The Right Is Increasingly Exploiting the Horror of Genocide

I attended the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference earlier this summer, an annual gathering of academics, writers and think-tankers on the cutting edge of the Trumpian Right. In the five years since NatCon’s debut, it’s quickly been recognized as a bellwether of a new right-wing vanguard, lending intellectual gravitas and organizational heft to nationalist movements in the United States and worldwide.

The mood was jubilant as several hundred attendees, including many prominent conservatives, converged blocks away from the White House. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley championed Christian nationalism from the stage. Ohio senator, and now Republican vice presidential nominee, JD Vance tipped his hat to the ​“intellectual leadership of the conservative movement.” Leaders of Project 2025 swapped insights with Hindu and Hungarian nationalists. ​“We are not part of the conservative movement — we are the conservative movement,” right-wing operative Rachel Bovard declared during the opening plenary.

But one voice was notably absent. Five years ago, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson headlined the first NatCon conference, marshaling his signature mix of blood-curdling xenophobia, nativism and white grievance. But this year, Carlson had, for many at the conference, become persona non grata.

That’s because nine months into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, Carlson has emerged as a leading voice in an emergent chorus of Israel critics within the America First movement. Carlson’s critiques of AIPAC, U.S. aid to Israel and even Israel’s oppression of Palestinians have drawn controversy in today’s rabidly pro-Israel GOP. 

But those unorthodox positions on the Middle East appear to have a real and growing base on the Right. Polling indicates that support for Israel is faltering among many young conservatives, including evangelicals. In early August, a Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll found that a record 45% of Republicans and 55% of Americans overall would oppose sending U.S. troops to defend Israel were it attacked by Iran.

A coterie of MAGA pundits, including Carlson and former Daily Wire host Candace Owens, have grown increasingly critical of U.S. support for Israel — and some GOP politicians and candidates have taken steps in their direction. Gen-Z white Christian nationalists like Nick Fuentes and his America First/”Groyper” movement recently declared ​“war” on the Trump campaign for being too pro-Israel, among other disappointments.

But make no mistake: the Right’s Israel critics care little for Palestinian freedom. Instead, many are fixated on antisemitic fantasies of nefarious Jewish cabals subverting American sovereignty from within — and they’re exploiting Israel’s genocidal war to try to move these narratives mainstream. 

Take Owens’ claim earlier this year, to 20 million social media followers, that her criticism of Israel was being silenced by cabals of ​“political Jews.” MAGA Senate candidate Royce White, who won the endorsement of the Minnesota Republican Party and then the state’s GOP primary, has called Israel the ​“lynchpin of the New World Order,” a nod to campaign supporter Alex Jones. 

While many mainstream Democrats falsely conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, they risk fueling this push by right-wing operatives to popularize antisemitic conspiracy theories.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the yawning gap between party base and leadership on Gaza was on full display, and recent Gallup polling finds that more than three-quarters of Democrats disapprove of Israel’s military operation. During the convention’s primetime programming, even the mildest of calls for a cease-fire drew thunderous applause from the crowd. 

But Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris remains steadfastly opposed to a U.S. arms embargo on Israel — and the party denied even the modest request from progressives to include a Palestinian speaker on the final night of the convention.

By taking this posture, Harris and the Democratic Party leadership are providing another space for these conspiracy theories to flourish.

I didn’t expect to find these voices at NatCon — at least, not from the stage. National conservatives claim to reject the decades-old, moribund foreign policy consensus which positioned the United States as the world’s policeman, pursuing bellicose overseas intervention in the name of an imagined global democratic order. 

Instead, NatCons champion a global alliance of like-minded nationalist regimes committed to exclusionary borders, anti-LGBTQ and patriarchal politics. Within this ​“Judeo-Christian” world order, Israel plays a crucial role as front-line defender of the West in its ​“clash of civilizations” against ​“radical Islam.” National conservatives from the United States to Hungary, accordingly, offer robust support to the expansionist, genocidal agenda of the Israeli Right. 

From the first plenary, NatCon speakers claimed to offer a new, non-hawkish foreign policy. Israeli-American philosopher Yoram Hazony, founder of the National Conservatism movement, used his opening address to denounce decades of U.S. foreign policy ​“built on the idea that America as a liberal country had a job of exporting liberalism to every country in the world using American armed force.” 

The next day, Elbridge Colby, go-to NatCon foreign policy expert and former Department of Defense official during the Trump administration, chastised the traditional U.S. role of ​“global hegemon” and ​“world policeman.” I heard no talk of ​“bringing democracy to the Middle East” at NatCon. 

Israel remains for NatCon what historian Suzanne Schneider has called ​“an illiberal model for the international nationalist brigade.” Hazony, a staunch Religious Zionist, models his archetype of ​“Judeo-Christian” nationalism off the Biblical ancient Israelite polity. 

NatCon was co-launched by Hazony and David Brog, co-founders of Christians United for Israel, the largest Christian Zionist lobby group in the United States. At NatCon’s April 2024 conference in Brussels, Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli called on ​“each and every country in Europe and in the West to come together to combat and overcome the evil Iranian regime as a united force — we must restore the power of Western Civilization.”

NatCons typically oppose U.S. boots on the ground in the Middle East, but they maintain that U.S. military aid, diplomatic and other support for Israel must remain robust, and they reject any potential U.S. attempts to rein in Israeli war-making. 

Israel will remain ​“ready and committed to defend itself autonomously, and looking to Washington to enable it to do so,” Colby wrote last year.

In a May speech to the non-interventionist Quincy Institute, Vance defended support for Israel in Christian nationalist terms. ​“A majority of citizens of this country think that their savior, and I count myself a Christian, was born, died and resurrected in that narrow little strip of territory off the Mediterranean,” Vance said. ​“The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn’t care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous because of who Americans are.”

While claiming to be non-interventionist, NatCon leaders like Vance want to deepen U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and regional belligerence — a terrifying posture that risks pulling the United States into World War III. Providing the Israeli Right weapons, cover and free reign seems designed to provoke this third World War that NatCons claim to oppose. 

After the conference was over, I asked Hadar Hazony, a 28-year old NatCon staffer and Yoram’s son, about this possibility. He told me that regional war between Israel and Hezbollah was ​“impossible to prevent.” Vance made a similarly ominous statement at the Republican National Convention last month. 

“We need to do something with Iran — but not these weak little bombing runs,” Vance told Fox. ​“If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard.”

In the crowded hallway, one NatCon attendee told me the Israeli government should ​“occupy Gaza” and rebuild Jewish settlements. He would support mass expulsion of Gazans if Israeli leaders ​“had the will to do it.” Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu was too weak, he explained, but former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin was better. Feiglin recently quoted Hitler on Israeli television while issuing a call to ​“turn Gaza Hebrew.” 

Unlike the Biden administration, the NatCon attendee explained, Trump would not hold Israel back from what needed to be done. 

An exchange during NatCon’s sole panel on Israel offered a glimpse of the emerging fault line among conservatives.

“Israel, Islam and the West” offered familiar far-right Zionist talking points from a coterie of analysts at prominent neocon and establishment think tanks. Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza was cynically recast as ​“the most restrained war in modern times.” By pursuing policies ​“enriching and emboldening” Iran while hamstringing Israel, one speaker claimed, the United States was ​“tying Israel’s arms” against the Iranian threat. Muslim immigrants in the West were cast as subversive ​“fifth columns,” an Islamophobic term depicting Muslims as enemy threats from within. And panelists falsely equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

The mostly older audience, including Hazony, nodded approvingly — until the Q&A began. 

“Why do Jews get to be the only religious group to have a state — that was taken from Palestinian Muslims — in the entire world?” asked anti-DEI activist Kenny Xu. ​“And if it is such a legitimate state, then why has it not gotten along with its neighbors … to the point where even America, under President Trump, tried to initiate peace and it didn’t work, and still hasn’t worked?”

Xu, the 27-year old president of the anti-DEI organization Color Us United, has authored two books on what he calls the ​“war on meritocracy” in higher education. Earlier this year, he lost a bid to win the Republican nomination for a North Carolina state representative seat. The antisemitic and nationalist undertones to his question deepened as I spoke with him outside the session.

“I mean, it’s America First, right?” Xu told me, when I asked him to explain why some on the Right were souring on Israel. Conservatives shouldn’t need to ​“ally with Jewish influence,” he continued. ​“We’ve appeased the Jews for a long time, they still vote Democrat 70% of the time.” Many Republican voters ​“don’t want America to be funding any country, especially Israel” he said, adding, ​“I have talked with Palestinians who feel like they’re living in an apartheid situation, and you gotta understand that.”

Most other Gen-Z NatCon attendees declined to speak to me — my reputation as an antifascist researcher had preceded me. But one Gen Z organizational leader, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me most of his peers are quietly critical of the ​“special relationship” between the United States and Israel, but expressing this publicly may hurt their career prospects in the conservative movement. 

Popular alt-right influencer Sargon of Akkad summed up this mood. Israel’s response to October 7 has been ​“excessively belligerent,” he told me, and the West shouldn’t be ​“sending them huge amounts of money.” And while they didn’t show it on the stage, several of the speakers at NatCon 2024 have opposed U.S. aid to Israel. That includes far-right pundit Jack Posobiec, who has also highlighted the brutality of Israeli bombing campaigns, as well as former presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, Claremont Institute Fellow Jeremy Carl, and MAGA kingpin Steve Bannon (whose headline speech at NatCon was canceled after his imprisonment).

In their bid for power, NatCon is maintaining a strategically flexible brand, allowing these Israel-skeptics to remain within the fold. 

“Any good political coalition is going to have diverse understandings,” Hadar Hazony told me after the conference, and the task is to synthesize ​“a policy which those diverse understandings will eventually coalesce around.”

Disagreements aside, all parties to this debate share hardline Western chauvinism, American nationalism and a ​“might makes right” worldview. They despise Palestine solidarity protesters and extend little tolerance to progressives of any stripe within the deeply exclusionary society they wish to build. 

As progressives continue to bang on the doors of the Democratic Party, demanding an end to Israel’s genocide, we should also remain attuned to the currents of dissent sweeping our MAGA opponents.

Even as public opinion on Gaza continues shifting, it’s by no means guaranteed that the winds will blow in the direction of Democrats or progressives — portions of the Right, too, are eager to mobilize discontent. 

The Democratic establishment should take heed. Here, as with other issues, when they refuse to translate popular public opinion into policy, they cede valuable terrain to opportunists on the Right — who are often less squeamish about allowing their dissidents a seat at the table.