The Fall 2025 of TOS is Published!
by Craig Biddle
Welcome to the Fall 2025 issue of The Objective Standard, the rational alternative to regressivism and conservatism.
With this issue, Maddox Locher joins TOS as an assistant editor. Previously Maddox was editor of The Future Today at Objective Standard Institute (OSI), where he is now a fellow focusing on rational philosophy as the life-serving alternative to religion. He writes at Substack under his own name and, in the coming weeks, he will be posting videos on YouTube, including his excellent LevelUp 2025 talk, “How I Renounced Religion and Embraced a Life of Reason.” Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Maddox!
Now, to the contents of this 79th issue of TOS.
In “The Heartbreak and Heroism of Sammy Davis, Jr.,” Timothy Sandefur explores the challenges and successes of Davis’s turbulent yet ultimately admirable life. As Sandefur notes, Davis’s individualistic spirit shines through in his lyrics, “I’ll not be a space, a no one, a number, a face. No sir, not me. I am free.”
Hailing another hero, Daria Topchii (a junior fellow at OSI), shines a light on Ignacy Ścibor-Marchocki in “One Landowner's Quiet Revolution in an Age of Serfdom.” A feudal landowner from the Podilla region of what is today Ukraine, Ścibor-Marchocki sought to create a rights-respecting, constitutional government on his lands.
Next up, in “Celebrating the Real Progressives,” Thomas Walker-Werth highlights several individuals who truly advocate and advance human progress, such as Peter Diamandis, Johan Norberg, and Robert Zubrin. The values these men embody and promote stand in stark contrast to the regressive ideas of the so-called “progressives” in today’s political discourse.
In “The False Narrative Behind Trump’s Trade Restrictions,” Michael Dahlen examines the Trump administration’s efforts to convince the world that trade restrictions are good for America, and finds them, well, ridiculous. For anyone still holding onto the notion that Trump is an advocate of liberty, this article should dispel it.
Of course, Trumpian conservatives have no monopoly on false narratives. Harrison Griffiths (a graduate of OSI’s junior fellows program) reviews Progressive Myths by Michael Heumer, which dismantles much of the “evidence” offered by today’s so-called “progressives” in support of their claims about “systemic racism,” “group identity,” economic inequality, and more.
Next, Thomas Walker-Werth interviews William Hagerup, co-founder of London’s Agora Debating Club and author of In Good Faith, a fictionalized autobiographical story about leaving the church to find one’s true identity. As Hagerup says, to fit into a religion you “have to deny yourself for the sake of the ideology you believe in”—something he decided he was no longer willing to do.
In that same vein, we are delighted to republish an excerpt from the great Elihu Palmer’s little-known work Principles of Nature. Palmer, a former Calvinist priest who threw off his religious shackles and overcame crippling blindness to become one of post-revolutionary America’s most outspoken advocates of free thought and liberty, sought to give “moral principle a basis as durable as time, and as immortal as the specific succession of human existence; and to render the sentiment of virtue, as far as possible, independent of all the theological reveries of antiquity.” Enjoy!
In “Fiction as Soul-Fuel: Why Stories Move Us,” Angelica Walker-Werth explores the ways in which novels and characters concretize principles in practice, demonstrate virtue and vice, and inspire us to live our best possible lives.
Next, in “V: An Outstanding Work of Dystopian Television,” Thomas Walker-Werth travels back to 1983 to review the classic sci-fi miniseries. Highlighting the show’s many allusions to Nazi Germany and its systems of control, Walker-Werth gives us just enough to pique our curiosity without revealing any dramatic twists.
Finally, the issue rounds out with nine poems on the heroism of industry, including works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane.
That’s it for this issue. I hope you enjoy the articles and reviews. If so, be sure to recommend and share them with friends—especially on Substack. And, if you have a Substack publication of your own, please recommend The Objective Standard on your homepage.
Keep loving life!
Craig Biddle
Editor in Chief
PS: If you’ve not yet subscribed to the journal for people of reason, or if you’d like to help us reach more minds, head over to TheObjectiveStandard.com and sign up. Or, better yet, become a Standard Bearer. When more people think clearly, our world is a better place to live.