Nobody Said Freedom Was Popular

Hannah Cox
7 min readMay 23, 2020

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When it comes to college football, I’ve always been on the winning side of history thanks to a lucky geographical birth in Alabama, and parents who had the good sense to pick the right program to support in the state. My mom, who moved all over the country as a child until her parents finally planted outside of Birmingham, often recounts the story of how she came to be an Alabama fan — thus sealing our fate.

She had just moved to the little factory town of Anniston and boarded the school bus one morning alongside her two sisters. As is normally the case in small towns with new members, the girls were peppered with questions — not least of which included what college football team they were going to support. Thoroughly confused as to why a program must be decided upon, my mother asked the other children to name the attributes of both Alabama and Auburn, and quickly decided to go with the former.

Like most people, I inherited my family’s football allegiances, and also like most people, I inherited their political views for some time. But unlike Alabama, whose upstanding moral character and grit have never made me waiver in my support, my political beliefs started coming apart at the seams a number of years ago.

This wasn’t a bad thing. Rather, it forced me to do something the vast majority of our population never does — figure out what I actually believed, why I believed it, and how to define it without being told what to think by politicians or parties. I actually didn’t stray far, but I realized the GOP had.

I was raised to believe in a limited government based on the knowledge that power corrupts and that central plans often wreak more havoc than they purport to fix. That hasn’t changed. I was raised to believe in fiscal conservatism — that leaders should be good stewards of our tax dollars, minimally collect them, and ensure the programs they fund actually work to produce the desired outcomes. That also didn’t change. And I was raised to believe in individual liberty, which I still adamantly think is the bedrock of our society. We have natural rights that exist apart from anything we do, or do not do. Government’s primary function should be to guard these natural rights, and little else.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I came to really understand capitalism…

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Hannah Cox

Hannah Cox is a conservative writer and political activist. Her work revolves around the defense of free markets, individual liberty, and limited government.