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

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

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

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

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

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

Market miracles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New feudalism

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

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

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

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

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

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Huge gift

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

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

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

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

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

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Hollywood babble

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extraordinary danger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tech dominance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Countering ambition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Extraordinary liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not blood and soil

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

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

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

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

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

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Past that never was

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Destructive cycle

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unleash American workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Moving the needle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Staggering debt load

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Activism over outreach

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No to unchecked power

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

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

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

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

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

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Freedom to trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Equity fail

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spirit of ’76

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The song’s lyrics underline the point:

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

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

Song of freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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Sound theology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Right this wrong

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

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

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

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

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Below basic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emerging coalition

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

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

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

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

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

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With or without you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Prep for victory

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Constitutional order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Patriot frames

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

Here are some great reads about America 250:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideas that work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Resetting the clock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Our time is coming

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How we win

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

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

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

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

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

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Better path forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Don’t outsource faith

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manufactured crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stick to principle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Next-gen energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Algorithms aren’t reality

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

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

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

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

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

“The sickness is spreading.”

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help families thrive

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

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

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

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

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

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Too much politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Extend opportunity

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

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

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

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

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Affordable homes

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vital message

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

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

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

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

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Offensive lines

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

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

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

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

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Clear conclusion

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Threat to productivity

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

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

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

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

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

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Capital idea

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

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

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

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

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

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Bad news for Team Blue

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

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

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

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

In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bravery for liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fusion and the Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Title match

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who is the conservative, again?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kennedy centered

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

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

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

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

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

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No to political enterprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Civic purpose

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nimble reformers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Full spectrum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Real fairness

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

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

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

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

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

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Conversation, not expression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What Has Conservatism Ever Conserved?

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

• How Can Freedom Conservatism Build a Winning Coalition?

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

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

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

A better pronatalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Imported NatCon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Populism vs. markets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More releases

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a title!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Peak synthesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Force for liberation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FreeCon v. NatCon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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