National Conservatism Has a Bigotry Problem, Whether Yoram Hazony Wants To Admit It or Not

"Nobody ever said that to be a good natcon you have to love Jews," Hazony declared at last week's National Conservatism Conference.

When the Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony appeared on The Ezra Klein Show in August, he worked hard to distance himself and his National Conservatism Conferences from the din of racist and antisemitic voices on parts of the American right.

"MAGA is a very broad alliance. I would say, roughly, it's the alliance of different groups that came together to make it possible for [President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance] to win. But those are not all national or nationalist conservatives," he insisted. As for his movement, "from the very beginning, we distinguished ourselves in two directions—from the libertarians…who were basically to our left, and from racialist and anti-democratic movements that are to our right."

The implication was that people like the Holocaust-denying Gen Z influencer Nick Fuentes and his army of online followers ("Groypers") were not welcome in the natcon tent. "I think that the border is clear," Hazony said. "Blood and soil is literally a Nazi term….We are not interested in a nationalism of blood."

Yet on the first day of this year's National Conservatism Conference ("NatCon 5") in Washington, D.C., Hazony gave a speech that didn't just fail to clarify which elements of the extreme right should not be counted as natcons in good standing; it seemed explicitly to carve out space within the movement for those with antisemitic views. "Nobody ever said that to be a good natcon you have to love Jews," Hazony, who is Jewish, said. "Go take a look at our statement of principles. It's not a requirement." 

The comment was in keeping with the larger theme of his speech, which was on the importance of holding MAGA together at all costs. "You can't win elections without a coalition, and thank God Trump and Vance are great at coalition building," he said. "But what I've discovered in these last few months is that there are some people who just—they're not into this. They don't want the coalition. What they want is to be pure."

Hazony repeatedly chastised right-wing podcast hosts and influencers who have criticized the current administration. "Do you really believe that you're going to be able to build a better coalition than the one Trump built?" he asked. "Well, I don't believe you. You can't do better than this. This is the best it's going to be." 

Hazony left the content of their complaints largely unstated, but the administration's decision to bomb Iran despite campaigning on a restraint-oriented foreign policy, its refusal to release the "Epstein files," and even its allegedly slow pace of deportations have been major sources of right-wing discontent over the last few months.

"How is J.D. Vance going to win the next election if what we're doing for four years is tearing each other apart, accusing one another of the most horrible things, smashing one another in public?" Hazony asked. "You can't win doing this. You can only lose….We're going to start seeing the real possibility that the left is going to be in power again in four years. And you yourselves are doing it if you keep up these savage attacks on Trump, on his administration, and on the other people in our coalition."

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Hazony is far from the first person to be confronted with the tension between a desire for "purity" and a need to bring disparate factions together in order to grow a movement's ranks and accomplish its goals.

In the middle half of the 20th century, the conservatives at National Review faced a similar conundrum. One of the most popular right-of-center groups at the time was the John Birch Society, run by a paranoid, autocratic conspiracy theorist named Robert Welch Jr. Many Birchers were also subscribers to National Review. This placed William F. Buckley Jr., the magazine's founding editor, in an awkward position. He and Welch had started out on friendly terms, but over time, the latter's unhinged comments—claiming, for example, that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy"—​became a source of embarrassment to "responsible" conservative institutions.

Buckley initially attempted to thread the needle by penning a series of articles that called out Welch's crackpottery while trying not to alienate the John Birch rank and file ahead of the 1964 election. "I believe the best thing Mr. Welch could do to serve the cause of anti-Communism in the United States would be to resign" as head of the society, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R–Ariz.), then contemplating a presidential run, added in a letter to the editor. Welch didn't listen; Goldwater ran and lost; and in 1965 Buckley went further, essentially using his syndicated column to excommunicate the Birchers from polite company. 

The decision was not without its downside risks. Several of his senior editors tried to dissuade Buckley from speaking out against the group. Anytime the magazine publicly disagreed with Welch—when it declined to endorse a Bircher campaign to impeach the chief justice of the Supreme Court, for example—it would receive angry letters. A donor once called Buckley and threatened to withhold support unless he made a "common front" with Welch; Buckley, to his credit, replied that National Review was "not for sale." (This is especially noteworthy given that the magazine was barely financially viable at the time.)

Buckley faced the same sorts of pressures that Hazony must grapple with today, and it's fair to say his purge of the Birchers was done reluctantly, almost as a last resort. He knew it would cost him, literally and figuratively. But in the end, he decided that he would rather be a leader of a smaller, saner conservative movement than a larger (and presumably more influential) right-wing coalition in which he would have to bite his tongue and implicitly affirm the ideas of kooks and cranks. As National Review lore has it, Buckley sacrificed short-term influence but preserved the integrity of the conservative movement in the long run.

Hazony, who did not respond to multiple interview requests, seems to be making the opposite calculation. He wants the power and prestige that come with being a leader of a "united front" coalition but without a willingness to accept the moral and reputational costs that such alliances entail.

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During his podcast appearance, Hazony reacted with indignation to Ezra Klein's suggestion that national conservatism is "congenial" to Fuentes and others like him. "No, I think that because I run nationalist conferences, and have been doing it for most of a decade—I'm sorry, but I do think I have a little bit more information than some other people do" about whether racism and antisemitism have a place in the movement, Hazony replied.

But during his speech at NatCon, Hazony acknowledged that he's "been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there's been online" in recent years. He was referring not to legitimate disagreements over American foreign policy toward Israel but to something darker. "The left has long gone into a rabbit hole of hating Jews," he said. "I didn't think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken." On some level, then, Hazony knows that bigotry is a problem on the right—but instead of tackling the problem head-on, his speech attempted to placate both sides so as to keep the coalition together.

With Klein, Hazony tried to separate the larger MAGA movement, with its attendant bigotry, from his more pure and principled nationalism. But at NatCon, he used his opening remarks to implore the various factions on the right to view themselves as one big happy family, united by support for "the greatest administration we've ever seen," thus collapsing the distinction between MAGA and NatCon.

Hazony also tried to take credit with Klein for turning away true white nationalists from the National Conservatism Conferences. And indeed, at the first NatCon in 2019, he did refuse a registration attempt by VDARE founder Peter Brimelow on the grounds that national conservatism doesn't truck with "racialist" ideas such as those found on Brimelow's website. In this, he was following in Buckley's footsteps as a gatekeeper of "respectable" conservatism.

At the same time, other members of the NatCon leadership have tried to take credit with right-wing audiences for being open to all perspectives. In her opening remarks at NatCon 5, Anna Wellisz (the president of the nonprofit that hosts the conferences) proudly described NatCon as "a forum where things that could hardly be whispered were being said out loud. Where we stood shoulder to shoulder when any of us was attacked. It didn't matter if we agreed or not. One thing we agreed on was that on this stage, anybody can articulate ideas and be taken seriously and listened to in good faith."

So which is it? Is national conservatism a movement of people who categorically reject antisemitism and white supremacy? Or is it a space where any idea can be aired openly, however transgressive? Either choice could be defended by someone willing to accept the tradeoffs that come with it. But Hazony evidently wants to have it both ways, saying one thing to The New York Times but doing little to confront the ethnonationalist currents at his events.

On the podcast, Hazony bristled self-righteously when Klein suggested that national conservatism is a "magnet" for Groyper types, whether intentionally or not, because it defines what it means to be an American in a way that in Klein's words is "very suspicious of immigrants and outsiders" and "fits their sense that America should be more about blood ties" and how long someone's family has been here.

Yet the NatCon 5 program was replete with speakers making just that sort of argument. Perhaps the most vivid example came from Sen. Eric Schmitt (R–Mo.), who hit the same note Vance did in a speech delivered at last year's NatCon, less than a week before he was named Trump's running mate. 

In addition to insisting that Republicans should oppose legal as well as illegal immigration, Schmitt took issue with the Reaganite idea that the United States is a "propositional" nation where anyone who embraces the American creed is welcome:

For decades, the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that…the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors….

That's what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract "proposition," but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests. His movement is the revolt of the real American nation. It's a pitchfork revolution, driven by the millions of Americans who felt that they were turning into strangers in their own country.

The writer John Ganz observed that Schmitt's speech was suspiciously similar to an article by the late racist writer Samuel T. Francis. The speech was reportedly penned by a staffer named Nate Hochman, who previously made headlines when he was fired by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over a campaign video featuring Nazi imagery; who prior to that had been recorded saying nice things to none other than Nick Fuentes; and who showed his familiarity with Francis' thought in a lengthy New York Times essay in 2022.

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The programs at the various National Conservatism Conferences suggest at the very least that Hazony has an expansive definition of respectability. They are a place where mainstream conservatives such as First Things editor R.R. Reno and American Compass founder Oren Cass rub shoulders with "neoreactionaries" such as Curtis Yarvin and Jonathan Keeperman.

Previous speaker lineups have featured people like Darren Beattie, Jason Richwine, and Hochman himself before his downfall. Speeches have favorably cited the nativist novel The Camp of the Saints and urged conservatives to use state power to "reward our friends and punish our enemies."

One panelist at this year's event suggested that the Chinese Communist Party has "quite a bit of ideological overlap with national conservatism." Another—an Anglican Catholic priest—became something of a right-wing celebrity after he imitated Elon Musk in performing what looked like a Nazi salute earlier this year. 

Hazony himself introduced Steve Bannon as "a hero of our movement." The hallway outside, meanwhile, featured a giant banner advertising the Bull Moose Project, a group that pushes "national populism," run by young activists with a history of making statements such as "white lives matter." And on the final night, Sebastian Gorka—a guy who wore a Nazi-linked medal to one of Trump's inaugural balls—headlined the VIP dinner.

As a plenary speaker at NatCon in 2024, the right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec proceeded to deem his political opponents "unhumans." Earlier this year, after Trump declared "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law," Posobiec shared the post to his 3 million followers with the comment, "America will be saved. What must be done will be done."

Hazony didn't have to invite Posobiec back to NatCon in 2025 or give him another main-stage speaking slot. He chose to do so, and Posobiec used the opportunity to deny that immigrants from foreign cultures can truly become Americans, saying of Muslims like the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, "These people are not American….They are not interested in assimilation. And I say…they can go home."

That is a pretty good summary of the view Klein was pushing back against in his conversation with Hazony. "My father is a Brazilian immigrant," Klein said. "My mother is a couple generations back from Eastern European Jews on both sides. I don't think I am less American than people who can trace themselves back to the Mayflower. The implication of a lot of these arguments is that I, or people like me, should be viewed with more suspicion. And I think [nationalists] don't always like to defend that, but if they're not going to defend that, I actually don't know what they're saying."

While it was clear that Hazony did not want to defend such a view to The New York Times, it is equally clear that he has created an institutional and intellectual space in which exactly those kinds of sentiments are not just tolerated but elevated, celebrated, and welcomed back year after year. 

Many people at NatCon have perfectly reasonable perspectives. I don't want to be misunderstood as tarring everyone who has ever been associated with these events. But Hazony is not a powerless participant. He is the main organizational force behind the National Conservatism Conferences as well as their public face. When he takes the stage and declares that one need not "love Jews" to be "a good natcon," it's impossible not to interpret it in light of the toxic stew of bigotry and authoritarianism bubbling within the larger cauldron of the nationalist right—and to wonder what he could be thinking.