“Restoring Self Governance” - Project 2025 Purpose Broken Down By Dr. Kevin Roberts
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Words per minute
204.39684
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Summary
In this episode, I sit down with Pat Buchanan, CEO of Heritage Resources and President of the Heritage Foundation, to talk about the importance of being authentic in order to attract a new generation of conservative Americans. We talk about what it means to be an authentic conservative, and how Heritage has been able to tap into the needs of a younger generation.
Transcript
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I always ask myself, you know, Humberto came up to me the other day,
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he says, we should launch a new series called How to Fix dot, dot, dot, whatever,
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Disney, How to Fix This, How to Fix the NBA, and, you know,
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I'll go to a business and I'll kind of look around, I'm like,
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I don't know if I would put the entrance there, I would put it over here.
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I don't know why the hostess, when I ask where the bathroom is, she just pointed.
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You don't point, you walk my dad to the bathroom.
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We were at Flagler's the other day, restaurant, on my wife's birthday,
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at Valentine's Day, and my dad asked one of the hosts, not the, what do you call it,
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the ones that come and pick up the stuff, I don't know what you call them.
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Anyway, so she comes, she's picking the stuff, and she says, where's the restroom?
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And she says, the restroom's at the front, but let me have such and such take you.
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Lady came, walked over there, said, that's all I was paying attention to.
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I said, that's great, this is why I love Flagler's restaurant,
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and Mikel does a great job running that restaurant, Italian guy.
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Okay, so what does heritage do, and I don't even know if it's part of your strategy
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If it's not, then just say, Pat, it's not that important.
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What does heritage do to become cool, attractive to 20-year-olds to say,
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I want to go, because you guys have a lot of history to learn from.
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My kids, you know, there is many, many institutions to go through to learn.
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It's very important for companies like you guys to make it, very important.
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For us, it's very important to make it, because we need that conservative ideology to,
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Your job is very, very hard, and the job of heritage or Claremont or any of these guys,
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TPUSA, you guys have a very difficult job to work.
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I don't mean it to be vanilla, although it's fair for you to say that.
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What I mean by that is, so bear with me for one minute...
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...is that the biggest critique that Gen Z has of our generation, of the United States,
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more than anything else, is that the existing institutions are not authentic.
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Congress, media, law enforcement, unfortunately, and so for heritage, we're not going to go
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out and say, we're going to change what we've been saying, we're going to change how we do
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We're going to be us, and I'm going to get to the second thing, which is something that
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But the greatest, or the segment of the population that loved our presidential transition project
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Because it is a massive critique of what youngest Americans have of this country, which is all
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of the elites, have all of this power, and here's a plan to take it back, and heritage,
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in spite of all the slings and arrows, you notice this is part of our ethos, we're willing
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to take those, is going to stand tall and keep pounding, pounding, pounding, pounding.
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But the second thing is, and this is what we're getting better at, we're not great at
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it yet, is using modern technology to access that segment of the population.
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And we're doing a much better job of that than we did three or four years ago.
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But a lot of it, I will say, is also the people you spend time with.
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Heritage is sort of leading a reconstellation, if you will, of the conservative organizations
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And organizations like Claremont, like Turning Point, like American Moment, like Center for
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Renewing America, like the Conservative Partnership Institute.
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But these are the organizations that are going to be authentic, and also to the extent that
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it makes sense for them, going to use the tools, social media in particular, to access
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a segment of the population that we haven't enough.
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That combination has allowed us to have quite a following with younger Americans.
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Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what that, what that movement would be, because it would need to
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I don't know if that's enough on what you're talking about, because what I do know is your
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So I think, and we're seeing younger men becoming more conservative.
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We're seeing, you know, specifically younger men, not younger women.
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So this is good, because yesterday my son and I were talking, it was reminding me at
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And I said, well, you weren't at the Vol Conference?
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And my oldest son has never gone emotional for it.
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He's not a, he's a very, very strong, you know, son.
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The day when that happened, I was at the Vol Conference, I had to call him.
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And when I came back and I walked with him for 30 minutes, he's never hugged me for 30
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So we are relying on you guys to get it right, because this is not what I do full time.
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So for us, I think you guys have a very important role to do a better job of getting the message
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Obviously, we saw the playbook of how Charlie did it.
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And Charlie would go out there and sit at the colleges and he would do the high school
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thing and all that stuff and get out there with the messaging even more.
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But I think you have a, you have a, you carry a burden, whether you want to call it a legislative
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And that burdens on you because your messaging and the history that you have needs to get
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to the kids, not just to people that are already agreeing with you.
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When Charlie and I first time sat down, 2017, Adam, on the podcast, I said, I said, how many
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He said, well, you know, we have 36 people that are Hispanic and 20 people that are this.
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So, and the next thing you know, you go to TPUSC, all types of people are now showing up,
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Is that even a, you know, is that even a thought?
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Because in Blue Ocean's strategy, is that even a strategy?
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You're like, ah, it's not really that important to us.
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We're not really wanting to go into sports car market.
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My point in saying that we've improved in that regard, but we have some improvement
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That we haven't figured out how to unlock that door.
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A closer collaboration with Turning Point has helped.
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But I will tell you, when it comes to your point about these almost all-white audiences,
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we have had some modest success with African-American outreach.
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Before I got to Heritage, I was running the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and we had
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begun to hone pretty well this outreach to voters in South Texas, almost all of them Hispanic.
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There are obviously huge increases in support by Hispanics, both men and women, and black
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And what I would call the MAGA coalition, where Heritage comes in, is in addition to wanting
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to reach those audiences, as Charlie did, is also to help be the glue behind the scenes
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between the principles and the policies, how you message it, and then learning from these
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other organizations we're collaborating with more closely, how we ourselves can do it.
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And a part of it is, if it's not part of the strategy, it's not part of the strategy.
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Because we exist to restore self-governance to the American people.
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That can only happen if there are conservatively-minded men and women in Congress and in state
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And so Heritage always thinks in 50% plus one terms.
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And when I go to CPAC and I look around, I'm like, okay.
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Unless if the main keynote speakers come, then it's a different story, right?
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But it's a lot of business, be done, deals, be done.
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I haven't been to your event to see what it's like.
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But the point is, the energy of who comes there is very important.
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Are your guests people that youth will say, I really want to hear what he has to say?
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These are things that you guys got to deal with on an organization.
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And I said, Brian Tracy, you know I'm one of the biggest donors at our heritage.
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There's a lot of people that you guys have that people don't even know these names.
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What it made me think about is, how do I not know this?
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I think there's a massive, massive opportunity there.
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One opportunity that I think would be there, if you opened it up, and we were at a church in Dallas.
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One day the pastor says, open, three hours, ask me any questions you want to ask.
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That you wanted to, you're allowing people to be heard.
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By the way, I'll just say, we'll take that for action.
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So the next time we talk, I'll give you a progress.
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Because I want to see you guys succeed at the highest level.
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When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury, we had the
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Introducing the Future Looks Bright collection.
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