| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
From the House Judiciary Committee, watch live at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3. | |
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| This morning, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer answers questions from members of the House of Commons on domestic and foreign policy. | ||
| This marks the first Prime Minister's question time since the UK Parliament adjourned for summer recess. | ||
| Watch live at 7 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| 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, in our 10th, 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, whilst Talichnaya 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 U.S. during the Cold War, an economic miracle in the Leninist homeland of the 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Bobby Kennedy fired the entire corrupt advisory committee for immunization practices. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No study. | |
| Not after three years of contemplation. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The old chestnut that every Republican in my lifetime has run on doing but never did. | ||
| Three natcons 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 right'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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| 35 years ago, the conservative movement won its defining victory over Soviet communism. | ||
| The wall came down, the evil empire disbanded, the West's long twilight struggle was over. | ||
| 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 rights 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. | |
| 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. | |
| The timely tactics of 1980s fusionism ossified into dogma and then into political irrelevance. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| 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. | |
| 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 Day 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. | ||
| Conservatism is about human dignity and human flourishing. | ||
| By definition, there is no such thing as a transhuman conservative. | ||
| But lest anyone misunderstand or misstate the point, conservatives should not cower in a Luddite crouch. | ||
| We have a future to win. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Short-term alliances are necessary, but conservatives, as you know, have just clawed our way out of one dead fusionism. | |
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 high 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 commonweal. | ||
| 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 industrialists 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 Uniparty'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 Uni Party 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 wounds, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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, entrusted 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. | |
| 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, 10 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 a 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, 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. | ||
| I'd be really happy if, you know, if JD gets to be president for eight years and then Marco Rubio for another eight years and I can keep going. | ||
| I'd be really happy. | ||
| That would be just great. | ||
| But right now, what I want to talk about is I want to talk about this impulse online. | ||
| And I don't think online is just some corner of America or something. | ||
| I think online is actually where the future is being shaped. | ||
| And I want to talk about why it is that it's so difficult for so many of our friends, when they get up in the morning, they roll out of bed. | ||
| Some of them say some prayers or eat some breakfast or take a shower, but not all of them. | ||
| They get up in the morning, they roll out of bed, they're online, and they're telling us about how awful everything is. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I mean, President Trump, I don't think he had, seriously, I don't think he had even three months. | ||
| I don't think he had two and a half months before many of our friends, these big podcasters who want to be the They want to replace the mainstream media. | ||
| I mean, that's what we've been talking about for 10 years, is we're going to create an alternative, like an alternative ecosystem for getting ideas, an alternative where people will be able to speak freely, an alternative where people are going to be able to say unsayable things and actually get the debate going on all sorts of things. | ||
| And it worked. | ||
| And now, I don't think Trump even had not even three months before the drumbeat started about how awful things are. | ||
| He was going to start World War III. | ||
| He's being controlled. | ||
| He's being manipulated. | ||
| He's lost the thread. | ||
| He doesn't believe in justice. | ||
| He's covering up for the CIA. | ||
| He's covering up. | ||
| Some of you don't recognize this, so just trust me. | ||
| The rest of you do. | ||
| And what I want to understand is, I want to understand, do you all understand that this administration, it actually needs our help. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying don't criticize them. | ||
| That'd be ridiculous. | ||
| I'm not saying don't voice skepticism about things. | ||
| I'm not saying be running dogs for the administration, be lapdogs. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| But what I do want to understand is, do you feel gratitude for having reached this unbelievable moment where our friends are in power and they're trying to do their best? | ||
| Now, I'm not just raising this subject for the sake of, you know, chewing people out. | ||
| I'm raising the subject because I'm actually worried that we're doing so much winning. | ||
| You remember winning? | ||
| President Trump promised us a long time ago, many years ago, that he would be doing so much winning that we'd be saying, please, please, Mr. President, no more winning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't take it anymore. | |
| All right, but I think you took him too seriously. | ||
| Like, he started winning. | ||
| He's been in office for seven months. | ||
| This great team has been in office for seven months. | ||
| And there's an awful lot of people among us, among our friends, who are outraged. | ||
| I mean, they're full, it's like howling rage. | ||
| Like, you go from program to program, and we're hearing howling rage. | ||
| There's something deeply wrong here, and I want to try to propose what it is that's wrong. | ||
| I think that many of us can't stand the idea that I think many of us can't stand the idea that when you're in power, when you're in government, you have other responsibilities that they're not the same as your responsibilities when you're in the opposition. | ||
| I think many people simply don't understand this. | ||
| You've all heard that the revolution devours itself. | ||
| How does it do that? | ||
| Why does the revolution devour itself? | ||
| Every revolution has this kind of dynamic. | ||
| People spend decades and decades working themselves up in a lather, hating the existing system. | ||
| And then they break in and they, you know, there's a chance to fix the system. | ||
| But fixing the system requires compromise. | ||
| It requires politics. | ||
| It requires coalition building. | ||
| Donald Trump couldn't have won. | ||
| There's no chance. | ||
| Trump Vance would not have won the election without coalition building. | ||
| And thank God Trump Vance are excellent at coalition building. | ||
| So they brought in all of these liberals and these tech bros and all sorts of people. | ||
| Some of them I like, some of them I don't like at all. | ||
| But it doesn't make any difference. | ||
| You can't win elections without a coalition. | ||
| And thank God, Trump and Vance are great at coalition building. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| When you're governing, you also have to have a coalition. | ||
| You have to have enough power to get anything that you want to get done through. | ||
| And if we've got all of these non-government people on the outside criticizing, not just criticizing, carping, savaging, attacking, hating, accusing, accusing, these accusations, they don't just go nowhere. | ||
| They shape our movement. | ||
| And they turn our movement into something vicious. | ||
| Do you really believe that you're going to be able to build a better coalition to win the next election better than the one Trump built? | ||
| Well, I don't believe you. | ||
| I don't believe you. | ||
| You can't do better than this. | ||
| This is the best it's going to be. | ||
| I'm not saying everything that he's doing is right. | ||
| I'm saying this is the best it's going to be. | ||
| And what we need, what we really need in this next stage of the movement is for the people who are on the outside to focus, to focus their attention on continuing the job of coalition building. | ||
| Now, that's what we do at NATCON. | ||
| That's what we do. | ||
| Going back to the very, very beginning, the first conference, I stood here and I told you what I think. | ||
| I think that there is no future for America without a return to Scripture. | ||
| I've said that many times. | ||
| None of you are surprised to hear me say it. | ||
| But it was hard. | ||
| It's hard to do it. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| When we started in ATCON, most of the people who rallied round the flag were Catholics. | ||
| And, you know, many of the people on the stage this morning are Catholics. | ||
| Many of my best friends are Catholics, and they always will be. | ||
| But I said at the very beginning, I don't see any way to turn this country around if it's just Catholics. | ||
| It's a traditionally Protestant country. | ||
| We've got to find the Protestants. | ||
| We've got to convince them. | ||
| We've got to bring them on board. | ||
| And we did that. | ||
| We worked for years in order to bring Protestants and to make peace among the different Protestant factions so that they would agree to be on this stage together and work together. | ||
| We worked for it for years. | ||
| And then the Catholics started saying, Yoram, the Protestants are taking over. | ||
| They're taking over this movement as anti-Catholic. | ||
| And so then we had to work to bring a whole bunch of more Catholics so that it would straighten out. | ||
| And since then, I've even been doing a lot of work on bringing in Orthodox Jews. | ||
| Hopefully get to meet some of them here. | ||
| That's our work. | ||
| That's our job. | ||
| Our job is to pull together journalists, academics, think tank people, writers, people who work in the field of ideas, to bring them in together into a coalition and to hold it there, to be the intellectual substrate, underpinning of this nationalist movement. | ||
| That's what we do. | ||
| But what I've discovered in these last few months is that there are some people who just, they're not into this. | ||
| They don't want the coalition. | ||
| What they want is to be pure. | ||
| They want to keep running the revolution. | ||
| The way they see it, well, look at all these people who are supporting the Trump administration and the nationalist movements in other countries, in Britain and other countries, and look how much they are not exactly like who I would want them to be. | ||
| And they're aggressively trying to make it difficult for the Trump administration to maintain its coalition. | ||
| This is not just a sideshow. | ||
| I want to know how is JD Vance going to win the next election if what we're doing outside for four years, if what we're doing is tearing each other apart, accusing one another of the most horrible things, smashing one another in public. | ||
| Now, you can keep doing that, but I'm telling you, if you keep doing that, you're going to hand J.D. when he steps up, God willing, to run for office, or if it's Marco or any other NATCON, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be handing him a wreck, a wreck of a public sphere. | ||
| People hating each other, people refusing to work together, and people staying home from the election. | ||
| If there are two sides killing each other in public, like with words, shedding each other's blood, then neither side is going to be excited to step up when the next time there's an election. | ||
| Neither side. | ||
| You can't win doing this. | ||
| You can only lose. | ||
| You keep going this way. | ||
| We're going to start hearing talk about a third candidate. | ||
| We're going to start hearing talk about splitting the party. | ||
| We're going to start seeing the real possibility that the left is going to be in power again in four years. | ||
| And you yourselves are doing it if you keep up these savage attacks on Trump, on his administration, on the other people in our coalition. | ||
| Now let me say something very basic about coalitions. | ||
| I've said it before, but now it's really important. | ||
| The only way to keep a coalition together is by giving honor to the others in the coalition that you don't agree with. | ||
| If you can't give them honor, right, meaning if you can't treat them like they're significant people, like their ideas are worth listening to, like their motives are, you know, just like anybody else is sometimes confused, but usually their motives are just good motives. | ||
| If you can't take, treat the other people you don't agree with in the movement that way, and they're not going to respond by honoring you back, right? | ||
| Like it goes both ways. | ||
| You're going to dishonor them. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| You're going to dishonor them. | ||
| You're going to constantly talk about how awful they are. | ||
| You talk about other people in the coalition that Trump brought in, that Vance brought in. | ||
| You're going to keep saying, no, they're terrible. | ||
| They're evil. | ||
| They're pernicious. | ||
| They're perverse. | ||
| They're just terrible. | ||
| You keep saying that. | ||
| You keep dishonoring them. | ||
| And it works. | ||
| It makes them feel worse and worse and worse. | ||
| And they respond by dishonoring you back. | ||
| And there's no way, once you get into that spiral, there's no way to turn it around. | ||
| It's got to stop here. | ||
| has to stop now we at this conference we we made a decision after the um we as the conference committee so there's eight people serving on the committee representing different different parts of the movement different institutions | ||
| We made a decision after in June after the U.S. strikes in Iran. | ||
| We made a decision we want a conciliation conference. | ||
| We were a little bit naive. | ||
| We thought that World War III didn't start. | ||
| We thought thousands of Americans didn't die. | ||
| So we kind of thought, okay, all these people got really, really hot under the collar about it, that they were going to be able to say, okay, you know what? | ||
| Trump, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, Bridge Colby, Mike Anton, all those people, all our friends, they actually know what they're doing. | ||
| Yeah, maybe I don't agree with the decision, but basically they know what they're doing. | ||
| So we thought we were going to be able to pull together a reconciliation conference. | ||
| Everybody was going to come back together and just say, you know, we had a good fight. | ||
| We had a good cry. | ||
| It didn't turn out exactly like we thought. | ||
| We're all right. | ||
| We've got the best government we've ever seen in our lives. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| But it hasn't gone like that. | ||
| It hasn't gone like that. | ||
| All summer long, all summer long, we've had friends pounding one another and accusing one another. | ||
| So I'll tell you what we did with this conference. | ||
| We have tried, as best we can, to provide a balanced conference. | ||
| You know, there's some issues in which there aren't a whole lot of disagreements among NATCON. | ||
| And so on those issues, we didn't try really hard to balance the panels. | ||
| There's this wonderful overturned Obergefell panel, which, thank God, is not even slightly balanced. | ||
| And we finally got an Orthodox rabbi to join. | ||
| But there are things that are balanced. | ||
| All these foreign policy issues, everything having to do with Israel and Iran, everything having to do with Trump doctrine, everything having to do with what kind of foreign policy makes sense. | ||
| We've tried to balance the different views. | ||
| We've tried to bring people from the different sides. | ||
| They're all part of our movement. | ||
| We're not going to be disloyal to people who have been our friends for years just because some of us think that they said things that didn't make much sense for a few months. | ||
| But the challenge of this conference is going to be, can we, now that we've brought them, now that we've brought the different sides together, the challenge of this conference is going to be, can we honor one another? | ||
| Because if these sessions where people are sitting together, if instead of remembering that we were friends for many years, if we're sitting here hating on one another, we're just going to be going in the wrong direction, and that could be really, really bad. | ||
| So I would like to ask you all a favor. | ||
| And more people are going to show up later. | ||
| I would like to ask you all who are sitting here to repeat, to tell everyone that I ask this favor. | ||
| I want these sessions to be sessions that are conducted as though they're conducted between brothers of the same movement. | ||
| Now, you know me. | ||
| You know what my views are. | ||
| It's not that I don't take, I don't have opinions about the Middle East. | ||
| I have them. | ||
| But there's nobody ever said, and this is for my Jewish friends, nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon, you had to love Israel. | ||
| Nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon, you had to love Jews. | ||
| Go take a look at our statement of principles. | ||
| It's not a requirement. | ||
| If I want to be in a place where everybody loves Israel and everybody loves Jews, then my wife and I have a good Shabbat table and we invite people. | ||
| We have a great time. | ||
| That's not what NatCon is for. | ||
| That's not what it's for. | ||
| What it is for is for restoring America, for restoring Britain, for bringing back the spirit of national independence, national interests, national traditions, scripture, God. | ||
| That's what it's for. | ||
| And I can tell the people who don't agree with me on all sorts of things, if you honor me, I'll honor you. | ||
| If we honor each other, then we can build a movement together. | ||
| We'll disagree on some things. | ||
| We'll build the movement together. | ||
| And God willing, we can see blue skies for, you know, maybe for decades. | ||
| Hard to believe, but it begins here. | ||
| It begins here. | ||
| Treat one another as brothers. | ||
| Let me just, let me say a couple of words about being Jewish here. | ||
| I've never done this before. | ||
| I'm not especially comfortable with it. | ||
| It was very, very easy for me to be a leader in the nationalist movement and to be Jewish up until a year and a half ago or so. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| It wasn't just easy. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| It was really great. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because every time some lefty Jew or some lefty non-Jew would accuse one of our speakers of anti-Semitism, I got to be the guy who went out and said, you people, you're completely out of your minds. | ||
| You've never spoken to the guy. | ||
| You've never talked to the guy. | ||
| You have no idea what he's saying. | ||
| You're pulling out one sentence. | ||
| I got to do this for years, for seven years. | ||
| And I have to tell you, it makes you really popular. | ||
| Everybody's really grateful. | ||
| I'm the guy who defended them against absolutely false, ridiculous accusations of anti-Semitism, and it was fun. | ||
| And there were lots of people, especially when you do these things in Europe, and each nationalist movement in Europe thinks that the other nationalists from some other country, that they're actually totally deranged. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they're all reading the liberal media and their country. | ||
| So it was great to have these conferences where the nationalists from different countries would get together and they'd say, wow, you're so normal. | ||
| That's not what it seems like from reading the newspapers. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| And many, many people told me, you know what? | ||
| I would have thought twice about coming to a nationalist conference, but there's like an Orthodox Jewish guy who's like standing there. | ||
| And so I felt confident that I could come. | ||
| And it was really my pleasure because the overwhelming majority of the people on the right, they really are good people. | ||
| It doesn't mean I agree with them about everything, but really, really wonderful people that I've met over these years. | ||
| And now it's not that easy anymore. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's not that easy anymore. | ||
| Now there's not just Criticism of Israel, which is fine, obviously. | ||
| I mean, that's just a policy question. | ||
| If you disagree about Israel, fine, all right? | ||
| So we disagree on lots of things. | ||
| We disagree on Israel, too. | ||
| But I've been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there's been online the last year and a half. | ||
| Like the left is already, you know, the left is long gone into a rabbit hole of hating Jews. | ||
| I didn't think it would happen on the right. | ||
| I was mistaken. | ||
| We now have quite a few people on the right who, in the last three years, have made a really interesting transition. | ||
| These are mostly people, some of them people that I used to admire a great deal, some of them I still admire, who've made this transition. | ||
| They used to think that Jews and Christians should be allied to try to save America, and now they think that actually, for reasons that I don't necessarily understand, they now think that saying good things about the Muslim Brotherhood and Islam and the Quran, that's where they're going. | ||
| And they think Jews are a big problem. | ||
| Okay, so that is the reality. | ||
| I hope it's going to pass. | ||
| I certainly don't say that every single accusation that's made against Jews is false. | ||
| Like we all know that 80% of, you know, let's say 67% of American Jews are liberals. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| So if many Jews have liberal ideas, many Jews work to advance liberal ideas. | ||
| Those are not my ideas. | ||
| There's a million and a half Jews who voted for Trump. | ||
| But if what's going to happen is that instead of having like a serious, honorable conversation about let's rethink the relationship between Jews and Christians in America, let's rethink the relationship between Jews and Christians in the West. | ||
| If instead of having like a serious conversation about it, and I agree that on some very important issues, that's a conversation we absolutely have to have. | ||
| And we can have it here. | ||
| But if instead of that, if instead of saying, listen, Yoram, we need to rethink the relationship between Jews and Christians a bit, let's discuss it. | ||
| I mean, I'm going to honor you, you honor me. | ||
| If it's not like that, if instead what we get is just a vile stream of accusations about what Jews did to Christians in the Middle Ages and all the rest of this stuff. | ||
| So I'm just, I'll return to what I said before. | ||
| This coalition was built by Donald Trump. | ||
| This coalition is broad enough to be able to win the next election and the next one and the next one. | ||
| If you take it upon yourself to drive members of the coalition out, to dishonor them, to keep dishonoring them until the point where they say, all right, fine, you can have it. | ||
| If you do that, all you're doing, you're destroying Vance's prospects, you're destroying Rubio's prospects, you're destroying America's prospects. | ||
| So we have a choice that we need to make. | ||
| And I have a proposal. | ||
| There are people who are, they can't stand the fact that we have the greatest administration we've ever seen. | ||
| And they've just got to attack it and savage it because it's not perfect. | ||
| And I'm telling you, I'm asking you, let's make a point of learning how to govern. | ||
| That's not just the people in office. | ||
| That's also the people at this conference and everybody you know. | ||
| Let's make a point of learning how to govern. | ||
| Governing means we need to build our coalition. | ||
| We need to maintain our coalition. | ||
| That means that we need to honor one another. | ||
| We need to create the runway for the next election victory and the one after that. | ||
| And the only way to do that is through mutual honoring of different groups and different factions within this coalition. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There is no other way to do it. | |
| So when you get that choice, when you turn that dial, whatever it is, you get that choice between being somebody who, you know, listen, I've just got something I've got to say. | ||
| Let's just destroy the coalition, but we'll be pure. | ||
| That's one choice. | ||
| Let's help the revolution consume itself, destroy itself. | ||
| The other choice is, you know what, I don't agree with everybody in this coalition, but gosh, look at what they're achieving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at what they're achieving. | |
| There's no limit to what we can achieve if we honor one another. | ||
| And there are severe limits to what we can achieve if it's more important for us to take the other guy down than to keep this coalition going. | ||
| Okay, so I'm sorry to have started on this kind of a down note, but I have a great deal of confidence. | ||
| I have a great deal of love for the people here. | ||
| I have a lot of confidence. | ||
| I think that three days from now, we're going to come out the other side of this and we're going to say, I can't really remember why we were hating on one another so much. | ||
| Because even if I don't agree with everybody here, they're really not such bad guys. | ||
| And mostly we're on the same side. | ||
| I believe that three days from now, we're going to come out the other side and that's where we're going to be. | ||
| And I'm asking you for your help. | ||
| I'm asking you for your help to make sure that happens. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Today, a congressional gold medal ceremony will be held to honor the African-American men of the 369th Infantry Regiment, commonly known as the Harlem Hellfighters, in recognition of their military service during World War I. | |
| The medal will be presented by Speaker Mike Johnson and will include remarks by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, along with several members of Congress. | ||
| From the U.S. Capitol, watch live at 3 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and on c-span.org. | ||
| On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will testify before the Senate Finance Committee on President Trump's 2026 health care agenda. | ||
| Committee members will also likely ask about recent firings and resignations from the Centers for Disease Control. | ||
| Watch it live at 9:30 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Looking to contact your members of Congress? | ||
| Well, C-SPAN is making it easy for you with our 2025 Congressional Directory. | ||
| Get essential contact information for government officials all in one place. | ||
| This compact, spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact information for every House and Senate member of the 119th Congress. | ||
| Contact information on congressional committees, the president's cabinet, federal agencies, and state governors. | ||
| The congressional directory costs $32.95 plus shipping and handling, and every purchase helps support C-SPAN's non-profit operations. |