The Daily Signal - After His Shocking Exit From Politics, Nick Freitas Hints at What's Next

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

With over 3 million followers between his Instagram shorts videos and his “Making the Argument” podcast, state Del. Nick Freitas is among the most well-known member of Virginia’s government. But on March 27, he shocked the commonwealth by announcing that he was not going to seek reelection. The Daily Signal asked him what went into that decision and what's next for him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Daily Signal podcast. I'm Joe Thomas, Virginia correspondent for The Daily Signal, your host for this episode. And I had a chance to speak with Virginia delegate Nick Freitas, who represents the 60-second district in the General Assembly and reaches beyond Virginia with his making the argument podcast to over 3 million subscribers, both in his short form and long-form media appearances. And he says that may be why he's changing a career path. We find out next. At Desjardin, we speak business.

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I'm never quite sure how to introduce the guy, so I'm just going to go with the way you probably know Nick Freitas, social media influencer and part-time member of the Virginia General Assembly. He is Nick Freitas. You've probably seen him on podcast. You've probably heard Joe Rogan talk about, you know, what are the podcast Joe Rogan listens to? Well, apparently Nick Fratis is.

and you see them on reels. If you follow them and if you don't, you should because it is common sense in like 30-second form. If you've never thought you could make a conservative argument in 30 seconds, you have to watch Nick Fratus on Instagram, I guess, is the best place to do it. And a good friend and I've known him since he arrived on the scene in the Virginia General Assembly. Good morning, Nick. How are you, sir? Doing well, Joe. How are you?

Good. Is that the wrong way to introduce you? full-time social media influencer, part-time legislator? You know, I remember the first time I got introduced as delegate and social media personality. And I got up to the first thing I said was, what the hell did you know? Am I supposed to be flattered or not? Well, you know, it's interesting because obviously our kind of foray in the social media was a lot of it was kind of built on necessity. It was the idea that every time we would talk about something in the General Assembly or that we would have a debate or a floor speech or whatnot.

I got so used to the media grossly misrepresenting what I was saying that we started just taking the speeches and putting them online. And then some of the speeches started to go viral because people were just hearing directly from me what I thought instead of the filters through a very hostile news agency. True. And so that's how we started, but I have to tell you right now, we, Tina, and I joke is, what do I get stopped on the street for? And more often than not now, I don't get stopped on the street because someone thinks I'm a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. It's because they saw something that I talked about, whether it was being a father or a husband or a soldier or whatnot, and it resonated with him.

Yeah, a daughter's dad, what do they call it, a girl daddy, all of those things that you talk about. So, yeah, and to me, it's, I, people who, joke that I get paid by the words. So the economy of words that you're able to do when you when you do your videos, I don't know how long you spend prepping them or if a stray hair gets you and you just walk out on your porch and grab a coffee mug. But gosh darn it, if that's the case, it sure is embarrassing. I appreciate it. I mean, yeah, a lot of the things that we discuss and we talked about, especially in politics. I mean, obviously I've been involved in politics for a while now.

And so a lot of this is stuff that I've thought about a lot. I've debated about. I've carried legislation on. And sometimes that makes it easy to talk about. But a lot of it, too, is just influenced by, you'll see some headline on the news or some statement that somebody makes. And it kind of strikes you funny because of the absurdity of it or whatnot. And so a lot of it is just that.

It's just seeing something or my wife will send me something and be like, babe, you've got to talk about it. And so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, executive producer, Tina Freitas. So part and parcel of this is Virginia, like New Jersey, is in the crosshairs of that post-presidential election cycle where we're the two dumb states that decide to have our gubernatorial races right after the president's race. And I don't want to get Nick's sense for this because this isn't your first rodeo. But first and foremost, you announced last week that you will not be seeking.

re-election to Virginia's General Assembly, which really shocked everyone, including all the anti-Tesla supporters that were outside protesting you in the street outside your town hall. What went on in that decision, Nick? So it said that 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 a lot of, it has been an honor to serve for the last 10 years in the General Assembly. It really has been.

It's like it's not lost on me that I had an opportunity to represent James Madison's district in the Virginia House of Delegates. And there's always a sense of, I mean, I think awe that should come over you when you get to go into that building, the house that Jefferson built, and the capital that Jefferson built and get to represent people. by the same token, we've been trying to fight this battle on two fronts for a while, both the political and the cultural side. And we've been trying to do both of those fights because we think they're very much connected.

I think the political is ultimately downstream from the cultural, but you've got to fight both of them simultaneously. And as we've moved on for the last 10 years, fighting it politically in the General Assembly and then fighting it culturally on social media and other places, we started to come to the conclusion that it was like, look, And there's two things here. One, 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 or that we were fighting, we started to ask ourselves like, okay, we're having a hard time. like the tempo is picking up. Like we're in 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. And I started to ask myself, I said, look, with all the travel, with all the demands, with all the things that are going on. And can I really say that I can do both of these jobs simultaneously to the degree that both of them deserve? And I started to come to the conclusion that I couldn't. And that was difficult.

Nobody likes to take a look and say, yeah, you might be spreading yourself a little bit too thin here. And I had to come to the conclusion that the most appropriate thing to do would probably be to acknowledge what I've said from the very beginning. And that is, you know, don't stay in this, don't stay in elected office too long. You don't have a monopoly on all the good ideas. You don't, you're not, you're not forever immune or, you know, inculcated from the pressures that come from being in elected office. And so sometimes it's a good idea to identify somebody else that you think would do a really good job in that position and then pass along the torch. And that's what I was able to do with Karen Hamilton, who I've endorsed to replace me. And I felt absolutely confident she will do an incredible job.

And it doesn't mean I'm going away. I mean, I will obviously not be serving in the General Assembly starting next year. But I'm still going to be fighting every bit as I, every bit as hard as I have been on the political front when it comes to supporting people. like Karen in the General Assembly or people that I believe in running for office, but also that cultural battle because, you know, again, going back to what I said earlier about what do you get stopped on the side of the road for or what do you get there on the side of the road, what do you get stopped when you're walking down the street for? And when somebody comes up and says, look, the stories that you were sharing about raising

daughters or raising your son or about marriage or even the ways that you talked about political matters, but put it into a way that I haven't thought of before, those are some of the greatest compliments I think I could get. And I want to be able to continue to do that. 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 of the common fundamentals and principles which make the United States special and unique. And it's not about, it's not all about government. It's all about individual people and families. You know, and so, you know, again, I've just become more convinced 10 years in the General Assembly. It's not like I did two or four, and I'm

leaving 10 years in the General Assembly, I came to the conclusion that I've learned a lot in that environment. And now I need to take what I've learned over there and I need to tell people more about what actually goes on, how decisions are made and what we need to do to actually fix some of the stuff. And I believe I can do a better job of that if I can focus on the cultural fight and not be torn in two directions. Because ultimately, too, my constituents deserve somebody that is laser focused on, you know, the concerns with respect to a delegate. And so That was how I came to the conclusion that I did. Well, let me ask you, because a lot of people will only see, you know, either the social media, the media personality or the delegate side.

And by the way, if you get a chance to go on YouTube and search Nick Freitas Second Amendment, it's perhaps one of the greatest, I mean, we don't have a lot of Patrick Henry's speeches recorded to YouTube. But it is perhaps one of the greatest treaties in how the two political parties treat each other. ostensibly is a speech about Second Amendment rights, but it's more about, you know, what the rhetoric had devolved into. And this wasn't even yesterday. This was several years ago when you made that speech, Nick. But I think it's the Andrew Breitbart paradigm. It's, you know, we have to win the culture war, which we were decades behind. I mean, if people thought we were behind in World War II when we stormed Normandy, we're almost as far behind the progressive movement in media. But the upside I see is young people, I look at Charlie Kirk and the work

he's done with Turning Point USA, I think 20-somethings flip a lot faster than the people who have been indoctrinating them and their parents and their grandparents in the public school systems into sort of this soft underpinning of Marxism. As soon as they get to see it in real life, they flip pretty quickly, Nick. Am I wrong? No, you're not. In fact, tomorrow, on making the argument we're dedicating an entire podcast where we're actually looking at that we, there's been this kind of impression that, you know, young people and specifically the young men are starting to reject kind of the woke ideology that's just been forced on him. And tomorrow we're taking a very, you know, we're taking a detailed look into the data,

the polls to the surveys that have been done recently in order to try to conclude. Like, you know, what is 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. And, you know, it's fascinating because I think young men especially have felt like woke ideology, critical theory ideology, which places everybody into oppressor or oppressed dynamics. Young men feel like they've just almost been automatically put into, and this oppressor category. And so you have this whole group of young men that have never done anything wrong. They didn't impress 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. And at the same time that they're responsible for things that happened decades or centuries before they were born, they're also being told to sit down, shut up, you know, don't be masculine. But then when they're not masculine, they also get punished for that because why aren't you being chivalrous? Like, what you told me, chivalry was bad. Well, now I think it's good because I want your seat. And young men are just absolutely fed up with it.

Young men are absolutely fed up with the inconsistency. They're absolutely fed up with being kind of the target of all of this. And they are. They are 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? Well, and certainly I can I can see it because I think, you know, we are at a cultural point where women are saying, hold it, I need help here, especially, you know, as, you know, the job market becomes more self-motivated, more entrepreneurial. And that's a nice way of saying, you know, two or three freelance jobs rather than one nine to five job. And they're thinking, I need help.

And if the men, and we've watched this since 1964, Nick, we're 60 years into the great society. And even then Ronald Reagan was saying that men were being pushed out of the home because there was more government aid money coming in than the young men could make even back in 1964. And it's just continued to get worse and worse. So I think, but you're right. There seems to be almost a genetic feeling like I should be doing more amongst these young men.

And maybe the pitiful results of the woke snow white should be indicative that culture isn't picking up on the, oh, I can't kiss her because that's hashtag me too. Well, and the interesting part about all this is both young women and young men were lied to. It was just for different reasons and the different results, right? Young women were often lied to by saying, no, no, we're going to empower you. oppress and now we're going to empower you. And the way we're going to empower you is through the government at the expense of, you know, having a husband or having a father in the home or those things. Don't worry, we can replace a husband and a father with a government program. And we found out that, no, that doesn't work. We should have known, but we've certainly, the data's in that.

We found out it doesn't work. The other thing that's interesting about it is young women, young women have repeatedly been told that, you know, the worst possible thing that could happen to them is getting married young or having kids because that'll staying in the way of all this, you know, feminist empowerment. And what that's also led to is women, and especially some of the most outspoken, like, liberal progressive women have been asking, you know, where are all the masculine men at or why am I only, why am I only attracted to conservative men? It's like, well, because conservatism, we still hold up those notions of traditional masculinity, like appropriate. masculinity of protect, provide, be strong, be competent, be intelligent, but also be compassionate. We hold those things up. And so it's fascinating to me that some of the most outspoken spoken liberal women are so frustrated with the dating market and whatnot. It's like, well, yeah, you asked for this. Of course, you're not going to be able to find what you're looking for in an environment where you pull out all the stops to destroy it. Nick Fradis is on with us, part-time member of the Virginia General Assembly, wink, wink,

and soon to be a former member, but full-time, as you can hear why, this is why his podcasts are so. How many followers, you know, when I heard Joe Rogan say he was watching your podcast and bring it up on like you? He read off a tweet I had put out, which was very funny, obviously, you know, Joe's got, I think one of the largest audience, if not the largest audience, out there for a podcast. You know, across all of our social media platforms, so when we include like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, things like that, we've got someone in the neighborhood of about 3.4 million followers. Wow. Between our things like our reels and our podcasts and our other forms of content, we probably average someone in the neighborhood of about close to anywhere from a million to 2 million views a day. But a lot of that could be just, you know, somebody flipping through their phone and seeing one of our reels or something like that.

But it has been, it's been really encouraging, obviously, because we didn't initially set out to do this. We were just talking about things that we cared about and things that we thought mattered. But that speaks to what you were saying earlier, is that this appetite for it is there. There are people finding, go, oh, you got to see this guy. And this is right. This is what I've been thinking all along. And I probably couldn't sleep at night, or I'd be worried about my wife taking Mike Lindell's find my pillow and smother. me with it if I didn't mention, hey, hey, Nick, if I send you a list of radio stations that

the show was carried on, could you mention it on your show once? I'm just kidding. I shouldn't have said that out. You know, there's no, there's no depth to the end of my shallowness. Because when I heard you were leaving the General Assembly, my first feeling is as having lost several members of the conservative movement to the Trump administration here in Virginia, I was concerned that that's where you were headed to because certainly there are plenty of ways. I know some great conservative leaders in Virginia that work for Jason Miaris in the Attorney General's office here in Virginia. And there are so many other ways to serve. And I run into people so many times that say, you know, I get more done now either in the private sector or working, you know, as a common old, working as a lawyer in the attorney general's office or something.

without having the whole door knocking, you know, town hall thing that I can do more, you know, out of the limelight, away from the limelight. You seem like you're going the other direction. You're looking for the bigger limelight there. No, it's not so much that. It's more about just speaking to, it's more about speaking to audiences and putting the maximum amount of effort into the area where you see the most positive results coming back. One of the most frustrating things about serving in a legislature when you're in the minority is, you know, you'll have people, sometimes it's your Democrat opponent.

Sometimes it's other people that maybe wants your seat. And they'll say, well, you didn't get any bills passed, Nick. It's like, well, yeah, we're not in the majority. And the Democrats don't tend to like my bills. They don't like the bills that are reducing taxes and reducing regulations and expanding or protecting your gun rights or protecting this in human life. They don't like those. And it's just kind of, well, yeah. but you're not getting anything done.

Okay, well, how would you suggest that I'd be effective in an environment that I don't control? Because there's only one way to really do that. And that you have to compromise on your principles so hard. You have to start voting for things that you fundamentally disagree with so you can get the budget amendment you submitted. Right. So you can get that one bill that really doesn't do anything significant, but at least affords you the opportunity to go back to your district and say, oh, I got a bill signed. But the cost of doing that, in many cases,

cases, not at all. The cost of doing that in many cases is you don't get to stand up and hold the other side accountable when they're doing something wrong. And that's, I'm sorry, but I never felt like that's what I was elected to do. I never told my constituents in any of my races, hey, elect me and I'll get the most budget amendments passed. Hey, elect me and I'll pass the most new laws. I said, no, elect me and I will fight for these things and I will diligently and consistently fight for these things regardless of the pressure. Yeah. And so that's what I did. And the cost of that, the cost of that in many cases is even when you have a bill that isn't politically motivated, it gets killed because they don't like you. And they're trying to shut you up. And there comes, again, I've been doing this for 10 years now. And I've experienced a lot of that. And you get to a point where it's like, you know what, I'm going to give somebody else a chance to do this. But I'm never going to shut up. I'll just find a different, I'll just find a different way to keep talking about this.

He is one half Russell Kirk, one half Mike Roe. He is Nick Fratis. and again, my shallowness is rising to the surface. Whatever you do in media, just not morning radio, okay? If you want to do noon to three, I've got openings. I know that there's a, but whatever you do in media, just 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern, don't, because I don't know if I could do it. I would, and we probably have a good time battling it out. But it is amazing.

I have to ask, you know, inside politics stuff, House of Delegates, the H.J.1, the abortion amendment. I've talked to a lot of folks heading into this November's election. Yes, governor is catching all the, whatever attention there is. And I think it's been less than it has ever been in my time in Virginia, mostly because President Trump has the fire hose out and the press can't leave Washington to come cover Virginia's governor's race. That being said, there are a lot of folks who are trying to flip the House of Delegates to a Republican majority and stop H.J.1 from passing and then coming to the voters. Do you, your seat seems like it's a fairly safe. I think somebody said it's an R plus 10 district. So I guess. R plus 22. Oh, is it 22? I guess they were being, quote, conservative about it.

But there are some seats, you know, a thousand, less than a thousand votes. in between in districts that Kamal Harris did very well in the Democrats underperformed in. Do you think that the Republicans can flip one or two of those key seats? Oh, there's no question. There's no question we can flip the, there's no question we can flip the necessary seats. This really comes down to who's going to show up in what is an off-year election and which party is more motivated right now. Now, there's a lot of people saying, oh, the Democrats are out for revenge. Okay, that might be true.

But I think there's a lot of people now that are not just like long-term loyal Republican voters. I think there's a lot of people that, especially people that, you know, work for a living, they were the ones that said, look, I'm tired of this. I'm tired of the absurdity. I'm tired of us having to have battles. And we do. We have to have them. But over battles about whether or not a boy can be in the locker room with my daughter at a public school.

Silly things, right. And we should never have to battle about it. And it's, yeah, things we should never have to battle about, but they're going to because they're a father and they're going to protect their daughter. And it's just, it's insane to them that we've got to fight these battles at the same time that the government should be focusing on things which are actually legitimate focuses of government instead of trying to micromanage our lives or manipulate the culture in a particular way. And those people, what those, I think what a lot of those people are excited about is that even if they don't agree with everything Trump has done or said, and, A lot of them do. But even if they don't, what they see him as is this is the first guy I voted for either side of the aisle that told me he was going to do something and then did it. And the biggest lesson Republicans have to learn from that is if you are not providing a contrast to what the Democratic Party has offered Virginians. And by the way, what they offered Virginians this year was to not even hear 130 Republican bills.

I mean, think about that for a second. The party that's always lecturing us about, oh, the importance of democracy. Well, the democratic process doesn't stop at electing politicians. We're supposed to follow those processes down in the General Assembly. On average, maybe five to ten bills a year don't get heard for whatever reason. They deliberately, deliberately prevented us from voting on 130 different Republican bills. They refused to hear testimony on it. And that's part of what's on the ballot right now.

And so I think you have a lot of people. that are basically just, they're fed up with this idea. They see Trump is actually doing something. They see all of the fraud waste and abuse that their government is perpetrated while at the same time, raising taxes on them and making life more unaffordable for them. And they're done with it. And as long as we can go out there and say, look, we have fought against this in the General Assembly. We promise you we will fight against just give us the House of Delegates in 30 days.

And we promise you we will pass meaningful legislation that is going to be better for family. But that's what we have to do, right? We have to go out there and actually draw the contrast. And again, I may not be on the ballot this year, but I plan to help my colleagues do that because I think it's critical because as you mentioned, HGA1, the Democrats have this idea that the most important thing to any voter in the Commonwealth of Virginia is whether or not you can have an abortion all the way up to the point of birth. And they will sit there and say, I'm being hyperbolic. Well, we sat there on the floor and we debated this and we pointed out, we said, okay, this bill, You want this resolution, which you want them enshrine in the Virginia Constitution, is going to allow abortion all the way up to the point of birth for essentially anything.

And if you don't want that, because you keep saying nobody wants that, nobody wants to do that. If you don't want that, great, well, then here's our opportunity right now to amend this and actually put in some protections. Maybe not as many as I would like, but my gosh, can we at least admit when a baby has a heartbeat, brain activity and fingerprint that's not a clump of cells? And their answer was no. And it gets worse, Joe, because not only did they then unanimously on the Democrat, every single Democrat voted for that legislation, but then immediately following it, they voted for another bill, which said automatic restoration of voter rights for anybody convicted of a felony in Virginia once they'd served their time. And, you know, Joe, there's certain areas where I would say, yeah, hey, for certain crimes, I can see that. I can see automatic restoration of voter rights. But here's what I don't understand.

You just told me that a baby at month nine has zero human rights, but now you're going to make it a constitutional priority that somebody that was convicted for murder, for rape, for, you know, molestation for sex trafficking, that person automatically gets to start voting again without any sort of, without any sort of analysis in the whether or not this person, you know, actually has been rehabilitated. You know, that's, that's automatic for Democrats. But when it comes to a nine-month-old baby in the womb, no human rights whatsoever. And it's just that's what's on the ballot. It really is, it really is fundamental at this point. I constantly try to tell some of my friends, I said, look, I get it. And I wish it was different. But we're not talking about the Democratic Party of the 1990s.

Yeah. I'm not the one that told, we're not the ones that told Democrats they had to adopt this, this philosophy. They chose it. I'm tired of being told it's not real because I sat there for 10 years and watched them debate for it. And grow into it, Nick. Nick Freitas on with us. You've seen it metastasize. I was told once we could save a fortune in Per Diem alone, just elect one Democrat senator and one Democrat House member and let them all vote the party line because it just, that's all it ever seems to be. Nick, you know, certainly we saw how a famous, you know, social media. personality could help a presidential candidate like Donald Trump. Do you know of any famous social media personalities in Virginia that might be able to help some of these candidates along the line?

Well, I don't know how, I don't know how famous I am, but I will certainly be making the argument for anybody that, I'll certainly be making the argument for anybody that's serious about doing something about that. And I, yeah, so I'll be all in on that. So is Newsmax calling? Is Chris Ruddy giving you a slot on Newsmax TV? Or, you know, because, you know, I know that you said you wanted to keep busy or are you literally going to just become gentleman farmer for a little while and decompress? No, no, I wish we could decompress. That's not going to happen. I mean, first things first is we need to get Karen Hamilton elected 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 and trying to make sure that we take back the house. We keep the governor. the Attorney General and the Lieutenant Governor's seat. Yeah, I've gotten some offers to do some things, but honestly, one of the things I've loved most about what we're doing is that allows us to be independent from any of the other influences.

And that's what I want. I manage to maintain that through 10 years in the General Assembly, and I want to maintain that as we move into this next chapter. Well, I know an independently owned radio station in Stanton, Virginia, that would love to put whatever number of hours you would. want to create onto their airwaves and share it with the, you know, the Nick Freitas show, because I know I know I don't have to edit out the cussing the way I would with the Joe Rogan podcast. But I appreciate it as always, Nick. And you have been an example to me in a way to be unabashedly righteous about conservatism

and conservative principles because it is really just common sense. And I want to thank you for that. And I'm glad that I get to know that you're going to keep on doing that. at very least for the future. Oh, no, it's again, my pleasure. As I tell some of my Democrat colleagues, you might not see me in the House anymore, but you'll still see me in your algorithm.

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