Trump Officials, GOP Lawmakers Join Far-Right Extremists At “National Conservatism” Conference

Next month, NatCon 5 kicks off with a colorful crowd.

This report was produced in partnership with the Counter Disinformation Project.

Several high ranking Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers are speaking at a major right-wing conference that will also feature an array of extremists including white nationalists and representatives of hate groups.

For two days, starting September 2, Washington, D.C., will play host to the so-called National Conservatism conference—the fifth ever. NatCon 5, as it is called, is organized around a right-wing ideology called “National Conservativism,” which emphasizes isolationism, xenophobia, theocracy, anti-LGBTQIA+ bigotry, right-wing populism, heavy handed law enforcement, and a crackdown on academic freedom at universities. In essence, the movement represents a synthesis of Trumpism and Christian nationalism.

A declaration of principles of National Conservatism, featured on the NatCon 5 website, is signed by a range of voices from across the far-right and Make America Great Again movement—individuals like tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has spoken at NatCon before. Other signees include Russell Vought, the White House Office of Management and Budget Director, and Larry Arn, the president of Hillsdale College president and vice chairman of The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, which The New York Times once called a “nerve center of the American Right.” The group is part of Atlas Network, a right-wing dark money seed organization that has fostered a global web of free market think tanks. Other signers include Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, fmr. Sen. Jim DeMint, founder of the Conservative Partnership Institute, Ben Weingarten, editor at large for RealClearInvestigations, and Katy Faust, founder of the SPLC-designated anti-LGBTQIA+ hate group Them Before Us. Faust has called to “breed out” immigrants and trans people.

NatCon 5 will bring together a wide range of far-right voices, including public officials and lawmakers, representatives from major right-wing dark money groups and media outfits, and a host of extremists and conspiracy theorists—and, of course, business interests.

Klingenstein is speaking at the conference along with four other speakers affiliated with Claremont—like John Eastman, for example, who worked to prevent the certification of the results of the 2020 election after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden. Eastman serves as the founding director of Claremont’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. Ryan Williams, another speaker, is president of the institute and publisher of the Claremont Review of Books. Spencer Klavan is the associate editor at the publication, and Will Thibeau is director of the American Military Project at the group’s Center for the American Way of Life.

Joining the Claremont crew are a number of high-ranking Trump officials. There will be OMB Director Vought, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. Small Business Administration Director Kelly Loeffler, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya—a friend of Thiel’s—U.S. Border Czar Tom Homan, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, former legal counsel for the Department Of Government Efficiency James Burnham, and United States Trade Representative and acting Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics Jamieson Greer. Several GOP lawmakers are also speaking—Sen. Eric Schmitt, Sen. Jim Banks, Sen. Josh Hawley, and Rep. Riley Moore. UK MP Nigel Farage and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier are also speaking.

Several of the speakers are affiliated with The Heritage Foundation, another Atlas Network right-wing think tank and arguably the most influential in the country. Heritage is behind the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership roadmap that the Trump administration appears to be hewing closely to. The Heritage speakers include Rob Bluey, executive editor of its Daily Signal outlet, John Backiel, a visiting fellow for its Capital Markets Initiative, Victoria Coates, Vice President of its Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, Robert Greenway, director of its Allison Center for National Security, and Ryan Neuhaus, the group’s chief of staff.

The conference will also feature two speakers from Trump-allied America First groups. Gene Hamilton is president of America First Legal, a lawfare group he co-founded with senior Trump advisor and white nationalist Stephen Miller that has targeted allegedly “woke” companies. Former Ambassador Carla Sands, meanwhile, is vice chair of the Center for Energy and Environment at the America First Policy Institute, which helped staff the second Trump administration.

Two of the NatCon 5 speakers are from organizations that the civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as hate groups. One is Faust of Them Before Us. The other is Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the anti-immigrant group Center for Immigration Studies, which was founded by eugenicist and famed white nationalist John Tanton.

Other extremists speaking at the NatCon conference as well—White nationalist commentator Steve Bannon, for example, a former Trump strategist and far-right conspiracy promoter. The event will also feature former Claremont 2019 Lincoln Fellow and white surpemacist Jack Posobiec as well as anti-vax conspiracy theorist and COVID-19 contrarian Jeffrey Tucker, who founded The Brownstone Institute.

A child labor and youth smoking advocate with past links to neo-Confederate groups, Tucker launched Brownstone in 2021 to oppose economically disruptive pandemic mitigation measures. Today, it is one of the leading organizations in the Make America Health Again movement that merges MAGA with the anti-vaccine movement. The group has become a hub of COVID misinformation, anti-vax content, and conspiracy theories. Despite being solidly on the fringes, it boasts impressive connections to multiple public health officials—Bhattacharya, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, his assistant Tracy Beth Høeg, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research head Vinay Prasad, and multiple members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices like chairman Martin Kulldorff and Robert Malone.

Other notable NatCon 5 speakers include Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, which works to keep the Supreme Court stacked with right-wing Justices and helped secure Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation. The conference will see the return of Dan Caldwell, the former senior advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who was ousted over leaks in a Signal chat that included a reporter. Josh Hammer, the senior editor-at-large at Newsweek, is also speaking. So is Inez Feltscher Stepman, senior policy and legal analyst at the anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum, an Atlas Network group with links to the Koch political network. Speaker Shyam Sankar, meanwhile, is the chief technology officer at Thiel’s Palantir Technologies.

NatCon 5 is a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a right-wing dark money group founded in 2019 to promote the National Conservative ideology. The foundation’s leadership includes Christopher DeMuth, a Distinguished Fellow in American thought at Heritage and former president of the American Enterprise Institute. DeMuth is the chairman emeritus of the conference.

The foundation has ties across the political right. Initial funding came from The Jewish Philosophy Fund which contributed $174,000. Yoram Hazony, an American-Israeli philosopher, is not only the group’s chairman, he is the president of the Israel based Herzl Institute, and was previously the director of the John Templeton Foundation's project in Jewish Philosophical Theology. Hazony is considered to be part of JD Vance’s inner circle, which has guided him on his political journey from Trump critic to vice president. The Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund also contributed $100,000 to the founding of the Edmund Burke Foundation. The Fund is a private foundation of hedge fund manager and GOP megadonor Thomas Klingenstein, who is also the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute.

Past sponsors of NatCon include Peter Thiel as well as Cathy and Alex Cranberg, who have provided at least $350,000 in support. Alex Cranberg is a Republican donor whose wealth comes from oil and gas production, and has close links to the Koch Network. In 2017 he hosted a Koch-sponsored gathering of donors in Colorado Springs. He is a founding member of the Edmund Burke Foundation and will be speaking at NatCon 5.

The Common Sense Society (CSS) donated at least $250,000 to NatCon Miami and $50,000 to an Orlando event, and was a named sponsor for conferences in Brussels and London held in 2019. The CSS also provided $205,000 in funding to the founding of the Edmund Burke Foundation.

Founded in 2009 in Central Europe, CSS describes itself as a “celebration of the political, intellectual, and cultural inheritance which constitute our shared civilization” seeking to cultivate “a future that draws on the best of the past”. Operating as an international network, CSS aims to identify and train future leaders in the “nature of liberty” on subjects such as “cultural inheritance and personal responsibility”.

The group has links to a multitude of conservative and radical right organizations in the U.S. Its President and CEO Marion Smith is a former visiting Heritage Foundation fellow and the former CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Other CSS leadership links include The Leadership Institute, Restoration Project Foundation, The Claremont Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, and The Daily Caller.

There are now also CSS National Branches in Hungary, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has spoken at previous NatCon events as have his Political Director Balazs Orbán, representatives of his MCC culture war think tanks and the Hungarian-based Danube Institute.