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

Do These People Know What They're Doing?

Yoram Hazony interview with Ezra Klein, August 1 2025

“National Conservative” Yoram Hazony

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 (excellent) book.

I think his withdrawing our invitation, even if extended accidentally, 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.com for more than 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?

FOOTNOTE, August 9 2025: In fairness, I should have noted that Hillsdale Professor David Azzarad was allowed to deliver an aside at the 2024 NatCon 4 conference denouncing New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ unconstitutional mugging of VDARE.com. As reported by James Fulford, who supplied links and weary comment, Azzarad said:

Now the Regime’s lawfare extends not just to individuals who challenge it but also to institutions that do not toe the party line. Do you remember when Lois Lerner’s IRSw as targeting the Tea Party groups during the Obama Administration or when the IRS during the Obama Administration leaked the donor list of the National Organization for Marriage in order to hurt them or look at what’s going on right now with VDARE.

VDARE is an anti-immigrant website [We’ve been explaining for years that ”opposed to mass immigration” is not the same as anti-immigrant] run by Peter Brimelow. they’ve spent the last three years fighting off an investigation by New York’s AG Letitia James. They’ve also been kicked off of Facebook, YouTube, PayPal, Constant Contact and Airbnb among other businesses that are permitted to deny services to a nonprofit on ideological grounds. If you’re lucky the punishment is the process. if you’re not you end up broke and incarcerated.

Unfortunately, this did us no good: we were forced to suspend operation a few days after Azzarad spoke.