My take away from this interview [gift link] is that Vance's "National Conservatism" is a form of blood and soil nationalism that is deeply invested in claiming (and possibly actually believing) that it is NOT a form of blood and soil nationalism. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/o...
Yes, Hazony’s very gauzy view of the current actions of Trump, Miller, Rubio, conservatives, + NatCons is hypothermic at best. His quietly polite insistence that there is life-enhancing tolerance + goodness at the core of this draconian movement is in fact the devil in one’s ear. 🤢
I finally listened to this and my jaw hit the floor at the end where hazony tells klein he gave such a good sales pitch for fascism that he should give it at natcon. Basically turned the pod into a marketing session for fascism
Its exactly how they have handled racism since 65. "Well, i don't personally feel racist so I can't be even if i support racist policies that have a racist history and wanting a white supremacist future celebrated by raciss...."
What a pile of 🐴💩
Yeah, there’s this amazing moment in the interview where Klein asks him about rejecting VDARE from NatCon and Hazony is like, they’re “racialists,” that’s not what this is about But then you look at what the NatCon types actually say and do and it’s indistinguishable
IMO many philosophers are just pulling shit out of their ass and that Yoram Hazony is just a big pile of shit altogether. Fuck these nationalists. I’ll stay with the good people, thanks
Shocked. Fascists not calling themselves fascists. Very Nazi-national socialism.
Hazony sounded like a smooth-talking Josef Mengele: “Give us just 12 years to perform sadistic experiments on you, and we’ll cure what ails you!”
Yeah, I found this part really horrifying.
For those too dumb to realize, J D Vance is dangerous.
bsky.app/profile/jenn...
I will love to see 'the loyalty' all the 'descendants' show each other when Christian nationalists are in charge of everything. Only a fool would believe any of this.
This person's view is extremely stupid, exhaustingly so. I don't see the point of interviewing them. Every single thing he says is subject to immediate and obvious counterexamples. It's like interviewing a flat Earther. I don't get what the point is of doing this.
Yes. And our job is to advance the idea that the US is a country that, at its best, really is about common devotion to human rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness). “Heritage nationalism” represents our country at its worst.
Yeah, I found it strange that he spent most of the interview trying to downplay his views
Yeah.. everything about the interview felt like someone providing intellectual scaffolding to old fashioned nativist racism
What is vance gonna do about his wife and kids?
One advantage of being in power in an authoritarian system is that you can always grant exceptions to whoever you like, and those recipients of your largesse can rest easy...until, of course, they stop being in favor.
FYI: christiansocialism.com/2020/09/30/y...
This was my take away too. Lots of obfuscation because it’s still taboo to just admit they’re a herrenvolk movement.
Fascinating, the far right seems to be done advertising and explaining its project. Its just stutter, mumble, dismiss and shrug. The debate friendly liberal ezra seems disappointed. The right is done explaining
Hegemony has been achieved they dont want to seem likeable anymore
At least we now know they want to stay in power for 12 years
"National Conservatives" like Vance and Hazony can sell this as "not blood and soil nationalism" to segments of the US population because they think America has never been hospitable to that version of nationalism...it's just a European thing. This historical ignorance is a necessary piece of this.
Hazony must be aware of the current revival of ancestry as a criterion for national membership, among the (western) European right.
Hazony's argument is that the US was founded as an "Anglo-Protestant" country, but one that "eventually" was able to "incorporate" others. First off, 18% of Americans in 1790 were enslaved, so that 95% number is odd. 2nd the Federalists wrote the Alien Enemies act in 1798, aimed at Irish Catholics.
It’s terrible history and also — as a descendent of Anglo-Protestant people who came to these shores in 1630 — even if their narrative were true, aren’t we allowed to have evolved? My ancestors might have had stupid ideas, but that doesn’t mean I have to.
Luckily ideas are not defined in our genes.
Exactly.
The "... or something" is shorthand for "this statistic is based on what I feel it should be."
Thanks for the gift article, Seth. I heard a clip of the podcast this morning on tik tok and was flabbergasted at Hazony's responses. Perhaps it was because of the clip, and therefore there was a lack of context.... I'll listen to the whole thing now and see if it changes my mind. 😁
I'm not saying Hazony is a fascist, but this talking point about the US being made "un-Christian" in the 1930s by hostile foreign elements is straight out of the US fascist playbook of that era. Those US fascists in the 1930s meant Jews, specifically Jews who they said were radical leftists.
This is also what nazi defenders say to avoid recognizing the role of Christianity in stoking 2000 years of anti-Semitism and the Christian Europeans doing the Holocaust "Actually the GOOD christians got purged so it couldn't have been us... The overwhelming majority of the population..."
Pretty sure folks like Jefferson & Franklin were Deists It’s not really what most Christians have in mind when they talk about Christianity
Hazony claims that the National Cons believe in pluralism and toleration, despite all of their actions to the contrary. He claims it's BECAUSE we're an Anglo-Protestant nation that the US can be so tolerant. It's the same claim from this apocryphal Patrick Henry quote, written by a 1950s fascist.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” is such a clear and beautiful statement. Whether natcons like it or not, each of us has the RIGHT to live as we see fit.
I wrote about that Hawley quote last summer. It's indicative of how the genealogy of today's National Conservatives traces back to a distinctively American fascist tradition, of which Hazony seems to be blissfully unaware. open.substack.com/pub/sethcotl...
This leads me to a question. What defines being a non-fascist conservative?
Yesterday, the official US Border Patrol FB page posted a winkingly eugenicist video riffing off of the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes kerfuffle. Today that video is no longer posted there, which shows a surprising amount of either self-awareness or shame.
If you want to see that trollishly eugenicist video, it’s available here. www.tiktok.com/t/ZPHs1R655H...
FWIW, 1924 is when the KKK-backed and eugenics-informed Immigration Act was passed. It was the reopening of immigration in 1965 that Nat Cons like Hazony point to as the moment that "real America" began to be undermined, and which they seek to restore.
The comments on that FB post by the US Border Patrol made it clear that people 100% understood that they were talking about "genes," and not just "jeans." Remember when a certain Presidential candidate talked about immigrants "poisoning the blood" of our country? They knew what they were voting for.
I thought this piece on the Sydney Sweeney jeans thing was pretty good. It was obviously a eugenicist provocation meant to garner negative attention, though it was a profoundly lazy and stupid provocation. The fact that many just sloughed such vile shit off is alarming. bsky.app/profile/newy...
it can't be racism or fascism or white supremacy or Nazism if there's a wink-wink involved, this is science
1920s was the time KKK immigrated to Canada to sell their anti-immigrant views
The soundtrack to that ICE video is about young men who are broken by vice. How fucking clueless are these people?
Very, very clueless.
I hope you are downloading your posts here and keeping it safe for when they inevitably come for this place. Such valuable work 🙏
The founders of your country would be amazed to be classified as Christians. People forget, or ignore that the Children of the Enlightenment were suspicious of religion ( for good reason, it turns out)
“America could have minorities as long as they weren’t visible and didn’t have rights and political power” is such a consistent historical mindset of these guys, with the mythic idea of this purported time receding and shifting as needed
I went to college with him. He was an extremist back then.
This is Judah Benjamin erasure, at least.
Shades of the “Cavuto mark”.
Also, Maryland was founded as a colony of English Catholics.
Hazony sounded patently ridiculous. Ezra did a good job of laying out the nonsense here.
After all, the USA really are sooo exceptional /s.
All this Blut und Boden drivel always ends up in the dustbin of history where it belongs. Things fall apart when rich ideologues with soft manicured hands try to impose their bullshit on actual working class people with common sense and empty bellies.
When the Nat Cons bright their act to the UK—with a lot of high-profile Tories participating—more than a few observers reached that conclusion
Par for the MAGAt course: misdirection and disinformation are everything...
I tried to listen to this but Hazony 'arguments' are so weak and spurious and Klein quibbles at edges w/o any form of forceful refutation of bad logic coming from the nationalist right that I just can't with such crap from either one of them
This article's argument, which is also an appreciative "yes, and" to Vance's speech at Claremont last month, works hard to sound tolerant, but also asks if the US is fated to become "a polyglot holding pen for mutually exclusive, competing cultures." americanmind.org/features/ass...
This interview was so fucked up. Ezra Klein should know better. Never calls out specifics about his claims. But not as fucked up as any of the interviews with Christopher Rufo, Curtis Yarvin or even Peter Thiel. All by Ross Douthat I believe.
Opus Dei.
I literally felt like I needed a shower after listening to that interview.
I got about 5 minutes into the interview and had to turn it off. The only thing that kept me listening that long was wondering if he could get Klein to drop his "we are serious people with serious ideas, talking seriously" schtick. But alas, no.
In a July, 2016 essay in The Atlantic, 2016 Vance also warned the country of excess American deaths to come if Trump were to be elected president in November, 2016.
I wish we could have a debate between 2016 (Trump is America's Hitler) Vance and 2025 (Trump can do no wrong) Vance. To his credit, 2016 Vance tried to warn us that we might be electing a serial sexual assaulter and someone who was "Unfit for our nation's highest office."
One more thing, Vance and Hazony's nihilistic nationalism fuels guys like this. www.wsj.com/us-news/cryp...
Vance and Hazony are also practicing weak-ass Whig history. In their readng, nations have a core, immutable essence and destiny. They can deviate from that essence and destiny. They can fullfill that essence and destiny. They falsely believe they understand the true essence of the nation.
More, it's clear that both Vance and Hazony (father of 9 children) just want to control their children and their womens. They are nothing more than weak-ass, wanna-be authoritarians.
At the end of the day, Vance and Yoram Hazony are trying to amplify and celebrate our basest desires, which is why they flock to people like Trump. We are living in the midst of a global struggle between the advocates of liberal democracy and authoritarians. I am not optimistic about the outcome.
This interview was absolutely horrifying. The intellectual incoherence and inconsistency used to justify their anti democratic ideology was clearly apparent
Hazony came across as a profoundly incoherent person who was desperately trying to go through the motions of justifying a bundle of genocidal ideas that, as a Jew, he should know enough to revile and have the courage to stand up against. Instead, he's just going along to get along.
You don't think people of Israel adopted the 'blood and soil' ideology? They adapted it but it seems to be an idea they are willing to embrace in quite a lot of what they say about their country. It seems unlikely any people is immune and no people must adopt it either. It's a political choice.
Well, no. Being Israeli and Jewish is obviously an essential background for his thinking. Conversely, some serious theorists of nationalism do see the Biblical Jewish people as a proto-nation, possibly the original proto-nation.
My husband recommended I listen to this interview and then I spent the rest of the day telling him exactly this point about Hazony’s willful ignorance, incoherence and status as a useful idiot to fascist’s and Nazis. It’s so obvious.
Right out of the Nazi playbook.
Self-hating fascism is an odd twist.
Ever since Klein moved back from CA, he's been softballing right-wingers like he thinks he's Isaac Chotiner, letting them handle themselves with their own rope, but the man just does not have the juice.
I kept waiting for that Chotiner moment in that interview and it never came. I thought Klein's intro was very clear eyed, but he's just far too invested in having a civil and respectful exchange with people who are just lying or incoherent.