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 end of the Cold War.

Today, across the West and around the world, the Left is prepared for that fight. But the political 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 gathering storm of the global Left.

Watch the full speech

The Failure of the Establishment

The West today stands less at a crossroads than at the scene of a civilizational 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 god-awful 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 continued to drown our nations in debt.

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

They—we—want our borders secured, and illegal immigrants sent home—all of them. They want leaders who will put their country, their culture, their 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 in astounding ways. Brexit and Nigel Farage. Viktor Orban. Giorgia Meloni. Even now, this movement is spreading across Europe and into Central and South America. News just yesterday with snap elections in Spain, a runoff in Brazil with the leading candidate being someone who understands what time it is. 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 now 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 I know 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 yes, 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—and they mean to tear it all down.

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, engaging in constitutional vandalism, or even engaging and implementing transgender ideology. No, the animating principle of the elite Left today around the world is hatred: hatred of the religious traditions in particular 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 indeed 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.

"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

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. Whether from the radical Left or from the fringes of the online, podcasting Right, antisemitism is evil and must not 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. What I've learned is that the worst thing you can do is to engage with them, because speaking as a parent of four, when you have a toddler who's misbehaving, you just need to ignore them. At Heritage, you see, we don't engage them because every day, every hour of every day, as you will see this week, as you hear from so many of my colleagues, we are doing the actual real work of building that durable conservative coalition, not just for this year or 2028, but for the rest of this century. And we invite you not only to be part of that, but to help shape it.

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. Benedict 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. Quite the opposite. We discussed everything. Both where we agree and where we have friendly differences of opinion. You see, the experience, as you can appreciate perhaps better than anyone in the world, 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 experiences like these, then I have no doubt of our ability, as Americans and Israelis, to forge an even more special relationship—which of course recognizes that such an alliance does not require categorical, universal agreement with each other—nor the “entangling alliances” our first president warned us of.

Nor should we include in those moments of differences of opinion the baseless accusations about each other when we disagree. These actually undermine the very project of the special alliance.

If nothing else, we know that 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. All these recent events have 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. 

They hate democracy.

They hate Christianity and Judaism. 

They hate public order.

And of course, they all 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. Meetings like that place in stark relief for us in the United States that the fight we share, shoulder-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—although genuine—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, we have 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). 

Heritage was also 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.

Consider, as an example, something that happened in the United States yesterday. A sitting United States Senator running for governor of Minnesota hosted a rally that if you watched it with no volume, would look like it should be in the country of Somalia. And then, when you turned the volume on, she was speaking Somali. You can't make this up. Everyone on the planet is created equally in the image of God. But the problem in the United States is that we have allowed unfettered immigration into our country by people who hate Western values, such that these radical leftists, like this candidate running for governor of Minnesota, have to bend the knee to them. This kind of political nonsense must come to an end.

This is why, by the way, when Heritage recently announced its major policy priorities for the next several years, we focus not only on stopping the growth of socialism in the United States, but just as importantly, stopping the Islamification of the United States.

The New Right

To win this new fight, America and the West, and our friends in Israel need 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.

No example better illustrates what I mean by this future of conservatism 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. In fact, Israel, as we know at Heritage, is 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.

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. Maybe you 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 living in a world where both America and Israel are enjoying a Golden Age together.

On college campuses and in our children’s classrooms and corporate boardrooms, we have a lot of work to do. But I do have to tell you in closing that the future is extraordinarily bright. 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.

A man we both admire, Pope John Paul II, spoke eloquently of our inheritance when he visited this city in the year 2000. A year later, I founded a school in my hometown named after him. On that visit here to Jerusalem, the Pope said, "I am moved by a vivid sense of God who has gone before us and leads us on." Echoing the final verses of the Psalm that I opened my remarks with, Psalm 122:

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.