Upcoming Lecture:
Michael Knowles
Date: March 2026
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Location: TBD, Grove City College
RSVP required.
Michael Knowles is the celebrated host of The Michael Knowles Show at the Daily Wire and The Book Club at PragerU. In 2017, Michael published the #1 national bestselling treatise Reasons to Vote for Democrats, which President Donald Trump hailed as “a great book for your reading enjoyment.” The book has since been translated into Magyar and is available in bookstores throughout Hungary. In 2021, Michael published his first book with words, Speechless, which also reached #1 on the national bestseller chart.
In early 2020, Michael teamed up with Senator Ted Cruz to launch Verdict, which quickly rose to the top spot on the charts across all podcasts. Later that year, after an appearance guest-hosting “The Rush Limbaugh Program,” Michael’s daily podcast became syndicated to terrestrial radio, and he was named a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. In 2025, Michael became the first podcaster to attend a White House Cabinet meeting.
Michael has received numerous honors, including the Fr. Benedict Groeschel Award from Good Counsel Homes, the Conservative Mind Award from The American Conservative magazine, and the Courage Under Fire Award from Regina Caeli Academy. In 2025, Ave Maria University awarded Michael an honorary doctorate of humane letters.
In addition to podcast and radio, Michael appears regularly on television, and his writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, the Claremont Reviews of Books, the American Conservative, the American Mind, and Fox News, among other outlets. Michael is a graduate of Yale University and has lectured at universities and research institutes around the world.
Outside of politics and media, Michael is also a founder and owner of Mayflower Cigars.
⇓ Please scroll down to view the first 7 lectures of the series. ⇓
What is conservatism?
What does it mean to be a conservative?
The founders of modern conservatism, from the likes of Russell Kirk to William F. Buckley, Jr. to Ronald Reagan, had a well-informed understanding of what conservatism is. Kirk said that conservatism is less an ideology than it is an attitude. Conservatives believe in the “permanent things,” in an “enduring moral order” based on Biblical law and natural law. They believe in an “ordered liberty” anchored in both faith and freedom.
Many of today’s self-identified conservatives, however, are not so well-grounded. They sometimes struggle to articulate conservatism’s distinctive ideas.
Grove City College has been dubbed the most conservative college in America—the college “most nostalgic for Reagan.” We here at “Freedom’s College” boast an Institute for Faith & Freedom, which every year since 2005 has hosted an annual Ronald Reagan Lecture and an annual conference that in past years has tackled the question of what it means to be a conservative. Now, in 2022, we see the need to take a step further, to do a more lasting examination of this question.
Beginning in the fall of 2022, the Institute for Faith & Freedom at Grove City College will be launching an important new lecture series, titled, “The Conservative Mind: A Lecture Series on Understanding Conservatism and the Foundations of Freedom.”
Each semester, this series will bring to campus a leading conservative thinker or scholar to explore the precise question of what it means to be a conservative. These lectures will be open to students and the general public alike. The lectures will be posted online and transcribed for publication in a series of companion volumes. This will be a wonderful learning opportunity for both young people and older individuals struggling to understand what it means to be a conservative today. This is a subject that the Institute for Faith & Freedom and Grove City College are uniquely positioned to tackle.
Watch the first episode featuring Jonah Goldberg here:
Watch the second episode, “Is Western Civilization Worth Defending?” featuring Dr. Joseph Loconte here:
Watch the third episode featuring Daniel McCarthy here:
Watch the fourth episode. “Russel Kirk and the Moral Imagination” featuring Dr. Brad Birzer here:
Watch the fifth episode, “The Conservative Mind at the End of Liberalism” featuring R.R. Reno here:
Watch the sixth episode, “A Conservative Response to Gender Ideology” featuring Ryan T. Anderson here:
Watch the seventh episode, “How Christian Women Can Change the World: The Conservative Mind & The Conservative Woman” featuring