With over 3 million followers between his Instagram “shorts” videos and his “Making the Argument” podcast, other than Virginia’s governor, state Del. Nick Freitas may be the most well-known member of Virginia’s government.
On March 27, while a crowd of anti-Donald Trump/anti-DOGE/anti-Elon Musk protesters were marching and chanting outside of a town hall he was hosting, Freitas shocked the commonwealth by announcing that he was not going to seek reelection to the Virginia House of Delegates seat he’s represented for 10 years. The Daily Signal caught up with him and asked him what went into that decision and what’s next for him.
Here is a lightly edited transcript from an excerpt of our discussion:
Freitas: It’s something my wife and I have talked about for a little while now, and honestly, we weren’t entirely sure exactly what we were going to do until fairly recently. But essentially, we’ve looked at it a lot.
It has been an honor to serve for the last 10 years in the General Assembly. It really has been. It’s not lost on me that I had an opportunity to represent James Madison’s district in the Virginia House of Delegates. By the same token, I’ve always said that I don’t think people should stay in politics forever. I think it’s a good idea to at least take a break, get away from it for a while. And if you get called back into it, that’s fine, but just making it a steady career, I think, is something that I’ve always been a little bit skeptical of.
And the second part was, as we looked at these two battles that we were facing, you know, that we were fighting, we started asking ourselves, OK, we’re having a hard time, the tempo is picking up. We’re at such a decisive point in our country’s history right now, with the things that are going on politically and culturally, that we wanted to be the most effective that we possibly could be.
I want to be able to fight for the sort of culture which will create the sort of electorate which will elect the sort of people that we need to preserve what I think the common fundamentals and principles that make the United States special and unique, and it’s not all about government.
Thomas: I think that’s the Andrew Breitbart paradigm: “Politics is downstream from culture.” I see young people and I’m seeing 20-somethings flip away from collectivism and the woke ideology a lot faster than the people who have been indoctrinating them in the public school systems expected. Am I wrong?
Freitas: No, you’re not. Tomorrow, we’re dedicating an entire podcast where we’re actually looking at that. We’re taking a very detailed look into the data, the polls, the surveys that have been done recently, in order to try to conclude what does the future look like, especially with respect to how young men feel about their society and their country and what they plan to do next.
It’s fascinating, because I think young men feel like they’ve just almost been automatically called oppressors yet they have never done anything wrong. They didn’t oppress anybody. They didn’t keep women from voting. They didn’t enslave anybody. They didn’t do any of this. And yet they’re somehow responsible for it all.
They’re absolutely fed up with being kind of the target of all this, and they are the target. They’re starting to revolt against it. And the real question now is going to be, what direction do they take in the midst of a rejection of “woke” ideology?
Thomas: So, is Chris Ruddy [the CEO of Newsmax] giving you a slot on Newsmax TV? Because you said you wanted to keep busy. Or are you literally going to just become a gentleman farmer for a little while and decompress?
Freitas: No, no, I wish we could decompress. That’s not going to happen. I mean, first things first, is we need to get [Republican] Karen Hamilton elected [as Freitas’ replacement] here in the 62nd District. So, I’ll be working. I’ll be helping her with everything I can, and then, we’ll be working to try to make sure that we take back the House, we keep the governor, the attorney general, and the lieutenant governor seats.
I’ve gotten some offers to do some things, but honestly, one of the things I love most about what we’re doing is that it allows us to be independent from any of the other influences. I managed to maintain that through 10 years in the General Assembly, and I want to maintain that as we move into this next chapter.
Listen to the full interview:
