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Suella Braverman has been announced as a headline speaker alongside former Trump advisor Steve Bannon at the upcoming US National Conservatism conference (NatCon 4) in Washington.
James Orr of the Free Speech Union and UK chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation which organises NatCon will also be speaking at the event from 8-10 July.
This will be Braverman’s third NatCon appearance in a row after she spoke at the UK event last year, and in Brussels in April, when the first day was held behind a blockade after police tried to shut down the conference.
Braverman, featuring alongside Bannon after Liz Truss was recently criticised for her conspiracy-laden interview with Bannon, demonstrates how the right of the Conservative Party is being captured by the radical right that has gained control of the Republican Party.
Bannon’s appearance calls into question claims NatCon isn’t a far-right movement, and suggests a troubling attitude towards the foundations of democracy and the peaceful transition of power.
Bannon hasn’t accepted the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, was banned from X in November 2020 and had an episode of his War Room podcast removed from YouTube after implying that FBI Director Christopher Wray and Dr. Anthony Fauci should be beheaded and have their heads put on pikes outside the White House. Bannon may be heading to prison soon after a federal appeals court upheld his conviction from 2022 of contempt of Congress for refusing to provide testimony or documents to the committee probing the 6 January Capitol riot.
Washington NatCon’s line up features Republican politicians who have questioned the integrity of the 2020 election and defended the Capitol Hill rioters. Senator Josh Hawley led efforts in the Senate to overturn the Electoral College vote in the 2020 presidential election. J.D. Vance, rumoured to be on Donald Trump’s shortlist for vice-president has described jailed Capitol Hill rioters as “political prisoners” and said he would only accept the results of this year’s election if he deemed the vote to be legitimate, stating he still has concerns regarding the 2020 result.
Eric Schmitt, the junior United States senator from Missouri was involved in failed lawsuits challenging the 2020 result by suing Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to invalidate their electoral votes for Joe Biden and overturn the election results
Held four months before the US presidential election, NatCon is closely tied to the Trump campaign with speakers including Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation.
As previously reported in Byline Times , although the Foundation condemned the violence on 6 January, it maintains that election integrity is one of the “biggest issues” the US faces and that “voter fraud is a very real example,” and platformed disinformation and conspiracy about the events that day. On its Daily Signal podcast, the organisation interviewed “6 Jan truthseeker’ Julie Kelly, who told her host the FBI is “the Gestapo basically for the Democratic Party”.
Roberts is an author of Project 2025, a four hundred page document that sets out the policy agenda for a second Trump term including policies that would “rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination”, and roll back access to abortion and contraception with a “focus on strengthening marriage and sexual risk avoidance”. Roberts also spoke at NatCon UK in 2023.
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Another speaker, Christopher DeMuth, has also been involved in writing Project 2025 and is a fellow of the Hudson Institute which receives funding from the Koch Foundation and Exxon Mobil. He was also president of the American Enterprise Institute from 1986-2008 which has received $960,000 funding from Exxon Mobil since 2005 and $2.5 million from the Donors Capital Fund in 2010, an organisation enabling rich activists to support conservative causes anonymously.
Also speaking at Washington NatCon are Tom Klingenstein, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute, and David P. Goldman, a Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. The Claremont Institute is a California-based conservative think tank which has been accused of having an influential role in the events of 6 January 2021.
On 5 January 2021 using the hashtag #HoldTheLine president emeritus Brian Kennedy tweeted from Capitol Hill, “We are in a constitutional crisis and also in a revolutionary moment…We must embrace the spirit of the American Revolution to stop this communist revolution.” In early January 2021, John Eastman founder of the Claremont Institute along with Trump and other advisors unsuccessfully attempted to persuade then-vice president Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
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After leaving the Trump administration, Bannon founded The Movement, a Brussels-based organisation to promote right-wing populist and economic nationalist groups in Europe. Bannon was named in an EU report Tip of the Iceberg (TOTI) – a Europe-wide network involved in funnelling US and Russian dark money into religious extremism with the aim of rolling back reproductive and sexuality rights. Previous NatCon events have featured various individuals and organisations named in the report.
Polish MEP Ryszard Legutko is speaking at the Washington NatCon and also attended NatCon Brussels. He is the co-chairman of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) grouping in the European Parliament which was responsible for organising the behind closed doors European Congress of Families conference (ECF) in Croatia in September 2023. The ECF speakers list featured key individuals and organisations from the TOTI report including Brian Brown of the International Organisation of the Family who has been linked to Vladimir Putin oligarchs and the Kremlin.
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Balázs Orbán, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Political Director, and Chairman of the Board of the Hungarian state funded Mathias Corvinus Collegium will also be speaking at Washington NatCon after the Hungarian Prime Minister appeared at the previous event in Brussels. Byline Times has previously reported on Orbán’s considerable influence on the NatCon movement.
Braverman is yet to respond to a request for comment.