Brussels Mayor and Left-wing Activists Force NatCon Brussels 2024 to Change Conference Venue
The 2024 National Conservative (NatCon) Conference will no longer take place at Concert Noble, a prestigious reception hall in the heart of Brussels. In a press release on Friday, the venue’s managing agency Edificio announced that it had canceled the event due to political pressure from left-wing activist groups and the city’s Socialist Party Mayor Philippe Close. According to The Telegraph, the conference will be held, as originally scheduled on April 16–17, at a new location beyond the mayor’s jurisdiction on the outskirts of Brussels.
Organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a think tank based in Washington D.C., the NatCon Conference has gained an international reputation for bringing together key public figures, scholars, journalists, and other thought leaders of the right from the United States and Europe. National Conservatism represents a turn away from abstract universalism, free market absolutism, and messianic interventionism, which have defined the right since the mid-twentieth century. Instead, it embraces a historic and rooted understanding of the nation-state as the antidote to One Worldism—the creed of leftists, right-liberals, and neoconservatives.
The theme of next week’s event (NatCon’s ninth gathering), Preserving the Nation-State in Europe, wherein Europe is synonymous with the European Union (EU), encapsulates the ideological-political conflict at hand. The EU has been increasingly using a heavy hand to influence how member-states address immigration, security, energy policies, identity politics, and the Russia-Ukraine War. As a result, right-wing populism has surged across the continent and Eurosceptic parties are expected to make substantial gains in the June 2024 EU parliamentary elections.
In addition, the NatCon movement endorses a traditional vision of civilization, championing family over contract, community over society, and faith over nihilism. It is not surprising then that the upcoming conference, comprising fifty speakers and around 500 attendees, would incur the wrath of the unironically self-described ‘anti-fascist’ left.
Several organizations including La Ligue des Droits Humains (LDH), Réseau Ades, and Coordination Antifasciste de Belgique mounted an aggressive campaign to confect a public safety crisis
with the goal of intimidating the venue’s owner. The LDH declared on Instagram: ‘Within the limits of the law, freedom of expression applies to everyone, but this principle does not oblige anyone to welcome the extreme right.’
Of all the ‘extreme-’ and ‘far-right’ confirmed speakers, Brussels’ favorite bogeyman and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been the focus of much spilled ink. He will headline NatCon Brussels—dubbed by POLITICO Europe as the ‘Orbán Conference’—along with former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman and U.K. Brexiteer Nigel Farage. One British media outlet accused the latter of ‘Orbánizing’ British politics. Moreover, the Labour Party called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to block Braverman from ‘giving oxygen to divisive and dangerous individuals,’ such as Orbán, and ‘legitimising fringe far-right elements that threaten our cohesion and democracy.’
Yoram Hazony, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, denounced the Brussels regime for touting a big game about spreading democracy abroad, while clamping down on conservative voices at home. ‘If Brussels can’t host both sides of the argument,’ he concluded, ‘then maybe the capital of Europe can’t be in Brussels.’
Frank Furedi, executive director of Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Brussels (one of the event’s sponsors), lamented the ubiquity of cancel culture as a ‘crisis for free speech and political expression for all of Europe.’
Why did the left-wing oligarchy (a political-administrative and academic-media apparatus) mobilize its militant wing against a conference of a few hundred conservatives? Did it fear that its political opponents would win too many hearts, minds, and Euros? No.
Canceling the original, sought-after venue was a naked exercise of its power. Réseau Ades warned that the agitation efforts will persist until NatCon Brussels 2024 is entirely aborted.
Proponents of the liberal-democratic world order—championed by the left and opportunists on the right in the United States, United Kingdom, and the EU—believe in freedom and equality before the law. All humans are equal but some, we have been told, are more equal than others. Furthermore, ‘in order to treat some persons equally,’ U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun explained in 1978, ‘we must treat them differently.’ Blackmun’s opinion in the landmark case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which argued that blacks deserve socio-legal privileges to get beyond white racism, illustrates how the modern liberal mind discriminates in favor of a ‘protected class.’
In the last fifty years, the protected class has expanded to include left-wing women, non-normative forms of sexual orientation and gender identification, and illegal immigration status. This group needs protection from the conscious and unconscious prejudices of the unenlightened masses, which allegedly subvert liberal democracy by asking questions about its sacred cows at conferences like NatCon Brussels. A scaremongering report by The Brussels Times arrives at the predictable conclusion that National Conservatism traffics in ‘Nazi propaganda’ and other inflammatory rhetoric about nationalism, tradition, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate change.
The conference organizers responded to the oligarchy’s power flex with resourcefulness, persistence, and cheerful optimism, securing a new venue at once. This week’s National Conservative Conference in Brussels will feature a wide array of Hungarian and Hungary-based speakers including Frank Furedi, Gladden Pappin (president, Hungarian Institute of International Affairs), John O’Sullivan (president, Danube Institute), Rod Dreher (author), and Zsófia Tóth-Bíró (The European Conservative). The Budapest-based Danube Institute is also a co-sponsor of the event.
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