Conservatism Must Be at the Heart of Our Institutions

My remarks at the Bradley Prize.

On Thursday, I accepted the Bradley Prize, which is widely regarded as the highest honor in conservative thought. The following is a transcript of my prepared remarks.

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It’s great to be with all of you tonight. I’d like to thank the Bradley Foundation, the members of the selection committee, and my family — my wife and four children, who are here with us tonight.

In many ways, I am an unlikely conservative, and being here on this stage tonight comes to me as something of a surprise. I grew up with very left-wing politics. My first political memories were with my aunts and uncles in Italy, looking through their bookshelves, which included Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and other communist theorists.

As a teenager, my family gifted me a flag of Che Guevara bearing his black-and-white portrait and the slogan “Always Until Victory” beneath it. I entered Georgetown University with an aspiration to be involved in left-wing politics here in America, but that early idealism did not survive contact with reality. My experience at Georgetown began a process of disillusionment with the American Left.

I remember participating in one of the left-wing campus groups, which had organized a hunger strike on behalf of the cafeteria workers. There was a lot of enthusiasm, but no one seemed to have spoken with the cafeteria workers themselves. When I talked with them — mostly Latina immigrant women — I realized that the students, largely descended from America’s elite families, had adopted a cause for status-seeking rather than out of genuine concern. The workers told me they felt awkward about the strike, did not support it, and worried it would harm them.

After college, I wanted to get away from academic life and politics and see the world. I traveled for about a decade, producing documentaries and reading widely about social, cultural, and economic life. I saw the devastation of post-Soviet societies and then the devastation of America’s post-industrial cities. That reading pointed me to a new politics — one I had not imagined: conservatism.

I was looking for answers to what I saw in reality, and the conservative tradition, to my surprise, best explained what I witnessed and aligned most closely with it. In time, I realized that conservatism, at its best, is a tradition that is not opposed to change but seeks to maintain continuity and hand down hard-won wisdom. 

The Bradley Prize winners are part of that tradition and, on my intellectual journey, have influenced me profoundly. Charles Murray’s Coming Apart explained what I showed in my PBS film America Lost. Robert Woodson helped me see the problems with the Great Society and that the solutions were spiritual and cultural. Dr. Larry Arnn taught me what it means to have a liberal education, and Harvey Mansfield gave me a deeper understanding of Machiavelli.

Most Bradley Prize winners are scholars with deep knowledge who have published a lifetime of work on the most serious questions facing our society. By comparison, my own contribution is modest. I’m a journalist, writer, activist, and tactician.

But I believe I’m here tonight because I’ve added a distinct element to the conservative tradition — practical politics, or political tactics. I’ve helped launch cultural campaigns against critical race theory, trans ideology, DEI, and the corruption of higher education. My practical work has changed institutions in Florida, and now, with the second Trump administration in Washington, D.C., I hope to do the same at the federal level. I’ve tried to take insights from our greatest scholars, philosophers, and theoreticians and make them real.

My core conviction is that politics is not only a matter of intellect and principle but of advancing those principles in reality. I’ve tried to give the conservative tradition a fighting spirit and to develop new tactics so our ideas — which, as I’ve seen worldwide, are most conducive to human happiness — once again animate America’s institutions. This fight is by no means easy, as many scholars have documented.

The radical Left has saturated our institutions with ideology, built the American state into a leviathan, and obscured our tradition’s highest principles so that most Americans no longer see them. My conviction is that we must fight to restore them. We have to recapture the institutions. We have to make the great principles of the United States visible again to the average American. And, as Larry Arnn has argued, we have to reanimate what it means to be a citizen.

For me, the future of conservatism carries life-and-death ramifications for America as a whole. Our civilization is under sustained ideological attack, to the point that many Americans can’t name the three branches of government or distinguish between a man and a woman.

The conservative tradition offers the antidote to this modern nihilism, but it requires more than holding the right principles. We must make those principles real. We must entrench them in the institutions that matter — especially in education.

As Aristotle observed many centuries ago, education must be designed to form the young for the political order, or regime. If we continue with critical race theory and gender cultism, that is what America will become. But if we fight for the high principles outlined by Samuel Adams, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the other founders at every inch, we still have a chance to renew America’s purpose and advance our civilization into the coming century. 

It is an immense honor to be included among the conservative tradition’s most distinguished thinkers. I am tremendously grateful to all of you for supporting the fight and for recognizing my work. Thank you, and God bless.