Kevin Roberts

The Washington establishment went nuts.

Why?

Because that's not the prevailing Republican establishment thought.

We're going to turn China into the United States.

This story leads to one of my favorite stories in my tenure at Heritage.

our aforementioned longtime president, Ed Fuller, calls me and he says, Kevin, we were wrong on China and I want to come to an all-staff meeting and I want to explain why.

I said, Ed, you don't have to do that.

You know, there's risk to you.

People will think that, you know, it's your fault.

I said, you've got nothing to be blamed on.

I had the same idea.

He came to a staff meeting and he said, I want to tell all of you that the policy we're now embarking on, which is a hawkish position on China, where now the conservative movement is, certainly the Trump administration is,

And he said, if we're going to have the humility to persuade people that we were wrong and now we're right, it starts with conversations internally.

It starts with conversations on the stage.

because sometimes policymakers need to develop that humility.

I am extremely proud, ironically, of that humble moment by Dr. Fulner, by Heritage as an institution, because what we said was our research was good, we were well-intentioned in the policy prescriptions that we offered, but that was a generation ago and circumstances have clearly changed.

And if we don't read reality truthfully and see what China has been doing, who in Washington will?

And so that really is how we operate, which is why

to connect to the recent story that you were asking about, we'd never doubted that we were going to flourish through that kind of news cycle because every three or four or five years, there's some controversy that Heritage starts because we are willing to take a look at the facts and tell the story as we think it is.

Well, Texas Longhorns, anything they play.