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It is reasonable to believe that some beneficial domestic policies will emerge from the American nationalist movement. Tucker Carlson, Oren Cass, Julius Krein, and others are capable advocates of economic and social policies that would serve ordinary Americans and families, instead of corporate oligarchs. Nationalists know there are lots of problems with immigration—above all, depressed wages and the displacement of native citizens—and it’s to be hoped that they can influence our politicians to finally pass responsible immigration policies. More Americans, including Missouri senator Josh Hawley, are realizing that Big Tech is a threat to free expression, which is an essential cultural value, and that it is deeply biased against conservatives and Christians in particular. It is going to take a conservative movement to fight the insidious new forms of leftist technological control, and the sooner the better.

With respect to foreign policy, however, it’s obvious that the primary goal of the nationalist movement is to maintain the Zionist status quo. This movement’s leader, and gatekeeper, is the Israeli Zionist Yoram Hazony. A former aide to prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, Hazony has spent the past three decades running conservative think tanks in Israel and has long-standing ties to wealthy Zionist donors. He is also chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation; it organized the recent national conservatism conference in D.C., and it may prove to be highly influential in American and international politics.

Certainly, if Hazony’s conference had intended to be serious about an America-first foreign policy, it would have featured men like Pat Buchanan and Daniel Larison, two principled critics of Zionist influence, including the powerful Israel lobby. But Israel is surrounded by enemies, and Hazony knows quite well that the nation’s existence depends on American resources and military backing. So, the foreign-policy aspect of the conference was hawkish and pro-Israel, with the most prominent person being the keynote speaker, National Security Advisor John Bolton. Needless to say, Bolton’s plan for “regime change” in Venezuela, and his eagerness to go to war with Iran, are inconsistent with Hazony’s ostensible aversion to “liberal imperialism.”

Since most American conservatives are Christians, it was necessary for Hazony and David Brog (his right-hand man at the Edmund Burke Foundation) to cultivate an alliance with certain key Christian players on the right. Among these are the non-Jews on the board of the Edmund Burke Foundation, all of them Christian Zionists, including Russell Reno, the prominent editor of First Things. That magazine undoubtedly gets Zionist funding, and though it has recently affected a friend-enemy approach to politics, over the years First Things—a running joke on the dissident right—has been about as critical of Zionism as Commentary.

Concerning Israel, Christian Zionists are rather like liberals in regard to illegal immigrants and culturally dysfunctional blacks, blind pity and needless guilt serving as profound liabilities in each case. The Holocaust having happened, and the Jews being “God’s chosen people,” even as Americans are “God’s almost chosen people,” Christian Zionists gullibly believe they owe Israel unconditional support, and that whatever is good for Israel is good for the U.S. Thus irrational and naive sentiments play into the Zionist agenda—contra American interests. In a revealing 2006 interview in Haaretz, Brog told the Christian faithful:

[Y]ou must stand by your friends even when you disagree with the choices your friends make. And…there must be due deference towards the Israelis who live in Israel and who pay with their blood and the blood of their families when there is a war or terrorist attacks.

Due deference towards the Israelis when it comes to deciding whether to fund and get involved with a foreign war or terrorist attacks, in which the U.S. has no interest? Plainly this is not good for us.

Compare Brog’s words with Hazony’s in his well-regarded book The Virtue of Nationalism: “We should not let a hairbreadth of our freedom be given over to foreign bodies under any name whatsoever, or to foreign systems of law that are not determined by our own nations.”

Now, what if the U.S. were to adopt the same philosophy? Well, that would entail having done with its unprofitable relations with Israel in the Middle East, something that could spell the end of that nation itself.

Hence the need for Hazony & Co. to conceal their agenda. Using the name Edmund Burke is an unintentionally comic attempt to conceal the Foundation’s overarching Zionism. Edmund Burke is historically the conservative figure in the Anglophone world, but Hazony & Co. need Americans to resist a real conservative nationalism, because if enough of them decide to put their own nation first, they will question the wisdom of allowing Jews to forbid white ethnocentrism and to perpetually liberalize the right to serve Jewish interests (neoconservatism; the Straussian schools), and the wisdom of allowing Zionists to have so much influence on our country’s reckless and corrupt foreign policy in the Middle East, including sending Israel roughly $10 million a day and $134.7 billion to date. (Much of that money is spent on weapons manufactured by U.S. defense companies, which, in a conveniently incestuous relationship, donate to “conservative” politicians, think tanks, and “nonprofits,” groups that typically either propagate Zionist perspectives and opinions or at least don’t question them.)

In an acerbic article, “Hazony Baloney,” Paul Gottfried writes:

Hazony and his fake meeting of minds are needed in order to allow the neoconservatives to go on controlling the Right, including those who are not as docile as Rich Lowry and other familiar types at ‘National Review.’ The neocons colonized the zombie-like conservative movement in the 1970s and 1980s, after they reached the conclusion that their fanatical Zionism plus moderate left-of-center politics no longer gave them a winning hand on the Left. Starting with George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972, Democrats moved slowly but perceptibly in the direction of the Palestinian cause, and so the neocons took over what became conservatism, inc. and reshaped it in certain predictable ways. In American politics, the captive or seduced conservatives would veer leftward and embrace an expanded centralized welfare state and all the civil rights and immigration legislation of the 1960s. In Middle Eastern affairs, however, “conservatives” would be unswervingly Zionistic and attack all critics of Israel as anti-Semites while hurling them off the bus of conservatism. Neocon and Jaffaite language about the US as a propositional nation would prevent any confusion between Israeli ethnic nationalism (which is supposedly a good thing) and America’s pluralistic, immigration-friendly identity.

This background and properly cynical take help us to understand the task of the circus master David Brog, a man whose body language, speech, and tone, to any close observer, evidence his wormlike fraudulence. Like Hazony, Brog is a very well-connected figure. He is the cousin of Ehud Barak. The former prime minister of Israel and the former minister of defense, Barak intends to challenge Netanyahu in the upcoming September 2019 Israeli legislative election. Brog sits on the board of directors of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), where he was the executive director for its first ten years. The group was founded by televangelist blowhard John Hagee, who wrote the forward to Brog’s 2006 book, Standing With Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State. Before CUFI, Brog worked in the U.S. Senate for seven years, rising to be chief of staff to Sen. Arlen Specter (a Jewish Zionist who was awful on immigration) and staff director of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Given his political background, Brog’s transparently phony manner hardly seems surprising.

Today Brog is president of the Edmund Burke Foundation and heads the Maccabee Task Force. Founded by billionaire Jewish Zionist Sheldon Adelson and billionaire Jewish Zionist Haim Saban—two huge donors to the Republican and the Democratic Parties—the Maccabee Task Force tries “to combat the disturbing spread of anti-Semitism on America’s college campuses.” Here “anti-Semitism” refers to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. To my mind, Brog’s role in opposing the BDS movement makes him an untrustworthy character by definition. Most Americans probably have no clue about what a threat the anti-BDS movement is to their freedom. Anyway, it is. This Kelley Vlahos demonstrated very ably in a March 5 article in The American Conservative. It is worth quoting this important work at length:

On January 3, amid the seemingly intractable government shutdown, Senator Marco Rubio made it his first order of business to sponsor a bill that supports the punishment of any U.S. company or contractor who engages in BDS by refusing to work with Israel.

As of January, [due to the efforts of Zionist lobby groups,] 26 states now have measures that require them to deny contracts to and divest from any companies that are involved in BDS.

One of the highest-profile cases to date is Bahia Amawi, a child language specialist who was contracted to work in the Texas public school system for nine years until December, when she was fired for refusing to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel. (When Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed his state’s anti-BDS bill in May 2017, he said he was “proud to have commemorated Israel’s Independence Day.”) As journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out, if she had signed, Amawi would not only be prevented from boycotting goods sold by companies in Israel and the occupied West Bank, but she would be barred “even from advocating such a boycott given that such speech could be seen as ‘intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel.’”

Vlahos goes on to give many more examples of Americans who have lost their jobs, had their rights violated, and suffered other harms just because they wished, per their constitutional right, to boycott companies that work with Israel. She also relates that

On the college level, a recent investigative series by ‘The Forward’ magazine shed light on a massive online blacklist called canarymission.org. Its motto is, “if you’re racist, the world should know.” Many of the outed “racists” and “anti-Semites” on the site are students and professors who have merely questioned Israeli policies and supported BDS, and are now forced to scrub their reputations. According to reporter Josh Nathan-Kazis, this is one flank in a much greater, well-coordinated rapid response force involving groups ranging from AIPAC to the David Horowitz Freedom Center that fly into action at the whiff of a protest or student government resolution on campus.

Also on the advisory board at the Edmund Burke Foundation is Alyza Lewin. According to the Israeli American Council website, she is

the President and General Counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a non-profit organization established to advance the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and promote justice for all. The Brandeis Center conducts research, education and advocacy to combat the resurgence of anti-Semitism on college and university campuses.

Yet another familiar type. Indeed, judging by the interests and activities of the people running the Edmund Burke Foundation, a more accurate name for it would seem to be the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Christopher DeMuth, a lawyer and fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a board member at the Edmund Burke Foundation. The president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) from 1986 to 2008, DeMuth is another sign that Hazony’s nationalism movement is really just neoconservative Zionism in disguise. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Bibi Netanyahu, John Bolton, the Israel lobby, and the largely Jewish neoconservative journalists all were ardent proponents of the Iraq War, from which AEI stood to gain. In Brandon Weichert’s words:

[T]he neoconservative movement is an outgrowth of mid-twentieth century corporate politics. Theirs is a small faction that has had extraordinary influence, simply because major corporations have sought to influence government policies in ways that would benefit their companies and their industries. It is no surprise that the American Enterprise Institute, the leading proponent of the Iraq War among think tanks, long enjoyed major financial backing from the oil company Exxon-Mobil.

Leading scholars with deep ties to interest groups that stood to benefit from the Iraq War, such as Richard Perle, were heavily involved with AEI. Nineteen other AEI scholars worked in the George W. Bush Administration. All were Iraq War proponents, though in 2008 there was a purge of the neoconservatives at AEI, when Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Joshua Muravchik were removed from their positions. Two years later, David Frum was let go from his influential perch at the think tank. AEI would end up receiving money from the Koch Brothers, becoming reliable parrots of their globalist line on open borders and “free trade.”

DeMuth would appear to be one of Hazony’s moneymen, along with fellow board member Dan Schmidt, a philanthropist at the Bradley Foundation. If the U.S. goes to war in the Middle East to advance Israel’s interests (and to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia’s), it’s a safe bet that some of DeMuth’s contacts would profit.

Those of us who are knowledgeable about American conservatism must recognize the nationalist movement as a familiar sort of game. Like John Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro, and other conservative Jewish Zionists, Hazony and Brog are enthusiastic supporters of Israel’s ethnostate. And again like their fellow gatekeepers, they equate white ethnocentrism with “racism.” In order to evade this double standard, Hazony farcically claims that even Israel is a kind of proposition nation. And yet, as Peter Brimelow has pointed out,

The plain fact is Judaism has not been a proselytizing religion, conversion is very difficult, and Jewish law historically required matrilineal descent as a condition of Jewishness. The inexorable result: Jews, generally although not exclusively, have developed characteristic genetic markers.

In their public appearances, Hazony and Brog appear as allergic to racism as any garden-variety leftist. Hazony is a tireless critic of the Enlightenment—but what is racism if not an Enlightenment concept? Notice, too, that Hazony’s and Brog’s ostensible aversion to racism does not seem to extend to the brutal Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. No wonder, that. As Michael Shindler, Mark Koyama, and others have shown, Hazony’s idiosyncratic, biblical conception of nationalism is rather dubious and doesn’t resemble any nationalism that has ever existed.

Why should it? It is evident that Hazony’s main purpose is to convince American Power that American conservatism, American nationalism, and Zionist interests are all one—with the first two goods being subordinate to the third one. The Zionists of the conservative country club thus recall the Jewish priestly class in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, infecting others with “slave morality” and gaining the upper hand on them thereby.

And yet one wonders how a worm like David Brog can crawl through some of America’s most powerful institutions without getting stepped on. When, beginning at around 5:50 in this video, he informs all “racists” that they are not welcome at the big national conservatism conference, he seems like a cross between Ned Flanders and an irate camp counselor who’s gone too long without his medication. What happened to the right, what happened to America, that this man can be an authority?