Yoram Hazony

And John Potter, it's, you know, the guy who said that if you go against the Jews, you'll be thrown headfirst into a buzzsaw, more or less.

Sort of gave up the grift here with Yoram Hazony's National Constitutional conservative conference, clip number 20 here, John Potter, it's giving away Yoram Hazoni's NatCon scheme in his commentary kibitzing session.

Let's watch.

What I've described as his project is not something that he acknowledges as his project.

It's put on in part by the Herzl Institute [laughs] which is the Zionist institute.

Uh, y- you know, the, the logo is the Star of David, and the founder of National Conservatism is a superb Israeli philosopher, Yoram Hazony, who wrote that great book, The Virtue of Nationalism.

Uh, but, but, uh, there is a whole gamut of people who could listen to Matt's speech here and be really edified by it.

Some of the people who are skeptical of the Israel alliance, who feel that the Is- the Israel alliance is costing America more than it's benefiting us, uh, who don't like the, the, the moral, uh, I don't know, slogans, the moral domineering that you have from the pro-Israel side that suggests that the United States has some always and eternal obligation, moral obligation to s- support the state of Israel, whether because of theology or something else.

Like, the entire thing is about Israel.

And Roberts seems to have gotten a lot of cover from Yoram Hazony, and thinks that, like, look, I've got this really famous MAGA Jewish guy over here, and he lives in Israel, and he says I'm okay, but he's also super MAGA, so can't we all be friends? And I don't think, like, you know, Yoram Hazony is, like, his shabbas goy, and I don't know that that works in the long term.

Like, there, there's gonna be a moment very soon where the Republican Party is going to be anti-Israel, and I just don't know how this bet that Kevin Roberts has made squares with that.

Well, I'm gonna say it.

People see that and wonder, what happened to draining the swamp? He writes, this week, some intellectuals of the populist right, the new right, or as you call it, the dissident right, are meeting at the National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem.

At the first edition of these gatherings in Washington in 2019, the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony declared an independent state from many conservative predecessors and principals.

Does the decline in Trump's standing, even at the margins, have any impact on the broader national conservative project? She says, many self-described national conservatives, including Hazzoni and the aforementioned Kevin Roberts, bet all their chips on Trump and Trumpism as the future of the conservative movement.

That bet looks at the very least more questionable now.

This isn't dinner, you know, cocktail, uh, party talk.

Um, and I understand that, you know, um, I'm friendly with, like, Yoram Hazony, and we argue about this stuff, and I like Yoram.

Yoram's, you know, I-- We disagree on a bunch of stuff, but, but I try to be friendly with everybody.

This isn't a you're wrong and I hate you kinda deal.

We can see this unstable formulation kind of teeter and collapse.

If Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed, an advocate for total regime change, was the philosopher coach and Dreher was the veteran point guard in this post-liberal squad, the rest of the starting five would include Catholic integralist Adrian Vermeule, the national conservative Yoram Hazony, the censorious culture warrior Christopher Rufo, and the shape-shifting opinion columnist and Compact magazine co-founder Sohrab Ahmari, with the sixth man of the year, Gladden Pappin, coming off the bench, who used to write under the name Manlius Capitolinus.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Perhaps a better term would be performative.

Yeah.

I think it's also, for people who aren't familiar, uh, Yoram Hazony, um, he's chair of the Edmund Burke Society, which organizes the National Conservative, or NatCon, conferences in, on both sides of the Atlantic, and whose most recent book is entitled The Virtue of Nationalism.

I don't think it's unfair, and I have heard people characterize Hazony's position as kind of like Israel as it is today, that mode of nationalism, that is the ideal model for a society.