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Sept. 2, 2025 17:26-18:31 - CSPAN
01:04:52
Conservatives Host National Conference
Participants
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kevin roberts
heritage 28:05
Appearances
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rachel bovard
04:22
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yoram hazony
04:27
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
And girls' clubs and support to veterans.
Whenever and wherever it matters most, we'll be there.
Cox supports C-SMAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy.
Next, the National Conservatism Conference held in Washington, D.C., activists talk about the need to prioritize family and morality and to practice the tenets of the conservative movement.
The Edmund Burke Foundation hosted this event.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the president of the Edmund Burke Foundation, Anna Wellish.
Okay, Rico, you can come back.
Thank you.
Good morning, everybody.
And welcome.
Welcome to those who have been with us from the beginning.
And there is such a cohort incredibly.
It's been years.
Welcome to all of you who have just joined, whether out of curiosity, hostility, boredom, doesn't matter.
Welcome to the young, the old, and everybody in between.
And I thought it was worth reminding all of us that it all started, quite literally, with a book.
Many good things do.
A mere book.
And here we are.
Incredibly, this book, The Virtue of Nationalism, is now in its second edition, both American and British.
And that book matters to me a great deal personally.
It reminded me quite uncannily when I first came across it of a Polish pope, John Paul II, and his memory and identity and the idea of such a thing as a theology of the nation, which John Paul II derives from the Old Testament and from the commandment to honor our father and our mother and all the generations that came before.
And incidentally, I met the book's author, Joram Hazzoni, at his first book event in the U.S.
It was here in the DC area in the fall of 2018.
I walked up to him and told him that he was going to think I was crazy, but that we really needed to work together and that this book shouldn't be a book, that it should be a movement.
I heard Joram tell that story not long ago.
Only he added one sentence.
He said, of course I thought she was crazy.
That was seven years ago.
And this today, this is our 10th conference together.
10th.
It's the fifth in the U.S., but the tenth we've done together.
And why a movement?
Because a book just wasn't enough.
Not then, when we first met seven years ago, and not now.
A book is not enough because we needed to do more.
We needed to do things with words.
And that is what we do here.
That is what we've been doing from the very beginning.
And just like the rebellious American voters who elected Donald Trump in 2016, we thought that America needed much more than a change or a tweak.
It needed a restoration.
It needed something quite radical.
To appreciate what and how completely things were off when NATCON got started.
It helps to look back.
It will really help to illustrate what I have in mind.
Take, for instance, sorry, going ages ago, but it seems like it.
Take the U.S. during World War II, say the Manhattan Project.
And please bear with me.
It has a purpose.
Imagine Fulbright scholars on student visas from Germany and Japan working on uranium enrichment.
Assisting where senior scientists work on sustaining a rapid uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.
Observing the work on the best implosion design.
Imagine a search for women scientists to balance the roster of scholars before any work even got started.
Does it sound ridiculous?
Maybe, but sadly plausible.
Let's remember that the success of the Manhattan Project required basically creation of new physics, massive scale industrial engineering, cutting-edge explosive research, and absolute secrecy and coordination.
Of course it did.
Let's keep going for a moment.
Imagine now the now legendary moonshot, say the Apollo space program.
Imagine the Russians invited to observe and learn.
That would be both diverse and inclusive.
Imagine the moon landing with no planting of the American flag because that could be too nationalistic.
Imagine no Al Shepard hitting two golf balls with his improvised six iron on the surface of the moon.
That would be probably supremacist and most definitely, decidedly, a display of toxic masculinity.
Imagine that it all started when a president said, think what you can do for your planet and in some other language, rather than what you can do for your country.
Now, imagine President Reagan's policies creating 20 million jobs, not in America, though, but in the Soviet Urals, while Stalichnaya vodka became a coping device of choice among the unemployed of Appalachia whose jobs were, well, just no longer in Appalachia.
Imagine no Cold War on Soviet industrial espionage and practically unrestricted American technology transfers to the US during the Cold War, an economic miracle in the Leninist homeland of world's proletariat.
I hope you see where I'm going with this.
And now think about why we won World War II, why we won the Cold War, or why in 2015 or 2016, there's no way we could win either.
So yes, we needed a restoration.
That was clear.
The world as we knew it needed to return to what most felt was simply normal.
We did not want to reinvent the world.
We wanted to restore it.
During our National Conservatism Conference in DC, we really mostly focused on common good and common sense.
There were a lot of great ideas.
There was a lot of fumbling.
That was the summer of 2019, and conservatism, we felt, wasn't doing much by way of conserving.
And it couldn't agree on what to conserve or what we even have the right to conserve.
It could agree, though, on being offended at the idea of national conservatism.
Our first NATCON was considered fringe not just by those on the political left.
It was also considered fringe by many who claimed to be on the right on our side.
Some joked, and I'm not sure how funny it is anymore, that if cannibalism were next on the progressive agenda, conservatives could be counted on conserving the value of consent of those on the menu.
Somehow, somewhere, conservatism got lost, ironically, ironically.
probably by equality and freedom that became unmoored from decent human life.
Radical equality and freedom of the individual erased all the differences between liberalism and conservatism.
It sowed tremendous confusion, and conservatism did not seem to notice.
See, perfect freedom and perfect equality threw everything in flux, letting nothing claim primacy over anything else.
Equal does mean equal when you think about it.
And without a hierarchy, man is free to absorb God, to be as delusional as he or she pleases, to displace whomever he pleases.
And what then of what interested us?
The past, traditions, family, dignity of work, what of those we love, of people and places we would do anything for, more than for some others, equality notwithstanding?
What of what we here care about?
National identity, a sense of cultural belonging, our traditions, faith, the respect many, whether they like it or not, feel for courage and honor.
What of any values?
Remember that by definition, designating a value means that you put it above other things.
It belongs and exists in a world that has hierarchy.
It cannot otherwise exist.
What of a child's respect for the parents?
What of anybody's knowledge that's greater than anybody else's?
What of any excellence?
What of anything that is more good, more beautiful, more smart, more anything on a scale where everything is subject to radical equality?
The two, equality of freedom, truly led to reductio ad absurdum, to chaos.
And ultimately, in this pursuit of freedom, just as C.S. Lewis warned us, that will ironically lead to terror.
Our humanity will go first.
And remember, if we're perfectly free, we can claim the right to cross the limit of the physically impossible.
If we're perfectly equal, everybody's right to everything else is exactly the same.
And there is absolutely no power save brute force to regulate competing desires.
My home, my country, those are oxymorons.
So is anything that you think is yours.
And this is where we were going.
That was the edge of where we as a fledgling movement started and started not just to talk, but to do things with words.
We worked to create a forum where things that could hardly be whispered were being said out loud, where we stood shoulder to shoulder where any of us was attacked.
It didn't matter if we agreed or not.
One thing we agreed on was that on this stage, anybody can articulate ideas and speak, be taken seriously and listened to in good faith.
This is our fifth American conference.
It's unlike any that came before.
For the first time, we see many of the ideas that we recognize, that we saw articulated on this stage.
We saw honed on this stage, in this forum, tested in real life as national policies.
Elections indeed have consequences.
It is an exciting time, but it's only the beginning.
We'll see where it goes.
So, welcome to the conference and welcome to the future of national conservatism.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rachel Bavard, Vice President of Programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Thank you, and good morning.
Welcome to NatCon 5.
I hope everyone who made it in this morning wasn't too triggered by the National Guardsmen on your sidewalks and your metro stops.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
In fairness, and we can be bipartisan here, Democrats and journalists aren't wrong when they say armed soldiers and police on city streets can be scary.
unidentified
They are scary to criminals.
That's the point.
In a civilized society, criminals are supposed to be scared.
Any kind of criminal.
Drug dealers, carjackers, James Comey.
You know what I mean?
Now, before we begin, I wanted to follow the example of a recent DNC summer meeting by opening our time together with a land acknowledgement.
Please bow your heads.
We acknowledge that we are gathered here today on the traditional lands of the Republican establishment, who opened borders, started wars, and betrayed working families here for generations.
We remember their contributions to globalization and tearing down the sovereignty of our country and its people, and solemnly commit to never listening to them about anything ever again.
Thank you.
That was very meaningful.
So, ladies and gentlemen, this is a new experience for me.
It's exciting, if a little disorienting.
And I don't mean speaking here at NATCON.
I mean living every day under a president who is actually doing the things I voted for.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
My entire adult life, I have listened to Republican leaders make all of the right promises on immigration, the administrative state, peace through strength, ending abortion, you name it, only to see those promises ignored or broken.
unidentified
For 12 years working on Capitol Hill, I had a front row seat to a generation of Republicans surrender.
Year after year, issue after issue, fight after fight, the message from the establishment elite was always the same.
Next time.
Stop the border invasion?
Next time.
Cut spending?
Next time.
Defund the left?
Definitely next time.
So, my friends, welcome to next time.
The last seven months under Donald Trump have repudiated once and for all the self-serving, craven, long game of the Republican establishment.
Contrary to a generation of failed GOP leaders, you really can just do things.
After decades of an unchecked invasion, our southern border is secure.
ICE Director Tom Homan's enforcement strategy is so successful that it's already reshaping the labor market.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
Over the last four months, native-born Americans have gained 2.6 million jobs, and foreign-born workers have lost 1.6 million.
unidentified
You can just do things.
Thousands of once until crafts have been fired.
Thousands more have taken the buyouts to leave voluntarily.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
Bobby Kennedy fired the entire corrupt advisory committee for immunization practices.
No study, not after three years of contemplation.
unidentified
No Blue Ribbon Commission, gone, fired.
USAID, gone.
I sat in my office and watched them take down the sign.
It was surreal.
DEI is now illegal in federal offices and contractors and universities.
Planned Parenthood and NPR are cut off.
The Department of Education is being shut down.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
The old chestnut that every Republican in my lifetime has run on doing but never did.
Three natcoms ago, I told a member of the audience to stop asking for the Department of Education to be shut down because it never would be.
unidentified
And I was wrong.
It's happening.
And why?
Because it turns out, you can just do things.
Donald Trump is the first Republican ever to seriously try and dismantle the federal government as a left-wing power base.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
Previous Republicans took the oath and then they just sat atop a system designed to undermine them without making any significant change.
unidentified
In that sense, I suppose Donald Trump really is the living embodiment of what can be unburdened by what has been.
I guess we finally know what that means now.
Only time will tell how much he accomplishes.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
But if you want any indication about its success so far, consider that since President Trump took up his sledgehammer, the Democrat Party's net approval rating has fallen 30 points underwater.
unidentified
They're heading into the midterms with a platform against safe streets, civil rights, and hot chicks and jeans.
Keep swinging, Mr. President.
But more importantly, keep swinging natcons.
As satisfying as the last seven months have been, what comes next will be far more important for our movement and for our country.
Now, don't get me wrong, more than once this year I have Googled, is it possible to die of Schadenfreude?
But after the Wright's stunning winning streak in 2025, it's not enough for us to say, this is what I voted for.
From now on, this needs to be the only thing we will ever vote for ever again.
And don't listen to the establishment or the media.
For all his unique style, Donald Trump is not sui generis.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
His populist politics, nationalist vision, and permanent offense strategy need to become the baseline for Republican presidential candidates from now on.
No more kid gloves, no more polite Republicans who crave social acceptance on the editorial pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, and no more Republicans who misunderstand the stakes of what we're up against.
An amoral elite that will use every inch of their institutional power to impoverish and disenfranchise their countrymen, jail and bankrupt their political opponents, and shower our money on every foreign interest that lines their wallets.
unidentified
This is important for two reasons.
First, because the work of re-Americanizing the federal government is going to take more than three and a half years to complete.
The last march through the institutions lasted decades, and so will America's exorcism of them.
And second, because reports of the Republican establishment's demise are greatly exaggerated.
Susan Collins still chairs the Appropriations Committee.
Mitch McConnell, the Rules Committee and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
Neocons are still stalling realist foreign policy nominations and together with K-Street, quietly steering policy back toward Bush-Cheney-Romneyism.
Congressional Republicans are openly talking about bringing back earmarks and amnesty for illegal immigrants.
They want to protect the establishment from Trump instead of protecting America from the establishment.
And if we let them, if we let up, they will succeed.
And we know this because we've been here before.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
35 years ago, the conservative movement won its defining victory over Soviet communism.
unidentified
The wall came down, the evil empire disbanded, the West's long twilight struggle was over.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
40 years of Cold War promises came due about peace, the peace dividend, and reorientation of American policy back toward our nation and our people.
unidentified
Yet within months of the right's global generational mission accomplished, a Republican president declared a new world order, took us to war in the Middle East, and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
Everyday conservatives who delivered Republicans landslides for decades looked on as the backseat drivers of our coalition, Wall Street elites, neoconservatives, and corporate libertarians took the wheel.
unidentified
A bipartisan uniparty formed and entrenched itself while delivering voters, at best, less than what they voted for, and at worst, the opposite of what they voted for.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
The timely tactics of 1980s fusionism ossified into dogma and then into political irrelevance.
unidentified
A generation of supposedly wise, prudent leaders steered our party, our nation, and much of the West into the culture-shredding maelstrom of globalism, intersectionality, and American empire.
If we don't think it could happen again, we can rest assured that it will.
Because just like Nixon and Reagan's coalition a generation ago, today's MAGA majority is already attracting allies whose personal, political, and philosophical goals are irreconcilable with ours, and not just in the Washington establishment.
There are debates coming very quickly that will challenge our new coalition.
Debates over drone technology, over eugenics dressed up as reproductive technology, and over algorithmically empowered commercial mass surveillance performed at a scope and scale we have never before witnessed and at a cost we have only just begun to contemplate.
But the most pressing of these debates is over artificial intelligence, specifically whether AI will innovate us to a more efficient and secure future or result in a technology-driven totalitarianism.
These debates are foundational to the conservative movement.
They will determine whether this new American conservative coalition will remain American or conservative at all.
Now, like everyone else in this room, I'm grateful to the tech right for being part of the coalition that elected Donald Trump.
I commend President Trump for drawing Silicon Valley's anti-woke disruptors into his campaign last year.
I support the administration, including Vice President Vance, for their confident but clear-eyed policy toward the new technology.
Moreover, I get it.
So-called techno-optimists are cool.
They offer to the right an alluring frisant of subversive edge and intellectual swagger.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
But in techno-optimism, as in all human endeavors, the line between confidence and hubris, between ambition and horror, can be very thin.
unidentified
The so-called transhumanist movement, the belief that technology can enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities beyond current human limitations, is on the other side of that line.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
AI raises important and difficult questions about public policy, about children and families, about labor and education and economic competitiveness.
unidentified
It raises profound and fundamental questions about human dignity and the care and stewarding of the soul.
Transhumanism also raises important questions, just not difficult ones.
Transhumanism isn't cool.
It's not interesting.
It is an existential threat to human dignity straight from the bifetic boardrooms of hell.
Nor, and let's be very clear, is transhumanism new.
It's stale and boring.
It's literally one of the oldest recorded ideas in the world.
And I quote: And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die, your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.
Today's post-humanism and genetic optimization and bio-enhancement cults are just yesterday's eugenics, child sacrifice, and euthanasia, this time with VC backing.
We don't need to speculate about how these technologies would be used.
They'll be used to exterminate supposedly inferior children, like those with Down syndrome, flat feet, or in time, the wrong color hair or eyes.
They'll be used to spare the conscience of middle-aged children and government health budgets from the burdens of caring for the elderly permanently.
They'll be used to manipulate, exploit, and abuse children, because naturally, Facebook's AI chatbot was already caught grooming kids.
This tech will be used to scale the manufacturing and re-engineering of helpless human life for the self-care routines of the glamorous and the powerful.
And here you thought the tech right was only bad on H-1B visas.
The transhumanist cult directly rejects the truth about human dignity, our creator, and the exquisite and unrepeatable Imago De imprinted on every human soul.
The problems with transhumanism are legion.
And I mean that in every possible sense of the word.
And on a personal note, let me just say, as a piece of advice to any of the young, very online tech right men here today, if you are at all intrigued by the idea of gene-optimizing bio-augmented lab-grown CRISPR babies, Throw away your phones and talk to more girls.
I love you all.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
Conservatism is about human dignity and human flourishing.
unidentified
By definition, there is no such thing as a transhuman conservative.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
But lest anyone misunderstand or misstate the point, conservatives should not cower in a Luddite crouch.
unidentified
We have a future to win.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
AI is going to be a powerful and transformative tool, and we should be encouraging its appropriate development here at home and staying ahead of America's foreign adversaries in this space.
And by the way, all of this must be done with the necessary civil liberties protections that ensure our cool and edgy defense contractor friends don't blow away the Fourth Amendment.
unidentified
AI research?
Yes.
AI-enabled data analysis, healthcare, transportation, absolutely.
AI is going to be the defining problem-solving technology of the 21st century.
But human dignity is not a problem to be solved.
And as for man's fallen nature, we already have a solution for that too.
He died on a cross outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.
None of this is to say we must read tech bros or AI engineers out of the conservative coalition.
No, we want them.
We should want all of them.
Politics is about addition.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
And to win the fights ahead of us against the left, the establishment, and the billionaire transhumanist screw tapes, the right needs to get very good at politics.
Short-term alliances are necessary, but conservatives, as you know, have just clawed our way out of one dead fusionism.
unidentified
We cannot be doe-eyed about entering another.
As with any political alliance, we must be wise as serpents and as innocent as doves, as the Gospel of Matthew tells us.
Or, as Michael Anton might put it, we must be Machiavellian in our coalition building and ruthless in protecting our values.
Conservatives cannot outsource our mission because we know from painful experience that no one else shares it, including many of our most powerful allies on Wall Street, K Street, and in the military-industrial complex or in Silicon Valley.
We must constantly strive to grow our coalition while remembering that it is our coalition.
And coalitions are only means, not ends.
We pursue the good, the beautiful, and the true, not the donors, the stakeholders, and the consultants.
This is what we fought for all those years under Bush and Dole and Bush and Cheney and Romney and McConnell.
The chance to fight and to win.
The chance to lead.
It's finally here.
For the first time in our lives, the success or failure of our coalition at home and abroad on economic, foreign, and social policy is up to us.
It's up to you.
The right is growing.
The left is cracking up.
The country and our culture are healing.
rachel bovard ▲ ● ▼
Across the West, brave conservative leaders are standing up and fighting back for their faith, for their freedom, for their neighbors, nations, and in service to the Burkean covenant between those who have gone before, those who are here, and those who are yet to come.
unidentified
My friends, welcome to NatCon, and welcome to Next Time.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation.
kevin roberts ▲ ● ▼
Thanks so much.
What a pleasure to be with you this morning and a real honor to follow two great leaders, Ana Wellish and Rachel Bovard.
How about another round of applause for them and their leadership?
Friends, at this moment in history, we face a choice.
A choice to decide the next 250 years of America can be greater than the first 250.
If we have the courage, the discipline, the vision, I believe this generation can lay a foundation of renewal so deep that our descendants will look back on us with gratitude just as we look back on our own founders.
And the most important choice that we can make together to ensure that the next 250 years of America are greater than her first is to focus our laws, our labors, our loves on making the family the centerpiece of everything we do.
You see, no nation in human history has entrusted so much of its future to the virtue and vitality of its families as America.
The great empires of Europe, France, Spain, and England placed their hopes in armies and palaces.
The stability of their regimes rested on the health of a king's bloodline and the strength of his throne.
But America bet her future on something humbler, yet infinitely stronger.
Not the pomp of royalty, not the machinery of a permanent bureaucracy, nor the shifting will of mobs.
We staked it all on what Chesterton called the most extraordinary thing in the world.
An ordinary man and an ordinary woman, bound in covenant love, passing on their faith and virtue to ordinary children.
We staked it all on the American family.
The family is the seedbed and safeguard of our grand experiment in ordered liberty, the source and summit of our political order, the true origin of our exceptionalism.
To quote John Witherspoon, the family is the seminary of the state, the first school of instruction wherein we have our tempers formed to virtue or to vice.
Strong families led by great men were the heartbeat of 1776.
And the American Revolution, the birth of this great nation, was sustained and won because of the strength of this heartbeating in every American home.
This is not revisionist history.
It's the truth.
The men and women of the founding generation were hopeful about their future and saw the family as the bedrock on which this fledgling nation would flourish.
In their homes, they cultivated prudence, courage, justice, temperance, integrity, and humility, long before such virtues of statesmanship were demanded of their children and their own public lives.
Strong families were the assumed condition of the Republic's survival, as natural and self-evident to Americans as freedom itself.
While the quiet heroism of ordinary fathers and ordinary mothers raising ordinary children with obedience to God and love of country was not inscribed plainly in the Declaration of Independence, it was inscribed on the heart of the American people.
And our founders, for all their erudition, prescience, and political imagination, could never have envisioned the state of the American family today.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, our political architecture is still outwardly intact.
The Constitution that gives our body politic its structure remains in its glass case in the National Archives.
But the American family, the spiritual heart and soul that animates that Constitution, has grown weak, fractured, and hollow.
We cannot say we were not warned of this risk.
As early as 1798, John Adams told us that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, that it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Yet today we permit and even applaud an all-out sustained assault on the very institution that Adams and his contemporaries were counting on to form such a moral and religious people.
The numbers today, as you know, paint a grim picture.
In 1776, the average age at first marriage was just over 22 for women and 26 for men.
Today it is nearly 30 for women and 32 for men, the highest in American history.
And all of you could no doubt list the relevant troubling statistics, chiefly the dramatic decline in marriage and birth rates.
And yet, the American heart still yearns for more.
Since the 1970s, Americans have consistently said their ideal family size is about two and a half children.
But reality has fallen short.
Financial pressures, cultural hostility to marriage, and the erosion of hope have opened a tragic gap between the families that Americans desire and the families they believe they can achieve.
That gap has only widened since 2008, as more young women and men quietly lower their expectations, even while their deepest longings remain unchanged.
But the most profound damage cannot be captured by statistics alone.
Numbers do not express the frustration and loneliness of countless young Americans drifting through life, desperate for duty, meaning, and purpose in a culture that offers only cheap satisfaction, which it calls freedom.
And numbers do not convey the righteous anger such young men feel when our elites say they can be replaced by immigrants or machines.
Likewise, numbers cannot show the emptiness that many young women experience.
Both men and women are told that the marriage and family might stand in the way of personal fulfillment.
But today, many are finding themselves longing for what the heart has always known-to give themselves in love, to prepare the next generation, and to help build something enduring.
Further, numbers alone cannot capture the quiet heartbreak felt by so many young men and women in a culture that treats marriage as just another lifestyle choice, trading the depth of lifelong vows for the transience of cohabitation and casual relationships.
Because of such arrangements, as many as one in three conceptions in this country ends an abortion.
Numbers alone can never convey the depth of that loss or the generations of lives and love that will never be known.
Numbers, of course, only measure.
They can show us that the basic elements necessary for the good life-a spouse, children, a home-lie out of reach for far too many Americans.
But they can't show the spiritual ruin that accompanies this reality.
They can't convey that feeling we all have of being lost at sea, tossed about by cultural currents we didn't choose as if we were helpless.
But friends, I'm here today to tell you we're not helpless.
We remain the masters of our fate, both as individuals and as participants in the Commonwealth.
We can make the next 250 years of America greater than the last 250 if we so choose.
The American people have entrusted us with the power to govern.
They are asking us to make America great again.
They are urging us to usher in a new golden age in American life.
To honor their request, we have one clear task.
We must do intentionally what the founders did instinctively, stake our future on virtuous and ordinary mothers and fathers.
As conservatives, this means we must change the way we approach and prioritize the issues of our time.
It will require being uncomfortably honest about our present crisis and take responsibility for our part in it.
That means acknowledging that the American family's collapse is not recent, accidental, nor inevitable.
Rather, our situation today is the result of a deliberate campaign to uproot the most fundamental institution of human life.
You can call this campaign liberalism or Enlightenment rationalism or modernity.
The name doesn't matter.
What matters is realizing that our current crisis has been centuries in the making.
Take marriage.
As early as the mid-1700s, decades before the American Revolution, certain Enlightenment philosophers were already taking a sledgehammer to its foundations.
What Cicero called the first bond of society, Rousseau dismissed as nothing more than a civil contract.
And David Hume, for all his insight into the frailty of human reason, spoke approvingly of the liberty of divorce as a remedy to what he viewed as the inconveniences of lifelong commitment.
Such ideas were not yet dominant in popular culture at the time of the founding, but like a rot within the beams of a house, they slowly weakened the structure from within.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the assault grew bolder.
The collapse in our birth rate didn't start with Instagram influencers or the careerist feminism of the sexual revolution.
Rather, it began more than a century ago when Margaret Sanger, funded by a coterie of wealthy industrialist and American eugenicists, who unsurprisingly bewailed, trust the science, set out to reduce births among the poor, the devout, and what Senger diabolically considered the racially undesirable.
She championed sterilization, spread contraceptives, and began the re-engineering of our culture around the idea that children are a burden.
These efforts were accompanied by a transformation in education.
Men like John Dewey, as you know, led the charge.
They shifted children's formation from home and church to state institutions, providing an education not grounded in classical or Christian principles and an understanding of the human person, but an activist education, a tool for social engineering, shaping children according to the latest theories of progressive ideology.
Being honest about the current crisis requires us to admit that these people have largely succeeded.
While we've won many battles recently, especially in the last seven months, we're still losing the war.
If that's difficult to hear, think about how they have affected every part of our society.
I'm not just talking about pride flags, DEI, and ESG.
I'm talking about the anti-family campaign of the Uniparty elites who have run this city for too long.
Isn't it good and just and beautiful to finally see the ridiculous project collapsing?
There's more to come.
The economic policies they champion built on the assumption that maximizing GDP is an overriding, if unspoken, goal, pushing those women who, by their very own accord, would rather be at home raising the next generation instead to work full-time to keep up with their neighbors or even simply to make ends meet.
As a result, we now have longer school days and shorter summer vacations, with parents delegating the role of raising their children to strangers they barely know.
That some of those strangers facilitate abortions and sexual mutilation surgeries without parental consent is a direct result of the family being too weakened to withstand the degradation that has taken its place.
Further, the Uni Party's national security strategies, which fail to be guided by the sanctity of life of each and every one of our soldiers and sailors, prop up what Uniparty leaders call the family of nations, whatever the living hell that is.
The cultural orthodoxies and technological pursuits they cling to that deny the very reality of man and woman.
But what is deeply concerning is the cowardice that still lives within our ranks.
Our opponents have succeeded in redefining the family and weakening our nation because we've allowed them to.
One contemporary observer foresaw this tragedy 25 years ago.
The great Patrick J. Buchanan, who is so deserving of a presidential Medal of Freedom, said in 2001, many Americans have seen their God dethroned, their heroes defiled, their culture polluted, their values assaulted, their country invaded, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans have held for generations.
Indeed, since then, time after time after time, our leaders have opposed the latest and most outrageous policies of the left while slowly conceding the philosophical ground on which those policies were built.
We have fought them in the public square, only to quietly allow their ideas to seep into every institution of American life.
Our laws, our schools, our churches, and even our homes.
But there is another truth, just as important.
What has been done by design can be undone.
The family's decline is not a law of nature, nor is it an unstoppable force.
It's the product of human choices, and human choices can change.
Indeed, if we hope to restore the family and save our republic, they must change.
We must meet the long campaign being waged against the family with an equally long offensive campaign to restore it.
And this campaign must begin first and foremost with taking back our own homes.
If those of us who claim to fight for the family do not ourselves order our lives around that truth, then every word we speak in its defense will ring hollow.
Today, there is a temptation to separate the personal from the political, to believe that our private lives are of no concern to our public work.
That separation is a lie.
A movement that seeks to save this nation and restore the family must itself be composed of men and women whose private lives are not a contradiction, but a confirmation of their public witness.
Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Navarum called the family a society very small, but nonetheless a true society.
He meant that the family is not a mere adjunct to the state, not a creature of legislation, but a community with its own God-given purpose and authority.
This authority is exercised not through force or bureaucracy, but through love and example.
And it is precisely this example of duty embraced, of promises kept, of sacrifice made for the sake of others that will rebuild the moral capital of our nation.
Just last week, Pope Leo XIV echoed his predecessor of a century ago.
He said, there is no such thing as a public personality split in two.
On one side, the politician, on the other side, the Christian.
No, there is the politician who, under God's gaze and in conscience, lives his commitments and responsibilities as a Christian.
So in that spirit, we cannot just praise marriage from a podium.
We must enter into it, embrace its commitments, and remain faithful through its trials.
We cannot merely lament the falling birth rate.
We must welcome children into our homes and give them the love and discipline they need to grow into virtuous citizens.
We cannot merely shake our heads at the falling marriage rates.
We must be hospitable and bring together people in our homes, just as the founding generation did.
We cannot criticize the state of our schools while outsourcing the next generation's formation to institutions that work against our values.
We must build new schools or transform our very own kitchen tables into places of learning and wonder.
Rather than simply opposing loneliness, atomization, and secularism, we should observe the Sabbath, open our homes to our neighbors, and pray with them and share the joy of a proper feast.
And we cannot sit back and complain about our leaders.
We must become leaders ourselves and raise our children to rule with the prudence that so many of our current leaders lack.
Which brings me to my final point.
The importance of prudence cannot be overstated.
This virtue, above all others, has been missing from our politics.
Recovering it is essential to ensuring it survives for another 250 years.
But what is prudence?
Prudence is not mere caution.
It's not the timidity of those who are afraid to act, nor the endless calculation of those who never decide.
Prudence is the ability to govern action by the light of reason, to discern in concrete circumstances the means most likely to achieve that which is good.
St. Thomas Aquinas named it the charioteer of the virtues, for it guides courage, justice, and temperance toward their proper ends.
Prudence is, in short, the opposite of ideology.
Ideology, whether on the left or the right, begins with an abstract formula and forces the complexity of human life to conform to it.
As Russell Kirk reminds us, conservatism is the negation of ideology.
It is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.
Prudence begins with the concrete reality before us, the family, our culture, the circumstances God has placed in our care, and asks what must be done here and now to promote the common good.
Reclaiming prudence has profound implications for the future of the conservative movement.
For too long, our debates have been dominated by questions framed in right abstractions.
Are we for or against tariffs?
For or against regulation?
For or against immigration, foreign wars, new technologies?
As if the answer to such questions could be settled once and for all, regardless of changing conditions, and then applied like a mathematical equation to every new situation.
Prudence does not permit such laziness.
It recognizes that the interest of the family and the national interest are not merely aligned, they are one and the same.
It demands that we ask of every policy, every proposal, will this strengthen the American family?
Will it advance the common good of the American people?
Will it cultivate the virtues without which liberty cannot endure?
If the answer is no, even if the proposal aligns with some past ideological commitment, prudence requires that we reject it.
But if the answer is yes, then prudence requires us to embrace it.
Consider trade.
There are times when tariffs are a tool of justice, protecting the livelihoods of families from unfair foreign competition, preserving the industries and crafts that sustain communities and strengthen our national defense.
There are other times, however, when tariffs raise the cost of living for working families, driving up the price of food, clothing, and shelter.
An ideological movement will declare itself pro-tariff or anti-tariff and remain so forever, regardless of the consequences.
A prudent movement will ask, in each case, what serves the long-term welfare of American families and act accordingly.
Again, Russell Kirk offers pithy guidance.
The attitude we call conservatism, he says, is sustained by a body of sentiments rather than by a system of ideological dogmata.
It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such.
The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no test act or 39 articles of the conservative creed.
Consider regulation.
There are industries, pornography, sports betting, social media, where business models prey on the weaknesses of our children, addict them, corrupt their innocence, and hollow out their capacity for love and responsibility.
Prudence demands that we, at the very least, regulate those industries with a firm and heavy hand.
At the same time, there are other industries, such as construction, where over-regulation has made it impossible for young couples to afford a home to raise their children.
Prudence demands that we deregulate those industries immediately.
Consider technology.
There are advances in medicine and science that can help couples overcome infertility, that can heal children before they're born, that can make family life more secure and prosperous.
Prudence embraces these.
But there are also technologies, cloning, IVF, gene screening, surrogacy, certain uses of artificial wombs, that seek to bypass or even replace the family altogether.
Prudence rejects these without apology.
To some, this flexibility will seem inconsistent.
To the ideologue, it will seem like compromise.
But to the statesman, it will be clear that keeping our eyes fixed on the good of our families while pragmatically adjusting our means to changing circumstances is the only true form of politics.
And to the careful observer of American history, it will be obvious that prudence is the animating principle of several core tenets of our very system.
Federalism in particular is dependent on prudence to determine which level of government is best suited to address a given problem.
So, as we seek to restore the family, we would do well to remember that states' proximity to the people may at times make them better equipped than Washington to implement ambitious family policies.
Considering that their powers are numerous and indefinite, as James Madison reminds us in Federalist 45, we should empower states to become laboratories of family formation, incentivizing them to compete to be the best place in America to be born, to marry, to raise a family, and to die with dignity.
In the years to come, we must be willing to say to our friends and allies, this policy may be good for your industry, for your donor base, for your Twitter engagement, or even for your electoral prospects.
But if it weakens the American family, we will oppose it.
And we must be equally willing to say, this policy may offend certain ideological shibboleths, but if it strengthens the American family, we will fight for it.
Prudence is not a retreat from conviction.
It's the application of conviction to reality.
And in this moment, conviction and reality both tell us the same thing.
The surest test of any policy, any law, any reform, is whether it fortifies the institution upon which the future of our nation stands.
If it does, it is worth pursuing.
If it doesn't, then it's not worth the time of free men and women.
Without the recovery of prudence, our movement will continue to lurch from one election cycle to the next, mistaking short-term victories for long-term success and confusing ideological purity with civilizational renewal.
But with it, we can chart a course that is faithful to our heritage, responsive to our present, and worthy of the generations yet to come.
That choice will determine whether America is merely another passing power or a great and enduring civilization.
In 1776, our forebears pursued freedom from the mightiest empire on earth.
They did so with a boldness that defied the wisdom of their age, but it was the prudent choice.
They knew that in winning independence, they would inherit a duty to preserve it.
And they understood that this duty would not be discharged by armies alone, nor by parchment constitutions, nor solely by the prosperity of markets.
It would be preserved, if at all, by the same force that had birthed it, the strength and virtue of ordinary mothers and fathers, American families.
250 years later, we stand where they once stood, at the edge of a future we cannot fully see, but for which we will be held accountable by history, by our children, and by God.
The weight is heavy.
America's anniversary should underscore that our obligation to the future will outlast a single election cycle or a handful of legislative victories.
Further, our rich cultural inheritance should remind us that we need to think in terms of centuries, not decades, and that we should measure success not by the headlines of the moment, but by the lives of the generations to come.
This project will require hope, the kind of hope that does not deny hardship but endures it for the sake of something greater.
And it will require sacrificial love, love that binds husbands and wives, parents and children, and citizens to one another as members of a great intergenerational covenant.
And it won't be easy.
Some here may think it impossible.
I can only remind you of this: America is not merely an idea.
She is both a place, one where ordinary men and ordinary women are born, where they will die, where they will be buried, as well as a people who inhabit what they see as their homeland.
America is, in the deepest sense, a great family, stretching across generations and trusted with a sacred inheritance.
Our forebears passed it to us, often at great cost.
Now the burden and the privilege are ours.
And so I ask you, certainly not as a political leader, not as the president of heritage, but as a fellow citizen, as a husband, as a father, will you choose to join me in doing the difficult work to pass it on to our children?
Together, can we have the courage to plant oak trees whose shade we will never sit in?
Can we labor to build cathedrals whose spires we will never see completed?
And will we embrace the sacrifices necessary to make America's next 250 years greater than her first?
A golden age awaits our answer, and our answer must be yes, onward, always.
Thank you.
unidentified
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Yoram Hazani, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation.
yoram hazony ▲ ● ▼
Okay, it doesn't really fit.
It's not going to fit.
There's nothing I'm going to do about it.
All right.
Well, here we are.
This is the 10th conference in the series.
NatCon 5 is the tradition is to count Washington or U.S. NatCons to give them numbers.
But we've actually done 10 conferences over the last 10 years.
And I have to tell you, I'm having a great time.
No, I'm having a wonderful time.
I think, and I hope none of you are going to be offended by this.
I think that the Trump administration is the best administration I've ever seen.
I mean, I get up in the mornings and I'm happy.
And my wife knows, like, I'm never happy.
It's a spectacular thing.
We're just 10 years out, 10 years after, even nine, maybe, ten years after the Trump movement, 10 years after Brexit, and we're in power.
Our friends are in power.
I mean, for those of you who are new here, hundreds of people like you are in the administration.
Now, I've never seen this before in my life.
You know, like I'm getting really old.
I won't tell you how old.
But this experience of having dozens of dozens of people who are really good people, like high-quality people, thinking people, and they're there.
I've had the honor to visit some of them in the White House and in the Pentagon and in the State Department.
And it's amazing.
It's an amazing feeling to see such good people there.
Who'd ever believed it?
Ten years.
In 10 years, we succeeded in getting there.
Now, let me just remind: I know that there's kind of a divide in the audience here.
There are younger people and there are older people.
And not everybody fits neatly into these two categories.
Some people are in between.
But the younger people follow what's going on online.
And many of the older people not so much.
And the younger people have been going through an experience that I'm going to describe to you.
I understand that many people in the room don't necessarily recognize this experience.
Just bear with me.
Take my word for it.
I think that we've been watching the best administration that I've ever seen.
I'm excited about what they're doing with immigration.
I'm excited by the efforts at reindustrialization.
by the efforts to shift primary security responsibility in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia from the United States as global empire and to shift it to regional actors.
I'm excited by draining the swamp.
I'm excited by the end of the rule of woke DEI in institutions across America and God willing across the world.
I'm excited by the fact that there's an administration that takes crime seriously, that thinks that criminals actually need to be fought and citizens protected.
That's an awful lot of things that are good about this administration.
Now, I'm not saying that they're doing absolutely everything right.
If I wanted to, you know, just like any of you, I have a list, things I could complain about, things I think they're doing wrong, things they really should have asked me about instead of just deciding it themselves.
But you know what, I'm just not going to share that with you because right now I really want to focus on this particular fact, this particular fact, which is that we don't know if we're ever in our lives going to see a group of people this good with ideas this focused and determination to this extent.
We don't know if we're ever going to see it again.
Now I hope we will.
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