Heritage President Talks Communist Chinese Threat, Empowering Parents, and Biden’s State of the Union Address

Mar 3, 2022 4 min read

WASHINGTON—Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts joined high-profile broadcast TV and radio shows in the last week to talk about a host of policy issues, including the existential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Heritage’s fight to empower parents in the classroom, and President Joe Biden’s fact-challenged State of the Union address.

While at CPAC 2022 in Orlando, Roberts told New Tang Dynasty’s Tiffany Meier that it is time for the United States to put a stop to the CCP’s influence on American policymaking:

“We have allowed in the United States, our freedoms, our freedom of association, our relatively free lobbying laws to be used, not just in support of the CCP, but against our interests as Americans. And it’s crucial that this year—not next year, not next decade—this year, every conservative in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate recognized that threat and advanced legislation to that end.”

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“What must be done, number one, is to make sure that lobbyists in Washington, D.C., who are lobbying directly or indirectly on behalf of the Chinese communists cannot do that. We have to disallow that. The second thing we need to do is to make sure that we do not have CCP-funded institutes in American universities. And the third thing is we need to delist from stock markets companies that have direct connections to CCP-funded military and technological interests. If we do that, then I’m optimistic about the United States’ weathering this threat. What concerns me is that it’s very difficult, even on the conservative side of the aisle, to convince everyone that it is such a threat that we need to take action.”

WATCH: Here's How We Overcome the Threat Posed by the Chinese Communist Party | Kevin Roberts on NTD TV

Roberts also joined WMAL’s morning flagship program, “O’Connor & Company,” March 2 to talk about President Biden’s State of the Union address and the missed opportunities for Biden to admit his policy mistakes and signal a change in course. He also discussed Heritage’s new aggressive approach and empowering parents frustrated with the current education system and making sure dollars follow students, not systems:

“That’s where Heritage comes in. We’re harnessing the angst, in this case on education, and the opportunity … is to harness that into making sure that every single dollar that we as Americans commit to education, follows the child to the school of the parents’ choice. Until and unless that happens, we are not going to honor what parents are telling us, that the system’s broken and it’s broken so bad that we’re miseducating, mis-forming their children. It’s a horrible situation that this wonderful republic has let itself get into.”

LISTEN: Every Single Dollar We Spend on Education Should Follow the Child | Kevin Roberts on WMAL’s “O’Connor & Company”

Since joining Heritage as president on Dec. 1, Roberts has joined a number of national broadcast shows, published a longform essay on the future of conservatism, and been profiled by the Washington Examiner.