We open each day at NatCon, and preface each meal, with a benediction. Let me go forth and do likewise. The Apostle Paul says: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11).
Liberals run America, and the ruling power belongs to the man, not to the child. This obvious truth might make us think conservatives, because they are ruled and unhappy, are like children. But conservatism as a whole is moving toward manhood—a new generation is increasingly in the mood for a fight and accordingly seizes whatever is ready at hand as a weapon.
Children speak without concern for consequences and often reveal fundamental truths for that reason. For example, conservatives are often indignant about something criminal that liberals are doing, and in their indignation they discover justice. They say someone should do something about it. They rarely say who, and they rarely volunteer to do what they claim to believe needs doing. After all, children are largely powerless to do what they say…. This restless inactivity is what we are looking to change, this is the character of our political moment as I understand it.
I work with Chris Rufo in the Logos Fellowship, teaching journalists to “do something about it” and to work together with others who want to do something about it; to engage in political activism, abandoning the weak and whining or cynical despondency of the past for the sake of public action. Our purpose is to change laws and destroy careers and offices, and in this way restore politics to its proper place in American life. Prestige and popularity are the prizes we hold out to our Fellows.
We teach our Fellows investigative journalism, we conduct campaigns in which they gain experience, and we connect them to politicians and influential, public-spirited men who want to help defend freedom and punish criminals.
Our first Fellows took down the president of Harvard. If you can still remember her name, you must be an intellectual. Everyone in America has already forgotten her and that should be punishment enough. But I promise you that you’ll remember the name of Chris Rufo for many years, because he’ll destroy many other corrupt leaders, and the American people will love him for it.
Our Logos Fellows are now working in Texas to send to jail some evil doctors who destroy the lives of innocent children with “transgender medical procedures.” Already, they have been brought up on charges, but we must not stop fighting until we’re victorious. This is butchery, and politicians here in D.C. as well as in Texas must do something about it—they must hold hearings, change laws, and protect the public. And they are already doing it, because it’s right, because it’s popular, and because we are working with them. The goal is to protect all children in America against this madness and punish those who perform or enable or profit from it. But we must start somewhere, and Texas is a better place than others if we’re to put the fear of God in the hearts of progressives.
This is the new journalism, the good news I’m here to spread. We work not only to bring you a story, but to bring your concerns to politicians in order to connect the people to the government and come to political decisions. Conservatism for too long has offered a spectacle of impotent righteousness. It’s demoralizing. We’re changing that, one political campaign after another. And of course we’ll have an even bigger fight on our hands this coming fall with the electoral campaign.
Political journalism perhaps also needs comparing with the rather embarrassing spectacle that moved us to act in the first place. We have three kinds of journalism in America. We can analyze them by the technology used to produce stories as print, TV and radio, and the internet. We can analyze them historically as successive products of the democratic revolution of the last two centuries. We can judge the minority of non-liberal institutions like FOX, the WSJ and Substack, and, thanks to Elon Musk, X accounts. We can consider their audience, respectively very old people, rich people, and the people simply, but especially young people.
We’re acting through our Logos Fellowship and our upcoming Logos Initiative to put these audiences together. If they’re divided, conservatism is lost in the conflicts of generational change and mutual recriminations for shared afflictions. We can only defeat progressive activists gone mad and their elite liberal masters by picking fights intelligently and fighting publicly to arouse public opinion to indignation and move politicians to act. Hitherto, conservative journalism has lacked the political passions and political skills necessary to fight and has avoided going to the American people to lead them into the arena. That’s why conservatism lost.
“The purpose of a system is what it does.” This phrase is gaining influence among our generation, because it leads young men to the conclusion that defeat, the state in which they came of age, is the purpose of conservatism. It will be difficult to change their minds since our institutions achieve few public victories. What is there to be proud of? What will inspire? To begin with, defiance and then some understanding of the weaknesses of our elites, who must not be measured by their arrogance but by their imprudence.
We have arrived at the latest moment of a greater crisis of liberalism. Liberalism is the engine of Enlightenment, which is also its product. Journalism is the propaganda of Enlightenment. It makes sense to spread the news, because the news is always good news, it’s news of Progress.
In our time, however, the news is invariably bad news. The nation sees a decrepit, senile zombie liberalism mocking the American ideals of self-government. We cannot escape noticing because we cannot escape this horrifying reality. We must therefore learn to make the best of this scandal.
Scandal will make us political, even prosperous, and that’s how we ultimately triumph. Scandal might make you blush or annoy you, but it also clarifies the issues, raises spirits, summons the fighters to the arena, scares adversaries and encourages allies, reveals vulnerabilities, and demands victory. Scandal is how we fundraise, not something we fear. Scandal tests the unpopularity of our elites.
I’m here, like our liberal friends all around us here in Washington, D.C. and in every other elite precinct, and like the apostle with whom I began this speech, to spread the good news. The good news is that concrete conflict will reveal our underlying agreement with liberals that America is worth fighting over. This experience will teach us that we love America and that freedom requires fighting. This fight will reveal and educate the leaders who can defend America.
These leaders are not going to be the predictable people we predictably applaud, but they will prove themselves by scandalizing us, by acting when we hesitate, by fighting when we demur, and by pursuing victory when we are satisfied merely with decency. We who are involved in political journalism help articulate and prosecute this conflict. Join us, support us—the young men are with us, and without them there is no conservative cause.