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It was a particular pleasure this week to welcome Gad Saad and his wife to Mississippi.

Gad is one of the most important conservative thinkers writing today. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is published next month, and I am the proud owner of a signed copy.

Gad Saad's new book is an instant bestseller!

Host of the Saad Truth podcast, Gad is now connected to the University of Mississippi's Declaration of Independence Center — one of the emerging citadels of intellectual excellence in American higher education today.

Gad is not just another academic. His work really matters to the future of the West.

How postmodernism quietly took over the West

For several decades, postmodern ideas hatched in the seminar rooms of 1960s France have been percolating through American academia — and from there into the corporate world, the public sector, the press, the courts, and the schools.

Postmodernism teaches that there is no objective truth and no shared moral order, only competing perspectives shaped by power. From that follows cultural relativism: no culture, no tradition, no inheritance can be judged superior to any other. By the time the rest of us noticed, these insane ideas had quietly become the unofficial creed of the Western managerial class.

This is how so much of America went "woke." These ideas encouraged a generation of young Americans to embrace identity politics — to stop seeing themselves as free individuals in charge of their own destinies, and instead to define themselves by where they sit in a hierarchy of victimhood based on race and sex.

The result is profoundly demoralizing — in two senses of the word. It has stripped us of confidence in our country and our culture. And it has made it literally harder for people in positions of authority to exercise moral judgement at all.

Allan Bloom warned us of this forty years ago in The Closing of the American Mind. Until now, however, the conservative movement did little to stop it.

Signed by the author…

What "suicidal empathy" means

Gad has dissected the way postmodernism turns empathy with the marginalized into the supreme moral test. He calls it suicidal empathy — an irrational form of altruism that hijacks our moral judgement.

The result is a society that protects criminals over their victims, privileges illegal migrants over citizens, condemns self-defense as toxic, and lets feelings outrank facts. Aimed at the wrong target, in the wrong dose, empathy does not save a civilization. It dismantles one.

Why this work aligns with Mississippi

What Gad is doing aligns with what we are doing here at MCPP, where we run programs that teach young Mississippians about American exceptionalism and the moral case for the free market. Our illustrated children's book, What Makes America Special, aims to teach 7- to 10-year-olds the truths that will protect them from the woke mind virus in later life.

As Mississippi's economy flourishes, it is increasingly clear that our state has led the way on free-market reform. Perhaps now we need to lead the way on an even more important mission: the recovery of the American mind — and the defeat of divisive, "woke" ideology.

Thank you, as always, for standing with us.

In April, we had the opportunity to welcome students from Pearl River County High School’s Student Council to our office during their visit to Jackson.

As part of a broader trip to tour the State Capitol and meet with legislators, the group made time to sit down with Douglas Carswell and our team to learn more about the role of a public policy organization and the work we do at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

The visit centered around a roundtable discussion covering how think tanks operate, the principles that guide our work, and how policy ideas move from conversation to implementation. Students engaged directly with our team, asking thoughtful questions about the challenges facing Mississippi, the importance of free markets and limited government, and the practical side of advancing policy solutions.

What stood out most was the level of engagement—from both the students and the educators accompanying them. The discussion was curious and encouraging, reflecting a strong interest in understanding how ideas shape real-world outcomes.

Opportunities like this matter. Creating space for young people to ask questions, engage with policy, and better understand the institutions shaping their state is an important part of building informed, thoughtful leaders for the future.

We are grateful they chose to spend part of their time with us, and we look forward to seeing where their leadership journeys take them.

While others debate these ideas from a distance, we’re in the room teaching them.

This semester, Douglas Carswell was invited to serve as a guest lecturer at the Declaration Center for Freedom Studies at the University of Mississippi—spending the semester working directly with students on the principles that make societies prosper.

Week after week, he made the drive to Oxford to lead conversations on free markets, limited government, and individual liberty—not as abstract theories, but as ideas with real-world consequences. Students were challenged to think critically, engage deeply, and wrestle with the foundations of a free and flourishing society.

Free markets. Limited government. Individual liberty.

The next generation isn’t just hearing about these ideas—they’re being trained in them, challenged by them, and equipped to carry them forward. In a time when many institutions are moving away from these principles, opportunities like this matter more than ever.

Not slogans. Not trends.
Real ideas, taught in real classrooms, to the next generation of leaders.

This is how you build something that lasts.

Mississippi lawmakers say they’ll spend part of the summer studying the state’s Medicaid program to see if there’s a way to save taxpayer money. But if recent history is any indication, the effort will not yield significant fruit.

Lawmakers in other states have, for years, picked through the federal-state medical welfare partnership, and so far, the best they’ve been able to do is slightly lower the annual increases.

Knowing the outcome of the inquiry is obvious, perhaps lawmakers would be better served in examining the questions that, so far, no state has dared to address:

This is not to say that state officials should not bother spending their time looking at the financial ledger of the state’s Medicaid program, overturning all the accounting rocks in search of waste, fraud, abuse, and potential for savings. But this leaves untouched the matter of what happens to society when compassion becomes a line item, when caring for the vulnerable is outsourced to a bureaucracy, and when neighbors are quietly absolved of any felt obligation to one another.

The Legislature already knows that real reforms — and therefore, real savings — require doing the things no one seems willing to do, such as wholesale elimination of the program’s federally unrequired elements, including prescription drugs and prosthetics.

Indeed, most states including Mississippi have found eliminating program components politically undesirable, and so they avoid raising the question. The reason is not simple electoral cowardice. It is that decades of Medicaid have conditioned Americans to regard government-provided care as so natural that imagining its absence feels monstrous — even though government is filling the role once held by the private charitable networks, church benevolence funds, and community mutual-aid societies.

When the government guarantees a service, the moral urgency to provide it privately fades. The obligation migrates, and with it, something irreplaceable about how a community understands its own members.

Of course, the most optional part of Medicaid is the decision of a state to offer the program at all. No state is required to participate in the Great Society program that Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law in 1965. States have, one by one, agreed to participate. Mississippi joined in following a contentious special session of the Legislature in 1969. And to date, not a single state has seriously weighed the prospect of dropping from the program, even as costs skyrocket.

Across the country, Medicaid is now the largest program that states administer, far surpassing education as the government’s chief responsibility by cost. Mississippi is expected to spend roughly $8.5 billion on government-run healthcare in the budget year that starts July 1. The state’s portion of the tab will cross $1 billion for the first time, an increase of roughly 16%.

Meanwhile, the loudest debate in Mississippi Medicaid circles is whether the state should expand coverage under the Affordable Care Act to able-bodied, childless adults. Expansion proponents argue that the federal government would cover 90 percent of the cost, that hundreds of thousands of working-age Mississippians fall into a coverage gap, and that rural hospitals struggle with uncompensated care.

Opponents argue the long-run costs are uncertain, federal promises are unreliable, and expansion would add 200,000 or more people to a program already straining the budget.

Both sides are, again, counting money. Neither is exploring the tougher, more challenging matter.

Mississippi has a tradition — rooted in its churches and towns, its extended families and its history of community survival under genuine hardship — of people caring for one another without being instructed to by statute. That tradition has not been destroyed by Medicaid, but it has been crowded out.

When the government guarantees a service, the neighbor who once organized the collection plate for a sick family now assumes there’s a government program somewhere to handle it. He doesn’t need to know about the struggles occurring on his block, across town, or on the other side of the state.

People who are sick need care, and the mere existence of a program is not care. “Care” requires active awareness of the plight of others. Such knowledge can seemingly challenge the capacity of voluntarism alone. But “challenging” doesn’t mean impossible. And it’s important to remember that Medicaid, as large as it is, still has a tough time meeting the needs of the people, in part because it is so large — and because bureaucratic rules often displace personal judgment and local knowledge.

The question is not whether the sick receive help but through what means, and at what cost to our common life and our moral character as a people.

Mississippi has spent decades and tens of billions of dollars discovering that you can administer a program for hundreds of thousands of people; you can budget it and audit it and let contracts for it, but you cannot manufacture compassion or replace what is lost when the community stops being its own first answer.

If Mississippi lawmakers really want to understand Medicaid and its consequences, these are the questions they should spend their time considering this summer.

— Wayne Hoffman is President of the public policy education and advocacy organization, Level Up Humanity, and is a research fellow of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. 

ALEC's Rich States, Poor States index now has Mississippi at 24th for economic outlook. The trend lines, and the policy choices behind them, explain why.

The latest Rich States, Poor States index has just been published by ALEC, and for anyone who cares about the direction of our state, it makes for encouraging reading.

Mississippi now ranks 24th in America for economic outlook. That is a forward-looking measure, built from fifteen different state policy variables — tax burden, regulatory environment, labor law, and more. A decade ago, the idea of Mississippi sitting in the top half of that table would have been difficult to imagine. Today, we are there — and we are still climbing.

Three trends worth noting

Public sector shrinking, private sector growing. The number of public sector employees in Mississippi is falling — which means the private sector, the part of the economy that actually generates wealth, is becoming more prominent. That is a structural shift, not a one-off.

Public Employees Per 10,000 of Population (full-time equivalent)

The cost of doing business is falling. The non-wage costs of hiring people in Mississippi have come down steadily. That is one of the reasons so many firms are now choosing to invest here rather than somewhere else.

Average Workers' Compensation Costs (per $100 of payroll)

More people are moving in than out. This may be the most important of all. For too long, young Mississippians moved to Birmingham, Nashville, or Austin to find better opportunities. Now, at last, the trend is reversing. More people are moving to Mississippi than leaving it.

Absolute Domestic Migration

How we got here

None of this happened by accident. It is the cumulative result of half a decade of serious policy reform — and at every stage, opposition was loud.

In 2021, Mississippi enacted serious labor market reform — making it easier for people to work, to train, and to move between careers.

In 2022, we replaced an old, progressive tax code with a flat tax.

Year after year, we have kept energy costs among the most affordable in the country — a quiet advantage that every family and every employer benefits from.

In 2024, we passed education funding reform so that the money at last follows the child.

In 2025, we enacted the historic elimination of the state income tax — a policy that only a few years ago was dismissed as politically impossible.

And in 2026, we have begun to take on the thicket of red tape that has held back our healthcare economy.

Every one of these reforms was resisted. Each was said, at the time, to be too ambitious or too politically risky. Each now stands as part of the answer to why Mississippi is moving up the rankings.

How laws actually pass

Ideas do not turn into law without people willing to fight to make it happen. Sycophancy might get you into the signing ceremony. It takes robust advocacy to ensure that there is a bill to be signed in the first place.

The rest of the country is beginning to notice. Mississippi is no longer the state that others use as a punchline. We are becoming a state that others are studying.

There is a great deal still to do. But the direction of travel is clear — and you have helped set it.

Something remarkable has happened here in Mississippi. The state that for most of the last century sat at the bottom of nearly every American economic table has, quietly, pulled ahead of the United Kingdom in GDP per capita. Last week, Governor Tate Reeves highlighted the fact on X/Twitter in his characteristically Southern style - and the tweet went viral.

It is a moment worth pausing over — and worth understanding because what Mississippi has achieved over the past five years is not an accident or down to luck. It is the product of a deliberate, sustained program of free-market reform that few governments successfully deliver.

I first noticed that Mississippi was overtaking Britain in terms of output per person back in 2023, and wrote about it for both The Atlantic and The Sunday Times. The reaction from British commentators at the time was a familiar scramble for excuses — purchasing power parity adjustments, Ukraine, Covid — anything, in fact, other than the policy choices Britain itself had been making for thirty years.

Now the claim that Mississippi has overtaken the UK is no longer disputed. A new report from the Institute of Economic Affairs last week asked British voters to guess where the UK would rank among America’s fifty states on GDP per capita. On average, they placed their country seventh. In reality, as the report showed, the UK ranks fifty-first — dead last, below every single U.S. state, including Mississippi. More than a quarter of respondents said they felt “shocked” when shown the truth. Alas, facts do not care about British feelings.

I am glad Governor Reeves has now put the spotlight on this again. But to me the more interesting question is not how far Britain has fallen. It is how far Mississippi has climbed.

For most of the last hundred years, the Magnolia State always seemed to be last. Our per capita income was the lowest in the Union. Serious investment passed us by. But recent years have seen a decisive shift.

In 2021, Mississippi passed meaningful labor market reform, making it easier for people to work, train, and switch careers. In 2022, we replaced an old tax code with flat tax reform - a clear signal that Mississippi had stopped apologizing for letting people keep more of what they earn.

Year after year, we have kept our energy among the most affordable in the country — a quiet advantage that every family and every employer benefits from. As other parts of the world that embraced aggressive renewable energy policies grapple with rising costs, Mississippi’s more measured energy approach is looking increasingly wise. 

In 2024, we passed education funding reform that finally lets the money follow the child, putting more of it into the classroom. In 2025, we took the historic step of passing legislation to eliminate the state income tax altogether — a policy that only a few years earlier had been dismissed as impossible. And in 2026, we have begun cutting through the thicket of red tape that has held back our healthcare sector for too long.

No single one of these reforms was enough by itself to turn the state around, but together this package of free-market reforms is enough to lift the trajectory of an entire state. And these reforms compound. Labor market liberalization makes tax reform more potent. Lower taxes make affordable energy more valuable. Better schools raise the human capital on which all of it depends. This is what a real politics of growth looks like — not a single heroic leap, but a steady accumulation of practical wins, year after year.

This is why our numbers have moved. It is why they will keep moving.

If you want to know why Britain is floundering, imagine what Mississippi might be like if we had had Bernie Sanders in charge for the past twenty years. Taxes there are too high. Regulation is intrusive. Immigration is out of control. Energy costs are sky-high. Britain has been run by a succession of Bernies, and it’s been a disaster.

Mississippi shows the alternative. The policies that lifted this state from the bottom of the American table are not secret. They are practical, proven, and available to any government willing to pursue them with the courage and patience they require.

The world is starting to notice Mississippi’s success. So should we.

Amazon has just announced another multi-billion-dollar data center project in Mississippi — the latest in a flood of inward investment now pouring into our state.

But here’s the thing worth reflecting on: even AI-related investments on this scale are only a fraction of what is flowing into data centers and AI infrastructure across the country. What is happening in AI is not just another tech cycle. It is going to be absolutely massive — and genuinely transformative in ways that will touch every kind of institution.

You would not know that from much of the media coverage. I’ve lost count of the number of articles warning about catastrophic job losses, mass unemployment, and whole industries being wiped out. The narrative has been relentlessly negative. But I think it is wrong — and I am not alone in thinking so.

Speaking at a recent event in Jackson, the author Matt Ridley explained something called the Jevons paradox. Named after the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons, the idea is counterintuitive but well-established: when something becomes cheaper or more efficient to use, people do not simply consume less of it — they consume more. Efficiency generates demand rather than redundancy.

So, too, with AI. Yes, it may make legal advice or specialist expertise far more affordable and widely available. But that does not mean lawyers and professionals will be put out of work. It means people will seek legal advice far more often than they did when access was expensive and limited. Making intelligence radically cheaper will not make smart people redundant. It will unleash more of it.

We are already beginning to see the first signs of an AI productivity boom. I am convinced that the people and organizations that embrace AI and use it effectively will not simply do the same things faster. They will become hyper-productive — able to produce, communicate, research, and act at a level that was simply not possible before. That is not a recipe for fewer jobs. It is a recipe for more output, more value, and more opportunity.

Running a think tank, I find myself thinking a great deal about what AI means for organizations like MCPP. Over the past forty years, the liberty movement in America has built an impressive infrastructure — dozens of policy institutes in Washington and one in virtually every state. That network has done enormous good. But there is a challenge that comes with maturity and growth.

As organizations get larger, productivity per person can fall. What begins as a lean, mission-driven operation can gradually become more corporate. The original focus blurs. 

Without constant effort to guard against it, there is a real danger that — rather like a rain dancer claiming credit for precipitation — organizations end up claiming agency for things that would have happened anyway.  My hunch is that some of the established donor groups are aware of all this.  

AI, I believe, is a way to reinvigorate the liberty movement in all sorts of wonderful ways. It might even, whisper it softly, be a little disruptive — in the best possible sense.

Small organizations that use AI well can now be more effective than much larger ones that do not. The capacity of a campaign group should never be measured by the size of its payroll — and AI is only going to make that point blindingly obvious. Again, I suspect donors in search of better bang for their buck will grasp this.  

Here at MCPP, we have started to use AI in lots of new and creative ways. We are working on our first animated children’s cartoon, based on our children’s book What Makes America Special. We have enormous amounts of data, and AI now allows us to use it in smarter ways to identify and reach exactly the people we need to be talking to. MCPP already has perhaps the largest owned audience of any conservative organization in this state — and AI means we are experimenting with new ways to extend our communication reach even further.

AI will never replace the personal relationships that sit at the heart of public policy work. But what it can do is free us up to spend more time on exactly those human connections — the conversations, the trust-building, and the relationships with legislators and opinion-formers that no algorithm will ever replicate. The multi-billion dollar data centers now dotted across states like Mississippi are only one of the ways in which the AI revolution is making itself felt here. The deeper transformation — the one that will reshape how organizations like ours think, communicate, and campaign — is only just beginning. We intend to be at the front of it.

Something significant is happening in America's South, and it deserves more attention.
 
While New York and California are losing residents, states like South Carolina and Alabama are gaining population at a record pace - and alongside that growth, it is southern states like ours that are generating some of the most impressive economic numbers in the country.
 
A recent JL Partners poll found that 36 percent of Americans now expect the South to lead economic growth over the next decade. That puts it well ahead of the West Coast (23 percent), the Northeast (21 percent), and the Midwest (19 percent). Young graduates are even more bullish: nearly four in ten name the South as the region most likely to grow fastest in the coming decade.
 
The data backs up the optimism.
 
Real GDP growth in 2024 tells the story clearly.  Mississippi and South Carolina grew at 4.2 percent. Alabama and Arkansas at 3.8 percent.  Tennessee at 3.0 percent. All surpassed the national rate of 2.8 percent. Between 2020 and 2024, 78 percent of all U.S. jobs added to the economy were located in the South. The region's population has grown by seven million since 2020 — and the pace appears to be accelerating.
 
Manufacturing is a key part of the picture. U.S. industrial output has roughly doubled since the Reagan era, and much of that expansion went South rather than overseas. Alabama alone has added over 50,000 auto jobs since 2000. Combined, Alabama and Mississippi now produce more vehicles annually than Italy or the United Kingdom.
 
Finance is following manufacturing. Charlotte, Dallas, Miami, and Nashville have become major financial hubs. JPMorgan Chase now employs more people in Texas - around 31,000 -  than in New York.
 
Even higher education is shifting. SEC universities have seen a 91 percent surge in out-of-state undergraduate applications between 2014 and 2023, with many of those students coming from the Northeast.
 
What explains it?
 
The answer is policy.  Southern states like Mississippi have built environments that are straightforwardly more attractive for businesses and workers alike.
 
Taxes are lower. Several southern states have no income tax — Texas, Florida, and Tennessee among them - while Mississippi and South Carolina are on a path to eliminating theirs entirely.
 
Regulatory burdens are lighter: South Carolina recently repealed a range of Certificate of Need rules that had constrained its healthcare economy, a stark contrast to California's expanding compliance requirements.
 
Labor markets are more flexible, with most southern states operating as right-to-work states. Occupational licensing restrictions are being reduced, making it easier for people to enter the workforce. And electricity costs are significantly lower, in part because the South never adopted the rigid renewable mandates that have driven up prices in the Northeast and California.
 
This is, in many ways, a natural experiment in governance. Fifty states, trying different approaches side by side - and some are producing markedly better results than others. The South appears to have found a formula that works.
 
None of these policy wins happened by accident.  They were the result of years of sustained advocacy - and you have been a vital part of that. Your support has helped make the case for lower taxes, lighter regulation, and greater economic freedom. The results speak for themselves.

We are officially in the final stretch of the legislative session.

Sine Die — the last day of the regular session — is set for April 5.

That means lawmakers have just days left to finalize remaining legislation, negotiate the state budget, and bring this year’s work to a close.

But as things stand right now, one big question remains:

Will everything actually get done before the clock runs out?

What “Sine Die” Really Means

“Sine Die” is simply the final day of the legislative session. It is the point when lawmakers adjourn and, in theory, wrap up all unfinished business.

By that deadline, the Legislature is expected to:

Once Sine Die arrives, the regular session is over.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Why a Special Session Is on the Table

In reality, not everything always gets resolved in time.

When lawmakers are unable to reach agreement on major issues — most often the budget — the Governor can call a special session.

A special session is different from the regular session in one key way:

Only the issues identified by the Governor can be considered.

That means instead of hundreds of bills being debated at once, lawmakers are brought back to focus on a much smaller set of priorities.

Mississippi saw this just last year, when lawmakers were called back to Jackson to finalize budget negotiations after the regular session ended.

Given the ongoing tension between the House and Senate this year, the possibility of a special session is very real.

What Could Be Included

If a special session is called, the scope of what gets addressed will depend entirely on what leadership chooses to prioritize.

That could include:

In some cases, special sessions are narrowly focused. In others, they become an opportunity to revisit major policy debates that were left unfinished during the regular session.

At this point, it’s still an open question which direction things will go.

Why This Matters

The final days of session — and the potential for a special session — will shape how this legislative year is ultimately remembered.

A session that has seen several high-profile setbacks could still end with meaningful action, depending on how these final decisions are handled.

And because special sessions operate under a more limited and controlled agenda, they can sometimes move quickly once priorities are set.

Looking Ahead

The final days of session — and the potential for a special session — will shape how this legislative year is ultimately remembered.

A session that has seen several high-profile setbacks could still end with meaningful action, depending on how these final decisions are handled.

And because special sessions operate under a more limited and controlled agenda, they can sometimes move quickly once priorities are set.

Track Legislation in Real Time

If you’d like to follow along as bills move through the process, you can track key legislation throughout the session using the Mississippi Center for Public Policy’s bill tracker.

Track Bills at the Capitol Here!

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