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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Fox News contributor Guy Benson. National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru. U.S. Sen. Rand Paul. Talk-show host Erick Erickson.

These are just some of the FreeCon signatories and allies speaking at our next Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held May 20 at Capital Turnaround in Washington, D.C.

The daylong event will begin with remarks by Avik Roy, co-founder of the Freedom Conservatism project. Next up are two panels:

• “Virtue and Liberty: A New Fusionism for the 21st Century,” featuring Reason magazine writer Stephanie Slade, John Locke Foundation president Donald Bryson, and Paul Mueller from the American Institute for Economic Research.

• “How Can Freedom Conservatism Build a Winning Coalition?” featuring LIBRE Initiative president Daniel Garza, Washington Free Beacon politics editor Zack Kessel, and Kate Carney, deputy director of More in Common.

After a fireside chat with Guy Benson and Brian Hooks, chairman & CEO of Stand Together, FreeCon 2026 will continue with these panels:

• “What Has Conservatism Ever Conserved?” featuring Iain Murray from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Phil Magness from the Independent Institute, Washington Post writer Dominic Pino, and Tony Woodlief from State Policy Network.

• “Rags to Riches Over Redistribution: Uplifting the Forgotten American,” featuring Scott Winship from the American Enterprise Institute, Adam Millsap from Stand Together Trust, and Les Ford from the Alliance for Opportunity.

• “Faith, Family, Freedom: Strengthening America’s Culture from the Ground Up,” featuring Lathan Watts from Alliance Defending Freedom, Carrie Sheffield from Independent Women, John Shelton from Advancing American Freedom, and Tim Carney, Washington Examiner columnist and AEI senior fellow.

• “Turning Ideas Into Action: Strengthening FreeCon Infrastructure and Building the Next Generation of Leaders,” featuring Dan Rothschild from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, Reformers Academy president Josh Archambault, Advancing American Freedom president Tim Chapman, and Roger Ream, president & CEO of The Fund for American Studies.

• “America at 250: The Founding Principles and the Future of American Conservatism,” featuring Beth Anne Mumford from Americans for Prosperity, Competitive Enterprise Institute president Kent Lassman, Mercatus Center executive director Ben Klutsey, and Mark Strand, former president of the Congressional Institute.

Interspersed throughout the day will be keynote speeches by Paul, Erickson, Ponnuru, and U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA). You can learn more about FreeCon 2026 and register by clicking here.

Today we feature recent work by Freedom Conservatives on the past, present, and future of the American economy.

Threat to productivity

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

Bahnsen is a frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox News, and Fox Business, and is a regular contributor to National Review. He hosts the popular weekly podcast, Capital Record, dedicated to a defense of free enterprise and capital markets.

In a recent National Review column, Bahnsen designated reform of America’s legal system as “the next supply-side battle.”

“The supply-side movement, rightly understood, doesn’t simply support tax cuts,” he wrote. “It champions the production of goods and services as the foundation of a flourishing economy, and it should take on forces that oppose this cause.

“Today, the greatest threat to economic productivity is America’s noxious legal environment. Excessive legal costs, the prevalence of frivolous lawsuits, and the fear of legal action all massively impede pro-growth decision-making. Legal reform must become the next cause of the supply-side movement. Our economic well-being depends on it.”

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Capital idea

Donald J. Boudreaux is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and professor of economics at George Mason University. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent Washington Post piece co-written with economist Mark J. Perry, Boudreaux challenged the conventional wisdom that trade deficits are economically harmful.

“If trade deficits drain wealth from a country, Americans’ average real net worth would have fallen over the past half-century,” they wrote. “Instead, even after accounting for growing government debt, it has risen significantly.”

Boudreaux and Perry pointed out that “U.S. trade deficits reflect rising investment in America, not necessarily excessive consumption.” Because of the way international economic accounting works, a net inflow of investment into a country — a surplus in the capital account — is typically accompanied by a corresponding deficit in the current account, which reflects trade in goods and services.

“Fifty years of trade deficits have not drained the United States of wealth or mortgaged its future to foreigners,” they concluded. “Rather, by bringing trillions of dollars of foreign investment capital to the nation’s shores, they have enriched it. That’s an economic outcome to celebrate, not one to condemn or correct.”

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Bad news for Team Blue

John Phelan is an economist at the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for The Daily Economy, Phelan contrasted the economic performance of conservatively governed states with those administered by left-wing governors and legislatures.

“When they vote with their feet, Americans make it abundantly clear which of these models they prefer,” he wrote. From 2020 to 2025, 3.5 million Americans left “Blue” states for elsewhere in the U.S. while “Red” states gained 3.2 million residents.

“These movements will have political consequences which Democrats are unlikely to appreciate,” including shifts in congressional representation and the Electoral College. “In politics, economic policy is destiny.”

In the mix

• At his Let People Prosper Substack, FreeCon signatory and former White House economist Vance Ginn contrasted the principles and policies offered by Freedom Conservatives from those of rival movements such as Christian nationalism and National Conservatism.

“Christian nationalism is right to worry about moral decay, family breakdown, and cultural drift,” Ginn allowed, but “once the state is asked to enforce a thicker religious or national identity, the line between moral witness and coercive politics gets blurry fast. The government is not and shouldn’t be the church. It is not a good shepherd.”

And National Conservatism is “often right to criticize elite detachment, institutional rot, and the failures of global managerialism. But it too often drifts toward tariffs, industrial policy, centralized favoritism, and the idea that national strength requires more state direction.”

• At The Free Press, FreeCon signatory Jonas Du explained how Dartmouth College president Sian Beilock’s response to campus protests and controversies differed dramatically from that of other Ivy League institutions.

“While other university presidents were preoccupied with campus agitators and either fending off or capitulating to investigations by the Trump administration, Beilock used her power to keep the peace at Dartmouth,” wrote Du. “That has given her the credibility to articulate a vision of reform for American colleges and universities that she hopes will restore the public’s trust in them.”

“If we as leaders can’t take responsibility for what we’re doing and be held accountable for outcomes,” Beilock told Du, “I worry someone else will try and do it for us.”

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How does it seek to apply the timeless principles of the American founding to today’s biggest challenges?

How can Freedom Conservatism nurture a new generation of leaders and build a winning political coalition?

And how can FreeCons lift up forgotten Americans and strengthen American culture from the ground up?

These are some of the questions we will answer at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference. The daylong event will be held on May 20 at Capital Turnaround in Washington, D.C.

Among the speakers will be Freedom Conservatism co-founder Avik Roy, Washington Post writer Dominic Pino, Competitive Enterprise Institute executive Iain Murray, American Enterprise Institute scholar Scott Winship, Phil Magness of the Independent Institute, Tony Woodlief of State Policy Network‘s Center for Practical Federalism, and Stephanie Slade of Reason magazine.

We’ll announce keynote speakers later this week. In the meantime, click here to learn more about and register for FreeCon 2026.

Today we feature the work of other FreeCons who seek to build and advance a conception of American conservatism capable of achieving both electoral and policy victories.

Bravery for liberty

Linda Chavez chairs the board of the Center for Equal Opportunity. She is also a FreeCon signatory.

Having written for many newspapers across the country, Chavez is a longtime political commentator and the author of the three books: Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation, An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal, and Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics.

During the Reagan administration she served as staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1983-1985), White House Director of Public Liaison (1985), and member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (1984-1986).

In a recent piece for the Washington Examiner, Chavez wrote about the women leading resistance to the tyrannical regime of Iran.

“Religious fascism, the kind that hangs women from cranes, executes children, and hijacks one of the world’s great faiths to justify medieval savagery, cannot be defeated by F-35s or sanctions alone,” she argued.

“It can only be defeated by a force that speaks its own spiritual language and proves, through sacrifice and example, that faith and freedom, Islam and democracy, devotion and dignity, are not contradictions.”

“I believe that the most important women’s movement in the world today is not happening in Washington or Brussels or Paris. It is happening inside Iran, led by Iranian women who are determined to bring down a ruthless regime for which misogyny is one of its hallmarks.”

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Fusion and the Right

George Hawley is an associate professor of political science at the University of Alabama and a FreeCon signatory.

Among Hawley’s books are The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism and Conservatism in a Divided America: The Right and Identity Politics.

In a recent piece for The Dispatch, he related the history of the fusionist movement within American conservatism and its relevance to today’s rivalry between Freedom Conservatism and the nationalist-populist Right.

“In the age of MAGA,” he wrote, “a variety of insurgent factions — including new right populists, postliberals, national conservatives, and antisemitic groypers — compete for influence in a right united less by shared principles than by a common hostility to both the left and the conservative mainstream of the late 20^th century.”

This is not the first time the American Right has encompassed a “jumble of ideological impulses,” he continued. During the 1950s and early 1960s, it took the leadership of William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, and others to fashion a conservative movement capable of large-scale persuasion, electoral success, and effective governance.

Fusionism “emerged as the most successful effort to give the postwar right-wing movement coherence,” Hawley wrote.

“A free society depends both on individual liberty and individual virtue. Virtue requires genuine choice; a society that excessively polices private behavior is not virtuous but totalitarian. At the same time, liberty requires a populace capable of self-restraint.”

Today’s populist Right offers “not a refinement of conservative principles but an alternative to them,” he continued. Having obtained power in Washington, “it has shown a tendency to erode institutional norms, intensify polarization, and substitute personal loyalty for stable principle.

“These outcomes were predictable. They align with the critiques advanced by an earlier generation of fusionist conservative thinkers who understood that the rejection of principle in favor of mobilization carries predictable costs.”

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Title match

Thomas D. Howes is a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University and a FreeCon signatory.

Co-host of the Reagan Caucus Podcast, Howes is also the co-author, with fellow FreeCon James Patterson, of the forthcoming book Why Postliberalism Failed.

In a recent article for Civitas Outlook, he described the title of his book with Patterson as prescient given Victor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary and the dismal results of populist policies here at home.

“Postliberals are a minority in American politics, but they punch well above their weight,” Howes wrote. “They are well organized, operate in lockstep, and are loyal to one another — they behave in many ways like the leftists who for decades carried out a strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions.’

“Like Joseph de Maistre, one of their intellectual forebears, they believe that social revolutions succeed from the top down, through strategically placed elites. The more transparent their unpopular project, the less successful it will be.

“They are willing to talk in popular fora about their movement as a populist one, about a fight against the ‘globalists’ and mass immigration, when it is far more about acquiring power for a much less popular social project.”

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In the mix

• On Substack, FREOPP president Akash Chougule summarized the consequences of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs as “an abject failure by nearly every standard, including the administration’s own.”

Tariffs are “sold as a way to make foreigners pay,” wrote Chougule, one of the leaders of the FreeCon project and a speaker at the upcoming Freedom Conservatism Conference on May 20. “In practice, they are paid at the border by importers and then passed through into higher prices for American households.”

The policy is “doing political damage as well as economic damage,” he continued. “President Trump’s overall approval has fallen below 40%, and his standing has softened even in the working-class white electorate that has been central to his coalition.”

“Tariffs were never likely to be a motivating issue that would win an election. But once they start raising prices for the working class, they can become exactly the kind of economic burden that helps lose one.”

• At The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory George Will laid out the consequences of lower fertility and the resulting decline in America’s population.

For example, it “makes it imperative to reverse the decline of the labor force participation rate of Americans aged 15 to 64,” Will wrote. “This rate is now lower than in anti-workaholic Europe.”

Furthermore, “a depopulating society cannot thrive with the chronic dependence that accompanies the breakdown of family structure: Since 1960, the percentage of babies born to unmarried mothers has surged from 5% to almost 40%. By 2023, more than one-fifth of children were in one-parent homes.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Charles C.W. Cooke described hard-left commentator Hasan Piker — a defender of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the murder of insurance company CEO Brian Thompson — as “disdainful toward the fundamental rules that keep our society together.”

“The central conservative insight,” wrote Cooke, senior editor at NR and host of an eponymous podcast, “is that civilizations are fragile and that it takes constant effort to sustain them.”

“Cretins” such as Hasan Piker “are free to emit their bilge without formal sanction, but they are not immune from the judgment of the sober.”

• In a recent feature for The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Kevin Williamson argued that “the music popularized by Elvis Presley represents freedom the world over.”

“Americans are experiencing a great deal of social and political trouble right now because we do not know what we want, cannot agree about what we should want, and know only that what the other side wants must be the wrong thing,” wrote Williamson, the national correspondent at The Dispatch and a writer-in-residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“But if you travel around the rest of the world, it is easy to see what they want,” he continued. “They want choices and agency and fun and freedom that may not look exactly like our version of it but that is freedom nonetheless. They want to rock.”

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When the voters of Hungary overwhelmingly rejected another term for Victor Orbán, the result wasn’t just a decisive turn in the history of a single nation, or of Europe more generally. It was a blow to the nationalist-populist Right here in America.

Or so many Freedom Conservatives have argued over the past few days.

Writing in National Review, FreeCon signatory John Puri observed that “large swaths” of the so-called New Right, including prominent postliberals and signatories to the National Conservatism Statement of Principles, saw in Orbán “a cathartic way of right-wing politics that wielded state power freely to make society behave.” The conservative politician who defeated him, Peter Magyar, “is on the other side, pledging to dismantle his predecessor’s state-control apparatus, advance national interests where appropriate, and otherwise leave civil society be.

“Who is the conservative, again?”

As FreeCon signatory Jack Butler pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, It was “always curious for the champions of America First” not to notice that Hungary under Orbán “became friendlier with China, Russia and Iran. It was likewise strange for American conservatives to elide Hungary’s deteriorating commitment to economic freedom — and diminishing economic returns.”

Far from being the “wave of the future,” wrote FreeCon signatory Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times, Orbánism proved to be “a tide of the past. And it’s good news that it’s receding.”

It wasn’t just that a foreign leader widely touted by American populists was decisively repudiated. It wasn’t just that Orbán’s governing model — combining political manipulation and rampant kleptocracy with excessive state involvement in economic life — failed so disastrously.

It was also that Victor Orbán has for years used Hungarian assets and tax dollars to subsidize American populists and the institutions they lead. FreeCon signatory James Patterson, an associate professor of public affairs at the Institute for American Civics at the University of Tennessee, calls the arrangement “The Grand Budapest Cartel.”

“With Orbán’s recent electoral defeat,” wrote Patterson in Providence magazine, “this entire apparatus of influence is likely to come crashing down. The Hungarian people were not only voting for themselves on April 12, but also for the fate of the American Right.”

What comes next? That’s the subject of the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held May 20 in Washington. Here are a couple of the panels:

Today we feature the work of other FreeCons who use historical evidence and analogies to explain present-day realities and offer time-tested solutions to America’s toughest problems.

Kennedy centered

Brian Domitrovic is the Richard S. Strong Scholar at the Laffer Center and a FreeCon signatory.

As a former associate professor and chairman of the department of history at Sam Houston State University, Domitrovic has written for numerous scholarly and popular publications.

In a recent piece for the Coolidge Review, he dispelled enduring myths about the economic policies of President John F. Kennedy, who advocated sound money and pursued reductions in income tax rates.

“The common claim that the Kennedy tax-rate cut was Keynesian — a means primarily of increasing consumer purchases and demand, and thereby growth — finds little support in the evidence,” Domitrovic wrote. “All tax brackets benefited from Kennedy’s cuts. But of course, the effect was sharper the more money one made.

“Kennedy and his advisers understood that the highest earners had the greatest propensity to save or invest from marginal income, and to take risks to gain more such income. In short, stimulating consumer demand was not their primary objective. The Kennedy tax-rate cuts focused mostly on incentives, not consumption.”

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No to political enterprise

Iain Murray is vice president for strategy and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is also one of the organizers of the Freedom Conservatism project.

In a recent piece for The Daily Economy, Murray compared the pervasive “villainization” of corporations to the much more positive depiction of government actors.

“In the Progressive Era, corporations were portrayed as extractive engines of class power, tolerated only if constrained by supposedly impartial regulators and administrative oversight,” wrote Murray.

“Now the New Right has mounted its own indictment, charging corporate America with ‘woke’ cultural coercion, economic disloyalty, and an unhealthy intimacy with left-wing regulators and the administrative state.”

Rather than attempt to yoke business decisions to political whims, Left or Right, Murray wrote, we should embrace a “classical liberal theory of corporate virtue: firms exist to coordinate labor and capital for productive ends; their social contribution is wealth creation within the rule of law; profit signals value creation rather than moral failure; and business and politics should remain separate. Regulators should set stable, predictable rules — not direct outcomes — and market discipline should guide behavior.”

“The choice should be clear. A return to mission-focused enterprise depends on it. Free enterprise, not political enterprise, built America — and it remains the only path to sustaining it.”

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Civic purpose

Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a visiting scholar at Grove City College, and a contributing editor at the Washington Examiner. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent AEI paper, Cost contrasted other provisions of the U.S. Constitution that protect personal and procedural rights with the First Amendment, which protects “relational activity — what Americans do with others.”

After discussing the influence of John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, and other thinkers on the American Founders, Cost explained their view that “state interference with religion corrupts religion by stifling the competition of ideas” and that “this kind of stultifying force could have widespread effects outside religion.”

The First Amendment reflects a “worshipful” and “civic” telos, he continued, that was “not the imposition of a philosophical elite but rather reflected a broad view of what the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness looked like in practice.”

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In the mix

• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Todd Myers argued that Washington might well be the most embarrassing state in the union.

“Politicians and government bureaucracies across the country make decisions that are self-destructive,” wrote Myers, vice president for policy at the Washington Policy Center, but in the Evergreen State “we find a way to make mistakes that go beyond ordinary incompetence or political hackery.”

“The decision by our governor and legislature to impose a new income tax has received much attention. It is just the latest silly decision that is driving leading entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Howard Schultz (Starbucks) out of the state.”

• At Law & Liberty, FreeCon signatory Thomas Savidge observed that while Adam Smith warned against the monetization of government debt 250 years ago, policymakers haven’t yet learned the lesson.

“The temptation to finance debt through monetization is a recurring feature of political systems that seek to deliver immediate benefits while postponing costs,” wrote Savidge, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. “History shows, however, that this strategy disguises default rather than prevents it.”

“If the United States is to avoid the failures Smith warned about, it must reinforce credible institutional boundaries between fiscal and monetary authorities. Without such constraints, the juggling trick will persist, gradually eroding purchasing power, distorting behavior, and undermining long-term prosperity.

“Sound money and disciplined fiscal policy remain essential safeguards for the future.”

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“Much of the discord in America today comes from the fact that too many decisions are made for us by centralized authorities,” we argued in the FreeCon Statement of Principles.

We also wrote that a “corrosive combination of government intervention and private cronyism” is blocking too many of our fellow citizens from achieving the American Dream, that enormous federal deficits represent “an existential threat to the future prosperity, liberty, and happiness of Americans,” and that we “oppose racial discrimination in all its forms, either against or for any person or group of people.”

But Freedom Conservatism is more than a bundle of objections. We are promoting an ambitious agenda of reforms to expand liberty and opportunity, enhance the cost-effectiveness of public services, foster economic growth and technological innovation, strengthen American families and communities, and promote human flourishing.

In no policy arena are FreeCons more active than in education. Our signatories have helped expand parental choice and competition, raise academic standards, improve the governance of colleges and universities, and champion free speech and equal opportunity. (You can learn more about these and other FreeCon priorities at the 2026 Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held May 20 in Washington.)

Today, we feature FreeCon signatories fighting for vital education reforms across the United States.

Nimble reformers

Jenna Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a FreeCon signatory.

Robinson serves on the board of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance and UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance, and on the Board of Visitors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work has appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Roll Call, Forbes, American Thinker, Human Events, and Carolina Journal, among other publications.

In a recent Martin Center piece, Robinson urged state leaders to take the lead on higher-education reform.

Public universities, where the vast majority of American students are educated, are “creatures of state law,” she observed, “and their governing boards derive authority directly from state legislatures. By contrast, the federal government’s influence on higher education is largely indirect.”

“While federal policy matters, state legislators and university trustees have the local knowledge and authority to make an outsized difference — from the classroom to the chancellor’s office. Lasting reform in higher education is far more likely to originate in statehouses than in Washington.

“What’s more, state reform efforts are often more nimble than federal policymaking. Federal rulemaking can take months of notice-and-comment procedures and is often tied up in litigation. What might take years in Washington can be done much more quickly and effectively at the local level.”

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Full spectrum

Dan Lips is head of policy and a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), and a FreeCon signatory.

Lips has spent decades working in public policy, including stints with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He also helped birth the concept of ESAs.

In a recent National Affairs piece coauthored with Michael Toth, Lips presented an agenda for “full-spectrum school choice” that includes expanded child-savings accounts, job training programs, lifelong-learning accounts, and other reforms.

Giving parents and students a wide range of options “creates new opportunities for teachers, school leaders, and entrepreneurs to provide high-quality instruction, learning models, and other services that have the potential to dramatically increase the return on taxpayers' investment in public schooling,” Lips and Toth wrote.

“And as vehicles for administering public benefits, education accounts have the further potential to achieve broader public-policy goals, including promoting lifelong learning, encouraging job training, and even reducing wealth inequality and promoting retirement security.

“In the future, these accounts may serve as the primary policy lever for promoting the development of human capital and intergenerational social mobility.”

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Real fairness

Kenny Xu is the author of two books: An Inconvenient Minority and School of Woke. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

Host of the “Inconvenient Truths” podcast, Xu has written for The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and The Federalist, among other outlets.

In a recent piece for The Free Press, Xu reacted to the news that a federal judge has ruled public universities in 17 states don’t have to turn over their records to administration officials tasked with enforcing equal opportunity in admissions.

“Racial preferences are going to die hard,” he predicted. “Rates of admission at most schools still suggest that blacks and Hispanics are getting a leg up — and it isn’t too hard for admissions officers to guess the applicants’ race based on name, location, and other details, even if they aren’t checking a box. Applicants can continue to put their race on the surface by talking all about it in their personal essays.”

“Real fairness in college admissions would allow millions of students to dream big while ensuring they work hard to achieve those dreams. We shouldn’t allow honest strivers to be thwarted by an overengineered system built around a flawed definition of social justice.”

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Conversation, not expression

Wilfred McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

A prolific author, he’s written or edited books widely used in high school and college classrooms, including A Student’s Guide to U.S. History, the American Intellectual Culture series, and Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.

In a recent City Journal piece, McClay argued that freedom of speech on campus isn’t meaningful if “we aren’t willing to listen.”

“Many of the methods we long took for granted — lectures, laboratories, textbooks, term papers, take-home examinations, and the close reading of long and demanding texts — now seem increasingly obsolete, or at least ill-suited to the crucial task of student assessment,” he wrote.

“This is a genuine crisis. But it is also a genuine opportunity to reconsider what we are doing, what we want our schools and universities to achieve.”

McClay credited philosopher Michael Oakeshott with the observation that the central task of education is to provide an “initiation into the skill and partnership” of conversation.

“If he is right, and if that is the goal we ought to set for ourselves, the implications would be profound.”

In the mix

• In the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Kimberly Ross celebrated the successful Artemis II mission, which reminds Americans “never to stop looking up.”

“The pictures from Artemis II showing the lunar surface and our beautiful, blue planet are the result of decades of hard work,” wrote Ross, a columnist for the Examiner and the Magnolia Tribune.

“But in an instant, we are struck by the beauty of the heavens. We are reminded that we all, as diverse and troubled peoples, inhabit this place. We are astonished at our privilege. No, it doesn’t fix our problems or serve as a compromise to conflicts, but it functions as a sort of warm admonition. We should be filled with both thankfulness and wonderment.”

• In the Los Angeles Times, FreeCon signatory Jonah Goldberg argued that biologist and constant predictor of Malthusian doom Paul Ehrlich, who died last month at age 93, remained influential for decades despite being “wrong about everything.”

“Perhaps the most remarkable thing is not that Ehrlich turned out to be so wildly wrong, but that he was so obviously wrong from the beginning,” wrote Goldberg, a CNN contributor and editor-in-chief of The Dispatch.

“My old boss Ben Wattenberg battled Ehrlich throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His feud began with a 1970 article for The New Republic titled, ‘The Nonsense Explosion,’ in which Wattenberg explained that even as Ehrlich was writing about soaring birthrates, birthrates were already declining.”

• In The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory Carrie Sheffield endorsed a proposed Labor Department rule clarifying the legality of offering private-market investments within 401(k) plans.

“The retirement security crisis facing middle-class Americans is real, even if the inequality narrative is overdrawn,” wrote Sheffield, director of the Center for AI and Technology at Independent Women. “Fixing it requires giving workers access to the same tool kit available to public-sector pension managers and wealthy investors.”

“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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Since then, FreeCons have won some victories. Especially at the state level, conservative policymakers continue to translate our nation’s founding principles into effective governance: cutting and reforming taxes, lifting regulations, expanding choice and competition in education and health care, removing obstacles to work and family formation, and championing the habits and virtues required for healthy communities and human flourishing.

Nevertheless, the future of the American Right remains uncertain. Nationalists, populists, and integralists — along with a smattering of reactionaries, cranks, and bigots — still dream of remaking and leading our movement.

Will they succeed? FreeCons certainly hope not, and will do everything in our power to prevent it. An American conservatism severed from its roots in civic republicanism and classical liberalism would be incapable of reliably winning and effectively wielding power in Washington, state capitals, and local communities. It would lose — and deserve to.

The future of the Right will be one of the main topics at this year’s Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held May 20, 2026 at the historic Capital Turnaround event center in Washington. Here are some of the panel titles:

• What Has Conservatism Ever Conserved?

• America at 250: The Founding Principles and the Future of American Conservatism

• How Can Freedom Conservatism Build a Winning Coalition?

• Virtue and Liberty — A New Fusionism for the 21st Century

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll announce the featured speakers and panelists at FreeCon 2026. To our surprise and delight, however, seats are already filling up fast. To secure your place at FreeCon 2026, click here.

Below, we feature the work of FreeCons helping to shape our movement’s future by offering new ideas and building new institutions.

A better pronatalism

Rachel Lu is a senior editor at Law & Liberty, a contributing writer at America magazine and National Review, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for Law & Liberty, Lu outlined three ways that liberty-minded Americans can promote family formation and fertility without abandoning their limited-government principles.

For example, “entitlement reform is the best pronatalist policy there is,” she wrote.

“Birth rates have fallen for many reasons, but the entitlement state is clearly one. Elderly entitlements are the worst offenders: they socialize one of the major benefits of children while privatizing the cost. Over the longer run, entitlements also seem to erode family networks, and perhaps especially intergenerational dependence and closeness, teaching people to view the state as the presumptive caretaker instead of kith and kin.”

Another insight is to conceive of parents as creators and innovators, not potential victims or wards of the state.

“When the state becomes the presumptive source of support for families (not in extremis but simply as a matter of course), that will sap parents’ natural inclination to explore organic solutions to family challenges. They’re less likely to build mutually supportive communities, demand helpful products, or look for new ways to combine work and parenting constructively.”

Finally, policymakers should remember that “fiscal and human capital tend to support one another.”

“Prosperity and opportunity may compete with family life in certain ways, but ultimately, thriving and energetic societies tend to compensate for those competing demands with less-quantifiable goods. Hope is harder to measure than a child bonus, but it may ultimately matter far more.”

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Imported NatCon

Tim Chapman is president of the think tank Advancing American Freedom. John Shelton is vice president for policy at AAF. Both are FreeCon signatories.

Chapman previously served as a principal at P2 Public Affairs, the executive director of Heritage Action, chief of staff at the Heritage Foundation, and an adviser and staffer to senators Jim DeMint, Don Nickles, and Asa Hutchinson. Shelton served as a policy advisor for offices in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House.

In a recent article for First Things, Chapman and Shelton observed that the National Conservatism movement, far from being an organic outgrowth of the initial election of Donald Trump as president, was “imported from the United Kingdom half a decade earlier.”

“Getting the history right is essential to navigating the fast-approaching future of post-Trump conservatism.”

“The Right was already grappling with the social consequences of economic and cultural upheaval well before 2016,” they continued, “even if Donald Trump gave voice to those concerns with unmatched force.”

“The institutions that sustain fraternity cannot be engineered by the state. They grow from citizens who understand that liberty carries obligations as well as rights. If the conservative movement remembers that truth, it will find that the path forward is not a departure from its principles but a return to them.”

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Populism vs. markets

Charles Hilu is a D.C. reporter for The Dispatch, a former Collegiate Network Fellow at the Washington Free Beacon, and a former intern at National Review and the Washington Examiner. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for The Dispatch, Hilu described a battle between populists and free-marketeers over housing policy, with the former borrowing bad ideas from left-wing Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren and the latter focusing on government-imposed constraints on housing supply.

The Senate’s version of a federal housing bill includes some deregulatory measures as well as “entirely new pieces that have proven to be the most controversial for market-minded members” such as restrictions on large institutional investors acquiring housing stock.

“Republicans have traditionally been against such restrictions,” Hilu observed, “and the party’s hardliners who often oppose government intervention into markets are not fans of the bill’s ban.”

By contrast, populist U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley supports it. Republican voters “want policy in this town that reflects their needs and interests,” Hawley told Hilu, “not Wall Street’s, not the giant foreign nationals.’’

“While the bill’s ban contradicts Republican free-market orthodoxy,” Hilu wrote, “it also tests the viability of a new movement among Democrats. Taking its name from a 2025 book by liberal writers Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, the ‘Abundance’ movement prioritizes housing policies that can increase supply to bring down costs. Part of that agenda includes cutting red tape to make it easier to build housing.”

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More releases

A couple of weeks ago, we spotlighted recently published and forthcoming books by FreeCon signatories. Here are some additional titles to look for:

Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, by Noah Rothman (due out in May).

The Civilization of Commerce: Invisible Hands and the Pursuit of Happiness by Samuel Gregg (due out in October).

Thinking About Freedom and Tradition: Understanding the Philosophers Who Make the Case for Western Civilization, by Donald Devine (published in January).

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In the mix

• At The Free Press, FreeCon signatory Judge Glock pointed out that frustrations with airport security long predate the recent budget dispute between Democrats in Congress and the Trump administration — and reflect a big-government approach America would be prudent to abandon.

“The idea of letting the private sector manage passenger security, air traffic control, and airports may seem far-fetched, but it is the norm in much of the world,” wrote Glock, director of research and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

“The United States, supposedly home to ardent free marketeers, actually has one of the most socialized air travel sectors anywhere. Other countries have demonstrated the success of a private-sector model. America should learn from them.”

• At The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory John Cochrane clarified that while there are some circumstantial parallels between the “oil shocks” of the 1970s and today’s crisis in the Persian Gulf, it was bad federal policy, not conflicts in the Middle East, that produced the gas lines and chronic stagflation of 50 years ago.

“Energy prices turn into recessions only if bad policies compound their effects,” wrote Cochrane, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. “Price controls, credit controls, windfall profits taxes, export controls, the 55-mph speed limit, corn ethanol, cardigan sweaters, malaise, and a slow-to-react Federal Reserve all fed the misery of the 1970s. They need not do so again.”

“What should government do about rising energy prices? Nothing. Or, more concretely, get out of the way, ease restrictions, and let the market work its magic of sending energy to the most economically important uses while encouraging others to save, substitute or provide new energy.”

• At the Daily Wire, FreeCon signatory Stephen Kent took NatCon signatory Jack Posobiec to task for the latter’s recent claim that J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is “overtly pagan.”

“Posobiec mistakes the absence of overtly Christian imagery for the lack of Christian themes,” wrote Kent, host of the show Geeky Stoics. “But just because no one takes the Eucharist in Gondor does not mean Tolkien’s world must be pagan. Quite the contrary. Middle-earth in all its strangeness speaks to the imaginative hunger of people’s hearts, calling them to see with fresh eyes the Truth they so often take for granted.”

“Tolkien and [C.S.] Lewis both favored dressing stories in ways that lower the defenses of the reader and free our God-given imaginations to know Him in different contexts. It’s a beautiful idea.”

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Many of us have spent years preparing for our nation’s semiquincentennial. To our way of thinking, it encompasses not just this year’s celebrations of the Declaration but commemorations of other key events in the Founding era, including the 250th anniversary (in 2038) of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

FreeCon signatories and allies are publishing books and articles, releasing films and podcasts, hosting conferences, and organizing patriotic shows, concerts, ceremonies, and tours.

Moreover, as we celebrate key events in American history, FreeCons will seek to place them in a broader context of political and economic developments occurring around the world. The Declaration of Independence, for example, wasn’t the only document of lasting significance released in 1776. Also published that year were Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And it was 500 years ago this month that the first English translation of the Bible was smuggled into England.

Today we feature FreeCon discussions of these seminal moments in the history of our country and our world.

What a title!

Donald J. Boudreaux is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and professor of economics at George Mason University. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In the latest edition of The Independent Review, Boudreaux contributed an essay to a symposium on the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

“It’s no astonishing coincidence,” he wrote, “that Wealth of Nations appeared in the same year as America’s Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson’s manifesto, which Milton and Rose Friedman described as ‘the political twin of Smith’s economics.’”

Adam Smith “clearly saw that the obvious and simple system of natural liberty was to be given unprecedentedly full rein in the fledgling new nation,” Boudreaux continued. About Revolutionary-era Americans, Smith wrote that “they are become statesmen and legislators, and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”

An insufficiently appreciated fact about Wealth of Nations, Boudreaux wrote, “is that Smith did more than merely notice the market’s ability to incite strangers to cooperate productively with one another and to inform them about how best to carry out this cooperation; Smith was gobsmacked by this social cooperation.

“We — 250 years later — should be even more gobsmacked. Much more. The extent of the market and the number of its participants are far larger today than they were in the eighteenth century. And we have the much-higher standard of living to prove it.”

Other contributors to the Wealth of Nations symposium include FreeCon signatories and allies such as Daniel Klein, James Otteson, and Erik Matson.

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Peak synthesis

Michael Munger is a professor of political science and director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics certificate program at Duke University. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

A past president of the Public Choice Society and former North American editor of the journal Public Choice, he also hosts the podcast “The Answer is Transaction Costs.”

In a recent Independent Review piece, Munger discussed Johan Norberg’s book Peak Human in the context of prior attempts to describe and explain “golden ages,” including Edward Gibbon’s magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which was published 250 years ago.

Munger wrote that Gibbon “changed the classic view (‘Rome fell because men declined’) into what we would now recognize as a social science-based comparative statics argument: ‘Rome fell because institutions changed incentives.’”

“A number of modern authors, including most prominently Mancur Olson, have taken up this approach and applied it fruitfully in new contexts.”

Norberg’s Peak Human belongs to the same tradition as Gibbon and Olson, Munger continued, but “departs from both in important ways. Norberg is less fatalistic than Gibbon and less mechanistic than Olson, while nonetheless sharing their skepticism toward teleological accounts of history.”

“Peak Human offers a synthesis that neither Gibbon nor Olson quite achieved. It combines Gibbon’s sensitivity to historical contingency with Olson’s attention to incentive-driven institutional decay, while adding a cultural and ideological dimension that explains why societies so often choose restriction over discovery.”

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Force for liberation

Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. A senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, Loconte is also a FreeCon signatory.

Among the books he’s authored are the bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918 and its follow-up The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945.

In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, Loconte reflected on the 500th anniversary of the arrival in England of William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible into English. Because the authorities banned Tyndale’s work, it had to be smuggled into the country.

“The effect of his New Testament was electrifying and empowering,” Loconte wrote, “as men and women read or heard aloud the words of Jesus in English for the first time in their lives.”

“The democratization of Bible reading,” he continued, “became a potent force of liberation. Reformers soon wielded the Bible to confront oppressive political and religious regimes. The Protestant defenders of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, which deposed an autocratic monarch and established a constitutional government, were armed with a biblical text deeply rooted in Tyndale’s translation.

“So, too, were colonial Americans. As the historian Daniel Dreisbach has observed, the King James Bible was ‘the most accessible, authoritative, and venerated text in early colonial society.’ Thus in 1776, even Thomas Paine, a religious skeptic, drew from the Bible to make his famous case for American Independence. ‘That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true,’ he wrote, ‘or the scripture is false.’”

In an earlier essay in The American Spectator, Loconte also observed that because Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire debuted in 1776, the American Founders had another compelling reason to focus on historical examples of failed states. “The fearsome story of Rome was near the forefront of their minds.”

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In the mix

• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Richard M. Reinsch II marked the anniversary of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs by chronicling their adverse effects.

“Tariffs are a very blunt form of taxation,” wrote Reinsch, editor-in-chief of Civitas Outlook. “They tax not only imported consumer goods but also intermediate capital goods. They lower workers’ real wages by making certain goods more expensive. They reduce the productivity of companies and capital by raising the prices of inputs and other goods used in business while protecting domestic industries, leading to inefficiencies and job losses in other sectors.

“We were promised liberation. Instead, we have relearned that tariffs are just taxes that slow down our strong economy and weaken America’s power.”

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Casey Given argued that plans in California and other states to impose wealth taxes could cripple charitable giving.

“Proponents of wealth taxes argue that government redistribution is a more equitable and reliable way to fund social priorities,” wrote Given, the president of Young Voices. “But this presents a false choice. A thriving society depends on both effective public institutions and a vibrant civil society.

“Weakening one in favor of the other is not a balanced approach — it’s a risky one.”

• At Providence magazine, FreeCon signatory Mark Tooley offered a faith-inspired case against the Christian Nationalism now rampant on the nationalist-populist Right.

Christ is “already securely Lord,” wrote Tooley, “no matter what happens on earth politically or otherwise, which He sifts and judges. We do serve Him by advancing authentic righteousness in society. But that cause is always complicated by the wheat and tares among us.

“It is not a project of installing the ‘right’ people in power. And righteousness often advances in providentially unexpected ways, sometimes through actors we deem adversaries.”

Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, concluded by arguing that rather than “restoring” America, which he called “an exercise in nostalgia,” the goal of Christians ought to be to “renew society, moving it forward.”

“A Christian Realist view, different from nearly all forms of Christian Nationalism, is that social righteousness advances haphazardly. There are rarely clear sheep and clear goats in this advance. Everyone is self-interested and short-sighted to various degrees. Yet Providence presides.”

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Among them are Ilya Shapiro (Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites), David L. Bahnsen (Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life), Catherine Ruth Pakaluk (Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth), David Harsanyi (The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists), Steve Hayward (Upon Further Review: Books and Arts, 1983-2020), George Hawley (The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization), Daniel J. Mitchell (The Greatest Ponzi Scheme on Earth: How the US Can Avoid Economic Collapse), and Raymond J. Keating (Subversion).

Here are some recently published and upcoming works by FreeCon signatories and key allies.

Book report

Andrew Taylor (pictured above), a FreeCon signatory and political scientist at North Carolina State University, is the author of A Tolerance for Inequality: American Public Opinion and Economic Policy, published last November by the University of Chicago Press.

Taylor’s book “breaks new ground and makes a significant intellectual contribution by focusing on those areas where the connections between economic and political inequality are least established,” said Matt Grossman.

• FreeCon signatory Bradley J. Birzer, Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and Professor of History at Hillsdale College, is the author of The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty, due out in May from the American Institute for Economic Research.

“Influenced by classical learning, the English constitutional tradition, Protestant political culture, and the philosophy of natural rights,” this book “presents the Declaration of Independence as both radical and deeply rooted in inherited traditions.”

Birzer‘s previous books include Russell Kirk: American Conservative (2015), Neil Peart: Cultural (Re)Percussions (2015), and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2003).

• Stephen Kent, a FreeCon signatory and principal of Better Media LLC, is the author of Great Escape: How Stoicism and Timeless Stories Can Change Your Life, If You’ll Let Them, due out later this year from Post Hill Press. His prior work includes How the Force Can Fix the World: Lessons on Life, Liberty, and Happiness from a Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Glen Beck described Kent’s first book as the “definitive analysis of how the virtues of Star Wars transcend political differences and can help us live better lives.”

• Stephanie Slade, a senior editor at Reason, is the author of Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, which will be published in September by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Slade “brilliantly illuminates the truth that the free society is made possible by the creative tension between liberty and virtue,” raved Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute. “This book is essential reading for conservatives of all parties.”

• Frank Lavin, a FreeCon signatory and former federal official and ambassador, is the author of Inside the Reagan White House: A Front-Row Seat to Presidential Leadership with Lessons for Today, published last year by Post Hill Press.

This “exceptional book” is “well-written, insightful, and chock full of first-hand experiences,” wrote one reviewer, offering “an informative view of how the political process works, or doesn't work.”

• Caleb Franz, a FreeCon signatory and program manager at Young Voices, is writing Becoming Ulysses: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Young Ulysses S. Grant. His first book was The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father.

“Filled with original research, beautifully written passages, and emotionally resonant moments,” wrote one reviewer, The Conductor “emerges as a triumphant achievement in narrative history.”

• Alexandra Hudson, a FreeCon signatory and author of The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, is currently working on a follow-up book for young readers entitled Heroes and Villains: The Soul of Civility for Young Citizens.

In his review of The Soul of Civility, Freedom Conservatism co-founder John Hood wrote that by “deftly combining personal narrative, cogent argument, literary allusion, and historical example, Hudson urges readers not to despair about our present state of discourse but to do something about it.”

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FreeCon v. NatCon

The Iowans for Tax Relief Foundation seeks to apply “the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and the rule of law to public policy” so that “all Iowans will have the opportunity to succeed.”

Earlier this month, the organization posted a point-counterpoint about the future of the American Right. Its policy director, John Hendrickson, argued that National Conservatism represents that future best, by preserving “what freedom alone cannot.”

Conservatives “should be cautious of free-market fundamentalism,” he wrote. “While markets are powerful tools, they are not ends in themselves.”

In his piece, FreeCon signatory Vance Ginn argued that “Freedom Conservatism beats National Conservatism every time.”

“Progressives have long preferred rule by executive action: agencies, emergency declarations, sweeping orders, and regulatory shortcuts,” wrote Ginn, who served as chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration. “What’s different now is how many on the right are tempted to use the same tactics for ‘good’ ends. That should set off alarms.”

National Conservatism is right to be concerned about “alienation, fragility, and institutional rot,” he continued, but “it’s wrong about the prescription. Executive-heavy populism, tariffs, and industrial planning are not a return to ordered liberty. They’re a new version of top-down management.

“Freedom Conservatism is better because it trusts people more than politicians. It protects the constitutional separation of powers. It rejects hidden taxes like tariffs. And it keeps the moral center of conservatism where it belongs: liberty under law, limited government, and free enterprise that lets people prosper.”

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In the mix

• At Issues & Insights, FreeCon signatory Richard Lorenc argued that the embrace of socialism by members of Generation Z should come as no surprise.

“Social media focuses intensely on the alleged sins of capitalism — greed, ever-rising prices, unfairness — while largely ignoring its vast and no less tangible benefits: abundance, freedom, innovation, opportunity, expression, and variety,” wrote Lorenc, the president and CEO of Lexandria, an education nonprofit that seeks to reignite the American spirit through innovative classroom content and tools.

“It’s time for both a truce and the truth. If social media influencers wish to expose the system’s flaws (and they should!), they also should expose its virtues.

“It’s also time for the adults in the house to tell Gen Zers to ‘take a deep breath and show us what you’re made of.’ And remind them: If you make the economy grow, you’re free to share your wealth however you see fit.”

• At The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory Ramesh Ponnuru observed that Democratic candidates are again offering voters the promise of Medicare for All — even though its “political and policy deficiencies become impossible to ignore as soon as the debate moves beyond slogans.”

A big one is that the policy “requires the government to kick 181 million people off their employer-provided insurance, 36 million off their individually purchased policies and 35 million off their Medicare Advantage plans. Surveys regularly find that an overwhelming majority of those enrollees like their coverage.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Jordan McGillis observed that, even as artificial intelligence is becoming more widespread, college graduates entering the job market still have an advantage over their non-college peers.

“The economic advantages of higher education remain substantial,” wrote McGillis, a fellow at the Economic Innovation Group.

“Technological change requires labor force adaptation; there is no doubt about that. College and non-college workers alike would be wise to stay abreast of market developments, sharpen their skills, and learn how to use AI to complement their contributions.”

Still, “the median pay for an American with a bachelor’s degree is more than 60 percent higher than the median pay for an American high school graduate. This gap has hardly budged over the past 25 years.”

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But Freedom Conservatism is more than just a set of public commitments. It is a strong network of leaders who are working together to build an effective American Right for the 21st century.

We hold regular FreeCon briefings on Capitol Hill and in legislatures across the country. We advise public officials and candidates. We train students and young professionals for key roles in government, business, journalism, advocacy, academia, and the law. We hold public events such as the Freedom Conservatism Conference (the 2026 meeting is coming up on May 20 at Capital Turnaround in Washington).

In addition, FreeCons communicate constantly with policymakers, political activists, and the general public through video, audio, and the printed word. Among our most effective communicators are those who write regularly for national, regional, and local news outlets. Today we feature some of their recent work.

National gallery

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.

In a recent column, Watts described the “haunting beauty” of former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse’s “swan song.”

During an appearance on the show “Uncommon Knowledge,” the terminally ill Sasse “evoked Cincinnatus as the inspiration for George Washington to return to Mt. Vernon after two terms. He spoke admiringly of federalism, republican government, our founding fathers, and the Constitution.

“He did so without the seemingly requisite, modern-day genuflecting caveats about their personal failings or the document’s imperfections. These failings and imperfections seem to be the only common knowledge among many Americans, regardless of their educational credentials.”

• FreeCon signatory George Will is a longtime columnist for The Washington Post and author of, most recently, American Happiness and Discontents.

In a recent Post column, Will argued that California governor and would-be presidential nominee Gavin Newsom has a “hold-a-wolf-by-the-ears problem.”

“Immigration is the sincerest form of disparagement of the place fled from,” he wrote. “California, which has gained congressional seats after every decennial census since attaining statehood in 1850, probably will lose four after 2030. Texas probably will gain four, thanks partly to disgust with the continuity of Newsom’s governance with California’s ‘blue state model’ of subservience to public-employee unions.”

“For any Democrat with national aspirations, coping with the party’s progressive wing is like holding a wolf by the ears: Can you let go without being mauled? Newsom is either going to find out, or be mauled by the national electorate for not letting go.”

• FreeCon signatory Karl Rove is a former White House deputy chief of staff and a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

In a recent Journal column, Rove warned Democrats not to count on a “Texas blue wave” in 2026. While more Democrats than Republicans turned out for the first balloting of the cycle, “primary turnout isn’t a reliable predictor of general-election outcomes.”

“To gauge Democratic chances for a statewide victory in Texas, it’s best to wait for the Republican Senate runoff,” he continued. “The nomination of the scandal-ridden Attorney General Ken Paxton instead of Mr. Cornyn could let Democrats repeat in Texas what they did in a 2017 Alabama Senate special election. That’s when Democrat Doug Jones beat a baggage-laden Republican candidate, Roy Moore.”

Other FreeCons who write regular columns for national outlets include Ramesh Ponnuru and Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post, Jack Butler in The Wall Street Journal, Kevin Williamson in The Dispatch, Noah Rothman and Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review, Merrill Matthews in The Hill, Stephen Moore in The Washington Times, and Donald Devine in The American Spectator.

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Byline local

FreeCon signatory Michael Reitz is a columnist for the Detroit News and executive vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

In a recent column for the News, Reitz summarized the Freedom Conservatism project and argued that it is “useful to restate the foundational ideas that enabled America to be the shining city on a hill for 250 years.”

“Repetition is important,” he added. “Ronald Reagan warned that we must not take America for granted: ‘Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.’”

“We have not always lived out our values as a people, but major national milestones moved us closer to them. The Bill of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. Women’s suffrage. The civil rights movement. In those moments, America did not radically change herself as much as she further embraced her founding principles.”

• FreeCon signatory Jeff Jacoby is a longtime columnist and associate editor at the Boston Globe. In a recent Globe column, he condemned a Tennessee representative for proclaiming that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” and “pluralism is a lie.”

“The United States was not built as a homeland for any single tribe, creed, or ethnic stock,” Jacoby wrote. “It was built on the radical proposition that people of every background and faith could become, and remain, fully American.

“There have always been boors and demagogues to claim that some minorities are so alien, or their beliefs so malignant, that they can never become true Americans. But there have also always been other Americans — better Americans — to prove them wrong.”

“During the debate on independence in 1776,” he continued, “Richard Henry Lee of Virginia declared that the promise of America had no religious barrier, and would extend to ‘the Mahomitan’ no less than to adherents of any other creed. George Washington wrote to assure religious minorities that the blessings of America were meant for them, too.

“They understood that pluralism is no lie. It is what makes America worth loving, and even dying for.”

• FreeCon signatory David Mastio is a national columnist for the Kansas City Star and editor of McClatchy’s The Point.

In a recent column for the Star, Mastio praised the Democrats rushing to the defense of freedom of speech. “What Donald Trump has done is a five-alarm fire for free speech,” he wrote.

But he pointed out that these same progressives were noticeably silent when prior Democratic administrations and congresses were doing their own damage to the First Amendment.

“Donald Trump was not the first person to use a law to try to shut down a political video he didn’t like, the Democrats were,” he wrote.

And “it wasn’t fascist Donald Trump who erected a Ministry of Truth controlled by the White House to silence millions of everyday Americans who had critical things to say about him. It was Joe Biden.”

Other FreeCons with regular columns in regional and local newspapers include Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times, Quin Hillyer in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and New Orleans Advocate, Andy Brehm in the Minnesota Star-Tribune, Krista Kafer in The Denver Post, Lynn Schmidt in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Andrew Dunn in the Raleigh News & Observer, Matt Wylie in The Charlotte Observer, Cecil Bohanon in the Indianapolis Business Journal, and John Hood in Carolina Journal.

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In the mix

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Tim Chapman urged Congress and the Trump administration to embrace a “proven and tested affordability agenda that delivers real results for the public ahead of the midterm elections.”

That means abandoning “tariffs, credit card interest rate caps, and 50-year mortgages” as “nonstarters,” wrote Chapman, president of Advancing American Freedom. Instead, alternatives such as “deregulation, freeing federal lands for housing development, and cutting government spending” are “proven ways to tame the affordability crisis.”

“Affordability isn’t a Democratic hoax or media conspiracy to take down the president,” he continued. “It’s a lived reality for the millions of American families who check their receipts when leaving the grocery store with a slight panic, review their bank and credit card statements with anxiety, or have given up on eating out due to higher costs.”

• At the Chicago Tribune, FreeCon signatory Sara Albrecht argued that the Trump administration should immediately refund its illegally levied taxes on imports — and to do so the “right way.”

“Tariff refunds should follow the legal payment trail,” wrote Albrecht, who chairs a public-interest legal firm, the Liberty Justice Center, that represented plaintiffs in the tariff case.

“They should be returned to the importer of record — whether that is a small business directly or a customs broker or carrier clearing goods on its behalf. Those intermediaries can then reconcile accounts with their customers under the contracts that governed those transactions. And then businesses should be trusted to decide what comes next.”

• In a recent Substack post, FreeCon signatory Jack Salmon explained that nearly all of the federal government’s projected deficits are attributable to spending growth, not tax cuts.

“As federal revenues are forecast to be notably higher than the point of neutral budget balance by 2055,” wrote Salmon, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center, “98% of the long-term structural deficit can be attributed to spending policy decisions, while just 2% is attributed to tax policy.

“Specifically, 67% of the long-term structural deficit is attributed to growth in net interest payments on the debt, while the remaining 31% is attributed to growth in mandatory spending programs” — with Medicare the primary driver.

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Today, as we approach 500 signatories, Freedom Conservatism represents an even-broader swath of the American Right. We are former elected and appointed officials, policy staffers, scholars, journalists, litigators, donors, educators, and grassroots activists. Some are generalists while others focus on discrete issues such as school choice, regulatory reform, foreign and defense policy, health care, federalism, and constitutional rights.

FreeCons don’t always agree on the particulars. But we all agree that, as our statement of principles put it, “to ensure that America’s best days are ahead, we must apply the timeless principles of liberty to the challenges of the 21st century.”

FreeCons also agree that American liberty and self-government will be impossible to sustain in the absence of strong private institutions that “inculcate virtue, deter corruption, foster community, comfort the afflicted, and nourish the soul.”

First on that list is the family. Our rivals on the nationalist-populist Right argue that only by curtailing liberty, markets, and limited government can policymakers strengthen the American family. FreeCons disagree. Today we feature some of their arguments.

Giving all a home

Carrie Lukas is the president of Independent Women, vice president of Independent Women’s Voice, and a member of Independent Women’s Network. She is also a FreeCon signatory.

The author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, Checking Progressive Privilege, and Liberty Is No War on Women, Lukas has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and numerous other outlets.

In a recent op-ed for USA Today, she praised efforts to remove marriage penalties from welfare programs and the tax code but warned conservatives that alienating single women isn’t a recipe for political success.

“Conservative policies are fundamentally pro-woman,” Lukas wrote.

“Women thrive in a safe, secure society with a robust economy offering plentiful opportunities for people to pursue their own visions of happiness, whether that is to be a full-time parent, entrepreneur, CEO or any combination thereof. This policy vision needs to be communicated carefully, in a manner that shows that women – all women – can find a home in our movement.”

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Too broad a brush

Kimberly Ross is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog, a regular columnist for the Examiner and the Magnolia Tribune, and a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent Examiner column, she pointed out that most American women aspire to be neither “girlbosses” nor “tradwives.”

Ross cited an Institute for Family Studies report showing that only 39% of married mothers with children under five say their ideal is full-time work while 40% prefer part-time work and 20% would prefer not to work for pay at all.

“The big flashing desire this data points to? A word called flexibility,” she wrote.

“It’s almost as if mothers have a complicated relationship with employment and what it looks like for them personally. And there is nothing in these figures to suggest mothers who do work want to abandon their biological duties as bearers and carers of children. Painting mothers with a broad brushstroke is never a good idea. It is a much more complex situation than culture warriors on either side of the political aisle will admit.”

“The competing camps of motherhood may look at the majority in the middle and say we are not achieving,” Ross concluded. “But most women are not failing to live up to an ideal. They are already living the real thing.”

Right to save

McKenzie Richards is a health policy fellow at the Cicero Institute and a FreeCon signatory.

A former policy associate at the Pacific Research Institute and policy analyst at the Freedom Foundation, Richards is a graduate of the Health Reformers Academy.

In a recent Forbes article, she warned that federal legislation intended to make childbirth “free” would worsen long-term health outcomes of mothers and children, not improve them, while ballooning the cost of healthcare for everyone.

Such policies “will not result in overall reduced costs,” wrote Richards and her coauthor, Josh Archambault, because insurers will “simply shift the costs to everyone in the form of higher premiums and deductibles.”

“So, the patient might not get a bill right after the birth, but everyone would be forced to pay higher rates for decades to come to make it appear free. Ironically, the greatest economic burden would fall on families since they comprise the largest demographic that pays for health insurance.”

A better alternative would be to employ financial incentives to “encourage patients to find less expensive care,” with savings returned to women and their families in the form of cash or savings deposits.

“Arizona, Maine, Oklahoma, and Virginia already have a Right to Save style program for their residents,” they observed, “and about a dozen states have one for their public employees.”

“Rewarding mothers for saving money empowers parents, drives down costs, and invests in children.”

Caricatures produce mistakes

Ryan Streeter is executive director of the Civitas Institute and a FreeCon signatory.

A former director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Streeter has also served as a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute in London and a research fellow at the Hudson Institute.

He was special assistant for domestic policy to President George W. Bush at the White House, deputy chief of staff for policy for Indiana Governor Mike Pence, and policy adviser to Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith.

In a recent Law & Liberty review of a book by fellow FreeCon signatory George Hawley, Streeter argued that there is surprisingly little evidence for the proposition that Donald Trump voters “supported economic populist policy ideas.”

“In fact, working-class Trump voters were less interested in such ideas than those with college degrees and were more optimistic about their future,” he wrote. “They cared about what most Americans care about: living in a country where their kids could own a company or achieve whatever else they set their minds to.

“What united Trump voters, rather, was a strong anti-elitist, anti-leftist sentiment, which expressed itself more intensely the higher a Trump voter’s level of education and income.”

“Caricatures of Republican voters,” Streeter continued, “have led to policy ideas and political tactics that most Americans do not like, which is why a book like Hawley’s provides such a valuable service.”

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In the mix

• At The American Spectator, FreeCon signatory David McGarry argued that a narrow focus on law enforcement, rather than broad-based regulation, is the best way to keep children safe when they go online.

“Private companies are no substitute for the men and women equipped with tremendous investigatory powers, guns, handcuffs, and the legal sanction to deploy force to stop predators and protect children,” wrote McGarry, research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, and “the worst perpetrators often prove not to be lone perverts in the proverbial basement but sophisticated criminal organizations, often headquartered in foreign countries.”

“Social media platforms have proven unable to best this formidable adversary — and nobody ought to have expected otherwise. In no part of the economy are businesses expected to do the work of policemen: A grocery store or pharmacy hounded by gangs of shoplifters looks to the police, and not to its own management or employees, for assistance, protection, and justice.”

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Taylor Millard argued that the Trump administration’s proposed 10% cap on credit-card interest would likely cut off a vital lending line for millions of Americans.

Recently released studies show “roughly 75% of Americans with open credit cards would see their limits reduced or their accounts closed if an interest rate cap were enacted,” Millard wrote. “They said this would include at least 71% of borrowers with a credit score above 600.”

The interest rate cap could “also have negative effects on Americans with lower incomes and credit scores — potentially pushing them out of the mainstream credit market,” he continued, forcing them to “turn to riskier ways to get money, potentially dampening consumer spending.”

• At RealClearMarkets, FreeCon signatory Randolph May criticized Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr for moving his agency away from sound policymaking.

It was a mistake for Carr to employ, or threaten to employ, the agency’s standardless “public interest” authority to “involve the FCC more intrusively in regulating broadcast programming,” wrote May, president of the Maryland-based Free State Foundation.

Ronald Reagan's FCC had it right, he continued, when it determined that the Fairness Doctrine "chills speech and is not narrowly tailored to achieve a substantial government interest.” And when it concluded, at bottom, that “the Fairness Doctrine contravenes the First Amendment and thereby disserves the public interest.”

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FreeCon signatory Richard M. Reinsch II, editor of Civitas Outlook and founding editor of Law & Liberty, pointed out in a recent piece for Commentary that the American Right has gone through similar conflicts before.

Consider what happened during the administration of Richard Nixon, who won the election of 1968 with a blend of conservative and populist messages, then lurched leftward on economic and social policy before resigning under the cloud of Watergate.

What came next was neither a continuation of Nixonian policies nor a permanent pro-Democratic realignment but rather a newly energized conservatism that championed economic opportunity and self-government.

What the Reagan-era conservative movement “brought to the forefront after the Nixon and Ford presidencies,” Reinsch wrote, “was the belief that core principles had to be front and center if the Right was to achieve its aims.”

“This was necessary not only to speak honestly to voters; it also allowed politicians and the movement to offer new answers and solutions to problems in American life and governance — both of which seemed to have gone off the rails.”

Freedom Conservatives aren’t expecting a precise replay of the politics of the 1970s. But we do believe that the next four years — encompassing two midterm elections, a presidential election, and multiple congressional and legislative sessions — will come to be seen as another “hinge point” (Reinsch‘s term) in the history of our nation.

Will it be a period of rejuvenation, resurgence, and effective conservative governance? Or will American politics devolve into a nasty war between the progressive Left and populist Right, with neither offering constructive solutions to our country‘s biggest problems?

Today we feature the work of FreeCons seeking to bring out the first outcome to fruition.

Powerful coalition

Paul Mueller is a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, host of “The Economist Next Door” podcast, and a FreeCon signatory.

A research fellow and associate director of the Religious Liberty in the States project at the Center for Culture, Religion, and Democracy, Mueller has contributed academic papers to such journals as The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, The Journal of Private Enterprise, and The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

He has also written articles for USA Today, Fox News, The Intercollegiate Review, and Religion and Liberty, among other outlets, and is the author of Ten Years Later: Why the Conventional Wisdom about the 2008 Financial Crisis is Still Wrong (2018).

In a recent AIER paper, Mueller explored the past, present, and future of fusionism as a unifying theme for the American Right.

The fusionist project of reconciling liberty and virtue “not only in a political coalition, but in a philosophical one” is “not unlike efforts towards ecumenism among Christian denominations,” Mueller argued.

“Although there are distinctions between Baptists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans, for example, they share a great deal of theology. And what they share is often more important than their disagreements. So too, fusionists would say, with most conservatives and libertarians.”

A “reinvigorated” fusionism — emphasizing “limited government, free enterprise, and a transcendent moral order” — may “offer the best hope at reconciling a broad array of communities and values to live peacefully together,” Mueller concluded.

“It also serves as a bulwark against authoritarian tendencies. A new fusionism might also form a powerful coalition to counter the radical collectivist bent in academia and on the political left more broadly.”

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Friendly fusion

Donald Bryson is president and CEO of the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina-based think tank. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

Bryson previously served as the North Carolina State Director for Americans for Prosperity and is a member of the American Enterprise Institute’s Leadership Network. He has written for National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, and FoxNews.com, among other outlets.

In a recent essay, Bryson observed that “the American Right’s current fractures are not merely ideological — they reflect a breakdown in ‘political friendship,’ the shared understanding of what is just and advantageous that once unified the conservative coalition.”

Citing Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics, he argued that political movements do not hold together through power alone.

“For much of the postwar era, American conservatism was held together by fusionism,” Bryson wrote, which was “not a philosophical synthesis so much as a moral and political settlement. It presupposed that liberty and virtue were mutually reinforcing and that political power must be constrained by constitutional form even when deployed for morally serious ends.”

The current divide within the American Right came about “not simply because conservatives disagree about policy or priorities,” he continued, “but because the once-sacred agreement to resist centralized power has eroded. Increasingly, the political vehicles of the Right and the Left differ less in kind than in degree — each tempted, and at times eager, to use the coercive power of the state to secure its preferred ends.”

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Inept defense

Matthew Mitchell is a senior fellow in the Centre for Human Freedom at the Fraser Institute. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

Prior to joining Fraser Institute, Mitchell was a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he remains an affiliated scholar.

He has testified before the U.S. Congress and advised federal, state, and local government policymakers on both fiscal and regulatory policy. Mitchell’s research has been featured in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio.

In a recent article for The Dispatch, he described Donald Trump’s response to losing his tariff case at the U.S. Supreme Court — which was simply to propose other questionable legal authority for stiff import taxes — and its likely consequences.

Mitchell observed that “two centuries of trade research have shown Adam Smith to have been correct when he declared, ‘Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.’ Trump has evidently weighed this research and rejected it. And he’s already shown that he’s not inclined to wait for Congress to delegate tariff powers to him.”

When Republicans on Capitol Hill and elsewhere reflexively defend President Trump’s usurpation of legislative power, after condemning similar behavior by Democratic presidents, they destroy their credibility and weaken our institutions.

“The system works only if we take the Constitution and our commitment to republican government seriously,” Mitchell wrote. “The Constitution is not, as progressives in the Wilsonian mold assert, an antiquated document. Nor is it, as some Republicans seem to think, a prop.

“We may yet keep our republic if we can resist the urge to get cute.”

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Where does it end?

Vance Ginn is an economic consultant, staff economist at Americans for Tax Reform, and a FreeCon signatory.

A White House associate director for economic policy during the first Trump administration, Ginn hosts the Let People Prosper Show and supplies economic analysis for such organizations as the American Energy Institute, the Club for Growth Foundation, NetChoice, and a number of state-based think tanks.

Interviewed in a recent New York Times story about the second Trump administration’s policy miscues on trade and industrial policy, Ginn advocated an end to government equity stakes in private companies and a return to sound economic principles.

“When companies are more dependent on the government, on taxpayer money fueling them, they’re less interested in the profit and loss motive,” he said. “That doesn’t work well throughout history.”

And “when you start picking winners and losers like this, it’s like, where does it end?” Ginn added. “We’re far away from capitalism in my view.”

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In the mix

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Noah Rothman described a recent “shot across the bow” of the Democratic Party by a consortium of left-wing groups called the Black Opposition Project.

In response to “young black men” not taking “steps to resist President Donald Trump at the same levels they did in 2020,” the organization demanded that Democrats adopt a more strident “message of both economic and racial justice.”

“To summarize,“ wrote Rothman, “the Democratic Party should not hammer Trump relentlessly with criticisms of his record on economics, which polling indicates is almost every voter’s foremost concern and Trump’s biggest political vulnerability. Rather, it should mute the economic message and emphasize the very ‘racial justice’ themes that had become a millstone around the Democratic Party’s neck by 2024.”

• At The Hill, FreeCon signatory Alex Salter argued that the Federal Reserve was never set up to address the “affordability crisis” in housing, health care and education.

“High prices in these areas are the result of non-monetary policy choices that restrict supply, subsidize demand, or both,” wrote Salter, a research fellow at the Independent Institute and economics professor at Texas Tech University. “Treating them as monetary problems invites a response that is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.”

“A free-market approach, which is the only kind that will work,” he continued, “starts from a different premise: Affordability comes from supply, competition and price discovery, not from suppressing demand.”

• At City Journal, FreeCon signatory Neetu Arnold discussed the risk that artificial intelligence poses to the educational progress and proposed a solution: more in-class testing.

“If AI cheating continues to rise, we can expect to see further declines in math and reading skills as students offload thinking to automated tools,” wrote Arnold, a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute and Young Voices Contributor.

“To combat this, schools need to approach in-person assessment more seriously. This could involve offering smaller, more frequent tests, fewer but larger ones with heavier weighting on final grades, or weighing in-person assignments more than homework.

“Students might still use generative AI to complete homework or other assignments, but their grades on in-person tests or classwork would suffer as a result. The key is to ensure that stakes are attached to graded work.”

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For the time being, at least, the Trump administration’s reckless tariff policies have been severely curtailed, their costly burden lifted off the shoulders of American households and businesses.

It was never the judiciary’s job to determine what trade policies best advance America’s interests. That is a matter best left to the policymaking branch of the federal government. What the Supreme Court actually did was to affirm that, when it comes to federal taxation, the policymakers in question reside in Congress, not the White House. Any congressional authorization for the president to impose tariffs must be clear, specific, and limited in scope.

We offer our heartfelt thanks to the victorious plaintiffs and their counsel at the Liberty Justice Center — chaired by FreeCon signatory Sara Albrecht — as well as the many other Freedom Conservatives and allies who assisted, supported, or wrote about the litigation. You can read more takes on the tariff decision and its consequences from FreeCon signatories George Will, Ilya Shapiro, Bryan Riley, John Puri, and Judge Glock.

We also express our gratitude to Justice Neal Gorsuch, whose concurring opinion expressed so eloquently a core theme of Freedom Conservatism: that the principles that animated our country’s founding two and a half centuries ago remain relevant and essential today.

“Americans fought the Revolution in no small part because they believed that only their elected representatives (not the King, not even Parliament) possessed authority to tax them,” Gorsuch wrote.

Americans later codified these beliefs in the Constitution, and in the exercise of federal power over the ensuing decades. The justice‘s conclusion deserves full quotation:

“Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design.

“Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day.

“In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious.

“But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.”

Freedom Conservatives do, indeed, believe that history should be our guide. Today we feature other FreeCons who, during this semiquincentennial year of the Declaration of Independence, celebrate the genius of the American founding and seek to apply its timeless principles to the biggest challenges of the 21st century.

America’s brilliant light

Wilfred McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

A talented lecturer, McClay has taught students at Hillsdale, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Pepperdine, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, among other campuses.

A prolific author, he’s written or edited books widely used in high school and college classrooms, including A Student’s Guide to U.S. History, the American Intellectual Culture series, and Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.

In a recent essay for American Heritage, McClay warned that too many Americans are ignorant of who we are and where we came from.

“The fear that we Americans might lose our national soul” is nothing new, he wrote, but “in our own time, the problem takes the form of a strange paradox: while we ‘know’ more and more about the American past, due to the labors of many battalions of specialized professional historians, we actually know less, because we lack a grasp of the overarching meaning of our history, the kind of meaning that helps shape the way we live together.

“We lack an adequate perspective on our history, a perspective that allows us to see the great achievements of American history in their proper light, properly weighed against the admitted failings and shortcomings of that history.

“We lack a shared sense of how exceptional our pioneering experiment in self-rule has been. A sense of how full of darkness and despair and want and inequity most of human history has been by comparison. A sense of what a brilliant light came into the world with the events of the year 1776.

”

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Good Americans

Charles C.W. Cooke is a podcast host and senior editor at National Review. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

Cooke has written for such publications as the New York Times, The Washington Post, the New York Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today, and is the author of The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future (2015).

In the most-recent issue of National Review, he contributed an essay on national identity that rejected the populist notion of “heritage Americans” while also embracing a rigorous process for earning citizenship.

“Immigration, among other things, is an audition,” wrote Cooke, an American citizen born in England.

“If the United States is, indeed, a creedal nation,” he continued, and “if its creed is identifiable and particular, then we must emphatically insist that all newcomers be well versed in that creed. The alternative to this — which involves the rejection of blood-and-soil claims and an indifference toward the national doctrine — is civilizational nihilism.

“Which is to say that it is neither diversity nor homogeneity that is ‘our strength,’ but assimilation. And assimilation necessitates judgment.”

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Blurred distinctions

Aaron Rhodes is president of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

Formerly the executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, Rhodes co-founded the Freedom Rights Project and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

His articles have appeared in such outlets as The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and National Review. He is also the author of The Debasement of Human Rights (2018).

In a recent article for Providence, Rhodes explored the influence of Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and natural-law theorists on the American Founders, including their approach to national defense and foreign policy.

“America’s strength has not been built on military power alone,” he wrote, “but on policies that, more often than not, demonstrated respect for the rights and dignity of other peoples. Many could cite counter-examples, but America has been widely admired as a superpower that used its influence to promote and defend liberty and democracy.”

In so doing, America’s best leaders “have been guided by moral standards from natural law traditions,” Rhodes continued. “With freedom increasingly challenged, and moral distinctions blurred by the contradictions of international law, attention to natural law is more important than ever.”

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Public virtue

Caleb Franz is a writer, trainer, and author of The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

His historical writing often highlights the forgotten people, places, and events that help define the American story and has been featured in such outlets as RealClearHistory, Washington Examiner, The Independent, and the Louisville Courier Journal.

Franz also serves as program manager at Young Voices, where he mentors young journalists and policy writers by sharpening their storytelling ability and accelerating their career trajectory. He previously served in the Ohio National Guard for six years, which included a tour in Kuwait.

In a recent Pivot essay, Franz argued that “for the American experiment to succeed in the next 250 years as it did in the first,” we need to rediscover the indispensability of “public virtue” in our national leaders.

“In contrast to both Washington and Lincoln,” he wrote, “the presidents of the modern age are routinely expanding their own power as a matter of first priority rather than last resort. This should come as little surprise. Strong or charismatic leaders rarely assume such authority without public clamoring and support.”

Public virtue, Franz continued, “is integral to the preservation of American liberty and the efficacy of the Constitution. Without it, power-hungry individuals can pray on the passions and lowest instincts of our humanity for their own gain.”

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In the mix

• In The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory Jim Stergios reported on the continuing flight of Americans from high-tax states such as Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, and California to lower-tax states such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina.

“History shows that Massachusetts can responsibly reduce taxes and still support its residents,” wrote Stergios, executive director of the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, along with coauthor Christopher R. Anderson.

“The last time Massachusetts cut income taxes, state revenue bounced back within a year and ended up higher after adjusting for inflation,” they observed. “New research suggests cutting the current income tax from 5 percent to 4 percent over three years would deliver more money to taxpayers and benefit the state’s long-term economic growth.”

• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Aidan Grogan observed that while Gen Z isn’t really the poorest generation of modern times, it may well be the loneliest.

“Zoomers aren’t suffering from a dearth of material opulence,” wrote Grogan, the donor communications manager at the American Institute for Economic Research, “but many seem dispossessed of the wealth that matters most and enriches one’s life with transcendent purpose.”

“At least one-third of zoomers were born to unwed mothers, and nearly one-quarter were living without fathers in the home. Many historic churches and fraternal lodges have become relics of a bygone era as fewer Americans attend religious services and volunteer in their communities.”

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“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.”

On the Right, our rivals include National Conservatives such as Yoram Hazony and Gladden Pappin, postliberal thinkers such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, and extremist influencers such as Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson.

While disagreeing on many matters of substance and style, these and other populist voices want the American Right to abandon its longstanding commitments to free enterprise, limited government, and virtuous statesmanship.

As we FreeCons see it, they want conservatism to shift leftward. We refuse.

Consider the example of Yoram Hazony, one of the founders of National Conservatism. He is “a principal figure in the drive to undermine universalist Enlightenment values as the basis of the American founding,” wrote James Kirchick in a must-read Commentary column.

NatCons assert the real intellectual fathers of the American Revolution are “not John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, whose classical liberalism Hazony conflates with the antinomianism of the 1960s,” Kirchick wrote, “but rather the 15th-century English jurist John Fortescue and the 17th-century John Selden, whose writings he uses to endorse the concept of America having a state-backed religion (Christianity).

“If this fake history sounds like a right-wing version of the 1619 Project, that’s because it is.”

In the case of Patrick Deneen, wrote Jason Hart in a fascinating piece on Substack, the Notre Dame professor says explicitly that Americans “don’t need a return to the founding.”

“His underlying theme is always the same,” Hart continued. “Americans make bad choices, and postliberals will make us make better ones.”

Today we feature FreeCons who work to expose the philosophical and policy mistakes of populists and progressives — and espouse a bold agenda of reform that applies America’s founding principles to today’s biggest challenges.

Economic astrologers

Phillip W. Magness is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

A former senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, Magness served as academic program director at the Institute for Humane Studies and adjunct professor of public policy at George Mason University.

His books include The 1619 Project: A Critique, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, The Rules of the Game: How Government Works and Why it Sometimes Doesn’t, and Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education.

In a recent essay for The Argument, Magness called Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen’s anti-market arguments little more than “bumbling aesthetic grievances, offered from a perch that neither understood economics at a basic level nor showed any interest in investigating it beyond the list of caricatures he had settled upon.”

Despite operating “well out of their depth” on such matters, Magness continued, Deneen and his allies “write as if they have exposed some devastating truth about the discipline — if only someone would listen.

“The situation is akin to the astrologer who chastises NASA for ignoring horoscope advice in advance of space launches, while also promising to lead the space agency’s course to Mars if only their fellow astrologers could be given a seat at the rocket scientists’ table.”

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Forfeiting authority

Greg Schaller is director of the Centennial Institute, a public policy think tank at Colorado Christian University. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

Schaller is past president of the John Jay Institute, a graduate fellowship program focused on preparing principled leaders for faith-informed public service, and previously taught at Villanova University and St. Joseph’s University.

In a recent piece for the Washington Examiner, he observed that American conservatism needs remembrance, not reinvention.

“Across the political spectrum today,” Schaller wrote, “support for policies is too often driven by partisan loyalty or personal allegiance rather than principled reasoning. This failure is especially damaging for conservatives because conservatism has historically defined itself by its commitment to enduring truths rather than transient passions.”

When politicians and activists on the populist Right “endorse national economic management, industrial policy, and sweeping protectionism,” he continued, “they are not merely adjusting tactics; they are abandoning first principles.

“In doing so, they forfeit the moral and intellectual authority to critique the progressive Left for pursuing the very same approaches. Selective principle is no principle at all.”

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Reagan‘s city still shines

Lathan Watts is vice president of public affairs at Alliance Defending Freedom. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

Watts previously spent nearly 20 years in various roles within the political, public policy, and non-profit sectors, including campaign and staff positions for U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, and Texas Governor Rick Perry.

In a recent column for Townhall, he commemorated the 115th birthday of Ronald Reagan and proclaimed that the former president’s “shining city on a hill” is still shining.

As people of all faiths can agree, Watts wrote, the right of conscience — to live and speak truth — must always be vigilantly guarded. He quoted Reagan’s admonition that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

After describing some of Alliance Defending Freedom’s recent cases, Watts argued that the courage of its clients “emboldens others to bravely take a stand, there is hope that freedom will be secured for yet another generation.

“And whether they realize it or not, these ordinary Americans of extraordinary perseverance are winning one more for the Gipper.”

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Rule of law

Allen Fuller is president of the Henry Knox Institute, which promotes proven solutions to reignite the American Dream and restore freedom and opportunity as hallmarks of our society. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

A digital communications consultant with experience in political campaigns and on Capitol Hill, Fuller is a graduate of the University of Alabama and the Leadership Program of the Rockies.

In a recent piece for the Detroit News, he argued that outbreaks of political violence in Minneapolis and other American cities represent a diminishing respect for the rule of law.

While often misunderstood as a cold or inflexible concept, the rule of law is actually a “framework that allows diverse people to live together peacefully despite deep disagreements,” he wrote. “It ensures that power is constrained, that disputes are resolved through institutions rather than force, and that accountability is applied consistently ― regardless of ideology, status or political alignment.”

The best path forward, Fuller continued, “is neither mysterious nor radical. It requires independent, transparent investigations into the use of deadly force.

“It requires clear boundaries for protest that protect free expression while rejecting intimidation and obstruction. It requires restraint from public officials whose words can either calm or inflame already tense situations. And it requires the humility to allow institutions ― courts, inspectors general and juries ― to do their work.”

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In the mix

• At The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory George Will predicted that the rapid rise of federal indebtedness, if left unchecked, will produce a series of financial and political crises.

“‘Dystopian’ is the antonym of ‘utopian,’” wrote Will, whose recent books include The Conservative Sensibility and American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent.

“‘Utopia’ was derived from Greek roots to denote something imaginary — ‘nowhere.’ The dystopian consequences of U.S. debt could someday be everywhere.”

• At Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory Michael Munger argued that the regulatory agenda of populist-Right activist Oren Cass is precisely the wrong policy response to Wall Street‘s excesses.

Cass advocates transaction taxes, changes to bankruptcy priority rules, ceilings on executive compensation, and a ban on buybacks.

“Such an approach assumes a regulator standing outside the industry, neutrally constraining it,” wrote Munger, a professor of political science and economics at Duke University. “But the post-2008 experience points uncomfortably in the opposite direction: Congress and the agencies were thickly lobbied throughout the Dodd-Frank legislative and rulemaking process, with predictable advantages for incumbent firms that can afford influence and compliance at scale.”

In another recent piece, published in The University Bookman, Munger reviewed a new book from John O. McGinnis entitled Why Democracy Needs the Rich.

“The book’s ultimate claim is not that the rich are virtuous,” he wrote, “but that a democracy hostile to wealth will not become more equal — it will become more centralized, more bureaucratic, and less free.

“In that sense, McGinnis’s argument is less a defense of inequality than a defense of constitutional humility.”

• In a post on the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity Substack, FREOPP president Akash Chougule explained that the American Dream is more than a paycheck, so restoring it will take more than transfers of cash.

“The country’s falling optimism and growing loneliness are two sides of the same problem,” wrote Chougule, one of the leaders of the FreeCon project. “When people feel disconnected — when they lack close friends, stable family ties, or civic anchors — they are more likely to struggle economically, to suffer worse health, and to withdraw from institutions that sustain community life and add happiness.

“Two-parent families, more stable marriages, and vibrant civic institutions are not mere moral posturing; they are engines of prosperity and fulfillment. They provide supervision, social capital, and networks that connect young people to mentors, employers, and civic life.

“Strengthening these institutions — culturally and through policies that remove barriers to family stability and encourage local community engagement — should be central to any serious agenda for opportunity.”

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Unless a proposed rule addresses a legitimate health or safety concern and has a reasonable prospect of conferring benefits greater than its costs, wise policymakers will pursue other, less-restrictive means of accomplishing their ends.

“Americans can only prosper in an economy in which they can afford the basics of everyday life: food, shelter, health care, and energy,” we wrote in the FreeCon Statement of Principles. “A corrosive combination of government intervention and private cronyism is making these basics unaffordable to many Americans.”

“We commit 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.”

Today we feature the work of FreeCons who believe innovation, investment, and competitive markets offer the best chance of boosting opportunity and living standards across our great country.

Close the door

Edward J. Lopez is a professor of economics and BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism at Western Carolina University. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

A scholar of institutional economics, law & economics, and political economy, Lopez is executive director and past president of the Public Choice Society. His books include Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change (2012) and The Pursuit of Justice: Law and Economics of Legal Institutions (2010).

In a recent post for EconLog, he discussed the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London and the subsequent uses and abuses of the power of eminent domain.

While many states responded to Kelo with statutory or constitutional curbs on condemnation, public officials have proven to be skilled at evading the restrictions, a practice Lopez and his colleagues call “loophole mining.”

“Tighter restrictions may beget more creative forms of loophole-mining and necessitate ongoing regulatory adjustments, creating a cycle of regulation and circumvention,” Lopez wrote.

“Much simpler, and arguably more efficient as well, would be for the Court to abandon its rational basis deference and instead close the door to takings for economic development.”

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Reform requires courage

Mark Hillman is a former majority leader of the Colorado Senate, a former State Treasurer of Colorado, and a FreeCon signatory.

During his seven years in the state senate, Hillman was named National Legislator of the Year by both the American Legislative Exchange Council and the National Republican Legislators Association as well as Outstanding Senator by the Colorado Farm Bureau.

The operator of a family farm, he also writes occasional articles for such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Denver Post, and Colorado Springs Gazette.

In a recent piece for the Kiowa County Press, Hillman cited Colorado’s legal and regulatory climate as one of the drivers of the state’s soaring insurance costs.

“If lawmakers really wanted to reduce insurance premiums,” he wrote, they would reform laws that rig the system in favor of trial lawyers and allow “phantom damages” in personal injury lawsuits.

“Of course, doing so would incur fierce opposition from lawyers whose advertisements boast about delivering enormous judgments for clients. Meanwhile, every Coloradan pays more to insure our homes and vehicles.”

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Painful tradeoffs

Chris Saxman is the Executive Director of Virginia FREE, a nonpartisan organization that advances free enterprise and responsible, pro-business government. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

A former member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Saxman has co-chaired presidential campaigns and gubernatorial transitions in his state. He previously led a family-owned business and chaired the board of directors for the International Bottled Water Association.

In a recent Substack post, Saxman warned that a new bill to raise Virginia’s mandated minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2028 would harm workers, small businesses, and the state’s competitive position.

“If the minimum wage goes from $10 to $15, a worker currently making $16/hour might successfully argue for a raise to $21/hour to maintain their premium over entry-level workers,” he explained.

“This escalator effect is why minimum wage increases can affect a much broader portion of the workforce than just those earning the minimum, and why the total impact on labor costs can exceed the direct effect on minimum wage workers alone.”

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Premature retirement

Taylor Millard is an contributor to such publications as Inside Sources, the Washington Examiner, and The Spectator. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

A former investigative reporter and radio correspondent, Millard is a graduate of the University of North Texas.

In a recent piece published by the Herald-Dispatch and other newspapers, he pointed out that electricity prices in 13 states are higher than they would have been had policymakers not shuttered coal-fired plants capable of producing less-expensive power.

One study estimated that “keeping existing coal plants online longer could save electricity customers between $3 billion and $4 billion annually,” Millard wrote.

“Wind turbines and solar panels are more expensive to maintain than existing coal plants,” he continued, in that “maintaining replacement solar capacity would cost $60 billion yearly, while wind turbines cost $11 billion. In contrast, coal plants cost $6 billion.”

“Other analysts, including the Institute for Energy Research, emphasized that regulatory delays and legal challenges prevent new power generation from connecting to the grid, reinforcing the need to maintain existing resources, including coal plants, for grid stability.”

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In the mix

• At the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Tiana Lowe Doescher urged the Trump administration to “return to principles that undergirded” the U.S. dollar’s gold-standard era, “the time when we became the world’s reserve currency in the first place.”

“If our trade deficit creates the flows of foreign investment that allow us to borrow indefinitely,” wrote Doescher, a columnist for the Examiner, “our trade deficit is a strength, not a weakness.

“When supply-side economics focuses on stability for the consumer, not protectionism for the producer, a rising tide of economic growth lifts all boats. For America to lead the world, King Dollar must not cede the throne.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Jessica Melugin predicted that if a lawsuit in California succeeds in declaring online networks liable for the emotional distress of children, it will “open the floodgates for plaintiffs’ attorneys to sue big-pocketed social media companies regardless of whether they actually caused the alleged harms.”

“Conservatives used to agree that the plaintiffs’ bar was out of control,” wrote Melugin, director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with CEI colleague Alex Reinauer. But cracks have begun to appear in the Right’s “dam against tort abuse.”

“This trial may provide a real-world test of tolerance for trial lawyers’ self-interest, popular anxiety around children being online, and protecting the rights of some of America’s most successful companies.”

• At Townhall, FreeCon signatory Sam Raus questioned the logic behind a new congressional push to limit exports of the chips that power artificial intelligence.

“With AI technology rapidly developing,” wrote Raus, the Boaz Resident Writing Fellow at Young Voices, “these efforts are less about true national security than about control: who gets to decide the future of the most important technology of the 21st century.”

“Preserving American dominance in artificial intelligence requires confidence in markets, respect for constitutional roles, and trust in elected leadership — not another layer of regulation undermining all three.”

• At Real Clear Politics, FreeCon signatory Christian Josi argued that whichever party learns to appeal effectively to moderate voters will dominate American politics for years to come.

“Independent voters care about the cost of living, housing, taxes, and government spending — in other words, all the stuff that actually affects daily life,” wrote Josi, founder of a public affairs firm and former executive director of the American Conservative Union. “They are less interested in partisan food fights and more interested in whether anyone in power can manage the basics without lighting the room on fire.”

“Republicans can’t assume these voters will come back just because they’re unhappy with the Democratic Party. Disillusionment cuts both ways. Independents want less theatrics and more governing. Candidates who conflate outrage with leadership may win primaries, but they’ll lose the room eventually.”

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When we announced our project two and a half years ago, it was in the form of a FreeCon Statement of Principles initially signed by 83 leaders. “To ensure that America’s best days are ahead,” we wrote, American conservatives must “apply the timeless principles of liberty to the challenges of the 21st century.”

Today, our signatory list is approaching 400 names, representing a broad range of disciplines, careers, and expertise. FreeCons work at every level of government, in boardrooms and courts, on campuses and editorial boards, and with elected officials, policy professionals, donors, students, and grassroots activists.

While our respective roles in the movement differ, we share an ambitious agenda of reform and renewal even as we disagree on some matters of policy design and timing.

FreeCons believe in free enterprise, free trade, free speech, strong families, balanced budgets, and the rule of law. We champion equal protection and equal opportunity. We think Washington has too much power and our states, communities, private associations, and household have too little. We believe Americans are safest and freest in a peaceful world that is led by a United States committed to pursuing its just interests.

It is true, however, that we don’t focus solely on our own agenda. FreeCons have rivals on both the populist Right and progressive Left — and we aren’t shy about challenging their bad ideas, rebutting their false claims, and highlighting the harms their policies produce.

Today, we feature signatories who think deeply about the future of the American Right and work diligently to shape it along the lines of Freedom Conservatism.

Reason and revelation

Steve Hayward is a visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, and writes the Political Questions Substack. He‘s also a FreeCon signatory.

Hayward’s books include The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 and The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989, as well as works on environmental policy, Straussian political science, Winston Churchill, and M. Stanton Evans.

In a recent essay for Civitas Outlook, he explored the history of fusionism on the American Right and, more broadly, the adaptation of conservatism to changing circumstances.

“To suggest that conservatism changes in necessary reaction to new and more precarious circumstances is not to say it is reactionary,” Hayward wrote. “What changes is the ordering of the hierarchy of core conservative principles and the vocabulary of argument in new circumstances. But whatever the issue map or the rhetorical needs of the moment, at its heart, conservatism is above all dedicated to defending Western Civilization itself against its enemies.”

“The tension between reason and revelation — between Athens and Jerusalem — that has been a part of the West’s vitality for two millennia has been overtaken by the Left’s assault on both traditions. What those two rival traditions have in common now looms more important than what has divided them, which may, oddly enough, be a cause for optimism.”

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Part of the problem

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

The author of 17 books and more than 700 essays, Gregg is an affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute and the recipient of a Bradley Prize for his work to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.

In a recent Law & Liberty piece, he reviewed Philip Pilkington’s The Collapse of Liberalism and described the “despair” exhibited by many on the populist Right and Left.

Pilkington’s willingness to provide some details of what a postliberal future might look like “is to be commended,” Gregg wrote. “But this should not distract us from the fact that his postliberal world would be less free, substantially poorer, riddled with the cronyism that unavoidably accompanies measures like industrial policy, and less committed to the rule of law.”

Postliberalism exhibits “unconvincing accounts of the history of ideas, dubious economic arguments, suspect cause-and-effect claims, and tendencies to ignore or demagogue anyone who questions the postliberal agenda’s underlying coherence,” he continued.

“These features also cripple postliberals’ capacity to accurately diagnose — let alone resolve — the very real social, cultural, and economic challenges we face. Indeed, they further accelerate the decline that postliberals lament. Postliberalism, it turns out, is not a solution. It is, in fact, part of our problem.”

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Nationalist contradictions

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of the Dispatch and a CNN contributor. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

Goldberg holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute. The author of such books as Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, Goldberg has written a syndicated column since 2000 and a Los Angeles Times column since 2005.

In a recent Dispatch piece, he pointed out that the reaction of National Conservatives to controversies about Greenland, Canada, and Greenland demonstrates the limits of “a nationalism that has no respect for actual nations.”

“Whether, where, and how America should intervene is an entirely legitimate and difficult question, the answer to which depends on all manner of specifics,” Goldberg wrote. “But if you’re an intellectual who claims to want to live in some postliberal global order of sovereign and independent states, I can’t take you very seriously if you don’t condemn actual violent violations of these principles while spending all of your time pounding the table about how the World Health Organization or the EU is an existential threat to them.”

The Trump administration has “beclowned intellectual nationalism,” he concluded, “because it demonstrates that in a world where America only thinks about itself, transnational alliances that harm America’s interests become more attractive even as America becomes uglier.

“When America ceases to think of itself as the good guy, it gives bad guys more room to maneuver.”

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Cheap and tawdry thrills

Richard Reinsch is editor-in-chief of Civitas Outlook, published by the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

The founding editor of the online magazine Law & Liberty, Reinsch previously served as editor-in-chief and director of publications at the American Institute for Economic Research and as director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

In a recent essay for FUSION magazine, he discussed possible futures for post-Trump conservatism in America. “Any serious study of populist movements,” he wrote, will conclude “that they tend to rise and fall with the personalities of their leaders.”

Conservatism in America “is more akin to a church than a sect,” Reinsch continued. “A church comprises members who hold related but unfolding understandings, that is, a gradual comprehension over time and experience of the revelation it believes it has received. Different theological schools come to appreciate others without fully grasping their knowledge or seeking to expunge what they do not know.”

The “cheap and tawdry thrills provided by characters like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes” are inconsistent with this conception of healthy American conservatism, he argued.

“Their hatred and tribalism break not only with decency and goodness, but with the principles of citizenship. To be a church and not a sect, conservatism must rebuild a society of goodwill, freedom, and responsibility, one that will allow Americans to pursue happiness untrammeled by arbitrary authority. But to do that will also require that our own house is in order.

“We have a rich history to draw from in righting our ship — and America’s.”

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In the mix

• At The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Jack Butler observed that the Trump administration hasn’t “drained the swamp” in the nation’s capital.

“Thirteen of the 20 largest lobbying firms enjoyed revenue growth of 10% or more in 2025,” wrote Butler, deputy editor of the Journal’s new Free Expression newsletter.

“The biggest beneficiaries were well-connected firms. Ballard Partners, where Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles both once worked, earned more in one quarter of 2025 than it had in all of 2024.”

“Accepting the trappings of comfortably corrupt life in D.C. necessarily rules out the possibility of restoring a limited, constitutional government,” he concluded. “It’s also bad politics. The last time Republicans got too swampy, during George W. Bush’s presidency, it precipitated their devastating midterm wipeout in 2006.”

• In a recent column published in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Front Porch Politics, and other outlets, FreeCon signatory Alex Salter argued that “very online candidates” are “quickly overpopulating the public square, apparently lacking a natural predator.”

“Politics is not a lifestyle brand, and governing is not performance art,” wrote Salter, professor at Texas Tech University and a researcher at its Free Market Institute. “Very Online Candidates offer the illusion of participation without the substance of leadership.”

“Voters should demand better — not because seriousness is fashionable, but because the work of governing real people in the real world requires it.”

• At The Public Discourse, FreeCon signatory Kevin Kosar explained how Congress has lost its way and offered proposals for restoring the legislative branch’s proper role across a broad swath of policymaking.

“There is the Toxic Congress filled with raging partisans who trash-talk one another, reflexively support or oppose whomever is president, and cannot pass policy on major issues, like immigration,” wrote Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Then there is the Secret Congress of lawmakers who move myriad bills and gently curb the executive branch’s errors and excesses. It is little noticed by the public and undercovered by the media.”

“Our national legislature’s split into a functional Secret Congress and a dysfunctional Toxic Congress is a recent development in our political history and a deviation from the norm,” he concluded. “It does not have to be this way. Congress can reform itself. Article I of the U.S. Constitution gives our national legislature near-plenary authority to organize itself, design its workflows, and fund its operations.”

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