Conservatives like to see themselves as the anti-communist, anti-socialist political tradition, the party of free markets, limited government, and individual autonomy. Those principles, of course, do not come without responsibilities, to family, faith, and community, but they have largely defined who we are. Or at least they used to.
For years now, conservatives have inched toward accepting a stronger central government when it serves their side’s immediate purposes. We often dismiss concerns about breaking institutional “glass ceilings” on the grounds that Democrats will do it anyway. Fine. Here is what happens when we adopt that logic: a political commentator and Christian minister with a substantial following among young religious conservative men has released a video arguing that Republicans must embrace socialism in order to win.
Beware of so-called “right-wingers” pushing philosophies which have a history of extreme opposition to the Church, family, and economic reality. pic.twitter.com/WT6tTqho8e
— Nick Freitas (@NickJFreitas) September 22, 2026
Joel Webbon is a Texas pastor, podcaster, and founder of Right Response Ministries, which says it seeks to “help people everywhere begin to embrace a right knowledge of God that will burst forth into a right response of obedience, worship, and heart-felt adoration.” Its homepage is crowded with videos openly defending Christian nationalism and criticizing Judaism and Israel.
Webbon plainly represents a strain of extremism. So why should the broader conservative movement care what he has to say?
First, the next generation of conservatives has come of age amid relentless cultural and political conflict. Young conservatives in Ronald Reagan’s era were taught a coherent set of principles: free markets, anti-communism, limited government, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Those ideas are often dismissed today with a sneering “muh principles,” but they helped produce one of the greatest leaders in American history, and a political movement committed to the Founding principles in both politics and economics.
What are young conservatives raised on now? Issues: illegal immigration, offshoring, domestic manufacturing, and opposition to men competing in women’s sports. Conservatives may well be right on each of them. But a movement built around a rotating list of grievances and policy fights is not necessarily building conservatives. It may simply be building people who are angry at things.
Young conservatives increasingly oppose all immigration, not just illegal immigration, and less from a commitment to limited government than from a desire to preserve “American culture,” a cause whose loudest champions too often have questionable ideas about what, and whom, America is for. And while conservatives are right to reject men in women’s sports and private spaces, that has not stopped parts of the movement from openly pushing the state to enforce traditional relationships and social roles.
In other words, many younger conservatives may diagnose the country’s problems differently, but they increasingly share progressives’ underlying fallacies, worldview, and preferred remedy. They embrace a fixed-pie view of immigration, jobs, and economic life, and they look to an ever-stronger central government, with authority over ever more aspects of our lives, to solve the problems they identify. Having attended plenty of Turning Point USA conferences, I have seen firsthand just how readily that message resonates with young conservatives.
Webbon is the most overt example, but others provide similar ideas with intellectual and electoral cover. J.D. Vance has derided the old free-market consensus associated with Milton Friedman and embraced post-liberal and “common good” arguments that treat the federal government as a vehicle for achieving cultural ends, not through freedom, but through political force. Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles belongs to the same broad tradition, presenting liberal neutrality and old conservative restraint as failures rather than important safeguards. Tucker Carlson, though no longer formally a Republican, still draws his audience heavily from the right and has spent years attacking free markets, globalization, and the old conservative consensus. He has even found kind words for Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro because of his cultural conservatism.
Conservatives more broadly have defended federal ownership stakes in private companies deemed “strategic,” including Intel and firms in the mining, semiconductor, nuclear, and steel sectors. Republicans have even gone beyond merely tolerating the entitlement state; with many eagerly defending J.D. Vance’s recent proposal for expanded child-care grants on the grounds that it is “pro-family,” it's fiscal problems, and misplaced faith in government be damned.
Fixed-pie style thinking now informs much of the movement’s worldview: immigrants take jobs, foreign workers take manufacturing, AI takes livelihoods, data centers take resources, and economic growth benefits someone else at the expense of ordinary Americans. These concerns are increasingly framed as though prosperity itself must be rationed by politicians, and few are willing to acknowledge that had America had a free market, none of these problems would exist in the first place.
The old conservative case for innovation, abundance, markets, and limited government has been replaced by a politics of scarcity, subsidy, and state management, though, naturally, it only becomes “socialism” when Democrats do it.
Webbon may be more candid than most, but his message is becoming increasingly familiar across the right, when it should have stayed on the left where it belonged: freedom is an obstacle, government power is the answer, and winning at any and all cost is an adequate substitute for the principles rooted in America’s founding tradition. What is emerging now is exactly what happens when the principles of Reagan’s era are abandoned. It is not a correction of conservatism, nor a needed departure from Bush-era failures. It is the abandonment of conservatism itself.
