It used to be that the annual Conservative Political Action Conference was the gathering where all the right-wing activists and conservative intellectuals would meet to compare notes and get on the same page. A raucous affair with lots of snarky panels and right-wing celebrities, CPAC also featured serious speeches and presentations by conservative politicians, writers and thinkers. While the conference still exists, it’s no longer the only game in town.
Turning Point USA, founded by the late Charlie Kirk, has attracted the fun, entertaining activist types, while the more staid National Conservatism Conference brings together the more serious thinkers. Held last week in Washington, D.C., NatCon featured speakers and panels that plotted an even more conservative future that was downright chilling.
“Overturn Obergefell” was one featured panel, the AP’s Joey Cappelletti reported. “The Bible and American Renewal” was another. The conference, he wrote, “underscored the movement’s vision of an America rooted in limited immigration, Christian identity and the preservation of what speakers called the nation’s traditional culture” — which is putting it very mildly. It certainly doesn’t seem there was much talk of individual freedom, free markets or liberty of any kind, and that is a big change from the conservative movement that has dominated Republican politics since the Reagan administration.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Director Office of Management and Budget (and lead Project 2025 author) Russell Vought, border czar Tom Homan and disbarred attorney John Eastman — who helped to plot a radical strategy to keep President Donald Trump in office after the 2020 election — were among those in attendance, representing some of MAGA’s most extreme policy leaders.
As Congress wakes up from its self-imposed slumber to face the prospect of yet another government shutdown showdown, what Vought said has particular salience. He “declared that the Government Accountability Office ‘shouldn’t exist’ after it said his latest effort to claw back funds already approved by Congress is illegal,” according to Cappelletti. “On the broader push for the rollback of appropriated funds, or rescissions, he said, ‘If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we’re going to use that authority aggressively to protect the American people.’”
There’s lots of paternalistic Daddy talk these days that centers on the need to “protect the American people.” (Some corners of MAGA have even taken to calling Trump “Daddy.”) But Vought’s underlying message showcased a more aggressive Daddy. According to most reports, his underlying message was reflected in a reckless refrain heard throughout the conference: “You can just do things!”
The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger attended the event and described its ethos: “The glue that binds the NatCon coalition is their contempt for the proceduralism of the conservatism that preceded them, their conviction that Republicans’ old focus on small government and personal liberty amounted to nothing more than unilateral disarmament against the teeming hordes of the left. Seizing and wielding federal political power, not restraining it, is the mission.”
In other words, it’s not only the president who is drunk with power.
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But perhaps the most revealing moment was a viral speech by Missouri GOP Senator Eric Schmitt titled “What is an American?” in which he made the claim that the country belongs to the descendants of white Europeans who took the land from the violent Native Americans fair and square because they were just plain superior. He said straight out: “America doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to us … We can no longer apologize for who we are. Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness. We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims who poured out onto the ocean’s shores.”
There was no mention anywhere of the Africans abducted and enslaved by these “Christian pilgrims.” That means, under Schmitt’s logic, America must not belong to their descendants either.
“Our ancestors,” Schmitt continued, “would be astonished to learn that they were fighting for a ‘proposition.’ They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. America belongs to us, and only us. If we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.”
This is, of course, a nod to the far-right Great Replacement Theory, which holds that the immigrant invaders are trying to supplant the rightful owners of America — identified by Schmitt as the “sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims.” You know, white people. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, is among the staunchest proponents of this idea, as are right-wing luminaries such as Tucker Carlson.
But Schmitt has it wrong: In fact, they were fighting for “a proposition.” To ignore that is to effectively spit on Abraham Lincoln, the most revered Republican president in American history — before Trump, of course — who gave the most famous speech in American history. Chances are, you might remember it, and you might even be able to recite its first line…”
But Schmitt has it wrong: In fact, they were fighting for “a proposition.” To ignore that is to effectively spit on Abraham Lincoln, the most revered Republican president in American history — before Trump, of course — who gave the most famous speech in American history. Chances are, you might remember it, and you might even be able to recite its first line: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
That proposition goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence.
John Ganz, the author of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s” noted in his Unpopular Front newsletter that Schmitt’s entire speech was nothing but warmed over paleoconservative dogma from 30 years ago, specifically the ideas of the writer Samuel T. Francis. “The basic notion of Franciscan ideology,” Ganz wrote, “is that a revolutionary right must craft a new nationalist myth to replace both worn-out 19th-century conservatism and liberal, ‘managerial globalism’ in order to mobilize ‘the core or nucleus of American civilization, the Real America, the American Nation.'”
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Francis acknowledged that America never had a national myth of a glorious past but thought it was a good idea to invent one. As Ganz archly observed, “the word for the politics that makes a pastiche of past glories to create a new type of regime is ‘fascism.'”
It’s tempting to write off NatCon, and Schmitt’s speech in particular, as an example of a bunch of right-wing kooks indulging their little fever dream of creating a white Christian autocracy. But these are powerful people now, and if there’s any person in government who is trying to create “a pastiche of past glories” — largely by erasing the true American past, both good and bad — it’s the most powerful one of all, Donald Trump, who has certainly discovered that “you can just do things!”
Nobody paid attention to Project 2025 until it was too late, and look where that got us. It would be foolish to make that same mistake again.
