NatCon Chief’s Muddled Brief
Yoram Hazony’s confused attempt to sort out the problem of right-wing antisemitism.
THANKS TO TUCKER CARLSON, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes, there has been a Vesuvian eruption of antisemitism on the American right. Fierce controversy has ensued in and around Trump world over how to address it—and how to deal with the swelling segment of MAGA supporters, especially younger people, who go in for it.
Especially fascinating is the MAGA subset1 of self-professed “national conservatives,” not least because their impresario, Yoram Hazony, is himself Jewish. Crosswinds have been blowing him hither and thither. The trouble is that some of the closest allies of his aborning ideology of national conservatism have become America’s most prominent antisemitic voices. Disturbed by this development, Hazony has been attempting to sort things out—most notably in a speech he delivered at a conference devoted to antisemitism in Jerusalem in late January. It is a case study in convoluted reasoning.
Hazony begins with a ritual denunciation of antisemitism on the left, where the hatred, he says, “has become so blatant and so ubiquitous that most of my American Jewish friends have concluded Jews have no future in the Democratic party.” Never mind that that is a caricature. There is indeed an antisemitic left among the Democrats, but it is a vocal fringe and hardly representative of the party as a whole. And while I have no doubt that Hazony’s own friends, as he says, have tilted away from the Democratic party, both exit polls and public opinion surveys continue to show that Jews tend to associate with the Democratic party, by a significant margin.
But that is an aside. As Hazony acknowledges, the Republican party is itself at risk for becoming infected by “relentless anti-Jewish messaging.” What he has in mind is not merely arguments about Israeli policy toward Gaza, but “the explicit and savage targeting” by rightwing podcasters “of Jews, Judaism, and Zionism.” Is this the future, he asks, of the Republican party?
The party, in Hazony’s description, is today divided into three distinct factions. A “liberal wing” led by figures such as Lindsey Graham, Mike Pompeo, and Ted Cruz was once dominant, but in the Trump era, it has been in decline and probably represents no more than “25 percent of the party’s primary voters today.”
Then there is a nationalist wing, represented by Trump himself, as well as JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth. Hazony estimates that it makes up about 65 percent of the party and is distinguished “by its support for an industrial policy to restore America’s manufacturing capabilities, its outspoken rejection of compromise on immigration issues, and its skepticism of long foreign wars.”
Finally, there’s the alt-right, “which was mostly a fringe phenomenon until 2023, when big-name media figures Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens moved into this space.” Today, Hazony says, its voters comprise perhaps 10 percent of the Republican party.
But of course, the distinction Hazony is drawing between liberal and nationalist Republicans is completely contrived and even nonsensical. In what ways, fundamental or otherwise, do such “liberal” Republicans as Graham, Pompeo, and Cruz—all of them Trump sycophants—differ from Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth—all of them also Trump sycophants? The only note of contrast one can detect is that Cruz by himself (and to his credit) has been outspoken in denouncing antisemitism on the right while all the others—both the so-called liberals and the so-called nationalists—have maintained a discreet silence on the subject.
Unsurprisingly, as the intellectual ringleader of the national conservatives, Hazony places himself firmly in the camp of the nationalist Republicans—Trump, Vance, and company. The nationalists distrust the liberals, he explains, because “they find the overheated rhetoric coming out of the liberal camp on the subject of anti-Semitism to be bellicose, alarmist, and unconvincing”:
Most nationalist Republicans don’t think America today is anything like 1930s Germany. They don’t see any Nazi party in America poised on the threshold of victory. And for that reason, they don’t jump to deplore the agitprop of right-wing podcasters the way liberal Republicans want them to. And when they don’t, this drives liberal Republicans—both Jews and non-Jews—to start misbehaving. They start lashing out at the nationalists, and accusing them of being anti-Semites, or of protecting anti-Semites, or of protecting Nazis, or of being Nazis.
Avers Hazony, “I’ve heard all of this with my own ears. It’s a disgrace.” Indeed, it is “political stupidity.”
The nationalists, Hazony continues, are today in charge of the Republican party and may retain that role for a generation or more. Antagonizing them is a huge blunder. Jews, says Hazony, should be “looking for ways to build bridges and friendships and rock solid, mutually beneficial alliances with nationalist Republicans.”
But this is not sage advice. It is contraindicated by the very narrative that Hazony himself deploys.
The Trump administration and its nationalist allies, acknowledges Hazony in his speech, “have been blindsided by the [antisemitic] podcasts, and by the Jewish outrage over them.” For months, the administration met the antisemitic outbursts with seeming indifference. Only in recent weeks did they step in to “impose order.” What Hazony has in mind are comments by President Trump himself. Asked by a journalist if he condemns antisemitism on the right, Trump said, “Certainly,” and asked to comment on the right-wing commentators’ antisemitic views, said: “I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them.” Hazony calls this Trump taking “the clearest possible stand against anti-Semitism in his political coalition.”
“Clearest possible stand”? Rubbish. Never mind that only days after his insipid disavowal of Republican antisemites, Trump, as Hazony himself recounts, honored Tucker Carlson with a luncheon at the White House, where the nation’s most prominent antisemite was also photographed with Rubio and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. And never mind that in an interview show days later, Carlson heaped praise on two Jews: deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Hazony himself, declaring, “That’s why I would never be antisemitic. You can’t generalize.” Comments Hazony: “These events were obviously choreographed to put an end to six months of nightmarish infighting on the political right.”
If so, the choreography, as Hazony himself is compelled to acknowledge, was in the service of a whitewash. Carlson’s interview show over the past eighteen months, he writes, “has become a circus of aggressive anti-Jewish propaganda.” The White House effort to distance itself from Carlson’s antisemitism has been “a total failure.” The trouble is that Trump still values Carlson and Carlson himself denies that he is antisemitic, and on top of that he “is a very smart, passionate, and very likeable man when you meet him in person. I had lunch with him once, years ago, and I thought he was great. I invited him to [the] NatCon 1 [conference in 2019] and he gave one of the best speeches we have ever hosted.”
THIS IS ALL A COMPLETE MISHMASH. Hazony is not mounting an intellectual argument. What he is offering instead is pure political positioning, pouring perfume on those in the Republican party to whom he wants to hitch his national conservatism hobbyhorse.
And it is also a study in self-contradiction. To begin with, by his own account, Trump and his administration—in other words, the nationalist Republicans—are continuing to court Carlson, the most notorious antisemite of the era.
Second, in what world have such “liberal” Republicans as Graham, Pompeo, and Cruz been “lashing out at the nationalists, and accusing them of being anti-Semites, or of protecting anti-Semites, or of protecting Nazis, or of being Nazis”? Either I have missed a lot of astonishing headlines, or this is pure fantasy.
Third, there is a great deal that Hazony conveniently omits. Would it not be relevant to note, in any honest account of what is transpiring, that far from taking “the clearest possible stand” against antisemitism, Trump has been a purveyor, if not of antisemitism than of notorious antisemites, like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, with whom he dined at Mar-a-Lago?
That Trump has tried to install individuals with a history of antisemitic remarks—such as Paul Ingrassia and Jeremy Carl—in positions of power?
That Vance refused to denounce Tucker Carlson for airing and praising the views of a Holocaust revisionist?
That Vance defended the inclusion of antisemites in the Republican party as recently as December 2025?
It is worth noting that in Hazony’s almost fanatical promotion of what he calls “the rich tradition of national conservative thought,” he has gone so far as to deny that even the Nazis were nationalists. “Hitler was no advocate of nationalism,” is what Hazony stated preposterously in his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism. Never mind that nationalism propelled Hitler to the apex of power in Germany, and never mind that Hitler proclaimed himself a nationalist and took the idea of purifying German peoplehood to its logical conclusion of exterminating Europe’s Jews.2
In promoting the cause of Trump, Vance, and other “nationalist” Republicans, Hazony is engaging in a brazen whitewash of antisemitism in the midst of a serious outbreak of the hatred in our country. It is a disgrace. And it is political stupidity.
Although some national conservatives presumably wouldn’t call themselves a MAGA subset, functionally they certainly are.
By stressing the “universalist” aspects of Hitler’s ideology, rhetoric, and ambitions, Hazony argues that the Nazi dictator was not a true nationalist.
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