by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:

(The Mises Institute) The 2024 Republican National Convention will be remembered for the raw emotions evoked by an attempted assassination the preceding weekend of its presidential nominee Donald Trump and for the now mostly Trumpified Republicans posing as the populist champions of American workers against the elitist Democrats.

This convention, however, should be remembered for another reason too. It marks the entrenchment of an organized “national conservative” movement within the party that espouses an anti-free-market ideology, overtly scorning individual liberty in favor of a powerful nation-state. This shift in Republican thinking is most clearly evident in Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as the party’s nominee for vice president (who recently explained his “NatCon” principles in a Foundation for American Innovation podcast) but is also hinted at in Trump’s advocacy of retaliatory tariffs in his acceptance speech: