In defense of liberty—it’s a lofty-sounding ideal. But truly defending liberty—safeguarding the precious ideals that have lifted millions of Americans out of poverty and into prosperity, freeing them to live their American Dream—takes work. At the Goldwater Institute’s Annual Dinner on Friday in Phoenix, hundreds of our supporters and friends celebrated our successful work to defend liberty and looked forward to how we’ll continue expanding freedom around the nation in the year to come.
Defending liberty means speaking out and fighting back when the forces of statism seek to destroy the principles of justice and equality under the law that we hold dear. That was a prominent theme highlighted by the event’s keynote speaker, media personality and political commentator Glenn Beck, one of the nation’s staunchest defenders of the Constitution.
Other featured speakers included Nicole Neily, founder and president of Parents Defending Education, and former California public school teacher Kali Fontanilla, winner of the Goldwater Institute’s 2022 Freedom Award. Kali bravely blew the whistle when she discovered her public school was indoctrinating children with the lies of Critical Race Theory, and she continued to show incredible courage even when she was harassed, demeaned, and threatened for speaking out—serving as a shining example of what it means to defend liberty.
You can read more about the Goldwater Institute’s Annual Dinner here.
Shootings. Stabbings. Rapes. Lives and livelihoods destroyed right in the middle of downtown Phoenix, in a vast homeless encampment called ”The Zone.” City officials are just making the situation worse—so the Goldwater Institute is demanding the government enforce the law.
For months, city leaders have been shunting homeless people into The Zone, and police have reportedly been ordered to take no action to protect innocent property and business owners. It’s not just the crime—it’s the pollution, too, with vagrants urinating and defecating in the streets and on private property, causing dangerous biohazards within easy walking distance of the Salt River. And Phoenix officials are blatantly violating state law, which forbids the city from “maintaining” any “activity” that can pollute public waterways.
That’s why the Goldwater Institute filed a brief this week urging the court to block the city from maintaining The Zone or from restricting police services to the business owners affected by it. “Hardworking Phoenicians should be able to rely on the public services their tax dollars pay for—and their elected officials owe them a duty to enforce the laws,” Goldwater Institute Vice President for Legal Affairs Timothy Sandefur writes at In Defense of Liberty.
Read more at In Defense of Liberty.
The news is echoing across America after teachers unions’ scheme to seize choice from parents officially evaporated in a blowout. “Now, America can look to Arizona’s first-in-the-nation model of a groundbreaking, statewide expansion of school choice to any family that wants it,” Goldwater Institute Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg writes in the Arizona Capitol Times.
History has already shown the nation that the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, which the Goldwater Institute created more than a decade ago and expanded earlier this year, has been hugely successful in transforming the lives of students and their families, particularly those living in the most severely disadvantaged communities in Arizona. Now, it can transform even more lives. “Arizona’s universal ESA program is a triumph for every student in the state,” Beienburg told Fox News. “With its passage, Arizona has fundamentally shifted the balance of power in K-12 education away from politically radical teachers unions and put it back in the hands of parents and their children.”
As Beienburg adds in the Capitol Times: “Special interests tried to snatch educational opportunities right out of parents’ hands. But families rejected their propaganda, and they gave America a blueprint for how to take charge of their children’s education.”
Read more at the Arizona Capitol Times.
