violent political writing, including a case where two parents were arrested in front of their crying three-year-old over messages nobody would show them, and where the force has since conceded the arrests were unlawful and paid damages. The permanence of the record in third-party hands, from a man in Taiyuan who deleted a forwarded video and found the police holding screenshots that never came from his phone, to a July 2026 Fourth Circuit ruling that a manual search of your phone at the border is routine and requires no warrant and no suspicion at all. And the state acting on a writing without having to prove anything else happened — a Tufts doctoral student detained and moved a thousand miles over an op-ed, where the government’s own memoranda record that it had nothing else, and where a judge later found it had introduced no evidence beyond the piece she wrote. This hour names a British government, a Chinese government, and an American administration, and applies the same standard to each. It also declines the easy version of its own argument. The British non-crime hate incident regime was found unlawful by Britain’s own Court of Appeal in 2021, abandoned for investigation by the Metropolitan Police in October 2025, and the statutory basis for it was repealed by an Act of Parliament that received Royal Assent this April. The reform is real, and it happened because British citizens argued in public for years. The celebrated Missouri consent decree, read line by line, protects a list of named plaintiffs on five named websites — not you. And the Honest Reckoning starts with the host, who has felt satisfaction watching people he dislikes lose their platforms, and says so. Did this leave people more free, or more governed? Fancy hats and larger mobs: take the thing being done, put it in your own hands, and ask whether you could do it — and if not, whether a thousand of you could. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 The Arrest of Julian Folkes Over a Tweet 03:13 Introduction: Episode 10, Part B — To Write is to Act 06:25 The Trial of Algernon Sidney and the Two-Witness Rule 09:55 How Sidney's Case Shaped the U.S. Treason Clause 11:19 Supreme Court Interpretations: Cramer and Haupt 13:53 The Arrest of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine 17:15 Non-Crime Hate Incidents and the Police Bookshelf Search 20:13 Britain Scraps the Non-Crime Hate Incident Framework 23:02 Speech Policing and "Picking Quarrels" in China 26:25 U.S. Border Searches of Electronic Devices 29:20 Stanley v. Georgia vs. Records in the Cloud 30:14 The Twitter Files, Murphy v. Missouri, and NRA v. Vullo 33:07 The Truth About the Missouri Consent Decree 35:23 Rumesa Ozturk: Visa Revocation for an Op-Ed 38:53 The Reckoning: Schadenfreude and Asymmetrical Outrage 41:22 Objection 1: The Hard Cases and Incitement (Lucy Connolly) 44:03 Objection 2: Judging Britain by the First Amendment 45:16 Objection 3: Writings as Evidence and Visa Discretion 47:25 The Liberty Test: Can Lawful Opinion Be Treated as an Act? 52:17 Preview of Thursday's Interview with Dr. Thomas Lane 53:46 Conclusion and Outro 📚 Read the companion article, “The Martyr and the Philosopher — Algernon Sidney and John Locke”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-martyr-and-the-philosopher-algernon-sidney-and-john-locke Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10B, the contemporary application companion to Episode 10. On Thursday, Dr. Thomas Laehn joins me — County Attorney in Greene County, Iowa, the first Libertarian elected to partisan office in that state, a former professor of constitutional law and political philosophy, and a candidate this November for the United States Senate. He has an answer to the umpire question involving a jury’s power to refuse, which is a startling thing to hear from a prosecutor. #freespeech #julianfoulkes #noncrimehateincident #bordersearch #fourthamendment #firstamendment #civilliberties #libertarian #selfevident #roadto1776 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

    Scribere Est Agere: When a Government Turns Your Writing Into an Act

  4. Aug 15

    Algernon Sidney and John Locke: How Two Men Answered Filmer and Armed a Revolution

    They Executed Him for a Book Nobody Had Read On the twenty-first of November, 1683, a sixty-year-old man stood at the bar of the Court of King’s Bench charged with high treason, without counsel, because English law did not permit a man accused of treason to have any. The crown had one witness to the plot, and the law required two. So the prosecution reached for the manuscript its officers had carried out of his study that summer — long, unfinished, unpublished, read by almost no one on earth. The Lord Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, instructed the jury in three words of Latin. Scribere est agere. To write is to act. Two weeks later they cut off Algernon Sidney’s head on Tower Hill for a book the crown never proved anyone had circulated. That same autumn, another Englishman was living in Amsterdam under the assumed name of Doctor van der Linden, in poor health, fifty-one years old, with the English government asking after him. John Locke had been the confidential adviser to the leader of the Exclusion movement, and when that movement collapsed and its leaders began going to the block, his position was not survivable. He stayed abroad more than five years. The manuscript he carried into exile was published anonymously at the end of 1689, and he admitted the authorship only in a codicil to his will. Both men were writing against the same dead opponent. Sir Robert Filmer had died in 1653, but Patriarcha was published in 1680, in the middle of the Exclusion Crisis, and it made a dead man’s book into a live weapon. This episode states Filmer’s case at full strength before answering it, because an argument answered in its weakest form has not been answered at all — and his hard question has never entirely gone away. When, exactly, did you consent? Where is this original agreement? Produce it. You were born into a country, under laws written before you existed, enforced by a government you never chose, and you did not sign anything. The hour does not stop at the answers. There is a reckoning owed for each man, and the second is harder by a wide margin. Sidney took secret money from the French ambassador while writing against arbitrary power. Locke held shares in the Royal African Company and, as secretary to the Lords Proprietors, was involved with versions of a colonial constitution declaring that every freeman of Carolina should have absolute power over his slaves — a gap not merely between a philosopher’s words and his conduct, but between what Locke himself wrote about slavery and what Locke himself administered. Historians genuinely disagree about how much of that scheme is his. The episode gives that dispute at full strength, sits with the offense before reaching for anything redemptive, and only then asks what it means that his principles proved larger than the man who stated them. Did that leave people more free, or more governed? Take a law or policy in your own country today. Does it rest on powers the governed could actually have delegated, protecting rights they already held? ⏱️ CHAPTERS * 00:00 Introduction: The Treason Trial of Algernon Sidney * 03:25 Episode Overview: The Martyr and the Philosopher * 04:28 The Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot * 08:08 Sir Robert Filmer and the Divine Right of Kings * 11:21 Algernon Sidney’s “Discourses Concerning Government” * 16:37 The Trial, “To Write is to Act,” and Sidney’s Execution * 20:30 John Locke and the “Two Treatises of Government” * 24:06 The State of Nature, Natural Rights, and Property * 27:26 Government by Consent and the Right of Revolution * 30:00 The Reckoning: Sidney’s French Subsidies * 31:29 The Reckoning: Locke, Slavery, and Colonialism * 37:23 Objection 1: The Intellectual Roots of the American Founding * 39:28 Objection 2: Algernon Sidney as a Factional Martyr * 41:11 Objection 3: Locke’s Liberty as a Property Holder’s Facade * 43:20 Transmission to America: Influence on Franklin and Jefferson * 46:42 The Liberty Test: Delegated Powers and the Umpire of Revolution * 50:45 Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode 📚 Read the companion article, “The Martyr and the Philosopher — Algernon Sidney and John Locke,” for the full account of Filmer’s challenge, the trial and the scaffold, the Two Treatises, and the documented transmission to Jefferson and Madison: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-martyr-and-the-philosopher-algernon-sidney-and-john-locke Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10, “The Martyr and the Philosopher.” Arc III, English Liberty. Next Saturday, Episode 11: “The Glorious Revolution.” And this Tuesday, the contemporary application takes up the rule that killed Sidney — to write is to act — and what happens to liberty when the record of your thinking is permanent, searchable, and in somebody else’s hands. #algernonsidney #johnlocke #naturalrights #consentofthegoverned #robertfilmer #twotreatises #englishliberty #libertarian #selfevident #roadto1776 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

    Algernon Sidney and John Locke: How Two Men Answered Filmer and Armed a Revolution

  5. Aug 12

    Brendan Kirby, FOX10 News Investigative Reporter, on Grand Jury Secrecy, Body Camera Records, and Alabama's Open Records Act

    A Justice Wrote a Warning Into His Own Ruling. Alabama Ignored It. In October of 2023, in a small town on the Alabama–Florida line, a newspaper publisher and one of her reporters were arrested and charged with felonies over a story about how federal COVID relief money had been spent at the local school system. Four centuries after the fight this week is about, the limit is written down. The arrest happened anyway. This is the Thursday conversation that closes week nine of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Sunday brought the written article. Saturday told the history of the Levellers, the printers and pamphleteers who wanted the limits on power written down and published without anyone’s permission. Tuesday carried it into the present. Today we close the week with a living voice — because rather than theorize about the distance between a document and its enforcement, it seemed better to ask a man who measures that distance for a living. Brendan Kirby is an investigative reporter with FOX10 News in Mobile, Alabama. He has covered courts and government for three decades, beginning in Washington and Maryland and, since 2000, on the Gulf Coast, including fifteen years at the Mobile Press-Register and AL.com. He is a graduate of American University and the author of Wicked Mobile, a history of the rogues and scoundrels of the Port City’s three hundred years. His beat straddles two states with nearly identical open records statutes and completely different habits about obeying them. The conversation runs along two threads. The first is what it actually costs to be the person who puts something on the record — and Brendan is candid that in his own case it has cost very little, which is not true everywhere and has not been true in every era. The second is the objection the Levellers’ opponents raised and never answered: once you write the limit down, somebody has to say what the words mean, and that authority has to sit somewhere. Along the way: why criminal defendants almost never testify, and what jurors probably think about that even when instructed not to. Why he believes juries get it right more often than the public assumes, and why a system where the government always wins is a system with something wrong in it. What happened to the economics of local reporting, and what was actually lost when the gatekeeper role went away. The Atmore case and where it stands now in federal court. And Justice Scalia’s argument, from his 2011 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that a bill of rights is not what makes a country free — that the Soviet Union’s read better than ours on paper, and that what separates the two is structure rather than text. Brendan covers these matters as a working journalist. He does not endorse candidates and does not advocate policy, and nothing here is offered as a partisan story. What is under examination is a mechanism, not a team. Episode 9i of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — the fourth touchpoint of week nine, and the third voice. The article gives depth. The history gives roots. The application shows stakes. The interview puts a living face on all of it. Recorded 08/02/2026. The federal litigation discussed is active and may have moved since. The question we put to everything we examine: did this leave people more free, or more governed? ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction: Arrested for Publishing a Story 00:27 Episode Overview: Interview with Brendan Kirby 03:55 Interview Begins: Thirty Years of Investigative Journalism 06:56 The Courtroom Experience and the Value of Juries 11:37 Cameras in the Courtroom: Florida vs. Alabama 14:29 John Lilburne and the Right Against Self-Incrimination 16:13 Public Perception of the Fifth Amendment and Testifying 22:11 The Permanent Record and the Cost of Journalism 25:50 The Broken Economic Model of the Press 31:25 The Atmore Arrests: Press Freedom vs. Grand Jury Secrecy 39:28 Interpreting Written Laws and Open Records 44:00 The Alabama Supreme Court on Police Body Camera Footage 48:47 The Overreach of Grand Jury Secrecy 51:16 Antonin Scalia on the Structure of a Free Government 55:35 Advice for Citizens: How to Stay Informed Locally 01:01:14 Post-Interview Reflection: The Mechanism of Transparency 01:02:46 The Liberty Test: When the Law Works Against Openness 01:05:15 Conclusion and Preview of Next Week 📚 Companion article: “The Levellers — The Lost Constitution,” Article 9 of Self-Evident. https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitution 🔗 Brendan’s reporting: fox10tv.com. His book, Wicked Mobile, is available from The History Press and wherever books are sold. Consequential Actions — Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, Episode 9i: The Thursday Conversation with Brendan Kirby #brendankirby #openrecords #bodycamera #pressfreedom #grandjury #localnews #levellers #firstamendment #transparency #selfevident This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

    Brendan Kirby, FOX10 News Investigative Reporter, on Grand Jury Secrecy, Body Camera Records, and Alabama's Open Records Act

  6. Aug 10

    Fauci Contempt Vote Explained: The Fifth Amendment, the Pardon, and the Lois Lerner Precedent

    The Pardon Meant to Shield Fauci Is Why He Faces Contempt On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times. On August 6, the committee voted 8 to 5 along party lines to hold him in contempt of Congress, and Chairman Rand Paul sent the referral to the Justice Department. This episode is not an argument about whether Anthony Fauci deserves any of that. I have been one of his harshest critics for years and I say so in the first five minutes. It is an argument about the machinery — where the right to remain silent came from, who it was actually built to protect, and what happens when the same body asks the questions, rules on the objection to its own questions, and then votes to set the criminal process in motion against a witness for disagreeing. The trail runs back to 1637 and John Lilburne, who was handed the ex officio oath and given three doors, each with a punishment behind it. He refused, and was whipped two miles through London for the refusal alone. The maxim he stood on — no man is bound to accuse himself — passed through the common law, into colonial charters, and in 1791 into eleven words in the Fifth Amendment. Then the part almost nobody believes until they hear the cases. In Ohio v. Reiner the Supreme Court reversed a ruling that a babysitter forfeited the privilege by claiming she was innocent, and it did so unanimously. The protection was not written for the mob boss. It was written for the honest person standing inside ambiguous circumstances, whose truthful answers become the government’s evidence — a woman charged over what she said about a stock sale that was never charged, a general convicted over an interview about conversations that were never a crime. The legal machinery is the second half. Waiver, and what actually counts as opening the subject. The Lois Lerner precedent from 2013, where a committee voted that an opening statement forfeited a constitutional privilege — and where a Democratic administration’s own United States Attorney, Ronald Machen, wrote in March 2015 that the theory was wrong as a matter of law and declined to bring it. The same theory is now being run on the same statute by the same party against an official of the other one. Then Brown v. Walker, Murphy v. Waterfront Commission, and the pardon itself, issued in January 2025 and covering conduct from 2014 through January 19, 2025 — a document that removed the federal jeopardy, and in removing it handed the committee its strongest argument for ordering him to answer. The instrument issued to protect him is the reason he is in front of a prosecutor today. This hour costs something. It defends a man I hold responsible for real harm, it criticizes Senator Rand Paul, who is on most days the best friend the Bill of Rights has in the Senate, and it turns on the movement and on me before it turns anywhere else. That is the point. The test this series always comes back to: did this leave us more free, or more governed? ⏱️ CHAPTERS * 00:00 Introduction: George Burdick and the Unwanted Pardon * 03:04 Episode Overview: Episode 9, Part B — No Man is Bound to Accuse Himself * 03:27 Disclaimers: A Non-Partisan Look at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Fifth Amendment Rights * 06:18 John Lilburne, the Star Chamber, and the Ex Officio Oath * 08:29 The Evolution of the Fifth Amendment and Miranda Rights * 10:46 The Danger of “If You Have Nothing to Hide” (Ohio v. Reiner) * 13:38 Case Study 1: Martha Stewart and the False Statements Trap * 15:33 Case Study 2: General Michael Flynn and Section 1001 * 17:40 Case Study 3: Anthony Fauci’s Blanket Invocation of the Fifth * 19:01 The “My Cousin Vinny” Example: The Perils of Compelled Testimony * 22:12 The Doctrine of Waiver and the 2013 Lois Lerner Precedent * 25:06 Senator Rand Paul’s Contempt Resolution vs. Constitutional Protections * 27:33 The Pardon Argument: Does Immunity Erase the Right to Silence? * 29:25 The Legal Exceptions: Perjury and Cross-Sovereign State Prosecutions * 34:30 The History and Controversy of Preemptive Presidential Pardons * 39:44 The Conundrum: How Biden’s Pardon Fueled the Contempt Charge * 41:28 The July 2026 Senate Hearing and Partisan Contempt Vote * 46:50 Modern Echoes of the Star Chamber * 49:00 The Reckoning: Personal Bias, Hypocrisy, and the Need for Immunity Grants * 54:32 The Skeptic’s Case: Three Objections to Defending Fauci * 57:15 Answering the Objections: The Principle Outweighs the Man * 01:01:16 The Liberty Test: Can a Committee Rightfully Compel Speech? * 01:04:33 Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode with Brendan Kirby 📚 Read the companion article, “The Levellers: The Lost Constitution,” for the full account of Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn, the Agreement of the People and its clause binding every person alike, the Putney Debates, and Burford:https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitution Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9B, “No Man Is Bound to Accuse Himself.” The contemporary application companion to Episode 9. On Thursday, investigative reporter Brendan Kirby of FOX10 News in Mobile, Alabama, joins me for the third voice of the week. #fauci #fifthamendment #randpaul #contemptofcongress #civilliberties #constitution #libertarian #johnlilburne #levellers #selfevident Thanks for reading Consequential Actions! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

    Fauci Contempt Vote Explained: The Fifth Amendment, the Pardon, and the Lois Lerner Precedent

  7. Aug 7

    The Levellers

    The Constitution England Wrote in 1647 — and Never Adopted In April of 1638 a twenty-three-year-old named John Lilburne was tied to the back of an ox cart and whipped two miles through London, then locked in a pillory at Westminster. He had been convicted of no crime. His offense was refusing to swear an oath that would have bound him to answer whatever the King’s court chose to ask him, including questions designed to draw a confession out of his own mouth. He told them no man was bound to accuse himself. Nine years later, he and the men around him were arguing that every government in England — court, Parliament, and crown alike — held its authority on nothing more and nothing less than the consent of the people who had to live under it. Episode 9 traces the Levellers, the print-and-petition network of London radicals and army agitators who took Sir Edward Coke’s defense of English liberty and moved its foundation out from under it. Coke had argued that English rights were safe because they were ancient. The Levellers argued something far more dangerous: that they were true. We follow the collapse of censorship that made the movement possible; the three men at its intellectual center — Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn — and the distinct edge each of them pressed; the Agreement of the People, which set down in one written instrument a government of granted and limited powers together with rights reserved above the ordinary legislature; and the argument at Putney between Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, who grounded a man’s right to a voice in the man himself, and Henry Ireton, who grounded it in a permanent fixed stake in the country. The episode is careful about what it claims. The Agreement was not the first written political covenant in the English-speaking world — Englishmen across the Atlantic had already been at this, at Plymouth in 1620 and in Connecticut in 1639. To call it the first written constitution, or to draw a clean line from its clauses to Philadelphia, would be to trade a defensible claim for an impressive one. What is defensible is impressive enough: ordinary Englishmen in the wreckage of a civil war reasoned their way to the form a free constitution would eventually take, and they wrote it down more than a century before that form became familiar. Nor does the episode flatter them. It takes up the real gap between the movement’s universal-sounding language and the bounded franchise it actually proposed, which excluded servants, alms-takers, and women — and it stays with the Leveller women who gathered signatures, carried a petition to the House of Commons, were told to go home and mind their housewifery, and came back in May with an answer. It meets three serious objections at full strength: that the Levellers lost completely and changed nothing, that the American line is thin and reconstructed after the fact, and that calling them democrats is anachronism. It ends where the movement ended. In the parish churchyard at Burford on the seventeenth of May, 1649, where three soldiers of the New Model Army were shot against a wall by the commanders they had followed to victory — and on the lead lining of the font inside, where a prisoner named Anthony Sedley scratched his name while he waited three days to learn whether he would be one of them. It is still there. You can go and read it. Episode 9 of 22 in Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, and the second episode of Arc III, English Liberty. Episode 8 established Coke and the argument from antiquity. Episode 9 is the turn toward nature, consent, and the equality of persons. The question we put to every episode: did this leave people more free, or more governed? ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 The Whipping of John Lilburn and the Star Chamber 04:00 Introduction: Episode 9 — The Levelers 05:11 The New Model Army and the Collapse of Censorship 08:40 Who Were the Levelers? 10:14 John Lilburn: "Freeborn John" and the Right Against Self-Incrimination 13:23 Richard Overton: Self-Ownership and Natural Rights 17:11 William Walwyn: Religious Toleration and Equality Before the Law 19:49 Unionizing an Army: Agitators and the Solemn Engagement 22:42 An Agreement of the People: Reserving Rights Above the Legislature 28:06 The Putney Debates: Rainsborough vs. Ireton on Voting Rights 33:51 The Franchise Gap: Excluded Classes and Leveler Women 40:19 Three Objections: Defeat, American Influence, and Democracy 47:49 The Burford Mutiny: The End of the Levelers 50:40 The Liberty Test: Does a Written Constitution Constrain or Protect? 52:56 Conclusion: The Shift to Natural Rights 55:45 Preview of Episode 10: Sidney and Locke 📚 Companion article: “The Levellers — The Lost Constitution,” Article 9 of Self-Evident. https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitution Key anchors: the Star Chamber sentence of 13 February 1638 and the whipping of 18 April; the Agreement of the People, October 1647; the Putney Debates, 28–29 October 1647; the Burford executions of 17 May 1649. Consequential Actions — Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, Episode 9: “The Levellers” #levellers #johnlilburne #putneydebates #agreementofthepeople #englishcivilwar #naturalrights #consentofthegoverned #selfownership #constitutionalhistory #selfevident This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

    The Levellers

  8. Aug 5

    Brian Peltier, Libertarian for PA House District 60: Open Fields, Defend the Guard, and Ballot Access

    His Opponent Ran Unopposed — So He Needed Double the Signatures A game warden walks onto a Pennsylvania farm. No warrant, no complaint, no reason given. For nineteen years, Pennsylvania’s own Supreme Court held that the Commonwealth’s constitution permitted exactly that. On July 21, 2026, that court reversed itself, and it did so unanimously. This week we have been tracing Sir Edward Coke and his insistence that the common law controls the crown. Today I sit down with a man asking Pennsylvania’s legislature to accept the same limit on itself. Brian Peltier is the Libertarian candidate for Pennsylvania’s 60th House District, covering Armstrong and Westmoreland counties. He spent 24 and a half years in the Navy, worked as a regulatory agent at Naval Reactors, and after twelve moves decided to stop moving and raise cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and turkeys outside Leechburg. His daughter serves in the Navy now. His campaign motto is Protect the Land, and that background matters this week, because Coke’s four grievances in the Petition of Right — taxation without consent, imprisonment without cause shown, soldiers quartered in private homes, and martial law over civilians — map almost exactly onto the four things Brian is running on. We open on Iran, where Brian’s naval background does work no historian can do for us. A blockade is an act of war, he argues, because a population starved of goods and supplies has no means left to act. We follow that from a closed strait to the price of fertilizer, to the price of hay, to what his neighbors will pay for groceries this fall. Then to war powers: the sixty-day clock, the ceasefire that resets it, and Defend the Guard, which withholds a state’s National Guard from federal overseas deployment absent a congressional declaration and which binds the governor, not the president. It is among the first bills he would push in Harrisburg. Then to the ground itself. Brian describes the open fields doctrine from the receiving end — what it is to farm land the Commonwealth has claimed the right to walk onto, and the hunter fined because his license was in his truck rather than his pocket. He wants the July ruling strengthened and broadened, because the cameras that worry him now stand not on tree trunks but on poles at the end of ordinary roads. And he gives the Liberty Test its answer before I can ask the question: he would rather be free than safe. Finally, the arithmetic of reaching a ballot in this Commonwealth. A major-party candidate for the Pennsylvania House needs 300 signatures. Because minor-party and political-body candidates must gather 2 percent of the largest vote cast in the district at the last election, and because the incumbent in District 60 ran unopposed in 2024 and therefore collected every vote cast, Brian’s threshold came to roughly 615 — more than double. The rule builds the next challenger’s wall out of the previous winner’s lack of competition. It does not measure support. It compounds incumbency. This conversation was recorded on July 27, ahead of Pennsylvania’s August 3 filing deadline. Brian filed his nomination papers before that deadline; certification was not complete at the time of recording. This is the Thursday interview closing Week 8 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — the fourth touchpoint of the week, following Sunday’s article, Saturday’s Episode 8, “The Common Law Will Control,” on Sir Edward Coke and the Stuart struggle, and Tuesday’s Episode 8B, “The Golden Metwand.” The article gives depth, the history gives roots, the application shows stakes. The interview puts a living face on all of it. Every episode of this series asks the same question of every consequential action: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed? This week Pennsylvania produced both answers. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction: The Game Warden and Warrantless Entry 01:18 Meet Brian Peltier: Candidate for PA District 60 03:22 Interview Begins: Brian’s Navy Background and Farm 07:06 Blockades as Acts of War and Supply Chain Impacts 09:16 How Global Conflicts Affect Local Farmers and Food Prices 11:51 The War Powers Act and the 60-Day Clock Loophole 14:43 Defend the Guard Legislation in Pennsylvania 18:27 The Open Fields Doctrine and the PA Supreme Court Reversal 21:16 Flock Cameras, Surveillance, and Privacy Concerns 25:00 The Unfair Hurdles of Ballot Access for Minor Parties 30:11 Brian’s Platform: Protecting the Land and Freeing Markets 31:37 The Apollo Nuclear Waste Issue (Shallow Land Disposal Area) 32:59 The Excessive Costs of a Part-Time Legislature 34:40 Property Taxes and Holding Government Projects Accountable 37:05 Where to Find and Support Brian’s Campaign 38:15 Post-Interview Reflection: The True Cost of Blockades 40:08 The Liberty Test: The Game Warden vs. Ballot Access Laws 42:38 Conclusion and Preview of Next Week: The Levellers Read the companion article, “The Common Law Will Control — Sir Edward Coke and the Stuart Struggle,” at consequentialactions.com. https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitutionKey anchors: Punxsutawney Hunting Club v. Pennsylvania Game Commission (Pa. 2026), decided 7–0 on July 21; Commonwealth v. Russo (Pa. 2007), overruled; Pennsylvania Constitution, Article I, Section 8; Coke’s Petition of Right (1628) and Case of Proclamations (1610); Pennsylvania Election Code, 25 P.S. § 2911(b), on nomination-paper signature thresholds. Learn more about Brian’s campaign at peltierforpa.com. Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 8I, Interview with Brian Peltier | Consequential Actions Podcast | Host: Jeff Kellick — X: https://x.com/jkellick #brianpeltier #libertarian #pennsylvania #openfields #ballotaccess #defendtheguard #pahouse #warpowers #district60 #selfevident This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

    Brian Peltier, Libertarian for PA House District 60: Open Fields, Defend the Guard, and Ballot Access
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Our overall goal is to help ourselves and the audience understand the rationale behind the actions of our collective past in order to learn from and address (effectively) the consequences of our present, and of our future. Help others understand what preceded us in various disciplines of study so that we will not waste our efforts reinventing what is already working, or by repeating and perpetuating our faults; but rather to refine the successes and correct the failures. We should learn from others, in their own words, to understand their motivations and determine their effectiveness over time. We live in a time of accountability and merit. Empathize with, and encourage, those who make mistakes and learn from them. Critique those who repeat the failures of the past, or aim to manipulate outcomes and obfuscate intentions. jeffkellick.substack.com

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