The Daily Signal was on the ground at the fifth National Conservatism Conference this week in Washington, D.C. The event was full of fiery speeches and fierce debates, but some themes rose above the rest.
While the conference, commonly known as NatCon, has had tech debates and industry interlocutors since its inception, previous conferences’ conversations surrounding technology and artificial intelligence were about censorship, economic concentration, and its impact on American culture.
Now, the age of AI is here, and it seemingly arrived overnight.
On Day One of the conference, Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute and board member of the Edmund Burke Foundation, took a lighthearted swipe at the right-wing transhumanists:
As a piece of advice to any of the young, very online Tech Right men here today, if you are at all intrigued by the idea of gene-optimizing, bio-augmented, lab grown CRISPR babies, throw away your phones and talk to more girls.
Transhumanism is the idea that technology should be integrated with the human body to overcome physical and mental limitations, such as aging and disease, to create a more “enhanced” human being.
But perhaps it was Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who went after the tech-oriented right the hardest. “The transhumanist ideal rejects the common man’s worth. And artificial intelligence threatens the common man’s liberty,” Hawley told the crowd. “To state it in the clearest terms then: Americanism and the transhumanist revolution cannot coexist. And it is our job to see that Americanism wins.”
A common theme throughout the conference was empowering the average American worker. Rep. Riley Moore, R-W. Va., called for reindustrializing the United States and “a commitment to focusing our energies, rebuilding our industrial might, and unleashing the energy to power a 21st century industrial base. It’s a rejection of overreach in favor of strength of focus instead of distraction,” he said.
Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., challenged the Republican Party to continue to be the party for working-class Americans, tying that strategy to electoral success.
“I understand what hard-working families in my state want from their government. It’s not complicated. They want us to close the border. They want us to stop selling out to China and stand up to them for ripping us off and stealing our jobs. They want good-paying jobs that allow them to buy a home, raise a family, and live the American dream. Those are the people that we’re fighting for,” the Indiana senator said.
Hawley emphasized that artificial intelligence should help Americans, not harm them.
“Splitting the atom fundamentally changed our view of physics, but nobody expects to run a personal reactor in their basement. The internet completely recast communication and media, but YouTube will still take out your video if you violate somebody’s copyright. By the same token, we should demand that AI empower Americans, not destroy their rights or their jobs or their lives,” he contended.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts prioritized the family component of the working class, noting that the American family had grown “weak, fractured, and hollow.” The public policy leader urged a prioritization of policies that favored American families.
“Will [the policy] advance the common good of the American people? Will it cultivate the virtues without which liberty cannot endure? If the answer is ‘no,’ even if the proposal aligns with some past ideological commitment, prudence requires that we reject it,” he stated.
The American Conservative’s executive editor, Curt Mills, put it mildly prior to NatCon when he said, “I’m not really sure that comity is going to be found” at NatCon regarding Israel.
While previous NatCons have featured foreign policy conversations, they were often about the threat of China or the embroglio in Ukraine. At this NatCon, however, not only was there a vigorous foreign policy debate, but a debate about perhaps the most bitter foreign policy divide on the right at the moment: Israel and the U.S. role in the Middle East.
In a packed breakout session on Tuesday, Mills, a critic of Israel’s conduct during the war, debated Max Abrahms, an associate professor at Northeastern University.
Abrahms claimed the critics of President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran, whom he called “MAGA isolationist realists,” were wrong that intervention would “result in thousands of American deaths and international isolation, and it will be another so-called never-ending forever war.”
Mills, however, followed with remarks that included a number of crucial, and largely unanswered, questions: “Why are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? Why are we in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking? Why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it’s advanced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept ‘America First’—[but] asterisk Israel?”
His conclusion? “The answer is, we shouldn’t.”
The conversation continued on Day Two of the conference at a breakout session called “The Trump Doctrine.”
Victoria Coates, vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, argued that the era of the so-called “rules-based international order” was dead and had been dead since the end of the Cold War. She noted that the United States had to reorient itself to a changing global strategic landscape. Coates defended Trump’s strike on Iran as a “one and done” “successful precision” strike to uphold the long-term goal of preventing a radical Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons.
“Far from getting entangled in regime change or dragged by Israel into a regional war, President Trump removed a gathering threat through exquisite U.S. military capabilities and cut off escalation,” Coates said.
In his remarks on the same panel, Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review argued that foreign policy restraint puts America first. “You cannot have economic integration and security integration and, simultaneously, democracy,” Dougherty argued. “The political freedom of a self-governing people must also mean the ability of that people to choose when to enter into trading relations and when or whether to join or exit a war.”
Former adviser to Trump and host of the WarRoom podcast, Stephen K. Bannon, said that a “kinetic” global war has already begun and that the U.S. needed to focus primarily on containing China.
“We must decouple—and hard decouple starting tomorrow morning,” Bannon said of the U.S. relationship with China.
Bannon took umbrage with recent remarks by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., that this dangerous era comparable to the 1930s had been caused by Trump’s policies toward Ukraine and tariffs.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Bannon said. “America First is what’s going to save this country.”
Bannon pointed to three decades of failure by “the neoliberal neocons” who allowed China to rise from a failing nation in 1989 to a formidable global adversary to the U.S.
To counter this threat, the U.S. needed to treat China and Asia as a whole as the main event. Conflicts in Eastern Europe were just sideshows to where the real conflict was taking place.
In typical Tom Homan fashion, the border czar did not mince words as he discussed the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to secure the border and deport illegal aliens.
Homan is at the forefront of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s efforts to arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens. Both Homan and ICE agents have come under increased scrutiny, threats, and even violent attacks following the increased arrests of illegal aliens.
“The media likes to attack ICE saying, ‘Most of the people they arrested aren’t criminals.’ Bulls—!” Homan said. “I look at the numbers every day, [and] 70% of everybody ICE arrests is a criminal.”
In addition to arresting and deporting illegal aliens and working to secure the southern border, Homan said Trump has also tasked him with finding the 300,000 unaccompanied alien children the Biden administration lost contact with. This, according to Homan, is his most challenging job.
Children who arrived at the border alone during the Biden administration were released into the care of so-called sponsors here in the U.S. It was revealed later that many sponsors were not thoroughly vetted. The challenge now, Homan explains, is tracking those children down and making sure they are safe.
Many of the children the Trump administration has located are safe and living with family, according to Homan, but others “are in sex trafficking. Some of the children we found in forced labor, and we rescued these children.”
Homan says he is committed to continuing the work the president has tasked him with, telling the NatCon crowd he is “not going anywhere.”
A theme of this year’s conference was that this was a time of victory—that many of the ideas discussed by national conservatives and many of the people who spoke about those ideas in years past had made their way into the Trump administration. But as several speakers noted, the Right in general had to adopt an institutional mindset as opposed to a mindset of dissent.
Matthew Peterson, the editor-in-chief of Blaze Media, said in a panel about the changing media landscape that conservatives needed to stop thinking like a “vanguard,” a tiny minority advancing ideas in a sea of left-wing institutions. It was time to think as the movement in power.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought spoke about how the Left had successfully marched through American institutions over the past century and had achieved a level of success that they could affect change through the government bureaucracies they controlled. This became what he called the “woke, weaponized bureaucracy.”
Now this weaponized bureaucracy is being aggressively countered by the Trump administration, Vought said, but the battle against what it has wrought is just beginning.
“Much work still remains, but we have a movement that is there to support that work,” Vought said. “We are not reading people out of the party when they raise the issues. We don’t have a movement that’s writing op-eds against the president for the steps that he’s taking. There is great enthusiasm for what is going on.”