The Blasphemy of the Courtiers

A bizarre episode rippled through the American right in early 2026. In late January, “neo-Zionist” Yoram Hazony gave a speech on “Anti-Semitism and the American Right” at the Second International Conference on Antisemitism, held in Jerusalem. Hazony’s remarks were a response, in part, to a growing willingness on the part of conservatives and right-wingers in America to tell the truth about Israeli violence and political manipulation, both in Gaza and worldwide as well as at home in the United States. That such people—“anti-Semites” in the minds of many Jews and Christian Zionists, no doubt—should remain in the Republican Party has to do with the “high level of incompetence by the entire anti-Semitism-industrial complex,” Hazony argued.

It seemed a strange move to make. Blame the Mark Levin types for not screaming about “anti-Semitism” loudly enough? But that was not Hazony’s core assertion, not the reason he gave his speech. Hazony dispensed with the brouhaha over “anti-Semitism” in the Republican Party in order to say what he really came to the podium in Jerusalem to say, namely that “the struggle for the soul of the Republican party” and the “actual battle over the future of Jews in the Republican party” are not unfolding in the debates among “alt-right” people opposed to Jews, but rather “within the big nationalist camp at the center of the party.” Hazony did not come to Jerusalem to bury Caesar, but to praise him. Capturing the nation-state, holding it fast, and bending it to his political will—these were the ends which Hazony had in view. Hazony sees America, not as a country filled with people, but as a platform to be hijacked, all under the cover of religious rhetoric which he well knows people in both Jerusalem and in Washington, as well as in Athens, Tennessee, and Zion, Illinois, will endorse, and for which many will willingly die.

This is why Hazony focuses on party, not on individual figures. He is not trying to win over “anti-Semites,” or even to purge them. He just wants the Republican Party as a prize, so he can move to the next stage of conquest. The Democrats, Hazony posited at the beginning of his January, 2026 speech, are an unthinkable ground for Jewish action in America, because “since October 2023, Democrats have largely made their peace with the anti-Jewish hatred of the neo-Marxists and Muslim Brotherhood supporters in their party.” Never mind that the “Muslim Brotherhood” canard and the “we’re being overrun by Marxists” trope have largely proven to be baseless hyperventilating, the old Cold War and Global War on Terror tricks dredged up for one last lap around the Washington circus tent. Read Mark Levin’s American Marxism for yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s a tendentious mess, the swan song of an ideologue whose mummeries have lost the crowd. That’s why Hazony ignores him. The fundamental question, for Hazony, is that “most of my American Jewish friends have concluded Jews have no future in the Democratic party of Zohran Mamdani and Ilhan Omar. And if the Republicans were to go down this same road, it’s not clear what would be left of Jewish life in America.”

Many have seen through this shtick, although not everyone realizes what the shtick portends. James Kirchick, writing at the notoriously Zionist Cold War neocon holdover Commentary, got it right when he intuited that Hazony’s real aim, not just in the speech but in his body of work as a whole, was not to rid one party or another of anti-Semitism, but to retroactively refound the United States of America as a Christian nation. Kirchick got it wrong, though, when he dismisses Hazony as misguided, for Hazony knows exactly what he is doing. Kirchick writes:

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 comparison to the 1619 Project is apt. The 1619 Project was, and remains, an attempt at narrative replacement, a drive to reframe the United States as a story about slavery and injustice, rather than as a story about Anglo-Saxon triumph and liberal global hegemony. What Hazony and his Zionist friends, on the right and the left, are doing is similar, but much worse. Hazony’s end goal is summed up in the title of the "Thirty-Ninth First Things Erasmus Lecture" he delivered on November 2, 2026, at the Union League Club in New York City. “Only the Old Testament can restore America,” Hazony’s headline reads. The logo for the talk is rank blasphemy: a Ten Commandments tablet, from which the Ten Commandments have been erased, and slathered with an American flag logo and the title of, and basic information about, Hazony’s talk. It’s not that America is, or is not, a Christian nation. It’s that God exists to justify whatever nationalist scheme Hazony is up to. With nations come armies, missiles, aircraft carriers, propaganda possibilities galore. Get the “Christians” at a fancy gathering in New York to believe that the Almighty is behind the initiative, especially when those “Christians” publish one of the most virulently Zionist magazines on the planet, and you have pulled off a major feat of narrative control. Not that it’s going to be tough for Hazony to do. The reason he was invited to Manhattan is because the First Things crowd already agrees with him, and is eager to do his genocidal bidding.

The bizarre speech Hazony gave in January, 2026 at the “anti-Semitism” conference no longer seems so odd. Why does Hazony sideline so-called “anti-Semitism” in the Republican Party, even at a conference dedicated to the topic? Because for Zionists anti-Semitism, real or imagined—and it makes almost no difference which—is a catalyst, a means to an end. Anti-Semitism, which Zionists invent if it does not exist, exaggerate when it does exist, and use as a political tool regardless, has nothing whatsoever to do with “Jewish life in America,” or anywhere else. Zionists, Christian Zionists, “Judeo-Christians,” and their fellow travelers have political outcomes in mind. Hazony needs a vehicle to maintain and strengthen Zionist control of Washington. The Republican Party is the likeliest carriage to hitch to that horse. By focusing on the Old Testament, Hazony can bring in Jews, Christians, maybe even a few Muslims to boot. The point is to keep the ball rolling, to keep the genocide in Gaza going, to expand the franchise, to export the kind of ethnic cleansing at which Washington has excelled for two hundred and fifty years beyond the borders of the United States and Israel, and to cloak the entire genocidal enterprise in the fictitious benediction of the biblical God. It is breathtakingly blasphemous, and the “Christians” at the swanky lecture in New York City are eating it up, probably relieved that, in endorsing ongoing massacres of the innocent and pretending that Yahweh approves of it, at least they are not being “anti-Semitic.”