A rightwing conference recently saw theocratic Christian nationalists, far-right publishers and members of men-only secret societies speaking alongside the Missouri senator Eric Schmitt, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at Donald Trump’s Department of Justice and other senior Republican figures.
The speaker list at the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC raises questions over what distinctions exist between the nationalist hard right in the US and members of the Trump administration and the Republican party.
Heidi Beirich, the chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said: “NatCon is filled with extremists touting white nationalism and conspiracy theories. What is notable is how Trump administration officials and allies are key players in the event, showing that it is near impossible today to distinguish the far right from the administration.”
The conference schedule was peppered with the names of leading figures of the so-called “new right,” an anti-democratic and ultra-nationalist far-right movement whose reactionary views have often undergirded the administration’s actions.
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Scheduled speakers at the event included Jonathan Keeperman, who the Guardian identified in May 2024 as the founder of the far-right publisher Passage Press. Passage Press is the literary home of a variety of white nationalist, neo-reactionary, and far-right authors including Steve Sailer, Taki Theodoracopulos, Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land.
On X last week, another NatCon speaker, Timon Cline, announced an upcoming book with Passage, Evangelicals in the Age of Trump and After. Cline, the editor of religious right publication American Reformer, is also the director of scholarly initiatives at the Hale Institute of New Saint Andrews College, the college associated with theocratic rightwing pastor Douglas Wilson and his CREC denomination, which counts the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, as a follower.
Several other NatCon speakers are closely associated with the secretive Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), a men-only, invitation-only, Christian ultranationalist network. In 2024, a Middlebury Institute report pointed to “undercurrents of neo-fascist accelerationism … in SACR’s Christian philosophy and articulated by SACR leaders”. It specifically pointed to co-founder Charles Haywood’s evocations of the fascist philosopher Julius Evola and a broader attraction to authoritarian “Caesarism” as a solution to a perceived civilizational decline.
Known SACR members speaking at NatCon include the venture capitalist Nate Fischer and the Claremont Institute president, Ryan Williams. Another SACR member, Andrew Beck, Claremont’s vice-president for communications, meanwhile is chairing a session.
Fischer was the founding president of SACR’s Dallas chapter, as the Guardian first reported in 2023. The Guardian also reported that an arms manufacturer Fischer partly owned enjoyed local and federal government contracts, and had a friendly relationship with JD Vance.
Haywood, a wealthy former shampoo manufacturer and would-be “warlord”, is a tireless promoter of far-right and authoritarian ideas, often under the banner of his self-devised “philosophy”, Foundationalism.
It is near impossible today to distinguish the far right from the administration
Heidi Beirich, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism
In recent days on X, Haywood has reposted calls for “the far right” in Europe to “[prepare] for the bloodiest civil war in human history” and called for “the total denigration of ‘career’ as the main goal of women”.
The conference also featured prominent faces from the universe of thinktanks surrounding the Trump administration who have signed on to, or even devised the Project 2025 agenda that has provided a blueprint for Trump’s actions in its first months.
The Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, for example, delivered a presentation entitled “The Family: The Foundation of America’s Next 250 Years”.
His speech leaned into male grievance and anti-immigrant sentiment, with Roberts endorsing “the righteous anger such young men feel when our elites say they can be replaced by immigrants or machines”.
Alongside the prominent far-right figures, several members of the Trump administration appeared at NatCon.
A speech by Schmitt, the Missouri senator, presented contemporary politics as a battle between “the nation and the forces that would erase it”, claiming that in Europe, “the immigration crisis threatens to transform the ancient fabric of those nations, and all who object are menaced by an increasingly totalitarian censorship state.”
Schmitt took aim not only at illegal immigration but legal immigration, saying: “It should be clear that the fact that something is sanctioned by our government doesn’t mean it’s good for our country.”
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Schmitt appeared to emphasize the idea that the American constitution has a basis in race: “If you impose a carbon copy of the US constitution on Kazakhstan tomorrow, Kazakhstan won’t magically become America. Because Kazakhstan isn’t filled with Americans, it’s filled with Kazakhstanis.”
Schmitt said “what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike” was his knowledge that “America is not just an abstract proposition, but a nation and a people with its own distinct history and heritage and interests”, and his election culminated “a pitchfork revolution driven by the millions of Americans who felt they were turning into strangers in their own country”.
He identified America with colonial violence, including “the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian warband attacks from beyond the stockade walls”, whom he said would be “astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a proposition” rather than “a homeland for themselves and their descendants”.
The Guardian has previously reported that Schmitt hired Nate Hochman as a policy adviser in February. He was hired despite his previous professional history, including his 2023 exit from Ron DeSantis’s failed presidential campaign over a promotional video containing neo-Nazi imagery, and a stint last year at an ostensible thinktank – founded by Marco Rubio’s current chief of staff, Mike Needham – where Hochman created conspiracy-minded videos targeting Haitian migrants, LGBTQ+ people, and human rights groups.
The present administration and its NatCon supporters represent a fanatical movement that does not believe in … any of the things that actually made America great
Katherine Stewart, author
The Guardian emailed Hochman and Schmitt’s media spokesperson, DJ Griffin, for comment, and specifically asked whether or not Hochman had played any part in drafting Schmitt’s speech.
In another speech, the White house “border czar”, Tom Homan, issued warnings to Chicago, a city that the Trump administration has been promising to flood with federal agents and national guard troops, as it previously has in Los Angeles and Washington DC.
“I said two months ago, we’re going to flood the zone and that’s exactly what
we’re doing,” Homan told the NatCon crowd. “In Chicago, it’s coming.
“So watch what happens in the very near future,” he warned. “President Trump is going to make Chicago safe again.”
Another member of the Trump administration, the deputy attorney general, Harmeet Dhillon, gave a speech in which she characterized the justice department’s civil rights division, which she leads, as “the president’s shock troops. We’re the front guard. We are going to go first and clear the way for others to do their work.”
In a series of stories in 2023, the Guardian reported on oddities in the administration of the Center for American Liberty (CAL), where Dhillon acted as CEO until she took up her job in the Trump administration. Dhillon’s law firm was the non-profit’s single biggest contractor, and had received more than $1m in fees on top of Dhillon’s six-figure salary. CAL paid over $130,000 to a GOP-aligned PR firm that also represented Dhillon in a private capacity. The executive director of the firm in the early 2010s also authored blogposts in praise of conversion therapy.
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CAL increasingly became focused on litigating high-profile anti-transgender cases, including those involving “detransitioning” transgender people, or the parents of minors, suing care providers and school districts.
In her own characterization of this period, Dhillon said: “Hospitals have recklessly engaged in the butchery of American children under our very noses in the name of so-called gender-affirming care.”
She added: “Now in my private practice, I fought all of these things, and people thought I was crazy doing it from San Francisco, but guess what? One or two people standing up can create a movement.”
Other administration figures who spoke at NatCon included the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the Small Business Administration head and former senator, Kelly Loeffler.
“The American public needs to catch up fast on the reality of American politics,” said Katherine Stewart, the author of Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. “This isn’t about left v right or liberal v conservative. The present administration and its NatCon supporters represent a fanatical movement that does not believe in democracy, individual rights, rational discourse, or any of the things that actually made America great.”
