Hazony Decrees: "VDARE Beyond The Pale." But Why?

Do These People Know What They're Doing?

Israeli intellectual entrepreneur Yoram Hazony is about to hold another of his “National Conservative” conferences, in Washington D.C. in September, and it is being boosted by the usual suspects. The clip above is from his August 1 2025 interview with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein; full transcript here.

As the former editor of the Letitia James-mugged VDare.com, I am particularly interested in the following passage [Hazony is unbolded text, Klein (who does talk a lot) is bolded]:

HAZONY:Now notice who’s not a part of it: If you look at the flyer that we circulated from the very beginning, we distinguished ourselves in two directions — from the Libertarians, which is basically the liberal Republican wing at the center, who were basically to our left, and from racialist and anti-democratic movements that are to our right.

Both sides — there’s been friction constantly. And by the way, I don’t mean that every single person who came to our conferences exactly fits that. We have a statement of principles — you can read it. People know what we stand for. But the key to what we’re discussing now is: Is there a border between national conservatives and what’s to the right of national conservatives?

I think that the border is clear. I’m not saying that we never make a mistake or there’s never confusion about some —

What is the border?

OK, the border is: From the beginning, we have said we do not admit, we do not invite, people whose platforms are racialist.

So there was a big — in our circles, anyway — fight with a publication called VDARE, which is —

I would call it a racist publication.

It’s certainly, at a minimum —

It is a racialist publication. Let’s definitely call it that.

At a minimum. VDARE is happy to publish people who are racialists. So that’s a minimum. I think maybe you could say more, but for us that was too much.

Note that both Klein and Hazony seem to shrink from the claim that VDARE.com is “racist” and settle on “racialist,” which I presume means “race-realist”—i.e. ready to discuss racial differences. Is this a good sign?

Nevertheless, for the record, Hazony is completely wrong to claim that he did not “invite” VDARE.com to his initial conference—I absolutely was invited, perhaps because I was on his email list after an earlier affable correspondence about whether there was going to be an audio version of his book.

I think his withdrawing our invitation, even if accidental, was extremely bad manners.

But maybe that’s a WASP thing.

The plain fact is that Hazony’s racist/ racialist “border” to the “National Conservativism” that he proposes for Americans is completely hypocritical.

Israel is an ethnostate. Why should the U.S. not be a white ethnostate, as it was implicitly until the 1965 Immigration Act.?

Hazony has simply not met these arguments, advanced on VDARE.co,. for more that six years.

Nothing we have said is incompatible with Zionism.

Perhaps he will invite me to debate this at his upcoming conference.

Otherwise, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Hazony’s National Conservative operation is an extreme Zionist Gatekeepers Ball, as the late lamented ZMAN described its first conference.

(Significantly, ZMAN was banned from subsequent conferences).

(FWIW Hazony’s cucking did not stop a Muslim Mayor in Belgium from trying to shut down his 2024 conference).

Do these people really know what they’re doing?