Bill Collier

Predictable. That is what most other content providers are giving you. The ones to the right and the ones to the left all sound similar, most use the AP stylebook, which literally dictates what kind of words apply to different scenarios or rules about headlines.

(*As a brief aside, yes, we continue to use the Oxford Comma. Not using it makes no sense.)

If you have a true north pointed at freedom and prosperity for all, to some degree your content should be predictable, based in principle. But the predictability of most content today is more tribal: the right will rally around and defend anything they think is in their tribe, and so will the left. Likewise, everything associated with the other tribe is always bad. That’s not principled, that’s a shallow tribalism that shouldn’t inform a respectable digital publication.

The Freedomist aspires to many things, which we hope to get better and better at. But when someone recently asked me what the value proposition of the Freedomist was right now, I said, “originality” and, at the same time, “consistency.”

The engaged audience for the Freedomist will find content that is true and inspiring that doesn’t even sound like everyone else’s content. We have a different style, in some ways more old-fashioned and in many others very future-looking. We tend to believe in the art of wordsmithing and the science of accurate reporting.

This content should show you new perspectives, and yet remain consistent with our core focus on freedom and prosperity for all, it should be original and unique, it should be inspirational and entertaining, and it should also give you concrete ideas you can use to become more free and prosperous yourself.

Our perspective is that individuals, marriages, families, extended families, communities of trust, and local communities are all the prime mover of human civilization. Mega corporations and the state are not, or, should not, be so powerful as to drown out these human scale structures which nurture us within warm and accepting relationships.

If we come off as conservative or to the right, it may be the tribalism of the left, which pigeonholes everything not of them, and not state-centered, as “to the right.” But in truth, the Freedomist, like you perhaps, doesn’t neatly fit into any of these molds. Our concern for issues of actual bigotry, intolerance, and injustice may not so easily fit the “right wing” epithet the left-authoritarians like to toss around so carelessly.

Who am I as the Publisher of The Freedomist and owner of both Regal Blue Media and Freedomist LLC’s? The short answer is I have been an intelligence analyst, newsmaker, newspaper publisher, marketing and PR professional and provider, activist organizer, minister, and author, among other roles. My unique perspective and experience, spanning 30 years, has given me an immersive and intimate knowledge and understanding of how things really are and my deep Christian faith and philosophical foundations has given direction to that experience.

I have moved millions to vote this way or that, broke major news and exposed corrupt leaders, and sat with some of the most influential people in modern history. My vision for the future is one based on a firm desire and commitment to extend freedom and prosperity to all people. Whether this is by influencing policy or through just showing people better ways to increase wealth or make themselves more free, the idea is to do all I can, where I can, when I can.

Below: what others said about me and the coauthor of “The Capitalist Manifesto.”

Our model is subscription based. Our aim in this is to cut out any need to resort to mega corporate backing or to seek major donors or backers in exchange for loss of control. But beyond this, we hope, through such subscriber-based crowfunding to build a nationwide digital network of Freedomists who will work to find ways to advocate for and build freedom and prosperity in their own lives.

I have personally, and my brother Paul has also, been laboring to improve and develop the Freedomist product and brand since 2007. We remain essentially the same but more mature and wise, we hope you will agree. In all our interations and evolutions, we have always come back to the center, which is to advocate for and promote freedom and prosperity for all.

For most of this time, the Freedomist has been self-funded through other business endeavors. But it is my desire to make it financially self-sustaining so we can focus more on content development and features development.

In the end YOU DECIDE if this content is worth at least $5.99/month or not. We think it is and we hope it is, but only you can say it is and decide to back our broader freedom-building efforts while getting interesting, original content that motivates, educates, and inspires.

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The decentralization of digtial platforms into an interconnected network of diverse niche communities with deep immersive experiences is web 3.0 and it is coming, whether the technocracy likes it or not.

This is not about the fears of tech censorship or tech bias, this is about the emergence of smarter, more robust technologies and the natural human desire to cluster around and with people who they easily identify with. The natural tendency for people is to want to cluster with people who share something of deep value, be it a belief system, values, lifestyle, interests, skills, or really anything that touches you at the level of identify.

What does this mean, “touches you at the level of identity?” Basically, it’s something so special to you, it is felt and often expressed as if it is part of your identity. I may say, “I am a military collector”, which is different than saying, “I have some military items in a collection.”

In web 2.0 we saw the emergence of meta platforms predicated on the cocnept of an open internet and free speech. While some clustering occurred, basically, they were wide open spaces where almost anything was allowed. Then came web 2.5, almost in some ways a seeming devolution, but in reality a precursor to web 3.0.

In web 2.5 the people paying the bills, the big money people of the corporate world, started worrying about brand friendliness. Also, policy-makers worried about content that was hateful or false and some worried more about decency. Users were overwhelmed with things they didn’t necessarily like or want to even see at all.

What were essentially wild west platforms that focused on attracting everyone of every interest on a more shallow relational basis now found themselves having to engage in much tighter governance. You see, the more you try to control or limit content, the more standards and fact-checking you create, the more difficult and expensive it is to run these platforms.

Good governance requires more than spitting out standards and fact-checking norms. It requires human-powered governance, as in actual people providing governance. But the response to bottom-line conscious platforms is to use algorithms and robots to replace humans, and of any group of people gang-report content, even of that content isn’t what they say it is, a seeming arbitrary suspension or ban takes place.

Governance is way beyond “moderation”, it is guidance and support to participants, treating them like adults and with dignity, and giving them support, not just deciding whether to ban them! Web 3.0 governance will be much more transparent and participatory than anything we have seen before.

We propose that people don’t want to be enmeshed into a virtual community or platform that has content or characters they find disagreeable. The public demand for free speech platforms may not be what some think it is. Nobody has done a study to see what exactly people like, but what we can see is that free speech platforms, while they have an audience, are not capturing any major market share.

This doesn’t mean free speech platforms aren’t desired by enough people to potentially make them viable. They can be viable, but they cannot be the predominant virtual community.

We don’t have a market research study showing exactly what kind of online environment people will tend most to favor. But we all know the human tendency to form cliques and to cluster with people of some like identity and affection. People tend to look more for affirmation than for things that challenge their beliefs, for instance.

The problems with both the meta platforms that started as one thing and are trying to become another and with the free speech alternatives may come down to the issues of governance, it being expensive, brand safety, because as free platforms they need mega sponsors, and this tendency humans to essentially seek affirmation and support from people they identify with.

On one hand, people want to cluster with people they identify with. On the other hand, they want to connect with people more broadly and to express themselves to the world at large. That being said, many just want to be entertained and to have affirmation in the process, they don’t really want or need broader connections online.

Web 3.0 has to both provide these more niche communities people can participate in, and, we predict, they will desire a more immersive experience with participants engaged in all aspects of the community, from content curation to governance. The wall between administration, governance, and participants (as opposed to “users”) will become more blurred: participants will become stakeholders.

While these niche communities will be necessary, it will also be necessary for tomorrow’s netizens to have a way to gather content and data from multiple places in one dashboard and to be able to push content through that dashboard to multiple niche communities or to free speech communities.

Common standards for connecting these communities through API hooks or many other means will emerge and various providers may supply dashboards for people to connect to all these niche communities.

We also foresee that the era of mostly free platforms paid for mostly by mega corporate sponsors will give way to a mostly paid subscription model as participants, again, instead of just users, take control of their data and advertisers focus more on placing their content in PLACES likely visited by their demographic than through serving content across all the virtual spaces to specifically targeted individuals.

The issue of advertising online in the future is a bit off subject, but is somewhat related. Advertising isn’t going away, but the halcyon days where anyone without real advertising smarts could use intimate user data to easily send their content to exactly the right person may be over. The old tried and true methods of scientific advertising targeted to places where your demographic are likely to be found will rule again. The lazy marketer who only knows how to use computer-assisted audience selection will struggle.

Who knows if this sudden stripping of access to that kind of user data will continue. The pressure by the corporate advertisers may be immense, unless they find the new environment actually makes it harder for smaller advertising and would-be competitors to engage.

We envision web 3.0 will be dominated by a decentralized web of mostly niche communities but a few major providers of something like a dashboard that allows people to connect to multiple spaces more conveniently. We foresee these communities will be more immersive and participatory and the line between administrators, governance staff, and participants will be more blurred.

The Second Amendment debate is wrapped around the axles a reinterpretative legalism and history revisionism, with both sides claiming absolutely that the framers of the Bill of Rights meant precisely what they mean. Getting lost in this word salad thicket of contradiction and wishful thinking sidesteps the deeper truth, a truth which is more sublime than the Second Amendment and which questions the entire basis of the Westphalian order of the nation-state as the prime mover in human civilization.

Let us assume we must craft a legal standard akin to the Bill of Rights which is considered so inviolate that even attempting to pass a law or policy against its standard of justice is considered at least a misdemeanor worthy of permanent disqualification from holding public office or even holding the voting franchise.

To what authority or standards of reason, logic, or justice do we appeal? Ultimately, we are forced to make a priori assumptions amenable to most everyone. As even the Declaration of Independence says, “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men (*they meant all HUMANS) are created equal” and that they are endowed by their Creator (whether you calls that Creator God or natural evolution) with certain “inalienable rights”, among which “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

This is all a priori assumption. Our 21st century declaration of independence might begin thus:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that in advancing the cause of a free and pluralistic society, which is our natural human state as ordered by the Universe, all human beings are created and deemed by law and custom to be equal in value, worth, dignity, and right and that they are inherently endowed with inalienable rights including life, liberty, self-determination, self-preservation, self-expression, and freewill participation through mutual agreement along with the inherent sovereign power to protect their sacred rights, persons, and property from hazards and harms, official or unofficial, foreign or domestic.”

We would further add that each individual elector owns a right to freely participate in the powers of petition, election, initiative, redress, and recall and to have and form their own families, extended families, free associations, communities of trust within a fraternal bond, and national communities as autompmous sociocultural and socioeconomic core constituent entities within our diverse and pluralistic commonwealth.

Again, these are a priori assumptions one either believes or does not believe. But the problem here is that if one believes these assumptions are true then believing thus does no harm to those who disagree, unless the freedom of others grieves them, while those who disagree and wish to deny such freedom must necessarily coerce the Freedomist into compliance.

The Freedomist imagines a world of diverse sociocultural and socioeconomic structures and communities, expressing nationhood in diverse ways but within a common standard of a sort of meta-nationhood based on a Freedomist standard of justice and peace. The anti-freedomist sees a world of much more narrow restrictions because they don’t really trust the freewill choices of others. They can easily disregard these so-called rights, except perhaps in a most narrow, restrictive interpretation.

President Biden’s assault on the Second Amendment, while also factually wrong in its claims gun control and restrictions on weapons were present “from the beginning”, is a radical anti-freedomist. His interpretation and understanding of the Second Amendment makes a hash of the basic right to self-preservation.

The Bidens of this world have a normative view of society: they imagine something in theory and assume they can use the law and public policy to make it so. Freedomists tend toward a more descriptive view of society based on nature, human nature, and the laws of cause and effect and then seek policies that contribute the most to the individual and common good and that reflect this framework of reality.

The right to self-preservation is an a priori assumption. You either think each person and then their primary communities of trust is the prime mover of human civilization therefore owns a right to self-preservation or you do not.

But were we to assume that this right exists and were we not using the legalism of the Second Amendment debate to frame it, but only our a priori assumption, what would our concept of an inherent right to self-preservation look like?

We will make the assumption, which seems logical and fits with human nature as it is, that as self-preservation cannot solely be achieved as a lone individual against any save a few other people, it stands to reason this right is, uniquely among any others, a corporate/collective right that is shared among a body of people. Again, it no more matters to us the ideological or legalistic intent of the framers of the Bill of Rights than it mattered to them how the framers of the English Constitution intended their (unwritten) provisions.

We often say we defend liberty as defined by the original spirit and intent of the US Bill of Rights, and as to the Second Amendment, the spirit and intent is deeper than the legalistic interpretation according to the Courts.

We claim that the right to self-preservation is in fact an inherent right owned by the electors in any given commomwealth and this right applies to the individual, their primary community of trust, and the other constituent entities of the commonwealth. Moreover, we claim, regardless of the legal reading and interpretation, that this understanding is far more consistent with the original spirit and intent of than the way Biden interprets it.

The practice of this right can occur at the individual level, but, we propose, as it is also a shared right, its implementation necessarily differs based on the scale of its practice. Basically this means how one practices this right, even what weapons one may access or prerequisite for their use, might differ. Those who argue whether this is alone an individual right or a alone a collective right, miss the spirit and intent of the right to self-preservation, which is all of these things at once.

The inherent right to self-preservation also runs up against a novel of the Westphalian nation-state concept. This novelty is predicated on the notions that the state is the prime mover in human civilization, that nationhood is best expressed and preserved in the form of a national state, and, therefore, that this state is the primary bearer of arms and owns a monopoly of force beyond the limited individual right to self-preservation.

The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 set this course and never has the idealistic promise of an international order of such nation-states been achieved. To be sure, if all national peoples who were large enough to be able to sustain themselves, and if different smaller nations of people formed confederal unions for mutual support, we might have a world of over 1000 nation-states or national comfederal unions, and that might be ideal.

But in the 21st century we have multiple ways to express sovereignty and to form sociocultural and socioeconomic bonds with people from around the world. The very scope of nationhood and sovereignty goes well beyond the old limits of geography, ancestry, distance we can travel, and ease with which larger associations can be formed.

We often call ourselves “nationists” instead of “nationalists”, because our concept and practices of nationhood transcend this 17th century civilizational paradigm, the Westphalian nation-state. A nationist believes every national people have a right to self-preservation and includes within the scope of alternative forms of sovereignty, such an enhanced NGO, fraternal benefit societies, domestic fraternal nations, and tribal entities, among other structures.

The idea that the “state” has a “monopoly of force” is inconsistent with either an individual or a shared right to self-preservation. While it is understandable that the scope of the means of self-preservation may vary between individuals, local communities, free associations, and the state and its subdivisions, in general, we hold that the right to self-preservation is inviolate.

We will not delve too far into our conception of this distributed magisterial and imperial mandate, which basically means that the state cannot ever be considered to hold a monopoly in such matters, beyond saying, for instance, a “tribal” structure like a society would not have nuclear missiles, but it (along with community constabulary companies) would likely have anything equivalent to a light infantry regiment, and an individual may have more limitations still, especially if they are not part of a local constabulary company.

Again, setting aside the argument as to the legal definition and meaning of the Second Amendment, which we see as an individual AND a shared right, we see the right to self-preservation as something that includes a responsibility. In essence, access to certain means of self-preservation may require some form of participation in local or other forms of mutual self-preservation, e.g. a local constabulary company (like the militia of colonial America but not like the private militia groups of our day).

We then move on to a ticklish issue: who has a right to keep and bear arms? In general, again, setting aside the present legal structures and laws, we tend to see a separation between mere citizenship and electorship. Electors are stakeholders who earn their status through merit alone, everyone is free to become an elector regardless of race or gender, so long as they adhere to and uphold the country’s charter and something like the Bill of Rights.

The ability to determine who meets this requirement is critical to the preservation of a country and its constituent nations of people. The abuse of this concept, for the purpose of preventing blacks in the south to vote, is morally repugnant. But this racism is most definitely NOT part of this idea: electorship should be earned, not assumed by birth or residency, and it should both be open to all and access to the means of gaining qualifications for electorship should be freely available to all without cost.

The concept of electorship is not part of the present American system and nor will that ever likely change. But the concept of electorship informs our view of self-preservation. The state does not own a monopoly on force, we strongly oppose that archaic notion! But the body of people, in the form of their diverse national societies (societies based on a nationality) and local communities, as well as the state and its constituent entities, as stakeholders, do own a monopoly on force.

In practical terms this means that while citizens own a right to self-preservation at a basic level, they do not have the same level of access to the means of self-preservation as the electors and their corporate bodies or the state.

Again, we are talking theory here, not prescribing policies or laws for America. What we are saying is that the right to self-preservation transcends the Bill of Rights and is both individual and corporate and includes, we think, the right for local communities in an egalitarian constabulary and of private societies based on shared nationhood, to share the monopoly of force with the state.

The workarounds for this may be forming local community policing initiatives which transform the hired police into a mostly voluntary constabulary force, the use of private security cooperatives, efforts to lobbh states to create local state-funded civil defense groups, and a robust defense of the Second Amendment.

As to this concept of electorship, it seems a good idea this country will never adopt, but it does explain our stance on self-preservation as an individual and shared right that comes with responsibilities.

As with most Freedomist ideas, our approach here is mostly on things we can do within existing frameworks to actualize our ideas and convictions. Private efforts like outdoors, hunting, and fishing clubs and security cooperatives coupled with promoting Freedom Sanctuaries and reforming local policing (community policing through a citizen’s constabulary) do not require a change in federal laws or the Constitution can fulfill in spirit this concept of self-preservation.