If you’re tired of news and analysis from a progressive standpoint but committed to the traditional left-wing concerns of civil rights, environmentalism, feminism, secularism, and working class politics, then Freedom and Reason is your spot for analysis of news, politics, and science.

Freedom and Reason is a left-libertarian dive into the issues of the day and the historical paths that led us to this point. The methodology pursued here is not what those claiming to be on the political and cultural left are offering you. On Freedom and Reason, critical race theory, postmodernism, and all the rest of it are the targets of critique, not the elements of it.

I hold a PhD in sociology from the large public university with expertise in law and society and political economy. I’m on the faculty of a a public university. In my academic work, I research and teach on, among other things, crime and justice, political economy, political sociology, race and ethnicity, and the sociology of religion. In other work, I am a musician and songwriter.

I started Freedom and Reason in 2006 because I came to believe that it was important to make my ideas available to audiences beyond academic outlets and the classrooms. It was originally launched on Blogger (a Google product) but due to frustration with that platform and sporadic activity due to my duties as chair of my department, which at the time involved a bottom up revision of the program, program review, and rebuilding the faculty, I decided to move my blogging to WordPress. I was spurred to regularly blog again after witnessing the results of the migrant crisis in Sweden in 2018. The move from Blogger has meant rebuilding my audience, and a lot of work migrating the best of my previous work there to WordPress (work that is still in progress) but, so far, it has been worth it.

You may use the table of contents on the lefthand side to navigate to a post that interests you. I moderate comments, so if you wish to communicate with me but don’t want your comment to publicly appear be sure to let me know in the comment and I will not publish it. I appreciate comments! Subscribe to my blog and, if you do, like the content! Share with others! This will help me reach more people with my takes on authoritarianism, censorship, class, crime, culture, economics, media and propaganda, politics, race, and religion. Thank you for taking the time to check out my blog!