A Transcript of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts' Speech About Our "Second American Revolution"
What was said at the National Conservatism Conference.
I spent the past week in Washington, DC, covering the National Conservatism Conference. It is the event where the Heritage Foundation and its allies lay the intellectual foundation for what turns into Project 2025. In These Times published my story about it, “Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!” last night. If you are curious what the right wing has planned for America if Trump wins the presidency again, give it a read. Scary things are in the air.
Inevitably, when you cover a long event, there is a lot of material that doesn’t make it into the final story. Today I want to publish for you a transcript of the remarks that Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts gave on the conference’s opening day. It is important to remember that the Heritage Foundation is one of DC’s most prominent and well-connected right wing think tanks, with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, and a goal of helping to staff the government under a new Trump administration.
Roberts, a former college president, is an influential and prominent figure in the conservative movement. I believe it is good for the public to hear exactly what people like this are saying right now. These remarks are transcribed from my own recording of his speech, and I have edited them down to a manageable length. I may post more transcripts from NatCon in coming days. These people may very well be the most influential voices in the federal government within six months.
Kevin Roberts:
I think that NatCon 4 is the most important gathering of conservatives yet in the 21st century. It’s no exaggeration. As I think about the future, to the extent that I can predict it, I think that decades from now, this convention this year will be remembered as the beginning of the future of the conservative movement, and as the next era of American history.
You might even say, accounting for the institution building that NatCon is leading, that we’re in the second American revolution: a political, social, and cultural wrestling from the left, all those institutions that have considerable power, that they have steadily co-opted over decades. In fact it was that motivation more than anything that propelled the so-called Reagan Revolution in 1980. The philosophical continuity between then and now is important. None other than historian Gordon Wood, in his magisterial Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” wrote that America’s “Republican revolution was the greatest utopian moment in American history. The revolutionaries,” he wrote, “sought to reconstruct a society and government based on virtue and disinterested public leadership, and to set in motion a moral movement that will eventually be built around the globe.”
For us in this room, and for so many others aligned with our movement, Wood’s summary of the American revolution offers striking parallels to our own work nearly 250 years after America’s independence. But today’s establishment Washington doesn’t understand [unclear]. Not unlike the stubborn coastal elites and centers of power in 1776, who moved only tepidly, if at all, to support the cause of American sovereignty. On the contrary, today’s beltway Republicans see the new right as just another interest group they have to manage. They think we’re just another sliver of the Republican coalition…
For three decades, progressive extremists captured almost every institutional power center in America. And the GOP went along with it in exchange for lower taxes and higher defense budgets. Now, we are living the broken nation that non-National Conservative leaders let the left build. The elite factions of the splintered movement pretended that the end of Soviet totalitarianism marked the end of existential threats to our way of life. Now we find that a new existential threat has grown up all around us. It is a threat not merely to a splinter conservative ideology, or a magazine, or a think tank, but to the nation that our elites assured us all along was safe.
The post-Cold War conservative movement that was supposed to be an expression of, an advocate for, the United States as a whole, came apart in heady, fractious self promotions. And the country we love has suffered. All that suffering, from gutted communities to poisoned schools to crime-ridden streets to our screen-addled youth would be more than enough reason for Americans to rise up and take their country back from the privileged elites who betrayed it. I think that’s a fair description of what happened in 2016…
[Remarks on how Trump is good and globalism is bad.]
The new left did not see themselves as inheritors of Western civilization or American exceptionalism. Like the psychopaths of the French revolution, they imagined themselves the founding fathers and mothers of something new. Call it “Woke Land”… the name doesn’t matter. What matters is that leftists’ moral, spiritual, and political loyalty now belongs to it, not the countries of their birth. It sounds far fetched, except this new global regime already rules large swaths of our land. Ask yourself, do you think the United Nations really serves the nations it supposedly unites? Is it a neutral forum for sovereign peoples to protect their diverse values and pursue their unique goals? Or is the UN an entity in itself, proposing and where possible imposing its creepy elite values on people they look down on?…
The left’s new America will have no written constitution. No rule of law. No independent judiciary. No democratic accountability or national sovereignty. It will be a global theocracy with Marxist fundamentalists sitting on thrones manning its bureaucracies and menacing its entrance.
It must be said that woke nationalism does have one thing in common with NatCon 4. It absolutely wants to reunite the divided conservative movement. Unfortunately, it just wants to unite us all in prison…
Those who still haven’t [become national conservatives], who cling to their sliver of the old fractured movement, must understand the real choice we now face. There is no third way any more. Libertarians may not like populism, but the left’s new American will erase individual freedom altogether. Neocons may not like the new right’s prudent foreign policy, but the only alternative are those “Death to America” chants at pro-Hamas rallies. Establishment Republicans must understand too that, eventually, the radical left will afford them no committee chairmanships or corporate lobbying gigs. Ex-conservative “Never Trump” performance artists must also understand that if the left succeeds, even their precious magazines, columns, and speaking fees will be taken from them.
The new left we now face is not simply nationalistic in character. It is totalitarian in its mission. It is expansionist, imperialistic, and practically jihadist in its theocratic stance. Given its international scope, limitless financial resources, and unprecedented technological sophistication, the global uber-nation the left is now building already threatens Americans more comprehensively and intimately than the USSR [ever did]…
Given the pace of the news cycle, our compromised attention spans, and the sheer volume of the left’s treachery today, it’s easy to miss just how far gone the fight to save our country already is. Look what’s happening on college campuses, in blue cities and states. on the border. across Europe, in the Holy Land, in the E-ring of the Pentagon, in foreign offices of the FBI and Justice Department. These are not glimpses of a possible future that could emerge if the left continues to gain power. They are what the left is already using their power to create.
They want our lives to be worse. They want our freedoms curtailed and contingent on obedience [to them]. We simply won’t defeat them by spouting abstract principles or advocating a niche vision of conservatism. We have to fight for the United States of America. For all its imperfections and internal divisions and broken institutions, this remains the only country we have, and the only country that can ultimately defeat the radical left.
By the way, I’m hopeful that once that happens, other nations will follow.
A generation hence, we’re gonna live in a place called the United States. But if the left succeeds, our republic will cease to be a nation at all, and certainly not with self-government. We’ll be ruled from afar, subjects without rights, subservient to a religion without God, in a land without hope.
More
My full In These Times story on the National Conservatism Conference is here. In These Times is a good magazine, which I write for regularly, and you can subscribe to it here. There are several other NatCon speeches I think may be worthy of publishing here as well. The remarks at the event were both unfiltered and delivered by legitimately influential people who could be poised to wield great power very soon.
If you’re wondering what we can do to balance out the influence of people like Kevin Roberts, you might enjoy reading my book “The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor,” which you can order wherever books are sold.
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The projection is unbelievable. It is always a mistake to believe your own nonsense, which this man does. I grew up in the same kind of environment this man spouts. I remember thinking at a young age that all of this ranting has nothing to do with reality. I think Hillary Clinton was right when she said that we need deprogramming of the right. This is insane. Thank you for posting this. Everyone needs to see it.
I would call this dude insane, but that would be an insult to all those good people with legitimate mental health issues. Let's go with, I don't know, "deranged"? Does that do it justice? I don't know, man.