In a special edition of Qualified Opinions, host Veronique de Rugy hosts an insider roundtable discussion featuring three AIER scholars: David Hebert (Director of Economics and Economic Freedom), Julia Cartwright (Senior Research Fellow in Law and Economics), and Thomas Savidge (Research Fellow) .

Together, the panel tackles three pressing geopolitical and economic developments :

• Canada's European Pivot: How tariff threats, trade tension, and rhetoric from Washington are driving Canada to explore an unprecedented "associate membership" with the European Union .

• The New Era of Populist Handouts: An analysis of high-dollar political promises—from a proposed $5,000 citizen dividend to $9,000 stay-at-home child subsidies—and how populist policy is blurring the traditional lines between the political left and right .

• AI Panics and Regulatory Capture: A critical look at recent doomsday warnings from tech whistleblowers and industry CEOs calling for AI regulation, exploring whether "pacing" innovation is genuine risk mitigation or a classic move to entrench market leaders against open-source rivals .

The episode wraps up with recommended reading from across the institute on central bank independence, international commerce, Gen Z spending habits, and inflation .

Stephanie Slade, senior editor at Reason, joins Veronique de Rugy to discuss her new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right.

Fusionism isn't a coalition strategy. It's the argument that liberty and virtue need each other — that coerced virtue isn't virtue at all, and that a free society depends on people who can govern themselves. Slade traces the idea from the founding through Hayek, Russell Kirk, and Frank Meyer, and explains how a movement that once took it for granted raised a generation that has never encountered the arguments.

They discuss why young people are looking for answers about the good life and where they're finding them, why the new right turned against markets, whether the culture of free speech can survive its current stress test, and what a recovery would actually require.

Roger Bate joins Veronique de Rugy to discuss his new book, The House Always Wins, sharing his personal brush with sports betting addiction and what it reveals about the industry's explosive growth, corruption risks, and need for smart regulation. They close with a candid look at Fauci and COVID policy accountability.

In this episode of Qualified Opinions, host Veronique de Rugy welcomes Akash Chougule, President of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), to explore how classical liberal ideas can drive real economic mobility for lower-income Americans.

Akash breaks down FREOPP's unique mission—applying free-market principles specifically to uplift the bottom half of the socioeconomic ladder—and explains why lasting policy reform requires genuine bipartisan coalition building. They examine the recent deregulation of housing supply as a blueprint for legislative success before taking a deep dive into the state of organized labor in 21st-century America.

Veronique de Rugy speaks with Thomas Howes and James Patterson about their book, Why Postliberalism Failed. The authors examine the growing post-liberal movement, particularly Catholic integralism, which rejects representative government and religious neutrality in favor of a powerful executive guided by a state-supported conception of the common good.

Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Latin America—including Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Vichy France, Slovakia, Croatia, Brazil, and Argentina—they argue that these ideas have already been tested. Rather than restoring religious faith or social order, post-liberal regimes became authoritarian, persecuted minorities, and compromised the churches that supported them. Political leaders used religious institutions for legitimacy while steadily subordinating them to the state, ultimately contributing to religious disaffiliation.

The conversation also explores postliberalism's influence on today's American right, its relationship to protectionism and Christian nationalism, and its failure to resist antisemitism within its broader coalition. Howes and Patterson conclude that religious communities would achieve more through liberal institutions—religious liberty, limited government, school choice, and voluntary association—than by attempting to capture the power of the state.

Welcome back to Qualified Opinions. This week, we tackle the revived debate on redistribution versus growth following the release of the 2026 World Inequality Report. To help us slice through the noise, we sit down with Dr. Phil Magness (Independence Institute) and Dr. Vincent Geloso (George Mason University). Together, they expose the flaws in contemporary inequality metrics, discuss how robust institutions and open markets destroy barriers to upward mobility, and explain why a country's institutional health matters far more than its wealth distribution.

"The issue is never the issue—the issue is the revolution."

When we talk about political violence in America, the public conversation is overwhelmingly dominated by the threat of the far-right. But is that tracking the whole reality? In this episode, Veronique de Rugy sits down with author and commentator Noah Rothman to discuss his new book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.

Noah breaks down the three massive historical waves of left-wing extremism that most Americans have completely forgotten—from the deadly anarchist bombings of the 1910s and 1920s to the thousands of domestic bombings in the 1970s. Together, Vero and Noah explore the excuses that politicians and media figures use to excuse left-wing violence, the manipulation of domestic extremism databases, and the dangerous modern mirroring where the right and left are beginning to adopt each other's most radical tactics. It's a candid, data-driven look at why political violence is a reciprocal problem—and why looking away from one side only guarantees the other will follow.

What happens when a fiscal watchdog and a government official start as fierce public rivals and end up as friends?

In this episode of Qualified Opinions, host Veronique de Rugy sits down with her long-time friend Matt Mayer—former Bush administration Homeland Security official and current President of Opportunity Ohio—to dissect the massive disconnect between bureaucratic intent and real-world policy outcomes.

They pull back the curtain on why simple government formulas fail to allocate security grants efficiently and share a candid look at the nuance behind infamous government spending anecdotes (like the $10,000 jet toilet and the 9/11 garbage trucks). Moving to current policy debates, they tackle the exploding costs of state programs like Medicaid in historically "red" states like Ohio. Mayer argues that the standard political battle cry of rooting out "waste, fraud, and abuse" is a lazy soundbite; the real fiscal driver is the aggressive expansion of legal eligibility standards pushed by politicians who lack the courage to make tough choices.

Finally, they discuss Mayer's new experiment in tech and fiction: writing his fifth book, an action-packed novel titled The Architect Rises, using generative AI to turn a decade-old national security war-game plot into a full-length book in under eight minutes.