Rachel Bovard spoke at the 4th National Conference of National Conservatism in Washington, DC on Monday.
Photo: NatCon/X
Walking into the Fourth National Conference of Conservatives in Washington, DC this week, I noticed the prevalence of men there. Most of them were young, white, clean-cut, and serious as they greeted one another. There were a few women at the table, for various reasons. Other women were dotted among the audience during the opening plenary session. I don’t mean to belittle the women; they are true believers, partners in the effort of cultural change and political conquest, just as the men are. But the gender ratio is hard to ignore, as is the obvious white Christian obsession with fertility. Perhaps more than any other subject, this engages the speakers and energizes the audience.
Faith, family and fertility are “the new mainstream,” Chris Demuth of the Heritage Foundation told a pale, mostly male audience. Demuth, a former aide to President Nixon who once ran the American Enterprise Institute, later complained that a “fragmented, feminized, self-centered culture” had come to prize individual autonomy above all else. He didn’t explain what he meant by “feminization,” but he clearly sees it as a fate to be avoided, and perhaps an obstacle to having children. Yoram Hazony, godfather of Natcon, would go on to say that no matter how many immigrants there are, if they don’t have children, the country is finished. Only having children is “honorable,” he said.
Anti-feminism is key to the NationalCon project, and women too. Someone has to have all the babies. Such obsessions are nothing new for the right, but they help distinguish NationalCon today from its peers. NationalCon sees itself as a defender of faith and people against the left as well as the more mainstream right. For now they are in the minority, but several panelists have worked in the Trump White House and could return if re-elected. Trump may want to distance himself from Project 2025, but NationalCon welcomes it. Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation defended it in a speech Wednesday afternoon. Earlier, I had gotten a Project 2025 sticker with Reagan’s face on it. Then I walked past a Liberty University booth and picked up a pink and white sticker. It said, “Biblical Womanhood, Not Feminism.”
After DeMuth opened the conference, we heard from Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a powerful “networking hub” for conservatives in Washington. She is a seasoned conservative activist, as David Brooks noted after the last NationalCon. She has worked for Republican Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee, and National Journal She was called one of “Washington’s most influential women under 35.” But she began her speech by establishing another truth: that of motherhood: She had been up since early that morning with her newborn baby, and she thanked her mother and husband for their help.
There is nothing wrong with Bovard’s gratitude, much less her motherhood, at least on the surface. I am a feminist, but feminism does not denigrate mothers, but rather aims for a world in which women are free to choose whether or not to have children, a world in which women can be full human beings who can work and raise children if they so choose. That world does not yet exist. With abortion no longer available in many parts of the country, motherhood has become a trap rather than an option for many, and it is conservative women who have broken that trap. Total victory is still eluding them, but their goal is gradually coming into focus. At NatCon 4, it was clear: a woman should be a nanny at home, where she takes care of her own children – unless she is a nagging, scolding person outside.
Neither role gives women any real freedom, let alone the autonomy that Demuth abhorred. If, as Hazony puts it, having children makes one “honored,” then women are dishonored unless they become mothers. Because women’s status depends on men, they must always work for, and especially for, aggressive masculinity. Women’s roles here are narrow, but they are still influential. Like Bovard, women can and do carve out public roles as natcons, just as women have always done in the broader realm. Natcons know they need women, especially white women; they are a resource that men want to secure for themselves.
That became more clear as the afternoon progressed. Stephen Miller injected his usual venom into the meeting. He argued that the “fugitives” and “predators” of the world see the United States as a place to plunder, and he spoke of a mother of five who had been raped and murdered, and of a 13-year-old girl who had been raped in a park, both allegedly by male immigrants. Miller was, in fact, obsessed with rape, and with women and girls. Voters, he argued, wanted to know that their mothers, sisters, daughters, wives could go out for a jog and come home safe. “Democrats,” he implied, had put them at risk, even the crowds.
But the women at Natcon aren’t just props: Like Bovard, they speak out, but their voices are often limited to traditionally female concerns like sex and reproduction. At the end of the first day, I joined a panel on “Big Tech, Big Porn,” moderated by The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham. Standing with Successful Men: A Woman’s Guide to Having It AllTwo of the four speakers were women: Claire Morrell of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Emily Jasinski of The Federalist. Here, I learned that women can also be scolds of the movement, an old role that has been repackaged for the digital age. Morrell wants to put pornography out of reach of children by imposing age verification laws, regardless of concerns about free speech. For Jasinski, ethical pornography production and consumption are both impossible. Another panelist, law professor Adam Canduve, supported age verification laws but vociferously argued that American conservatives should avoid pornography altogether, calling it “bad men, bad male sexuality.” But not everyone seems worried about that. During the Q&A period, a male college student asked why we don’t try to ban pornography for everyone, not just children. Morrell said starting with a child pornography ban would be more feasible and would “create momentum for the future.”
NationalCon’s critique of pornography is similar to that of Anthony Comstock, a 19th-century zealous Christian who sought to eradicate impurity in society. No one on the panel mentioned the Comstock Act, which banned the distribution by mail of “obscene” material, including pornography and material that could cause an abortion. As The 19th reported earlier this year, the law has not been enforced for decades. But in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Comstock has taken on new meaning. Dobbs Opinion overturned eggIn a recent case before the courts, anti-abortion plaintiffs cited the Comstock Act in asking the FDA to revoke its approval of mifepristone. The court dismissed the case on standing grounds, but the Comstock Act looms.
“Beyond DobbsPanelists made oblique references to the law on Day 3, on “Abortion Law.” According to Katie Talent, a naturopath and former Trump administration official, the U.S. Postal Service has become “Planned Parenthood.” “There are laws that prohibit organizations from sending abortion pills or other abortion supplies or equipment across state lines through the mail,” Talent added. “This is an agenda for a pro-life administration.” (Talent also once said that IVF “furthers our cultural right to godlike power over life and death.”)
In line with the general trend, Dobbs The panel included three women, a higher number than I’m used to seeing at NatCon. One of them, Mary Margaret Olohan of the Daily Signal, spent time on “gender ideology,” i.e. transgender rights. Panelist and longtime anti-abortion activist Tom McCluskey identified these as obstacles to having children. “We have children. They don’t have children,” he said. Instead, he said, liberals “neuter” and “sterilize” children. As Olohan finished misgendering college swimmer Leah Thomas, Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation began her remarks, emphasizing her own motherhood, just as Bovard had. She went on to praise traditional wife influencers on social media and urge “cultural solutions” such as matchmaking and date-setting for children.
Here, women had some power, but it depended on whether they made the right choice to marry a man and have children while they were still young. After all, that’s what we really wanted. Abortion is “abominable,” Talent said during the Q&A. “It’s against nature. It’s against all women’s desires.” The decision of whether a woman should continue or abort the pregnancy “is primarily up to the man, the father,” Waters told one of the attendees. The idea that a woman might not want children for her own independent reasons didn’t seem to occur to the panelists. To her, there were only two options: to be a nanny at home or to be a scolder who scolds others. Talent added that if “women who control sex value it so cheaply,” men have no reason to marry them. For Natcon, women have little value outside of sex and reproduction.
The thing is, Dobbs The panel convened. On the second day of the conference, two right-wing Christian leaders took to the stage: Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention and Doug Wilson, a popular radical Idaho-based pastor who founded the unchartered New St. Andrews University. Their presence was a meaningful statement for the women. Mohler supports criminalizing some women who get abortions. “I think there are different kinds of moral responsibility,” he said in a podcast in March. “The law, by the way, makes a distinction on this point. The law makes a distinction between manslaughter and murder and first-degree murder and premeditated murder and all that kind of thing. In other words, there is a distinction in the law.” For Mohler, men are God-appointed leaders in the home and in the church, and women must obey them.
Wilson shares Mohler’s beliefs, but goes a few steps further than the Southern Baptist theologian: Heterosexual sex “cannot be a party of equal pleasure,” he writes. Chastity: What it means to be a faithful man. “Men invade, conquer, colonize, and plant. Women receive, submit, and accept.” He argued in his blog that Christian women are simply more beautiful than “non-believing” women, who “either compete for men’s attention with outlandish messages conveying variations on ‘easy sex’ or give up on the effort altogether in exasperation, thus giving birth to Lumberjack Lesbians.” Anti-LGBT bigotry is an obsession for Wilson, and he couldn’t finish a speech at NationalCon without slandering it, but pedophilia may not bother him as much. He once asked a judge to show leniency to Steven Sittler, a New St. Andrews student who abused children in the early 2000s. He later performed the wedding of Sittler to a young woman in his church, but Sittler returned to court because he was sexually aroused by his young son. Wilson welcomed him into his church. Wilson has now found his own haven, despite or because of his past work.
It’s a small conference, but the participants are moving forward. “I’m a Christian nationalist,” Sen. Josh Hawley proudly declared in his speech. So did his wife, Erin, a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom who recently argued the Comstock Act before the Supreme Court. The ultimate success of national conservatism may depend on women: women who already have faith, and women who rule. Women didn’t invent “biblical femininity,” but the sentiment feels threatening here.
