We just received a grant from one of our donors to host what just might prove to be the finest and most important conference in the 25-year history of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
We are doing the conference in partnership with the Young Americans for Liberty, a nationally renowned group devoted to libertarianism. We have worked with YAL in the past on our college tours.
The theme of the conference is: “Stop the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism.” Given that these two wars are the two most destructive forces against the liberty, peace, and prosperity of the American people in our time, we decided to combine them into one conference to show people why it is so critically important that we bring both of these wars to an end.
This one-day conference will be held at Columbia University on Saturday, October 18.
Speakers will alternate with talks on the drug war and on the war on terrorism. After all the talks, there will be a big Q&A panel consisting of all the speakers and covering both issues.
Here is our speaker line-up:
1. Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden to reveal the massive surveillance scheme that the NSA has secretly imposed on the American people and others around the world and who is the author of the gripping new book Nowhere to Hide, which details Greenwald’s experiences with Snowden.
2. Eugene Jarecki, Emmy-award winning Hollywood producer, and producer of the film documentaries The House I Live In, which is on the drug war, and Why We Fight, which is about the national-security state, and author of The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril.
3. Jeremy Scahill, author of the book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield and producer of the film Dirty Wars, which garnered an Academy Award nomination last year for Best Documentary, and national-security correspondent for The Nation magazine.
4. Radley Balko, opinion blogger at the Washington Post and author of The Rise of the Warrior Cop and Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Raids in America and whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Playboy, Time, and Los Angeles Times.
5. Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, who is ranked among the nation’s top 500 lawyers and whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
6. Hina Shamsi, director of the national-security project at the American Civil Liberties Union, law professor at Columbia University, and former senior advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions at New York University School of Law.
7. Matt Welch, editor in chief of Reason magazine, former editorial page editor for the Los Angeles Times, and co-host of Fox Business Network’s The Independents.
8. Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the leading organizations in the country working to end the war on drugs, and author of Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement and Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in Internationals Relations.
The conference will be open to both students and non-students. Please help us spread the word. If you know people in the New York area and elsewhere, please let them know about the conference.
We will have a registration form on our website within the next few days.
Ideas have consequences. They can move the world. The war on drugs and the war on terrorism are destroying our country, our freedom, our peace, and our prosperity. We need to end them now, before they do any more damage to our society.
Why should you attend this conference? In the wise words of John Henry Cardinal Newman, “The general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already.”
Admission price to the conference: FREE.