Bolton, Carlson Square off at National Conservatism Conference.

White House National Security Advisor Ambassador John Bolton talks to reporters Wednesday, May 1, 2019, outside the West Wing entrance of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

At The American Conservative, W. James Antle III, outlines the forthcoming National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C. The conference will host heavyweight speakers from various ends of the broad “conservative” tent, such as Tucker Carlson and John Bolton. Among the issues discussed will be nationalism.

Antle suggests in his headline that nationalism’s time has come. One of the most important pieces of a nationalist agenda is enforcing border security, including deporting illegal immigrants from within the United States, controlling the border itself, and preventing immigration from countries hosting Islamic-terror groups.

Antle writes (abridged):

Embedded in the immigration debate is the question of whether affluent countries like the United States have any right to enforce their borders at all, especially if such enforcement will have a disparate impact on poor migrants of color.

Deportation raids are unpleasant and should not be a country’s primary enforcement mechanism. But some are taking up Mexican flags and, reportedly, Molotov cocktails to protest the removal of people who have received lawful deportation orders.

Without denying the global humanitarian role a country as rich and powerful as ours can play, who does the United States government exist to serve primarily?

What of our obligations to our own communities of color, including the descendants of slaves, whose suffering remains a stain on our national soul? Are we not more than an idea or a marketplace, a collection of squabbling factions or identity politics subgroups and unrelated consumers?

These are but a few of the questions we can expect the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. to wrestle with.

The speakers come from a variety of perspectives, as one might expect of an event that features both John Bolton and Tucker Carlson as keynote speakers.

Organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation—itself chaired by Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism—this discussion could not come at a better time.