Denial, Thy Name Is Yoram Hazony

A broadside against the doyen of the NatCons and his deliberate denial of the Right’s antisemitism problem.

If you’ve been reading my writing for any halfway decent length of time – and I thank you profusely for that – you’ll know that I am no fan of the so-called National Conservative, or NatCon, movement. These right-wing partisans are ostensibly on my side of the aisle, yet our views could not be more at odds. They are in no way conservative in the classical American sense of the word; in fact, they have far more in common with European right-wing nationalist movements. They are economic statists, fans of using federal power to intervene in the culture, skeptics of American involvement abroad, culture war obsessives, hardcore nativist-minded immigration restrictionists, and people who believe in the authoritarian adage “to my friends, anything; to my enemies, the law.” They are also, in several cases, antisemites.¹ This is especially ironic given the fact that the progenitor of the NatCon movement is an Israeli intellectual who has far more influence in America than he does in the Jewish state.

Yoram Hazony, the father of the NatCons, has been advocating this particular brand of right-wing national populism for over a decade now, finding relatively few takers in the US until his ideas were glommed onto by right-wing commentators looking for an intellectual underpinning for Trumpism and MAGA.² Since then, he has been a feature of the commentary circuit, promoting his ideas about national populism as the saving grace of the West, entirely without reference to how those ideas are manifesting in the real world. That was made perfectly clear in Hazony’s recent speech to a conference on antisemitism, wherein he completely failed to understand or confront the rank Jew-hatred in the movement he claims to lead. That address was so full of errors, deliberate misstatements, cowardly obfuscation, and willful blindness that it deserves to be struck with a rhetorical broadside. And friends, I am here to do just that.

Hazony’s speech relies entirely on strawmen. The most obvious is the fiction that the NatCon movement is completely free from the stain of antisemitism. Hazony conveniently blames the “alt-right” for being antisemitic and the “liberal” right for noticing antisemitism and arguing against it, while holding the “nationalists” harmless. His categorization of the American right is a perfect microcosm of his broader failure to make a persuasive argument; he labels conservatives like Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo, and Lindsey Graham “liberal” simply because they have criticized the rise of blatant right-wing antisemitism, while marginalizing them as unable to take even a quarter of the primary vote in a national election. He downplays the influence of the antisemitic far right on the mainstream of the party – Hazony’s own “nationalists,” naturally – essentially dismissing them as any sort of meaningful representation of the electorate his movement is courting. He falsely avers that they were fringe until 2023, completely discounting the fact that the label was incredibly prominent during the first Trump term, as such figures became significant parts of the very movement he led.³

The “nationalists,” under Hazony’s rubric the only group capable of claiming the mantle of the Republican Party, include pretty much every current major administration figure, from Trump and Vance to Rubio and Hegseth. Hazony claims that they differ from the “liberals” because they all support “industrial policy,” reject “compromise on immigration issues,” and are skeptical of foreign intervention. This is simply untrue; Rubio and Vance disagree on many foreign interventions, Trump has waffled on aspects of immigration policy several times, and “industrial policy” can range from full-on state capitalism to slightly altering tax policy. The “nationalists” are not a coherent camp by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly are not under this incredibly tendentious definition.

Hazony states that the online spat between the “liberals” and the “alt-right” over antisemitism is completely overblown and useless, as the real “battle for the future of Jews in the Republican party” is taking place within the NatCon mainstream and happening behind the scenes. He claims that since we aren’t living in “1930s Germany,”⁴ attacks on incipient antisemitism on the American right are “bellicose, alarmist, and unconvincing.” As such, he lambasts the efforts of what he calls the “anti-Semitism-industrial complex”⁵ to call out bad actors like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly. In essence, he blames American Jews, particularly those on the political right, and Christian Zionists, a backbone of the GOP coalition, for what he believes is an inflated controversy over right-wing antisemitism.

At the same time, he excuses antisemitism from those he sees as allies, conveniently ignoring it even when it is blatant. For instance, he is more than happy to believe Carlson when he disclaims antisemitism (in between bouts of blood libel), fawns over a speech he invited Carlson to make at the inaugural NatCon expo, and says what a good guy Tucker is. He even goes so far as to suggest that since nobody has made a “15-minute explainer video” showcasing Carlson’s antisemitism, the charge itself is unpersuasive. Contra Hazony, several people have laid out such a clear, evidence-based case against Tucker, including the very well-known Ben Shapiro. Ironically enough, Hazony’s own outfit, the Edmund Burke Foundation, produced such a video – a video that was purposefully spiked by Yoram himself. This is denial made manifest.

Hazony simply cannot accept the reality that his right-wing nationalist movement, like so many other right-wing nationalist movements over the past few centuries, has been infected with the conspiratorial mind virus known as antisemitism. He argues that antisemitism is not the future of the Republican Party while also suggesting that his nationalist movement will drive that future. This tautology can only be true if the rank antisemitism among some of his NatCon fellow travelers is whitewashed away. But if Hazony genuinely wants the future of the GOP to be both nationalist and non-antisemitic, he must confront the rot in his own house. And that means realizing his own share of responsibility for the problem.

Hazony was the one who invited this growing Jew-hatred into his coalition by refusing to police its boundaries on the subject; instead, he focuses on attacking those who notice it. He was the one who invited Tucker Carlson to give a keynote speech at his first ever NatCon conference. He is the one who decides to take Carlson’s denial of antisemitic feeling as the gospel truth, while downplaying even the evidence found by his own employees. He is the one who thinks right-wing antisemitism is an exaggerated phenomenon, despite the facts. He is the one who has promoted this strain of right-wing national populism as the inevitable future of GOP politics – completely without acknowledgment of the antisemitic ethos that has lived within it from Day 1.

Despite being Jewish himself, Yoram Hazony is one of the main players the rising antisemitism on the right, not some disinterested observer giving neutral commandments from on high. This speech, in spite of its intentions to the contrary, proves that point in spades. One cannot fix the Right’s antisemitism problem without recognizing from where it stems. But that is one thing that Yoram Hazony either cannot or will not understand. Denial is a hell of a thing, especially when one’s career depends on it.

1. That link goes to a long essay I wrote about the America First movement, a more radical subset of the broader NatCon tent, explaining exactly why they are antisemitic and anti-conservative in nature. They deserve nothing less than complete ostracism and exile from the American right.

2. Donald Trump is not an ideologue, despite what many on the left and right wish to believe. The man is perhaps the least ideological president in modern American history and shifts his views at a whim. Attempting to erect a consistent, coherent ideological scaffolding around such a mercurial president is a fool’s errand; it is quite humorous that so many keep trying to push that boulder up the impossibly-steep hill.

3. For a guy who claims that his political opponents are missing the foundational realities of American politics, Hazony sure lacks basic familiarity with the domestic political environment of the past decade.

4. This is the flip side of the left-liberal argument that everything is fascism or Nazism, arguing that since we aren’t in the equivalent of that dread epoch (correct), there is no need to worry about right-wing antisemitism at all (incorrect). It’s a poor argument that misuses history to push a political cause in the current day; in short, it is the epitome of presentism.

5. This phrase is straight out of the antisemitic playbook. I do not believe Hazony understands this, as he is something of a naif. He is not an antisemite; he’s just a buffoon.