The following is a transcript of Kevin Roberts's remarks at the National Conservatism Conference, Jerusalem, on October 6, 2026.

A New Fight

It is an honor to be with you—here at this conference and especially here in Israel.

Psalm 122 describes Jerusalem as a city “bound firmly together.”

This is the city of unity. The city that united the tribes of Israel.

That links this world to the Kingdom of Heaven.

And of course it is the first of the five formative cities—preceding Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia—that unite the great civilization of freedom and human flourishing that we call The West. And so Jerusalem is the perfect place for conservatives from across the West to gather this week—so that we too can unite.

And not a moment too soon.

Western politics is going to change more in the next ten years than it has in the last thirty-five. The issues are going to cut deeper—and the stakes climb higher—than at any time since the Cold War.

Today, across the West and around the world, the Left is prepared for that fight. But the Right is not.

If that doesn’t change, we are poised to lose more than a few elections. Politically, culturally, civilizationally, the fight we face is going to be existential.

Which is just one more reason it’s fitting that national conservatives are gathering here, in a nation that has been fighting for its survival since 1948…and for its freedom for millennia. The people of Israel have never indulged the luxury of precious, abstract politics. Theirs—yours—is a politics of the permanent things. Circumstances have always forced Israel to put her own interests first. To see her enemies for who they are and what they want. And to righteously and unapologetically fight for her interests against all those enemies, no matter how powerful, fashionable, or barbaric.

It is a lesson the rest of the West must learn—and the Right must champion—and quickly, if we are to meet the storm now gathering on the global Left.

"If Americans put America first, like Israelis put Israel first … if every Western nation puts its own interests first … we can stand up to this new threat and, bound firmly together, toss red-green Leftism into the ash heap of history." — @KevinRobertsTX at NatCon Jerusalem. https://t.co/w8VdKiYh1w

— National Conservatism (@NatConTalk) October 6, 2026

The Failure of the Establishment

The West today stands less at a crossroads than at the scene of a train wreck. For a generation now, from Washington to Wall Street, from Davos to Brussels, elites of the Right and Left have squandered their predecessors’ victory in the Cold War—and the trust of nations they serve.

The fall of the Soviet Union did not mean the End of History, merely the end of establishment competence.

Since 1991, elites on both sides of the aisle—and both sides of the Atlantic—conspired to hand over their constituents’ sovereignty to supra-national organizations like the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and the most useless, expensive of them all, the United Nations.

They handed our industrial base over to China—enriching corporate billionaires and communist tyrants at the expense of the blue-collar workers whose battlefield courage and economic productivity actually Tore Down That Wall. They opened our borders to foreigners, swept God from the public square, rigged government against marriage, families, and children, and drowned our nations in debt.

It got worse: Censorship. Cancel culture. Transgender-fanaticism. They tried to force Catholic nuns to pay for abortions. They force girls to change, shower, and compete against biological males in school sports. They invited violent felons into our country, looked the other way when they attacked our communities, and sicced law enforcement on native citizens for objecting.

As the globalist elite Left failed, nationalist, populist conservatism rose—and continues to rise. The story of the last decade is very simple: the people of the West want their countries back.

They want their borders secured, and uninvited migrants sent home. They want leaders who will put their country, their culture and values, their people first. They want economic policy to spur new investment, jobs, and higher wages. They want criminals thrown in jail—or deported—and their streets safe. They want their culture protected and honored, not maligned.

Across the West, the New Right has answered this citizens’ revolt. Brexit and Nigel Farage. Viktor Orban. Giorgia Meloni. Even now, this movement is spreading across Europe and into Central and South America. And of course, the man who nearly single-handedly has forced this long-overdue reckoning: Donald Trump.    

In response to this global repudiation, progressives might have dialed back their haughty elitism to win back the national democracies they betrayed. Instead, they have gone the other direction. They have lurched farther into Marxist extremism…and climbed down into the Islamic jihadist sewer to recruit allies even more hostile to the West than themselves.

That is why this convening of national conservatives in Jerusalem, coinciding with the anniversary of a heinous act of Islamic terrorism against Jews and Israeli sovereignty, is not only important—but will prove to be historic.

Here and now, we get to chart and build and coalesce the conservative movement that will reject all the lies of the Radical Left and Radical Islam.

“Faith family and nation — these are the things the new left wants to destroy.” — @KevinRobertsTX, President of @Heritage at NatCon Jerusalem. https://t.co/XqqWnqDOAF

— National Conservatism (@NatConTalk) October 6, 2026

The New, New, Red-Green Left

This new, New Left is different in kind from anything conservatives have faced since the end of the Cold War. It is a political movement organized to destroy our political system—indeed, the pillars of Western civilization itself.

In the United States, for instance, they are calling for the elimination of the presidency, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College, free speech, and religious liberty. They want to repeal our Constitution, empty our prisons, abolish the police, confiscate our firearms, and open our borders.

But even this does not capture this New Left’s true ambitions. They don’t just want to erase the constitutional legacy of America’s Founding Fathers. They want to sever our ties with all five of the West’s foundational cities.

According to the Third-World mentality of the New Left, all the moral and civilizational triumphs of Philadelphia, London, Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem are violent, oppressive, and racist.

They hate that Philadelphia gave us our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, limited government, property rights, and the rule of law. They hate that this inheritance enabled generations of Americans to turn a colonial backwater on the far side of the world into the strongest, freest, and most prosperous nation in human history. They hate that the Founding Fathers set a model for justice, equality, opportunity, and progress unmatched by any nation on earth.

They mean to tear it down.

In the same way, they hate London’s legacy of impartial law and individual freedom. It precludes their vision of group hierarchy and tribal privilege.

They hate Rome’s legacy of republicanism and civic order. It denies them the absolute power and dependent populace their totalitarian ideology craves.

They hate Athens’ legacy of reason and democracy. Because they believe neither in science, nor objective truth, nor the natural sovereignty of the people.

And most of all—worst of all—they hate the divine revelation and moral order given to the world by the city of Jerusalem and the Jewish people. For this is the cultural inheritance—the place and the people—on which all of Western civilization rests.

Indeed, if you listen to the New Left closely, you’ll notice very quickly that their squad’s true passion isn’t redistributing wealth…or constitutional vandalism…or even mutilating children without their parents’ permission. No, the animating, unifying principle of the elite Left today around the world seems to be hatred: hatred of the religious traditions that formed Western civilization—Judaism and Christianity. That hatred, as you know all too well, is not abstract. It extends to real people, namely to faithful Jews and Christians, for the mere act of living out our faith—and daring to do so publicly. And as people in both our countries know, that hatred extends ultimately to Israel and the United States as Western nations whose foundational principles sprang from the same source.

Israel is a cornerstone of Western civilization—and so an indispensable partner of conservatives committed to defending it. Israel’s survival—let alone its security and prosperity—is all by itself an act of defiance against the West’s worst enemies: foreign, domestic, and spiritual.

Conservatives ought to be resoundingly clear about that last point. Speaking on behalf of The Heritage Foundation, to anyone who needs to be reminded, especially anyone who considers himself a Christian: anti-Semitism is not edgy or provocative or avant-garde. It is evil—a malignant sin not only against the Jewish people, but against Our Lord, His Mother, and all His people. No Christian may tolerate, let alone commit, this sin. Whether from the radical Left or from the fringes of the online, podcasting Right, antisemitism is evil and cannot be tolerated.

I’m sometimes asked about one or two of these podcasters in particular. Let me say here, that as idiotic and absurd as their rhetoric and theories can be, that they are irrelevant—irrelevant—to the conservative coalition we are building in America. At Heritage, instead, we focus on the real work of building a durable conservative governing coalition—one we invite you to be part of and to help shape.

To that point: the long, heroic history of our civilization makes very clear: the only way the West can stand is together. And Israel is as much part of the West as the Vatican, the Parthenon, and Independence Hall.

As a historian, I have known this—by that, I mean intellectually, academically. But I can now say I know this personally, firsthand. In the days leading up to this conference, I made a spiritual pilgrimage with my friend and friend of this conference, Fr. Ben Kiely, and my chief of staff, Stewart Whitson. We traveled all across your beautiful nation, visiting the Holy Sites, praying and contemplating. We also were aided by the knowledge of an Israeli friend whose Jewish faith complemented, not detracted from, our spiritual journey.

That complementarity was not merely because of friendliness. Nor did it exist because, out of professional courtesy, we avoided discussing theology—both where we agree and where we disagree. Rather, the experience was enriched precisely because of our ability to converse, over a period of days, and to do so in the land which gave birth to both our faiths.

If we could somehow replicate and scale experiences like these, then I have no doubt of our ability, as Americans and Israelis, to forge an even more special friendship—which of course recognizes that such an alliance does not require categorical, universal agreement with each other—or the “entangling alliances” our first president warned us of.

And if nothing else, we share two common enemies.

To anyone who doubts it, ask Israel’s enemies—in Hamas or on university faculties—what they think of Western civilization…our Christian faith, our European heritage, our Founding Fathers.

Whatever their demonic promptings, in practice, the New Left hates Israel for the same reasons they hate the United States and the rest of the West.

It’s not a coincidence that the same people who burn American flags on Monday and throw paint at great works of art on Tuesday can be found chanting “globalize the intifada” outside a Jewish student center on Thursday. Nor that 2026 has revealed the natural political alliance between woke elites and terror-sympathizing Islamist activists across the West.

This new, Red-Green Left is welded together by its common hatreds.

They hate national identity. Socialism was an international movement from the beginning. Patriotism was always its greatest stumbling block. That’s why leftists burn American flags, ban the Union Jack, open borders, tear down statues, smear national heroes, and indoctrinate school children against their homelands and heritage.

They hate Christianity and Judaism. That’s why they try to sweep Biblical religion from the public square, and deface Christian and Jewish sacred spaces. And why they demand Christians, Jews, and secularists all bend over backwards to accommodate one religious sect…or else.

They hate traditional marriage and the nuclear family. They hate science, and reject it whenever facts contradict their preferred narratives.

They hate democracy. See how woke elites brag about annulling election results they dislike, and how jihadists govern their own nations.  

They hate public order. See how they celebrate mob violence, rationalize assassinations, and accommodate rape gangs.

And of course, they hate Israel.

Tomorrow, the world will get another chilling reminder of how deep that hate runs, as we mark the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre. I remember well, in the months following that attack, hosting in my Washington office several family members of four hostages—Evyatar David, Guy Gilboa-Dalal, Omri Miran, and Matan Zangauker. Meetings like that place in stark relief that the fight we share, should-to-shoulder, is not abstract.

Thus, my Heritage colleagues and I are honored to be able to attend the memorial service at the Nova Festival Site tomorrow. We do so in solidarity with the victims and their families, and with all of you—just as you and other allies of the United States did recently for us on the 25th anniversary of another radical Islamic attack, 9/11.

For Heritage, the fight against antisemitism did not begin after October 7, and it does not end with mere expressions of solidarity.

More than thirty years ago, we vociferously challenged the United Nations’ absurd effort to brand as racism the defense of the Israeli state’s right to exist. Since then, consider just these highlights of our work:

• we have defended Jewish religious liberty,
• explained why antisemitism threatens every person in every free society,
• Supported Israel’s political integration in its region through the Abraham Accords (after all, the Abraham Accords Institute is housed at Heritage, with two colleagues working right here in Jerusalem),
• Was the first and only organization on the political Right to convene a national antisemitism task force,
• And we launched, under the leadership of my great friend and colleague, Dr. Victoria Coates, Project Esther, an initiative we are in the process of expanding to also study and combat antisemitism on the Right.

I mention these efforts—and Heritage does them—not for plaudits, not for political positioning, not for fundraising. But because they are RIGHT.

This continuous commitment by all of us at Heritage is one that the new conservative coalition we are working to build must include: an ironclad commitment to the dignity of the Jewish people, to the national security of Israel, and to the preservation of the Western Civilization in which Jews and Christians share an indispensable inheritance.

Make no mistake: the Red-Green Left is not a marriage of convenience. It is the logical conclusion of Marxism and Jihadism’s failure to destroy the West from without. They are combining forces now to destroy us from within.

This is why recently, when Heritage announced its major policy initiatives for the coming years, we identified two relevant, major goals: stopping the growth of socialism and the increasing Islamification of the United States.

They have a vision. And they have a very specific policy agenda to bring that vision about. They have the resources of the entire globalist, corporate and institutional elite to bankroll their scheme.

And make no mistake: right now, they’re winning.

On college campuses and in our children’s classrooms, in corporate boardrooms and government bureaucracies and in our popular culture, the poison of Red-Green leftism is everywhere. Even in the United States, self-identified socialists with Red-Green views and messages have trounced traditional Democrats in primary elections all year. They are campaigning for offices up and down the ballot on the most radical agenda in American political history.

All they need to win…is a divided Right.

That is the choice conservatives now face: unite to defeat the Red-Green Left…or surrender to it, not just for an election cycle or two, but maybe for decades.

The New Right

To win this new fight, America and the West need a new, New Right—a conservatism based not on abstractions or elite convenience, but in the permanent things: faith, family, and nation. These are the things the New Left wants to destroy. So these are the things the Right must defend. And that requires understanding the history and inheritance that originates right here in Jerusalem.

We cannot save our nations if we cannot secure our borders. For a generation, globalist elites let millions of foreigners invade our countries and our cultures with an eye to weakening both.

Just as we protect our nation’s borders, so must we protect her culture. We need to give families and children the same respect in law that we give them in our hearts—including getting Red-Green teachers and curricula out of our schools.

We need to make public order great again. We need to stop lying down for criminals and start standing up for the innocent people they terrorize.

In the same way, we must root national security policy strictly in our national interests as well. Lest there be any confusion about this point: nationalism is not isolationism. It’s because our world is becoming so interconnected and interdependent that we need the policymaking clarity that only nationalism provides.

Alliances, diplomacy, and military action are too important to leave up to abstractions. National interest is the only dependable basis for conducting serious foreign policy, especially at a time when our national identities are under attack.

No example better illustrates what I mean than America’s relationship with Israel. In the eyes of international opinion and globalist institutions, Israel is a problem to be solved. It’s only from the perspective of national interest that Americans can see Israel for what she is: a bulwark of Western civilization, an indispensable strategic ally in all the fights that actually matter, and a model of nationalist vigor that conservatives across the West should learn from.

And because of that recognition and friendship, Israelis can offer critiques of American policy, just as Americans can do the same about Israeli government policy — without either of those actions meaning that the special bond between our two nation-states is somehow broken.

Put simply, it is time for the West to stop apologizing for putting our people, our values, and our interests first.

Putting the West First

I know it is impolitic to say so these days, but the West wasn’t built everywhere else. Democracy, civil society, religious freedom, free enterprise, scientific inquiry, and the rule of law are not natural human conditions.

They are a unique achievement of our civilization.

And they are as incompatible with Marxist elitism as they are with Sharia law. And right now they are under attack.

The Red-Green Left understands the stakes. They have methodically exploited our Jewish and Christian foundational values and weaponized our institutions, wielding them like sickles and scimitars against our entire way of life.

Defeating this enemy will require political conflict so intense that it will make the last decade look like a pillow-fight.

And yet, I must say that I am hopeful. Perhaps you expect that of an American. I would hope you’d expect it of a Christian. But in the same way that I am convinced this is the beginning of the Golden Age of America, I believe, as a result of this visit, that Israel’s trials and tragedies of the last few years—and the response of her people, especially your young men and women serving in uniform—will forge your country’s “greatest generation.” Imagine a world where both America and Israel—and our true allies—can say we live in a Golden Age!

Let’s be honest: it will take a conservative coalition large enough to destroy Red-Green Jacobin-jihadism forever.

The only chance we have to build such a coalition is on the foundation of national identity. If Americans put America first, like Israelis put Israel first, and Britons put the U.K. first—if every Western nation puts its own interests first as our adversaries surely will—we can stand up to this new threat and, “bound firmly together,” toss Red-Green leftism onto the ash heap of history where it belongs.

To do so will require not only a bold plan for the future of conservatism, but a clear understanding of our shared inheritance. Perhaps, just as Psalm 122 was a fitting introduction to my remarks, its conclusion will serve as one of our guideposts for the future:

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
“May those who love you be secure.
May there be peace within your walls
And security within your citadels.
For the sake of my family and friends,
I will say, “Peace be within you.”
For the sake of the house of the Lord of God,
I will seek your prosperity.”

Thank you for being here, for your hospitality, for your witness, and most of all, from a grateful American and Roman Catholic friend, for your courage—in defense of your home, of your faith, of Truth, and of our shared inheritance.

God bless you—and may He prosper the work of our hands.