Free reign
Event to offer Freedom Conservative vision for American renewal
We are only days away from the inaugural Freedom Conservatism Conference, to be held on Monday, February 24 in Washington.
And there are only a few seats still available for the event, which will run from 8 am to 5 pm at the National Press Club. Click here to reserve one.
Why are so many conservative leaders, activists, policy staffers, and journalists attending FreeCon 2025? Because they want to hear from the likes of Dan Crenshaw, Kristen Soltis Anderson, Jonah Goldberg, and Charles Murray.
Because they want to meet and build relationships with fellow Freedom Conservatives and allies who share their commitment to America‘s founding principles.
And because they know that the conversations at FreeCon 2025 — and at other FreeCon events to follow — will help shape the course of American politics and government for many years to come.
Today we offer additional profiles of featured speakers at the conference.
Indiscriminate hysteria
George Will is a longtime political columnist and author who will speak at the inaugural Freedom Conservatism Conference on Feb. 24 at the National Press Club.
A columnist for The Washington Post since 1974 and former Washington editor at National Review, Will received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. He is also a regular contributor to NBC News and previously appeared regularly on ABC News and Fox News.
His most-recent books include American Happiness and Discontents and The Conservative Sensibility.
Early in his career, Will worked on Capitol Hill. He has also taught political philosophy at the University of Toronto, Harvard, Princeton, and Michigan State.
In a recent Washington Post column, he argued that Democrats aghast at what’s unfolding in the nation’s capital are often reaping what they sowed.
“Donald Trump’s rampant (for the moment) presidency is an institutional consequence of progressivism,” Will wrote. “Progressives, who spent recent years trying to delegitimize the Supreme Court and other federal courts, suddenly understand that courts stand between Trump and the fulfillment of his least lawful whims.“
The Left’s “indiscriminate hysteria is helping Trump,” he continued. “Does the Constitution or democracy or something require the U.S. Agency for International Development to remain forever as it always has been: ill-focused and inadequately supervised?”
Course of history
Avik Roy is president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), one of the organizers of the FreeCon project, and a featured speaker at the Freedom Conservatism Conference to be held Feb. 24 at the National Press Club.
After training as a scientist at MIT and as a physician at Yale Medical School, Roy joined a then-unknown investment firm called Bain Capital, where he focused on biotechnology.
During the original congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act, he began a popular health-policy blog called The Apothecary and later became opinion editor at Forbes.com.
After advising three presidential campaigns, Roy founded the free-market think tank FREOPP in 2016 to “focus exclusively on research that moves the needle for people with below-median incomes or net worth.”
Last fall, he debated NatCon signatory Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, about this proposition: “Has religious freedom weakened America?”
No, Roy argued, pointing out that America emerged from World War II as a superpower because of its religious pluralism and toleration.
As Jewish immigrants to America, Edward Teller and Albert Einstein were critical to the development of the atomic bomb. If Germany had developed an atomic weapon first, history would be much different, America would be much weaker, and millions more lives would have been lost.
“The United States’ embrace of religious diversity has literally changed the course of history,” Roy said.
America’s checkbook
John Hart is CEO of the government-transparency group Open the Books, a FreeCon signatory, and a featured speaker at the Freedom Conservatism Conference on Feb. 24 at the National Press Club.
A co-founder of C3 Solutions, a leader in free-market environmentalism, Hart previously served as Sen. Tom Coburn’s communications director. He also worked for U.S. House members Steve Largent and Jim DeMint.
Hart co-authored two books with Coburn: Breach of Trust (2003) and The Debt Bomb (2012). He’s appeared as a guest commentator on Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and PBS and written for Politico, Forbes, RealClearPolitics, National Review, and The Hill, among other outlets.
In a recent New York Post piece, he urged Elon Musk’s DOGE team to make federal transparency permanent with a simple tool allowing individual Americans to view the Treasury payment system in real time.
“Individual Americans have the same right to review ‘America’s Checkbook’ as they do their own personal accounts,” Hart wrote.
“Why not allow taxpayers to set up their own ‘fraud alerts’ or ‘low balance alerts,’ flagging them when their money goes to a purpose that they find objectionable?”
Justice and mercy
Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence. He’s also a FreeCon signatory and a featured speaker at the Freedom Conservatism Conference on Feb. 24 at the National Press Club.
At IRD, Tooley leads the New Whiggery project, which hosts monthly dinners for young professionals in the nation’s capital to advance the principles of ordered liberty, limited government, rule of law, free speech, and religious liberty, among others.
He worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency. His books include Taking Back The United Methodist Church (2008), Methodism and Politics in the 20th Century: From William McKinley to 9/11 (2012), and The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War (2015).
Tooley has written for The Wall Street Journal, World, Law and Liberty, National Review and other publications.
In a recent post commemorating his years at IRD, he explained the organization’s case for democracy, human rights, and religious freedom.
“God gives equal dignity to all persons whom He made in His image,” Tooley wrote. “But fallen human nature in all times defies His wishes and makes prideful claims of superiority for one group over others, justifying coercion and persecution for some ostensibly righteous cause.
“IRD always seeks to encourage churches and Christians to challenge these spurious claims and to model God’s justice and mercy for all.”
In the mix
• Two FreeCon signatories — both speakers at the Freedom Conservatism Conference coming up on Feb. 24 — offered their perspective on federalism in a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal.
In a op-ed, Tony Woodlief wrote about the prior administration’s frequent abuse of executive authority to coerce states and localities, and the opportunity lawmakers now have to remedy Biden’s lawlessness.
“Congress can send a clear message,” wrote Woodlief, senior executive vice president at State Policy Network. “The Justice Department works for the people — not the other way around.”
And in a letter to the editor, Judge Glock argued that the current practice of yanking tax dollars to Washington, skimming off shipping and handling charges to compensate the bureaucracy, and then sending the money back with strings attached does state governments no true favors.
“In a system where states were true laboratories of democracy, they could use their own residents’ funds to craft their own health, transportation, education, and welfare systems,” wrote Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute. “These would doubtless be less costly than the federally funded ones.”
• In The Hill, FreeCon signatory Merrill Matthews previewed FreeCon 2025 and other conservative gatherings occurring over the next several days.
He wrote that “traditional conservatives have created an updated version of the Sharon principles, highlighting their continuity to a movement that began 65 years ago. They have adopted the term Freedom Conservatives, or FreeCons, as a way of distinguishing themselves from other conservative factions.”
• In National Review, FreeCon signatory Henry Nau reviewed Max Boot’s new biography of Ronald Reagan. It is “ambitious and noteworthy,” argued Nau, a professor emeritus at the George Washington University and national-security staffer in the Reagan administration, but badly misses the mark in describing the president’s successful negotiations in both domestic and foreign affairs.
“The novel question,” he wrote, “is not why Reagan compromised but where he got the imagination to pursue unconventional ideas in the first place and the judgment to know when his leverage had peaked.”
Reagan “stands in a class of truly exceptional American presidents,” Nau concluded, because of a gift for “strategic consistency and timely intervention.”