Hillsdale College
CV NEWS FEED // A media outlet targeted conservative thinker Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute after she delivered remarks at the National Conservatives Convention (NATCON) Monday.
“We are and must be conservatives of action,” Bovard said at the conference. “We don’t live in a fantasy world of what ought to be. We live and serve in the wreckage of what it is.” Bovard’s speech called on conservatives to remember their identity and put their principles into practice.
Just four weeks after giving birth, Bovard spoke warmly and confidently to the crowd, listing the ways in which the National Conservative movement is currently winning but is also in need of greater unity.
The National Conservatives are, Bovard claimed, “not part of the conservative movement. We are the conservative movement.” That fact was “not a boast,” she said, “but a responsibility.”
Conservative successes are based on (and depend) on rootedness in identity, Bovard said. “We will win, because unlike the left we know who we are,” she argued:
That we are made in the image of God. That men are men. That women are women. That each precious human person is unrepeatable and unmatched in dignity and worth from conception to natural death. We define our common identity not by our creed, or our tribe, or our race, or by our pronouns – but by our country. By the sovereign land in which we have built the freest nation the world has ever seen.
Left-leaning critics, however, chose to focus not on the content of Bovard’s speech but on her opening remarks thanking her husband and mother for their support in taking care of her newborn son.
A New York Magazine headline read: “The Nursemaids of National Conservatism: At a conference on the future of the right, women are a resource for men.”
Bovard took the new title as a badge of honor, adding it to her X profile and commenting that she may print the article and hang it on her wall.
Readers can watch Bovard’s full speech below.
