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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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