From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

We also need to give parents the tools and the levers and the mechanisms so that they can act as enforcers of good education.

They can act as protectors of their kids and kids of other families. I don't think that

very many parents think that the system is working well right now. And so we need to have all hands on

deck. This is your host Scott Bertrand. And that's Christopher Rufo. Chris's senior fellow at the

Manhattan Institute, also a conservative journalist and activist, working

specifically against critical race theory. We'll talk with him about that and how parents can get involved

a little bit later on in today's program. But first, this week ado documentary on PBS, turn the spotlight

on Benjamin Franklin. We in turn tap one of our Benjamin Franklin experts, its associate professor of politics politics Kevin Slack, who has written to book Benjamin Franklin, Natural Right and the Art of Virtue.

Dr. Slack, thanks for joining us.

Hi, Scott.

Good to be here.

We want to break our conversation on Benjamin Franklin into a couple of different areas.

Today we'll talk about Benjamin Franklin as Enlightenment philosopher.

We'll come back at a different time and talk about him as moral lawgiver. And then talk about Benjamin Franklin as Enlightenment philosopher. We'll come back at a

different time and talk about him as moral lawgiver. And then finally, Benjamin Franklin as statesman.

So Dr. Slack, we begin today with Ben Franklin as Enlightenment philosopher. The Enlightenment is a

complex era of philosophical history. How would you situate Franklin as an enlightenment philosopher?

Well, I think the way that we think of Franklin is, first, as a philosopher of nature. So as a natural philosopher, he's always associated with his great experiment with lightning. And so he is able to, he's able to construct a test, right? His hypothesis is,

is that lightning is made up of what he called an electrical fluid. And it was a test that

could be repeated and imitated in Europe and in France and other places. So Franklin, we usually

think of in this context of the

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