Imagine the definitive global ranking of freedom,
like the metric that literally shapes billions
of dollars in U .S. foreign aid. Right, the index
that splashes across the front pages of major
newspapers worldwide every single year. Exactly.
Now imagine that for decades that globally defining
score was decided by, well, practically one guy.
Yeah, a single person using what he openly called
an intuitive rating system. It is just wild.
That is the messy, highly controversial and absolutely
fascinating reality behind Freedom House. Welcome
to the deep dive. Glad to be here. Today we are
looking at the complex deeply influential machinery
behind this preeminent American nonprofit. And
our source material today is drawn directly from
the comprehensive Wikipedia article on Freedom
House. Right. And the mission here is really
to figure out how an organization born in 1941
attempts to mathematically quantify something
as abstract as liberty. Yeah. And how its grading
methods have evolved and honestly how it manages
to draw intense synchronized criticism from almost
every point on the global political spectrum.
OK, let's unpack this. Because the origin story
of Freedom House is, well, it's not what I expected
at all. It rarely is. I mean, when people hear
phrases like think tank or research institute,
they usually picture quiet, sterile rooms. Yes,
absolutely. Like academics in tweed jackets pouring
over data. Exactly. Completely detached and passive.
But Freedom House was born in a state of absolute
urgency and action. Yeah, we're talking October
31st, 1941. the world is quite literally on fire.
World War II is raging across Europe and Asia.
even though the U .S. hasn't officially entered
the conflict yet. And the founders of this organization
are massive historical heavyweights. You've got
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Wendell Willkie
is there too. Yeah, and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
But they weren't just sitting around writing
dry white papers about the philosophical concept
of liberty. They were actively fighting access
propaganda on the front lines of public opinion.
What's fascinating here is the methodology they
used. They actually acquired a 19 -room building
in New York City. Yeah. And it wasn't just office
space, right? It had a broadcasting studio. Yeah,
fully operational broadcasting facility. They
were directly sponsoring radio programs, programs
with incredibly dramatic names like our secret
weapon. Which is just a great name for a show.
It really is. This was a CBS radio series created
specifically to counter Axis shortwave radio
propaganda. They had Rex Stout, the famous mystery
writer. Exactly. Rex Stout getting on the mic
to systematically rebut the most entertaining
lies the Axis powers had broadcast that week.
And the whole operation was produced by Paul
White, the legendary founder of CBS News. Wow.
I mean, when you read about it, it feels less
like a traditional nonprofit. and more like a
modern think tank running a rogue podcast or
like a pirate radio station today. That's a great
analogy because it highlights their inherent
operational DNA. I mean, from day one, Freedom
House was not a passive academic observer taking
notes from the sidelines. They were an active
participant in shaping public opinion and heavily
supporting U .S. foreign policy goals. They were
aggressively interventionist. But wait, this
is where I get a little confused. World War Two
ends. The Axis powers are defeated. Shouldn't
a war time propaganda group just you know pack
up the microphones and go home you would think
so like how do they justify sticking around when
their primary enemy has surrendered well they
didn't pack up they simply pivoted to the new
geopolitical reality the new global threat from
their perspective was communism oh of course
the Cold War Exactly. Throughout the Cold War,
they started vigorously supporting the Marshall
Plan, the establishment of NATO, and even the
Johnson administration's policies in the Vietnam
War. Wow. Okay. Yeah. They viewed the spread
of Western -style democracy as the ultimate weapon
against totalitarian ideologies. active, fiercely
policy -driven stance created some incredibly
complex domestic paradoxes. Yeah, the relationship
with the American Civil Rights Movement is a
perfect example of that friction. On one hand,
during the 1950s and 60s, they supported the
movement. Right, they gave out awards. Yeah,
they awarded Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar
Evers their annual Freedom Award in 1963. But
then, just a few years later, they completely
turned on Dr. King and severely criticized him.
And that was because of his anti -war activism.
Right. After King started speaking out against
the Vietnam War, Freedom House, which, remember,
actively supported the Johnson administration's
war policies, publicly rebuked him. It's wild.
They accused him of aligning with what they called
well -known communist allies. It perfectly encapsulates
their rigid geopolitical focus. I mean, if you
align with their anti -communist, pro -U .S.
worldview... They championed you. If you deviated,
even if you were an absolute icon of domestic
civil rights, they pushed back hard. So how does
a group of radio broadcasting policy shaping
Cold War activists transform into the world's
primary greater of global democracy? Like, how
do they make the leap from fighting Soviet propaganda
to handing out authoritative global report cards?
Well, that shift really crystallizes in the 1970s.
Freedom House starts publishing an annual report
called Freedom in the World. And this quickly
becomes their flagship product. Since 1973, they've
been assessing the state of civil liberties and
political rights in 195 countries and 15 territories.
That's a lot of ground to cover. It is. And they
distill all that complexity into three simple
grades. Free, partially free, or not free. And
over time, they expanded this model, launching
freedom of the press and freedom on the net.
Okay, but here is where I really have to push
back on their whole system. When you look at
how they actually calculated these massive globally
influential grades in those early decades, it
wasn't a team of hundreds of independent data
scientists cross -referencing field reports.
No, not at all. For nearly 20 years, from the
1970s to 1990, the Freedom in the World rankings
were practically a one -man show. Yes, a political
scientist named Raymond Gastille. For years,
he essentially produced the entire global report
on his own, sometimes with the help of his wife.
Just him and his wife. Basically, yeah. He was
the one reading the news clippings, assessing
the political rights, and assigning the scores
for every single nation on earth. Wait, so for
decades... The definitive global freedom index
was basically one guy's intuitive vibes because
he literally called it a loose intuitive rating
system. He did. Yes. That sounds like a figure
skating judge handing out Olympic medals based
on their own personal aesthetic rather than a
strict objective rubric. It's a highly subjective
foundation without a doubt. Yeah. And what's
fascinating here is that when modern academics
actually dug into the historical numbers they
found serious quantifiable flaws. Really? mathematical
bias. A researcher named Kenneth A. Bolen, along
with Nils D. Steiner, analyzed that specific
era of Gasteel's ratings. They estimated that
Gasteel's method produced a mathematical bias
of 0 .38 standard deviations against communist
countries and an even larger bias of 0 .5 standard
deviations favoring Christian countries. OK,
standard deviations can sound a bit abstract.
What does that actually mean in practical terms
for a country getting graded? Walk me through
the mechanics of that bias. Sure. To put that
in perspective, just Just by having a communist
government, a country's score was automatically
dragged down by a mathematically massive chunk.
Oh wow. Completely regardless of what actual
day -to -day civil liberties existed on the ground.
Conversely, simply being a Christian majority
nation artificially inflated your score. So it
wasn't just a slight subconscious lean. The math
shows the ruler itself was warped. The tape measure
was literally weighted to favor one side. Exactly.
To be fair to Freedom House post 1990, they recognized
this extreme limitation. They finally hired some
help. Yeah, they hired a full team, diversified
their evaluators, and the methodology became
much more formalized with standardized checklists.
Their data became so highly regarded that massive
U .S. government entities like the Millennium
Challenge Corporation started relying heavily
on Freedom House data. Right. To determine which
foreign countries were actually eligible for
U .S. financial aid. Right. It became very official.
But you can't really discuss the potential biases
in a grading system without looking at who is
paying the teacher's salary. Very true. Let's
follow the money here, because if you look at
their bank accounts, the picture gets incredibly
clear and honestly highly precarious for an organization
claiming global objectivity. Well, it's a fundamental
rule of institutional analysis to truly understand
an organization's output. You have to look closely
at its input. So let's look at their 2022 financials.
That year, Freedom House reported about $93 .7
million in total revenue. Out of that $93 .7
million, a staggering $79 .6 million came from
federal grants, mostly from the U .S. State Department
and USO Day. That is an overwhelming percentage
of their operating budget. It's almost 85%. I
mean, think about it like this. If you read a
massive scientific study about the health benefits
of nutrition, and then you flip to the back and
saw that 85 % of the scientists' funding came
directly from a global soda company. You'd be
pretty skeptical. You'd inherently squint at
the results, right? Yeah. You couldn't help but
wonder if the money influenced the conclusion.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, when
the U .S. State Department is effectively your
angel investor, providing 85 % of your cash,
Your entire operational model is at the mercy
of whoever occupies the Oval Office. And remember,
federal grants aren't blank checks. They're tied
to specific foreign policy initiatives. You are
always one election away from an existential
crisis. And that exact crisis hit them like a
freight train in 2025. Yes, it did. The incoming
Trump administration instituted a massive foreign
aid freeze through executive order 14169. So
what actually happens inside an organization
when 80 percent of its funding vanishes overnight?
It's not just a matter of tightening the belt
or canceling the holiday party, right? Like,
what are the mechanics of that collapse? It is
a catastrophic operational collapse. Because
of that executive order, Freedom House was forced
to suddenly terminate over 80 percent of their
global programs. Over 80 percent? That's insane.
Yeah, they had to lay off a massive portion of
their staff. I mean, imagine trying to monitor
human rights violations across 195 countries
when suddenly you have no field teams, no regional
directors and no travel budget. They're just
stuck in Washington. Right. They had to desperately
divert whatever internal funds they could just
to keep their flagship freedom in the world report
alive. They were suddenly scrambling for private
donations. to fill an insurmountable gap. Because
of this intense historical reliance on U .S.
government funding, Freedom House acts as a massive
target for criticism. Oh definitely. And as analysts
trying to understand this group What's fascinating
to us isn't picking a side in these political
fights. It's the fact that they managed to make
enemies out of entirely opposing political camps.
The sheer breadth of the criticism is what's
truly remarkable. Now, before we go any further,
I need to make something very clear. As hosts,
we are strictly impartial here. We are not taking
sides or endorsing any of the following political
viewpoints. Absolutely. We are impartially reporting
the arguments contained in the source text to
provide a complete picture of the controversy.
Exactly. We're just looking at the facts of who
is criticizing them. So let's look at how the
political left views them first. Prominent left
wing academics like Noam Chomsky and Edward S.
Herman argue that Freedom House basically acts
as a PR wing for U .S. foreign policy. Right.
Their critique is that Freedom House is excessively
harsh on states opposed to U .S. interests and
way too lenient on regimes that support the U
.S. They point out that in the 1980s Freedom
House found the elections in El Salvador, which
was a staunch U .S. ally with a horrific human
rights record at the time. They called those
elections admirable. Yeah, the argument from
the left is that they provide a veneer of academic
legitimacy to whatever the State Department wants
to do. OK, so the left thinks they're just a
PR firm for U .S. imperialism, but that means
conservatives must love them, right? Because
they are reinforcing U .S. power. You would certainly
think so. But in 2004, former U .S. representative
and libertarian Ron Paul accused Freedom House
of meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign
nation. Meddling how? Well, he pointed out that
Freedom House, using millions of dollars from
US -eyed, funded non -governmental organizations
in Ukraine that were blatantly favoring presidential
candidate Viktor Yushchenko. Oh, wow. And the
conservative pushback didn't stop there. By 2018,
the National Review, which is a major conservative
magazine, was writing articles accusing Freedom
House of having an anti -conservative bias. Interesting.
Yeah. They claimed the organization had abandoned
its Cold War anti -communist roots and morphed
into a progressive partisan NGO that unfairly
penalized conservative governments in its global
rankings. So you have Chomsky on the left saying
it's a tool of US hegemony and the National Review
on the right saying it's a partisan progressive
activist group. They really can't win. No, they
can't. But the critiques go much deeper than
domestic US politics. They strike at the very
core of how Freedom House actually defines the
word freedom. Right. The academic critiques really
highlight this. Academic Wenfang Tang points
out that Freedom House uses criteria developed
exclusively by Western elites. Yes, the cultural
bias argument. Exactly. For example, Freedom
House scores China near zero for freedom and
human rights. But Tang points to data from the
World Values Survey showing that 72 percent of
Chinese respondents report being highly satisfied
with the state of human rights in their country.
Which is a massive discrepancy. Huge. He argues
Freedom House is measuring countries against
a strict Western standard of individualism, completely
ignoring the subjective cultural values of the
people actually living there. And Daniel Treisman,
a political scientist at UCLA, points out glaring
inconsistencies in their comparative rankings.
He notes that Freedom House has ranked Russia's
political rights on the exact same level as the
United Arab Emirates. Wait, really? The exact
same score? Yes. And regardless of one's view
of Russia, Treisman points out that the UAE is
a federal of absolute monarchies with absolutely
zero elements of democracy. Ranking them as politically
identical exposes a deep flaw in the methodology,
especially when you compare it to other academic
scales like Polity 4, which score them very differently
based on actual institutional structures. And
unsurprisingly, countries that get bad grades
don't just sit back and take it. The international
backlash is intense. In 2019 and 2020, China
placed heavy sanctions on Freedom House and its
president for intervening in Hong Kong affairs.
And in May 2024, Russia officially declared Freedom
House an undesirable organization. But perhaps
the most explosive international claim comes
from Craig Murray, who was the British ambassador
to Uzbekistan in the early 2000s. Right. This
is a very heavy allegation. This detail is wild.
Murray wrote that in 2003, the executive director
of Freedom House actually told him that the organization
decided to deliberately back off from spotlighting
human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. Which is shocking
for a human rights monitor. Exactly. And why?
Because some Republican board members wanted
to give full support to U .S. and coalition forces
operating there at the time. And the abuses we
are talking about are horrific. Murray reported
incidents of prisoners being killed by immersion
in boiling liquid. Boiling liquid. That's just
horrific. Now, it is absolutely critical to state
here that Freedom House vehemently denied this.
Yes, absolutely. Jennifer Windsor, the executive
director at the time, called Murray's claim an
inexplicable misrepresentation and insisted they
had been a consistent and harsh critic of Uzbekistan.
They push back hard. They did. But the fact that
this allegation even exists and was made by a
former ambassador highlights the perpetual cloud
of suspicion that surrounds them when you combine
human rights monitoring with heavy U .S. government
funding. So what does this all mean? I am just
marveling at the fact that a single organization
has managed to draw the synchronized ire of Anon
Chomsky, Ron Paul, the Chinese government, and
the National Review. It is a master class and
angering literally everyone. This raises an important
question, doesn't it? Can any organization ever
truly measure freedom objectively? when their
very existence, their funding, their historical
founders, their headquarters in Washington DC,
is so deeply embedded in a specific geopolitical
landscape. Yeah, it seems impossible. Every choice
they make, from the indicators they select to
the way they weigh civil liberties against political
rights, is inherently a value judgment. And that
brings us to why understanding the messy history
of this one Washington DC nonprofit actually
matters to you, because we consume the output
of this organization constantly, often without
even realizing it. We really do. When you read
a news headline that says global freedom declines
for the 15th consecutive year. or Country X dropped
five points in the Freedom Index, that data is
almost certainly coming from Freedom House or
an organization just like it. And the media presents
those numbers as absolute mathematical facts,
like reading the temperature on a thermometer.
But as we've seen today, those numbers are the
product of deeply human decisions. They were
shaped by an organization that started by broadcasting
anti -Nazi radio, that fought the Cold War, that
relied for decades on heavy federal funding,
and that was just gutted by a 2025 executive
order. Understanding this doesn't necessarily
mean you have to reject the data entirely. No,
not at all. Freedom House still provides incredibly
detailed reports on global conditions. But knowing
the history makes you a much sharper, more critical
consumer of information. You start to see that
freedom isn't a naturally occurring element on
the periodic table that you can just measure
with a ruler. It's a human construct. Exactly.
It's constructed by people with perspectives
and biases. Which leaves us with a final thought
for you to mull over as you go about your day.
We've spent this whole time dissecting how a
massive organization's definition of freedom
is heavily shaped by its founders, its history,
and its bank accounts. So the question to ask
yourself is, what does your personal metric for
a free society actually look like? Yeah, if you
had to build your own index tomorrow, if you
were the one creating the rubric to judge the
world, what invisible cultural biases would you
accidentally bring to the table based on where
you grew up? What would you weigh heavier? The
right to vote in multiple elections or the right
to affordable health care? The freedom of speech
or the freedom from crime? It's a challenging
thought. When we try to measure the world, we
often just end up measuring ourselves. It really
is. Thanks for taking this deep dive with us.
Keep questioning the metrics.