NatCons Don't Know What the Fuck They're Doing

Nikos Mohammadi

September 24, 2025

What is the point of winning?

In June, President Donald Trump, disappointed over both Israel and Iran’s ceasefire violation, said to a reporter, “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” 

I went to the National Conservatism Conference earlier this month. What I saw is that NatCons, not unlike jingoistic military powers in the Middle East, simply don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

The Origins of NatCon

NatCon’s statement principles, signed by individuals such as Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, Miranda Devine of The New York Post, and Peter Thiel, include rejecting imperialism and globalism, curbing immigration, and supporting a free market that acts in the national interest. The NatCons, you would be correct to think of them, are the intellectual powerhouse of the New Right. 

The conference, which dates back to 2016 as the Christian-Jewish Alliance for Reclaiming and Rebuilding Conservatism, is organized by Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American political theorist whom Ezra Klein believes is “the man driving the nationalist revival on the Right.” 

In today’s political discourse, “nationalism” and “conservatism” might indeed go hand in hand. But in the times of the pre-Trump GOP, the likes of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George Bush weren’t so much committed to the nation proper as they were to the free market and American global hegemony. A different, anti-fusionist vision for conservatism is precisely what Hazony and company are attempting to “reclaim.” They envision a right which prioritizes the good of the nation and its citizens over the two n-words of our day: neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative foreign intervention.

Addressing a group of college students, Hazony told us that "libertarians believe that liberty is the supreme value. Conservatives think that liberty is great, but it’s like one out of seven or eight crucial principles.” He said that “postliberal is one word you could use” for this “rebellion against fusionism” (that is the conservatism à la National Review.)

Hazony published his most acclaimed book, The Virtue of Nationalism, in 2018, and in July 2019, he was able to organize NatCon 1 in Washington—the first truly large and prominent conference of Hazony’s project. He managed to secure then-Ambassador John Bolton, Tucker Carlson, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Peter Thiel as keynote speakers. 

Fast forward to 2025, and NatCon 5—the first during Trump 2.0—featured members of the Trump administration such as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Director of the National Institutes of Health Jay Battacharya, and Border Czar Tom Homan; alongside Steve Bannon, Mike Benz, and Patrick Deneen, amongst a slate of myriad other right-wing intellectuals, pundits, and personalities. But rather than presenting a coherent plan for the aims of the revolution of the New Right, my overall impression was that these speakers were simply concerned with the deeply trivial.

During his conversation with the students, Hazony emphasized that “NatCon has been pretty consistent on foreign policy” and that “everyone’s in the tent. Nobody’s a neocon here. We’re not doing George Bush 2.0.” While he acknowledged that “many disagreements have blown up” over Israel, Hazony instead pointed to how “everyone is behind” overturning Obergefell. The NatCons certainly understand the immense power and influence they have as Trump attempts to recreate the government. And yet, they unify over opposition to gay marriage. I couldn’t help but think: is this really the best use of their time? To deem Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s and Thiel’s marriages void?

The Tension Between America First and Israel

The conference was held in the basement of the Westin D.C. Downtown. The first day of the conference, the Tuesday after Labor Day, I went to register in the morning and got my nametag: “Nikos Mohammadi.” I was probably the only person with a Muslim last name there, but fitting I thought, that this only individual would be a secular Iranian-American who is quite skeptical of Islam himself. 

Now, it might appear that the logical end of a post-neoconservative America First nationalism would be an aversion to all foreign entanglements, certainly including our close alliance with Israel, by far the largest recipient of military aid. In fact, this is in my view the only logical end to America First—leaving debates on foreign policy aside. 

However, this is seemingly not apparent to many NatCons, such as Hazony, who sees Israel as the NatCon state par excellence. His reasoning, which Suzanne Schneider correctly identifies in Jewish Currents, is that Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the “light among nations” and should serve as the model for America and other Western nations to emulate: an explicitly nationalistic, postliberal-adjacent state. Though almost all discourse around Israel has now been muddied by the ongoing war in Gaza, recall that before October 7, 2023, the Jewish State was mostly in the limelight for the Likud’s desire to stage a judicial coup and take power from the High Court of Israel. This was broadly characterized as “majoritarian” and “postliberal,” in line with the New Right in America or at least segments thereof.

Hazony’s take on America First—that America should remain close allies with Israel, and even emulate Israel—is entirely antithetical to the way Carlson (the self-appointed guardian of “Trumpism”) sees it. And Hazony’s perspective is especially out of touch with the directionality of the MAGA movement, particularly as young conservatives sour over Israel. In fact, throughout the conference, the principal, though subtle, tension between both speakers and attendees appeared to be support for Israel. 

Only once was this tension put front-in-center and into actual words, during a debate with Curt Mills of The American Conservative, articulating the Israel-skeptic position, and Max Abrahms, advancing the ardently pro-Israel position. Abrahms began by bashing Carlson, and he articulated what has become the standard pro-Israel MAGA position: Abrahms said that both the isolationists and neocons alike are wrong, representing two radical extremities over the question of American involvement in the Middle East. Mills, by contrast, asked: “Why do we accept America First, asterisk Israel?” He called Israel a “vassal state” of the U.S., and lamblasted America as “uncle sucker.” Abrahms fired back, justifying his position in that “the big difference is that Ukraine is not a winner, whereas Israel is a winner.” Mills couldn’t stop himself from laughing, and many of the Jewish audience members in their yarmulkes seemed visibly uncomfortable. Among them was Rabi Rafi Eis, one of the event organizers, who had a frown on his face during virtually the entire session.

As Jonathan Chait correctly pointed out in the Atlantic, “The post-liberal American right set out to destroy the guardrails that restrained anti-Semitism, without giving any thought to what might happen next,” and that, “National conservatism may be recorded in history as a movement of activists who thought hard about how to gain power, and little about anything else.” Now, I don’t agree with Chait that what Mills was saying was necessarily a hint at anti-semitism. Later, over a heated debate at Clyde’s, some Jewish attendees agreed with me, and others did not. 

This debate aside, replace “anti-semitism” with “America First Israel skepticism” or “anti-Israel” (take your ideological pick) and the broader point still stands. So does Chait’s observation about how now that the NatCons have won, they are deeply confused about the directionality of their movement, about what the purpose all is.

Later in the conference, I struck a conversation with one of the students who had openly voiced support for Mills during the Q&A session. Benjamin Patrick, 20, a student at Kenyon College, told me that those organizing the conference “understand the direction in which the right-wing is going, and they're trying to place a pro Israel group as the sort of organizational and logistical [institution].” According to Patrick, their modus operandi appears as, “‘we're gonna organize the big conference that sort of represents this part of the New Right in order to say, okay, you can go this far, but not so far as to, you know, start being in violation of our interests.’” He said it simply wasn’t “a good strategic move” on Hazony and company’s part. 

“I think that the state of the right wing, in terms of Gen Z and online, is so anti-Israel that there is just absolutely no hope,” opined Patrick. “But on the other hand, I think the people organizing this conference maybe understand the general trend towards secularization and away from, like, Protestant, low church, evangelical religion that traditionally supported Zionism in the United States among right-wing people. And so I think that they understand that there's maybe a more secular Zionism that can be rooted in framing the conflict as a standoff between civilization and savagery.” He called this approach “rationalist.” 

For all his prolific criticism of this Zionist right coupling itself with America First nationalism, Patrick rejected the categorization of them as “nefarious.” He noted, “if I was a Jew, or if I was a Zionist, or if I was Israeli, I'd be doing the same thing. Because, like a big part of this conference is like national sovereignty, realism, countries acting in their own interest. If you're Israeli, you should be acting in the interest of Israel. But from the American side of that coin, I think that that should be resisted. Because, although I think it is a very clever ploy to get the younger generations to support Israel in a more updated, 21st Century, cool, trendy, youth, friendly reasoning, I still don't support Israel, because I support America, and I think that Israel has our political process in a wee bit of a chokehold, and I think that it would be best if we parted ways as close allies.” 

He also told me “that what is happening now is a political realignment in which the political party that traditionally represented the left, obviously, the Democrats, is sort of in this tussle in which it's coming to represent the urban, privileged, educated, economically wealthier, middle to upper classes, and that has resulted in a lot of establishmentarian type of behavior.” Patrick continued that “you need to be critical towards that elite class so that you can improve the social organization of your country. And so,” he expressed, “that is sort of what the New Right is becoming.” The right as the true left in 2025?

Horseshoe Theory, Materialized?

On the second day, I saw PETA members outside the Westin. Now, under normal circumstances, I would expect them to be protesting a conservative conference. But Trump’s Republican Party operates under no normal conditions. PETA in fact was there to support Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the National Institutes of Health Director who spoke at the conference. 

The organizer, Mason Melito, 21, told me, “PETA is thanking Dr Bhattacharya for his pledge to reduce animal use, and we're encouraging him to do more to continue saving taxpayer dollars and funding treatments and cures that actually work for American citizens.” Moreover, Melito said that “PETA ran into Robert F Kennedy out and about and thanked him for his work to reduce animal use as well,” and that as “a registered 501, c3, nonprofit, we cannot and do not endorse any political party or candidate, but we do encourage all politicians and all candidates and anyone who is deciding who to vote for to consider animal issues when they make their decision.” You wouldn’t be wrong to call that statement support for Trump and Kennedy’s health agenda. Overall, Melito explained, “the response has mostly been positive. People are horrified to learn what happens in these National Institutes of Health funded laboratories, and are hopeful for the future where we can have more human relevant medicine and treatments and cures that actually work.” 

However, as we finished talking, a stereotypical conservative in a suit and tie walked past us and said something to the effect of “animals are tasty.” Clearly there were still some holdouts.

I wrote about the horseshoe theory phenomenon for a conference I attended a month earlier in Hungary. I mentioned how Mick Hume, the editor in chief of the Budapest-based and Fidesz-allied European Conservative, is a former Marxist, and that Steve Bannon is a self-styled Leninist. Bannon would later talk at the conference, in the final series of keynote addresses. His shtick was mostly about how America had to stop always supporting Israel’s military objectives, and that we are “funding an enemy” in China. “Send them all home tomorrow,” Bannon argued of Chinese students, and that “We must decouple starting tomorrow morning from China.” 

He wanted American students to attend Harvard and MIT, not Chinese students. He raged about how “a bunch of folks on the spectrum in Silicon Valley” are making decisions for the American people. He argued that “the biggest threat to Israel and Jewish people is not in Tehran,” but that “the threat is right in New York City,” where a “grassroot equivalent of what President Trump has built…a better programed version of Barack Hussein Obama,” a “Marxist and a jihadist,” will soon govern.

The irony of a “Leninist” saying so was not lost on me. Bannon was very angry at a bunch of things. But that’s all he was: filled with ire. I expected more. 

Later, at a panel on publishing and the New Right, I saw similar animosity without direction. Titus Techera, a film critic, visiting fellow at MCC Budapest, and distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College lashed out at Bari Weiss as “the full completion of feminism.” He noted, without much explanation aside from the fact that Weiss is a liberal-ish woman, that she “is the enemy we need now.”

What Next?

The NatCons gave Trump the intellectual force to win. But they now find themselves deeply divided over a number of issues. Hazony certainly does not want to welcome more anti-Israel voices into the movement. Bannon wants to deport all Chinese students. They are perhaps all unified in overturning Obergefell, the subject of a whole panel. Meanwhile, PETA is outside supporting them.