Young Americans today are coming of age in a world that can seem to be careening into the future. Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how we relate to technology and to one another. Socialism, communism, and radical Islamism are on the march, while loud voices — and at times violence — at home and around the world are testing young people's understanding of and confidence in our foundational principles of freedom, opportunity, and constitutional government. And on many college campuses, the case for liberty is seldom made and conservative ideas are simply unwelcome.

For the generation that will carry the principles of freedom well into the second half of the 21st century, the challenges are real and the stakes are high.

Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom has dedicated this chapter of his career to preparing that rising generation. Governor Scott Walker is President of Young America's Foundation and served as the 45th Governor of Wisconsin from 2011 to 2019, leading the state through some of the most significant reforms in modern state government. Since 2021, he has led YAF's work with students at the Reagan Ranch, the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home, and regional sites across the nation. YAF hosts more conservative campus lectures than any other organization and reaches millions more through its digital presence. Governor Walker also recently joined the board of the Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund affiliated with The Bradley Foundation.

Topics Discussed on this Episode:

• Governor Walker's early years as a pastor's son in Delavan and meeting President Reagan at Boys Nation

• What Act 10 has accomplished for Wisconsin and why it needs to remain in place

• Why he moved from elected office to leading Young America's Foundation

• Why President Reagan's ideas still resonate with students born decades after his presidency

• What conservative students face on campus today and what it takes to prepare them amid AI and competing ideologies

• His new role on the board of the Bradley Impact Fund

• What America's 250th anniversary and Wisconsin's nearly 180 years of statehood mean for the future — and what gives him hope

College should be a place where young people wrestle with big ideas and discover who they are. Yet for many conservative women, campus can feel so isolating that they just decide to keep their views to themselves before they even arrive.

In the fall of 2004, a University of Virginia student returned from an internship in Washington, DC, looking for a place where college women could talk about public policy, including conservative ideas. When she asked the campus Women's Center to co-sponsor a group for conservative women, she was essentially laughed at and told, "not here." So she started a book club. Within a year, women on other campuses wanted chapters of their own. Today, the Network of enlightened Women is on more than 40 college campuses, with professional and alumnae chapters that carry its mission beyond graduation: to educate, equip, and empower women to be principled leaders for a free society.

That student is our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Karin Lips is the Founder and President of NeW. A graduate of the University of Virginia and its School of Law, she practiced law at Wiley Rein and was a Resident Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. She is the author of You're Not Alone: The Conservative Woman's Guide to College and editor of She's Conservative: Stories of Trials and Triumphs on America's College Campuses.

Topics Discussed on this Episode:

• How a rejected request at UVA sparked a book club that grew into a national network

• What NeW's mission to educate, equip, and empower looks like in practice

• How conservative women on campus are finding their voice

• What Karin is seeing in higher education today — and what university leaders should do differently

• What gives Karin hope about the next generation of young women

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is a moment to reflect not only on the founding of the United States, but on the much longer story that made the founding possible. The American experiment did not begin in 1776. Rather, the Founders drew on ideas about law, liberty, faith, and human dignity that reach back centuries, if not millennia.

Our guests on this episode of Voices of Freedom have spent their careers tracing that story. James Hankins and Allen Guelzo met as boys, and they have been talking about the Western tradition ever since. Those conversations — and their decades of scholarly work spanning the full arc of the Western experience — have now produced The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, a two-volume history published by Encounter Books that runs more than two thousand pages, with hundreds of maps, works of art, and primary sources set alongside the narrative.

James Hankins wrote Volume I, which begins with the ancient Greeks and continues through Rome, Christendom, and the Renaissance. He is Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, taught at Harvard for forty years, and is the founding editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library and the author of the prize-winning Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. Jim is a 2026 Bradley Prize recipient.

Allen Guelzo wrote Volume II, which picks up in 1500 and follows the West through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of revolutions, and into our own century. Also a Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School, he is one of the country's leading historians of Lincoln and the Civil War, a three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, and the author of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion and Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment. Allen is a 2018 Bradley Prize recipient.

Topics Discussed on this Episode:

• How a boyhood friendship grew into a two-volume history of the Western tradition

• Where the golden thread first emerges in the ancient world, how it carries forward through the Renaissance and into the modern age — and where it came closest to breaking

• America's place in the arc of Western civilization as the country marks 250 years

• The character a free society requires, and whether it can still be taught

• What gives Jim and Allen hope that the Western inheritance will be carried forward by the next generation of students and readers