Americans need to get involved to rescue public education, strengthen families, and revive a culture of life, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts says in an interview featured in the new episode of his podcast.
It’s not too late to achieve a “golden era” in America rather than witness its “final chapter,” Roberts says.
“The work of The Heritage Foundation is to be the American people’s advocates behind enemy lines,” Roberts tells Jonathan Saenz, president of the nonprofit group Texas Values, in the interview. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
“The single most important thing we work on [is that] we will spend the last cent of our endowment defending religious liberty, life, and marriage,” he says.
The latest episode of “The Kevin Roberts Show” flashes back to this September interview, in which Saenz interviewed Roberts in Austin during the Texas Faith, Family, and Freedom Forum.
Roberts, who is The Heritage Foundation’s seventh president, previously was chief executive officer of the Texas Public Policy Center.
In the discussion with Saenz, the former educator and college president says his vision for the Washington-based think tank includes a “more aggressive” Heritage that, among other things, has ramped up its outreach to state legislators.
“Because I know what time it is in America,” Roberts says, adding: “The radical Left is not only taking away our rights, but they are redefining what a man is, what a woman is. And we even have a Supreme Court justice who doesn’t even know what a woman is.”
Roberts describes Heritage’s new role in shifting the “Overton window” of public acceptance on issues such as education, religious liberty, and cases before the Supreme Court.
Heritage’s president particularly laments the state of education in America.
“We are radicalizing our students, weaponizing the most noble part of our noble experiment, which is that every single child in this country get an equality of opportunity that starts with their education,” Roberts says. “It is unjust and evil what is happening in American schools, and we darn well better fix it.”
In the interview, Roberts says his top priority is gaining more influence in advancing conservative policy solutions at the state level through Heritage Action for America, the think tank’s grassroots activism arm.
Roberts also says Heritage, and conservatives in general, must remain active in the pro-life movement. This determination comes after the Supreme Court’s ruling June 24 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and the practice of abortion on demand.
“We are going to continue to fight to be pro-life,” Roberts tells Saenz. “We are going to win some state battles and we are going to lose some state battles. But the trajectory is upwards.”
“When we root out the indoctrination that’s happening in our schools, we root out the injustice of defining people by their skin color with critical race theory,” he says, adding:
And [when] we get back to American schools being in the top 20 in terms of reading, math, and writing, then we can be sure America has turned a corner from this dark age. We can enter not the final chapter in American civilization, but a golden era that comes from this redemption.
Roberts invited members of the audience to get involved with The Heritage Foundation and to use the think tank’s resources for “intellectual ammunition.”
Ken McIntyre contributed to this report.
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