#natcon

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Badash at NCRM:

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) declared Monday he is advocating for Christian nationalism, a far-right ideology that claims there is no separation of church and state in the Constitution, and promotes as a national religion Christian fundamentalism, a hardline, extremist brand of Christianity at odds with the religious beliefs of many Christians across the country. It opposes LGBTQ people and people of other faiths or of no faith, and their civil rights. It often has links to neo-Nazis, white supremacy, and dominionism, and many see Russia and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, as its leader.

“Some will say I’m calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. My question is – is there any other kind worth having?” Senator Hawley said at “NatCon 4,” the National Conservatism conference being held in Washington, D.C., this week (video below), as reported by Semafor’s David Weigel.

Sen. Hawley, not backing down, promoted his remarks by reposting them on social media. Senator Hawley told attendees at the far-right conference, “Christian nationalism founded American democracy.. the Christian political tradition is our political tradition,” Weigel also reported. “They want the religion of the pride flag. We want the religion of the Bible. I have a suggestion: Why don’t we take down the trans flag from all the federal buildings from which it’s flying, and instead, inscribe on every federal building our national motto: In God We Trust?” Hawley also reportedly said. [...] National Conservatism is a multinational “project” created by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a Netherlands-based group.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) spoke at NatCon recently and declared that he is “advocating Christian nationalism”. Hawley pushed the lie that “Christian nationalism founded American democracy.”

[theinconvenientlifestyle]

While the National Conservatism conference has been making headlines – for reasons ranging from admissions of gerrymandering to calls for delegates to breed – it’s been quite publicity-shy with journalists. openDemocracy was one of at least three left-leaning outlets whose application to cover the conference was refused.

But I managed to blag my way in anyway.

And once inside, I saw no shortage of whackadoodlery. ‘Deep State’ conspiracy theories were alive and well, as a man in a crumpled linen suit rose to his feet to declare: “One of the reasons Liz Truss was removed as prime minister was that her government was going to move against the Net-Zero agenda!” He offered no supporting evidence.

What I found more interesting was the feel of the place. Over 300 delegates, packed into a plush, wood-panelled hall in Westminster. The mood was angry, but comfortable. These were normally shy conservatives, glad to be among like minds, where they could speak freely.

For a ‘national’ conservatism conference in Britain, it was more Trump rally than Sunak conference. The crowd was almost entirely male, and younger than might be expected. In fact, as a 38-year-old, I couldn’t find anyone my own age – it looked like about 80% were under 30, and the other 20% over 50. One man next to me had dragged along his clearly bored girlfriend, who audibly harrumphed through several speeches.

Standard dress was blazers, tweeds, waistcoats, Union Jack bow ties, and summer dresses. In fact, there were more neckties than I’ve seen anywhere since the pandemic. This wasn’t a political convention; it was the Chap Olympiad.

It was a diverse audience, they assured us. Earnest young men introduced themselves as students from both Oxford and Cambridge. But they were not all Oxbridge types. One member of the audience piped up that he was attending the elite $78,000-a-year private Williams College, in Massachusetts.

The ‘red wall’ voters who featured so prominently in rhetoric didn’t appear to be terribly well-represented among the evidently affluent delegates, many of whom had flown in internationally, their airline labels still affixed to the luggage piled up by reception, as delegates introduced themselves as being from Pennsylvania, California, Copenhagen and Brussels. So much for anti-globalisation.

Still, there is an honesty about the conference: delegates and speakers didn’t really seem to care how they came across. A look at the speeches bears this out. “The ‘mad person’ is the apex individual!” declared writer and philosopher Nina Power, to an audience that lapped it up. Quite a few of them seemed keen to play the ‘mad person’.

What got them going

Most revealing were the bursts of applause. Energetic, prolonged, tub-thumping applauses whenever somebody said something that really struck a chord. It was instructive to see what pressed their buttons.

Immigration was the hottest topic – a guaranteed crowd-pleaser every time. In fact, delegates seemed inordinately interested in it, with outbursts of “oooooh” and “hear, hear” at every mention.

Someone who worked for the hard-right YouTube channel Triggernometry complained: “The left doesn’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigration! That’s what’s happened to people I know, particularly [in] London.” Mentions of London, or big cities, were often accompanied by a hiss.

Another barnstorming topic was gun ownership. When recently elected Trump-backed senator JD Vance of Ohio mentioned that he attended a raffle event where the prize was an AR-15 assault rifle, a prolonged ripple of applause broke out.

Nina Power’s declaration that “I strongly recommend everyone goes to church” also got a rapturous reception, suggesting that the “faith” part of the old far-right rallying cry of ‘Faith, Flag and Family’ is alive and well.

Clean energy and wind farms were a popular object of anger. Vance – who opposes US support for Ukraine – still gave the war as a reason for countries to stick to “coal and gas”, invoking populist tropes against wind farms: “I don’t want to live in some post-apocalyptic hellscape filled with dead birds!”

The subject of trans people’s rights was another favourite bogeyman, as speakers queued up to ridicule “hormones” and trans people themselves, with repeated references to so-called “basic biology”.

Meanwhile, Frank Furedi, a former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who has now seamlessly moved to the far right, told the audience that the conservative cause was “civilisational… there’s so much at stake… it’s existential.”

And, curiously, the most quoted political thinker was Karl Marx. More Marx was cited than at any Corbyn-era Labour Party conference. Delegates seemed obsessed with the idea that Marx lurks behind every corner.

Think tanks

Not all of the delegates were slightly awkward young men from Oxbridge and private liberal arts colleges in the US.

Many introduced themselves as working for conservative think tanks. This makes sense, for the ‘national’ conservatism conference in the UK is in fact organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a US think tank.

Among the many think tanks represented were the Bow Group, the Centre for Digital Assets and Democracy, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (an offshoot of the Legatum Institute), and the Hungarian-state-funded Danube Institute – one of the few civil society organisations the Orbán government has not cracked down on, but has instead propped up.

Talk was rife, on and off the stage, of “Anglosphere conservatism” – code for stage two of Brexit, with deepening relations with the hard-right.

Media management

Perhaps surprisingly, given its shambolic public image, the conference has a professionally organised social media presence. It’s just that none of the curators seems to think there’s anything amiss with what is being said.

Organisers film the proceedings, transcribing highlights, while monitoring Twitter and Facebook mentions in real-time, along with a WhatsApp channel.

The conference itself has been tweeting carefully curated highlights of some speeches. (See Douglas Murray declaring, “There was nothing wrong with nationalism in Britain, it’s just that there was something wrong with nationalism in Germany. I don’t see why no one should be allowed to love their country because the Germans mucked it up twice in a century.”)

Of course, one of the two reception desks was marked ‘media’. Given how many journalists had been kept out, perhaps that should have been marked ‘desk for excluding media’.

Is this the future of the right? They certainly think so. Professor Tim Bale has warned elsewhere, though, that this risks being a “cul de sac” for British conservatives – of great interest to the activist base, but navel-gazing over issues that leave most voters baffled, or even alienated.

This is a strand of the right that enjoys seeing itself as a popular insurgency, against the old boys’ club of Westminster politics, the heirs to UKIP and Brexit. But meeting in a prestigious Westminster venue, they did not seem to practise what they preached.

In fact, all it took for me to get in, free of charge, despite my not having booked, was my plummy accent, a blazer, a Panama hat, and old college cufflinks. Deference quickly kicked in, and they were tugging at their forelocks to show me in, imagining me to be one of their own. This was about as ‘establishment’ a gathering as you could imagine.

[ianfulgar]

Helping our local profession grow one debate at a time. Let's do this. #debate #stage #stagelighting #architectduties #architecturestudent #learn #duties #cpd #professional #stagedesign #share #sharingiscaring #calltime #uap #philippines🇵🇭 #natcon

[scavengedluxury]

Narrator: it was.

This NatCon thing is a dress rehearsal for the fully Orbanized Tories as a party of opposition isn’t it? The far right repeatedly referring to themselves as being centre right is the biggest dog whistle going. Oh and yes, it’s this Melanie Phillips:

[azspot]

David Azerrad, a Research Fellow at Hillsdale College, delivered an unabashedly White nationalist and male supremacist speech, for which he received one of the only standing ovations at the conference. Declaring that “the regime today is anti-White anti-male and anti-Christian,” Azerrad condemned the “browning of America,” the “intentional demographic transformation of America into a majority-minority country through large scale immigration.”

[eightyonekilograms]

Goddammit, I didn’t even notice it when I made that post, but thinking about it more… there totally will be a pan-ideological coalition calling for hukou in the United States pretty soon, won’t there. The leftists will want it to “stop white gentrifiers”, centrist NIMBYs will want it to try and keep anyone else from moving to their town and preserve the neighborhood character, and the NatCons will want it so they can BeneOpt and prevent their children from fleeing.

It’ll be everywhere on the various discourse spots by, say, 2025. You heard it here first.

[kepeslajoska]

Nemzeti Konzervativizmus (NatCon) brüsszeli konferenciája

2024. április 17.

[chuckyeager]

Der Mussolini

[sztupy]

Az irrelevanciába kellett volna folytani ezt a konferenciát inkább, erre most meg van miről írni az újságoknak

[sudden-narratives]

finally secured a roundtrip flight and hotel accommodation for the NatCon happening very soon. here's to the start of many firsts 🥂

[andreykovalenko570]

NatCon: the most memorable moments from the rightwing conference

[collapsedsquid]

Although I said the natcons are a bunch of doomed weirdos but having no actual constituency or ideas people actually like didn't stop the neocons I guess

[azspot]

For decades, Wilson has been relegated to the fringes of evangelicalism for his slavery apologism, ties to the neo-Confederate movement and longstanding, documented racism. That makes it significant that he was invited to speak at NatCon this year. More significant still is the fact that Wilson shared the stage with Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a longtime leader within the second-largest Christian denomination in the United States and for decades a standard-bearer of the religious Right.

The GOP Is Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

[korrektheiten]

Wahl des Brüsseler Bürgermeisters, der eine konservative Veranstaltung verhindern wollte, für ungültig erklärt

Tichy:»Am 13. Oktober hatte der amtierende Bürgermeister Emir Kir bei der Wahl die absolute Mehrheit errungen, so dass er ohne Koalitionspartner regieren konnte. Kir, ein linker Politiker, erlangte im April 2024 eine gewisse Berühmtheit, als er die Polizei vorschickte, um die NatCon, eine Veranstaltung der Konservativen, an der prominente Persönlichkeiten und internationale Staatsführer teilnahmen, nicht Der Beitrag Wahl des Brüsseler Bürgermeisters, der eine konservative Veranstaltung verhindern wollte, für ungültig erklärt erschien zuerst auf Tichys Einblick. http://dlvr.it/TGJqhg «

[antonjesus]

ELECTION SPECIAL | The NatCon Squad | Episode 188

[zmkccommonplace]

A transnational liberal-left ‘regime’ is the primary domestic threat to both the USA & the UK, & chasing international bad guys & spreading ‘universal values’ ought to be put on hold until our countries can put their respective houses in order.

Michael Anton, a National Security committee member, speaking at NatCon 2023