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Freedom Conservatism Freedom Conservatives affirm the distinctive American creed that made our nation great.

The National Review Institute, the Commonwealth Foundation, and other partners will host FreeCon Philadelphia on Tuesday...
10/18/2026

The National Review Institute, the Commonwealth Foundation, and other partners will host FreeCon Philadelphia on Tuesday, November 17 from 3pm to 7pm. Former U.S. Sen Pat Toomey and Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday will deliver remarks at the event, which will be held at at the Union League in Philadelphia.

Other speakers on the future of American conservatism include Rich Lowry, John Puri, and Andrew Stuttaford from National Review as well as Andrew Lewis from the Commonwealth Foundation, Emily Brey from Americans for Prosperity, and Caleb Fuller from Pennsylvania’s Grove City College. Will drop a link in the comments for more info and registration.

The John Locke Foundation, Carolina Journal, Competitive Enterprise Institute and other partners will host FreeCon Ralei...
10/16/2026

The John Locke Foundation, Carolina Journal, Competitive Enterprise Institute and other partners will host FreeCon Raleigh on Wednesday, November 18 from 4pm to 8pm at the Renaissance Raleigh North Hills Hotel. Delivering the keynote address will be Stephanie Slade, senior editor at Reason Magazine and author of the new book “Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right.”

Other speakers at the event include Donald Bryson (John Locke Foundation), Donna King (John Locke Foundation), Kent Lassman (Competitive Enterprise Institute), Scott Lincicome (The Cato Institute), and Jenna Robinson (The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal).

During an initial panel, Carolina Journal editor David Larson, Locke political analyst Mitch Kokai, and Harper Polling’s Brock McCleary will present the results of a post-election Carolina Journal Poll. Will drop an RSVP link in the comments.

The Goldwater Institute, the 1912 Institute, and other partners will host FreeCon Phoenix on Monday, November 16 from 8a...
10/14/2026

The Goldwater Institute, the 1912 Institute, and other partners will host FreeCon Phoenix on Monday, November 16 from 8am to 5pm at the Westin Phoenix Downtown. Clint Bolick, justice on the Arizona Supreme Court and co-founder of the Institute for Justice, will deliver the keynote address.

Other speakers include Victor Riches, Christina Sandefur, Timothy Sandefur, Matt Beienburg, Jon Riches, and Jenna Bentley from the Goldwater Institute as well as Rebecca Painter (The Policy Circle), Joe Pitts (1912 Institute), Danny Seiden (Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry), Jason Huang (Abundance Law Society at Arizona State), Jackson Moll (Home Builders Association of Central Arizona), Tessa Dysart (University of Arizona), Jenny Clark (Love Your School), Jason Bedrick (Heritage Foundation), and Betsy Sanz (Institute for Justice).

Will drop an RSVP link in the comments.

With Election Day still weeks away, we cannot say for sure what American voters will do in the 2026 midterms. Dozens of ...
10/12/2026

With Election Day still weeks away, we cannot say for sure what American voters will do in the 2026 midterms. Dozens of key federal, state, and local races remain too close to call. Still, Democrats appear likely to take the U.S. House as well as several state governorships and legislative chambers. Republican control of the U.S. Senate is also endangered.

Among the hundreds of signatories to the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles are campaign professionals, political activists, and former elected officials — including mayors, school-board members, state and federal lawmakers, governors, and even a former vice president. Most have a rooting interest in partisan politics. Some remain personally involved in campaigns.

But the FreeCon project itself is nonpartisan. Our goals extend far beyond one election cycle or the fate of any particular candidate.

We believe that unless there is a healthy, vibrant American Right committed to individual liberty, federalism, free enterprise, free speech, free trade, civic virtue, equal opportunity, and the rule of law, any hard-won electoral victories will prove fleeting. And if our movement tolerates cranks, bigots, and other reactionaries, fewer such victories will occur in the first place.

Unless conservatives offer real solutions to the problems voters care about most — such as affordability, fiscal responsibility, family formation, and broad access to the American Dream — voters will seek them elsewhere. That voters are destined to be disappointed by populists, progressives, and socialists is true but beside the point. You can’t beat something with nothing.

And American greatness is impossible without American freedom.

That will be one of the themes explored at three post-election events in battleground states: FreeCon Phoenix on November 16, FreeCon Philadelphia on November 17, and FreeCon Raleigh on November 18. At each summit, FreeCon signatories and allies will discuss the lessons of the midterms, the challenges and opportunities we will face in 2027 and beyond, and how a rejuvenated American Right can meet those challenges and seize those opportunities.

Please join us! You’ll find links in the comments.

After 20 years of public service in the legislative and executive branches, Brent Orrell joined the American Enterprise ...
10/09/2026

After 20 years of public service in the legislative and executive branches, Brent Orrell joined the American Enterprise Institute as a senior fellow to work on job training, workforce development, and criminal justice reform. He is also a Freedom Conservatism signatory.

In a recent article for National Affairs, Orrell applied the lessons of economic history to current debates about artificial intelligence and the future of the American worker. After the invention of the coal-fired steam engine in the early 1700s, waves of innovation dramatically increased its efficiency. While many observers expected the result to be declining demand for coal, its production actually exploded. The increasing productivity of the engines led both to more-efficient mining of coal and the application of steam to more and more industries.

“Today, code has reached its coal moment,” he wrote. “Thanks to artificial intelligence, code production is picking up speed, adding vast new supplies of a basic input in the same way technological change and demand interacted to increase coal supplies.”

How will these developments affect the labor market? No one knows for sure, Orrell concluded, but policymakers can still take prudent action to adjust to potential economic and political disruptions.

“If technological change continues at its current pace, training workers with specific technical skills and capacities — which are, by definition, more exposed to AI-driven automation — will produce diminishing returns. We should instead be cultivating the skills that give workers the capacity to learn new ones. These include reasoning skills, communication skills, collaboration skills, and the sort of judgment and prudence that enables a worker to decide what a problem requires before deciding which tool to apply.”

Mitch Pearlstein is founder emeritus of the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based think tank, and a forme...
10/06/2026

Mitch Pearlstein is founder emeritus of the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based think tank, and a former education official in the Reagan and Bush administrations. He is also a Freedom Conservatism signatory.

Pearlstein previously served as an editorial writer and columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, policy aide to a former Minnesota governor, and a research fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

In a recent essay, he reflected on the phrase “only in America” and how the rich history of our country should engender gratitude among Americans today. Other countries, such as our neighboring Canada, have many wonderful attributes, Pearlstein argued. Still, America has welcomed strivers and refugees from around the world whose personal experience demonstrated the power of our country’s founding principles and institutions.

“I’m fully aware that the United States isn’t sui generis in all things good and wonderful,” he wrote, but “an American, I’ve been luckier than 99% of humans ever to walk the planet. And that won’t be changing.”

James Hankins is a professor of humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School School for Classical and Civil...
10/05/2026

James Hankins is a professor of humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School School for Classical and Civil Education. He is also a Freedom Conservatism signatory.

A former professor at Harvard University, Hankins is the founding editor of the “I Tatti Renaissance Library” (Harvard University Press) and associate editor of the “Catalogus Translationum and Commentariorum” (Union Académique Internationale). His books include “Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy” (2019), “The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy in the Renaissance” (2008), and the two-volume text “The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition”, written with Allen Guelzo.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Hankins discussed the abiding importance of studying the history of the West in general and of the United States in particular. “Patriotism is love of country,” he explained, and “you can’t teach a civilization without loving it.”

In their series “The Golden Thread”, Hankins and Guelzo are “trying to revive the original purpose of history, which is prudence or practical wisdom.”

“Thucydides will tell you the story of the Peloponnesian War as a tragedy and tell you about all the mistakes. And this is the kind of wisdom that we need. Unfortunately, thanks to Marxism and Hegelian historiography, that is no longer considered a valid use of history. Hegel and Marx both believed that the past is unusable, except as a whipping boy for projects of utopianism in the future. That’s a terrible way of studying history.”

“We have people who are completely disoriented,” Hankins concluded. “They don’t know where they stand, especially young men who don’t understand where they fit into a tradition. Their education is very piecemeal, bits of disconnected information. So, they’re easily misled by people who are passing out false information. When you don’t teach Western Civ, bad actors step in and tell you that everything about your civilization is evil, and you have nothing between your ears which enables you to say no to that.”

In the Houston Chronicle, Freedom Conservatism signatories Aaron Pomerantz and Garion Frankel criticized Republican cand...
10/01/2026

In the Houston Chronicle, Freedom Conservatism signatories Aaron Pomerantz and Garion Frankel criticized Republican candidate Bo French, who set off a national firestorm with a post complaining about fans of apparent South Asian ancestry cheering on the University of Texas at a recent football game.

Pomerantz (a graduate of the University of Oklahoma) and Frankel (of Texas A&M) are hardly Longhorn fans themselves. “Politics could stand to be a little more like football,” they wrote, not because elections are games but because “football shows that strong identities and strong disagreements do not require exclusion from the larger social order.

“We can passionately support our own side. We can hope our leaders succeed. We can argue, compete and fundamentally disagree with each other’s political parties and perspectives. However, we must also recognize that all Americans have a place in this country.

“College football works because the Aggie, the Sooner, and the Longhorn can hate one another on Saturday while still understanding that all three belong on the field.”

Edward J. Pinto is a senior fellow and co-director of the AEI Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s ...
09/30/2026

Edward J. Pinto is a senior fellow and co-director of the AEI Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s also a Freedom Conservatism 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 AEI report coauthored by Tobias Peter, Pinto described how freeing up state and local regulation to encourage the construction of more starter homes would expand homeownership in many communities across the United States, including those with significant minority populations.

“Latino demand for starter homes is substantial,” they wrote, with 66% of Latinos agreeing that “having more affordably priced starter homes in their community is extremely or very important.”

New construction expands access in two ways. “Building homes at or below the Latino home-price opportunity threshold directly expands the supply of homes within reach of Latino starter-home-ready households,” they explained. Moreover, building “somewhat higher-priced homes” can also help by “enabling existing homeowners in lower-priced homes to move up, freeing those homes for other buyers, including starter-home-ready Latino households.”

Wendy Damron is the president of Palmetto Promise Institute, a South Carolina-based nonprofit dedicated to advancing fre...
09/29/2026

Wendy Damron is the president of Palmetto Promise Institute, a South Carolina-based nonprofit dedicated to advancing free markets, individual liberty, and limited government. A member of her state’s advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Damron is also a Freedom Conservatism signatory.

In a recent piece for the SC Daily Gazette, she explained that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s restrictions on accredited investing bars Americans from private markets — including venture capital, angel investments, and startup equity — unless they have a net worth above $1 million or annual income above $200,000.

Almost two million of her state’s 2.1 million households “are locked out entirely — even as venture capital firms have closed over $1.8 billion in South Carolina deals between 2018 and 2023,” Damron wrote with coauthor Nicholas Morgan. “The opportunity is flourishing here. Most South Carolinians simply are not allowed to access it.”

This “federal wealth gate” controls even those seeking to claim state tax breaks such as those South Carolina offers.

“A Boeing engineer in North Charleston or a Medical University of South Carolina researcher in the Charleston Medical District — people who understand local industries better than any Wall Street analyst — could not use South Carolina’s tax code to back a local startup unless they first clear Washington’s arbitrary net worth hurdle.”

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