A conference that has struck fear into the conservative old guard and served as an ideas lab for policies now being implemented in the Trump administration kicks off Tuesday.
Now in its fifth year, the National Conservatism Conference is not a flashy rally like the Conservative Political Action Conference or events that Turning Point USA packs with young people and pyrotechnics. Rather, it has fostered the intellectual muscle behind the aggressive, nationalist power-wielding that has defined the second Trump administration and rapidly taken hold on the right.
“I do think that NatCon represents the conservative movement at this point,” said Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute who’s a speaker at this NatCon and those in the past, noting the high number of former speakers now in the Trump administration. “These ideas are not only driving the movement, but they’re popular enough to get elected.”
This week, the gathering will preview more targets for its movement — such as taking aim at Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. An “Overturn Obergefell” session Wednesday night will be a public event. (Breccan F. Thies goes deeper on this in The Federalist.)
And it is an important forum to assess live debates still happening on the right and in the Trump administration. While there is broad agreement in the “national conservative” space on issues like immigration — they support more restrictions, on the off-chance you assumed otherwise — there are still divisions on issues like tech and foreign policy that will be hashed out at this year’s gathering.
Anna Wellisz, president of the Edmund Burke Foundation that puts on the conference, said there are “bright eyed” conservatives who are enthusiastic about artificial intelligence and “very pro tech,” while others are more concerned about “what technology will do to that life, what it will do to families, to children, to surveillance.”
On the tech front, keep an eye on the “AI and the American soul” breakout session Tuesday morning; and pay attention to the “America and the Israel-Iran War” breakout session Tuesday afternoon, where bubbling differences on Israel policy (which I wrote about recently) could be on display.
This year’s big speakers include Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.
Wellisz said that the conference has been influential over the past several years because it has been a forum for debate on the political right, defining what it means to be a national conservative.
“It’s simply conservatism — and national, because conservatism is attached to a place, a people,” Wellisz told me. “It’s not a planetary movement, not a galactic movement. It’s not a starship enterprise and a federation. It’s a nation, a place, a place you love, whose culture you take your own, whose language you understand, whose history speaks to you.”
Vice President Vance, as a Senate candidate in 2021, gave a NatCon speech on how “the universities are the enemy,” and other speakers in 2024 focused on taxing university endowments and getting red-state governors to put more pressure on trustees. Now, the Trump administration is aggressively cracking down on universities, and the president signed a bill that raises taxes on university endowments.
“Usually you don’t get that chance in your career to see something go from its intellection formation to practice. Sometimes you do, but it’s over like, 20 years,” Bovard said. “We’ve seen it over like, five years.”
The national conservatism statement of principles first released a few years ago — whose signatories includeTurning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, investor Peter Thiel and many others — endorses restrictions on immigration; the national government intervening “energetically to restore order” in states where “lawnessness, immorality, and dissolution reign”; promotion of the Bible in public life; and free enterprise with the caveat that “the free market cannot be absolute.”
The popularity and influence of national conservatism have rocked thinkers and institutions that dominated the right in the pre-Trump era of politics.
As something of an answer to national conservatism, free-market evangelists put out a Freedom Conservatism statement of principles that stressed “liberty” and greater individual choice — with signatories including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Karl Rove, Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, and “The View’s” Alyssa Farah Griffin — and held a conference earlier this year.
Avik Roy, a main crafter of the Freedom Conservatism statement of principles, was motivated in part by wanting to expose young people to those classical principles they might not be seeing — noting a 17-year-old now was 7 when Trump first ran for president.
If you believe in freedom as a principle, Roy said, “that means that you have on a fundamental level, a confidence that people, when left to their own devices, will do the right thing and will do things, will achieve great things. And If you subvert or subordinate freedom to other goals, what you’re basically saying is that you don’t trust people to live their lives the way they want to.”
After attending the conference in 2021, columnist David Brooks (no relation to me) wrote in The Atlantic that NatCon gave him the “sinking sensation” that NatCon was “the future of the Republican Party.”
Bovard was heavily featured in the introduction to that piece, saying she had “absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.”
“The most striking thing to me about it was that he sort of created, or tried to portray me as being manipulated or something,” Bovard said.
“I just think he got it completely wrong. I was reflecting a lot of what the younger conservatives were feeling at the time,” she added.
And that is why I’ll aim to stop by NatCon — if the congressional schedule allows — to see what they’re feeling now.
Welcome to The Movement, a weekly newsletter looking at the influences and debates on the right in Washington. I’m Emily Brooks, House leadership reporter at The Hill.
Drop me a note if you’ll be at NatCon and we can say hi: ebrooks@thehill.com.
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SHOOTING INVIGORATES ANTI-TRANS AGENDA
If Democrats want more than conservatives’ thoughts and prayers in wake of the shooting at Minneapolis’s Annunciation Catholic School — as MSNBC’s Jen Psaki posted, to much disdain — they better get ready for GOP calls to action that focus on transgender individuals.
Police said the shooter intended to terrorize children and had a fascination with mass killings. But conservatives quickly homed in on federal officials saying 23-year-old Robin Westman, who was born Robert Westman, was transgender.
They pointed out the similarity to the 2023 Nashville Christian school shooting by 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who police said identified as a man — and are looking toward action on transgender policies as an answer.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) in an interview with the New York Post called for Minnesota to repeal its “trans refuge” law that blocks out-of-state subpoenas or arrest warrants for those who travel from out of state for gender-affirming treatments.
The Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt about whether the Trump administration would support instituting “a new class of domestic terrorism that involves trans ideology.” Leavitt said that she would have to check with the relevant people.
Anthony LaBruna, executive director of the American Principles Project, called on Congress to take up legislation to ban gender-affirming medical procedures for transgender minors in wake of the shooting.
FOLKS, IS TAYLOR CONSERVATIVE NOW?
The hot conservative takes about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement started even before The Daily Caller’s Regan Reese could inform President Trump about the biggest pop culture news of the year.
Charlie Kirk said that he hopes Swift becomes conservative.
“Taylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter, and I think we should celebrate that,” Kirk said on his radio show soon after the news broke. “I think that Taylor Swift having two or three children — she should have more children than she has houses. That is my challenge to Taylor Swift, and I’m not being sarcastic.”
“Submit to your husband, Taylor,” he added.
A reminder, and reality check: Swift has endorsed Democratic politicians, criticized Trump, heavily featured her journey into activism in her “Miss Americana” documentary, and cast a transgender model as her love interest in a music video, among other public statements.
Still, Ben Shapiro argued that the mere act of Swift getting engaged without any blowback from the left is a cultural win: “The sort of Gloria Steinem take on marriage is dead, and Taylor Swift may have just put a stake through it,” he said on his show, referring to the feminist icon who was long skeptical of marriage but did eventually tie the knot.
Conservatives also seem convinced that Swift and Kelce could help stoke a baby boom if they have a child soon. I’ve yet to see any empirical data of major celebrities or public figures fueling a bump in birth rates, but the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney — who wrote a book, “Family Unfriendly,” on the causes of the current baby bust — made this argument:
“When birthrates are lower, people’s social lives are less child-friendly. Also, when nobody around you is having children, you have trouble imagining yourself with a child. If someone who is constantly watched by millions of people starts living a married life and a mother life, then the idea of being married and a mother becomes more imaginable — even if her life is inaccessible in so many other ways.”
ON MY CALENDAR
- Tuesday, Sept. 2 to Thursday, Sept. 4: The fifth annual National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C.
- Friday, Sept. 19 to Saturday, Sept. 20: The Intercollegiate Studies Institute hosts its “Homecoming Weekend” in Wilmington, Del.
THREE MORE THINGS
- Natalie Allison of The Washington Post had a very cool rundown of “The six factions of Trumpworld.” Those are:
- MAGA populists like Steve Bannon and Vice President Vance
- Traditional Republicans like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.)
- Small-government conservatives and fiscal hawks like Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rand Paul (Ky.)
- The religious right like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)
- The tech right like venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks
- MAHA and other converted Democrats like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
2. The Spectator has some tea on Trump’s new pick to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, E.J. Antoni: “One event last year has made some [Heritage Foundation] staff hesitant to publicly endorse Antoni: a presentation delivered by Antoni to Heritage interns last summer was sidetracked when he was asked a question about IQ. Antoni argued that women were clustered around average intelligence, while more men were likely to be hyper-intelligent or below-average intelligence. After some complaints about the presentation, Heritage VP of domestic policy Roger Severino told the interns that this was not Heritage’s formal policy position.”
3. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) put out a pro-worker Labor Day video on Monday, with a release saying the video comes “as union support continues to realign,” noting recent Teamsters contributions to the NRCC and GOP candidates. “Republicans stand with the American worker. Lower taxes, better jobs, bigger paychecks. Democrats ship your jobs overseas … We bring them home,” the video says. “Democrats side with the elites, Republicans side with you. We work for the people who build America, not the ones who tear it down.” It also features a clip of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who spoke at the Republican National Convention last year.
WHAT I’M READING
- Wall Street Journal’s The Costly Ingredient That Big Food Companies Are Processing: MAHA
- Washington Post’s Rachel Kurzius: Why Gen Z conservatives love the ‘Reagan Bush ’84’ tee
- National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty: Why Reaganism Persists
- The American Conservative’s Evie Solheim: Did FDA Just Ignite a War Between SSRI Skeptics and Pharma?
- Wall Street Journal’s Jesse Newman and Owen Tucker-Smith: The Costly Ingredient That Big Food Companies Are Processing: MAHA
- Washington Post’s Rachel Kurzius: Why Gen Z conservatives love the ‘Reagan Bush ’84’ tee
