Onward, Christian Soldiers—To War!
At this year’s National Conservatism Conference, a right-wing army prepares to rise.
Hamilton Nolan
It would be wrong to say that the entire “national conservatism” movement is a product of repressed psychosexual urges. Some of it is about tariffs. Most of it, though, seems to be what happens when you mix strict religious morality with QAnon, internet porn, Donald Trump’s need for mewling adoration and the American urge to land a high quality internship. Unpredictable things happen.
This week, I found myself just blocks away from the White House, in a crowded room at the National Conservatism Conference at Washington’s Capital Hilton, listening to a clean cut assistant Texas attorney general giving a speech entitled “Porn’s Penumbras.” This was after the morning lecture against the perils of our “feminized” culture, from a gray-haired D.C. think tank veteran who had also preached about the need for “faith, family, and fertility”; after the Israeli Bible scholar had informed us that “the only honorable thing to do is to get married and have children, lots of them — if you’re not doing that, what you’re doing is dishonorable.”
All this came after the many mocking remarks about rainbow flags, and the demands for the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom, and the dark warning — delivered by a smiling young mother in a flowery dress — that the supposedly trans-crazed Left “literally conspired to kidnap struggling, mentally ill children whose parents refused to mutilate them.” And it was after an animated Stephen Miller, dressed in a tan summer suit, spent 10 straight minutes thundering about the most important issue facing this country: the epidemic of military-aged men from foreign countries sneaking across our shamefully porous border to prey upon beautiful, innocent American women. “Not one more life should be stolen by illegal immigration!” Miller proclaimed, referring to the American women, not to the immigrants themselves. “To the Democrat party I say: I have nothing to discuss with you when you are letting criminal migrants rape and murder American citizens!”
After this entire morning of aggressive admonishments to channel our masculinity into breeding, church, and striking down in cold blood anyone looking sideways at our precious American women, all of us — the men in navy blue suits, the dozens of clean shaven, college-aged conservatives in imitation blue suits and sensible long skirts, and me — packed into Breakout Room C for the “Big Tech and Big Porn” session. The room, like the rest of the conference, was freezing cold, presumably to squelch any latent sexual urges that might arise among the youngsters. All attention was focused on the problem of Big Porn, and its Big, Throbbing Penumbras. Together, we wrestled with the hardest problems of our time. “The founding, of course, had nothing like Pornhub,” noted the Texas attorney, with a respectful nod to originalism, “But I think it’s safe to say the founders would not have considered Pornhub to be constitutionally protected speech.”
The greatest accomplishment of those on the panel was getting states to pass laws requiring users to upload their ID to verify their age in order to view porn sites, which the hosts touted as a solid first step down the road to stopping adults from looking at naked pictures of other adults. Emily Jashinsky, a podcaster and editor at The Federalist, lectured on the traps of technology. “The internet removed even more friction from the process of sexual gratification, putting cameras and porn stores in our pockets every second of every day,” she said. “I think the example of a man walking up to a bodega counter with a pornography magazine is a very interesting one. And comparing that to what it’s like to shop for porn and consume porn on the internet. You’ve got to have a physical interaction with the cashier in that situation.”
The man in front of me nodded vigorously.
During the question-and-answer period, one query about whether “ethically sourced pornography” was possible drew a firm “No. Just no,” from one policy analyst — but Adam Candeub, a Michigan State law professor with a scholarly air, pushed back. “There’s a danger for American conservatism that we end up seeming anti-male,” he warned of the porn restriction crusade. “American conservatism should be pro-male libido.”
I glanced surreptitiously around the room. Was there hidden sexual tension here? Were the hormones of the young conservatives raging millimeters below the surface of their Brooks Brothers suits? Were we, collectively, doing our part to support the male libido? No matter where I looked, I saw no licking of lips, no shifting of hips, no flickering of eyes to indicate that the thoughts of everyone there were drifting into unseemly territory. The male mood seemed to be more represented by the recent college grad who announced proudly that he had led a “rather ecumenical coalition” of students trying to get porn banned on campus. Likewise, the women present gave no indication of falling prey to the “trans influencers” that Candeub warned were spreading “transsexualism among girls.” No! The libidos in that room were all focused on the proper goal: To wed! To breed! And to create a morally upright army to save America!
From? From… from… from everyone else.
“The second American revolution”
The Heritage Foundation is one of the defining institutions of Washington, D.C.’s omnipresent political class. Its headquarters are in an impressive eight-story stone building on Massachusetts Avenue just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. It had, as of 2022, more than $100 million in annual revenue and $332 million in net assets. Its president is Kevin Roberts, a tan, bald man with an easy smile, who was paid $622,000 in 2022, not including the value of private jet travel. Roberts, a PhD and former college president, has one big enemy: the elites. “I’m sorry that you’ve got to be in the swamp to do this, but this is in fact an imperial city that we’re in the process of taking back,” Roberts told the assembled crowd on the opening morning of the conference, before reeling off a list of D.C. think tank people for special thanks.
“We’re in the second American revolution,” he said. “Today’s establishment Washington doesn’t understand this yet.” Roberts, who works in Washington, is a friendly face of an apocalyptic movement. He decried the out of touch “coastal elites” and hapless “Beltway Republicans” to the room full of Republican Capitol Hill staffers and D.C. foundation executives. The Left, he warned, is “totalitarian in its mission” and “practically jihadist in its theocratic fanaticism” and has, I was surprised to learn, “limitless resources.” If they win, “we will cease to be a nation at all” and become “subservient to a religion without God, in a land without hope.” Then he wrapped it up to polite applause, and everyone filed out to attack the platters of pastries that were laid out in the Capital Hilton’s mezzanine.
This event was an odd amalgamation. The “national conservatives” see themselves as the zealot wing of the Republican Party, the Christian nationalist counterpoint to the squishy careerists who have unconscionably compromised with the evil Left for too long. At the same time, the conference, held from July 8-10, had none of the loud raffishness of a Trump rally. This was a gathering for those trying to position themselves for jobs in the looming Trump administration, and to jockey to construct the intellectual foundation of the Right’s ascendancy for the next four years, to the extent that such a thing is possible. This was the group that saw itself as responsible for implementing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term — which calls for, among other things, purging the federal workforce, curtailing reproductive rights nationwide and a mass crackdown on immigration — even as that abominable document was getting so much bad press that Trump himself was claiming he had nothing to do with it. Yet Project 2025, I assure you, is alive and well. It was available in print at the Heritage Foundation’s display booth at the conference, right next to copies of “Six Ways to Save America with The Heritage Foundation.” (Number Two: “Serve in the next conservative administration!”)
“We are basically building the personnel pipeline to the next administration,” one of the event’s staffers explained, chatting to an attendee between panels. “Training all these young people to be cutthroats.” The professional right-wing nationalists, from Liberty University and Hillsdale College, from Heritage and the Claremont Institute, from the Conservative Partnership Institute and American Compass, were all here to share the good word about how our wicked nation must be remade. And the glowing youth of the Movement With More Church Than Tattoos, in their uniforms of brown dress shoes with blue slacks, were all here to soak it in.
A particular sort of hawkish Christianity pervades this movement so thoroughly that you might just take it for granted, unless you aren’t the sort of person used to hearing apocalyptic speeches casting Christians as persecuted warriors with no option but to smite their enemies, in which case it comes as a bit of a shock. If you have not already convinced yourself that Christianity is the One True Religion and familiarized yourself with the entire encyclopedia of Godless Threats, some of this stuff can feel mystifying. Like when Doug Wilson, a bearded Idaho reformed evangelical shuffled to the podium and began, “The neo-Pagans have returned to their ancient faith in the power of chaos.” The who now? Or when his counterpart, Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler, seemed to be trying to set a Guinness World Record for the number of uses of the word “ontology” in a single speech. “We’ve reached the point that we are now autonomous from ontology!” he lamented, immediately after decrying boys who dressed like girls. “The Left no longer shares any moral order, and it certainly rejects the ontology of the Christian tradition.” Okay.
Some things, though, were easier to understand. Professional right-wing media figure Jack Posobiec, sporting facial stubble that was groomed to an embarrassingly meticulous degree, came to preach the Gospel of Trump, the savior who would bring salvation to the persecuted victims of elite globalist leftism. In order to “save Western civilization,” he said, the Right must enact “absolute reciprocity,” to visit upon their communist foes — meaning, I think, everyone to the left of Steve Bannon — the same outrages that Republicans themselves have suffered.
“If they are going to hold J6 investigations to target patriots, then we will hold investigations to identify the neo-cultural Marxists in seats of power all across Washington,” Posobiec said. “We don’t negotiate with un-humans. Because that’s the stakes of this battle: humanity versus un-humanity.”
A resurrection of McCarthyism would therefore be just a stop on the road towards the full-on purges. This was the plan being voiced just blocks away from the White House by the leading figures of a political faction that could very well be moving into that White House in six months. This is a faction that believes, as a rock solid truth, that white Christians are the most persecuted people in America, and that this screaming injustice is being exacerbated by the wholesale importation of illegal immigrants through our open borders. One of the most bizarre elements of listening to these true believers talk for a few days is that you hear little about things that are, objectively speaking, the biggest challenges that Americans share — the economy, for example, or healthcare, or transportation — and instead hear tons about immigrants murdering women, and children being “mutilated.” It is not just that these people have different views on political issues; they seem to have recently arrived via wormhole from an alternate universe in which the nation’s entire survival depended on preventing someone coming from Mexico in order to sneak into your daughter’s bedroom and convince her to dress like a boy.
It is hard to square all this with the Republican belief that non-white voters are moving in their direction. The need for mass deportations was taken for granted. The average immigrant was cast as a potential rapist (although some, they assume, are good people). And the plain old classic racism was never far from the surface. One panel featured both a paean to Booker T. Washington and a discussion of the virtues of Afrikaners, an extremely potent combination. Claremont Institute chairman Tom Klingenstein, who looks like Henry Kissinger and speaks in a prissy, high-pitched drone, explained to the entire ballroom that the 1619 Project was an effort to smear our ancestors as racist by woke radicals out to mislead our children. “Eliminate Juneteenth, a silly woke holiday,” he advised, to applause. “Martin Luther King Jr. was a great man, but he was not great enough to displace holidays for Lincoln and Washington. They were our best.”
Every single security guard I saw who was assigned to protect the conference was Black. By my estimation, the attendees of the conference were, generously, 1% Black. One unlucky security guard, assigned to stand mutely next to the stage day after day, was the lone regular person forced to watch every single speech at the conference. Oh, how I craved an anonymous quote from him. Alas, he was too wise to give me one.
“Pro-worker” posturing
As with all political movements, there are competing crosscurrents within national conservatism. The economics of Project 2025 are fundamentally Republican. Yet at least one group, American Compass, is apparently trying to advance the plausible appearance of concern for the working class. They sponsored a panel on “Working Class Conservatism,” where Riley Moore, the state treasurer of West Virginia, gave a heartfelt preamble about all his relatives who were union members, and the fact that “my family has benefited generationally from organized labor,” before admitting that he supported “right to work” laws in West Virginia, which are designed to sap the power of unions. Ah! But! He did not support a federal “right to work” law. And he showed his concern for workers, as state treasurer, by divesting state funds from Blackrock, because they… well, because they didn’t want to build more fossil fuel stuff. Also! He wants to stop illegal immigrants from taking American jobs. And! He proudly described his signature pro-labor achievement: a program so that construction workers can get a tax credit to pay for business costs like tools.
I got up and asked him: What, exactly, are your pro-labor policies? Are you for the PRO Act? Do you support increased funding for the NLRB? How about harsher penalties for corporate violators of labor law? To this, he repeated the things he had already said.
This, then, is what the most pro-labor fringe of the conservative movement offers to unionized workers: support for the worst anti-union law in America, anti-environmentalism, harsher immigration laws, and a tax credit for work supplies. With this handful of scraps, they hope to woo unions away from the other party, which supports the entire suite of pro-union policies. I’m not sure it’s going to happen.
Moore did, though, make a point to tell the room full of inherently hostile Republicans that unions are not anti-American. “If you look at their shirts, they have the American flag on it,” he said.
Oren Cass, the wonkish head of American Compass who positions himself as organized labor’s friendly bridge to the conservative world, gave an address to the full conference on its final day. His goal was to convince them that “worker power” was not bad. This involved a great deal of quoting from Ronald Reagan, to prove that he did not completely despise the existence of government, and much gentle suggestion that it would benefit the Republicans to do something concrete to solve the problems of working people. “A strong labor movement is something conservatives should love,” Cass said, because it would benefit the humble common man in his fight with the faceless, predatory, greedy financiers. Even though he insisted that labor unions should not be involved in national politics, this position made him the Che Guevara of this particular conference.
Conservatives should “indicate some interest in addressing the concerns of common citizens,” he suggested, instead of “pounding the table for Christian nationalism or a second American revolution.”
I began to wonder whether Cass was in the wrong place. Pounding the table for Christian nationalism and a second American revolution was exactly what this conference was for. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley was here, declaring himself a Christian nationalist! The head of the Heritage Foundation was saying we’re in the midst of a second American revolution! The entire “working class conservatism” brigade is naive, at best. Oren Cass wants unions to stop meddling in national politics. Why the hell does he think they’re involved in national politics in the first place? It’s because of what the people who filled the National Conservatism Conference plan to do to unions if they take power.
Darkness at the gates
What made the conference so unnerving was how close to power it was. A host of Republican senators turned up to pay homage and buff their own conservative credentials. There was Josh Hawley one night, and Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, and Rick Scott all shooting the breeze on a daytime panel about keeping government spending in check, interspersed with obligatory condemnations of the government’s persecution of Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, John Eastman, and Mark Meadows — the Mount Rushmore of Trump-era “political prisoners.” There was Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall espousing family values and fundamentalism like an evangelical Of Mice and Men character. Marshall prayed for the ability to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly,” and chuckled that the folks in D.C. were no good at walking humbly.
“That’s why we need God at the Capitol,” he said. The fact that the certainty required to want to impose your religious faith on others is not very humble was not discussed.
On the last evening of the conference, the big room’s chairs were replaced with round tables, and hundreds of attendees filed in for the final VIP dinner. Over salad, they heard from Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a National Conservatism Conference veteran who is riding high on the chatter that he may become Trump’s vice presidential nominee. That could represent a tangible bridge between the conference’s organizers and intellectual backers and the Oval Office. Vance is the ideal national conservative specimen, a man who preaches heartland values but wears a nice suit and looks like he sleeps in a vat of lotion.
The entire right-wing D.C. think tank infrastructure is designed to produce this sort of man. Delivered with a little polish, all sorts of crazy things can be made to sound palatable. Vance has the soothing mannerisms of a mid-market TV anchor, lacing his fingers in front of him and softly punctuating his sentences, smiling and making mildly funny jokes. This is just the sort of sweetness that can help you swallow poison. He spoke about how immigration made America poorer and less safe, grounding his points with stories about small towns in Ohio suffering under the burden of an influx of newly arrived Haitians, who strained municipal budgets. He leapt nimbly on, from the frustrations of small town Americans to love of family to something that grew darker, like twilight creeping in imperceptibly.
“America is not just an idea, though we were founded on great ideas. America is a nation. It is a group of people with a common history, and a common future.” He spoke of his family’s roots in one of the poorest parts of Kentucky, a long way from where he stood under that Capital Hilton chandelier. There, he said, “They are very good people. They are people who love this country — not because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones, they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it.”
As a southerner, I recognized this line of thinking. It is the same thinking that led to the Civil War. Hell, slavery may not be a good idea, but this is my home, and I will die fighting to protect it. This almost reasonable-sounding ode to a homeland is a wave whose force is meant to wash away any surrounding questions. Whose home? Since when? What about those before us? What about those after us? Who are we fighting, anyhow? What about love for all mankind?
STOP! Yells national conservatism. Abandon your questioning mind. Sink into the warm bath of faith. As Vance concluded, the entire room stood up to cheer. For God! For family! For marriage! For breeding! For Trump! For triumph! Hundreds of young conservatives ingested their mission. They are the soldiers in the war between good and evil that all of their elders assure them is imminent. And they will march onward, an army in brown dress shoes and navy blue blazers, to seize back the imperial city, or to fall as glorious martyrs in the effort.
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Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
