POLICY COUNSEL
FEBRUARY 2026 POLICY COUNSEL SPEECHES
Kelly Shackelford
Member | Religious Liberty Commission
Thank you. I’m going to try to give in eight minutes a 30,000-foot level view of religious freedom in the United States. I’ll start with what you know. The attacks are great, right? We all saw in Minnesota, we’re literally invading churches right now. The thing that might be shocking to you is this isn’t the first one of those. We already had a case like that not too far from here outside of San Diego where they literally came in, disrupted the service, used bullhorns at Easter against the kids saying some of the vilest things and all against the law. We’re having to actually litigate that case. So, the attacks are great, but the main point I want everybody to get is God is moving in a very new and dramatic way.
I’ve been doing this for 37 years, and things have shifted. We’re in a huge opportunity time right now. I’d say this started back when Trump was elected the first time and judges. We felt a real responsibility at that time to do vetting. We’re eight years later. We now have a multimillion-dollar vetting operation because it’s so important to have good judges. When you put good judges on the court, it starts to change the opinions. They start to look at the Constitution. To give you a feel for the change, on average, there’s about 6,000 requests for the Supreme Court to take your case. They took 56 last year. So, your chance of getting a case is not very good. In 13 months, we didn’t have one. If we just said, hey, let’s get one case, we didn’t have two, we didn’t have three. We had four wins at the Supreme Court on religious liberty.
I’m just going to go very quickly to give you a little bit of a feel. Carson v. Makin is a case in Maine where they had school choice for 130 years. But 30 years ago, they decided to make one change. You can pick any school that you want, except from now on you can’t pick a religious school. Well, that went to the Supreme Court. Six to three, that is unconstitutional. So that’s a huge victory. Think of all the school choice that’s occurring around the country and how new states are even coming on board. It’s going to be very clear from now on that if you have a school choice program, the parents have a right to pick the Christian school. They can’t be told they have to pick only the secular schools. So that was a big decision.
Right after that, even a bigger decision was the Groff v DeJoy case. This is a case about religious freedom in the workplace. We’ve had those protections for a long time. But what happened 50 years ago, the Supreme Court, in a very dishonest opinion, reinterpreted all the words to take the protection away. We had this case with this guy, and we said, “This is the chance. Let’s go after these wrong decisions.” We did something a little unusual in our briefs to the Supreme Court. We said, “This decision from 50 years ago was a lie then, and it is a lie now, and you know it’s a lie. This is not what these words mean.” Nine-zero, they ruled in our favor, overturning that old standard. Now the religious freedom protection in the workplace is back up to high protection. Think of the hundreds of millions. All our kids, our grandkids, this will affect all of them. All of the case books are being changed. All of the HR manuals are being changed. That’s a huge deal, right?
And then, of course, a lot of you know about Coach Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. This flipped a lot of law. We never really had a case on religious freedom of teachers and coaches. But more importantly, within the decision, they overturned the Lemon precedent, which had been in place for 50 years to create a hostility to religion. If you wonder why nativity scenes were taken down and menorahs were taken down and Hanukkah and all this, it’s not because any of that’s in the Constitution. It’s because of Lemon. In the Kennedy case, it said Lemon is over. It’s reversed. It was cited over 7,000 times by federal cases in the last 50 years to crush religious expression. So everywhere a cross went down, it can come back up. Everywhere a Ten Commandments was rolled in the closet, you can bring it back out. It’s a total shift for our country.
These are huge shifts, and we just argued a case in December on the right to share the gospel in a public park, the Olivier case. I felt good about it. We’ll see this spring. I think we’ll win. But two days after that, in another case we’d filed that we thought was going to take a long time—the McDonald case, this is about Amish being forced, the attempt of the state of New York to force Amish to vaccinate their children against their faith, okay—the Supreme Court, as soon as this reached the court, they immediately vacated the decision, sent it back down, and told New York, why don’t you look at this in light of religious freedom and parental rights? So, a huge victory there, at least in the meantime, and we’ll keep fighting that out.
I just can’t explain to you how quickly things are moving. My only question has been why? I know God is doing this because this is so much bigger. Alan and I, we’ve been doing this kind of law for a long time. These kinds of shifts, this quickly, this is not normal. My question has been, is it just going to get so hostile that we’re going to need the protection? Is that why you’re doing this, Lord? Or is the third Great Awakening coming? The last time I was with Charlie Kirk, we both had concluded that a third Great Awakening is coming. It is starting with the youth, they’re flooding into the churches, and they’re coming behind us, and our job is to open the gates for religious freedom.
One of the things we did is we started restoring faith in America, because most people don’t know about the Kennedy case. You can put the Ten Commandments back up. We just did this one in Fort Worth. They are starting to happen across the country. The Kentucky lawn, they just put theirs back up. Indiana is starting the process. We’ve got Ten Commandments going in the schools. We have got it in West Virginia. We’re doing this in partnership with many organizations. It’s open for everybody, all your groups. I mean, this is not just us. Patriot Mobile’s working with us. Family Policy Alliance is working with us. And even “In God We Trust” signs, we did 20,000 throughout every public school in West Virginia. So just be encouraged that things are changing.
The Religious Liberty Commission—this is a great example of how God has moved. We’ve never had one of these. It’s the first time we’ve ever had a Religious Liberty Commission. Trump created one. Most commissions report directly to an agency or department. Our specific charter is to report only to the President of the United States and share our specific recommendations on what we’re asking him to do to secure and protect religious freedom into the future. That’s what we’re doing. The testimony has been powerful.
I just want to give you one example. The president showed up one day for the hearing. We got 12 people testifying. He picks one person out of the crowd that’s going to testify. It’s a 12-year-old boy. He’s our client. What happened is all the fifth graders in that class were ordered to read a book called My Shadow is Pink to their kindergarten buddy, forcing them to question their gender. He said he couldn’t do that. They proceeded by not only forcing his parents to file a lawsuit, but they had a Hate Out the Pink Day to bully him. The school did this, okay? Think of a little kid being asked by the president to come up. You can see the podium’s so big, they have to get a stool but look at what this kid did.
*Video Plays*
Wow. He’s like a professional speaker, right? So just know the opportunities we have right now are unbelievable. Come to the Action Session to get ideas and all that. Just realize we are actually on offense right now, not on defense. So be encouraged.
Vicky Hartzler
Chair | U.S. Commission on International Religious Liberty
Thank you. I’m so glad to be here and so grateful to CNP for focusing on religious freedom, protecting it, and speaking up so everyone has that opportunity. As you said, Mike Johnson appointed me to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and I’m honored to serve as chair this year. I thought I’d start by speaking on their behalf of what we do as a lot of people aren’t aware of the organization.
Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, and it established that we would be monitoring the persecution around the world on behalf of our government. We’re a legislative branch, really, an agency tied to Congress, but we report to them on the worst offenders in the world, what’s going on, and we make policy recommendations on what our government can do through our foreign policy to help advance the cause for everyone around the world. It is a worthy mission, and I’m honored to be a part of it.
What does it really mean and what do we do? What recommendations do we have? I thought I’d just give an overview and then in the Action Session we’re going to get into what everyone can do to help because I know we all care about this issue. IRFA, that’s the International Religious Freedom Act, mandates that we at USCIRF, that’s the short name for U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, adhere to international standards for religious freedom, which are outlined in the landmark agreements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
A lot of countries around the world have signed on to these documents, yet they totally ignore what they say. These documents not only establish international religious freedom as a fundamental human right, but they also lay out what that right means in practical terms. So, of course, it means that you have the right to worship as you choose or to not worship, as the case may be. These documents establish that it also includes the right to congregate, to publicly express one’s beliefs, to share one’s beliefs with others, to possess religious literature, to change one’s beliefs, to educate your children in your family’s beliefs, and so on. They established that a government cannot dictate the terms of anyone’s own religious convictions or force them to follow a set of religious laws that are not their own.
I know all of us here gathered say, of course! But the reality is, unfortunately, for millions, in fact, they estimated for the Christian population, about 388 million Christians around the world right now are living in countries where these rights are just a dream and a prayer.
In China, the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, forbids Christians from gathering for prayer in their homes, using Bibles, other than the ones the CCP has infused with its corrosive ideology. The Iranian government throws Christian converts, I’ll add, if they don’t shoot them, and Baháʼís into political prison, where they face torture, attempts at forced conversion and execution. In Uzbekistan, a parent can face stiff fines or worse for simply teaching their own children the tenets of their faith at home. France forbids public school children from wearing a Christian cross, a Muslim headscarf, or Jewish kippah. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which carry the death penalty, are often weaponized against Christians through false allegations, mob violence, social exile, arrest, violent retaliation, and death. In 2024 alone, at least 344 new blasphemy cases were recorded.
The religious freedom abuses go far beyond these examples, many of them involving horrific violence, displacement, and other atrocities in the name of religion. In Nigeria, which thankfully President Trump declared a “Country of Particular Concern” in October, which was following up on our commission’s recommendation, non-state groups such as ISIS affiliates and ethnic Fulani militants attacked the villages of predominantly Christians and some Muslims who disagree with them, killing and abducting thousands of innocents and displaced millions. Burma’s military junta forced over a million, mostly Muslim Rohingya, into desperate refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh, and it continues to bomb Chin Christian villages and churches in its thirst for power and control.
Most of you are familiar with the brutality of ISIS, which tried to eradicate Yazidis, Christians, and many others from Iraq and Syria, even as it killed tens of thousands of Muslims who stood in its way. And Christian girls in Pakistan are sometimes abducted, coerced into conversion, and married to their abductors, with courts often legalizing these acts in clear violation of domestic and international law. Between 2021 and 2024, at least 137 Christian girls were documented as victims of forced conversion and forced marriage.
USCIRF has, for many years, led the way in highlighting these sorts of systemic, ongoing, and egregious abuses of religious freedom around the world, and it does so in close collaboration with other parts of the U.S. government, whom we advise. The U.S. Department of State has its own Office of International Religious Freedom, headed by its own ambassador-at-large, and now it’s by Mark Walker as Principal Advisor for Global Religious Freedom.
We also work with Congress, and we’re very thankful for members of Congress taking our recommendations and acting on their own to introduce legislation or to help follow up on things. USCIRF makes recommendations, and we have hearings, press releases, podcasts. We also post on our website a victims list with over 2,500 names, pictures, stories of individuals who are in prison right now around the world for their faith, or they have been killed because of their faith, or they’re being tortured. It’s something everybody can know, such as we have Leah Sharibu on our victims list. I know many of you have highlighted that. Penny wrote a wonderful article on her just recently, but she was abducted eight years ago yesterday. Yesterday was the anniversary when she was abducted with a lot of other girls, and they were released except for Leah. Why? She refused to renounce her Christian faith. She is still in the captivity somewhere in the forest, we believe, in Nigeria. We think she has parented two children by now. It’s just horrific. That’s one thing we’re asking President Trump and our government to do, is to get her out and to rescue her.
At USCIRF, we make lots of noise, and we try to work with Congress and the Administration to keep this at the forefront of our foreign policy. And I hope we can get into more specifics here, but there’s a lot of opportunities we have as the strongest, greatest nation in this world to stand up and to help. Thank you.
Alex Marlow
Editor-in-Chief | Breitbart News
It really is a pleasure to be here at CNP. This is such a distinguished group. This is a group I’ve been familiar with for so long, and it is my first time here. It is a historically significant group. I will tell you, the first sign that you know it’s a good group is because Ken Blackwell is a key part of the group. We did not coordinate this, but in my last book, Breaking the Law, I wrote about who the leading lights are in the legal world for conservatives to follow. This is a direct quote. “Ken Blackwell is so ubiquitous in conservative and Republican causes that if he isn’t on your Board of Directors, it raises questions about the legitimacy of your organization.” I got Simon & Schuster to print that. He is a happy warrior, as I am.
I am really happy to be here. CNP has been so hospitable to me. I have incredible accommodations. They sent me a really nice packet where they talk about their mission statement, and I actually read these things because I am a reader. In the packet, it says that one of the points of the group is to “facilitate a national conversation.”
What better place to start a national conversation than my home state of California? It is the Democrat utopia that even the Democrats can’t leave fast enough. It is truly fascinating to be in this state because you get a window into the mind of the Left. I’m someone who has followed Gavin Newsom’s rough and tumble upbringing since I was in college over 20 years ago. Remember, when I say rough and tumble, I mean his dad was General Counsel for Getty Oil and his best friend was a billionaire heir and they started a wine business. He really had it tough until he got to this point.
We have made this state number one in a bunch of categories. I want to share some of them with you. Homelessness, we are number one. Poverty, gas prices, and state income tax. But we are also the worst in a few ways, including illegal immigration, schools are the worst, unaffordable, and half of my hometown burned down, Los Angeles, while the mayor was in Africa. Maybe some of you can come out here and help.
If you look outside, it’s very sunny and nice, right? Some of the time. Not today. They heard you guys were coming. There are a lot of people here because of jobs, family, weather, the vacation destinations are great. What concerns me is not that the state’s gone wrong. What concerns me more for the country is what we learned yesterday from Steven Spielberg, who has been funding the Democrat apparatus in the state for his whole life. It’s failed, so he’s leaving. But what is he going to do once he gets to wherever he goes? He is going to start funding the same exact stuff that ruined my state.
Ken also acknowledged that I brought my eldest son with me. He is seven. Ken is correct. The other three cannot sit still, so they are at home. I did get a chance to introduce him to my good friend, Charlie Kirk, God rest his soul, just a wonderful person. I am thrilled to have been a part of Charlie’s legacy, and I’ll hopefully get a chance to share some of that with you. I have four young children who are going to grow up not just in this state but in this country, and I want to maintain optimism. I’m going to share with you a lot of optimism today. But before I do that, I want to share a little bit about my background in case you’re not familiar with me.
I was the first employee of Breitbart News and was part of a generation of new media pioneers. We are the original conservative media success story because we were canceled long before it was cool, way before anyone got points or extra followers or extra sponsors. No, we were just canceled. And we persevered and fought through it. We did this because we thought our principles were righteous. First of all, culture is upstream of politics. If you are not winning the culture wars, you are not winning anything. Donald Trump proved this, I think, with what’s going on with all the trans stuff. Now we are picking up all these new recruits because of what’s happening in our school system. All this proves culture wars matter.
We were deeply skeptical of the Republican establishment. You can be a Conservative, but when you see people fail over and over again and don’t change their tactics, we have to throw that out, and we have to look for winners. We did that. We did that in a steadfast way. Immigration. Of course, we were called racist just for having normative views on immigration that, I don’t know, for example, you should sign the guest book when you get here. That sounds pretty good. Is that a minimum that we can ask in this country? Sure, it is. I grew up in L.A., and I watched the town get overrun with homelessness, crime, and the schools became unusable as they got more expensive. One of the reasons for this is because we imported the Third World into our city. Why? Because the price of gardeners and nannies went down and everything else got way worse. Why do we want to do that? You do not have to be a racist person to make that observation. That is not great for the country.
So, we made that observation and we were called racist. That’s what happens, but we stuck with it, and we were the first ones to see the rise of Trump. That was when we really got canceled, but again, it’s cool because look at us now. We are doing well. We are respected and people understand us. We got to show people, people like you, that you really are only taking flak if you are over the target. I am so heartened from the days when I was working for Andrew Breitbart as basically a glorified assistant in his basement in West Los Angeles next to the Veterans Cemetery, which feels like it was yesterday. I am going to run down some of the great things happening in this country momentarily. But none of this would have happened without Andrew Breitbart and people like you in this room who saw the vision I am talking about.
I am not telling you anything you haven’t heard before thus far. Hopefully, I am putting better words around it or else why am I up here? I am trying to tell you things that should be fundamental to who we are as people. We are not afraid now of the fake news. We are not afraid to be called names. But we are also honing our issues. Stronger borders, fundamental. Anti-globalism, the globalist experiments consistently fail. Anti-elitism, the elites must be questioned. What have universities done for us lately? The credentialed class are part of the problem in this country. I am an educated person. I have an extremely educated spouse. My family is extremely educated. I am not anti-education. What I am is anti-elitism. Just because you got that piece of paper, it does not make you superior to people who work with their hands every day, people who build things every day. That was Donald Trump’s original message, and he saw that because he was pals with the most powerful people on earth, but he loved spending time—preferred spending time—on a construction site.
This is really important stuff. Anti-corporatism, skeptical of the corporations, understanding that the corporations became tools in many places of China in particular. I write about this. It’s consistent in all of my writing, all my works, that if you want to understand major corporations in this country, unfortunately, you have to just look at the money, follow the money, and so many of them feather their nest with CCP cash while they have human rights atrocities. Let me add about China—we always miss this point—they are trying to murder us right now. That is what the fentanyl crisis is all about. It is China trying to murder Americans, trying to murder American children, by allowing those drugs into our country. Mexico is run by the cartels. They know what they are doing. China knows what they are doing too. Yet we act like that is not happening, and we put people like Eileen Gu, the traitor, on the cover of magazines because she’s a skier. She grew up in this country. She went to Stanford University. She benefited from all of America’s largesse. She takes a big bag of cash from the CCP and then acts like the Uyghur genocide, which is happening right now, is not happening, and acts completely ignorant of human rights abuses. That is not acceptable, and that’s a winning message. When you say this to people, what are they going to say in retort?
It is really important that we are also skeptical of the tech oligarchy. Really important with the AI wars happening. We can do AI right, which is a big conversation. Bigger than I have time for today. We are pro-rugged individualism, and this is the thing that I like the most and what really drew me to media. I am a conservative activist, and I’ve always said this, but what has driven me to be in broadcasting, to be in commentary, to be in the news business, is because I am looking for those super interesting American individuals—the people who have led the world. The people who do not take no for an answer, who are undeterred, who you cannot stop. Those forces of nature, even if you do not agree with them all the time. Those are the people that inspire me. Those are the people I want to share with my children. There is no other country on earth with people like that than America. We have gotten away from that talking point, that discussion.
What are we doing to facilitate the American individual? It seems like all we are trying to do right now as a society is get people to conform. We have to break out of that. I think that mindset is essential to restoring the Golden Age of America, which I fundamentally believe could be happening right now. I am going to give you some details on why I think that is.
For me, I’ve been very fortunate because I got in early with Andrew Breitbart. We had all these successes. I have been able to fulfill my dream of sitting behind a keyboard and typing for 20 years with a bunch of blue light on my face, never seeing the sun. That is not true. I got to do great stuff. I got to interview the coolest people in the world, meet the coolest people in the world, fly around the world, write books, and it’s been an absolute blast. I want to provide arguments for people. That is why I wrote my first book, Breaking the News, my takedown of the media. My second book, Breaking Biden, is a takedown of Joe Biden, which, remember, he did beat Trump and could have conceivably beat him again if we did not sharpen our blade, which we did. Figuratively speaking, you always have to say that. I am nonviolent.
My latest book is the takedown of the lawfare superstructure, Breaking the Law. The reason I wrote this book is because the lawfare that went after President Trump is really all they have right now. There is no stronger weapon against Trump. I mean, who do you guys think it is? Do you think it is Jasmine Crockett? Is it AOC? Did you guys catch AOC? You know, she thinks Taiwan is something that ICE does to illegal aliens. Wait a minute. Come on. You guys are going to get it. It is going to wash over the room. So, she is not going to beat Trump.
It’s the lawfare superstructure that is going to beat Trump. They are the ones who nearly put him in jail, nearly bankrupted him. No one could have seen the rapid decline of our legal system and been so casual about it. I cannot believe we were so casual about it. It was every corner of Biden’s DOJ. It was these lower courts. It was the funding establishment.
The biggest story of the year, unfortunately, has been the Epstein stuff. One of the guys that has looked the worst is a guy named Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman is a George Soros-esque figure on the Left. He funds everything, including the lawfare superstructure. This guy had extensive meetings with Epstein, fundraised with him, went to the island at least once, that we know of, and this is all after he was convicted and went to prison. Then he bankrolled the lawfare against Trump, particularly the E. Gene Carroll case, which is way too X-rated with my son in the room. I will say, if you guys read Breaking the Law, that is my favorite chapter of the book to read. It is insane. The case is ridiculous from top to bottom. Completely absurd. Funded by one guy, Epstein associate, Reid Hoffman. Completely disgusting freak. And we are letting him control much of the country unless we get engaged and we fight back.
We did, thank the Lord. We had some victories in 2024. Those feel a long way off today. Today, wake up, get some bad tariff news, puts you in a bad mood. Do not despair. I’m going to remind you of some of the stuff we have already done. We, and I mean we, the Trump administration, of course, a true force of nature but none of this would have happened without the activists in this room, the people who care and fund and donate and support and get involved.
Okay, the border—crossings are virtually at zero. This is a miracle. We have seized half a million pounds of drugs at the border already. We have added border walls. We are bombing drug boats and not apologizing for it. Military, Customs and Border Patrol hiring is at a huge level. We are seeing a huge boom in people who want to defend our country, young people who feel like America is worth fighting for. World peace—Rwanda, Congo, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Gaza. The Gaza peace would have seemed completely impossible with any other president. And trust me, I wrote about this in my second book. The Ukraine war was 100% the responsibility and fault of Joe Biden. 100%. If Joe Biden had a semi-competent foreign policy, Putin never would have invaded Ukraine. This is common knowledge now. It was not the time I wrote it. I’m very proud of that. But the list goes on. Most favored nation drug prices. That means all of you can get the fat shot at a cut rate if you need it. Not all of you need it. Some of you are in good shape. Congratulations. We are getting some of the best pricing in the world, all because we have a new regime in power negotiating.
MAHA. We’re reducing synthetic food. We are ending the war on coal. We’re producing the most oil in the world. We’ve got major job growth, but in particular, the job growth is for who? Native-born Americans in the private sector. Not illegal aliens, not government jobs. Blowout jobs report last month saw a dip in 34,000 federal jobs. I get chills just thinking about it. This was a dream of Libertarian Alex walking around with Tom Sowell and Milton Friedman books under my arm at high school, getting made fun of relentlessly, but being smarter than everyone else, too.
The tariffs got bad news today, but there will be a plan B. They have worked, and I know even people in this room were skeptical they would work. We were not at Breitbart. I write something called the Breitbart Business Digest with John Carney, who is the number one expert in MAGA economics. They generate tens of billions of dollars with no inflation. We were told that at a minimum it would create inflation, but it did not. Now, we have deals that are getting cut with all countries all over the world from the UK, China, Japan, others. No taxes on tips, no tax on overtime. Inflation is not only down, but I had a big sit down with Scott Bessent in what is called the Cash Room with the Treasury in December. He thinks it is going to go close to zero this year. Close to zero. We are seeing energy deregulation.
We are winning a lot of the culture wars, I think, with a lot of the trans and women’s sports, or as Trump says, transgender for everyone, which I love. I’m confused, but then I think hard about it. We’re out of the Paris Accords again. We had to do a Mulligan on that one. Offshore wind projects are dying. Then we have not even seen the major tax cuts kick in, which are going to kick in over the summer. So, we were getting robbed blind by the world with trade deficits, letting illegal aliens commandeer and subvert our country. Tax rates were going up. Now we’re in this spot where we don’t even have to have paper straws in our iced coffee. It is a beautiful thing.
We are not going up against strong people. This is where a lot of the news cycle is still not super positive. I get it. I am in it. But just remember who we are up against. If we can beat the lawfare superstructure, of course. We got Mamdani with his piles of trash and the dead rats next to the trash in New York City. He gets in and immediately says we are not picking up trash anymore. No dogs in homes. Like, no dogs in homes. Okay, good luck selling that to Americans. Then he says, we are not going to raise rent, but we are going to raise property taxes. Look, economics was not my strongest subject in school, but the math ain’t mathin’ on that one.
Stephen Colbert, who I believe engaged in Jim Crow 3.0 this week, because he disenfranchised the brilliant, beautiful Jasmine Crockett by not giving her time on the show, which is an act of overt racism. Think about it. He would not give her the time. He is promoting fake Christian James Talerico, who uses the Bible to justify abortion. That is blasphemy, and that is who they’ve got.
We are going to crush these people, but we have to get focused. We have to have fun. We have to be relentless. The lesson that I learned in the first Trump administration more than any other: zero days off. We are working. We are working for this movement. Thank you very much.
Lila Rose
President | Life Action
Hello, everyone! I have been speaking on a lot of college campuses lately doing debates against pro-abortion advocates, and usually there’s the “boos” when I walk in. So, thank you for being so welcoming here.
I am also so grateful for all of you because the pro-life movement, the pro-family movement, and certainly the work that I’ve been privileged to be a part of now for going on for two decades would not be able to succeed without the people in this room. I remember joining CNP when I was, I think, 19 years old, having my first opportunity to join all of you. The support of the folks in this room and the courage and the moral clarity have been so incredibly foundational. We would not have the pro-life successes we have had without your conviction. So, thank you. I just think we should all applause all the leadership of CNP. Alan Sears is here and his lovely wife, Paula, who’s on the Live Action board. All of you have been so incredible. Thank you.
When I started Live Action, I was responding to a call. I think most of the people in this room have felt a call at one point or another by God to stand up and to fight for this country. For me, it was the consequence of finding out about what abortion is and having my heart broken by that. When you find out about an evil, and you find out about how it is hurting a victim, especially a child, when they are the most vulnerable, it is heartbreaking.
Usually, God starts a calling with heartbreak. For me, that was the genesis of Live Action. I was one of eight kids, homeschooled family, beautiful, loving parents, in San Jose, California. I had no idea of the national or international needs. I just knew that there was a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic ten miles from my home where I was born and raised and loved in San Jose that was killing babies up to 24 weeks old—babies old enough to survive outside the womb. I did not hear this talked about at church. I did not hear this talked about in the media, of course. I did not hear it talked about at all, except occasionally if I learned about it, it was from the pro-choice perspective, people saying that this was my right as a woman, this was empowering to me.
My prayer to God early on was, God, use me. Use me to somehow save some lives or help change some minds. It’s dangerous to ask God to use you to do anything. I’m sure people in this room might relate to this because God wants to use us. I’m going to get into the pro-life and pro-family movement in a moment, the state of that movement, the challenges, the opportunities, how I see this fight that we are in. But I want to start with this verse, and this is a verse that is also a motto for Alan, a wonderful mentor of mine here, but it is something that is so important, I think, for all of us in the advocacy, the activism, the work that we are doing. It’s from John 15:5. The words of the Lord, of our Lord, he says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. But apart from me, you can do nothing.”
It is so convicting, but also profoundly encouraging to have this in front of us for all of the work we’re here to do this weekend. Because with the Lord, we can do anything. We can do the greatest feats imaginable. We can take back this country. We can end abortion. We can renew the culture. We can transform the entire future that we’re fighting for, for the good. But without Him, we can literally do nothing. Everything we do needs to be rooted in Him.
What does this look like for where we are today? I am very excited about some things, and I’m very concerned about some things. I just want to lay out how I see things right now. We have right now a country where there are in the last reported year, which was about a year and a half ago, there were over 1 million abortions reported. Now, these numbers are always a little bit suspect because they’re coming from the abortion industry, but we know it’s around this number. You compare it to CDC numbers; a million children’s lives are being ended. That’s 100,000 more than it was two years prior to that. How can this be? We’ve had pro-life laws passed that we know have changed hearts and have saved lives. We know that there are more live births in states that pass pro-life laws. We see this progress. We see dozens of abortion clinics that are closing. There have been dozens of Planned Parenthood clinics that have closed in just the last year.
Last year, we saw a victory that people told me would never be possible. I remember walking up and down the halls of Congress in my early 20s as an activist saying, “We have to defund Planned Parenthood.” People told me that would be impossible. You have too many people against this. It’s not going to happen. And last year, in the Big Beautiful Bill, our amazing champions in Congress were able to slide in the defund of Planned Parenthood for one year. They lost over $600 million. So that’s something to celebrate.
We’ve seen historic gains, but we’re seeing also the reality, and this is what I’m here to say, the reality. I don’t want to walk in like Pollyanna and say, well, everything’s perfect. We saw a defund Planned Parenthood. We overturned Roe v. Wade. We have trigger laws in states like Texas and Idaho and Ohio that are saving lives. That’s all well and good. That’s all beautiful. Every life saved is a victory. Every life saved is a victory beyond even what we can imagine, what God can do with one life. But we have to face our reality. And Live Action, the organization I’m privileged to lead, we face this reality head on daily.
We are dealing with the mass destruction of innocent human life at a scale that has never existed before in human history. It’s legal. It’s protected by law in most states. And the victims are the most vulnerable. And despite the progress, abortions are up. Why? Why is this happening? How do we solve this?
We have to look at the why. I’m going to let you in on this political background about how we got there, because it matters a lot for what we’re trying to do as we move forward. It is because of the change in the abortion industry. The chemical abortion pill is the way abortions are being done in dorm rooms, in bathrooms, inside of our own homes, and they’re being shipped via mail to our most vulnerable, sometimes our little girls, young women. They’re purchased by abusers. They’re being shipped to the home.
Guess what? President Clinton fast-tracked the abortion pill illegally under the FDA without proper approvals and put it on the market. This is a drug designed to kill. Drugs that kill people are not supposed to be on the market. The FDA should take it off the market. They put it on the market. There were three doctor visits required to ensure that the mother was safe, to ensure that the baby was even implanted in the uterus and not the fallopian tube, because this pill can be deadly for the mom, too, not just the baby. When the pill is killing the baby, if the baby is not in the right part of the woman’s body, when it’s processing and forcing the miscarriage, it might lead to internal bleeding, hemorrhage, infection, and death.
Under President Obama, two doctor visits were removed. Then under President Biden, under COVID, the excuse was COVID, they shut down the churches. They shut down the schools. In California, they shut down the beaches. And what did they do? They left the abortion clinics open. They allowed the drugs to be sent via mail with no doctor’s visit. That is exactly the reason we now see abortion rates spiked, because people can just order this pill online with the click of a button.
What do we do in an environment where we are dealing with not only a cultural decay but a political situation that allows drugs that kill to just flood our markets.
Politically, we have defunded Planned Parenthood. There have been dozens of clinic closures, and lives that have been saved because of this. It is very exciting. But guess what will happen this year on Independence Day? The 250th anniversary of this country, but it’s not just fireworks. What’s scheduled to happen on July 4th, unfortunately, horrifically, is the refund. The refund starts because the defund was for one year. This was the compromise made in back rooms because some people just love Planned Parenthood so much, so it was one year. They’re operating on a razor-thin margin, as you all know, in Congress. They’re dealing with the midterm elections. There’s all of these dynamics. We need to pray and ask to make the defunding of Planned Parenthood permanent. That is the other big fight that we’ve got to fight here.
Pray for Speaker Mike Johnson. He’s our hero. He’s doing amazing work. Pray for the President. Pray for Secretary Kennedy. Pray and ask. These are the asks of our movement. So politically, there’s opportunity.
What about culturally? A lot of people tell me there’s only so much we can do. I’m told that my message is a little too hardcore and maybe I should water it down a little bit, make it softer. Or they say, what about all the other issues that we have to fight? Or this is so controversial, why do you focus so much here? The answer is because every life is made in God’s image. Every one of these are God’s children, and every woman deserves the opportunity to know of the resources that exist for her and not be told by our abortion culture to go get an abortion. We know abortion is devastating for women and men. We know it’s crushing our culture. It destroys families. It destroys, of course, lives.
We know that women deserve better. Women deserve better than abortion. What does that fight look like culturally? Live Action did an analysis recently asking how do we win? We need to win. We celebrate every life saved, but one life isn’t enough for us. We need to save all of them. How do we win? We fight the political battles. We keep our true north. We want to abolish abortion. We need to save every life. But how do we win culturally?
We have found again and again that the way to win culturally is you have to make people’s hearts break. You’ve got to get under their skin and into their heart because sometimes their minds are just shut. It’s like case closed. They can’t accept it. Yet life begins at conception. The science is clear. Abortion takes the life of an innocent child. It’s always wrong to take an innocent life. You can make the logical case all day long, and we do that, but you want to get their hearts to feel about this.
I want to share with you a quick example of what this looks like because we are in a media war. It’s a political war. But with the cultural battle there is a media war, a media war for hearts and minds where propaganda is relentless, especially among young people. They’re being told to have their hearts broken to support abortion. Oh, if women don’t have abortions, they’re going to die. Oh, abortion is great. You need abortion to succeed. Abortion, abortion, abortion. People receive their Golden Globe Award, like Michelle Williams receiving her award, and she says, “I want to thank the right to choose for this award.” That’s what girls are being told. Thank your right to choose. Thank the abortion that you had, because that’s the reason you’re successful. This is the culture we’re in.
I want to share with you a sample of what this looks like when Live Action does this day in and day out. This is the core of our work. It’s changing hearts and minds. What it looks like is telling the story of the victims of abortion and humanizing them.
*Video Plays*
Dr. Levatino now travels the world speaking out on behalf of life. He was an abortionist and now he’s a passionate pro-life advocate.
Here’s the thing. Despite what the devil wants to tell us, and despite what our opposition wants us to believe, there is no one too far gone for God’s mercy and to receive the truth back into their hearts. There is no one too far gone.
On college campuses, why is Live Action doing more there? We are the largest social media presence and digital media presence, education presence for the pro-life movement globally. There are 20 million college students. My friend Charlie Kirk gave his life working to persuade lovingly, winsomely, college students, they matter. High school students, they matter. Young people, they matter. They are all persuadable.
We need armies of people going with love to campuses to persuade winsomely, to tell the stories, to make the case, to engage. That is the focus. We can persuade the next generation. We are seeing the next generation persuaded.
A recent poll came out, and there are some depressing polls, but a recent poll showed that the percentage of young people who support abortion and say they want it legal, dropped 10 points in the last 18 months. Progress is being made. But we have to win culture. We have to change hearts and minds. We have to awaken people’s hearts. We have to tell the stories of the children, the mothers, the former abortion workers, the women who’ve had abortions and grieve it and regret it and now bravely share their stories about why this is not the right choice. Share the stories of women who started taking the abortion pill and then took the abortion pill reversal.
That’s possible, by the way. Seven thousand lives have been saved through abortion pill reversal, pioneered by Dr. George Delgado. We need to tell their stories, to tell young women it is, in some cases, not too late to change your mind, even if you started taking the abortion pill. We have to out-tell our opposition.
That’s the war we’re in. It is a media war. The pro-life movement right now spends about $800 million on pregnancy resource centers, which is amazing. That money should be increased. We need our pregnancy resource centers. We need to connect women to them. We spend around $200 million on politics. When we do the analysis, we spend around $200 million or a little less on grassroots mobilization. On media, to educate and change hearts and minds, it is less than $50 million. We need to double down on education, double down on changing hearts and minds. No one is too far gone. We’re privileged to see hearts and minds change every single day.
The last thing I want to share with you—and this goes back to our verse from John—this is a spiritual battle. We just started Lent. We just had Ash Wednesday. Did anybody get their ashes? Some of us got some ashes. There’s 40 days preparing us for Easter. We know, according to St. Paul and Galatians, that we don’t just battle against flesh and blood, but we battle against powers and principalities. This fight, everything that you see physically, there is also a spiritual reality. The demonic loves abortion. Abortion is the sacrament of the demonic. It is the inverse of what Jesus Christ did for us. He laid down his life for us. Abortion says, I will take your life for me. It is the inverse of what we are called to do and be as Christians. It is the opposite of love. This fight is going to be riddled politically and culturally with those spiritual realities. People in politics are going to say no; I cannot do that. It is too big of a deal. It is too controversial. I am going to lose votes. They are going to constantly hear that voice again and again, don’t do the right thing because the right thing is going to cost you. Do not do the right thing. We need to encourage them to do the right thing.
Culturally, we must relentlessly out-persuade our opponents. Invest in this cause. Take time for this cause. Pray outside the abortion clinics for this cause. Get involved in this cause. This cause for our children, I believe, is not just my cause or some of the wonderful people already fighting this fight here in this room. It is everyone’s cause. It is every Christian’s cause. It is every Conservative’s cause. It is every American’s cause. Because our future as a country is defined by how we treat our children. That is the number one weight for our future. How do we treat our children? Let’s fight for our children and choose life for our children. Thank you all so very much. God bless you all.