By James Kirchick
Monday, February 16, 2026
On January 27, Israeli-American political commentator
Yoram Hazony delivered a speech at the Second International Conference on
Antisemitism in Jerusalem. Founder of the Edmund Burke Foundation and convenor
of its National Conservatism (“NatCon”) conferences, Hazony was well situated
to discuss the subject of his address, “Anti-Semitism and the American Right.”
Last November, after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts released a
bizarre video denouncing a “venomous coalition” of “globalists” for attacking
his “close friend” Tucker Carlson, Hazony hopped the next flight to Washington
to assist the embattled think tank president with damage control. “I’ll never
forget how these jackals circled, sniveling for blood,” Hazony later wrote of
the conservatives who had taken Roberts to task for defending the country’s
most influential promulgator of anti-Semitic ideas, and for using anti-Semitic
tropes in doing so.
In Jerusalem, Hazony’s message was the same: The problem
with anti-Semitism on the American right lies not with the anti-Semites but
with those—President Donald Trump excepted—who call it out. “On January 11,
President Trump took the clearest possible stand against anti-Semitism in his
political coalition,” Hazony declared. “Asked if he condemns anti-Semitism on
the right, he said, ‘certainly,’ and then he added: ‘I think we don’t need
them. I think we don’t like them.’”
Trump’s clarion call against anti-Jewish bigotry—which
ranks among his denunciations of David Duke (“I don’t know anything about David
Duke”) and the Proud Boys (“stand back and stand by”) in its moral clarity—was
undermined by his decision to host Carlson in the Oval Office just five days
later. Acknowledging the gulf between Trump’s supposedly strong words and his
actions, Hazony assessed the effort to convince people that Carlson is beyond
the pale. “Judging by President Trump and Secretary Rubio’s photo op with
Tucker at the White House two weeks ago, I’d say it’s been a total failure,”
Hazony concluded. “How do we explain this defeat?”
According to Hazony, the fault lies with the “Jews and
Christian Zionists” who have called out Carlson for being “one of the leading
promoters of anti-Semitic propaganda in our time.” Blithely avoiding the
substance of that accusation, which Carlson had himself confirmed months
earlier at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, where he insinuated before an
audience of millions that the Jews killed the conservative youth activist just
as they had Jesus Christ, Hazony demanded evidence. “Where is the 15-minute explainer
video that I can show my friends on the political right which proves that this
very serious accusation against Tucker is true?” he asked not so much as
ordered. “A 15-minute explainer video” and “serious research” into Carlson’s
voluminous record of anti-Semitic vitriol “don’t exist because, for some
reason, there are no Jews or Zionist Christians who think it’s their job to
produce such things.” The failure to supply information to Hazony’s liking
testified to “an extremely high level of incompetence by the entire
anti-Semitism-industrial complex.”1
Hazony sharpened his argument with a breakdown of the
Republican Party’s three “wings.” The “liberal wing,” which Hazony estimates as
representing 25 percent of the GOP electorate, is led by Senator Lindsay
Graham, Senator Ted Cruz, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The
“nationalist” wing, where Hazony counts himself and “the great majority” of the
GOP,” includes Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Rubio. Finally, there is the
“alt-right,” where Carlson and Candace Owens lurk among 10 percent of Republican
voters. According to Hazony, the fight over the future of the conservative
movement is taking place within the nationalist wing, where the “liberals” are
creating more enemies than friends by “misbehaving” in their attacks on people
who Hazony acknowledges are bigots.
A stickler for taxonomies, Hazony had offered a preview
of this argument on December 29 with a 14-point Twitter memo titled “How to
wreck the Trump coalition so it never recovers.” In Hazony’s telling,
“High-Strung Liberal Zionists” (a category that appears to include everyone
from Ben Shapiro to the editors of this magazine to the editorial boards of National
Review and the Wall Street Journal) are at war with “Wacko
Anti-Semites.” In their zeal to defeat the “Wacko Anti-Semites,” the
“High-Strung Liberal Zionists” are firing too wildly and hitting “normie
nationalists and realists,” who in return “will become hurt and angry and start
lashing out blindly and absolutely loathing everyone they believe to be a
High-Strung Liberal Zionist or someone giving cover to a High-Strung Liberal
Zionist.” The winners of this intramural fight will be “the Muslim Brotherhood,
and the Commie Left, and the Chinese, and the Qataris, and the Iranians, and
the Mexican cartels” who will “just laugh and laugh and laugh as they watch
America, which could have been great again, sink like a stone.”
The thrust of Hazony’s argument is that combatting
anti-Semitism is as alienating or more alienating to voters than anti-Semitism
itself. This reasoning is both morally and tactically wrong. Polls continue to
show that a large majority of conservatives support Israel and oppose
anti-Semitism. And yet Hazony believes that the 25 percent of the party that is
exercised about anti-Semitism should avoid hurting the feelings of the 10
percent who are anti-Semites. Tucker Carlson, Hazony said, is “a very smart, passionate,
and very likeable man when you meet him in person.” At the first NatCon
conference in Washington, D.C., “he gave one of the best speeches we have ever
hosted.” Moreover, “Tucker has been saying—as clear as the day—that he is not
an anti-Semite.” Acting like the tough Israeli sabra, Hazony is the cowering
Jew of the shtetl, furious at his fellow Jews for provoking anti-Semites.
Hazony’s analysis of American politics and
history—epitomized in his laughable claim that Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, and
Mike Pompeo are the ideological heirs of Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay—is
as apt as his prognostication skills. In a November interview with Ross Douthat
of the New York Times, Hazony said that he was “hoping” Vice President
Vance will have “the skill of determining what the boundaries of the coalition
are.” The following month, Vance decried “endless, self-defeating purity tests”
and righteously affirmed that he would not “bring a list of conservatives to
denounce or to deplatform.” Hazony also told Douthat, “I assume that Heritage
is going to solve the problem [of anti-Semitism]. I know a little bit about
what steps they’re taking, and I think it’s very, very likely that Heritage is
going to get on an appropriate and excellent path.” As of this writing, more
than 60 senior Heritage staff have left the think tank since Roberts avowed the
institution’s unflinching loyalty to Carlson.
While Hazony feigns at playing a moderating force within
the movement, what he’s really doing is covering his own tracks, desperately
attempting to retain his influence by whitewashing the egregious behavior of
his allies and the logical outcomes of his own philosophy. Through his books (The
Virtue of Nationalism and Conservatism: A Rediscovery) and
conferences, Hazony has been a principal figure in the drive to undermine
universalist Enlightenment values as the basis of the American founding.
According to Hazony, those who believe such hogwash are “imperialists” who
support “the ideal of an international government or regime that imposes its
will on subject nations when its officials regard this as necessary.” Proper
nationalists, by contrast, believe that “nations should be free to set their
own course in the absence of such an international government or regime.” Into
the former category Hazony places the Third Reich, the European Union, and the
late Charles Krauthammer.
Furthermore, American conservatives have got their
history all wrong, a failure for which they must “repent.” The real
intellectual fathers of the American Revolution are not John Locke and Thomas
Jefferson, whose classical liberalism Hazony conflates with the antinomianism
of the 1960s, but rather the 15th-century English jurist John Fortescue and the
17th-century John Selden, whose writings he uses to endorse the concept of
America having a state-backed religion (Christianity). If this fake history sounds
like a right-wing version of the 1619 Project, that’s because it is.
The rise in anti-Semitism on the right is attributable to
a handful of individuals whom Hazony is too cowardly and embarrassed to
condemn. Like a vengeful alcoholic at an intervention, he is lashing out and
blaming everyone but himself for the wreckage he helped create—the mirror-image
of the left-wing Jew who makes excuses for his anti-Semitic comrades. Imagining
himself a world-class intellectual, he is, for lack of a better term, a moron.
How else could he have thought that forging alliances with European-style
blood-and-soil nationalists would be good for the Jews, or America?
Hazony sees himself as a scholar-statesman on the level
of a Jabotinsky or Ben-Gurion when he’s really an arriviste. In a reprehensible
attempt to protect his access to power, Hazony is willing to gainsay his
American co-religionists, who know better than him the threats they face.
Watching Hazony’s Jerusalem speech reminded me of no one so much as Rabbi
Lionel Bengelsdorf from Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, in
which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential
election and keeps the country out of World War II. The oleaginous Bengelsdorf,
who supported Lindbergh, becomes the new president’s court Jew. “I have
encountered considerable hostility from members of the Jewish community for
allying myself in the 1940 election with the Lindbergh campaign,” Bengelsdorf
tells a Jewish family, one of whose sons lost a leg fighting with the Canadian
army against the Nazis. “I am pleased to tell you that it took no more than two
or three sessions alone with the president to get him to relinquish his
misconceptions and to appreciate the manifold nature of Jewish life in
America.”
Alas, not even Bengelsdorf’s obsequiousness can outweigh
the fact of his Jewishness, and the FBI arrests him for being “among the
ringleaders of the Jewish conspiratorial plot against America.” At the end of
the book, Bengelsdorf is released and writes a face-saving memoir in which he
admits the error of his ways. At this point in his intellectual career, a mea
culpa is the least Yoram Hazony can do.
1 There was one small problem with Hazony’s
complaint. It turns out there is such a 15-minute video documenting Carlson’s
anti-Semitic obsession (a 14-minute and 57-second video, to be precise), which
Hazony himself had commissioned and subsequently suppressed. “I am
flabbergasted that Yoram would say that no such video exists, because he
produced one,” the former director of communications of Hazony’s Edmund Burke
Foundation, who had gathered materials for the video, wrote in Tablet.
“He just didn’t have the courage to put his name or his organization’s name on
it or to make it public.”
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