Professor of History, Hillsdale College
Bradley J. Birzer is Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and Professor of History, Hillsdale College. Co-founder and senior contributor of The Imaginative Conservative, he is also the author of several critically-acclaimed biographies, including those of Russell Kirk, Christopher Dawson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton. He is also proudly a member of Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom. Birzer and his wife, Dedra (also a professional historian), have seven children and divide their time between Michigan and South Dakota.
President, Free the People
Matt Kibbe is Co-founder and President at Free the People, an educational foundation which uses cutting-edge technology, video production and storytelling in order to turn on the next generation — “the liberty curious” to the values of liberty and cooperation. Kibbe functions as the team’s Yoda, ensuring that issues and projects don’t succumb to the dark side. He is an Executive Producer at BlazeTV where he produces the Kibbe on Liberty podcast, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, and Co-Founder and Partner at Fight the Power Productions, a strategic communications firm focused on video production, social media branding, and compelling storytelling.
In 2015 he served as Senior Advisor to a Rand Paul SuperPAC, and in 2016, created AlternativePAC to support liberty candidates. In 2004 Kibbe founded FreedomWorks, where he served as President and CEO for 11 years. Steve Forbes said, “Kibbe has been to FreedomWorks what Steve Jobs was to Apple.” Previously, Kibbe worked as a Chief of Staff on Capitol Hill, as Budget Director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Senior Economist at the Republican National Committee. Dubbed “The Scribe” by the New York Daily News, Kibbe is the author of three books, most recently of the #2 New York Times bestseller Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto.
Senior Attorney, DC, Pacific Legal Foundation
Steve Simpson joined PLF in 2019 to head up its Separation of Powers practice group.
Steve’s career in public interest law started at the Institute for Justice in 2001, where he litigated free speech, campaign finance, and economic liberty cases. Among other high-profile cases in which Steve was involved, he was co-counsel in Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, IJ’s successful Supreme Court challenge to Arizona’s public financing law for political campaigns. He was the lead litigator in SpeechNow.org v. FEC, a joint effort between IJ and the Institute for Free Speech that led to the creation of super PACs. And he was co-counsel in Swedenburg v. Kelly, IJ’s successful Supreme Court challenge to New York’s ban on the interstate shipping of wine.
In 2013, Steve moved into the policy arena as the Ayn Rand Institute’s director of Legal Studies, where he spent five years writing and speaking on a wide variety of legal and cultural issues. From there, he moved back into law as senior litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance in Washington, D.C.
Steve has spoken and written on a wide variety of legal and policy issues. He has testified in Congress and briefed congressional staffers. He has been interviewed on scores of television and radio programs, including PBS News Hour, Stossel, and The Rubin Report. His writings have appeared in many publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. In 2014, Steve was a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is the editor of Defending Free Speech (ARI Press, 2016).
Steve earned his law degree magna cum laude from New York Law School in 1994. Following law school, he clerked for a federal district judge in the Southern District of Florida and spent several years as a litigator at Shearman & Sterling.
When he’s not at work or spending time with his wife and three daughters, Steve can usually be found mucking around in the woods at his cabin on Shenandoah Mountain.
FS-2112
Brad Birzer, Matt Kibbe, Steve Simpson
Northwestern Law Student Chapter
The Federalist Society's Student Division &The Northwestern Law Student Chapter Present You Don't Get Freedom...