The Daily Signal - Defining Conservative Leadership: Dr. Kevin Roberts on Policy, Politics, and the 2025 Elections

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Starting point is 00:00:25 We'd love to talk, business. Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. I'm your host, Joe Thomas, Virginia correspondent for The Daily Signal. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to thank you for tuning in today. If you're a first-time listener, The Daily Signal, brings you fact-based reporting and conservative commentary on politics, policy, and culture. And I hope you join our band of regular listeners to our podcast. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and also take a

Starting point is 00:01:06 moment to rate and review us wherever you get your podcast, you can find additional content at DailySignal.com. Now, let's get started with today's conversation right after this. Dr. Kevin Roberts from the Heritage Foundation is on with us. Dr. Roberts, thank you for taking some time out with us. How are you doing, sir? Well, I'm doing well. It's wonderful to be with you, Joe. There are a lot of challenges in the country across the world, but there are also a lot of opportunities as I like to remind people and you know this well, we're winning and we need to act like it. Well, and that's where I think a lot of this mania comes from is, and I made this case yesterday. I'm curious your thought, all this redistricting mania that I haven't seen since the Jim Crow days.

Starting point is 00:01:52 I mean, you want to talk about Jim Crow 2.0. We're trying to district out entire swaths of a population from having any electoral voice. it all really, I think, ties to the power of the Turning Point USA movement, because I truly believe the American Marxists believe that if they don't gain power now, by the time these kids that are in all these Turning Point USA chapters get, graduate and get out into the world, they could be facing 70 years of political irrelevancy in very quick order because of all these kids that are coming through turning Point, USA. I believe that's 100% correct at Heritage and especially at Heritage Action, our campaign arm, as you know, we do a lot of collaboration with Turning Point. We always have. We're perhaps going to be doing more of that in the near future. But even beyond the election cycles where we might be doing some work with them, there's a larger point to be made, and you just made it really well. And it's more social. It's more cultural. And that is that the left, which has got this really weird but also tragic, co-elial.

Starting point is 00:03:01 going on between the neo-Marxists like AOC with the radical Islamists like the soon-to-be mayor of New York, Mondani. That's something that is so radical that I would like to think there will never be a time that majority of Americans would adhere to that. And so they've got to attempt to impose their will from their thought on the left right now. But contrast that with the positive, a bullion rally in Mississippi last night, that turning point organized with Erica Kirk, Charlie's widow, and Vice President J.D. Vance. This is something, you know, the tenor, the tone of those rallies, in addition to their size, a very impressive

Starting point is 00:03:42 10,000 people, is the tenor and tone are really optimistic. They're aspirational about the American future, and I think that scares the daylight out of the left, because ultimately the political project of the left has only two things to it. Hate Donald Trump and divide the populace so that they can have power. Well, and that America, of itself is a racist, inequitable society. I think is something that, you know, I can't even remember when I first noticed that that was their argument. I think it's the Ibram-Kendi anti-racist school curriculums here in Charlottesville, the riots of 2017, this idea. And what's funny is they'll talk about Thomas Jefferson being a racist, but then you'll look at the very

Starting point is 00:04:26 people who wrote the Permanent Reapportionment Act of 1929. And They were actual members of the clan in some cases because they were afraid that if they didn't cap the size of the House of Representatives, the black population would continue to grow and continue to gain congressional power and weaken theirs. And yet, we're told that Jefferson is the racist. I mean, that's where I really feel like I almost feel bad for the people who have been so gaslit into believing this stuff. No, it's true. and offer just a sliver of optimism there. I'm still hopeful. We operate with this rationale at Heritage, as you know,

Starting point is 00:05:05 that maybe there are still some people on the left, on the center left, who are open to persuasion. Yeah, let's hope and pray, because the future of America would be good. But the point I wanted to make in response to your great observation there about the racism on the left is the irony that all of that revisionist history really accelerated at the exact same time that the country elected

Starting point is 00:05:27 its first black president, Barack Obama. And I think the tragedy of Obama's presidency, and I mean this respectfully toward him, both personally and politically, the tragedy beyond really terrible policy is that as the first black president, he did more to harm racial harmony in this country than he did to heal it.

Starting point is 00:05:48 Dr. Kevin Roberts, on with us from the Heritage Foundation where he is president. And please, you know, almost more important than it's been since, Russell Kirk and company, you know, started Ned Felner, the Heritage Foundation, more important now than almost ever before in its history where we meet today, Kevin. So I appreciate your time. I have floated a theory on what's going on in the, I mentioned earlier, the Permanent Reapportionment Act. And if you go back to 1930, which was the census right after it was enacted, and you say, okay, the population was 122 million, then it's 340 million now.

Starting point is 00:06:34 So even if you go back to that number, we would have almost three times as many Congress people as we did then. The original draft of the Bill of Rights, the very first thing that George Mason thought would be the most important thing to protect America. from an out-of-control central government was congressional districts that didn't exceed 50,000 people, which I know would mean 6,400 people in Congress. But I think that you would have a country that certainly wouldn't fall prey to this redistricting mania, where we're watching people gerrymander districts in a 53, 47 state like Virginia into, you know, 10 to 1 Democrat Congress people. Does that make any sense whatsoever, or am I just a talk show host who may have had one too many cups of coffee? No, you make 100% sense, which is no surprise to me, Joe. In fact,

Starting point is 00:07:33 my heritage colleague Hans von Spacobst, who is one of the foremost election law experts, says that he's observed for years that your thesis is exactly correct. In other words, let's just posit that what the country decided to do with the Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s was legitimate and fair and important to correct what was indeed racial injustice. The time has come, as a very, this is context for your question, the time has come to realize, as the Supreme Court is considering now, that that served its purpose, but even worse, to the heart of your question, that law and others, particularly state laws and blue states, are being used as a cudgel by the radical left to accrue more political power illegitimately.

Starting point is 00:08:18 And so the good news, the silver lining, and it's really legitimate and all of that, is that I think the Supreme Court is likely to at least partially overturn the Voting Rights Act soon. And then that gives us the opportunity on the political right, not to do to the left what they have done to us, but instead to the great aspiration in your question, to actually do the will of the people. in every state to be fair and certainly to have honest elections but most of all socially and culturally to come back to that point that we're no longer dividing Americans along racial and ethnic lines that is in our past and we need to recognize it I you know that's so important because you know

Starting point is 00:08:59 recognizing that we're different and being okay with it is such an essential part of what makes America and and why when people say well what's a conservative is conservative is conservative means conserving the society. And that is so essential to the society. If we lose it, there's nothing left to conserve. That's so true. And this is why the left has been so zealous in taking over most of our institutions,

Starting point is 00:09:30 our K-12 schools, our colleges and universities. And as we've talked about this morning, our politics and our elections. And so not only do we need to have the policy solutions for that, which I haven't think we do at Heritage, but we also have to convince our fellow Americans, wherever they are on the political spectrum, our neighbors, our friends, our family members who maybe don't follow politics as closely as you and me, that in order to achieve the American dream individually, but in order for this republic to be on a path toward a golden age, that we have to put all that divisiveness in the past, and not just our policies, but our own behavior and rhetoric

Starting point is 00:10:09 have to exemplify that. And I'm just, I lament the following. I'm not jabbing at the left when I say it. I just don't see a lot of aspirational rhetoric from the left right now. And I think the American people are going to hold them accountable to that in the next couple of election cycles. Dr. Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president on with us this morning. First thing today.

Starting point is 00:10:32 And you bring this up, and I think some of it has to do with this idea that there's poverty. And I go back to the great society. I mean, we just celebrated, quote, unquote, 60 years of the great society. We have four times as many people living below the poverty line, which then allows the politicians who prey on reparations and you're poor, they're not. It really, to a great degree, and I know you're a historian as well, a lot of what a lot of these Marxist movements, whether it be Germany in the 30s or Russia in the teens of the 19th, of the 20th century, use is they point at the middle class. and say, those are the rich guys. And the poor, having grown in such destitution, say, well, we're going to go get them. And the actual rich people are hiding out with the Marxists at the end of it.

Starting point is 00:11:22 And we're watching it happen in real time. No, we are. And just think of how successful the left has been in marching through the institutions over that century. And as my great colleague and friend at Heritage, Mike Gonzalez, has tracked in his last couple of books, really the last several years, his career, the intellectual history, if you will, of Marxism from the famous names of Marx himself and Lenin, up to the modern neo-Marxists, not just AOC in Congress, but perhaps even more importantly, the majority of American professors, at least in the arts, in the liberal arts, somewhat at least adhere to that ideology. And at the base of that is dividing the populace, first on economic

Starting point is 00:12:07 lines, and then secondly, on our immutable characteristics like our skin color. I mean, the whole project of the United States in the last hundred years has been an attempt to get beyond that. And it's interesting that it's the left that's standing in the way of that healing and harmony. Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation is on with us. Dr. Roberts, do you bring up a great point? And we're watching it here in Virginia. We played the clip of Eric Holder earlier in the hour where he laughably says, you know, gerrymandering is the way in which politicians pick their voters. But that's what we're watching here in Virginia and California.

Starting point is 00:12:46 I mean, Virginia, they're dropping a nuclear bomb on the entire constitutional process that goes back 400 years that's supposed to protect minority votes from being just trampled underfoot. you know, is this redistricting mania going to fail from where you sit, or is it going to be successful, and then it's going to require a Herculean effort to get rid of it, almost in the way we can't seem to get rid of Obamacare? Well, I'm an optimist, and so I'm optimistic that the mania will come to an end, and I want to be very specific about my answer, particularly as it relates to what the Democrats in Virginia are doing. Let me observe right before I do that very briefly how connected these two conversation threads that we have this morning are.

Starting point is 00:13:34 You just mentioned Eric Holder. Eric Holder, who is the architect of what the Virginia Democrats are doing right now as we speak, Joe, is also the architect of the Obama-Biden divisiveness along racial lines. It's really important to understand the connection of these two projects. But let me speak to the redistricting name because it's really important and it's timely. someone can be opposed to gerrymandering, to redistricting. Someone can be for that. That's actually a separate issue from the real problem that the Democrats have implemented in Virginia. What they're doing is illegal and unconstitutional. So even if you are a stark raving radical leftist and you think that Virginia has to respond in kind to Texas and to other red states, the way in which Virginia Democrats are

Starting point is 00:14:22 doing that is literally unconstitutional according to the state constitution. So what Texas did, even if someone disagrees with it, is actually fine according to their state constitution. But in Virginia, as you know well, what they are doing is saying, what the Democrats are doing is saying that the special session from 2024 has carried over into 2025, even with the interlude of a regular session. So obviously what they're doing has no basis to sum up here, Joe. How about you follow the Virginia Constitution and follow the will of the people, which is for a bipartisan commission to review this. And ultimately what that means is that you're going to have district lines that reflect the population in the Commonwealth of Virginia. That'll do it for today's show.

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The Daily Signal - Defining Conservative Leadership: Dr. Kevin Roberts on Policy, Politics, and the 2025 Elections

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