The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, Welcome, welcome. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be together. Thank you for joining us on Pro America Report each day and you can check it out. We have 4 segments a day, one WYNK, the opening segment 1, segment 4 kind of a wind up and two interviews. And so every day you can find those social media at at @EagleEdMartin. Ed Martin Live on Facebook and visit proamericareport.com. There’s my substack. You can sign up and also please go to phyllisschlafly.com and sign up there for our daily e-mail. The daily e-mail is called the WYNK, the Daily WYNK. It goes out. What you need to know WYNK goes out every morning, 8:00 AM, East Coast, 5:00 AM Pacific everywhere in between. Gives you a few links, a few things to think about, and one overriding point that I’d like to make, and I often make the same point during this segment on the radio show, which is also a podcast and a standalone link, again @EagleEdMartin on X, check it out there.
So today I want to tell you a quick story about leadership and there’s a guy, a gentleman named Kevin Roberts, who I have never met. Actually. I’ve never met him in person. I know of him for years and I’ve seen him work at various levels. I’ve I guess I don’t even know if I’ve been. I think I’ve been to one event that he hosted. Where he was like the MC at. But it may I may be in. My mind morphing that. Remembering that as a an online thing and a, you know, a a video presentation, ‘cause I did see him do a number of those during the COVID period.
So Kevin Roberts is a professor, a an academic. He was President of Wyoming College out in Wyoming, a fascinating school, really special place. And he was president there and then he went, which is a really unique thing to do and to be a leader of it’s a very successful place, very small and very rural and just very, very Catholic, very conservative and impressive. And then he went and became the head of a think tank in Texas, which is the opposite of Wyoming. And that, I mean, it’s big time. Texas is big. Everything’s big, it’s big, it’s brash, it’s bold. And he was a very impressive leader of a think tank, a conservative think tank. He sort of really gathered his voice and became a figure of conservatism and the impressive, impressive team that he built all that kind of stuff.
And then in a what was considered I think something. Of a of a a dark horse candidacy. He became the President of the Heritage Foundation.
Now the Heritage Foundation has one of the most storied histories in all of American political life started in the ‘70s Ed Feulner started it. It built up and was really influential in the Reagan era and then maintained its influence and grew in its stature in throughout the late ‘80s, early ‘90s into the opposition to the Clinton years. Gingrich relied on it. Became a Real dominant place in. In many ways it grew from being a start up. A conservative, renegade start up to being a sort of old bull, a big, you know, lion of the conservative movement. Speakers and folks that came through Washington, DC always came and spoke in the Heritage Foundation. They had a particular role In helping to highlight leadership in the Republican Party, I mean, it was a, Heritage Foundation is a big Deal. And it grew in stature, but also grew in its footprint. It has a beautiful building for many years, the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, we hosted our Collegians event in one of their upper floor auditoriums. It’s got a meeting space. It’s got some dormitories for interns. Very impressive.
So Kevin Roberts becomes ahead of that after Ed Feulner had retired after 25 or 30 years. And then there had been Senator Jim DeMint. Who had a sort of probably proved the old adage that it’s hard to have a senator or an elected official go and run an organization. They tend to be kind of singularly focused, which is about their own career, their own self. It’s not as it’s not as natural for them to become builders of organizations or. Or creative leaders in the same way, it’s just. Uh, you know, that’s a description. That’s not a criticism. And then there was Kay James, who was a long time conservative woman. Very impressive lady who sort of was a caretaker role for a few years.
So Kevin Roberts has taken over at the Heritage Foundation, and he’s invigorated it reinvigorated as necessary. But he’s brought a bunch of energy, lots of energy. There’s lots of things happening. I’m a big fan of the Oversight committee effort. That a guy named Mike Howell has undertaken, which is one of the related to heritage efforts. There was a period where Heritage Foundation, a 501C3 sort of a think tank in the classic sense also has and still does Heritage Action, which is a C4 which is more of a political arm that basically if if Heritage Foundation says let us explain to you what what the this policy means. Let us explain to you how this budget plays out. Let us explain to you why these regulatory frameworks are problematic. The Heritage Action was saying. Hey, up there on Capitol Hill, you should vote against this bill or you should vote against this set of issues a little bit more edge in terms of of of what you’re doing and and that was more or less successful. I’m not sure it was as successful as Senator Jim DeMint, I think who was leading on it, wanted it to be.
But now in particular there’s efforts to not just educate members on conservatism, not just talk about the glory days of Reagan and of of supply side economics or or the Monroe Doctrine, all these conservative principles, but how do you put them in action, how does it relate to America First, how do you do oversight? The oversight effort at Heritage has been extraordinary. I mentioned Mike Howell, one of the guys that I go to and talk about things.
Well, Kevin Roberts. Has been cutting a. A larger and larger profile in the policy debate and in understanding things and just in the last couple of days, one of the things that he seized upon and he posted it, he didn’t shy away from it. It’s what he’s pushing. He’s not. He didn’t make this comment and then say ohh well, let’s see what people think. He made this comment, a series of comments and then promoted it through his own social media private presence. And the the point he made was he’s talking about China, communist China. And he says we have never in the history of the American Republic had to confront an enemy, not an opponent, not an adversary, an enemy who is as strong as we are in every aspect. So, every respect.
So first. What he’s doing is Acknowledging that China, the Communist Chinese regime. Is an enemy. Then he’s acknowledging the Communist Chinese regime is. A powerful, powerful. force.
But then he goes on and he talks about the Communist Chinese threat to America in terms of espionage, in terms of what the state security system in China and Communist regime has been doing. We now know and Heritage was a big part of this in terms of the opposition to the Soviet communists. In the Cold War Heritage Foundation was extraordinary, but we now know from declassified documents and from the Soviet documents which have been released that the Soviet communists were infiltrating America in an extraordinary way. It’s not just the Americans that movie or I’m sorry that TV series about these Russian spies that’s most popular in the last decade. It’s actually practically. How did they infiltrate? What did they do? And Kevin Roberts’ point is the Communist Chinese are even more advanced in terms of their technology in terms of their commitment, in terms of their size and scope. And he even goes where most of the conservatives won’t go.
He goes right at TikTok and he says Ban TikTok, ban the use of Chinese drones as surveillance equipment, expel CCP agents and shut down the Confucius Institute these Communist Chinese. Supposed Education Institute set up on college campuses higher ed, which is desperate, desperate, higher education, desperate always to find more funding, find more money, build more buildings, get more students attract more People. And here comes the Communist Chinese regime and says, hey, we’ll throw money at you and a lot of our institutions said, well, if they’re just talking about ideas why not? Well, Kevin Roberts and again, he’s a smart guy and a good communicator, really good, but he’s now the president of the Heritage Foundation. He’s one of the leading uou know. Names in of all, not just conservative, of all the think tanks. Brookings Institution is on the left. Hoover is out at Stanford, Heritage Foundation. There’s, you know, Cato, I suppose. But it’s really not as conservative as is libertarian. AEI seems pretty quiet. After Arthur Brooks was done sort of ringing the the, the, the the fame out of that, and we all went off to Harvard, you know, I don’t hear much about AEI.
So here we have this gentleman who is standing up and saying, hey, the Communist Chinese are a threat. We have to understand it. Look, naming the threat. Is half, more than half the battle. Now we can look at it and say, oh, what do we do?
I remember vividly having a conversation with the late Phyllis Schlafly. And she said that when the communist Soviet empire fell, she said there’s lots of corruption there. There’s lots of things happening in that part of the world. But the threat of the Communist Chinese was what she turned her focus to, because she had spent 40 years from the 1940s through the ’80s, almost 50 focusing on the Communist Chinese. Excuse me, communist Soviets and the threat because of the communist nature of what they were doing, and she turned him. She had the Eagle Forum. She had the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, which had been focused on Soviet Communism, she turned all those organizations. She started writing and talking about the threat of the Communist Chinese. That’s what Phyllis Schlafly did. Well. Thank you to Kevin Roberts and Heritage Foundation for standing up.
What you need to know is this is real leadership. This is a turning point. It’s a turning point to have someone like him be so outspoken, so comfortable with this position and what he’s doing. So very important.
All right, we got to take a break. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. We’ll be back in a moment. Here on the Pro America Report.
