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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They include former Vice President Mike Pence, longtime columnists George Will and Karl Rove, commentators Alyssa Farah Griffin and Jonah Goldberg, former governors Larry Hogan and Jeb Bush, scholars Charles Murray and Wilfred McClay, activists Grover Norquist and David McIntosh, and editors and writers for such media outlets as National Review, Forbes, Christianity Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Washington Examiner, The Dispatch, The Free Press, and The Boston Globe.

But the ranks of FreeCons also include many emerging leaders across the conservative movement — those still in the early stages of careers in public policy, politics, journalism, the academy, or the law.

Today we feature the work of recent signatories to the FreeCon statement whose leadership will serve our cause well in the coming decades.

For tech dominance

James Erwin is director of innovation policy at Americans for Tax Reform and a FreeCon signatory.

A former Capitol Hill staffer, Erwin serves as executive director of Digital Liberty and writes frequently for such media outlets as The Hill and The Federalist.

In a recent column for RealClearMarkets, he criticized a congressional effort to give American companies right of first refusal to buy advanced AI chips from American producers before they are exported.

“If the U.S. is to get the world building AI on American chips, as President Trump and AI czar David Sacks have challenged us to, restricting our companies’ market access is the opposite of what we should do,” Erwin wrote.

Supporters of the legislation have good intentions, he concluded, but “to help American tech dominance they should focus instead on getting more nuclear reactors and natural gas liquefaction plants online through streamlined permitting and environmental reviews” while “eliminating barriers to workforce development or apprenticeships.”

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Disagree accurately

Elizabeth Doll is the director of Braver Politics at the civil-dialogue organization Braver Angels. She is also a FreeCon signatory.

Dole previously worked for the Family Policy Institute of Washington and on Republican campaigns for county office, judgeships, state legislature, and governor.

At Braver Angels, she and her colleagues assist candidates, elected officials and their constituents in finding common ground where they are unaware it exists, depolarizing political conversations, and helping elected officials and constituents understand and hold space for people with different opinions while respecting and caring for their humanity, even if they still disagree.

At the organization‘s recent workshop in southeastern Washington, Doll explained the organization’s philosophy and why its work in the state is important.

Braver Angles seeks not to downplay disagreement but to help participants learn to “disagree more accurately,” she told the Spokane Spokesman-Review, and the state of Washington is a good place to do it because “its political and identity diversity” is “unlike virtually anywhere else in the country.”

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Core constitutional protection

Reilly Stephens (left) serves as senior counsel and director of amicus practice at the Liberty Justice Center. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In his current role, Stephens litigates cases in state and federal courts around the country on such subjects as free speech and association, campaign finance, labor law, search and seizure, property rights, educational freedom, federalism, equal protection, due process, and the separation of powers.

A former Antonin Scalia Fellow, he has offered commentary on constitutional issues to such outlets as National Review, the Washington Examiner, Real Clear Policy, and Gray Television.

The Liberty Justice Center has just filed an amicus brief in the case of a California county attempting to collect fines from a church that held indoor services during the pandemic. The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that similar restrictions on religious worship during COVID violated the federal constitution.

“Religious exercise is a core constitutional protection, and local governments need to respect those rights, even where it’s inconvenient for them,” Stephens explained. “Imposing fines for illegal restrictions validates the government’s bad behavior, and we hope the Supreme Court takes up the case and affirms the church’s rights once and for all.”

In another case, the Liberty Justice Center successfully pressed a casino developer to abandon racial preferences.

“No one should be excluded from participating in our economy on the basis of their race or sex,” Stephens told Cook County Record. “We are glad to see Bally’s new offering allows the people of Chicago to invest in one of the city’s premier projects without discrimination or exclusion.”

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Green deception

Jason Reed is the partnerships manager at Young Voices, overseeing various projects across North America and Europe to assist emerging journalists and commentators. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

Reed is also a policy and political analyst in his own right, appearing in a wide range of outlets in various countries on such matters as energy, the environment, obesity, taxes, and technological innovation.

In a recent essay for the journal Meer, he decried the deceptive marketing of companies seeking to earn political points with extravagant environmental claims.

“For example, the trend of labeling products as ‘palm oil free’ to appeal to environmentally conscious shoppers can be deceptive,” Reed wrote. “This marketing aims to associate palm oil production with deforestation. But the reality is rather different. By avoiding palm oil, as these ads claim, manufacturers must switch to a different oil.

“Those oil alternatives might include rapeseed, coconut, or soybean. But those oils are generally much less land-efficient than palm oil. That means going for a ‘palm oil-free’ product often translates into even more deforestation occurring, not less, which is a disaster for the planet.

“But some brands seem happy to let consumers remain oblivious.”

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In the mix

• In The Washington Post, FreeCon signatory Ramesh Ponnuru observed that despite all the electoral lightning and rhetorical thunder, Trump and the MAGA movement have neither embodied or implemented a coherent alternative to American conservatism — and “few influential Republicans have even been calling for one.”

Ponnuru, the editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, cited multiple examples of administration policies failing to match the pre-election hype or the stated goals of the nationalist-populist Right.

Meanwhile, at the state level, “Republican governors are presiding over what previous generations of Reaganites might have considered paradise, with taxes being flattened, educational choice expanded and union membership declining.”

On the other hand, political writers “tend to dwell on questions of ideology and policy,” he concluded, while “the most striking changes in the Republican Party, conservatism and our political culture in general over the past decade do not directly concern such questions.

“Conspiracy theories circulate more widely than ever. The search for factual truth is less practiced and less respected. Corruption raises fewer eyebrows. Our debates are dumber and more thuggish. Trump and those who excuse his worst behavior are not solely responsible for these trends, but they have contributed greatly to them.”

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Richard Lorenc argued that strong reading skills and a rigorous education in history, civics, and the classics remain the key to good citizenship.

“Today, with American society bitterly divided, civic education couldn’t be more necessary, not only for immigrants but for native-born Americans as well,” wrote Lorenc, the president and CEO of Lexandria, an education nonprofit that seeks to reignite the American spirit through innovative classroom content and tools.

This can’t be done in our schools alone, he concluded. Parents must take the lead and “push back” against both popular culture and the education bureaucracies. “That’s best done in their homes.”

• At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Jessica Riedl warned that if Congress enacts another budget-reconciliation bill in 2026, it is likely to widen, not narrow, the federal government’s already yawning budget deficits.

“While conservative Republicans may push for Reconciliation 2.0 with the best of intentions,” wrote Riedl, a Brookings Institution fellow, “it is overwhelmingly likely that any initial savings provisions would be quickly jettisoned and replaced with new tax reductions and spending expansions to protect vulnerable Republicans up for reelection and give President Trump another budget-busting win.

“The best way to stop this runaway train is to not let it out of the station in the first place. Unfortunately, there is not a sufficient presidential or congressional constituency for major spending cuts in 2026, and that means conservatives should not awaken the sleeping giant of reconciliation.”

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In part, we were responding to the National Conservatism statement promulgated the previous year. “We emphasize the idea of the nation,” the NatCons wrote, “because we see a world of independent nations — each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own — as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.”

Freedom Conservatives also affirm the value of independent nations and view the concept of a world-spanning government as preposterous and dangerous. In the FreeCon statement, we affirmed that “American foreign policy must be judged by one criterion above all: its service to the just interests of the United States” while pointing out that “Americans are safest and freest in a peaceful world, led by the United States, in which other nations uphold individual liberty and the sovereignty of their neighbors.”

What separates us from the NatCons isn’t our respective commitments to preserving and strengthening the American nation. It is how we define that nation.

As American conservatives, we reject any attempt to import from Europe or elsewhere conceptions of nationhood that are inconsistent with America’s history, founding documents, and civic traditions. Other nations may profess allegiance to a throne or altar, or define citizenship based on shared ethnicity or religious affiliation.

Here in America, however, those are foreign ideas.

At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the populations of the rebellious 13 colonies included people of English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, French, German, Scandinavian, African, and Native American ancestry. Most were Protestant but some professed other faiths or none at all.

Later additions to the union such as Florida, Texas, and New Mexico included people of Spanish and indigenous descent who possessed distinctive cultures and whose ancestors lived in America before the settlement of Jamestown and Massachusetts. The final two states admitted, Alaska and Hawaii, contain descendants of other ethnic groups living in those lands long before the 1500s.

Add in the descendants of generations of immigrants to the present-day United States, and you have a mix of cultures, folkways, and histories that renders incoherent and absurd the notion of “heritage Americans.”

How can we unify America? The same way our best leaders have done at the best moments of our history: by rallying Americans to embrace our founding principles, apply them wisely and consistently, and expand access to the American Dream.

Today, we feature the work of FreeCons who reject narrow conceptions of nationalism and expose the false promises of populism.

No turning back

Aidan Grogan is donor communications manager at the American Institute for Economic Research. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

A Ph.D. candidate in history at Liberty University, Grogan is a former newspaper reporter and development writer whose articles have appeared in such outlets as the Washington Examiner, The American Spectator, RealClearMarkets, and LifeSiteNews.

In a recent Civitas Outlook essay, he discussed the belief in “Red Caesarism” among young “Groypers” (followers of Nick Fuentes) and others on the populist Right.

“The Groypers are young, energetic, and proudly extreme,” Grogan wrote. “But they’re also nihilistic and deeply immature, exhibiting an alarming dearth of knowledge, prudence, and principle. In short, they want to burn everything down, have a good laugh doing so, and wage memetic warfare behind the anonymity of the internet.

“Aside from intellectual incoherence, there is pervasive ingratitude and ignorance in this form of grievance politics — uninformed by history, tradition, reverence for the tried and true, and respect for institutions and procedures that have stood the test of time.”

“It is a time for choosing on the Gen Z Right,” he concluded, “and we must steadfastly refuse to cross the Rubicon. Once liberty and the self-evident truths of the American founding are abandoned, there is no turning back.”

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Civilizational calling

Tanner Nau is an editorial fellow in the Washington bureau of The Free Press. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

A former College Fix fellow at the Washington Free Beacon, Nau previously interned at the John Locke Foundation and in the office of U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry.

In a recent article for National Affairs, he explored how longtime National Review “back of the book” editor Frank Meyer managed the tensions at the core of Western civilization — and why Meyer’s project remains critically important today.

“By connecting the American republic to the roots of the West,” Nau wrote, “Meyer reminded conservatives that the preservation of the United States is not just the conservation of a political order nearly 250 years old, but of a civilizational tradition of enduring tension between freedom and virtue that dates back thousands of years.

“Meyer's tensionism — rooted in the dual inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem, culminating in the Christian Incarnation, and driving our national story — positioned the individual as the nexus of an endless tug of war between freedom and virtue, the transcendent and the temporal. Meyer's recovery of this heritage was not a political endeavor but a civilizational calling.

“At a time when conservatives are again looking for an organizing principle for their intellectual and political projects, recovering Frank Meyer’s thought on his own terms is vital. Only through such a recovery might we see the real potential of a renewed conservatism — a potential not just to pursue a convenient fusion between libertarians and traditionalists, but to preserve the life-giving tension between freedom and virtue that defines the West and continues to shape America.”

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Creedal nation

Richard Reinsch is editor in chief of the Civitas Institute’s Civitas Outlook. 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 Law & Liberty piece, he criticized both progressives and populists for ignoring the creedal principles of the Declaration of Independence.

“We can recognize culture, history, memory, songs, and battles as vital to sustaining American identity, recognizing that for many, these will be their primary ties to the American founding,” Reinsch wrote.

“But what will this cultural memory and practice be if we lose the principles that gave rise to it, through misinformation, propaganda, and cultivated ignorance? Right now, we need understanding, and the more we explore the richness of our creedal principles, the more we should want to embrace them.”

When Americans no longer take seriously the notion that the government exists primarily to secure our rights, Reinsch continued, we come to “want it to give us everything. We struggle with comprehension, which ineluctably leads to poor practice.

“Those are the stakes for America at 250: understanding the deep wellspring of anthropological, natural, theological, rational, and legal truths that have shaped us as a constitutional people and formed the culture we cherish.”

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In the mix

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory David Bahnsen labeled as “economic lunacy” four new policies of the Trump administration: 1) a ban on institutional purchase of single-family homes, 2) limits on executive compensation and buybacks at defense and aerospace companies, 3) expansion of credit by government-sponsored enterprises, and 4) a cap on credit-card interest rates.

“Being untethered to first principles leads to a slippery slope of abuse, distortion, malinvestment, and even corruption that undermines optimal conditions for human flourishing,” wrote Bahnsen, the managing partner of a wealth-management firm.

“But economic populism, as embodied in the aforementioned four policies, becomes a double whammy when it not only violates the principles of our American experiment but also woefully fails to deliver on its very own terms.”

• On Substack, Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity president Akash Chougule labeled as “policy theater” recent progressive and populist responses to the challenge of making the American dream more affordable to more families.

“If Republicans want credibility on affordability, they should avoid imitating the class-war theatrics of the Left,” wrote Chougule, one of the leaders of the Freedom Conservatism project.

“If the goal is to make life more affordable for struggling Americans, Washington needs to swap the optics for supply, competition, and fiscal responsibility. Build more homes. Make hospitals compete. Reform entitlements. Keep markets open to trade. Do those things, and we’ll actually lower costs — not just score a 15-second sound bite that won’t even last until the midterm elections, anyway.”

• In a recent post, FreeCon signatory Jack Salmon updated his compilation of empirical research on the relationship between government debt and the public good.

“Higher public debt levels are associated with slower economic growth, particularly when debt ratios exceed a critical range,” concluded Salmon, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center.

“While the precise threshold varies across studies and contexts, the bulk of the evidence places it between 75% and 80% of GDP for advanced economies — a level that the United States has materially exceeded since 2020.”

• In a new research paper, FreeCon signatory Scott Winship confirmed that America’s middle class is shrinking, but explained that its cause deserves celebration, not concern.

“Using an absolute definition of the middle class, we find that the ‘core’ middle class has shrunk, but only because more families have become upper-middle class over time,” wrote Winship, director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility, along with coauthor Stephen J. Rose.

“The upper-middle class boomed from 10% of families in 1979 to 31% in 2024, and its share of income doubled. The share of families whose income left them short of the core middle class fell from 54% to 35%.”

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What are Freedom Conservatives really up to?

We get that question a lot. Some believe the FreeCon project is a vehicle for some future political campaign. Others deem it a cynical power play between rival organizations, or a stealth operation by left-wing or right-wing donors, or a publicity stunt.

Freedom Conservatism is none of these things. Our project is precisely what we said it was in our 2023 announcement: a network of leaders who affirm the fundamental principles of American conservatism and seek to apply them to today’s biggest challenges “in order to ensure that America’s best days are ahead.”

Many FreeCons have direct experience in policymaking as elected officials, staffers, consultants, or policy analysts. Others are journalists, litigators, scholars, educators, or civic leaders. Nearly all continue to work in their chosen fields while offering some of their time, resources, and expertise to Freedom Conservatism programs.

What are those programs? In addition to this Substack, there are regular FreeCon briefings on Capitol Hill for congressional staffers and other policy professionals. There are regular meetups at conservative gatherings and conferences. FreeCon signatories routinely work together on policy papers, articles, presentations, and other collaborations. And FreeCons are in constant online and offline conversation — sharing ideas, promoting each other’s work, and planning future projects.

We held the first Freedom Conservatism Conference last year. In 2026, you’ll get invitations to multiple FreeCon events.

Politics matters. Public policy matters. Freedom Conservatives necessarily spend much of our time on politics and public policy. But we also recognize that building an effective conservative movement is a long-term effort requiring significant investment in parenting, educating, and inspiring future generations to cherish the principles of the American founding and defend them from progressive and populist assault.

Today, we feature the work of FreeCons who recognize the critical role played by art, literature, and popular entertainment in acculturating Americans — either for good or for ill.

Redemption and genius

Bradley J. Birzer is a professor of history and the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College. He is also a FreeCon signatory.

The co-founder of The Imaginative Conservative and a frequent writer for publications such as Law & Liberty, Modern Age, and the Claremont Review of Books, Birzer is the author of such books as Russell Kirk: American Conservative (2015), Neil Peart: Cultural (Re)Percussions (2015), and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2003).

In a recent Wall Street Journal review of the finale of the Netflix series Stranger Things, he argued that the show served to “mythologize” the 1980s.

“If any decade of recent history should be mythologized, it’s the 1980s,” Birzer wrote. “In terms of reputation, culture and wealth, the U.S. had achieved its greatest victories since the ages of Washington and Lincoln.”

Stranger Things “excels at demonstrating the redemption and genius of people,” he continued. “Even those who have been torn apart by life or who experienced actual abuse and torture find themselves whole and healthy again. Though not without great struggles and never without friendship and sacrifice. The Duffer Brothers have created something meaningful and real. And people have responded.”

Here’s another cultural take by Birzer: in a recent review of fellow FreeCon Joe Loconte’s new book on J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, he wrote that Loconte “might be the first to examine the influence of the interwar years, the Depression years, or the Second World War on the Inklings.

“He does so brilliantly and with a beautiful narrative flow. The reader experiences nothing short of a sense of awe as Loconte poetically interweaves the story of Western civilization with the personal stories of Lewis and Tolkien.”

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Theater with teeth

Grace Salvatore is the director of the Dissident Project, a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, and a FreeCon signatory.

As a professional actor, Salvatore’s credits include HBO’s High Maintenance and stage appearances in Romeo + Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, and James the Many. She also contributes regularly to such outlets as National Review, The Daily Wire, and the New York Sun.

In a recent Dispatch piece, she reviewed the new play Slam Frank, a musical satire that depicts a progressive community theater troupe attempting to de-center “privileged, straight, white Europeans (who also happened to be hiding from the Nazis).”

“Those who have accused the show of punching down at minority groups misunderstand the mechanics of satire,” Salvatore wrote. “In fact, Slam Frank punches up at tribalism taken to its logical extreme and the absurdities of identity-driven thinking — ideas that have long infected and de-fanged American theater.”

The show has built a bona fide cult following, she continued. “Nightly lines stretch around the block. Turns out, audiences and critics alike are starved for theater with teeth.”

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Collectivism’s bane

Christian Schneider is op-ed editor at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a columnist for National Review, and a FreeCon signatory.

A former staff columnist for USA Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Schneider is the author of a humorous novel, 1916: The Blog, and host of Wasn’t That Special, a podcast about the TV show Saturday Night Live.

In a recent National Review column, he described Apple TV’s hit science-fiction show Pluribus as a “direct refutation” of the “hot new collectivism trend” represented by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his newly appointed tenant advocate Cea Weaver, who advocates seizing private property and calls homeownership a tool of “white supremacy.”

Vince Gilligan’s show “cuts sharply the other way, demonstrating what happens when both physical and intellectual egalitarianism are forced on the populace,” Schneider wrote.

“When everyone is compelled to think and act the same, individual creativity dies. Like Team Mamdani, the new collectivists shun private property, so the citizens all sleep together on the floor of a local arena. They refuse to kill animals or even plants, so the world is wracked with hunger, leading to predictably horrifying results.”

Just because collectivism has become the “ideology du jour for Democrats,” Schneider continued, doesn’t mean the American Right can’t learn lessons from Pluribus.

“When a Republican president vows to commandeer 50 million gallons of foreign oil to distribute as he sees fit, or begins using taxpayer money to buy stakes in private businesses, or tells Americans how many dolls or pencils they need, or threatens to pull broadcast licenses for television networks he doesn’t like, it smacks of the same collectivist impulses currently animating Democrats.”

Wicked scar

Stephen Kent is media director at the Consumer Choice Center and a FreeCon signatory.

Author of the Star Wars-themed book How The Force Can Fix The World: Lessons on Life, Liberty and Happiness from a Galaxy Far, Far Away, Kent hosts the GeekyStoics podcast and writes frequently on both public policy and cultural topics.

In a recent Washington Examiner piece, he compared the socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani to the character Scar from Disney’s The Lion King.

Both are “privileged, well-fed, exceptionally smart, and deeply annoyed,” Kent wrote.

“Resentment and scorn are the marks of the scavenger, nothing more. The almost immovable problem for New York City is that as a one-party metropolis in a one-party state, there is no clear avenue for a lion to emerge and take back what was just given away. The heart of the Democratic Party would have to change, and every available piece of social science on the entrenchment of political views suggests that Mamdani’s voters will only dig deeper into the the socialist pit in search of the promised cure for human nature.

“They won’t find it, and the Pride Lands will most likely fade. The only hope for NYC may be a J.R.R. Tolkien truism: ‘The burned hand teaches best. After that advice about fire goes to the heart.’”

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Facing justice

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

Author of such books as The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War (2015) and Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century (2012), Tooley writes frequently for other outlets and worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for eight years.

In a recent blog post, he reflected on the recent Russell Crowe film Nuremberg and its relevance to today’s war crimes and their perpetrators.

“The International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, which, barring his overthrow, likely will never be enforced,” Tooley wrote.

“Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, infamous for the Red Terror of the 1970s and 1980s that murdered thousands, now age 88, has enjoyed a comfortable exile in Zimbabwe since 1991. Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, charged with war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court, was arrested in 2001 and died before his two-year trial concluded in The Hague.

“But the standards of international law are still important as reminders that murderous despots and their agents, who operate lawlessly under their own regimes, still potentially face international justice. These standards point to natural and divine law, which no gross criminal will ever ultimately evade, if not in this world, then in the next.”

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If 2025 was a year of populist blunders in Washington and progressive victories in places such as New York City and Seattle, 2026 could well be the year that more constructive versions of the American Right and Left assert themselves in legislative debate, political organizing, and electoral contests across our country.

As Freedom Conservatives, we can have little role to play in rescuing the American Left from the likes of Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar. But we have committed ourselves to rescuing American conservatism from the nationalists, populists, and other radicals who seek to capture its institutions and dictate its future.

Over the course of 2026, you’ll see and hear a lot more from us. We’ll be announcing new signatories and collaborative projects. We’ll be holding FreeCon events in the nation’s capital and elsewhere. And we’ll be lifting up politicians, activists, scholars, litigators, and communicators who exemplify the best of American conservatism and are working together to build a brighter future for our movement and our country.

Today we feature some fascinating articles by FreeCon signatories that you may have missed over the holidays. We wish you — and the United States of America — a very happy new year.

Identity politics

During the last days of 2025 and first days of 2026, robust debate continued about American identity, the nation’s founding principles, and their relevance to today’s public concerns and controversies.

At The Wall Street Journal, for example, FreeCon signatory Jack Butler rejected the invented category of “heritage Americans” as a notion of national identity at odds with our country’s history and traditions.

“The Founders left us something unique in human history: a country with the ability to grow and incorporate new arrivals,” wrote Butler, deputy editor of the Journal’s new opinion newsletter Free Expression. “To restrict access to American identity to the direct descendants of those who got here first is inherently self-limiting. America wouldn’t have become truly great had this perception been allowed to dominate our national life.

“None of this means that being an American is the birthright of all the world’s people. Rising to the occasion of America’s experiment in self-government is hard, as it should be. But a rejection of aristocratic pretensions to hierarchy is at the heart of what it means to be an American. Claims of hereditary superiority resemble nothing so much as the feudal conceptions of life that generations of Americans — including the Founding generation — intentionally left behind.”

Over at the Washington Examiner, FreeCon signatory Thomas D. Howes described the origins of postliberalism and its manifestation within today’s populist Right.

Postliberals such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule “draw on a preexisting Catholic reactionary tradition that went out of favor following the moral failures of Vichy France, Franco’s Spain, or Dollfuss’s Austria,” wrote Howes, editor-in-chief of The Vital Center and the founder of the Reagan Caucus and Reagan Caucus Action.

“Deneen believes that the Church needs to rethink its support for liberal democracy, expressed in the Second Vatican Council. The far more likely fate of this contemporary iteration of postliberalism, however, will not be that of Vichy France or Franco’s Spain. It is more likely to falter like integralist movements in Brazil and Argentina, outcompeted by other, more powerful factions within their coalition.”

And at The Washington Times, FreeCon signatory Randolph May urged Americans to think carefully about references to “the people” in our founding documents.

“In its very first sentence, the Declaration of Independence, issued 11 years before the Constitution was drafted, refers to ‘one People,’ not unlike the Constitution’s ‘We the People,’” wrote May, president of the Free State Foundation.

“The Declaration goes on to proclaim that governments derive ‘their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ This foundational precept at the core of individual liberty and a free society means that the exercise of ordinary politics, not force, threats of violence or government diktats, must be the way in which political differences among us are resolved.”

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Emerging issues

Freedom Conservatives are also at the forefront of transforming general principles into actionable policies.

At City Journal, for example, FreeCon signatory Neetu Arnold reported on the remarkable success of school reforms in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — and the lessons they can teach other education policymakers.

Test-score gains and other indicators of school improvement in conservative-led states have “rightly been credited to a handful of commonsense reforms: early literacy laws that require the use of phonics, the tightening of retention and promotion policies, universal literacy screeners in early grades, and rigorous curricula,” wrote Arnold, a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute, along with her coauthor Daniel Buck.

“But another factor may be these states’ strict disciplinary policies. The states seeing the greatest gains academically are also the ones doing the most to bring order and stability to their schools.

“A teacher can use the best curriculum, and states can make schools use the best instructional methods, but if classrooms are chaotic, then students will not learn. The presence of a misbehaving peer causes other students to act out, dilutes instruction, and drives down achievement for other students.”

Over at National Review, FreeCon signatory Paul Winfree offered a strategy of reforms to make the American dream more affordable for young families.

“The fundamental problem is that America is not producing enough of the things that make a nation prosperous,” wrote Winfree, president of the Economic Policy Innovation Center and White House staffer during the first Trump Administration.

“We do not build enough homes. We do not expand child care capacity fast enough. We do not permit new technologies to scale. We do not create enough high-productivity jobs that allow workers to produce more and earn more. A country that invented the modern economy now spends too much of its talent on complying with government requirements. This is one important reason why affordability has become a problem.

“The path out of the scarcity-mindset trap begins with recognizing that affordability depends on productivity, and productivity depends on innovation. Economic growth is not simply a matter of capital and labor. It requires that people have the skills and freedom to turn ideas into commercial products, and a culture willing to let changemakers disrupt the status quo.”

And at The Fulcrum, FreeCon signatory Lynn Schmidt wrote that the most effective response to medical misinformation — be it from leftist cranks or the secretary of health and human services — is to present facts calmly and respectfully.

“Heavy-handed censorship risks creating martyrs, driving misinformation underground where it becomes harder to counter, and eroding public trust in institutions,” wrote Schmidt, a columnist and editorial board member at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “But a completely hands-off approach allows falsehoods to proliferate with devastating consequences.

“Perhaps the answer lies not in choosing between these extremes but in pursuing a more nuanced approach. This might include: prominent placement of accurate information from credible sources without outright censorship of alternative views; transparency about content moderation decisions and clear, consistently applied standards; investment in digital literacy education that helps people evaluate health claims critically; and, perhaps most importantly, holding leaders to a higher standard when it comes to the dissemination of incorrect medical information.”

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Electoral stakes

Freedom Conservatives recognize, of course, that principles can only become policy if conservative leaders win elections, secure and maintain majority coalitions, and wield power effectively. The primary and midterm elections of 2026, then, represent another potential inflection point for American politics and the conservative movement.

In The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Karl Rove surveyed the major political events of 2025 and pondered their implications for the future.

“MAGA is engaged in internecine warfare, with different people who claim to represent and lead the movement viciously attacking one another,” wrote Rove, senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to former President George W. Bush.

“Populists and traditional conservatives are increasingly at odds over important policy issues. The Democratic Party has its own internal battles, pitting socialists against moderates and liberals. These divisions are likely to intensify as 2028 approaches.

“The media, meanwhile, is changing in ways that seemed unimaginable a few years ago. Some in the legacy media are attempting to re-establish public trust. Bari Weiss at CBS is insisting the network return to calling balls and strikes. The Washington Post is trying to move toward the center. Only time will tell if these experiments pan out.

“The prevailing theme is the public’s pervasive distrust of virtually every institution in American life. There’s almost no authority figure or august body in our society in which most people have confidence. That’s dangerous for the country.”

At The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Josh Lewis wrote about former Senator Ben Sasse’s cancer and the rhetorical example he set when announcing the news.

“Sasse’s note on his cancer diagnosis sounds like it was written for a different era,” wrote Lewis, a government auditor and host of the podcast Saving Elephants.

“It’s candid (‘death is a wicked thief, the bastard pursues us all’), rejects superficialities (‘not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength’), and unapologetically orthodox (‘We hope in a real Deliverer–a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place’).

“Missing from the post were any hints of vindictiveness or complaints about the unfairness of the world. There were no attempts to convince readers he had been right all along; there was no chest-thumping about all of his successes or his accomplishments.”

Lewis concluded that if hope “can buttress the spirit in the face of eternity, it can certainly provide the strength to fight for temporal reforms despite disheartening setbacks.”

“Without hope we might demand some assurance of success, or cling to the delusional vanity of short-term gains. Sasse points the way to a path not taken.”

And in The Hill, FreeCon signatory Merrill Matthews wrote that commitment to principle, even at personal or political cost, should be a defining characteristic of American conservatism.

“The time is coming, perhaps as soon as 2029, when a Democrat will be in the White House again,” wrote Matthews, co-author of On the Edge: America Faces the Entitlements Cliff.

“That person will almost surely follow Trump’s lead in expanding the role of government in business, doling out taxpayer money, imposing tariffs or other taxes at will, and ignoring constitutional restraints when inconvenient — and do much or all of it by executive order, bypassing Congress. Conservatives will certainly denounce any Democratic president for doing so.

“But that raises the question: If a person is only a strong defender of conservative principles when the other party is in power, is that individual really a principled conservative?”

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One key difference concerns the label “nationalism” and what it signifies.

FreeCons believe in American greatness, of course, and celebrate our nation’s founding principles, rich history, and cherished traditions. We are fiercely patriotic. FreeCons firmly reject the mythology embedded in the 1619 Project and other revisionist attempts to sully and delegitimize the American experiment.

But we also reject the abstract and ahistorical notion that nationalism per se is the foundational principle of America, or of Western civilization as a whole. We also reject the notion that addressing our country’s many challenges requires strengthening “the nation” at the expense of state governments, localities, and the private institutions of family, faith, community, and enterprise that form civil society.

As American conservatives, we embrace the federalist principle that places strict limits on Washington’s power and influence. Today we feature the work of FreeCons advancing liberty, order, and human flourishing at the state and local level.

Coin of the realm

Michael J. Reitz is executive vice president of Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy and a FreeCon signatory.

A weekly columnist for the Detroit News, Reitz also chairs the Michigan Coalition for Open Government and serves on the board of the Detroit Prosperity Center.

He formerly served as general counsel and director of labor policy at the Freedom Foundation and frequently comments on public policy for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe.

In a recent Detroit News column, Reitz observed that if critics of the Trump administration really want to push back against what they perceive to be abuses of power, they ought to limit the scope of federal spending and allow states and localities to create and fund their own solutions to public problems.

“Americans should be concerned about the imperial presidency,” he wrote. “But there’s a problem: It’s hard to protest the king when you depend on the coin of the realm. Governors and state legislatures tolerate dictates from the federal government because of the billions available in federal funding.”

A recent report from State Policy Network’s Center for Practical Federalism found that nearly half of all states are more reliant on (borrowed) federal dollars than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When states rely on Washington, D.C., to fund programs,” Reitz concluded, “they give presidents immense leverage to dictate policy.”

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Rural America’s best hope

Jeffery Tyler Syck is an assistant professor of politics at Kentucky’s University of Pikeville. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

Syck’s articles on politics, philosophy, and history have appeared in such publications as Law & Liberty, Carolina Journal, and the Louisville Courier-Journal.

In a recent piece for Persuasion, he argued that localism, not nationalism, offers the best cure for rural America’s ills.

“MAGA-style nationalism has proven itself incapable of stemming the tide of rural decline,” Syck wrote. “The past ten years have not seen a rejuvenation of rural America, nor do there seem to be any indications that the economic trends of the last half century are starting to reverse in these regions.”

“Champions of rural America must reject reactionary nationalist attempts to rewind the clock back to the 1950s,” he continued. “They need a totally new solution to rural malaise — one that combines the localism of the past with the values of the open society that will likely dominate the coming century.

“This is not an easy task; it asks us to combine two things that have not historically gone well together. Yet it is the only real hope for rural America.”

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Don’t stifle innovation

Randolph J. May is president of The Free State Foundation, a Maryland-based think tank. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

Prior to founding The Free State Foundation, May served as associate general counsel at the Federal Communications Commission and as a senior fellow and director of communications policy studies at the Progress and Freedom Foundation.

He is a past chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and a senior fellow at the Administrative Conference of the United States.

In a recent post, May noted that America’s broadband providers have collectively spent some $2.2 trillion since 1996 on high-speed connections — but could have done even more in the absence of onerous regulations.

“It’s not news that it is very expensive — very capital intensive — to meet America's expanding need for fast, reliable, and secure broadband networks,” he wrote, which will be “essential to enabling and facilitating the burgeoning use of AI. America's economic security will depend on it.”

“Given the competitive environment that exist today,” May continued, “there certainly is no need for adoption of any heavy-handed regulatory mandates such as the now eliminated ‘Net Neutrality’ regulations. They stifle investment and innovation, rather than promoting it.

“And there is a need to remove permitting and other impediments, especially at the state and local level, that unduly delay infrastructure projects and render their costs unreasonable.”

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Losing freedom with a shrug

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 for RealClearMarkets, Bryson noted the upcoming anniversaries not only of the Declaration of Independence but also the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

“A December 9 Economist/YouGov nationwide poll finds that only 41% of Americans say capitalism is the better economic system,” he wrote. “Just 21% choose socialism. But the most revealing figure is this: 38% say they are not sure what to think at all. Among young adults and independents, uncertainty rises even higher.

“That ideological softness should alarm anyone who cares about America’s future.”

The Trump administration’s deviations from free enterprise haven’t helped matters, he continued.

“When federal officials take equity stakes in private companies, that is not capitalism,” Bryson wrote. “When state and local governments offer targeted tax breaks and subsidies to favored firms and industries, that is not capitalism. And when success depends more on political connections than on serving customers, that is not capitalism either.”

“History shows that when societies lose confidence in the moral legitimacy of their economic system, they invite ever-greater government control to correct perceived injustices. Those interventions create new distortions that invite still further intervention. Freedom erodes not with a revolution, but with a shrug.”

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In the mix

• In the Coolidge Review, FreeCon signatory Samuel Gregg wrote about Adam Smith and other Scottish thinkers who influenced the American Founding.

“Eighteenth-century Scotland produced many scholars from whom prominent American Revolutionaries absorbed the ideas of that movement of ideas which we call the Scottish Enlightenment,” wrote Gregg, president of the American Institute for Economic Research.

“Whether it was the philosophy articulated by Jefferson or the legal thought embraced and promoted by another signer, James Wilson (himself a Scot who probably attended Adam Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence), Scottish Enlightenment thinkers provided both style and content to the Revolutionary generation.

“The men of 1776 read the sermons and lectures of enlightened Scots like the Reverend Hugh Blair — close friend of Smith and David Hume, chair of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh, and Sunday preacher to Scotland’s burgeoning merchant class.”

• In FUSION magazine, FreeCon signatory Russ Greene argued that Capitol Hill would be a better place for policy formations if congressional staffers were better compensated.

“Paying staffers more will not solve all of these problems,” wrote Greene, managing director at Prime Mover Institute. “Yet improved staffer compensation will attract more capable individuals, who have more in common with the average American. And it will help retain them longer.

“In addition, it will help build staffers’ attachment to Congress as an institution, making them more attentive to infringements upon its constitutional rights.”

• At The American Mind, FreeCon signatory Ilya Shapiro rebutted the notion that the conservative legal movement, championing originalism in American jurisprudence, has somehow lost its momentum.

“Contrary to the ‘dog that caught the car’ anxiety, originalism’s judicial project is nowhere near complete,” wrote Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute.

“The overruling of Roe v. Wade, the restoration of the Second Amendment, the rejection of racial preferences, the skeptical turn in administrative law — all of these are foundational, not terminal, victories. They clear out some of the worst doctrinal underbrush, but the forest is still dense: whole swaths of administrative, civil rights, property, and remedies law still bear the marks of 20th-century judicial policymaking.”

“The state of the conservative legal movement is, in truth, remarkably strong,” he continued. “This isn’t a moment for existential despair or theoretical reinvention. It’s a moment for gratitude, patience, and continued work — on the bench, in the political branches, and in the culture that ultimately sustains our law.”

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In recent years, Freedom Conservatives have gotten used to fielding such questions from people who say they agree with us on most matters — or that they used to agree with us but now find our resistance to the nationalist-populist Right to be ill-advised, frustrating, or infuriating.

We FreeCons do, in fact, continue to devote lots of critical attention to the political misfires and policy mistakes of progressivism. It is true, however, that we do not focus exclusively on the failings of the Left. Nor can we afford to.

Freedom Conservatives believe that the principles of limited government, individual liberty, competitive markets, free speech, free trade, federalism, and the rule of law are essential guides to sound policymaking.

FreeCons also believe that strong families, congregations, and communities create an essential layer of civil society between the state and the individual. We believe such classical virtues as prudence, temperance, courage, and justice are essential to human flourishing. And we believe such practices as honesty, transparency, civility, and responsibility are essential for making politics endurable and self-government enduring.

In the American context, at least, these beliefs place us on the Right. American conservatism, properly understood, seeks to conserve the classical liberalism and civic republicanism exemplified in the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, our other founding texts and cherished traditions, and the best efforts of past generations of Americans to deliver on their promise.

In today’s politics, some who consider themselves to be on the Right reject many of the beliefs just articulated. They wish to draw more power to Washington. They exhibit little interest in balancing budgets or reforming entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (it’s impossible to do the former without the latter). They disdain the classical liberalism of free markets and individual liberty as well as the civic republicanism of mixed constitutions and limits on executive power. Some go further by trafficking in bigotry or crankery.

Who are the rivals to Freedom Conservatism?

One faction calls itself National Conservatism. As the name suggests, National Conservatives believe the nation-state is the fundamental building block of a properly ordered society. In contrast to FreeCons, NatCons are hostile to free trade, religious pluralism, and the decentralization of power across states, localities, private entities, and individual citizens.

Another faction, Post-Liberalism, believes the American Founding was flawed from the outset. Some advocate an explicit integration of church and state, either along Catholic or Protestant lines, while other PostLibs even flirt with such un-American notions as monarchy, aristocracy, or authoritarianism.

The Populist Right contains other factions, as well, often with less-consistent ideologies than those of the NatCons and PostLibs. Many follow the lead of podcasters such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes in employing antisemitism, anti-capitalism, or other conspiracy theories to explain conditions in the modern world — or in their personal lives — that disappoint, distress, or anger them.

To succeed, American conservatism must be broad. But if it’s broad enough to contain these factions, it will fail and collapse. As FreeCon signatory David Harsanyi put it in the Washington Examiner, their inclusion will doom the American Right and its political champions.

“The white-collar worker living in the suburbs, like most people today, isn’t preoccupied with bringing back widget factories from Malaysia and banning drag queen library story hour,” Harsanyi wrote, “though social corrosion isn’t unimportant. Without affordability and jobs, you’re not winning elections. If you’re not winning elections, you’re not conserving anything.”

Today, we feature the work of FreeCons pushing back against the NatCons, PostLibs, and Populist Right.

Built-in dynamism

Corbin K. Barthold is Internet policy counsel at TechFreedom and a FreeCon signatory.

A former litigation counsel at the Washington Legal Foundation at partner at Browne George Ross LLP, where he engaged in high-stakes complex litigation, Barthold writes frequently for such publications as Law & Liberty, The Bulwark, and RealClearMarkets.

In a recent City Journal piece, he discussed a potential alliance he called “technological conservatism.”

“Technological progress will continue,” Barthold observed. “Like so much else, liquid modernity is a matter of trade-offs. Conservers of tradition can no longer simply hand down ‘the way things are’ to subsequent generations; they must continually rebuild the link between past and present. Family, education, community, gender roles, rites of passage, work–life balance — all must be adapted to modernity without succumbing to it.”

“American conservatism has this dynamism built in,” he continued. “It does not serve a landed gentry, an established church, or a senatorial class. It conserves freedom, carrying forward the principles of a revolution and the instincts of a pragmatic, mercantile, frontier people.”

Barthold argued that post-liberal thinkers such as Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen “disdain this distinctly American conservatism. They deride those who uphold the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as ‘right liberals’ peddling ‘Zombie Reaganism.’

“Whatever this stance may be, it is hardly conservative. In seeking to upend the balance between freedom and virtue that has defined American conservatism, the post-liberals do not conserve; they aspire to remake the world.”

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Rebranding integralism

James M. Patterson is an associate professor at the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee’s Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

Author of the 2019 book Religion in the Public Square and coauthor of the forthcoming Why Postliberalism Failed, Patterson is president of the Ciceronian Society and a contributing editor at Law & Liberty.

In a recent Law & Liberty essay, he explained that for many thinkers and activists, their preferred term of “post-liberal” is “really a rebranding of Catholic integralism.”

“Historically speaking,” Patterson continued, “Catholic integralism was a product of nineteenth-century France, attracting traditionalists who worried that the Church was growing too soft on modernity. From the beginning, its ideology was deeply antisemitic.”

In contemporary discourse, he wrote, the Catholic integralism of Patrick Deneen and Vermeule has a “different valence” but still “relies on a story that our social and political life has been secretly molded by a small group of nefarious elites, even if they wear the innocuous moniker ‘liberals,’ where previous generations of integralists would have blamed Jews or Masons.”

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Inviting chaos and bloodshed

Gregg Nunziata is the executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

Nunziata previously served as chief nominations counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, policy counsel to the Senate Republican Policy Committee, attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and litigator in an international law firm.

In a recent piece for the Democracy Project, he argued that American conservatives must defend the constitutional order and liberal democracy from their adversaries, be they on the ideological Left or Right.

“Conservatism has always cautioned against those who would tear down institutions, promising ‘golden ages’ to come, but inviting only chaos and bloodshed,” Nunziata wrote.

He observed that Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, warned against violent rupture with the past and reminded us that society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

“For Burke,” Nunziata continued, “the task of conservatives was to tend this inheritance, not to squander it. Our American inheritance is liberal democracy — imperfect, often frustrating, but the only political order that has delivered stability, freedom, and prosperity across generations.

“Too many on the Right have forgotten this. They speak contemptuously of norms and traditions. They express frustration with the rule of law and the separation of powers. Some romanticize strongmen abroad as they succumb to authoritarian temptations at home. They openly talk about the need to seize the power of the state, in response to crises, real and imagined, to destroy the Left.

“This isn’t only not conservatism; it imperils all that we, on the political Right, value.”

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No to tribalism

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 piece for Civitas Outlook, he explained the populist fascination with work of German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt, who played an early role in the rise of National Socialism.

Among other positions, Schmitt argued that politics is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy. “The practical use of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction from his essay The Concept of the Political is almost always to rationalize tribalist politics,” Howes wrote.

Schmitt “does not argue that liberal-democratic politics, which tries to limit conflict, is impossible” he continued. “He thinks it will have a tough time defending itself against internal and external foes (a doubtful empirical claim). But even if it were to succeed, Schmitt would still oppose it, because its success would make politics less meaningful.

“Those who share his inclination for tribalist politics, perhaps also implicit in his desire to be subject to a personal sovereign, find this compelling. The rest of us do not.”

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In the mix

• FreeCon signatories Avik Roy and Brian Blase have been offering proposals for health care reform to leaders on Capitol Hill.

“Republicans should pair a short-term subsidy extension with far-reaching, premium-reducing deregulation of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges: specifically, restoring a 5:1 ‘age band’ and installing reinsurance,” wrote Roy, founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP).

“These two changes will address Obamacare’s two worst regulatory flaws. Only when there’s a functioning market for individually-purchased health insurance can we eventually have a truly market-based health care system.”

Blase, president of Paragon Health Institute, urged lawmakers to embrace a policy framework from Sens. Mike Crapo and Bill Cassidy that would restore the Affordable Care Act’s original payment structure, broaden access to high-deductible catastrophic plans, and funding health savings account contributions for enrollees choosing catastrophic or bronze plans on ACA exchanges.

The Crapo-Cassidy bill “avoids the worst policy mistake Congress could make (extending the COVID subsidy boosts), takes reasonable steps to reduce distortions, strengthens program integrity, and shifts resources toward people rather than insurers.”

• In Arena magazine, FreeCon signatory Judge Glock dispelled persistent myths about the stock market of the 1980s and its implications for finance and economic policy.

“If the eighties were the ‘decade of greed,’ as the New York Times still calls it, then Wall Street was the representative of everything that went wrong in those years,” wrote Glock, director of research and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

“In reality, Wall Street was a great symbol of things going right. American outsiders challenged the old ways, got rich, and in the process made the country, and the world, better off. We should be so lucky to have another such era.”

• At Reason magazine, FreeCon signatory Ed Tarnowski argued that the free market is connecting rural America more effectively than is the federal government’s costly Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

“Just five years ago, direct-to-consumer low-Earth-orbit satellite service was only an idea,” wrote Tarnowski, a senior contributor at Young Voices and a policy and advocacy director at EdChoice.

“Today — built and scaled overwhelmingly through private investment rather than being dependent on federal broadband deployment subsidies like BEAD — Starlink reliably connects millions, and with additional and higher-performing satellites coming, it is set to expand in quality and reach.”

“New entrants also underscore that this industry is steadily advancing. While fiber-based, last-mile broadband infrastructure will remain part of the solution, the federal government should steer clear of tilting the playing field and let innovation lead.”

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“Authoritarianism is on the rise both at home and abroad,” we wrote in the FreeCon Statement of Principles. “More and more people on the Left and Right reject the distinctive creed that made America great: that individual liberty is essential to the moral and physical strength of the nation.”

While NatCons and other critics claim our focus on liberty elevates “mere process” above human flourishing, we recognize that only by treating all people with respect, as free and equal before the law, can American greatness be achieved and sustained.

Writing in Law & Liberty, Dan Rothschild, director of the Center for Civics, Education, and Opportunity at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, aptly described the nationalist-populist Right as “awash with intellectual energy” that is “almost entirely placed into service of revanchist efforts to re-popularize old bad ideas, or in the American context, to take various strains of foreign conservatism that have never had purchase in the United States and bring them to our shores.”

“Tariffs, industrial policy, welfare statism, clientalism, protecting incumbent firms and favored sectors, and nostalgia-based grievance rhetoric all have significant purchase” among elected officials aligned with the populist Right, Rothschild continued, but “all are ideas that have been tried and failed.”

Today we feature the work of FreeCons articulating a more robust and relevant conception of American conservatism, one seeking to conserve the practical wisdom and moral foundations of a free and just society.

Rules of evidence

Kim Holmes is a former executive vice president at the Heritage Foundation and served as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs from 2002 to 2005. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent piece for The Dispatch, Holmes chronicled the devolution of his former think tank from a principled organization devoted to conservative ideas to a political organization devoted to clicks and conflict.

“Any policy research organization worth its salt will respect the rules of evidence and argumentation and avoid sensationalist rhetoric and ad hominem attacks,” he wrote. “And it should certainly avoid besmirching the think tank’s reputation by flirting with toxic and vile media personalities.”

“The fusionist conservatism that Heritage once pursued may not have been perfectly unified in theory,” he continued, but “it still reflected a coherent worldview. It was an American tradition inspired by the American founding and confirmed by two and a half centuries of American history.”

“A major reason once-proud conservative think tanks — like Heritage, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Claremont Institute — have lost their way is that they have bought into the notion that traditional conservatism is dead and that its purveyors failed to stop the rise of progressivism.”

“But this idea isn’t just unprincipled; it has little basis in reality.”

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Moral commitments

Tal Fortgang is a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a FreeCon signatory.

A writer for such publications as City Journal, Commentary, National Affairs, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal, Fortgang has also published legal scholarship in the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty and the Texas Review of Law & Politics.

In a recent Civitas Outlook essay, he rebutted the accusation that those seeking to conserve the classical liberalism of the American Founding are fixated on neutral rules at the expense of moral order and human flourishing.

“This ‘dead consensus’ of liberal proceduralism, critics insisted, was an incomplete politics,” wrote Fortgang. “A conservatism incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, only between legal and illegal, was inadequate and sowed the seeds of the republic’s demise.”

“The Heritage Foundation is, in many ways, the institutional home of this New Right sensibility. Under Kevin Roberts’s leadership, it positioned itself as the voice of a conservatism unafraid to abandon older pieties in favor of a more combative, moralized, and openly substantive approach to political and cultural conflict.”

But when Roberts attempted to defend Heritage’s ongoing relationship with the increasingly unhinged Tucker Carlson, he resorted to familiar arguments.

“Cutting through the bravado and putting aside the bizarre script, Roberts’s actual position was neutral — everyone should have a right to express their views freely, regardless of how odious — and procedural, emphasizing that if you don’t like someone’s views, you should debate them. No guidelines delineating the acceptable moral limits were in place. As long as everyone retains their ability to speak, all was as it should be.”

“This is precisely the formulation that New Right intellectuals have spent years attacking when deployed by establishment conservatives.”

In reality, Fortgang pointed out, the classical-liberal principles championed by American conservatives are “concrete expressions of profound moral commitments. When we speak of constitutional limits on government power, we insist that human beings possess an inherent dignity that precedes state authority. Freedom of religion acknowledges that the individual mind and soul possess a sacred quality that no political power may violate. Equal treatment under law affirms the equal moral worth of every person.”

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No to charlatans

Akash Chougule is president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) and one of the leaders of the FreeCon project.

Chougule’s previous positions include vice president at Americans for Prosperity, vice president of the Economic Opportunity Initiative at the Stand Together Chamber of Commerce, and policy staffer on the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee.

Freedom Conservatives were featured prominently at FREOPP’s recent Freedom & Progress conference in the nation’s capital. During his opening remarks, reported in The Hill, Chougule contrasted FreeCon ideas with those offered by the nationalist-populist Right.

“Americans who are being drawn to bad ideas because they are struggling — like discarding free markets and pluralism for socialism or racism or antisemitism — do not need to be coddled,” he said.

“And the charlatans who push those bad ideas onto them do not need to be embraced as part of our movement. For those of us here in Washington, that includes lawmakers, media personalities, heads of esteemed think tanks, and anyone else who contributes to public policy and our public discourse.”

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In the mix

• At National Review, FreeCon signatory Noah Rothman argued that the Trump administration’s rollback of rollback of electric-vehicle mandates and unrealistic miles-per-gallon standards will increase efficiency in the car market.

“Consumers will once again have the liberty to reward the firms that are the best performers in that sector, not just the best connected — keeping more of their own money in the process, which they can subsequently use to patronize other high-performing and efficient businesses,” wrote Rothman, a senior writer at NR.

“That’s how the market keeps prices low, and it’s good to see the Trump administration embracing the logic of consumer capitalism.”

• In The National Interest, FreeCon signatory Sam Raus argued that saving money in America’s defense budget need not mean a reduction in military strength.

“The defense budget has grown too large and complex to be managed with superficial tweaks or partisan talking points,” wrote Raus, the David Boaz Resident Writing Fellow at Young Voices.

“Cost savings should not be viewed as a threat to readiness but as a strategic advantage — a way to redirect funds toward emerging threats such as AI, drones, and quantum communication. Every dollar reclaimed from waste could be a dollar invested in keeping America safer and more technologically competitive.”

• At Civitas Outlook, FreeCon signatory Steve Hayward observed that the era of apocalyptic environmentalism is fading, and its recycled doomsday warnings now sound more desperate than dire.

“Bill Gates’s that he has changed his mind about climate change and no longer views it as a serious threat to the future of humanity is not just a major blow to the “climate crisis” camp,” wrote Hayward, the Edward Gaylord Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, “but likely signals the end of a 50-year cycle of Malthusian catastrophism that has hobbled liberalism for the last several decades.”

“There will be many death rattles, such as the newest alarm that climate change will deliver a new ice age rather than boiling oceans and endless heat waves. This was the leading climate scenario back in the 1970s, proving that everything old is new again. But it smacks of desperation. The ghost of Thomas Malthus can rest in peace.”

• In the Chicago Sun-Times, FreeCon signatory Mona Charen argued that the biggest “reveal” in the released Epstein files wasn’t the late sex-trafficker’s past ties to former Harvard president Larry Summers but instead his ongoing relationship with populist-Right propagandist Steve Bannon.

Bannon had even filmed 15 hours of footage for a documentary in an attempt to redeem Jeffrey Epstein’s reputation.

“The released emails show that one of those who was working most closely with Epstein, up to and including attempting to scrub his public image, was Bannon himself,” wrote Charen. “Whatever else Summers may be, he is not one of the principal authors of the MAGA movement who stoked conspiracies about the ‘deep state’ and gave oxygen to the most unhinged beliefs in circulation.”

“Bannon, the man millions of MAGA fans trust to tell it like it is, stands revealed as one of the most cynical liars ever to mar this country.”

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