Dr. Kevin Roberts champions Project 2025, a 900-page conservative policy blueprint and personnel database, as a strategic tool to dismantle the "deep state" and restore constitutional order under current leadership. Heritage Foundation’s cautious AI adoption—aggregating research while preserving human oversight—contrasts with Musk’s warnings, emphasizing ethical regulation over unchecked innovation. Roberts credits JD Vance’s Munich speech for pressuring European allies to act independently and condemns the UK’s religious liberty crackdowns, framing cultural decline as a broader threat than economic metrics. The Phoenix Declaration pushes back against federal education overreach, urging parental control over schools corrupted by unions or extremist policies. His optimism stems from Trump’s lasting disruption, akin to Jackson’s era, fueled by grassroots momentum and shared national pride across political divides. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, also sometimes called the mastermind of Project 2025, which puts him somewhere between Darth Vader and Sauron on the list of supervillains.
And of course, I admire him for it as well.
I've also always been a big, big supporter of the Heritage Foundation.
It is not just a smart, conservative think tank with integrity.
It's also one of the very, very few people who reached out to me when I first started talking about the culture.
There were very one of the few conservative organizations that understood what I was saying when I said we've lost the culture.
And if we lose the culture, it won't matter how many elections we have won.
It has taken a long time for them to find a leader who understands the transitions that are going on in the country.
And Kevin is the right man for the job at the time.
It is very hard to do MAGA graciously.
It's a very aggressive movement with sometimes spills over into belligerence, but Kevin has managed to do that to be a full-on MAGA man, but also a gentleman and a scholar.
Kevin, it is great to see you again.
How are you doing?
Man, I'm doing great.
It's always wonderful to speak with you.
Obviously, we did that recently.
And you're very, very kind in your comments.
You know, whatever Heritage is accomplished is because of the great men and women who are inside it.
I bet the best colleagues in the world.
But also, I think our secret is that we're supported not by any white knight, so to speak, inside the beltway, but by hundreds of thousands of regular ordinary Americans who just want to wake up in a normal country again.
Fancy that.
And it is true, wherever the money comes from, that's where the trouble comes from.
And it's nice when it's actually coming from the people you're trying to help instead of from one 90-year-old zillionaire who's sitting there demanding that everything looks like him.
So I want to get to 2025 and your new education plan.
But before that, I just want to talk a little bit about your book, Dawn's Early Light, Taking Back Washington to Save America.
And I have not really had a chance to delve into it, but I keep reading reviews of it.
And I'm really interested in the thesis, which seems to be that technology is going to be part of our future.
And the way we deal with technology is going to kind of define what's happening.
I agree with that completely.
I'd like to hear what you mean by that exactly.
Yeah, when I set out to write the book, I knew that it couldn't just be the typical boring think tank policy book, right?
And even though that's as an academic, that's sort of my inclination.
But the process of this, I started talking to people.
And one of the groups of people that I talked to were people I hadn't spent a whole lot of time with, which were technology entrepreneurs, also just some of my younger colleagues, younger people in the kind of center-right movement, who, of course, understand technology, but far better than I have, Andrew.
This is the point.
All of those folks had spent a lot more time thinking, I mean, with great depth, with great nuance, of how those of us who call ourselves conservative, sort of common sense people, might not do what I had been doing, which is sort of giving the stiff arm to technology, both in personal usage, but also how we might be able to use it to improve our lives as a conservative movement.
And instead said, let's embrace it.
Let's figure this out.
And but what you've got to be able to do, and I talk about this in the book, is be willing to have a conversation.
You've got to be willing to swap stories, you know, to talk about something that you've taught me from afar over the years, but recently one-on-one.
And ultimately, to drive home this thesis, it's that as conservatives, we actually can see technology as something that aids us.
It's something that in public policy, as we talk about at heritage, might need a little bit of balancing because technology can get in the way, not just a personal virtue, obviously, but also in terms of the common good.
The upshot is this.
I'm really confident as a result of the research I did for this book, the conversations I was having with people, that technology, whether it's AI, whether it's other new adventures in technology, will actually become part and parcel of the conservative movement.
That's really interesting because I think we're reaching this moment where there are going to be a lot of choices we have to make, kind of transhuman moment when we have to decide what technology makes us more human and what makes us less.
The one thing I'm concerned about that six months ago, I think it was, Elon Musk was telling us that AI was the most dangerous thing that he'd ever seen in his life.
He was going to wipe us all out.
And now suddenly we're hearing no, no, full steam ahead with AI.
And I thought, what changed?
What changed in the middle?
Are you concerned about that?
Or do you think it's just a lot of fretting over nothing at this point?
Well, look, I don't subscribe to the school of thought that says full speed AI.
And what we're trying to do at Heritage, what I talk about in the book is to acknowledge that AI can offer, does offer a lot of improvements to our workflow, maybe even to our life.
At Heritage, for example, though we'll never have AI write a paper, right?
We're using AI very intentionally to aggregate some of the research in the first phase of a paper.
And it took us a lot of conversations as a staff to say, look, we can never lose what it is that humans bring to this, what people expect us at Heritage to offer, which is our discernment, our own moral judgments and so on.
But it was a great opportunity to understand that while I love the spirit of Elon Musk, that let's just go full board with this.
We also also have to understand we always have to put these things in balance.
We have to keep them at balance.
And that ultimately, the bottom line here, Andrew, that ultimately is going to be the big challenge facing policymakers, whether at the federal level or the state level, is allowing these entrepreneurs, in this case with AI, to keep the initiative that obviously drives innovation, while also understanding that for the sake of the common good, we have to be very careful about this.
And this lifelong conservative will even use the R word.
We have to regulate it appropriately.
Yes, I know.
I always have to remind conservatives that everything is regulated.
We're allowed to argue.
I'm not allowed to attack you.
That's a regulation.
Yeah, no, I'm really happy to hear you say this because one of the things, we all love capitalism.
It's this brilliant thing, but it does tend to take the ethical considerations.
We want to push them out of the way to get to the big profits and the big advances.
And I think that this is something we really have to think about because it could strip us of our humanity.
It's just an important thing.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, I just say that's really what it's about.
I mean, I'm reminded of a group of young AI and tech entrepreneurs I spoke with on the West Coast a few months ago.
And they sort of tried to prevail in this friendly debate we were having that I should embrace this concept of Jupiter brain, you know, which these young technology folks love.
And I said, guys, that sounds awful to me.
And they said, well, they said, well, Kevin, you know, don't you want to know, have all of the knowledge of all of the history of the world at your fingertips?
I said, no, I'm busy enough with what my little brain can comprehend, right?
But it speaks directly to the humanity of this.
And I think if we keep that in mind, and no doubt Elon Musk understands this, in spite of his recent comment, I think we're going to keep this in order.
Good, good.
That's good.
I'm encouraged to hear that.
I actually believe that.
And I believe there's just going to be people who go one way and people who go the other.
And I think that's going to be the world we live in.
So I have to ask you about Project 2025.
One of the guys who worked on it goes to my church, and I was scolding him about the fact that you didn't release a four-page abstract so that people could see what was there.
It was like 900 pages.
And it gave the left a chance to demonize what seemed to me perfectly reasonable ideas.
And then Trump had to distance himself from it because he felt it was weighing him down.
How do you feel that worked out?
And how do you feel about going forward?
Because it's still, the ideas are still really good and really intelligent.
Well, we took as a great compliment that the left saw the work, not just of Heritage, but 110 other center-right organizations to be so effective and so good that they probably gave us collectively a billion dollars to earn media value.
Now, Andrew, you know me and you know Heritage well enough.
We actually prefer to be out of the limelight.
We prefer to be working behind the scenes and advising elected officials on what might be good policy and good people.
This is something we've done since 1980.
But two quick things that are very important.
Number one, they could have spent a trillion dollars on us.
We were never going to roll over.
We're never going to stop doing the work that we're doing, which is appropriate.
It's obviously ethical.
A lot of elected officials really rely on this.
But number two, to remind people that at Heritage more than anything else, we do try to have more humility than we do hubris.
There were some lessons learned.
And the big lesson that I learned was that the left, when they started punching us in April and May, and we thought it would sort of go away, we should have punched back.
And when we started punching back, when we developed that abstract that you mentioned, fully understanding President Trump and this campaign needed to distance themselves in order for the sake of the campaign, that's when the left realized this isn't going to work any longer.
And ultimately, they failed in that attempt.
And the American people should be doing a victory lap right now, not because of our project, but because we have a president and vice president who are so courageous to go do the will of the people.
To the extent that on the outside, our work has allowed their courage to be paired with some real substance and some great people.
That's wonderful, but they deserve the credit.
If you had to sum up Project 2025 in a couple of sentences so that people actually know what they're talking about, because they're still throwing this, you know, that Trump is secretly still doing Project 2025.
I think do it openly.
This is great.
But can you explain what basically the project is?
It's a menu of conservative policy solutions and obviously is a menu in the same way that we ought not go into a restaurant and order everything on the menu.
There's just no way that a politician is going to implement everything.
But the second component, and it's the new component, is a personnel database, not just for presidential administrations, but for gubernatorial administrations that we're actually going to expand in the coming decades.
Okay.
One of the things about conservatives that's kind of endearing, but can be kind of frustrating, is that they have their conservatives because they're able to see how any change in anything can lead to complete disaster.
Like they can always see how if you pull this string, the entire suit is going to unravel.
And sometimes change is good and sometimes change is bad, but it always is interesting.
And one of the things that I thought was interesting about Heritage during the first Trump administration is while everybody was wailing and crying and Trump says these things and everybody goes insane, Heritage was the first people to point out that he had accomplished more of the conservative agenda in approximately 20 minutes than the rest of the Republican Party had accomplished in the last 50 years.
And I'm wondering now, you're looking at this onslaught.
I mean, now this guy comes back.
He's had four hours, four years, I'm sorry, to rest and get ready and to sort of re-understand the situation that he's in.
He's come back like gangbusters and it's going so fast that people are just, their heads are spinning.
How are you feeling about this administration?
Let's start with, well, let's start with what you like about it.
Well, I like everything or almost everything.
And I mean, I'm ecstatic.
To your point about the first administration, there are a lot of Beltway conservatives who do a lot of beard stroking about whether one idea of the presidents is fully conservative, if it's heterodox or orthodox.
Well, at heritage, we rather just get things done for the sake of the American people.
And there's so much that needs to be corrected.
And to drive home the thing we're most excited about, it's the dismantling of the deep state.
I mean, that's really the whole purpose of Project 2025 is so that in our lifetimes, but even more specifically than that, more narrowly than that, in this decade, we've got perhaps the last chance to reimpose constitutional order on the federal government.
And the fact that Trump has done this in his first four weeks in office is really remarkable.
The one thing I don't like is the concept of Canada being the 51st state.
I don't want Canada to be the 51st state.
It's with all due respect to the president.
He knows that.
We love him at Heritage.
And I think that feeling remains mutual.
We don't want Canada.
And also, I think that that continues to be a problem in Canadian politics where it's actually giving the left something to talk about.
We need a conservative government in Canada and we need them to remain an independent country.
It's too boring to be part of America.
Yeah, there's just no way.
I was in London recently and a friend from Alberta who'd been in politics there said, you know, we kind of have a lot in common with the Rocky Mountain West.
I said, with all due respect, we love you, but you just need to remain part of Canada.
There's a reason that border is there.
You know, Kim Strossel in the Wall Street Journal says something really interesting in her column last week.
She said, you know, Trump is actually doing, trying to change things in a very constitutional way.
He's basically inviting lawsuits and saying, I'm going to take this to the Supreme Court and hopefully the court will clarify and even change this relationship we have to the deep state, where basically they're in charge of whatever their bailiwick is.
Whereas Obama would just ignore laws, which always seem to me to make him a monarch, you know, if he can just say, I'm not enforcing this law.
And I don't know what Biden was doing or who was doing what Biden was doing, but he basically was denying that the court had the power to stop him from doing anything.
I mean, Trump is actually, I don't even know if Trump has ever read the Constitution, but he's actually acting in a more constitutional way than presidents have been up to this point.
Yeah, I can't help but think.
I mean, here I am, the historian invoking some early American history into this.
I can't help but think that Alexander Hamilton would love Trump.
He would love Trump because of the point that you just made, which is that Trump's gut instincts, perfectly brilliant guy, obviously, in the case of Trump, but probably has not studied the Constitution in great depth.
His gut instincts are toward common sense, toward constitutional order.
But the second thing Hamilton would love about him is that Trump personifies this spirit of a vigorous executive.
Why We Left Education00:11:01
And when we hear the phrase vigorous executive, we're hard pressed for those of us who are political conservatives to think of someone who fits that mold in modern times.
Reagan, certainly, but that's been 45 years.
And the importance of a vigorous executive, to your point, of the constitutional order, is that otherwise, in the absence of a vigorous executive, the other two branches would run roughshod over the executive branch.
And that is precisely what has been allowed to happen for too long when we have conservative presidents.
You know, I know when you look at me, you think, how can I become a godlike figure of a man like that man there?
And a lot of it has to do with taking care of yourself.
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How do you spell that godlike individual?
That's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Yeah, you know, heritage mostly deals with internal politics, but I'm wondering how you feel about Trump's attitude toward the world.
I mean, I was stunned when the vice president gave that speech in Munich.
I thought, this is a brilliant speech, but also a kind of simple speech.
I mean, he's saying things that are so obvious that and yet, and yet the right almost universally came out scratching their chins and saying this is destroying the world order and offending our allies.
And shouldn't we be talking about Russia?
And I thought, this is like, I don't know what that question that he asked is, why should we be defending you if you don't represent the values that we're supposed to share?
I mean, isn't that the right question to be asking at this moment?
It is the central question.
And by the way, I think JD Vance's Munich speech is already one of the most important in modern history.
I mean, truly, that sounds ridiculous.
It sounds like hyperbole, but I really do mean it.
And part of it is it's ridiculous that this even has to be said by the vice president of the United States to our closest allies in modern history.
But I also happened to be in Europe when that speech was given.
I was in the United Kingdom for heritage business at a conference, and a lot of European friends, so conservatives, whether members of the UK Parliament or members of the European Parliament, came up to me and said, we think we understand what he's getting at, Kevin, but what does it really mean?
I said, guys, two things.
It's a reality check, which y'all have been, frankly, too arrogant to be willing to hear.
And the second thing is JD Vance and Donald Trump will be the best friends you've ever had in diplomacy, God forbid also in warfare, if you do one thing, and that's pull your own weight.
Stop coming to the United States and wagging your fingers that we need to do more to bail you out again.
Actually, take some responsibility for your own societies.
And I will tell you this, Andrew, while it's still early, I think that the benefits of this, the fruit is already being reaped.
And I think we're going to see a much more peaceful and stable world order as a result of that clarion culture.
Interesting.
You know, I also, I mean, when you tell stories, I've asked my, I lived in Britain for most of the 90s, you know, and when I asked my friends there, you know, they're threatening to arrest people for praying in their home.
Doesn't that bother you?
I get this kind of blank stare, like, you know, it's all kind of water under the bridge and, you know, we don't really care that much.
And they really have to wake up.
I mean, it's we cannot support nations that are arresting people.
I mean, if you're arresting a guy praying in his home, I don't care if you're a Chinese cop or a British cop.
It doesn't matter to me.
You know, it's like they don't seem to understand how completely their freedoms have collapsed.
No, and I think it's because for the better part of two generations, they have actively rejected their cultural inheritance.
And their cultural inheritance, of course, is based in part, perhaps even in large part, I might argue, on this belief of religious liberty.
And obviously, religious liberty begins with conscience.
I mean, I, you know, to go back to our thread about AI, it's not ridiculous for me to assert that if the UK continues on this trajectory and that they might actually be able to use AI to figure out what someone's thinking in terms of their conscience, and they would be willing to regulate that.
It sounds totally absurd to make that claim, but they're just one or two steps away.
I mean, this person in Scotland was arrested or at least threatened with arrests because they were praying in their own home.
I just can't underscore enough for your mostly American audience that from someone who travels to the UK in particular often, and I know you know it well, that that society is teetering on the brink of collapse.
And economist friends might measure that in the form of the GDP, which is fair, but I'm going to measure it more in the form of what we're talking about, which is freedom broadly, but particularly the freedom to worship as you choose.
It's a real problem.
Yeah, it really is.
So let's talk about the Phoenix Declaration, which is really hitting at something that I think is another one of these bizarre things where I feel like I'm having a bad dream, but everybody just seems to shrug it off.
This is talking about education.
What is the declaration?
What are you declaring?
Well, we're declaring that education is broken, to tell you something, and then secondly, we're declaring that all of the great work on universal school choice, for example, is very important, but it really only that only speaks to the mechanism of delivery of education.
And therefore, point three, which is the most important, is that there needs to be a renewed, a revitalized, a rehabilitated, if you will, vision of American education.
And at the core of that vision for American education, apropos of our conversation about the United Kingdom, is understanding our cultural inheritance.
That the most noble promise we make to Americans is that in spite of our pluralism, in spite of the fact that some of our people came here because they were enslaved, they came here involuntarily.
Some of us grew up poor.
Some of us grew up rich.
It doesn't matter who your people are.
That's the point.
That we make this promise that we're going to give you access to the greatest education in the history of mankind.
And we ought to revitalize that, get some of the delivery mechanisms right, so that Americans can transmit from one generation to the next the spirit of freedom, the spirit of self-governance.
You can tell that this is a passion of mine.
Perhaps it is my greatest passion.
It's why I do public policy.
But my colleagues and some friends outside Heritage put together this declaration as a way of taking advantage of the political moment that we have.
So, I mean, I'm watching around the country teachers' unions, which are the most corrupt unions, I think, which is saying a lot, and school boards fighting with the people they're supposed to be serving.
They have anti-Israeli and really anti-Semitic propaganda going out into their elementary schools.
In upstate New York, there was a school board where they threw the people out because they didn't want pornography in their elementary schools.
I mean, what is the enforcement mechanism for making that stop?
I mean, obviously, people have to pay attention to who they're electing to the school boards.
But in the meantime, what is the enforcement mechanism for bringing education in line with true American values?
Well, there are multiple layers or multiple levels, I should say.
A lot of people think about the federal level of the U.S. Department of Education, but we're in the process of eliminating that.
That please go away.
Which then leads us to a very appropriate level, which is the state level, the local level, and so on.
But what I'm driving at is there's a group of us, and it's us, who for too long have been too passive when it comes to enforcing common sense in our schools.
And it's we who are parents of kids.
But even for friends who either have kids who've grown older and no longer in school, or maybe friends who don't have children at home, we all are the enforcers of common sense in our local schools.
You see, part of the problem of this managerialism, this technocratic mindset that has beset American education more than any other arena is that we just defer to the experts.
And what the overwrought COVID lockdowns showed us was that the experts not only don't know what the heck they're doing, some of them actually are ill-intentioned as it relates to our most precious resource, our own children.
And so obviously the bottom line that I'm driving at is each of us must play a role in just trusting our gut instincts.
That it actually is absurd.
It's evil to be defending having pornography of any kind in the local schools.
It's ridiculous.
It's absurd.
And ultimately, to sort of conclude this screed on a positive note, I actually think that we're making great progress.
What we're trying to achieve with the Phoenix Declaration is to remind regular, ordinary, everyday Americans who are perfectly smart, but happen to be busy doing other things, that the first and most important part of what we owe this country is what we transmit to the next generation.
And if our government-funded schools are standing in the way of that, then something dramatically must change about them.
Yeah, it has been shocking to me to see parents, you know, obviously the FBI investigating parents who want pornography out of their school as potential terrorists was about as shocking as these things get.
And it's been, what's been shocking to me is when I talk to people, and I know people, you know, who are, I don't know far left people who are my friends, but I have left-wing friends.
And you talk to them about this with this kind of, and you just get this kind of blank stare, that this is not a terrible, terrible thing to be happening in America.
They do not care.
And so I think this is urgently, urgently important.
So the day Trump got reelected, I had this absolute wonderful feeling of just like we did it.
An Amazing Awakening00:03:55
This kind of, we broke the back of this incredible propaganda instrument that was the mainstream media.
You know, we broke the back of the fear-mongering.
We finally showed people that you don't have to be afraid of being called all these names and all this.
And we couldn't have done it without Donald Trump.
But there is this kind of, you know, Tolstoyan idea that history throws up the people at needs.
Come at the hour, come at the map.
And I think that Donald Trump represents something as much as he is the instigator of that thing.
He's also the representative of something that's happening.
Now, for me, a lot of this has to do with God.
It has to do with the fact that this long descent into unbelief, I think, has foundered on logic and experience and morality.
It's all kind of coming apart.
Let me see how I can put this question.
How big a change is this?
I mean, we've seen changes come and go.
We saw Reagan come in, followed by a Bush who said, oh, I'm going to be kinder, gentler.
And I thought, why?
How can you be kinder than the things that Reagan brought to us?
And it all kind of dissipated and disappeared.
Is this a hinge moment?
I mean, is this a moment that really is going to last through our children's generations?
Or do you think this is just flying by, a little blip in the system?
Definitely the former.
In fact, I think that 100 years from now, 200 years from now, God willing, that this republic is not only around, but flourishing, maybe proving the point of the importance of this moment.
People, our successors in the American public square are going to be talking about Trump's second term, Trump the Man, in the same way that you and I talk about Andrew Jackson in the 1830s.
A man, two men, 200 years apart, different backgrounds decidedly, but when they were president, disrupted the status quo entirely, fearless when it came to upending the way things were supposed to be by the capital markets in New York, by the politicians in Washington.
Trump now is fond of casting himself more as President McKinley.
In fact, he did that last night at an event that I attended.
I have no problem with that.
What Trump loves about McKinley is that he, of course, used tariffs.
But the point is, whether it's McKinley or whether it's Andrew Jackson, we're in that moment.
And to your point, or to Tolstoy's, Trump, of course, deserves a lot of credit for this, but he's also a reflection of something that has been festering for the better part of 30 or 35 years, personified in the late 80s and early 90s by my political hero, Patrick Buchanan, also tapped into by Ross Perot in the 92 and 96 elections, the Tea Party movement of 2010.
But what Trump has done in the same way that Jackson did in the 1820s and 30s is really give voice to the forgotten Americans.
That is part of our political and cultural inheritance, which is why it's not just going to be a fleeting political moment.
It is going to be something that really does change the arc of American history.
I cannot be more optimistic about this, not just because of the politics and policy, Andrew, but because Americans are waking up once again and saying, we love this country, warts and all.
And very importantly, I know you care about this too.
We love one another.
We love our neighbors.
You know, maybe they had a Harris sign in their yard, but guess what?
We can have them over for July 4th.
And let's celebrate what is the greatest privilege we have, which is that we get to wake up and call ourselves America.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
And it is.
And I feel like we came, you know, like Trump, I feel like we dodged a bullet.
It really is an amazing thing to see people coming around.
It has been like a nightmare to see people afraid to have college students afraid to have arguments.
You know, I mean, that's why you go to college so you can have arguments.
It has been an amazing thing.
Celebrating America00:00:45
Kevin, I'm so glad you are in this fight.
And Heritage is a great organization.
I think you are making it even greater.
Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Organization, his book is Dawn's Early Light, Taking Back Washington to Save America, which is a great title right there.
It's great to see you again.
Thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Well, my friend, thanks for having me.
You're just the best.
Thanks.
Once again, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, and the name of his book is Dawn's Early Light, Taking Back Washington to Save America.
He is also the mastermind, the evil mastermind behind Project 2025.
We need more evil masterminds in this country now that Lex Luther is dead.
And speaking of evil masterminds, I will be back on Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.