Bulwark Takes - GOP Senator Pushes “Heritage American” Caste System

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Tim Miller talks to Andrew Egger about his day at the National Conservatism Conference. It is on the rise, and it’s getting darker. At their latest conference, GOP figures pushed a “heritage American” caste system, openly embraced authoritarian power grabs, and even flirted with overturning gay marriage. The movement is fractured between Christian nationalists, tech futurists, and grievance politics, but united in wanting to redefine America on blood, soil, and power.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. Tim Miller from the Bullwark here with Andrew Eger, author of our Morning Shots newsletter, White House correspondent, who are several other hats, porn correspondent. We haven't done anything on that in a while. It's been out of the news.

It has been out of the news. Andrew was at the National Conservative Conference for us yesterday and wrote for that in the morning newsletter. You should check that out. That was the conference for people who are not following, you know, right-wing nerd stuff that closely that we referenced on yesterday's TNL where the senator from Missouri, Eric Schmidt was talking about how, you know, we should appreciate

blood and soil, Mayflower Americans. Because Schmidt is definitely one of those. And so I want to talk to you, Andrew, about that speech, but also kind of this broader trend in this group about really emphasizing

kind of when people came to America. There's a new identity phrase out there, which makes me laugh, called Heritage Americans. You know, you have African Americans, Asian Americans. Now we have heritage Americans, which are not Native Americans, by the way. They are people that came over on certain boats during a certain time period that their ancestors did. And Eric Schmidt, even though his ancestors were not among those heritage Americans, was kind of honoring them as greater Americans than the rest of us, just regular old Americans. So I'm wondering

what you make of that trend, what you saw, and what you heard around all that. Yeah, I don't know if you've seen. There's been this meme bouncing around among certain people on the right these days that I've seen a bunch of times. And it literally is like a, it's a little cheat sheet. It says at the top, how American are you and has grade A Americans who are colonial old stock? Colonial old stock from 1607 to 1789. The antebellum stock are grade B. Their families came over between 1789 and 1861. Grade C are the Ellis Islanders. We're bringing back. We're bringing back. We're bringing back. Jingoism against the Ellis Islanders 1861 to 1945 And that's my crew Shout out Ellis Island stock Grade D are the new arrivals So anybody since

Anybody since 1945 1945 to present And that Where do black people fit in there Do you know Are they in the colonial stock Do they count as part of the colonial stock Certainly a lot of them

At least antebellum right I mean there are all sorts of weird kind of cross currents To all of this because a lot of these A lot of this is focused less on you know, anti-black racism. It's more like, you know, the latest wave of Hispanic migration that we have recently. It's all very, you know, you could spend a long time sort of digging around in the muck of all this stuff.

But this way of looking at sort of the world, it's a little bit ironic. It's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's real. I mean, like, this is kind of genuinely how a lot of these people feel about it. And you felt a lot of that at NACON. The thing that interested me so much about Eric Schmidt's speech is that Eric Schmidt is an adopter of this ideology, right? I mean, I covered Eric Schmidt on the campaign trail, and he was very Republican. You know, I mean, he's the former attorney general of Missouri. He spent his whole term as attorney general, basically suing the pants off the Biden administration for all sorts of things and using that to build his brand to run for Senate.

But that's the kind of stuff he talked about. But also, like in a different world, if Paul Ryan had become president, Eric Schmidt would be a Paul Ryan Republican. Maybe, yeah. He's very Ted Cruzy, I think, is like a pretty good analogy from the before times. Ted Cruz actually spoke out of a Schmidt rally. that I was at in St. Louis, the St. Louis area one time. So Schmidt gets to Washington, and as a new freshman senator in Washington, he apparently decides that one way to make a name for himself is by really embracing this national

conservatism thing, which is all about sort of hanging this, sort of star spangling that idea, taking that idea that we were just talking about, which is really a fundamentally anti-American idea that, that, you know, we should basically think of Americans in terms of these racial casts, or at least like chronological casts, like some weird version of India. And to say that that very anti-American idea is actually like, if you're not into that, you're the one who's anti-American, right? It's actually, it's actually like, you know, a betrayal of the spirit of the, of the Valley Forge, you know, the guys who fought under George Washington and the Revolutionary War who suffered through the winter at Valley Forge, like, like if you don't think that those guys are

and their descendants are basically better than, you know, the whoever, the riffraff, we've got all around now, you are, you're the problem here. You're the one who's kind of spitting on the idea of America. It's all a little more coded than that, but that's, that's very present in all of this. It's anti-American. There's a hint of neo-confederate, though, to it. There's a bit of, I mean, even just the terminology, like stock, like stock is a, is a strange word to talk about the group of people. You know what I mean? It is kind of, it does, it feels almost like you're talking about a racehorse, you know, like a non-human, like you're trying, like they come from a good. And there are ways to talk about how someone comes from good stock that isn't racist.

But, you know, just like the terminology, you know, heritage obviously ties to a lot of, you know, one of the rallying cries of neo-Confederates about how they were about heritage, not hate. Like this idea that that we need a separate identity group for them and that like they are, they have a special status. It is fundamentally anti-declaration, anti-American, but they kind of say their anti-declaration a lot of times. And it is, like, we have foreign viewers on YouTube. Like, it's not so uncommon for foreigners.

Like, I got into an argument with one of our FYI podcast, who's a conservative guy from Australia. And he was, like, saying that, like, from his point of view, that makes sense. I don't know, like, in other countries, right? Like, if you're in Turkey, like, or Hungary, like, that is at least a common way to view. you know, maybe you don't get a special status, but like, you know, we honor our traditional Magyar Hungarian heritage in a way that, you know, that is, that's like kind of true to their history. Like that is not not what America is about. Like it's the opposite, right? Like this, this idea. And the funny thing is it's such an opposite that it's kind of, it's like, it actually is

embracing an ideology that a lot of these people's ancestors fled, right? That was the ideology in Europe that these people fled, right? Which is like, oh, I don't, I don't not respect it as much because I don't believe the appropriate approved religion or I don't, you know, I don't have the, the noble, nobility titles that I do. And so they came to America for something different. And these guys are trying to now reanimate that here under the like American flag. It's a really perverse deal. And I want to just dwell on one other thing about it because I think there's like, like when you lay it out this way, it is very unappealing to basically everybody.

Like there's this, there's this small, small group of like, you know, basically race science obsessed weirdos who are mostly online who like traffic in the open stuff, right? Like that meme I was just talking about before. But what is kind of like Theo Vaughn doesn't know when his ancestors came across the ocean. Like, there's a lot of like regular people, mac and people out there like not, like this is not only unappealing to them.

It's just like crazy. Yeah, yeah. But I think like sort of the seductive like appeal of what guys like Eric Schmidt and a lot of these other NAC cons tried to do with all of this is they bolt that on. They kind of they kind of launder what we've been talking about into a more general sort of grievance about a sense that the country's not what it used to be and we're losing sight of ourselves as Americans and just sort of this broader right wing critique. of sort of modernity and the left and all of this stuff. And they, and they sell, they try to

sell people and have succeeded and selling at least some people on the idea that these are actually fundamentally the same thing, right? Like, so just a quote very briefly from Eric Schmidt's speech. This is him. Trump's movement is the revolt of the real American nation. It's a pitchfork revolution driven by the millions of Americans who felt that they were turning into strangers in their own country. They were the Americans whose factories were gutted in the name of free trade, whose sons were sent to die in wars that served no American interests whose neighborhoods were transformed beyond recognition by immigration. So he's he's he's he's lumping in all these things that are not like, you know, phrenology. They're not talking about like

ethnic, you know, casts like like some of these other napcons do. But, but it's it's an attempt to like say, oh, you're the one. Are you like a regular conservative person sort of feeling alienated and unsettled in these sorts of ways? Well, I got news for you. Like the good news is you are the only one who's opinion really matters, right? And you're, you're, we, we, we can get you back to like to, to the restoration. And it's actually by, uh, and they kind of like whisper this part. And it's by sort of like getting into the, all this business of sort of race superiority and stuff like that that we're going to deliver that project to you. So it's, uh, it's all very strange and, and different and new. The process side of this is as ominous and creepy and horrible as it is, is another thing that

you observed, um, is right. Like you said, this is, it's an unappealing message. Like it's, it's stuff that Trump also launders through other things, right? Like, and he never really even gets as, like, as nerdy about it as they, as these guys do. But, um, even in the, like, you, you observed that they, they seem to be Trump, uh, struggling to gather, like a proactive, um, agenda, uh, among the Nat cons, right? Like, they know what they don't like, right? They don't like immigrants. They don't like modernity. They don't like woke corporations, right?

They don't like us. They don't like, they don't like, you know, the free market. They don't like free trade. They don't like neoconservatives. You know, like there are a million different things that they're like, well, that sucks. Right. But like when it comes to saying, okay, but our platform is this, right? Like they seem to be struggling with that a little bit.

Yeah, that has been, I mean, that was kind of a through line that I experienced over and over again as I was at this conference, which is that by far the slogan that you heard the most often. And you hear this a lot kind of on the new right is, it turns out you can just do things. And that is a slogan that is like deliberately sort of tweaking an older school of conservatism, right? That was more about sort of federal restraint. It was more about like limiting and shrinking the size and power of the federal government and, you know, preserving maximal individual autonomy and individual liberty and, you know, pushing more stuff down to lower levels of decision making than the federal government. and the NAC cons have hated that for a long time. They've been saying, no, let's wield power at the federal level.

Let's get as much of it as we can. Let's invest it for now in the person of Donald Trump. And let's use that, you know, to beat down our enemies to size a little bit. And so, you know, they said that over and over again. You can just do things. But when it came to actually talking about what it is that this group, this supposed like coalition wanted to do, it very quickly becomes clear that it is not one coalition. There is not one like policy project.

at all. And it's not like the old sort of fusionism, right? Like, because, you know, back in the day, back before your time, back before my time, the kind of way that conservatives got along with one another for a long time is it was like, all right, the neoconservatives are in charge of the foreign policy, and the social conservatives are in charge of the social policy, and the fiscal conservatives and free marketers are in charge of the economic policy, and everybody kind of gets along. But these guys are all, like, wrapped up together. There are like super pro-Israel foreign policy people in this coalition. And there are super anti-Israel foreign policy people in this coalition. There are incredible tech optimists who think that AI is going to usher in this sort of bold

new future. And that all we need to do is like de-wokify Silicon Valley. And then Silicon Valley will like, you know, lead us where we need to go. And there are enormously anti-tech, like kind of Luddite type, more sort of like religious, social conservative types who are like, no, that stuff's all poison. That stuff's all terrible. We need to get out, get that out. you know, there was a speaker on Tuesday who was railing against sort of like Silicon Valley transhumanism as sort of a concept. And so like all these things are, are all, you know, there's, there's a very strong Christian nationalist presence that's like what we absolutely need is to, you know, basically as a Christian coalition organized politically for the benefit

of Christians and for the benefit of the Christian faith and draw, you know, on the Christian faith to govern these policy decisions. And then there's, you know, the kind of older school sort of like Judeo-Christian ecumenism sort of thing where it's like, no, you know, we can all kind of like get along as theists who believe in the natural law. And the thing is, it's not at all clear, you know, as they're all having all of these fights, that they are like reconcilable in any way. And the way that they get over that in the meantime is by focusing on the common enemies, right?

It's like, you know, we'll deal with the left first or we'll deal with, you know, the Muslim first before we deal with this like Christian Jewish problem or or whatever, you know, like, well, we got a, we got to, you know, I don't know, wrap up whatever's going on with Iran before we, before we figure out like what we're going to do with Israel, all that sort of stuff. At least, or at least we got to, or at least we can agree that we hate the neocons and the neocon approach is wrong to Iran. Like, like, all they can ever do is like fall back on this common enemy thing or fall back on like the fact that they all love Trump, right? But they're supposedly going to be running the coalition from now on. That's what they want, right?

Like they want to be, they want to exile all of us and be the people in charge and they want to outlast Trump. Like they want to still be doing this even once Trump is gone. And like that was the thing that just I came back to over and over again is it just does not seem possible that that is going to work as a governing coalition once they lose those two kind of like things that are gluing them all together, the president and us. I guess I'd say I'd be worried about the Jew if I was a Jew in the coalition because it doesn't, it seems like they might be next on the chopping block. The last topic that might divide them, I guess, but you mentioned, which caught my eye, was in this discussion in the group about overturning Obergafel. I've been kind of a skeptic of this, like, concern about overtrained gay marriage.

I just, I think that there's a lot of ways where it's different than Roe, even though they get loved together, you know, both legally and politically. That's, I don't think there's a zero percent chance. And I think that even if it doesn't happen, like the fact that they want to try is telling and a pretty noted sea change from like where these kind of discussions would have been a few years ago. Yeah, absolutely. And especially strange, you know, at a moment when, you know, there's like a much more significant presence of like out gay men in the Trump administration right now than there ever has been in Republic anywhere. Yeah, the A-gays.

New York Times gave him a splashy, you know, write-up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I honestly did not know what to make of that. I mean, the, the NACON conference was founded by Peter Thiel a few years ago. I mean, not founded by him, but he was like its first big bank roller. Now, he's in a homosexual marriage. Yes, yes, and has, you know, like... He did have his boyfriend died mysteriously, but anyway.

I don't know anything about any of that. But he hasn't been a NACON. I'm just saying something that happened. I don't know anything about it either. I was just saying that's an interesting fact when you're talking about the context. Sorry, continue. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he, I mean, like, he's not at NACCON now, you know, like, he's just absent and, like,

not that that's interesting not just because there's all these people who are going after you know his sort of techno futurist secular populism but also but also the gay marriage stuff and I don't know like like I'm not sure the guys at this conference speak in this way for sort of the broader even national conservative movement right I mean this is exactly what I'm talking about there's tons of internal discord on all of this stuff but it's but it's very interesting and notable that it's like that the the explicitly Christian nationalist faction of that faction is at least, I guess, running the conferences now. All right.

Well, thank you for being there and monitoring so that I didn't have to. I don't know that I would have been a welcome site there at the NatCon conference, not really my base. But we'll keep an eye on these guys because unfortunately, as you mentioned in your articles running a trip, which should go read, many of the people that were in those kind of empty chairs there were, it's because they're in the government now. A lot of folks that had been there in the past are in the government. So unfortunately, it's an important group to monitor.

That's Andrew Agger. subscribe to the feed we'll see all soon