This personal invitation arrived in my email inbox recently:

Naturally, I was delighted. I had been very impressed with the Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony’s book The Virtue Of Nationalism and had even had an affable exchange with him via Twitter Direct Message about his publisher’s curious failure to release the book in audio form:

So Lydia and I duly paid our $285 fee (each) to register. But we got this response:

It’s a form letter. Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, who tried in his frugal way to get press credentials, got exactly the same thing.

Jared very reasonably wrote back to ask if would he be denied press credentials if he were “a socialist or Open-Borders advocate” a.k.a. a typical member of the Main Stream Media.

Needless to say, Hazony and Brog did not have the courtesy to reply.

But the answer to Jared’s question, of course, is “NO!”—cuckservatives are always desperate for MSM attention. And Hazony (alas) and Brog turn out to be cuckservatives—although not, I think, for the reasons (stupidity, cowardice, careerism) that motivate the typical American cuck.

I’m pretty battle-scarred after nearly three decades in the Immigration Wars. But I must admit I felt a twinge of sadness about Hazony. Apart from his book, I think his tweets display a really interesting, and I had thought fair, mind.

Thus as Editor of a website that for nearly twenty years has focused on “The National Question”— defined as “the viability of the US as a nation-state”—I was naturally delighted by this:

I keep thinking of those self-identified conservatives who knew for decades that I was a Jewish-Israeli nationalist and thought that was fine and good. But when it turned out I thought Brits and Americans could be nationalists too, they suddenly went all wobbly on me.

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) January 28, 2019

And of course I agreed with him about the Democrats’ extraordinary refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election—now definitively discredited by the Mueller Report’s finding that the Trump campaign did not, despite all the hype, “collude” with Russia:

Some want to impeach the President, impeach the Supreme Court majority, impeach the Electoral College—anything but have a respectful argument and then honor the voter’s decision | The Time Has Come for Democrats to Impeach Brett Kavanaugh | The Nation https://t.co/6sqIcYIDzu

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) March 20, 2019

And I think he’s exactly right that some deep cause underlies both Trump Derangement Syndrome in the U.S. and the post-Brexit elite tantrum in the U.K.:

I don’t think it’s the hatred of Trump that’s the real cause. Look at the way the British elites fear and detest and are being driven mad by Brexit—it’s the same exact syndrome but without Trump. https://t.co/P3jGz8bqt0

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) April 13, 2019

And, as a British-American, I found his incisive take on the virtues of a No Deal Brexit distinctly affecting:

The truth is that this is what those who admire Britain, the world over, are waiting to see: To see Britain stand up for itself. In so doing, the British will gain the respect of others, and, more important, some of the self-respect that has been missing under the May government.

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) January 21, 2019

And, given my long-standing interest in the War On Christmas, I was affected by his wise and judicious response to Julia Ioffe’s arrogant attempt to bully her adopted country out of celebrating its majority’s main festival:

I sympathize. Christmas didn’t make me happy when I was in the US either. But I choose to live in Israel where the holidays are from the torah. You *choose* to live in America. Why would you want to tell the Christian majority how “wearying and alienating” their holiday is? https://t.co/0WeWErnEP7

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) December 20, 2018

Sigh.

Hazony opened The Virtue Of Nationalismwith a bracing challenge to Anglo-American conventional political wisdom:

Politics in Britain and America have taken a turn toward nationalism. This has been troubling to many, especially in educated circles, where global integration has long been viewed as a requirement of sound policy and moral decency. From this perspective, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the “America first” rhetoric coming out of Washington seem to herald a reversion to a more primitive stage in history, when war-mongering and racism were voiced openly and permitted to set the political agenda of nations. Fearing the worst, public figures, journalists, and academics have deplored the return of nationalism to American and British public life in the harshest terms…

[But s]urely, the many statesmen and intellectuals who embraced nationalism a few generations ago knew something about this subject, and were not simply trying to drag us back to a more primitive stage in our history, to war-mongering and racism. What, then, did they see in nationalism?…

My own background allows me some insight into the subject. I have been a Jewish nationalist, a Zionist, all my life…^.I have lived most of my life in a country that was established by nationalists, and has been governed largely by nationalists to this day…Among them, nationalism is not some unfathomable political illness that periodically takes over countries for no good reason and to no good end, as many in America and Britain seem to think these days. It is instead a familiar political theory on which they were raised, a theory of how the political world should be ordered.

…The nationalism I grew up with is a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference. This is opposed to imperialism, which seeks to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime.

Of course, I think this is wonderful. It sounds exactly like positions we have argued for years. And, of course, it fits right into VDARE.com’s documentation of the emergence of National Conservatism before Trump through his use of it to win the nomination and the Presidential election.

Note here that that Hazony ingeniously defines the European Union, and global “integration” generally, as examples of “imperialism”—he calls it “liberal imperialism” because of its common assumptions about free trade, free markets, equal atomized interchangeable individuals etc.

And note also that Hazony is fully aware that, notwithstanding its name, this modern form of “liberalism” is actually increasingly repressive (now a huge problem for VDARE.com):

[L]iberal-imperialist political ideals have become among the most powerful agents fomenting intolerance and hate in the Western world today…

One of the most striking features of public life in contemporary America and Europe is the way that the Western nations are now afflicted by public shaming campaigns and heresy hunts whose purpose is to stigmatize and render illegitimate one or another person or group of people, opinion or policy, that is perceived as having the ability to mount any kind of meaningful resistance to liberal doctrine.

Much of what has been written about these campaigns has concentrated on the deterioration of free discourse in the universities, where official and unofficial censorship of the professorate’s opinions—including their views about Islam, homosexuality, immigration [my emphasis—PB], and a host of other subjects—has become commonplace. But…much of the public sphere is now regularly visited by the same kinds of campaigns of vilification…

(Interestingly, London University professor Eric P. Kaufmann, in his incisive new book WHITESHIFT: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, also makes the point that liberalism, which he calls “left-modernism,” relies increasingly on Swedish New Totalitarian-type repression in what were previously open, Anglo-Saxon societies. So it seems that political scientists have now extended diplomatic recognition to this disgusting phenomenon. Perhaps next it will occur to conservative politicians).

All good stuff—if pretty ironic, given that this sort of “heresy hunt” is precisely what Hazony and his colleagues are doing to completely harmless, law-abiding American patriots like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor and VDARE.com’s us.

Another victim of the Hazony/ Brog “heresy hunt”: Patrick Casey, the young leader of the American Identity Movement activist group. Casey got exactly the same form letter, but responded more brutally on Twitter:

Reminder that @yhazony defends nationalism for his people but not yours. pic.twitter.com/MWEP4qaUcx

— Patrick Casey