Welcome to the America First Antitrust Forum. I'm Aiden Bazetti, the president of the Bullmoose Institute, and I'm very glad you're able to join us today. The America First agenda has always been fundamentally about restoring balance, returning power to workers, to families, to small businesses, and to communities that were left behind by decades of policies that put global interests ahead of American citizens. That project has made real progress on trade, manufacturing, and energy. But there's a domestic dimension to this agenda that deserves equal attention: the structure of our own markets.
For too long, Republicans and Democrats allowed the steady consolidation of economic power into fewer and fewer hands. Not through competition and innovation, but through mergers, acquisitions, and the quiet capture of industries that Americans depend on every day. The result is an economy where too many workers have fewer employers to choose from. Too many small businesses face dominant suppliers or buyers with no real alternative. And too many entrepreneurs find that the path to market is blocked before they ever get started.
Detractors will say that we are against a free market, but what they're defending is a captured one. Restoring genuine competition, the kind that produces lower prices, higher wages, and real innovation, is as much a part of the America First vision as any trade policy or industrial strategy.
This forum exists as a repudiation of the outdated and damaging economics of the last 60 years. Today, you will hear from enforcers, policymakers, and advocates who are working through the hardest questions. How to enforce our competition laws with rigor and discipline. How to distinguish consolidation that genuinely serves American interests from consolidation that simply serves shareholders. And how to build the policy and legal infrastructure for an antitrust agenda that puts American workers and communities first.
These are not easy questions and the people in this room do not agree on every answer. That's exactly why this conversation matters. It may feel like the landscape has completely changed since 2016, but ultimately the conservative movement is still struggling on how to best reclaim the antitrust mantle. Therefore, the goal is not to develop consensus for its own sake. It is clarity, a clearer sense of what an America First approach to competition policy actually looks like in practice, what it requires of our enforcement agencies and what it demands of us as policymakers.
I'm grateful to the many people who have joined us today and I look forward to the discussions ahead. And with that, I want to turn to somebody who is doing exactly that work, leading the Federal Trade Commission with a clear understanding of both the law and what is at stake for the American economy. Chairman Andrew Ferguson was confirmed as the 30th chair of the Federal Trade Commission and has moved quickly to reorient the agency, making the case for competition in American markets and signaling that the FTC will pursue antitrust policy with rigor. He has been a consistent voice for the proposition that protecting competition is not a partisan exercise, it is a governing one. We are very honored to have a recorded message from him for this forum. Please join me in welcoming Chairman Andrew Ferguson of the Federal Trade Commission.
