“Seeking for the roots of order,” wrote Russell Kirk in his influential work The Roots of American Order, “we are led to four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London.”

We FreeCons are deeply indebted to Kirk and glean many insights from him, but in this case we feel compelled to amend his list. At least one other city deserves to be on it: Edinburgh.

This city was at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Its leading figures helped shape the arts, sciences, and economic transformation of the West. “The University of Edinburgh possessed a set of truly great men,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “as have ever appeared in any age or country.”

Today we spotlight FreeCons who explore the influence of Adam Smith, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and other path-breaking thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and how their ideas remain relevant to modern politics and policy.

Lessons for our time

Samuel Gregg serves as president and Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent essay for Law & Liberty, Gregg described the influence of Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment on the American Founding and the broader tradition of ordered liberty.

Scottish philosophers of the 18th century “inherited some formidable pre-Enlightenment intellectual foundations,” Gregg wrote, nothing that medieval and early modern Scotland “may have been an economic and political backwater” but “punched far above its weight in the realm of higher learning.”

Schooled in the ancients, the scholastics, and the likes of René Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment turned their scholarly attention to such matters as “literature, philosophy, history, religion, and the relationship between economic development and political change.”

“Scottish Enlightenment thinkers did not agree about everything,” Gregg continued, “They believed, moreover, that improvement (a classic Enlightenment motif) necessitated thinking with and critiquing others. This points to another element that accounts for Scotland’s Enlightenment: the high moral premium that became attached to an atmosphere of relative toleration.”

Their accomplishments remind us, he concluded, that “despite unpromising political and economic circumstances, it is possible for long-standing intellectual traditions combined with institutional reform, openness to new forms of knowledge, and twin commitments to tolerance and substantive debate to generate remarkable improvements that reflect both continuity and innovation. Therein may lie lessons for our time.”

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Denying common sense

Ryan Streeter is executive director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute, former director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for The Wall Street Journal, he posed a provocative question: can Dave Hume save the Democratic Party?

The influential thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment famously distinguished between principle and interest as a driving force for political faction. “Democrats’ intramural struggle with socialism is only the latest evidence that they are morphing from a party from interest into a party from principle,” Streeter wrote.

“Coalitions consisting of organized labor, minority populations, immigrants, farmers and urban machines have given way to a party dominated by highly educated people driven by superstitions and enthusiasms about race, sex and class.”

The Democratic Party’s socialism problem “didn’t appear in a vacuum,” Streeter continued. “Its path was paved by elites who insisted on denying common sense and imposing esoteric ideas — ‘defund the police,’ ‘all white people are racist,’ ‘men can become pregnant’ and so forth.

“Candidates are backing away from some of them, but that is merely an electoral strategy. As Joe Biden’s presidency demonstrated, Democrats who run as moderates don’t end up relenting on culture wars.”

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Same bad arguments

Jon Murphy is an assistant professor of economics at Louisiana’s Nicholls State University, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for the Liberty Fund’s EconLog, Murphy explained Adam Smith’s case for free trade and supplied new information to reinforce its prediction that protectionist policies are required to keep workers from being unsettled, victimized, and shafted by foreign competitors.

He drew two insights from decades of employment data, including a measure of “job security” that consists of initial weekly jobless claims as a percentage of the total employed population.

“First, from the 1980s to the present (with recessions excluded) the average percentage has been trending downward — suggesting that American workers are generally becoming more secure in their jobs,” wrote Murphy. “Even in the 2008 recession, the percentage was lower than during recessions in the 1970s and 80s.

“Second, major international trade deals, such as NAFTA (1994) and China joining the WTO (2000) did not affect job security levels in the aggregate. The general downward trend that starts in the 1980s is uninterrupted (except for recessions).

“If these trade deals really led to the devastation of American workers, as asserted by protectionists, we should expect to see some indication of that devastation in the data. But we do not. The increases we do see are tied to recessions, not trade policies.”

After answering several potential rejoinders from protectionists, Murphy circled back to where he started. “To refute every argument against international trade would require a book,” he concluded. “Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is a good starting point; he refuted protectionist arguments of his day, and protectionist arguments have not changed since the 1700s.”

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In the mix

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Noah Rothman chronicled the hostility exhibited by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and like-minded progressives not just to artificial intelligence but to a broad swath of technological innovations that would improve living standards for the very constituency they claim to champion: lower-income Americans.

Rothman, a senior writer at the magazine, offered the example of the data centers they so vociferously criticize. On net, these data centers not only enable AI development but also “reduce consumer power bills” by expanding electricity generation.

Fracking, off-shore drilling, nuclear power — in each case, Sanders and his allies have opposed new practices and technologies that ended up slashing costs and enhancing America’s economic competitiveness.

“Fortunately,” Rothman concluded, the country has “had the good sense to ignore Bernie” — so far.

• At The Hill, FreeCon signatory Aaron Rhodes warned that President Trump’s reduction of military pressure and overtures to reopen direct diplomacy with Kim Jong Un “downplay and legitimize North Korea’s assault on human rights standards all governments are morally obligated to respect.”

“Entering into negotiations with North Korea could frame the rogue state as simply another established nuclear power,” wrote Rhodes, formerly the executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and president of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe.

“A failure to call out North Korea’s humanitarian atrocities in the context of engagement on other issues implicitly corrupts standards that are vital to defending freedom and dignity everywhere.”

• At Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory and Duke University professor Michael Munger argued that Vice President J.D. Vance and other purveyors of the so-called new economics don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to Alexander Hamilton’s tariff record.

After describing the precarious fiscal position faced by the new American republic, Munger observed that “given the lack of national capacity, and the encumbrances of federalism, tariffs were the only administratively workable tax the young federal government had.” Hamilton’s case was “fiscal rather than protectionist.”

Most of the treasury secretary’s proposed tariffs were “too low to afford protection” precisely because they were designed to maximize revenue, Munger wrote.

“It is entirely fair to say that Hamilton, once concerned with British dominance, would today be concerned with China; that concern is a legitimate basis for targeted tariffs and subsidies in specific strategic sectors. But that is a very different proposition from espousing broad-based industrial policy or general tariffs for economic reasons — the argument Vance’s Hamiltonian framing suggests, and the one Hamilton’s own report does not support.”

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Among the hundreds of signatories to the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles — and the many thousands of other political leaders, thinkers, communicators, educators, litigators, and activists who advance our cause in their daily work — are many who call themselves “fusionists” or otherwise affirm the philosophical synthesis of liberty and virtue associated with the likes of Friedrich Hayek, Frank Meyer, and Ronald Reagan.

Other FreeCons describe their deeply held values and strongly preferred policies in different terms but still recognize fusionism as an essential feature of the Center-Right movement of which they are members.

It comes as no surprise, then, that so many Freedom Conservatives have reacted to the publication of Stephanie Slade’s new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right with excitement, appreciation, and approbation.

“Slade brilliantly and artfully tells the story” of the founding of the modern American Right and “offers brand new insights into the twentieth century,” raved FreeCon signatory and Hillsdale College professor Bradley J. Birzer. “I love it so much, I'm now reading it for a third time.”

Another signatory, University of Alabama professor George Hawley, observed that Slade’s book shows why fusionism remains “the clearest path out of our present impasse.”

Today we feature other reviews of Fusionism from Freedom Conservatives.

Sticky term

Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies and a FreeCon signatory.

In a review for The American Spectator of Stephanie Slade’s new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, Devine raved that Slade’s account of fusionism is “simply perfect in presenting what one needs to know about the political philosophy that produced post-World War II American conservatism, and what is required to revive it today.”

“Slade’s story starts by confronting the term ‘fusionism,’ a designation actually given to the movement by one of its opponents,” he wrote, “just as capitalism’s title had been given to it by communism’s Karl Marx. Fusionism’s philosophical founders preferred designations like ‘tension’ and ‘synthesis,’ but like the term capitalism, fusionism stuck.”

The author introduces Friedrich Hayek as a libertarian and Russell Kirk as a traditionalist, as if they were opposites, but later concludes that both were “in fact freedom and traditionalist fusionists,” Devine pointed out.

Slade “importantly distinguishes between political and philosophical fusionism,” he wrote. “What is clear philosophically is not necessarily so when synthesized into practice.”

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What is freedom for?

Mark Miller is the director of environment and natural resources litigation at the Pacific Legal Foundation. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a National Review piece about Stephanie Slade’s new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, Miller commends the author for describing “the central dispute on the American Right more clearly than anyone else has.”

Fusionism is “a philosophical synthesis developed in the 1950s and ’60s,” he wrote, “holding liberty and virtue together. The two sides of that synthesis began from different concerns. Classical liberals emphasized individual freedom, private property, free markets, limited government, and protection against concentrated political power. Traditionalists like Russell Kirk, on the other hand, emphasized religion, family, community, inherited wisdom, and the moral order.”

“Fusionism argued that these commitments were not rivals; virtue supplied the purposes for which freedom should be used.”

Miller explained that members of the so-called Dissident Right may be deeply misguided in their policy prescriptions but they do raise an issue that many young conservatives find salient: What is freedom for?

“Explaining why government planning and too many regulations are bad is not the same as explaining why economic freedom is good,” he wrote. “The modern fusionist argument increasingly stopped too soon. It became less adept at explaining what economic freedom allows people to build.”

“Slade’s answer, as the book’s title telegraphs, is a return to fusionism: Government must preserve the freedom by which virtue can be chosen. Families, churches, communities, and other voluntary institutions must then form individuals capable of using that freedom well.”

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Message vs. substance

John Hood is president of the Pope Foundation, a North Carolina-based grantmaker, and former writer for such organizations as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute. He is also co-founder of the Freedom Conservatism project.

In a recent Carolina Journal review of Stephanie Slade’s new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, Hood wrote that her “magisterial work describes the creation of modern American conservatism during the 20th century and the philosophical insight at its core — that our republic cannot survive without a strong commitment to both liberty and virtue.”

“I particularly appreciated the distinction Slade makes in her book between messaging and substance,” he continued. “In the American context, the job of conservatives is to conserve the principles of the Founding. These include the classical liberalism of individual freedom and legally enforceable rights as well as the classical republicanism of representative bodies, checks and balances, and civic virtue. ”

“An American Right seeking to conserve and apply these principles to modern-day problems would shrink deficits, not expand them; free the economy, not attempt to steer it; devolve power, not centralize it; and combat the grievance politics and other worse tendencies of modern progressivism, not mimic them.”

Leaders of the Dissident Right “certainly have adopted a rhetorical extremism” to “whip their base into an emotional froth,” Slade writes, but on substantive policy issues, they are “supremely flexible, even mushy.”

Hood agreed. “On economics, foreign policy, and the constitution,” he wrote, “they are certainly to my left, not my right.”

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More Slade

You can read excerpts of Fusionism at The Dispatch, Reason, and The Wall Street Journal.

Slade has also appeared on podcasts hosted by Freedom Conservatism signatories and allies. We commend to your attention, for example, this Saving Elephants interview by Josh Lewis, Slade’s appearance on the “Economist Next Door” podcast hosted by Paul Mueller, and a recent Liberty Fund podcast hosted by James M. Patterson.

From the latter:

“Now is a time for going back to first principles and rebuilding from the ground up,” Slade told Patterson, “because we have allowed that foundation to erode and because a whole generation has come of age not being asked to engage with these ideas.”

Instead, they have been given “a permission structure where you can use whatever weapons are at hand against your enemies and feel good about it.” They have been told this is “the only option, the only realistic approach to politics.”

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In the mix

• At The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Daniel Erspamer related the story of populist Louisiana political Huey Long’s rise and fall — and why current Vice President J.D. Vance ought not consider Long a role model for an American Right of the 21st century.

“Louisiana’s long-term malaise is the predictable outcome of a populist system that distrusts markets, concentrates power and treats economic growth as something to be redistributed rather than created,” wrote Erspamer, president of the Pelican Institute for Public Policy.

“Put simply, Huey Long-style populism doesn’t build a competitive economy. It takes money from families and job creators and wastes it. It fills boards and commissions based on political loyalty, not expertise. It leads to lawsuits that villainize employers. It drives investment and jobs to neighboring states like Texas.”

“Long’s genius was persuading people that concentrating power in his hands was the same as empowering them. A century later, Louisiana is still paying the bill for that con. The rest of America will get suckered, too, if it listens to would-be kings who promise what they can’t deliver.”

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory David Harsanyi wrote that despite claims to the contrary, Democratic leaders and candidates have not effectively distanced themselves from the antisemitic and socialist commentator Hasan Piker.

“The whole ‘Dems distance’ themselves campaign is part of an effort to save the candidacy of far-left Michigan senatorial hopeful and Piker buddy Abdul el Sayed, who keeps demanding reporters stop talking about the man he invited to his primary victory celebration,” wrote Harsanyi.

“If el Sayed is really ready to distance himself from Piker, a name he didn’t even use in his ‘distancing’ statement, he could provide the specific topics of disagreement. I doubt there are many.”

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“Liberty is indivisible,” we wrote in the FreeCon Statement of Principles, “and political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom.”

Neither the Progressive Left nor the Populist Right accepts this basic truth. They pretend that government management of an economy can occur without undermining enterprise, squandering resources, supplanting families and civil society, and corrupting the very politicians and institutions attempting to dictate the daily decisions of millions of producers and consumers.

“The free enterprise system is the foundation of prosperity,” we observed. “Americans can only prosper in an economy in which they can afford the basics of everyday life: food, shelter, health care, and energy.”

Voters this fall are likely to punish candidates of either party who dismiss concerns about affordability. That doesn’t make voters excessively materialistic or oblivious to social and spiritual concerns. What they understand — and what far too many National Conservatives and other populists don’t — is that strong families and healthy communities are difficult to form and sustain in the absence of robust economic growth and the dynamic innovation it requires.

Today we feature the work of Freedom Conservatives who emphasize the relationship between free enterprise and human flourishing.

A fight we must win

Jordan Ballor is executive director of First Liberty’s Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy. He is also a senior research fellow at the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for World magazine, Ballor argued that the fight to preserve free enterprise in America is essential to defending political and religious liberty, as well.

“John Witherspoon, exploring causes of the advocacy for American independence in 1776, pointed to the interrelationship of political, religious, and economic liberties,” Ballor wrote, citing Witherspoon’s observation that there was “not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage.”

Disputes over the role of government in society and markets are nothing new, he continued, and are clearly present on the American Right today. “These divides will only continue to sharpen and deepen as Trump enters the end of his final presidential term and the jockeying for leadership of a post-Trump GOP becomes more aggressive.”

“In many ways, this is the natural continuation of disputes that have erupted over the past decade of Trump’s ascendancy, which galvanized populist and nationalist sentiments among many of the president’s supporters. As the National Conservatism, or NatCon, movement grew, it was answered by the FreeCon, or Freedom Conservative, project (of which I am a signatory).”

“Never in American history has a fiscal situation so dire been paired with public attention to the challenge as attenuated as it is today,” Ballor concluded. “The need to address our public debt is absolutely urgent. And the single most important element of addressing our broader economic challenges effectively is the re-ignition and revival of American ingenuity, dynamism, and growth.”

“The central importance of political and religious liberty is certainly among the key lessons to take from America’s 250th birthday and apply to the future. But we must also recognize that economic freedom and prosperity are likewise foundational for our civic flourishing. And that means that the fight for free enterprise remains as important as ever—and it’s a fight we must win.”

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Crowding out civil society

Andrew Langer is the president of the Institute for Liberty, a frequent host on Baltimore’s WBAL and other stations, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for The Wall Street Journal, Langer described how Vice President J.D. Vance has misinterpreted the ideas and legacy of Alexander Hamilton in a misguided attempt to turn the American Right away from free-market principles.

“Hamilton’s prescriptions responded to the unique circumstances of a new nation burdened by Revolutionary War debt, dependent on foreign manufactures and lacking other reliable sources of federal revenue,” Langer wrote. “His tariffs were generally moderate and principally intended to raise revenue without suppressing imports—a far cry from President Trump’s sweeping protectionism.”

Vance has argued that free markets made sense decades ago in a culture dominated by “a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity” that imposed guardrails but that they no longer serve America well.

“That claim confuses the moral freedom of individuals with a particular religious or institutional order,” Langer wrote. “Markets don’t require comprehensive Christian guardrails. They require individual liberty, property rights, honest dealing, enforceable contracts and equal rules against force and fraud. These principles are compatible with Christianity, but they aren’t exclusively Christian. They allow people of different faiths—and no faith—to cooperate peacefully without agreeing on theology or a common conception of the good.”

Vance has the causation at least partially backward, Langer concluded. “Laissez-faire economics didn’t create the welfare state. It didn’t transfer responsibility for human needs from local communities to Washington. Over several generations, government programs assumed functions previously performed by families, churches, mutual-aid societies, fraternal organizations and local charities.”

“Government expansion didn’t single-handedly cause the decline of religious participation or civic life. But public provision frequently displaced voluntary provision. Americans increasingly looked to bureaucracies rather than to neighbors and communities for assistance.”

“Industrial policy, corporate subsidies, protective tariffs and government equity stakes won’t restore the habits of voluntary association. They will transfer additional power to the political institutions that crowded out civil society in the first place.”

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Not our fate

David McGarry is research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty, McGarry placed current fears about artificial intelligence and other innovations into a historical context. “Anxiety over technological development and its corollary, industrialization” have been “a routine feature in American history,” he observed.

“Americans strive to operate on and improve their world; innovation foments anxiety; anxiety is overcome as society and the law adjust sensibly to new conditions, preserving liberty, the seedbed of technological progress. In other words, previous bouts of innovation did not turn Americans toward socialism.”

Might today’s reactions to AI and the digital revolution turn out differently?

“Man does not, of course, live by GDP alone,” McGarry argued, and “homo economicus is a mythical creature in which no respectable economist believes. Indeed, many have become anxious because they believe artificial intelligence will create a new breed of human being—will bring about a de-evolutionary process, so to speak.”

But this need not be our fate. “Technological advance can be reversed only by the fall of civilization itself, but what is to be done with technology is a matter to be determined,” he concluded.

“Technological facts—and, for that matter, economic, geographic, climatic facts—mark us, even form us to some degree. But those who say such facts remove all choice, all agency, from individuals or nations or humanity itself” essentially “transform man into little more than a victim of time, place, and chance. What AI makes of us will largely be determined by what we choose to make of AI.”

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In the mix

• At Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory Juliana Geran Pilon asked whether the Democratic Socialists of America will succeed in overturning the country’s founding principles.

“DSA’s very name is a decoy,” wrote Pilon, a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the author of such books as The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom and An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left.

“Rolling in money and victorious in many cases at the ballot box, DSA is basking in its recent primary wins, effectively obliterating the Democratic Party, thereby unwittingly energizing Republicans who think they can win by default in November,” she wrote. “That optimism, however, may be premature.”

We can no longer afford to ignore “the cancer gnawing at America’s core,” she concluded. “Both socialism and antisemitism have started infecting the Republican Party. Blaming Democrats and specifically the DSA misses the point. The real question is whether America will turn against itself.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory John Puri reported the dismaying news that the Trump administration is considering a new round of import taxes on semiconductors that would severely hamper the capacity of American companies to compete in artificial intelligence.

“The proposed tariffs, as they so often are under this administration, will be used as a cudgel for government to funnel capital into favored pockets of the economy,” wrote Puri, the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at the magazine.

“Is there a word for this?”

• At the Foundation for American Innovation, FreeCon signatory Soren Dayton urged Congress to follow up on the Supreme Court’s 2024 Loper Bright decision by reclaiming the legislative branch’s authority.

Each congressional committee should “establish clear, templated language that signals the fact of a regulation, what it is for, and what its boundaries are,” wrote Dayton, director of the American Governance Policy Team at FAI. “Second, it should include in the committee report for a bill an inventory of what regulations the committee understands to be authorized by the bill.”

“In Congress, the doctrine, templates, and precedents are all sitting on the table. What the courts and the drafting offices cannot supply is the first committee willing to pick them up. Action comes first.”

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Nor is there any significant faction who conceives of the common good in purely material terms. Yes, access to food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and other necessities of life makes human flourishing possible. Abundance made it likelier. But fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness also depend on the intimacy of family, the vitality of community, and the practice of virtue.

Although self-styled “common good conservatives” may claim otherwise, we Freedom Conservatives are no less committed to the common good. “Neither individual liberty nor human flourishing is sustainable,” we say in our Statement of Principles, “outside a civil society of strong institutions that inculcate virtue, deter corruption, foster community, comfort the afflicted, and nourish the soul.”

The real distinction between FreeCons and our rivals is that, heeding the lessons of history and the wisdom of our Founders, we do not believe good intentions are a sufficient safeguard against the abuse of government power. Washington’s proper role is limited and constitutionally constrained. Even at the state and local level, government is best directed to protecting individual rights and financing public goods as traditionally defined — services that are non-exclusive and non-rivalrous — while enabling families, congregations, and private associations to perform their distinctive roles.

“Debates about the common good should not be framed as the common good versus the individual,” wrote our friend Dan Hugger of the Acton Institute. “Any honest grappling with the common good must include a serious commitment to the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person as a part of and not an obstacle to the realization of the common good.”

Today we feature the work of Freedom Conservatives who embrace this conception of the common good and government’s proper role in advancing it.

Image of God

Vladimir Snurenco is a research fellow at the Center for Social Flourishing at the Acton Institute and teaches economics at Calvin University. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for The Dispatch, Snurenco argued that even as academic institutions make a show of dismantling or trimming diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, there remains a need to offer a coherent alternative: Imago Dei in Latin, the concept that all human beings are made “in the image of God.”

This concept “grounds human dignity in our shared nature of being created by God,” he wrote. “In contrast, DEI emphasizes differences and drives divisions. At its core, Imago Dei puts dignity before difference. It speaks to what all human beings are, not to which group they belong.”

“A society built on merit alone may be efficient, but it may not be humane,” Snurenco continued. “DEI promised unity through managed inclusion, but in reality, it often produced fragmentation by turning differences into identities.”

Even those who do not share its theistic worldview “should want a society shaped by this moral logic,” he concluded, “because it protects the weak, limits the powerful, and insists that human dignity does not depend on usefulness, identity, achievement, or social approval.”

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Rank statism

David L. Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of the Bahnsen Group, where he oversees the management of over $4.5 billion in client assets. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent National Review piece, Bahnsen reacted to online debates among conservatives about government and the common good by making some essential distinctions.

“Those beating the common-good drum in 2026 are not the writers of The Federalist Papers or founders of the American experiment,” he observed. “Rather, they are think-tankers and postliberals who have magically had nothing to say about adultery, vulgarity, business corruption, or a variety of other violations of the common good that inconveniently sit in the Oval Office. In other words, power appears to be more of the agenda than a reclamation of virtue. Who could’ve guessed?”

“Asking the federal government to take on the role of common-good morality, manners, and virtues,” Bahnsen continued, “is a grotesque violation of jurisdiction and suitable silo. Using common-good language to rationalize some state intervention in the marketplace must contain a limiting principle, or it is better referred to by its other name: rank statism.”

“Fusionism was, is, and will be the best framework for reconciling and holding the tension between the moral order we want and need and the liberty and freedom an individual is granted by his or her Creator.”

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Material blessings

Paul D. Mueller is a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research as well as a research fellow and associate director of the Religious Liberty in the States project at the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent University Bookman review of a new work on Christian political economy co-written by fellow FreeCon Jordan J. Ballor, Mueller pointed out that “themes of wealth, poverty, and greed pervade early Christian writing about markets.”

“Some Christians see market activity as ancillary to the life of faith, others view it as deeply connected, even integral, to living faithfully,” he wrote. Ballor and coauthor Erik W. Matson have made a “valuable contribution” that “should be on any Christian’s shelf who wants to understand how Christians have thought about markets, trade, and wealth.

“Though no single or uniform view emerges, one finds that over time, Christians have largely embraced the insight that God extends material blessings far and wide through voluntary, decentralized exchange in the marketplace. This is not the sum of human flourishing, but it is a key component.”

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In the mix

• At The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory Ramesh Ponnuru urged GOP candidates to capitalize on Democratic endorsements of Medicare-for-all.

“Americans, for all their complaints about the health care system, generally dread the prospect of Washington disrupting their insurance,” wrote Ponnuru, the editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“At the start of that campaign, a poll found that two-thirds of Medicare-for-all supporters believed it would let people keep the health insurance they already had. More recent polling has found that most Americans like the idea in broad outlines but that only 29 percent had “some” or “a lot” of confidence in the federal government’s ability to administer it. Seventy percent said they’d prefer to stay with their current insurance.

“Perhaps Republicans should inform them that they wouldn’t have the choice.”

• At The Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Kimberly Ross profiled Amy Coney Barrett, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and someone political partisans seem desperate to mischaracterize and demean.

“Given her history so far, questions will linger as to whether she is conservative enough,” wrote Ross. “However, the real question should be whether she applies the law as written, even when doing so is politically inconvenient.

“Barrett’s legacy is likely to be mixed. She will certainly continue to surprise colleagues and Supreme Court observers alike going forward. But this is less about perceived failings or ideological pressures. The truth may be that onlookers of all political stripes seem to have forgotten what judicial independence is supposed to look like.”

• At Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory Steven Hayward analyzed progressive proposals to reform American government and concluded that they would “would likely cause greater instability in our already unstable politics.”

“To behold contemporary progressive attitudes toward the Constitution is to see what could be mistaken for clinical bipolar disorder,” wrote Hayward, a visiting professor at Pepperdine University. “On the one hand, a common refrain from the left today is that President Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Constitution. Yet in the very next breath, leading progressives will say: the Constitution stinks and should be changed wholesale.”

“Already there is great instability in four areas of policy directly traceable to our close partisan divide: energy policy, tax policy, and, to a lesser extent, health care policy and education policy. These four policy areas swing wildly today, depending on which party is temporarily ascendant. Let’s blow up the features that currently reflect, and protect, the undecided American mind and see how things go.”

• In the latest edition of Religion & Liberty, FreeCon signatory Brian Domitrovic reviewed a new Marxist-inflicted account of capitalism that “is not so much history but the arranging of history to fit a particular opinion about history.”

“Jeff Bezos’s building of Amazon from scratch gets half a sentence” in the book, wrote Domitrovic, a scholar at the Laffer Center. “With some other companies, it ‘arrived on the scene.’ We hear nothing of the new low-tax environment that enabled engineering talent to break away from legacy firms and create new enterprises that toppled old ones. This was the actual drama of capitalism in real life in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

“Instead of recounting such rich history, Capitalism gives us barbs about free-market theorists, which is to say merely an attempt at point-scoring in a professorial rivalry.”

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Many of these names will be familiar to you. They are former governors and members of Congress. They are longtime columnists for national newspapers and commentators on national networks. They are bestselling authors and popular podcasters. They are CEOs of prominent think tanks, activist group, and policy shops.

We’re proud to count them among our ranks. But Freedom Conservatism is a broad movement with goals that cannot be accomplished by a single election cycle, ballot referendum, or piece of legislation. Success will require building new institutions, reforming old ones, changing the incentive structure of politics and public policy, and revitalizing America‘s culture of freedom, virtue, community, and self-government.

It will, in short, take time. Fortunately, we also include among our ranks some of America’s most promising young activists, communicators, scholars, and leaders. FreeCons in their 20s, 30s, and 40s play key roles in our movement. They are challenging the socialist lurch among left-leaning young people as well as the populist lurch among right-leaning youth.

Today we feature some of their work.

Zoomer time

Aidan Grogan is an associate editor at City Journal, a senior contributor with Young Voices, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for Civitas Outlook, Grogan argued that his fellow members of Generation Z cannot afford to damage their country’s institutions and squander its legacy by embracing authoritarianism.

“From the Mamdani Left to the Groyper Right,” he wrote, “a growing number of young Americans have an appetite for collectivism and would dispense with foundational American principles such as the rule of law and economic freedom to advance their ideological vision. But as the United States contemplates its next quarter millennium, Gen Z must not take for granted the self-evident truths of our nation’s founding, lest we forfeit the rights, liberties, and opportunities we enjoy and exercise daily.”

“Many young Americans aren’t interested in the of compromise or civil discourse either,” Grogan observed. “Around 18- to 29-year-olds describe themselves as ‘extremely ideological,’ far surpassing older age cohorts, and believe political violence is sometimes acceptable. About of college students think it’s at least sometimes okay to shout down a speaker on campus.”

“Despite its historical and present-day flaws, America is the last best hope for freedom and the dignity of the individual,” he concluded. “Gen Z should be grateful and patriotic that it will inherit this free, prosperous nation that remains the envy of the world.

“As Zoomers assume leadership positions in business and government, they will face unprecedented challenges which will strain economic systems built upon models of endless population growth, along with mounting geopolitical tensions and realignments that may jeopardize America and its allies’ wealth, security, and global prestige. Overcoming these obstacles and sustaining the American way of life will require Gen Z to abandon its ideological silos and reaffirm its robust allegiance to liberty, the rule of law, and human dignity.”

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Suburbs are cool again

Russ Greene is senior advisor for public affairs and defense policy at Apex Path, executive director of the Prime Mover Institute, and a FreeCon signatory.

“Americans still believe the American dream is worth striving for,” Greene wrote in a recent article for The Free Press, “yet less than half believe that every American has the opportunity to achieve it.

He observed that many young Americans today “are trying to find their way toward a lifestyle their parents had that they took for granted and now feel they cannot reach as adults. That includes owning a home, having a good-paying job with benefits, and being able to afford some added comforts in addition to the necessities. In a word, suburbia.”

Greene called it an “extraordinary and ironic turn” that bourgeois suburban life has become the deepest desire of many young Americans. Still, if we want Americans to keep believing in the American dream, policymakers at all levels must “stop inhibiting young people’s suburban aspirations.”

“While Congress’s interest in housing reform this month is an encouraging sign, most of the regulations holding back the housing supply are imposed at the state and local level. Moreover, getting mortgage rates down sustainably will also require controlling the federal government’s deficit spending, for which Congress shows little appetite. And housing may even be a simpler problem to solve than modernizing the electrical grid or bringing down automobile costs.

“The Man once wanted to keep you locked in suburbia. Today, it feels like he’s locking you out.”

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Entrepreneurs, leave!

Jon Hartley is a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution and an assistant professor of economics at the UT-Austin School of Civic Leadership. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent op-ed for the New York Post, Hartley that Democratic activists in California have gone all in on a billionaire wealth tax even though prominent party leaders such as Gavin Newsom and Xavier Becerra oppose it.

“California’s wealthiest residents already generate enormous amounts of income tax revenue year after year,” he wrote. “If a one-time wealth tax causes even a modest number of them to relocate (and it has), the state will lose them as taxpayers. The ‘net present value’ of those losses may exceed the revenue generated by the tax itself. A policy advertised as raising money could ultimately leave California’s finances worse off.”

There is also “a broader question about what message California wants to send,” Hartley continued. “For generations, the state attracted entrepreneurs, investors, engineers and innovators from around the world. Silicon Valley became the global center of technological innovation because talented people believed California was the best place to build ambitious companies.

“That competitive advantage should not be taken for granted. Other states actively compete for investment, headquarters and high-skilled workers.”

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In the mix

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Christian Schneider called Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers an “electoral gangster” — and meant it as a compliment.

“Evers, a relatively moderate Democrat, stood up to the socialist wave overcoming his party, and he did so armed with only a soup ladle,” wrote Schneider. “Francesca Hong, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a backbencher in the state legislature, had shot to the front of the gubernatorial field, imperiling the Democrats’ chances of winning against Republican Representative Tom Tiffany in November.”

In order to stop Hong and face down the socialist wing of his party, Evers convinced Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who had dropped out of the race weeks before, to “reenter the contest and become the ‘establishment’ candidate.” Crowley then defeated Hong.

While “Republicans may be angry that the Democrats have a more viable candidate,” Schneider concluded, “there is something admirable in anyone who stands up to the creeping influence of socialism and expanded government control of our lives.”

• On Substack, FreeCon signatory Robert VerBruggen cited new research made possible by artificial intelligence that explores the relationship between shifts in cultural values and economic progress over the past millennium.

“The West — or at least the literate elite whose preoccupations are reflected in surviving, digitized books — gradually endorsed hierarchy and fear of the unknown less, and patience and autonomy more, over this time span,” Verbruggen wrote.

The study found that “as countries produced texts with a lower Innovation Wedge — less hierarchy and fear of the unknown, more patience and autonomy — they also tended to produce more future inventors and scientists” and predicted “nearby urbanization.”

• At The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory David Hebert rebutted the often-repeated claim that imports are bad for economic growth. While the calculation of gross domestic product requires subtracting the value of imports from the total, that is simply an accounting adjustment to avoid double-counting.

“GDP tabulates domestic production, but because directly measuring every U.S. factory’s and office’s output is difficult, the government approximates it by counting expenditures,” explained Hebert, a senior research fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research. “This includes household consumption, private investment, government purchases and exports. All of these spending categories, aside from exports, include purchases of both American and foreign goods.”

“The next time someone says the trade deficit is weighing down American growth, ask why imports are subtracted. If he demurs, you’ll know you’re talking to someone who is reading the scoreboard upside down.”

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Philip Magness laid out the Trump administration’s new legal strategy for defending what is not, in reality, a significantly different strategy of levying punitive taxes on imports.

“Since ‘Liberation Day’ on April 2, 2025, the administration has pivoted from statute to statute for its tariff-of-the-month club to prolong its illegal regime of taxing imports,” wrote Magness, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, with coauthor Marc Wheat of Advancing American Freedom. “Many of its claims have been inconsistent and contrary to well-established economic history.”

“If Congress or the courts do not reiterate that the power to tax, and therefore impose tariffs, belongs exclusively to Congress, the economy will suffer, and the public will continue to pay the costs.”

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• “Reducing the cost of living through competitive markets, greater individual choice, and free trade with free people.”

• “Building a constructive reform agenda that can restore America’s fiscal sustainability, ensuring that future generations inherit a more prosperous and secure nation than the one we now inhabit.”

• “Expanding opportunity for those who face challenges due to past government restrictions on individual and economic freedom.”

On other policy issues, Freedom Conservatives agree on the ends but not necessarily on the best means to pursue them. Among our hundreds of signatories, for example, you’ll find differences of opinion about child tax credits, monetary and crypto policy, Medicare and Medicaid reforms, and antitrust enforcement.

And on two potentially divisive subjects, immigration and foreign policy, the Freedom Conservatism statement explicitly recognizes inherent tensions and inevitable tradeoffs. “Immigration is a principal driver of American prosperity and achievement,” we wrote, while also observing that the United States “has the right to secure its borders and design a rational immigration policy—built on the rule of law—that advances the interests and values of American citizens.”

Regarding international affairs, we wrote that “American foreign policy must be judged by one criterion above all: its service to the just interests of the United States” and that “Americans are safest and freest in a peaceful world, led by the United States, in which other nations uphold individual liberty and the sovereignty of their neighbors.”

Not surprisingly, signatories express a range of opinions about how best to turn these statements into policy prescriptions. Today we feature several such FreeCon viewpoints.

Market-based system

An immigrant from Venezuela, Daniel Di Martino is the founder of the Dissident Project and a Manhattan Institute fellow who writes for such publications as USA Today, Newsmax, the New York Post, and The Daily Wire. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for the Washington Examiner, Di Martino offered a conservative case for using market mechanisms to reform U.S. immigration policy. Some key passages:

A serious conservative immigration agenda should do what we demand of every other sphere of public policy. This is what a market-based immigration approach would do: cut back on luck and family ties and instead prioritize the economic and cultural interests of the United States by selecting immigrants who would contribute most to the economy and who also happen to assimilate best into American culture.

***

The federal government issues approximately 1 million green cards to immigrants annually, giving them the right to reside here permanently and to apply for naturalization after five years. Over a third of green cards go to the spouses and children of citizens and permanent residents. Over 1 in 7 go to the aging parents of citizens, immigrants who arrive at the end of their working lives rather than the start, and with little education and English proficiency. The rest is dominated by extended relatives, refugees, and winners of a “diversity” lottery that selects for country of origin rather than contribution. Only roughly 1 in 8 immigrants are chosen on the basis of skills or a job, and that figure includes their own spouses and children.

A market-based conservative approach to immigration should look at this selection and see an enormous missed opportunity. We are running one of the most consequential selection systems on Earth almost on autopilot, letting family ties and luck do the choosing that merit and need should do. Imagine instead a system built to ask, for every visa, a simple question: Will this person, over a lifetime, add more to America than they take? Prioritize workers over dependents, the founders who build companies, the scientists and physicians, and tradespeople who pay far more in taxes than they draw in benefits, over adding more retirees or low-paid workers.

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Dreamers and permits

Merrill Matthews is an opinion contributor at The Hill, Texas state chair of Our Republican Legacy, and a FreeCon signatory.

He co-authored On the Edge: America Faces the Entitlements Cliff and contributed chapters to several books.

In a recent column for The Hill, Matthews laid out a conservative strategy for immigration reform. Some key points:

• “Immigration reform needs to be bipartisan. The issue is too politically fraught to push through something every Democrat opposes. That means Democrats have to get something politically out of it, even if Republicans aren’t wild about the concessions.”

• President Trump should “put on the table a path to citizenship for so-called ‘Dreamers’ — those who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. In his first term, Trump twice offered to create a path to citizenship for these residents, brought to the U.S. illegally as children, if Democrats would fund his border wall. Democrats said no both times.”

• “Congress needs to create a functioning immigrant-worker program, where immigrants register and legally work. The country and especially the economy need them. Congress could start by creating a private or public-private organization charged with vetting and approving worker applicants. The organization could do the background checks and cover its costs by charging applicants several thousand dollars for, say, a two- or three-year work permit, allowing immigrants to fill jobs most citizens aren’t willing to do.”

• “What about those who have been in the country illegally for years? Congress would have three choices: let them stay where they are and apply for the work permit, have them pay a fine in addition to the work-permit application fee, or make them leave the U.S. and then apply.”

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Ideals are realistic

Paul D. Miller is a professor of the practice and co-chair for Global Politics and Security at Georgetown University’s School of Public Service. He is also the General Hugh Shelton Visiting Chair in Ethics at the US Army’s Command and General Staff College Foundation at Ft. Leavenworth, an editor-at-large for Providence, a research fellow with the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, and a FreeCon signatory.

His books include Choosing Defeat: The Twenty-Year Saga of How America Lost Afghanistan, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong With Christian Nationalism, Just War and Ordered Liberty, and American Power and Liberal Order.

In a recent essay for The Catalyst, Miller argued that any “America First” approach to foreign policy worth pursuing by conservatives must marry the judicious use of power with the country’s noblest ideas and aspirations. Here are the opening and closing passages of the piece:

The free world is the outer perimeter of American security, an engine of American prosperity, and a megaphone for American influence. U.S. foreign policy should aim to preserve, protect, and defend the free world.

That may sound obvious. That is because it was obvious to most U.S. voters and policymakers from 1945 to 2016. Even well before World War II, many American leaders envisioned the United States as an “Empire of Liberty” (in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase) and a proverbial city on a hill whose moral example meant something on the world stage.

That consensus has collapsed over the past decade. For the first time in generations, it is now necessary to make the case for U.S. leadership of the free world. Americans should still embrace a foreign policy that defends U.S. interests and U.S. values alike, that supports free trade with free nations and cooperative security with fellow democracies. U.S. foreign policy works best when it rests on the premise that American power and American idealism go hand in hand.

***

Democracies don’t fight one other, they don’t export terrorism, and they don’t conquer and annex territory. Instead, they free their people to innovate, trade, and prosper, and they trade together, collaborate together, and converge on a common view of the world. The most obvious truth of foreign policy, the one that should serve as the polestar for U.S. grand strategy, is that the spread of democracy is good for American interests.

The pro-democracy agenda is also achievable and realistic, despite what some self-styled realists say. When Jefferson wrote of “self-evident” truths, they were only evident to him and a select few elites in British and American society. Today, about half the world is governed by those ideals, and the rest wishes it was. The only people who dislike liberty and equality are the self-interested rich men who hail from a ruling tribe. Everyone else – women, the poor, ethnic and religious minorities, and rich ruling men with a conscience – understand that accountable governance is their best shot at decent government. There is nothing uniquely Western about not wanting to be oppressed. As President Reagan said in 1982, “Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.”

That idea has foreign policy implications. The United States has been, and should remain, on the side of legitimate, accountable governments that respect human dignity and protect human liberty and equality. Washington should deal with everyone as necessary, but it should align itself and its power with those that see the world the way Americans do.

The highest calling of statesmanship, as the ethicist Paul Ramsey once wrote, is to align the national interest with the international common good, insofar as is possible. When the two align, there is no tradeoff between what is good and what is strategic, between what is just and what is pragmatic, or between what is right and what is selfish. Using American power to uphold ordered liberty among nations – democracy, capitalism, and collective security – is how the United States aligns its interests with the international common good. An unfree world is unsafe for the United States; an unfree world is a poorer world for the United States. If we truly want to put “America First,” the most effective way to do that is to preserve and uphold the free world that the United States built and from which all Americans benefit.

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Limits are prudent

Henry Nau is professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and a FreeCon signatory.

His books include Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan (2015) and Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas (2018).

In the following piece written for FreedomConservatism.org, Nau argued that the Trump administration ought to adopt more limited objectives in Iran and the rest of the region:

There is no doubt that Trump has moved the conservative consensus on foreign policy to the right. President Reagan had to keep the Rockefeller and Goldwater Republicans on board, but he never had to deal with a “never Trumper” revolt on the left or a MAGA movement on the right.

After Reagan won the Cold War, America got “a brief holiday from history,” that is, until 9/11 sparked fear and forever wars. Afghanistan and Iraq then tested the limits of freedom in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. There were no limits. We aimed for “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” And eventually we abandoned those interventions.

The same may happen again if we don’t set limits on America’s exceptionalism. Where do we see those limits? Henry Kissinger once asked, is Iran a cause or a country? But the same can be asked of any country that claims exceptionalism. Is the US or Israel a cause or a country?

The easy answer is both. The hard answer is in what measure. In Europe and a lesser extent Asia (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), we want a balance of power (country) “that advances freedom” (cause). Why? Because freedom is strong in these regions and has a reasonable chance of being strengthened and expanded.

The same is not the case in the Middle East. Israel is the only democracy in the region and freedom is not appealing to other societies. We have little chance of converting Persian Muslim zealots (Iran) to democracy.

If over the next several years we stabilize the region by a durable balance of power (Israel, US and moderate Arab states containing Iran and militant terrorism), maybe prospects for democracy will improve. But if in the meantime we lock horns indefinitely with Iran and retrench in Europe and Asia, those prospects clearly vanish.

Trump seems to be “all-in” in all three regions, except when he chastises allies and threatens to leave NATO. He will have to set priorities and define limits. In my view that means Ukraine first, China and South Korea/Taiwan second, and Iran/ME third.

Ironically, his nationalism has run amuck and become an “indiscriminate” internationalism. And I haven’t even mentioned Greenland.

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In the mix

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Noah Rothman observed that the problematic renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool now qualifies as a “serious scandal.”

“The president’s critics were right all along,” wrote Rothman, “the pool wasn’t a victim of sabotage but, rather, a ‘botched installation.’ Now they tell us! Too late, however, to prevent innocent people from being prosecuted.”

“This isn’t just a political scandal. It’s a genuine controversy in which elementary good governance hangs in the balance. All and only so that Trump wouldn’t have to admit that the paint really was peeling.”

• At The Washington Times, FreeCon signatory Steve Moore took issue with Vice President J.D. Vance’s claim that “American economic policy on the right is now more Alexander Hamilton than it is Milton Friedman” and that “that’s obviously a good thing.”

“That is not so obvious to those who value limited government,” wrote Moore, the co-founder of Unleash Prosperity.

“What is so odd is that Mr. Vance wants more federal control at a time when the Republican model in red states is flourishing and blue states are melting down. The only way the Left can win with its set of invasive economic policies is to centralize the power structure and minimize the competition among states. The Vance model would enable that outcome.”

• In the latest edition of the journal Social Philosophy and Policy, FreeCon signatory Emmett McGroarty argued that “without democracy, capitalism’s inculcation of virtue in the person is incomplete.”

“Imbued with an outward-looking disposition, the market agent is encouraged to suppress individualism and selfishness and instead embrace a mission of service to society,” wrote McGroarty, executive director of Belmont Abbey College’s Belmont House on Capitol Hill, along with coauthor (and brother) Brendan McGroarty. “Government centralization, particularly the usurpation of local power, has negative consequences which affect commercial society, impairing the moral formation of the market agent and the worker.”

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FreeCons defend free enterprise, free trade, and limited government. We champion fiscal responsibility, the rule of law, equal protection, and the federalist principle of devolving as much power as possible to states, localities, communities, and families. We oppose business subsidies, oppressive regulation, and the administrative state. On potentially divisive issues such as foreign policy and immigration, we advocate prudence and constructive engagement.

The final plank of the FreeCon statement discusses freedom of conscience. “Essential to a free society,” we wrote, “is the freedom to say and think what one believes to be true. Under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, federal and state governments have a legal obligation to uphold and protect these freedoms. Private institutions have a moral obligation to do the same.”

Conservatives have long rebutted attacks on free speech, religious liberty, and other fundamental rights from the Progressive Left. Increasingly, we are now compelled to fend off similar attacks from the Populist Right.

Peter Biles, an author and Young Voices contributor currently pursuing a doctoral degree in English at Oklahoma State University, clarified the stakes in a recent Washington Examiner op-ed.

Given abuses by both the Biden and Trump administrations — in the latter case using subpoenas, licensing regulations, antitrust actions, and other means to retaliate against unfriendly media — Biles urged conservatives to remind their fellow Americans that “free speech is a non-negotiable for a thriving republic. The Freedom Conservatism statement, supported by many prominent signatories, makes a point of prioritizing our cherished First Amendment, offering a tangible path to first principles that both address contemporary concerns and uphold timeless American ideals.”

Conservatives “shouldn’t unilaterally submit to a charismatic leader or a single political party,” he concluded. “We should strive to conserve the right for every citizen to speak their minds freely.”

Today we feature the work of Freedom Conservatives who seek to defend constitutional rights and freedom of speech.

Unnecessary choice

Casey Mattox is vice president for legal and judicial strategy at Stand Together and a FreeCon signatory.

Over his legal career, Mattox has focused on defending the First Amendment rights of students, faculty, families, healthcare workers and religious organizations. He has litigated in 35 states and also testified before congressional committees.

In a recent essay for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, he argued that colleges and universities are putting freedom of association in grave danger.

A 2010 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court treated this freedom as “a second-tier right,” Mattox wrote, forcing student groups to “choose between equal access to a university speech forum or their freedom of association.”

“If they want to speak like other groups on campus, the Court decided, universities can require student groups to give up the most essential aspect of freedom of association — the ability of a group to decide who speaks for it. Student groups could be forced to choose one First Amendment right or the other.”

In response, some administrators have “tried to use this new power against unfavored (often conservative and faith-based) student groups.” To prevent such crises, at least 16 states have enacted laws to protect student association on public university campuses. Congress should follow suit, Mattox concluded.

“From Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty, and for 250 years hence, Americans have worked with one another to improve their communities and keep the republic. Congress can help to insure this spirit remains alive on campus, inspiring the next generation to form their own communities and practice this distinctly American form of civic life.”

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Enforce neutral rules

Ilya Shapiro is senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a FreeCon signatory. He is also the author of, among other books, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court and Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites.

During recent testimony before the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Shapiro chronicled the grotesque treatment of Jewish students on American campuses and explained the difference between protected speech and illegal conduct.

“The problem is selective rules enforcement,” he wrote. “I’ve spent my career defending offensive, unpopular, and even ugly speech. Students must be free to criticize Israel, U.S. foreign policy, or anything else. But there’s no First Amendment right to block Jewish students from campus spaces, urinate on Hillels, occupy buildings, shut down classes, vandalize property, or otherwise create a hostile educational environment based on shared ancestry.”

“Civil rights and free speech are not opposing values. Neutral rules, consistently enforced, protect both Jews and everyone else.”

“Antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine because it reveals which institutions still believe in their own rules,” Shapiro concluded. “A university that can’t condemn the slaughter of Jews without consulting an intersectional matrix has lost its moral bearings. A law school that can’t distinguish protected speech from targeted harassment has failed at its most basic pedagogical task. And a bureaucracy that sees Jews as too privileged to count has forfeited any claim to the word ‘inclusion.’”

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Orwellian database

Richard Morrison is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, host of the Free the Economy podcast, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for National Review, Morrison warned that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Consolidated Audit Trail, which he described an “Orwellian database of every stock and option transaction,” poses a significant threat to civil liberties protected by the First Amendment.

“Investment choices may not be as obviously expressive conduct as writing a newspaper op-ed or protesting in front of a government building,” Morris wrote, but an SEC commissioner has admitted that “economic transactions offer a window into a person’s deepest thoughts and core values” and “are a rich form of value expression.”

Moreover, “maintaining a giant database full of information on millions of presumptively innocent Americans” impinges on key Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections and “presents significant cybersecurity problems.”

The SEC staff has “now received hundreds of comment letters” to inform a “comprehensive review” of the Consolidated Audit trail,” Morrison explained. “When the staff is done with its analysis, they should do the right thing: Shut down CAT entirely.”

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In the mix

• At the Orange County Register, FreeCon signatory Ed Tarnowski mourned the diminishing ranks of pro-tech Democrats who once served to promote the party’s “stated priorities” of job creation, infrastructure investment, and widespread prosperity.

Many of today’s Democratic leaders and activists express deep skepticism about artificial intelligence and the data centers required to fuel them, in ways that “threaten to smother most facets of the digital economy,” wrote Tarnowski, a resident fellow with the R Street Institute’s technology and innovation team, along with his R Street colleague Adam Thierer.

“Lawmakers in progressive states like California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and New Jersey are advancing heavy-handed AI regulations. If even a fraction of these bills become law, this growing regulatory patchwork will restrain innovation and tie smaller firms in red tape.”

• At Law & Liberty, Rachel Lu reviewed a recently released book, Why Postliberalism Failed, by fellow FreeCon signatories James Patterson and Thomas Howes.

“Postliberalism is unpromising for reasons that go far beyond the misbehavior of particular online influencers,” wrote Lu, a senior editor at Law & Liberty and a contributing writer at America magazine and National Review. “It seems to draw most of its energy from a kind of reactionary rage, directed indiscriminately at everything displeasing in modern life.”

“Contemporary postliberals both resemble, and draw extensive material from, historical movements that collaborated with brutally repressive twentieth-century regimes,” she continued. “Patterson and Howes show how postliberals have flirted with many of the same repressive ideas that these earlier groups embraced (for instance, wanting to punish Protestants for defying Church authority, or calling for the disenfranchisement of Jews, Muslims, and women).”

“The authors aren’t paranoid. Contemporary postliberalism really is drawing energy from the same wells that once watered clerical fascism, and for many, this appears to be a very intentional choice.”

• At Lyceum, FreeCon signatory Scott Rasmussen punctured the myth that large numbers of American voters are embracing socialism as a practical solution to the country’s problems.

“The political class and America are two nations separated by a common language,” wrote Rasmusssen, founder of the Napolitan Institute and co-founder of ESPN. “Socialism means one thing in the world of Bernie Sanders and AOC; it means something quite different among the nation’s voters.

“Among voters with a favorable view of socialism, 74% also have a favorable view of free markets. Not only that, but only a third — 34% — of those who say they like socialism think more regulation and government involvement are good for the economy.

“Those views make absolutely no sense to those who adhere to the textbook definition of socialism. However, in popular culture, the meanings of words often shift and bear little resemblance to textbook definitions.”

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As a rhetorical device, the “what time it is” trope is intended to silence dissent. They believe, apparently sincerely, that the American republic is so decadent and precarious that, like Weimar Germany, it is about to give way to something else.

Will the next regime be run by a progressive movement devoted to woke ideology, radical deconstruction of America’s civic republicanism, and greater government control of the economy? Or will it be run by a nationalist-populist movement devoted to culture-war ideology, radical deconstruction of America’s classical liberalism, and greater government control of the economy?

Neither, say Freedom Conservatives—not if we have anything to say about it. We reject both options. Indeed, we reject the entire premise that our country is in any way analogous to Weimar Germany or other failed regimes of the past.

The United States faces many serious problems. FreeCons have been at the forefront of analyzing these challenges, proposing serious policy responses to them, and (especially at the state and local levels) enacting those policies into law.

But nothing about today’s policy challenges justifies abandoning America’s founding principles of limited government, free enterprise, the separation of powers, the rule of law, or the devolution of power to communities, families, and other private associations of civil society.

Freedom Conservatives seek to keep the American Right from lurching towards populism. As today’s featured FreeCons demonstrate, however, we also seek to keep the American Left from wreaking its own form of havoc on our country’s economic and social institutions.

Market miracles

Tiana Lowe Doescher is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner, an on-air contributor for “The First” on Pluto TV, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a remarkable new piece for the Examiner, she narrated a harrowing personal experience that reinforced the wonders of market innovation, the protections of America’s rule of law, and the risks posed to both by progressive schemes to expand government control.

After her daughter Anastasija was born premature and both patients required significant medical attention, Doescher reflected on the much-higher rates of infant and maternal mortality that previous generations endured.

“America is the greatest nation known to man for the bevy of founding principles beyond its colossal wealth — equality, liberty, private property, speech protections, and so on — but it is indeed exceptional for its wealth in ways that we often don’t appreciate,” she wrote.

“America’s greatness, both its founding principles and the wealth and power that those principles created, go beyond mere individual convenience.”

“First and foremost, I thank God for bringing Annie and me home safely,” Doescher concluded. “But I also thank America — including the imperfect health insurance cartel, our ruthless capitalism, messy melting pot, and all — for saving our lives.”

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New feudalism

Gary Frankel serves as editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He a former regional leader at Young Voices, a former reporter for Chalkboard Review, and a current signatory to the FreeCon Statement of Principles.

In a recent Martin Center essay entitled “The New Feudalism,” Frankel described how the mostly left-wing administrators and faculty who run American colleges and universities accidentally recreated a medieval hierarchy within academia.

The problem isn’t that so many academics “are merely rude, or that insecurity is simply one of the negative trade-offs of a proper life of the mind,” he wrote. “The problem is that this poor behavior has a structure and logic governed by academia’s obsession with credentials.

“In this respect, degrees, titles, and interactions with ‘prestigious’ institutions play the same role that bloodlines and courtly prestige did in medieval Europe. They mediate all interactions, tightly regulate the social order, and aim to prevent any disruptions from malcontents or free thinkers.”

“This state of affairs produces a vicious irony—the people most vocally committed to dismantling all sorts of social and institutional hierarchies have created what is perhaps the most rigid status hierarchy in contemporary American life,” Frankel continued. “And while the arbitrariness and structure of the medieval aristocracy were widely known, academia (despite the DEI industrial complex’s explicit rejection of meritocracy) uses a meritocratic self-justification for this system that makes it difficult to understand and challenging to correct.”

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Huge gift

A former deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to former President George W. Bush, Karl Rove is now a Wall Street Journal columnist, Fox News contributor, and FreeCon signatory.

In a recent column for the Journal, Rove explored the rising importance of the Democratic Socialists of America within the Democratic Party coalition.

The DSA platform of “public ownership” of large swaths of what is now the private sector, along with wacky positions on such issues as public safety and health care, would be “economically impossible to achieve,” he wrote, and do tremendous damage to the country’s constitutional system and governing traditions.

In addition, the platform “doesn’t mention terrorist regimes or anti-American dictators,” he pointed out. “You’ll search in vain to read who slaughtered 1,100 people in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, or who invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.”

“The DSA platform is a huge gift for Republicans if they focus on its substance,” Rove concluded. “For Democrats, it’s a real threat—but also an opportunity. Wise Democrats will define themselves by what they’re against—not only Mr. Trump but also the hard-core socialists in their midst. Democrats need to find the courage to say that the DSA is a wrecking ball that threatens to destroy both the party and America.”

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Hollywood babble

Ashley Baker is the executive director of the Committee for Justice and a FreeCon signatory.

An expert on judicial confirmations, Baker is an active member of the Federalist Society, where she serves as a member of the Regulatory Transparency Project’s Cyber & Privacy working group. Her writing has appeared in Fox News, USA Today, The Boston Globe, The Hill, RealClearPolitics, and elsewhere.

In a recent piece for the Washington Examiner, she argued that a lawsuit by Democratic attorneys general to block Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery misreads the facts, both about antitrust policy and about the movie business.

“Paramount has committed to maintaining both studios, releasing at least 30 theatrical films a year, and guaranteeing a 45-day theatrical window before video-on-demand,” Baker wrote. “And since Skydance took over last August, Paramount has nearly doubled its slate from eight films to 15. These commitments mean more production days, more crews, more stages booked, more location spending — precisely what the unions say they want protected, and the only real medicine for what ails Hollywood: too few movies worth leaving the house for.”

“Courts should weigh evidence, not rhetoric,” she concluded. “An industry that has lost half its audience in a generation needs no protection from more movies.”

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In the mix

• At The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Donald Boudreaux rebutted populist claims that Alexander Hamilton was a full-throated protectionist who would have supported the Trump administration’s trade policies.

“It’s true that Hamilton endorsed some elements of the infant-industry argument for tariffs,” wrote Boudreaux and coauthor Phil Gramm, “but he did so because American industry then was indeed in its infancy. America today occupies a completely different position, with productivity per manufacturing worker in the U.S. about 10 times as great as in China, U.S. capital markets as large as the rest of the world combined, and America now in its second century of dominating innovation and technological development.

“The conditions that led Hamilton to support tariffs have long since disappeared. He never saw protection of domestic manufacturing as a long-term policy but rather insisted that ‘continuance of bounties on manufactures long established must almost always be of questionable policy.’”

• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Jessica Riedl explained that the federal government’s broken budget process has produced gross fiscal irresponsibility and grave economic risk.

“In a city allergic to hard choices, it is absolutely vital to maintain a budget process that at least sets a framework for responsible decision-making and imposes guardrails that only supermajorities can waive,” wrote Riedl, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“The chaos we have seen—lurching from government shutdowns to debt-limit standoffs to trillion-dollar Christmas-tree bills that no lawmakers have read—is not merely embarrassing. It is expensive: The collapse of the budget architecture has yielded the steepest budget deficits among the 38 countries the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.”

• At Law & Liberty, FreeCon signatory Tyler Syck reviewed three novels of Robert Harris that relate the life story of the Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero.

“The Harris narrative shows that as maddening and corrupt as politics may be, it is the only avenue through which meaningful political change is likely to be effected,” wrote Syck, an assistant professor of politics and the director of the Center for Public Service at the University of Pikeville. “For every evil, scheming, would-be tyrant, the book introduces us to at least one well-meaning but naïve individual with little to no ability to navigate the choppy waters of political reality.”

“The story of Cicero offers us both greatness to aspire to and mistakes to learn from,” he observed, “all of which is the greatest gift any work of history (fictional or scholarly) can offer. After all, what is the point of history if not to serve as a moral guide to future generations?”

• At The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory Ramesh Ponnuru argued that the Populist Right’s turn against Supreme Court associate justice Amy Coney Barrett makes no sense.

“Even if conservatives were to judge her on the basis of how frequently she frustrates their policy objectives,” wrote Ponnuru, the editor of National Review, “she is nothing like Anthony M. Kennedy, a Republican appointee who often voted with the liberal justices on cases involving abortion, gay rights and the environment. Nor is she like David Souter, another Republican appointee, who voted with liberals on, well, everything.”

“You don’t have to agree with all of Barrett’s jurisprudence to recognize that she is, one, thinking about the law in a way that conservatives have championed for decades, and two, helping the court deliver one victory after another, both in legal and policy terms, for the right. Her opinions reflect a calm and fair-minded evaluation of the facts and arguments before her. Her right-wing critics obviously labor under no such constraints.”

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Dismayed by the twin threats of nationalist populism on the Right and socialist progressivism on the Left, more and more leaders are joining our ranks every week. Among them are professors at American colleges and universities who teach undergraduate and graduate students, write books and monographs, testify before congressional and legislative bodies, and pen commentaries for newspapers, magazines, and online outlets.

FreeCon signatories currently hold positions on such campuses as Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, North Carolina State, Princeton, Florida State, Tennessee, Tulane, Cornell, Clemson, George Washington, Southern Methodist, Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Western Carolina, Ball State, William & Mary, Liberty, Catholic, George Mason, Ave Maria, Hillsdale, and Grove City.

Today we spotlight new signatories who bring their own distinctive voices, experience, and expertise to the Freedom Conservatism movement.

Extraordinary danger

Paul D. Miller is a professor of the practice and co-chair for Global Politics and Security at Georgetown University’s School of Public Service. He is also the General Hugh Shelton Visiting Chair in Ethics at the US Army’s Command and General Staff College Foundation at Ft. Leavenworth, an editor-at-large for Providence, a research fellow with the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, and a FreeCon signatory.

Miller’s distinguished career in public service includes such roles as director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff, intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, and military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army.

His books include Choosing Defeat: The Twenty-Year Saga of How America Lost Afghanistan, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong With Christian Nationalism, Just War and Ordered Liberty, and American Power and Liberal Order.

In a recent piece for The Dispatch, Miller discussed the origins and implications of “MAGA Christianity” and other uses of religious faith in nationalist-populist rhetoric and activism.

“MAGA Christianity is a political-religious movement with extraordinary power and appeal,” he wrote, “yet it is also a movement with a strong and rising chorus of critics from both within and outside professing Christianity. Though some do, not all critics argue in bad faith, from anti-religious bigotry, or from the progressive left. Some are coming from sincere love for fellow believers, and ‘faithful are the wounds of a friend.’”

“As a political scientist, I fear MAGA Christianity is a movement that holds extraordinary danger for the American republic. But more importantly, as a Christian, I fear that if you are in this movement and feel no discomfort whatsoever, it is a movement that holds extraordinary danger for your immortal soul.”

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Tech dominance

James Hartley is professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College and a FreeCon signatory.

At the college, he has served as interim executive director of its professional and graduate education division, the director of first year seminars, and chair of the economics department. His books include The Representative Agent in Macroeconomics, Real Business Cycles: A Reader and Mary Lyon: Documents and Writings.

In a recent Law & Liberty review of the book Why Democracy Needs the Rich, Hartley wrote that “the argument that the rich have too much political power is an argument that political power should instead be wielded by the influential people in the moral-cultural order who hold ‘correct’ views on the issues of the day.

“If George Soros funds my favorite ideas, there is no problem, but if Elon Musk funds ideas different from mine, it is an existential threat, not to democracy, but to achieving what I want to achieve. The New Right is falling into exactly the same pattern.”

In another book review, this one for Civitas Outlook, Hartley suggested that Mehran Gul’s The New Geography of Innovation should remind Americans that reports of the death of their country’s dominance in technological innovation have been exaggerated.

“In modern America, immigration and a cultural exaltation of risk-taking leading to high wealth are both under threat,” he wrote. “Will America continue to be willing to accept the large inflow of migrants hoping to make it big in Silicon Valley? Will America continue to celebrate the wealthy technological titans who have shaped the world?

“Given the critiques now coming from both sides of the political aisle on exactly these two things, it is not hard to imagine a future where America sacrifices its technological advantages in the service of reshaping society. But before destroying the sources of American technological dominance, perhaps we should consider what would happen if the U.S. finds itself envying technological advances happening elsewhere.”

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Countering ambition

James Huffman is professor and dean emeritus at Lewis & Clark Law School. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

The author of American Factions: How the US Constitution Can End Extreme Partisanship, Huffman has served as a visiting professor at Auckland University in New Zealand, the University of Oregon, the University of Athens in Greece and Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala. He currently serves as a trustee of the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation and on the board of the Property and Environment Research Center.

In a recent essay for Law & Liberty, Huffman argued that while majority rule was a key principle for the American Founders, and continues to be an essential element of American self-government, democracy is a broader concept — and the Founders also established and defended counter-majoritarian institutions to guard against abuses.

“The founding generation aspired to a virtuous population of informed citizens who would be as concerned for their fellow citizens and the public good as for their own interests,” he wrote. “But they understood human nature and did their best to, in Madison’s words, write a Constitution in which ‘ambition … [is] made to counter ambition.’”

If at any given time a majority is empowered to rule “without constraint,” he continued, “Congress abandons compromise, judicial invalidation of liberty-infringing legislation becomes abuse of judicial power, the president claims unlimited authority as if he were a king, dissent becomes un-American, and everything can be turned upside down at the next election.

“The democracy of the US Constitution is not one of simple majority rule. Rather, it is designed to protect liberty and prevent tyranny by making it difficult for a minority or a majority to abuse the powers of government.”

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Extraordinary liberty

David C. Rose is CEO of The American Civics Academy and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

Author of The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior and Why Culture Matters Most, both from Oxford University Press, Rose writes frequently on such topics as behavioral economics, political economy, and organization theory.

In a recent piece for Civitas Outlook, he described the origins of the “extraordinary level of liberty” enjoyed by American colonists on the eye of the Revolution — and why they were so passionate about defending and expanding it.

“From the founding of the first permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607 until the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, sheer distance and frequent wars with France left the colonies very lightly governed by the crown,” Rose wrote. “Colonists, therefore, got used to not being told what to do and to speaking their minds with little fear.”

Moreover, “a few particularly brilliant citizens were strongly influenced by the wisdom of the ancients, English common law, new ideas in political philosophy, and the unprecedented rise of liberty in the American colonies,” he argued.

“This was their frame of mind when they drafted, debated, and approved the Declaration of Independence. It was also their frame of mind when they created the Constitution, a formula for government devised to ensure it did not erode the liberty it was created to protect.”

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In the mix

• In the New York Post, FreeCon signatory David Harsanyi urged Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to stop blaming Boomers for the challenges facing young Americans today.

“The notion that Millennials and Gen Z are toiling in a uniquely grueling economic era” is “utterly delusional,” wrote Harsanyi, whose latest book is entitled The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists.

He argued that “convincing young people they’ve been handed a broken world only fostered an unprecedented sense of hopelessness.”

“Boomers have failed on plenty of fronts, but being on the hook for a ridiculously expensive student loan on a useless degree isn’t one of the great tragedies to have befallen mankind. It’s just the consequence of choices. And most progressives want other people to pay for their choices.”

• At The Hill, FreeCon signatory Aidan Grogan argued that J.D. Vance’s positions on economic policy would not make America greater or its families stronger.

“Contrary to Vancenomics, entrusting the federal government, specifically the executive branch, with the power to reward concentrated interests through tariffs, tariff exemptions and subsidies at the expense of small entrepreneurs and everyday consumers doesn’t promote the dignity of the human person,” wrote Grogan, an associate editor at City Journal and senior contributor with Young Voices. “It makes Americans of all stripes less able to support their families, serve their communities and enjoy leisure time.

“Conservatives rightfully mourn the decline of family values and the loss of faith and community, but a remedy won’t be found in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule or at the Federal Trade Commission. The path to human dignity and cultural renewal will be charted when Americans are empowered to innovate, compete and flourish in a free economy and civil society — without federal bureaucrats standing in their way.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Christian Schneider described the Democratic Party as responding to the MAGA era not by recruiting appealing candidates but by emulating the worst characteristics of their political adversaries.

“So far,” wrote Schneider, it appears Democrats see an unprincipled, unserious president who is out of his depth — and want to start a new era with Democrats who are unprincipled, unserious, and out of their depth.”

“One need only gaze upon the embers of the fraudulent Graham Platner Senate campaign to see this plan in action. Trump’s phony populism has pushed Democrats to boost unproven self-described socialists into public life, thinking buffoonery on the right deserves equal but opposite extremism on the left.”

• In The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Jack Butler ridiculed CNBC for using “quality of life” measures in its state-by-state ranking that reflect ideological positioning on social issues and economic issues, not real-world conditions for human flourishing.

“The 10-worst quality-of-life states are all red: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Missouri, Utah, Georgia, Louisiana, Indiana and Texas,” wrote Butler, deputy editor of the Journal’s opinion newsletter Free Expression. “Tennessee is last.”

“I haven’t been to all of these places, but I’ve visited some and enjoyed them. I know people in all of them. If they’re suffering, they hide it well. What’s up?”

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Was it symbolic of America’s fraught present and cloudy future? Not really. As Tanner Nau, an editorial fellow at The Free Press and a Freedom Conservatism signatory, reported more than a week before the Semiquincentennial celebrations, the pool’s problems were technical in nature, as were its remedies.

The challenges facing the United States of America aren’t primarily technical in nature. We can’t just hire a few knowledgeable experts and set them loose with the policy equivalents of skimmers, test kits, and buckets of chemicals. Societies are vastly more complicated than pools. Human beings aren’t mindless molecules. And the tools of government, while essential to human flourishing, are also inherently dangerous and easily abused by ambitious politicians, rent-seeking interest groups, and maniacal ideologues.

Ensuring a hopeful future for America means thoughtfully adapting and skillfully applying “the timeless principles of liberty,” as we observed in the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles. They include limited government, free enterprise, free speech, free trade, fiscal responsibility, equal opportunity, and the rule of law.

“More and more people on the Left and Right reject the distinctive creed that made America great,” we wrote, “that individual liberty is essential to the moral and physical strength of the nation.”

Today, we feature a range of reflections by FreeCons about the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and its implications for American politics and public policy.

Not blood and soil

Marc Thiessen writes a column for The Washington Post on foreign and domestic policy. He is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, a Fox News contributor, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent Post column, Thiessen urged his fellow Americans to reject the “blood and soil” nationalism of the Populist Right, who are attempting to graft “European-style” nationhood on “the American body politic” and thus “inadvertently making common cause” with socialists and progressives on the Left.

“We are the first nation in human history built not on blood and soil but on an idea: the idea of human freedom,” he wrote. “What unites us as a people is not a common bloodline, but our common creed.”

“Our creedal identity is precisely why we need not fear the rise of nationalism in America,” Thiessen continued. “In Europe, nationalism is based on ethnicity — and, in its most toxic form, pride in the superiority of a particular race. But our nationalism is a belief in the superiority of the American idea.

“European nationalism is inherently exclusive. But American nationalism is inherently inclusive, open to those who come here legally and accept our creed, our Constitution and our founding principles.”

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Past that never was

Jonah Goldberg is editor in chief of The Dispatch and holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a CNN contributor, host of “The Remnant” podcast, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a Times column, Goldberg observed that while Americans were in a “pretty foul mood” for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the country is better off many ways than it was during the prior Bicentennial celebrations.

“Fifty years ago, America was in many respects much more of a mess than it is today,” he wrote. “Inflation, gas lines, crime, unemployment, political violence, race relations, geopolitical tensions — including the just concluded Vietnam War — were not the stuff of a golden age.”

“Surveys routinely find that Americans think the country is in much worse shape than they are personally,” Goldberg explained. “Even when large majorities of Americans say the nation is in a bad way, equally large majorities say they’re personally doing OK. Last year, a Federal Reserve survey found that only about a quarter of Americans thought the economy was doing well. But about three-quarters said they were personally doing OK.”

“None of this is to say that Americans don’t have real problems,” he concluded. “I’m a conservative, so I’m the first to concede that the past is worth remembering and studying. But if all you do is cherry-pick the good — real or alleged — while blinding yourself to the bad, you’re not studying the past.

“You’re grading the present against a past that never was.”

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Destructive cycle

Karl Beckstein is a former GOP campaign strategist and conservative activist who works in the tech industry in North Carolina. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for the North State Journal, Beckstein wrote that the very principles the inspired America’s founders in the 1770s can help today’s leaders address our country’s many political problems and policy challenges.

“Constitutional violations breed more constitutional violations,” he argued. “Every time we abandon our principles for a short-term win, we give the other side permission to do the same and we lose the moral authority to object when they do.”

American conservatives should be “setting the standard for constitutional governance, not racing to the bottom,” he continued.

“Our current dysfunction isn’t unprecedented. Politics has been dominated by cultural decadence and populist power grabs before. Our problems aren’t new. Neither are the solutions.”

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In the mix

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Randolph May wrote that if America wants to enjoy another 250 years of self-government and prosperity, Americans must reject the siren song of socialism.

“Whether through outright seizure of private property for conversion to public use or through imposition of stringent regulatory controls that substantially diminish a property’s value, a lack of respect for private property rights remains a cornerstone of the socialist program,” wrote May, president of the Maryland-based Free State Foundation.

“This antipathy towards private property is directly contrary to the reverence for property rights embraced by our Founders, which they made manifest in the Declaration and Constitution.”

“The Founders understood that protection of property rights by the government is essential to the preservation of life and liberty. Freedom and property are inseparable.”

• At Newsmax, FreeCon signatory Merrill Matthews debunked the claim of progressives (and an increasing share of populists) that upper-income Americans don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

“In fact, the United States arguably has the most progressive tax system among developed countries,” wrote Matthews, the Texas state chair of Our Republican Legacy.

Including state and local taxes flattens the curve somewhat but doesn’t change the basic distribution: wealthy people pay much more than middle-income people, who in turn pay more than lower-income people. According to an index from the Fraser Institute, the average American living in California faces a more-progressive tax structure than the average resident of Canada, South Korea, Japan, or Australia. Even living in Texas doesn’t keep upper-income Americans from shouldering more of the tax burden than in most other developed countries.

• In Regulation magazine, FreeCon signatory Jonathan Adler reviewed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s often-cited book Abundance and concluded that the two left-wing analysts stopped far short of the right destination.

Their “recognition that progressive legal institutions are obstacles to growth, innovation, and solving societal problems is welcome,” wrote Adler, the Tazewell Taylor Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School. “Yet they show little curiosity as to why they and their fellow-travelers had so many ‘blind spots’ for so long.”

“Klein and Thompson seem to think the failures of centralized government decision making can be repaired while maintaining centralized government decision making. They want a ‘liberalism that builds’ without thinking too deeply about what building requires. It would have helped had they consulted Mises or Hayek at least as much as they did Marx.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Joe Loconte argued that Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has proved to be a “champion for Western unity.”

“The Italian prime minister has emerged as the most consequential European advocate for the ideals and institutions that have built Western civilization,” wrote Loconte, director of the Rivendell Center in New York City and a senior fellow at Sagamore Institute.

At a speech before the Atlantic Council, Meloni stated that the West “is a system of values in which the person is central, men and women are equal and free, and therefore the systems are democratic, life is sacred, the state is secular, and based on the rule of law.”

No Western leader “understands and embraces this cultural inheritance more fully than the Italian prime minister,” Loconte concluded.

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So far, we’ve hosted two Freedom Conservatism Conferences in Washington as well as dozens of other events, meetups, and Capitol Hill briefings for members of Congress, staffers, journalists, and other policy professionals.

We’ve done dozens of media interviews and placed more than a hundred articles in newspapers, magazines, and online media to describe the FreeCon Statement of Principles and explain their continuing importance in modern politics and public policy.

And we’ve continued to expand our ranks! When we announced the Freedom Conservatism project on July 13, 2023, there were dozens of signatories to the FreeCon statement, including former elected officials, prominent communicators, distinguished scholars, grassroots activists, think tank presidents, and other leaders of right-of-center organizations and causes.

As of early July 2026, the FreeCon statement has more than 400 signatories — representing a wide variety of professional backgrounds, institutions, expertise, locations, and leadership roles. If you are aligned with Freedom Conservatism, work in the movement in some formal capacity, and would like to be considered for signatory status, please fill out this form and tell us why you support the Statement of Principles.

Today, we profile several new FreeCon signatories and the work they do to promote our timeless principles and apply them to present-day issues.

Unleash American workers

Dave Hebert serves as director of economics & economic freedom at the American Institute for Economic Research. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

A former professor at Aquinas College, Troy University, and Ferris State University, Herbert has worked at the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget and the U.S. Joint Economic Committee. His articles have appeared in academic journals such as Public Choice and Constitutional Political Economy as well as popular outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

In a recent piece for AIER’s The Daily Economy, Hebert described as “neo-mercantilism” the policy approach of the Trump administration and its secretary of the treasury, Scott Bessent.

They would “would have us believe that American manufacturers have been competing in a game rigged by Chinese state subsidies and that we are ‘losing,’” Hebert wrote, that American communities have been hollowed out by cheap imports and the offshoring of jobs, and that American manufacturing is in decline.

“And they blame economists for naively supporting free trade when, in the words of Scott Bessent, ‘the warning lights were glaring all around us.’”

But American manufacturing is “not in decline because of free trade,” he continued. “In fact, it could hardly be described as ‘in decline’ to begin with. The truth is that manufacturing output in the US is quite high” but comprises a smaller share of the economy because other sectors have grown even more rapidly. And lower employment in manufacturing is the result of productivity gains, not international trade.

“It’s time to end the experiment with tariffs once and for all,” Hebert concluded. “We need to be tearing down barriers to trade, not erecting new ones. Doing so would unleash the American worker on the rest of the world. Doing so will not only make us wealthier, it’ll make us safer, too.”

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Moving the needle

Edward J. Pinto is a senior fellow and co-director of the AEI Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

A former executive vice president and chief credit officer for Fannie Mae, Pinto is frequently interviewed on radio and television and often testifies before Congress. His writings have been published in trade publications and the popular press, including in the American Banker, The Hill, RealClearPolitics, and The Wall Street Journal.

In a recent piece for Barron’s, Pinto and co-author Arthur Gailes argued that the housing bill recently passed by Congress and sent to the president will, unfortunately, do little to help Americans buy homes.

“It eliminates an expensive requirement to build manufactured housing on permanent steel frames, streamlines environmental reviews, and incentivizes cities to provide pre-approved home designs, which will simplify things for governments, regulators, and builders,” they wrote. “Beyond that, it likely won’t change the homeownership equation for Americans.”

“The House managed to undo most of the damage the Senate’s earlier version of the bill would have done through its misguided crusade against institutional investors. But, at the end of the day, most of the bill’s provisions won’t move the supply or affordability needle.”

The real action in housing reform is at the state and local level.

“Fortunately, state legislatures are already passing bills to boost supply,” wrote Pinto and Gailes. “According to our State Housing Supply Legislation Tracker, state-level laws are on track to produce roughly 280,000 new homes a year, which could halve the national housing shortage within a decade.”

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Staggering debt load

Jeremy Lott is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner and a FreeCon signatory.

A former editor at The Center Square and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Lott has written for hundreds of media outlets. His books include The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency (2008), In Defense of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue (2006), and William F. Buckley: A Biography of a Conservative American Icon and the Founder of National Review Magazine (2010).

In a recent Washington Examiner piece, Lott noted that the “last time the U.S. federal government had a balanced budget was in fiscal 2001, when it recorded a surplus of about $130 billion.”

The sums required to service the national debt “are not lunch money,” he pointed out. “Over $2.8 billion in interest is paid out every day. For the fiscal 2025, debt service cost taxpayers about $970 billion. That was close to one-seventh of all expenditures and slightly more than the federal government spent on the military that year.”

Neither Democratic nor Republican presidents have made fiscal responsibility a priority.

President Trump, for example, “has occasionally paid lip service to the problem of the U.S.’s mounting debt. Yet he has left things off the table that might slow the accumulation, such as entitlement reform and reductions in military spending.

“His initiatives to address the problem, such as attempting to tariff most countries and one island populated entirely by penguins, have proved to be mostly beside the point.”

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Activism over outreach

Josh Appel is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a FreeCon signatory.

A graduate of Yeshiva University and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, Appel has written for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Public Discourse, Law & Liberty, Commentary, and National Review.

In a recent City Journal piece, he profiled New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdami’s pick for “faith liaison” to the Jewish community, Rabbi Miriam Grossman, whom Appel described as “more interested in radical activism than Jewish tradition.”

Grossman’s activism “harmonizes neatly with Mamdani’s progressive politics,” he reported. “In April 2025, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice — for which Grossman serves as a member-leader — held a ‘Seder in the Streets’ protest against Donald Trump’s election. The ‘seder,’ marking the Jewish exodus from Egypt, was held outside the traditional date of Passover and likened Trump to the biblical Pharaoh, who enslaved the Jewish people and cast their children into the Nile. Mamdani made an appearance.”

Jews continue to top the list of victims of religiously motivated hate crimes, he concluded, yet at “a time of heightened fear among them, Mamdani chose as a taxpayer-funded ‘faith liaison’ someone whose background makes her a dubious choice to serve as a genuine advocate for the community.”

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In the mix

•At The Free Press, FreeCon signatory Ilya Shapiro praised the U.S. Supreme Court for “standing up for girls” in its latest decision on transgender students in sports.

“Sex categories in sports exist for a reason, and neither the Constitution nor federal law requires schools to pretend otherwise,” wrote Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute.

“The Court properly emphasized that no student-athlete deserves ostracism or vilification. None of this requires denying anyone’s humanity, good faith, or personal distress. But law requires categories, and fair competition requires categories that track reality. In sports, sex matters.”

• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Gil Guerra argued that the principle of birthright citizenship just upheld by the Supreme Court makes America stronger — and its absence in the legal framework of America’s enemies makes them weaker.

“Birthright citizenship is among the most effective instruments of assimilation we have at our disposal,” Guerra wrote. “It takes the children of immigrants, including immigrants from the countries the United States most needs to understand and compete with, and makes them Americans without qualification or delay, which is a large part of why they have filled the ranks of the institutions that defend the country.”

“Our ability to absorb and assimilate the children of immigrants is one that China lacks and cannot hope to build,” he continued. Indeed, because of our country’s relative freedom, economic dynamism, and openness to immigration, “America has helped to accelerate China’s demographic decline by taking many of its most productive and liberty-minded citizens.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory John Puri bemoaned the Trump administration’s practice of demanding “golden shares” in private firms.

“The federal government had not made an indefinite, non-crisis investment in a healthy private company since at least the 1950s,” wrote Puri, the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at NR. “The Trump administration has now taken more than 20 such stakes, targeting a range of industries from minerals and semiconductors to nuclear energy and quantum computing.”

It is a “scheme that progressives can fall in love with,” he wrote, noting that “Bernie Sanders is now clamoring to take government stakes in artificial intelligence companies.”

“There are ways for government to secure critical supply chains without constructing a corporate patronage network. Indeed, that was the intent behind many of the programs that Trump is using to extract equity. But so long as the state is taking stakes in private companies, there can be no neutrality. The paper profits may be sweet, but the losses will be booked against sound governance and economic dynamism.”

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Jay Cost observed that if Americans are as dissatisfied with the quality of major-party candidates as polls and media commentaries suggest, they should vote accordingly.

“If average Americans are not insisting on wise and prudent leaders to go into government, the whole process of representation malfunctions,” wrote Cost, the Gerald R. Ford nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and assistant professor at Geneva College.

“The government stops reflecting our best virtues and instead represents our worst impulses. That means we should be supporting candidates that are not just principled, but also exhibit some of the qualities leaders should possess.”

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Freedom Conservatives aren’t late to this party. Our movement has for many months been discussing the Declaration, the timeless principles that formed its foundation, and its continuing influence on our culture, politics, and government. Indeed, some FreeCons have devoted much of their professional careers and scholarship to the American Founding.

Moreover, FreeCons recognize that while the Declaration itself can have a birthday, the founding of the United States was not accomplished in a single day. It was the culmination of many years of statesmanship and struggle, and the work of many generations of Americans who lived before and after July 4, 1776.

Our country’s semiquincentennial will encompass not just this week‘s commemorations but many others, extending all the way to the 250th anniversaries of the Treaty of Paris ending the War of Independence (in 2033), the creation of the U.S. Constitution (2037), its ratification (2038), and the addition of the Bill of Rights (2041).

The prospect suits us just fine. We enjoy celebrating — and defending — American liberty. We love to get our FreeCon!

Today we feature Freedom Conservatives who connect the American colonists’ concerns about economic liberty and the separation of powers to modern-day policy challenges.

No to unchecked power

Sara Albrecht is chairman and CEO of the Liberty Justice Center, which represented the small businesses that successfully challenged the executive's unlawful emergency tariffs before the Supreme Court. She is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent National Review piece, Albrecht argued that the tariff decision ratified the wisdom of the Founders about the taxing power, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.

The lesson “feels especially important as Americans prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” she wrote. “The Declaration was a complaint not simply about taxes but about unchecked power. The colonists objected to a system in which one man could exercise authority without meaningful limits and without accountability to the people whom he governed.

“The Constitution that followed was designed to ensure that no American president, judge, legislator, or bureaucrat would ever possess that kind of power.”

“The American experiment has never depended on perfect leaders but on institutions that are strong enough to restrain imperfect ones,” Albrecht concluded. “And despite the doubt and cynicism that often dominate our politics, the past year offered a reassuring reminder that the system still works.”

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Freedom to trade

Samuel Gregg is the President and Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for Civitas Outlook, he described the American colonists’ struggle against British tyranny as an “anti-mercantilist revolution.”

Among the Americans’ specific complaints listed in the Declaration of Independence was “that King George III should be condemned for ’cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,’” Gregg wrote.

“On one level, this was an indictment of the Royal Navy’s attempts, with mixed success, to impose a blockade on the rebellious American colonies. But it also hints at long-standing British efforts to restrict American colonists’ ability to trade with whomever they wished, throughout the British Empire and, more generally, the world.”

There is “little question,” he continued, “that mercantilism’s restrictions on economic liberty played a significant role in the American colonies’ decision to declare their independence.”

The country forged by the resulting Revolutionary War was “one that, for all its desire to remain free of foreign entanglements, was full of merchants anxious to trade with the rest of the world,” Gregg concluded. “That included Britain, which would remain America’s biggest trading partner for decades to come.

“It also began an unravelling of mercantilist restrictions upon much of the world that continued throughout the nineteenth century. In that sense, the Declaration of Independence proved to be liberating for more than one nation.”

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Equity fail

Iain Murray is vice president for strategy and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for The Daily Economy, Murray drew a parallel between British attempts to prop up the East India Company before the American Revolution and modern-day attempts by progressives and populists to involve American government more directly in private companies by taking equity stakes or controlling their operations.

“It was the Company’s monopoly on legal tea imports to the colonies,” he pointed out, that spark the American Revolution.

The East India Company was so entangled with the British government that it was deemed “too big to fail,” Murray wrote.

“Its bailout by the government in 1773 included the infamous Tea Act, which sought to facilitate repayment of its £1.4 million government loan by granting the Company a monopoly on selling its vast stockpile of tea in the American colonies without paying duty in Britain. This undercut colonial merchants and helped provoke the Boston Tea Party and everything that followed.”

“America does not need its own version of the Company with better marketing.”

Spirit of ’76

Quin Hillyer is a columnist for the New Orleans Advocate and the Times Picayune. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent column, Hillyer argued that as the Declaration of Independence turns 250 years old, Americans desperately need to recapture the Spirit of ’76.

“Nowhere else in the world back then, not even in England itself, was there such a sense (if any sense at all) of humans as self-governing, rights-owning individuals, not mere subjects,” he wrote. “This was, to apply [John] Adams’ words, a new, unique, and heroic ‘learning [and] spirit.’”

“Freedom is both our heritage and our gift to the world,” Hillyer concluded. “That heritage and gift are wondrous blessings. We must sustain them and consecrate them forever.”

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In the mix

• At National Affairs, FreeCon signatory Judge Glock discussed the issue of “state capacity,” the ability of governments to accomplish their goals efficiently.

One reason for the “atrophy” of state capacity, he wrote, is that the federal government “has placed many mandates on its own operations that it could never impose on society at large, from compulsory unionized workforces to affirmative-action goals to ‘Buy American’ requirements. Whatever the value of such mandates, there is no principled reason the government should force more of them on itself than it does on private citizens and companies.”

Glock, senior fellow and director of research at the Manhattan Institute, concluded that adopting “a political norm against government as social vanguard would go a long way toward enabling our public officials to do the jobs their constituents elected them to do.”

• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Gregg Nunziata discussed whether the Democratic Party can seize the opportunity presented by the Trump administration’s faltering fortunes to form a new electoral majority.

“Any Democratic candidate for president who truly wishes to heal our republic must be ready to put our democracy ahead of his or her party,” wrote Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law.

“And that means embracing a system that has a meaningful place for the voices of those who lose the next presidential election. Such a president would inevitably disappoint the Left, but generations to come would owe them a debt of gratitude.”

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory David Harsanyi listed the many contributions to human well-being conferred by the pharmaceutical industry.

“Doomsdayers and cynical partisans are endlessly depicting our country as a spent force that doesn’t ‘make’ anything useful anymore,” wrote Harsanyi. “By every metric, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry dominates the world.”

“Whenever I praise Big Pharma, people accuse me of being in the pocket of the industry. Really, it’s much worse. I praise Big Pharma gratis. Because no business, save perhaps Big Agriculture, has done more to improve our lives.”

• At The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory George Will clarified that Arthur Miller’s classic work Death of a Salesman is not an anti-capitalist screed but rather a “shattering depiction of something timeless, not context-dependent: the pathos of a despairing individual whose dreams exceed his capacities.”

Will Loman’s “unquiet, raving, finally fatal desperation is not ‘tragic,’ as tragedy is often understood: a great flaw dooming a great person,” wrote Will, a longtime Post columnist. “Loman is nevertheless a movingly sad figure eliciting pathos. We go to the theater to be moved, not to be lectured.”

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Sure, the melody was borrowed from Great Britain’s national anthem “God Save the King/Queen.” But this only serves to underline the hybrid nature of the United States. Formed from what had been 13 colonies within the British empire, our republic retains its language, its common law, and other traditions of undeniably English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish origin.

Still, the birth of the United States 250 years ago also represented something truly novel in the world — “a new nation,” as Abraham Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The song’s lyrics underline the point:

My country, 'tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing:
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims' pride,
from every mountainside
let freedom ring!

Freedom Conservatives have pledged ourselves to preserving our “sweet land of liberty” and extending its promise to an ever-wider swath of our fellow Americans. Today, we feature the efforts of FreeCons to defend the American Founding from its skeptics, be they on the Left or Right.

Song of freedom

Wilfred McClay is a professor of history at Hillsdale College, where he holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair of Classical History and Western Civilization. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for Civitas Outlook, McClay argued that America is both an idea and a home — and patriotism withers if it loses its roots in shared memory, history, and love of an actually existing place.

These experiential roots are clearly visible in “popular culture, songs and stories,” he wrote, “where one can find the more primal aspects of American patriotism expressed with directness and vividness.” His examples include “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America” as well as “This Land is Your Land” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

“The debate between America defined as an idea and America defined as a home should not be based on the false premise that it is possible to be entirely one or the other,” McClay concluded.

“Instead, there is a vital and living tension in the makeup of American patriotism, a tension between its universalizing ideals, which so often form the propulsive force behind our aspirations and reforms, and its particularizing sentiments, with their emphasis upon memory, history, tradition, culture, and the land.”

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Sound theology

Lathan Watts is vice president of public affairs at Alliance Defending Freedom, a columnist for Townhall, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent National Review piece, he argued that the American Founders understood freedom and morality to be inextricably linked.

Watts pointed out that the first sentence of the Declaration begins with the phrase “When in the course of human events . . . ” which “presupposes the existence of human events.”

“Human beings with free will, balanced and aided by divine providence, can influence and even shape the world around them. This is a distinctly Judeo–Christian view of the co-laborer relationship between man and God and a departure from Greek, Roman, or Eastern religion.”

Thomas Jefferson’s personal theology “is still debated and puzzled over to this day,” Watts continued, yet “two and a half centuries after he penned it, the theology of the Declaration of Independence is sound.”

“In a letter to Henry Lee, Jefferson referred to his work as an ‘expression of the American mind.’ More importantly, it was the annunciation of the American heart and soul. It is worthy of commemoration and every effort to persevere toward the high calling set forth in it.”

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Right this wrong

Richard Lorenc is president and CEO of Lexandria, an education nonprofit that seeks to reignite the American spirit through innovative classroom content and tools. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In The Washington Times, Lorenc wrote that the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence should spark renewed teaching on freedom, capitalism and constitutional government.

“Why are so many young Americans down on their country?” he asked. “Why did a 2025 national survey show that nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults younger than 30 have a ‘favorable’ view of socialism and one-third have a favorable view of communism?”

“The sad truth is that many Americans, especially younger ones, do not understand their country. As a result, they neither appreciate nor love it, putting them at risk of losing it. America’s teachers have a responsibility to right this wrong.”

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Below basic

Michael McShane is director of National Research at EdChoice and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for National Review, McShane reported that nearly a third of U.S. students have a “below basic” understanding of American civics.

“Low levels of civic awareness persist into adulthood,” he continued. “More than 70% of respondents failed a basic civics quiz on topics like the three branches of government, the number of Supreme Court justices, and other basic functions of our democracy.”

A EdChoice survey found that more than seven in 10 parents said schools should “teach the rights and responsibilities of citizens, the U.S. Constitution, the three branches of government, major events in U.S. history, the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, state and local government, elections and voting, civil rights history in the U.S., how to evaluate news and information sources, and how to discuss political or social issues respectfully.”

“If we want our nation to endure for another 250 years,” McShane concluded, “we have to cultivate virtue in our citizens and demand it from our leaders. Virtue is shaped through education, and learning about the history of our nation and that of other nations can give ample examples of both virtuous and vicious leadership.

“Really engaging with that history and asking the tough questions is the only way to instill in young people the knowledge and disposition to participate in representative democracy.”

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In the mix

• At The Center Square, FreeCon signatory Ashley Baker chronicled the European Union’s continuing efforts to undermine American tech companies and the competitive markets that facilitate their creation and growth.

Over many years, EU digital policies have “prioritized investigating, regulating, and punishing a small group of American technology companies while insulating domestic competitors,” wrote Baker, executive director of the Committee for Justice.

“These policies are not only unfair and out of step with what one would expect from an ally, but also strategically counterproductive. They have increased transatlantic tension and undermined American technological innovation at a moment when it is vital to Western economic strength and national security.

“Policies that consistently disadvantage U.S. firms carry serious consequences for the broader alliance, including opening the door for Chinese companies that pose significant security threats to European digital infrastructure.”

• At The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Phil Magness revealed the deceptive statistics used by left-wing professors to defend soak-the-rich tax schemes.

Emmanuel Saez of UC Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman of the Paris School of Economics claim that the ultrarich pay a combined federal, state, and local tax rate of only 23%, supposedly lower than the 24% working-class Americans pay.

“Both figures are manipulated,” explained Magness, who holds a chair in political economy at the Independent Institute. “In fact, Messrs. Saez and Zucman’s own earlier research told a very different story. In a 2018 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, their own data files showed that the top 0.001% pay an average combined tax rate of roughly 41%.”

“The billionaire-tax movement depends heavily on stoking public outrage fueled by misleading statistics. Americans should be skeptical anytime activist academics present enormously complicated tax calculations as simple moral certainties.”

• At City Journal, FreeCon signatory Thomas Savidge described the dodges used by state governments to evade their balanced-budget requirements.

One “particularly pernicious” tactic, wrote Savidge, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, is the use of off-budget enterprises (OBEs) — “nominally private entities that provide public services and are funded by compulsory, government-created revenue streams.”

“On paper, such entities are financially independent, avoiding ordinary scrutiny and authorized to issue revenue bonds without direct voter approval,” he explained. “But many are subsidized by other government units when user charges fail to cover costs.”

Such abuses illustrate why “fiscal rules must be paired with limits on government’s ability to shift costs outside the budget,” Savidge concluded. “Otherwise, politicians will substitute regulations, fees, mandates, and assessments for taxes and appropriations.”

• In the Chicago Tribune, FreeCon signatory Robert Lawson argued that while Elon Musk may be a trillionaire, members of Congress exercise more power over the American economy.

“This joint assembly of just 535 individuals — less than 0.00016% of the U.S. population — spends approximately $7 trillion every year, accounting for about 23% of the more than $31 trillion U.S. economy,” wrote Lawson, who holds the Jerome M. Fullinwider Centennial Chair in Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist University.

“Everyone who thinks the rich should do more to solve our social and economic problems should instead be asking why Congress, with 17.5 times as much money to spend every single year, hasn’t yet solved any of these problems.”

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For the hundreds of Freedom Conservatives and allies who attended FreeCon 2026 last month in Washington, D.C., the daylong event offered welcome opportunities for inspiration, introspection, and collaboration.

Longtime leaders of American conservatism mingled with young activists, students, and interns. Think tank analysts and Capitol Hill staffers discussed legislative initiatives and policy reforms. Authors and journalists met new sources and jotted down new ideas. Donors and board members compared notes on best practices and brightest prospects.

“The FreeCon conference was great,” raved one nonprofit CEO. “Thank you so much for putting it on!”

Another participant, Justin Stapley, praised a FreeCon 2026 panel on the future of the American Right. “Absolutely love that when asked what fusionism is, the panel focuses on the way the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the classically liberal tradition came together in a mutually supportive way at the American founding,” Stapley wrote.

“So true. Fusionism represents an understanding of the founding genius, not just a Cold War allyship.”

Today we feature more outtakes from and reactions to the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference.

Emerging coalition

Sam Raus is the David Boaz Resident Writing Fellow at Young Voices and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for Real Clear Markets, Raus wrote that the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference demonstrated that a “vibrant, diverse and youthful coalition of right-leaning voices is not ready to give up on market solutions and American liberty.”

Too many activists within the Populist Right are willing to trade “limited government and free-market capitalism” for “welfare and industrial policy,” he continued, which means “drifting toward the ideas of progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren or the state-directed model embraced by Viktor Orbán’s failed governing coalition in Hungary.”

Raus pointed to recent polls showing 80% of Republicans prefer candidates that keep the government out of business activity and that 89% want “economic regulation, when necessary, to be applied evenly rather than reward or punish businesses based on politics.”

“A narrow fringe of outspoken individuals seeks to politicize business, dictate markets and determine the future of free enterprise from bureaucratic offices on the Hill,” he concluded. “The majority of Americans do not agree — and Freedom Conservatism is offering them a movement to voice that perspective.”

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With or without you

Ramesh Ponnuru is the editor of National Review, a columnist for The Washington Post, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a new cover piece for National Review based on his remarks to the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, Ponnuru urged FreeCons to work with National Conservatives and other factions within the American Right on matters of mutual concern while rejecting the NatCons’ views on free enterprise and the rule of law.

“When we encounter NatCon arguments, proposals, and personalities, we need to sift through them, finding common ground where possible and identifying real points of disagreement and arguing them out,” he wrote.

FreeCons should also take seriously public concerns about family, culture, and assimilation, Ponnuru argued.

If FreeCons do so, if “we avoid the mistakes that I have mentioned while making the case for needed reforms as aggressively, creatively, and persistently as we can,” he concluded, “we will have done our part to repay the obligation we owe to Madison, Lincoln, and our other forebears.

“We will make it possible for Americans 50 years from now, on our 300th anniversary, to be still free, still secure, still prosperous — and, no doubt, still worried about the future of our country.”

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Prep for victory

Avik Roy is co-founder and chairman of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) and one of the creators of the FreeCon project.

In a Real Clear Politics article adapted from his remarks at FreeCon 2026, Roy described the hundreds of conservative leaders, scholars, activists, and policy professionals who’ve signed the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles as “representing an incredible array of individuals and institutions all over America.”

“The entire business model of our post-liberal compatriots on either side of the aisle is to exclude a giant chunk of Americans from our shared enterprise,” he wrote. “They don’t believe it’s possible for all of us to achieve great things together; instead, they believe in ‘rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies.’

“We win by showing – and, ultimately, proving – that all Americans benefit from our values and our policies, even the ones who disagree with us, don’t look like us, don’t talk like us, or don’t vote like us.”

Roy concluded by observing that it is “time today to prepare for the victory that’s coming very soon, for the values that have made America great in the past and will make America great again in the future.”

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In the mix

• At The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory John Cochrane argued that federal regulation of America’s financial markets has been “a mess for years” and that new Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh should start straightening it out.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, “leaders had the decency to admit that regulation failed and reforms were needed,” wrote Cochrane, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and his colleague Amit Seru. “But the resulting changes — the Dodd-Frank law and the Fed’s subsidiary regulation — simply piled on the previous approach that focused on managing asset riskiness.”

“The Fed cannot rewrite Dodd-Frank by itself — only Congress can do that,” the authors concluded. “But the central bank can revise the subsidiary regulations and review its discretionary implementations. Periodically sunsetting and reviewing each rule would be a good start.”

• At The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Jack Butler mourned the death of Gordon S. Wood, the longtime Brown University historian who “loved America.”

Wood’s work helped make the American Revolution and its consequences “accessible to the public,” wrote Butler, deputy editor of the Journal’s “Free Expression” newsletter. “It also clarified how, in a philosophical sense, the inheritance of the founding was accessible to more than the direct posterity of the Founders.”

“Against ‘1619 Project’-style radicals, who view America as corrupt from its conception due to the original sin of slavery, Wood stressed that slavery was taken for granted around the world for millennia — ‘until the late 18th century and the American Revolution.’ And against ‘Heritage American’-style exclusionists, who would rate authentic Americanness by how long one’s family has been in the country, Wood argued that what makes America unique — and radical — is that ‘to be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.’”

“As America approaches its 250th anniversary, there are worrying signs that Americans are forgetting — or actively rejecting — what makes this nation great,” Butler concluded. “Gordon S. Wood did much to contest these baneful trends.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Noah Rothman ridiculed a Guardian piece by by Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, and four other left-wing economists claiming “growth” was a “doomed strategy.”

Their piece “was an exhibition in moral blackmail masquerading as an argument,” wrote Rothman, the author of the just-released Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America. “It made no attempt at persuasion. Rather, it was a fundraising pitch aimed at the already converted.”

“By the final paragraphs,” he continued, “the reader is wading hip-deep through a fetid cesspool of socialist buzzwords. The West must commit to ‘debt justice,’ which in practice leaves Western taxpayers on the hook for profligacy and mismanagement in the developing world. Another wealth transfer in the form of ‘reparative climate finance’ would also be nice. And this isn’t just sound economic policy, these ostensibly economic minds contend. It’s a ‘moral obligation rooted in the historical reality that many rich countries built their wealth by impoverishing the south.’”

“Are you ready to fly the red banners and storm the Winter Palace yet? No? Then perhaps you weren’t the intended audience for this one.”

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At the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, held May 20 in Washington, multiple speakers and panelists discussed how FreeCons can defend that experiment from its skeptics — found on both the Progressive Left and Populist Right — while broadening its benefits to include all Americans.

Constitutional order

The final panel of FreeCon 2026 was entitled “America at 250: The Founding Principles and the Future of American Conservatism.” Moderated by Kent Lassman, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the discussion explored how the country’s founding principles can and should guide policymakers today.

Freedom Conservatives repeatedly reference the “Founding Era,” Lassman observed, citing famous phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the unique structure of the U.S. Constitution, and the powerful arguments found in the Federalist Papers for the “constitutional order” America’s initial leaders sought to create and preserve.

“When I think about our Founding, what is really compelling is the idea of the pursuit of happiness,” said Beth Anne Mumford, vice president of state operations at Americans for Prosperity. “How do we make sure freedom and opportunity give a way for people to be able to build the life they want to build and flourish in a way they can find and pursue their own happiness. That’s really what this work is all about, right?”

“The struggle right now is that Congress is voluntarily giving up its role in the Constitution,” said Mark Strand, former president of the Congressional Institute. “Freedom has been protected in our country by a Constitution that has checks and balances, that has limited government, and that prevents any one of the branches from exceeding it.”

“There is definitely a lot of energy and interest in these ideas beyond the federal level,” said Ben Klutsey, executive director of the Mercatus Center. “There are some challenges there, but across the states there is so much hunger.”

You can watch or listen to the entire panel discussion here.

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Patriot frames

The approaching 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence has inspired dozens of Freedom Conservatism signatories to write about the health of American institutions, the ongoing threats to American liberty, and the fate of the American Dream.

Here are some great reads about America 250:

• At Civitas Outlook, the journal he edits, FreeCon signatory Richard Reinsch explored the goals the Founders hand in mind when drafting and promulgating the Declaration of Independence.

“The Declaration was built on centuries of law, history, philosophy, and theology that inspired the Second Continental Congress to ratify and proclaim the document,” Reinsch wrote. “The Congress’s bravery and insight are forever reflected in the Declaration of Independence, establishing America as a new nation committed to liberty and law.

“The ideas and arguments in the Declaration are timeless; they remain true across each generation of Americans. They are our heritage and a source of pride and living memory that must — and will — continue to guide us as we live as citizens of this great country.”

• At Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory Bradley Thompson focused readers’ attention on the momentous first sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

“By publicly declaring the ‘causes’ which impel them to the separation and by showing their ‘respect to the opinions of mankind,’” wrote Thompson, a professor of political philosophy at Clemson University, “American revolutionaries demonstrated that reasoned discourse and moral principles guided their actions.”

“Twenty-first-century Americans who still revere the revolutionaries’ spirit of liberty are beckoned to recover the moral impulse and moral logic that drove their ideological ancestors to independence and freedom.”

• At The Daily Economy, FreeCon signatory Adam Millsap celebrated the classical liberalism of the Founding, an essential part of what today’s American conservatives seek to preserve and expand.

“The Declaration of Independence clearly articulated a set of principles that had been developing for centuries,” wrote Millsap, a senior fellow at Stand Together Trust, “namely, that people are born free and possess an inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“Seven years later, after a long and arduous war, they realized their dream, and the United States of America began its grand experiment: a nation governed by its citizens rather than a monarch or dictator, with liberty placed firmly at its center.”

• At The American Spectator, FreeCon signatory Donald Devine clarified that as the Founders saw it, consent of the governed required more than regular elections. It required limits on power.

“As important as are the Declaration’s ends and the moral legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed,” wrote Devine, a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies, “the Declaration’s own justifications rest primarily upon its higher moral powers — Nature and its God, a Supreme Judge, Providence, and Creator.”

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Kimberly Ross urged her fellow Americans to heed George Washington’s warnings against the excesses of political faction.

“Problems arise when loyalty to one’s party, politician, or brand takes the place of loyalty to our nation and its principles,” wrote Ross, a columnist for the Examiner and the Magnolia Tribune. “Despite claims to the contrary, this is a bipartisan tendency. It was not new in Washington’s day. Human beings are much the same as they were when this country was founded. Warnings against what might cause us to crumble are every bit as applicable now.”

• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Joe Pitts chronicled the recent movement to reinvigorate civic education and create institutes of civic thought on public and private campuses across the United States.

Leaders of the new civic-education movement “refuse to be bystanders,” wrote Pitts, a public policy professional working in Washington. “They recognize that neither renewal nor decline, dawn nor dusk, is inevitable — America’s genius is that we make our own luck at least as often as we stumble into it.”

• At Constituting America, FreeCon signatory Randolph May discussed the ratification debates that following the Constitutional Convention of 1787, pointing out that the battles in the state conventions between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists were “heated.”

“The vigorous debates among the elected delegates in those conventions were the devices by which the Constitution itself envisioned that the new government would rest on a foundation of popular consent,” wrote May, president of the Free State Foundation in Maryland. “The conventions were how ‘We the People’ gave our assent to be governed by a new Constitution.”

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In the mix

• At The Hill, FreeCon signatory Garion Frankel decried the arrival of the “Taylor Swift University,” meaning the proliferation of college course devoted to pop culture rather than core subjects and abiding truths.

“Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research,” wrote Frankel, an editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and his coauthor Daniel Buck, “but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture.”

“Universities were once places where students and faculty alike pursued higher aims — truth, beauty, ethics and even the divine. What are they now? Too often, they resemble four-year summer camps, designed to make students comfortable with a participation diploma at the end.”

• During his remarks at the National Review Institute’s Regional Seminar in Dallas, FreeCon signatory David Bahnsen stated that “the free society is worth defending because the human person is worth defending.”

“The great crisis of our time is not merely inflation, debt, regulation, political polarization, and technological disruption,” wrote Bahnsen, the managing partner of a wealth-management firm. “Those things matter. But beneath them lies something even more dangerous: a growing loss of confidence in the moral capacity of free people.”

“My professional life has been and will continue to be in the capital markets, stewarding wealth, and utilizing the miracle of markets toward the achievement of financial aims. But accompanying the blessing that is my professional life is my moral duty to continue studying economic history and doing all I can to defend free enterprise for what it is: a moral architecture that promotes human dignity, constrains human nature, and feeds responsibility and flourishing of creatures made in the image of God.”

• At Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory Alex Salter argued that good governance and self-governance are complements, not substitutes.

“The aim of government is to maintain the institutional and moral architecture of self-rule,” wrote Salter, the Georgie G. Snyder Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. “That is why political economy cannot be reduced to either technocratic management or reflexive anti-statism. It is the study of how liberty and order reinforce one another through institutions that respect human dignity and harness dispersed knowledge.”

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Of all the vacuous catchphrases uttered by nationalists and populists, this one is the most familiar — and the most obnoxious. It isn’t really a question, of course. Nor is it a good-faith invitation to debate first principles, evaluate evidence, or argue policy particulars.

Its rhetorical purpose is to evade such discussions by declaring them moot, pointless, even perilous. Asking “Do you know what time it is?” with either mock exasperation or preening bravado is meant to shut opponents up, not engage them. Given the precarious state of the republic and the radicalization of the Left, say National Conservatives and their allies, the American Right must resort to extreme measures to avert imminent disaster.

Don’t take our word for it. The media strategist and Claremont Institute fellow who appears to have coined the phrase, David Reaboi, made its meaning explicit. America’s public and private institutions are “crumbling,” he said in 2021, “and the surest way to get to something better is to allow them to crumble — and for as many people as possible to recognize that these things are, indeed, crumbling.”

His Claremont colleague and fellow NatCon signatory Michael Anton established the rhetorical template in his overheated “Flight 93” essay from 2016. The only alternatives to rule by the populist-nationalist Right, he argued, were “Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three.”

Freedom Conservatives reject the silly notion that these are, in fact, America’s only choices — and the not-so-silly, frankly authoritarian implication that refusing to accede to the Populist Right’s hijacking of American conservatism is tantamount to surrendering our country to violent mobs.

At the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, held May 20 in Washington, several featured speakers discussed these and related issues and great length. Today we offer excerpts of their remarks.

Ideas that work

Erick Erickson hosts a nationally syndicated program for Atlanta radio station WSB and writes a column distributed by Creators Syndicate.

A former editor-in-chief of RedState.com, practicing attorney, and commentator at CNN and Fox News, Erickson served for nearly four years on the city council of Macon, Georgia.

During his speech at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference in Washington, he referenced the Populist Right’s frequent accusation that FreeCons committed to limited government, constitutional safeguards, and constructive dialogue among Americans of differing views “don’t know what time it is.”

“It is time, they say, for a new system,” said Erickson. “A new movement. A new strongman. A new revolution from our side of the aisle.”

But in reality, he continued, the nationalists and populists “mean to use our movement as a costume while they smuggle in the very ideas — the central planners, the tariffs, the strongmen, the grand designers — that conservatism exists to resist.”

“We know our ideas are still right,” Erickson concluded. “Progressives have no sense of history because they always ‘move on’ from it and circle back to the bad ideas of the past.”

As for “our friends on our side who have gone a little wobbly,” Erickson urged them not to “embrace the ideas on the ash heap of history” but instead to “hold firm to what works — because, at the end of the day, the markets do work, and families work, and individuals work, and Washington rarely ever does.”

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Resetting the clock

Ramesh Ponnuru is the editor of National Review, a columnist for The Washington Post, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a FreeCon signatory.

During his speech at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, held May 20 in the nation’s capital, Ponnuru observed that “those of us who retain the skepticism about ambitious government that once seemed to define the Right are ceaselessly told that we are obsolete. We do not, the cliché has it, know ‘what time it is.’

“It is, to judge from various articles and social-media posts, a time for strongman rule; a time to let go of a Constitution that has served our country reasonably well (exceptionally well when we have actually adhered to it); a time to forget everything we have ever learned about how government plans can go awry.”

Ponnuru described many positive trends that ought to “reset the clock” for wayward conservatives, such as the recent spate of tax cuts and school-choice reforms by conservative-led states and legal victories on racial preferences, religious freedom, federalism, and the separation of powers.

“We Freedom Conservatives know it is not 1981,” he observed. “We face different problems than Ronald Reagan did, and the solutions must be different too. Some of us had been saying so for years before our self-appointed timekeepers came along. The Left is different too, and thus also the character of the battles.

“But we also know that the changes in our circumstances have made some free-market, limited-government reforms more urgent rather than less.”

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Our time is coming

Avik Roy is co-founder and chairman of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) and one of the creators of the FreeCon project.

During his opening remarks at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, held May 20 at Capital Turnaround in Washington, Roy quoted a recent defense of American Exceptionalism by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as an earlier defense by former Rep. Jack Kemp of the “American idea” that “the Declaration of Independence applies to every individual,” that “everyone should have the opportunity to rise as high as their talents and efforts can carry them,” and that “while people move ahead, we should endeavor to leave no one behind.”

“Our ideological competitors on the Left and Right think such sentiments are quaint and passé,” Roy continued. The rise of these “supposedly post-liberal ideologies was disorienting to many of us. Post-liberals declared the death of the American idea and argued that the very concept of an American idea was a lie — that America was just like any other country, just a collection of people who share the same blood and soil.”

Freedom Conservatives know better, he concluded, “and our time is coming once again.”

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In the mix

• At The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Neil Chilson wrote that a proposed “Artificial Intelligence Oversight Act” would serve the interests of China far more than those of the United States.

“Excessive regulatory burdens hurt U.S. AI exports, deter investment, and will push global developers toward China’s AI ecosystem,” wrote Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute.

“To secure U.S. dominance in military AI, Congress should focus on cutting red tape, from power plant rules to the Pentagon’s outdated acquisition system — areas where China’s advantages are becoming insurmountable.”

• In a recent American Enterprise Institute paper, FreeCon signatory Robert Maranto described the many failings of today’s so-called scholarly journals and offered a practical strategy for reforming them.

“Improving the ecosphere of scholarly publishing across fields is not only a worthwhile endeavor,” wrote Maranto, a University of Arkansas scholar and editor of the Journal of School Choice, “but one that is consequential for reforming higher education and improving American discourse.”

• At CapX, FreeCon signatory Samuel Gregg advised conservatives not to fall for the pitch that “their side” can plan an economy more successfully than the Left can. “Industrial policy is,” he wrote, “a dead end.”

“If governments throw enough money at something, they will get some results,” wrote Gregg, president of the American Institute for Economic Research. “But the long-term damage in terms of opportunity costs, overproduction of goods for which there is weak demand, severe capital malinvestments, and unbridled cronyism are there for all with eyes to see.”

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The 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, held May 20 in Washington, brought together some 240 FreeCon signatories and allies for a daylong discussion of our nation’s founding principles, the biggest policy challenges of the 21st century, and why we are rebuilding an American Right capable of inspiring, winning, and governing.

Prominent commentators such as Guy Benson, Erick Erickson, and Ramesh Ponnuru joined elected officials, scholars, journalists, and activists on the stage at Capital Turnaround, a beautifully restored historic property that once served as the last stop on Washington’s Red Line, repairing and rerouting streetcars for the Capital Transit Company.

FreeCon 2026 was, indeed, about repairing and rerouting the American Right — which, at its best, has always sought to conserve both the civic republicanism and the classical liberalism embraced by our Founders.

In future updates, we’ll publish excerpts from the conference’s keynote speeches and announce follow-up events to be held across the country in the coming weeks and months. Today, we offer some initial coverage of FreeCon 2026.

How we win

In its news story about FreeCon 2026, held May 20 at Capital Turnaround, the Washington Examiner quoted two featured speakers and leaders of the Freedom Conservatism movement: Avik Roy and Tim Chapman.

Roy, chairman of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, told the audience that broadening opportunity by advancing freedom is the best way to reduce the cost of living and restore the nation’s fiscal sustainability.

“That’s how we win,” he said. “The entire business model of our post-liberal compatriots on either side of the aisle is to exclude a giant chunk of Americans from our shared enterprise. They don’t believe it’s possible for all of us to achieve great things together. Instead, they believe in rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies.”

During his remarks at FreeCon 2026, Tim Chapman described American politics being in the 10th of 12 years dominated by “one central personality.”

“I think the influence of the president, even though it seems to be at its zenith — and in many ways you could argue it is, especially with the primaries this week and whatnot — but that influence will wane, and now it’s time for conservatives to think about building a post-Trump conservatism,” said Chapman, president of Advancing American Freedom.

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Better path forward

Vance Ginn is an economic consultant, host of the “Let People Prosper Show,” and former associate director for economic policy during the first Trump administration.

An original FreeCon signatory, Ginn attended FreeCon 2026 in Washington. D.C. and chronicled the experience on his Substack.

“The American political Right is in the middle of an identity crisis,” he wrote. “Many conservatives correctly see that progressive economics has failed. But too many are tempted to respond with a conservative version of the same mistake: more tariffs, more subsidies, more mandates, more industrial policy, more executive power, and more government management of private life.”

Freedom Conservatism matters, Ginn continued, “because it reminds the right what it should be conserving.

“Not state power.
Not political favoritism.
Not managed capitalism.
Not bureaucracy with a flag pin.

“We should conserve the American promise: liberty under law, strong families, free enterprise, property rights, personal responsibility, sound money, federalism, and civil society.”

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Don’t outsource faith

Richard Morrison is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, host of the Free the Economy podcast, and a FreeCon signatory.

At his Substack Great Capitalism, Morrison offered his reflections on the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, held May 20 in Washington. The first panel of the day featured a discussion of liberty, virtue, and the fusionist take on American conservatism.

“Yes, government economic policy should leave us free to work, employ, build, and invest with minimal interference from the state,” wrote Morrison, “but it is still incumbent upon us all to cultivate and encourage virtuous citizenship. In fact, it is only under a government with minimal state coercion that we can be free to organize our lives toward a maximally virtuous expression in the first place.

“The argument is not that spiritual virtues are too unimportant for the government to bother enforcing, it’s that they’re too important to allow the government to monopolize and pervert them.”

“The only practical off-ramp from greater conflict between religious and quasi-religious materialist beliefs,” he continued, “is exactly what the experts at the Freedom Conservative conference recommended – pluralism and maximum freedom of conscience for every person and family in America.”

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In the mix

• Two FreeCon signatories have new books out this month. Pollster Scott Rasmussen — founder of the Napolitan Institute and, previously, Rasmussen Research — is the author of Out of Touch: The Elite One Percent and the Battle for America’s Soul, just published by Republic Books. While Americans across party lines still “agree on core values” of freedom, equality, and self-governance, he argued, the ruling political culture has “drifted far from those ideals.” The result is a nation trapped in manufactured conflict while decisions are quietly centralized in elite hands.

Noah Rothman, FreeCon signatory and senior writer at National Review, is the author of Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America. Just published by Center Street, the book seeks to “train American political observers to recognize left-wing violence and to apply the same scrutiny and foresight to it that they reserve for violence that comes from the Right.”

“We cannot arrest the trend toward political violence in America if we are focused on only one side of the equation.”

• In the Tampa Bay Times, FreeCon signatory Williamson M. Evers looks forward to a future in which the schools in Cuba are free to “replace nationalization with pluralism, ill-advised pedagogy with scientific methods, and indoctrination with liberalization.”

“Freedom is the liberty to do what you can without interference,” wrote Evers, senior fellow and director of the Center on Educational Excellence at the Independent Institute. “Free speech is speech not interfered with by the government. Cuba under Communism has enjoyed neither.”

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Hundreds of FreeCon signatories and allies will convene May 20 in the nation’s capital to discuss the past, present, and future of American conservatism.

The daylong event at Capital Turnaround will feature such speakers as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru, and Stand Together CEO Brian Hooks.

Topics for discussion include economic opportunity, family formation, talent pipelines, electoral coalitions, and the fusionist tradition informed by the politics of liberty and the ethics of virtue.

You can read the full agenda here and register for the May 20 conference here.

Today we feature the work of other FreeCon 2026 speakers on such issues as technology, polarization, fiscal policy, and the extremist rhetoric endemic to clickbait media and online fever swamps.

Manufactured crisis

Ben Klutsey is executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also a featured speaker at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held May 20 at Capital Turnaround in Washington.

A former policy assistant at the Institute of International Finance and research fellow and policy director at Mercatus, he is a native of Ghana who earned his undergraduate degree at Lawrence University and his graduate degree at George Mason.

In an interview with Fulcum, Klutsey distinguished between political polarization, most evident among partisan elites, and affective polarization, reflecting mutual suspicion and animosity.

“Affective polarization is a big, big, big challenge right now,” he said. “Our views on the issues haven't changed that much over the past several decades. If anything, we’ve moved a little bit closer to each other. But the way we feel about each other has changed over time.”

Affective polarization is “driven by all kinds of things, including social media and the way that Congress functions,” Klutsey continued. “So we feel worse about each other.”

“And then you have the media environment where the incentives are to show the sensational and the outrageous. This gives people this impression that we are in an existential crisis.”

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Stick to principle

Tim Chapman is president of Advancing American Freedom and a featured speaker at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, coming up on May 20 in Washington.

Chapman has served as a principal at P2 Public Affairs, executive director of Heritage Action, chief of staff at the Heritage Foundation, and adviser and staffer to former U.S. senators Jim DeMint, Don Nickles, and Asa Hutchinson.

In a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, he argued that American conservatism is most effective when focused not on personalities but on timeless principles such as limited government, free markets, and institutional checks to constrain power.

When economic confidence falters, and policy missteps go unchallenged, electoral consequences follow, he added.

And in a separate interview with The Hill, Chapman urged conservatives to apply American’s founding principles consistently and build a movement capable of driving policy reform not just in the short term but over the coming years and decades.

“The last year has been about conservatives quietly getting to work on a post-Trump future,” he said. “Trump delivered some genuine wins and some genuine losses, and the task ahead is building a movement rooted in time-tested principles — one that learns from the Trump era without being trapped by it.”

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Next-gen energy

Rich McCormick represents Georgia’s 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he serves on the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Science, Space, and Technology committees. He is also a featured speaker at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held May 20 in the nation’s capital.

McCormick served for more than two decades in the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy, piloting the CH-53E Super Stallion Helicopter and serving as an officer in the Medical Corps. He also served as an emergency-department physician at Gwinnett Medical Center.

In a recent Washington Times op-ed, McCormick argued that the U.S. is “in an intense global race with China for technological dominance” and the victory depends on which side “can build power plants, supply transmission lines and generate enough energy to keep data centers running.”

“America risks falling behind not because we lack talent or innovation,” he continued, “but because red tape is painfully slowing the process and, too often, stopping projects before they ever break ground.”

“If we want to beat China and keep AI leadership at home, we must fix the problems that make it so hard to build in America. That means advancing next-generation technologies, such as small modular reactors, while supporting existing sources, such as natural gas and renewables.

“It means pursuing an ‘all-of-the-above’ approach that allows America to build more energy more quickly and at lower cost.”

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Algorithms aren’t reality

Erick Erickson hosts a nationally syndicated program for Atlanta radio station WSB, writes a column distributed by Creators Syndicate, and will be a featured speaker at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference on May 20 in Washington.

A former editor-in-chief of RedState.com, practicing attorney, and commentator at CNN and Fox News, Erickson served for nearly four years on the city council of Macon, Georgia.

In a recent syndicated column, he decried the antisemitism and other forms of extremism “infecting the American mainstream.”

Whether it be Candace Owens and Theo Von on the Right or Graham Platner and Hasan Piker on the Left, such cranks draw lots of clicks because social media algorithms are designed to amplify transgressive voices, Erickson wrote.

“Unfortunately, the vice president of the United States and many of his supporters — and the Democratic Party — have all embraced varying forms of antisemites, conspiracists and extremists because they have interpreted the algorithm as reality.

“The sickness is spreading.”

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In the mix

• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Jessica Riedl argued that “surging government debt is harming the economy and our fiscal priorities — and its rapid growth poses an existential threat to the long-term American economy.”

“Indulging in escalating debt is like indulging in a lifestyle of fast food, cigarettes, and no exercise,” wrote Riedl, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“It may be occasionally manageable — and one may avoid feeling the effects for years or even decades — but the damage accumulates until a day of reckoning becomes virtually inevitable. With government debt, the effects are already being felt, and the U.S. is approaching a point at which reversing course will require substantially painful reforms.”

• At The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Judge Glock detailed the COVID-era use of federal funds to aid shuttered theaters and the $10 billion in improper payments that resulted, often to well-off talent agents and celebrities.

The law was “written broadly enough to include touring companies and other companies tied directly to musicians, who could pay themselves money with little documentation,” wrote Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute.

Rapper Lil Wayne “spent more than $1.3 million in grant money on private-jet flights and nearly half a million more on clothes and accessories. Rapper Chris Brown’s touring company received the $10 million maximum, of which $5 million went directly to Mr. Brown.”

“When politicians and the press push the government to hand out more cash without strings, ordinary Americans pay for it.”

• At USA Today, FreeCon signatory Merrill Matthews predicted that if Republicans fail to take the lead on health-care reform, Americans may once again be left with “Democrats’ same failed formula: more bureaucracy, more complexity and less control.”

“Today’s sprawling, vertically integrated insurance giants did not emerge by accident,” wrote Matthews, Texas state chair of Our Republican Legacy. “Democratic policy, particularly Obamacare, created powerful incentives for insurers to grow larger, consolidate and control more of the health care system.

“Obamacare’s architects believed American health care was too fragmented. Their answer was greater integration: bringing insurers, doctors and hospitals closer together in hopes of reducing waste, improving efficiency and delivering better outcomes.

“Instead, it unleashed a wave of consolidation that reshaped the industry for the worse.”

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When Freedom Conservatives defend free enterprise, free trade, and the freedom to pursue the American Dream, we get this question a lot — both from left-wing progressives and right-wing populists.

It’s a fair question! FreeCons can’t defend the market process in theory while ignoring practical objections. Indeed, in our Statement of Principles, we observed that “Americans can only prosper in an economy in which they can afford the basics of everyday life: food, shelter, health care, and energy.”

What sets us apart from our rivals is our answer to the question. We reject the notion that giving government more tax dollars, employees, and power over private households and businesses will truly expand access to the American Dream.

Instead, signatories to the FreeCon Statement of Principles have committed ourselves to “reducing the cost of living through competitive markets, greater individual choice, and free trade with free people, while upholding the rule of law, property rights, freedom of contract, and freedom of association.”

At the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held May 20 at Washington’s Capital Turnaround, our panelists will talk extensively about these solutions — and how they and other policies can help foster family formation in America.

Help families thrive

Les Ford is president of Ford Policy Solutions, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Opportunity, and a former special assistant in the White House. She is also a speaker at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference on May 20 in Washington.

In a recent paper published by the Alliance for Opportunity, Ford urged states to implement reforms to Medicaid and food assistance that will promote “greater prosperity for low-income Americans by ensuring that these vital programs fulfill their purpose by safeguarding them against fraud, so they are able to meet the vulnerable when they need assistance, and refocusing them on their long-term goals of independence through gainful employment or community engagement.”

Policymakers should seek to ensure that “every beneficiary who can work can find stable, meaningful employment that allows them to be self-sufficient and thrive,” Ford continued.

“This will require the administrative agencies to provide states with clear, cross-program guidance and regulation. This will also require better alignment in state safety net and workforce agencies.”

“As the safety net front line, every state can holistically reform and restructure these vital programs to ensure that all vulnerable, low-income families can thrive.”

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Too much politics

Tim Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a speaker at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference on May 20 in the nation’s capital.

Carney’s books include Family Unfriendly: A Critical Examination of Overparenting and Its Consequences (2024), Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse (2019), and The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money (2006).

In a recent Examiner column, he built on former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse’s correct observation that both left-wing progressives and right-wing populists are fixated on Washington and federal power.

“Our problem is not simply caring too much about Trump and Kamala and Congress,” Carney wrote.

“Our problem is caring too much about activism, government, policy, and elections in general. Activism isn’t bad in itself, but activism is often rivalrous with community: The more time you spend trying to change the world, the less time you spend living and working among your neighbors.”

“Politics is making us lonely, and loneliness is making us more politically partisan.”

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Extend opportunity

Carrie Sheffield directs artificial intelligence and tech policy at Independent Women and is the author of Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness (2024). She is also a speaker at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference on May 20 in Washington.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Sheffield praised a Labor Department move to clarify and expand access to private-market investments within 401(k) plans. “If done right, this could be one of the most consequential retirement policy reforms in a generation,” she argued.

Wealthy individuals and large public pension funds “have long invested in private equity, private credit, real estate and infrastructure — asset classes that offer equity-like growth, steady income and returns that don’t move in lockstep with the stock market,” Sheffield observed, while “the typical 401(k) holder remains on the outside looking in.”

“The wealthy have long understood that diversification means owning a piece of the whole economy, not just the sliver that happens to be publicly listed. Let’s extend that understanding — and that opportunity — to everyone.”

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Affordable homes

Adam Millsap is a senior fellow at Stand Together Trust, author of Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City, and a speaker at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference on May 20 in the nation’s capital.

In a recent interview, Millsap explained why so many families — and Americans who desire to start a family — are having so hard a time finding affordable housing.

“The fundamental driver of the affordability crisis is that we haven’t been building enough housing to keep up with population growth and family formation,” he said. “We saw a significant decrease in the number of new units during the Great Recession, resulting in what we’re seeing today: high prices and a lack of housing options, especially in areas close to good jobs and schools.”

“The long-term solution is to dramatically increase housing supply,” he added, “especially smaller starter homes and multifamily housing such as duplexes and triplexes.”

“Policymakers often turn to short-term, demand-side solutions like down payment assistance or subsidized mortgage rates that might help some individuals in the moment, but if you don’t increase supply at the same time, you’re just pushing prices higher.”

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In the mix

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Joel Griffith argued that the Trump administration’s stiff tariffs on vehicles assembled in other countries — plus taxes on imported auto parts and metals — are “totaling affordable cars.”

Honda, Nissan, and Toyota may have to “pull affordable, entry-level cars off the market” if the tariffs continue, observed Griffith and his Advancing American Freedom colleague Marc Wheat, “because those vehicles are no longer profitable.”

“New car prices are near all-time highs, used car prices are surging, repair costs are rising, and the Corolla is on the endangered species list.”

• At the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression site, FreeCon signatory Michael Reitz asked readers to “imagine if our elected officials squared off publicly against each other instead of bickering or reciting talking points.”

“Voters should demand that local and state officeholders hold monthly debates,” wrote Reitz, executive vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan.

“Pressure senators and members of Congress to square off publicly against each other. There are tricky details to work out — who picks the interlocutors, who decides the topics — but it’s better to seek answers to these questions than to accept a world where politicians never answer hard questions at all.”

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When Freedom Conservatives convene in Washington on May 20 for our second annual conference, we’ll hear from a wide variety of policymakers, policy analysts, scholars, and commentators.

The daylong event at Capital Turnaround will feature such speakers as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA), National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru, and Stand Together CEO Brian Hooks.

Think tank exexcutives such as Kent Lassman (Competitive Enterprise Institute), Tim Chapman (Advancing American Freedom), Ben Klutsey (Mercatus Center), and Tony Woodlief (State Policy Network) will speak, as well.

We’ll talk about emerging issues, fusionism, developing talent, building coalitions, expanding opportunity, strengthening families, and the future of the American Right.

With the event still two weeks away, FreeCon 2026 has already proven to be a popular ticket. Only a few seats are still available — so if you want to attend, now is the time to click here and register.

Today we feature recent work by other speakers appearing at the Freedom Conservatism Conference on May 20.

Vital message

Guy Benson is a senior columnist for the Washington Examiner, a Fox News political analyst, and the host of the Guy Benson Show. He is also a featured speaker at FreeCon 2026, to be held May 20 in the nation’s capital.

In a recent Examiner piece, Benson criticized left-wing attempts to whitewash the behavior of an antisemitic terrorist accused of murdering a Holocaust survivor and fire-bombing peaceful protestors in Colorado.

“Is it now the ‘progressive’ position,” he asked, “that foreign nationals can come to America on tourist visas, file legally dubious asylum claims, then stay indefinitely, even after an immediate family member commits a deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil?

“One might argue that even if none of the rest of the family had anything to do with the murderous assault against Jews, it is vital to send a message that foreign nationals who come to America and attack our people will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and that their relatives, who are guests in our country, will not be permitted to stay.”

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Offensive lines

Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, forthcoming from University of Notre Dame Press. She is also a speaker at FreeCon 2026, to be held May 20 at Capital Turnaround in Washington.

In a recent magazine piece, she dissected the “Groyper” movement led by Nick Fuentes and its popularity among far-right youth.

“Following their leader's example,” she wrote, “Groypers generally adopt an ironic posture and winking delivery intended to make onlookers feel unsure whether to be horrified by their unabashed racism and misogyny or to laugh it all off as performance art. Since transgressiveness is their main source of in-group social capital, a status competition has emerged to see who can be most inflammatory and offensive.”

“The influence and relevance of Groyperism to right-wing politics is increasingly hard to deny,” Slade concluded.

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Clear conclusion

FreeCon signatory Lathan Watts is a columnist for Townhall and vice president of public affairs for Alliance Defending Freedom and its sister organization ADF Action. He is also a speaker at FreeCon 2026, to be held May 20 in Washington.

In a recent Washington Examiner piece, Watts praised the U.S. Supreme Court for unanimously affirming the constitutional rights of faith-based nonprofits.

“From Washington state to Vermont, California to New York,” he wrote, state officials have targeted pro-life organizations. “Whether they’re going after confidential donor data or attempting to punish centers for sharing possibly life-saving information about abortion pill reversal, their message is clear — if you provide free, compassionate care and information to women and families, you could be subjected to harassment by your state government.”

Now, thanks to “a clear conclusion from the highest court in the land,” such harassers are on notice that they may be “held accountable in federal court for violating constitutional rights.”

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In the mix

• At RealClearHealth, FreeCon signatory Joel White described hospital consolidation as “the monopoly tax on your health insurance.”

“In 1970, about 90% of U.S. hospitals stood on their own,” wrote White, who leads the Council for Affordable Health Coverage. “Today, only one in five does. Eight in ten hospitals are now part of a consolidated system, and those systems control 93% of acute care beds.”

“Roughly one in four U.S. physicians worked for a hospital in 2013,” he added, while today “nearly four in five work for a hospital or another corporate entity such as an insurer.”

“This is not a functioning market. It is a patchwork of local monopolies where patients, employers, and taxpayers are paying the bill.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Christian Schneider cast a spotlight on left-wing commentator Hasan Piker’s defense of “microlooting” as a form of political activism.

Piker’s preposterous use of the term “will almost certainly fade, as most political neologisms do when they outlive their tactical usefulness,” wrote Schneider, op-ed editor at the Pacific Legal Foundation. “But its brief moment of circulation did exactly what it was designed to do: insert a small hesitation, a philosophical speed bump, between the act of shoplifting and the social consensus that shoplifting is simply wrong.

“That’s not wordplay. That’s the Left burdening us all with more emotional labor.”

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