A publication (which will remain nameless) that used to cover me quite frequently recently and abruptly stopped. After looking into it, I found out that there had effectively been a ban put on my name — an internal embargo of sorts. Of course, I was curious as to why? What exactly did I do to, all of a sudden, deserve a ban? As I came to find out, they claim that I am a “Christian nationalist.”
Now, I am a proud Christian, but I thought it was a bit strange that a media hit was put on me for the sole reason of being a Christian — because my show is not overtly Christian. There would be nothing wrong with that, but we&#8217;re not exactly praying on the show (though maybe we should be, considering everything that&#8217;s happening in society).
Regardless, I’m not sure I have any problem with either of those terms. I definitely consider myself to be a nationalist, and I am also a Christian. However, they’re saying it in a much more sinister way. If you’re paying attention, “Christian nationalist” is everywhere as of late. Suddenly, Christianity is being smeared, libeled, and attacked. It is being presented in the same vein as white supremacy.
In February alone, major media outlets published numerous headlines about Christian nationalism. <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-is-christian-nationalism-and-why-it-raises-concerns-about-threats-to-democracy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">PBS</a> published “What is Christian nationalism and why it raises concerns about threats to democracy,” <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/02/28/poll-christian-nationalism-americans-reject" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Axios</a> published “Poll: Most Americans cool to Christian nationalism as its influence grows” (apparently we’re now conducting polls and saying Christian nationalism is influential), <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/28/1234304058/christian-nationalism-survey#:~:text=Christian%20nationalism's%20support%20is%20strongest%20in%20rural%20states%20A%20new,as%20Alabama%20and%20West%20Virginia." target="_blank" rel="noopener">NPR</a> published “Christian nationalism’ support is strongest in rural, conservative states,” and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/opinion/christian-nationalism.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">New York Times</a> published “Four Ways of Looking at Christian Nationalism.”
Those all came out within just the last month.
This topic is also getting the Hollywood spin, so, now, it will be pumped through our television screens. After all, once the propaganda goes out, it must get the Hollywood treatment. Apparently, the man for that job is Rob Reiner. Reiner is directing a new documentary titled “God and Country,” which puts Christian nationalism in America under the spotlight. On his press tour, one of his stops was CNN, and in <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2024/01/30/exp-amanpour-rob-reiner-god--country-intw-013001pseg2-cnni-world.cnn" target="_blank" rel="noopener">his interview</a>, Christiane Amanpour asked Reiner why he selected Christian nationalism as his next film topic. He responded saying that over time, he has come to see how powerful and well-organized the movement has become: “I then realized that this [movement] has taken root far more and far more deeply than I had ever thought.” Reiner believes Christian nationalism is deeply embedded in society — and believes that’s a problem.
Now, I’m sure when you consider the myriad of issues facing our country today, what you’re really concerned about is that there might be some Christians who are also in love with our country. They are Christian nationalists. When you see drug dealers, illegal immigrants, crime rates, gang violence, I’m sure you’re thinking, it’s the Christians we should be afraid of. It’s an absurd idea.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-296-holy-smokes-the-media-just-put-a-hit-on-me" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: Candace Owens</a></h4>
I believe this is a further attempt to divide and brainwash Christians, which is something that has gone on for decades.
Once upon a time, the Bible was taught in classrooms all across the United States, and teachers and students prayed in school. Then lawsuits were filed and all that went away, beginning in the 1960s. Since then, there has been a concerted effort to divide Christians, to make them feel embarrassed about their religion. That push just continues with more force; that is exactly what is happening again with the topic of Christian nationalism.
Hollywood is notorious for supporting initiatives like this. Believe it or not, they’re even going after Justin Bieber. Bieber, as we all know, was young and innocent when he came onto the scene, so he had much potential to be a victim of evil in the industry. Granted, he went through an intense period of partying, but in 2018, he married Hailey Baldwin — and his world completely changed. He dropped the party-boy reputation, changed his ways, and started attending church. This was and still is not the kind of story that usually circulates in Hollywood.
Hollywood has never been a fan of Christianity, so church-going people in the industry simply cannot be allowed. That makes Justin’s pastor’s post on the internet no surprise. Victor Marx took to social media to make a somewhat unusual, though understandable, request, asking for Christians to pray for wisdom and protection for Justin and Hailey, for them to draw close to the Lord, because people in the limelight often face “spiritual warfare.” Hailey’s dad, Stephen, shared the post which caused more questions in the comments. He has since deleted the post, and though we don’t know more details, it is obvious that there is some kind of spiritual battle happening.
It seems that every time we get a glimpse of truth, forces unite and more evil occurs. I cannot imagine the pressure Justin is facing, and I am sure that the evil he has experienced and witnessed in the industry is weighing heavier and heavier on his heart, especially since he has strengthened his relationship with God over the years.
So, to any person going through this type of conflict, know that Christians will stand by you if and when you are ready to share the truth. We will be there with you. We will pray for you — and the entire world. Plus, people who are not Christians will thank you, even if silently, because they know that if Christians are being considered evil, something very sinister is going on.
Pay attention, pray, and encourage each other. If we can unite in our faith, we can conquer more evil together than we can alone.

Small wooden cross and flag of USA. God save America

The Latest Attack On Christians: Christian Nationalism

Candace Owens

Christians

Justin Bieber

Leftists

Nationalism

Readers Pass

Rob Reiner

The Trump administration is now the first U.S. administration to label a white supremacist group a terrorist organization. The move, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/us/politics/terrorist-label-white-supremacy-Russian-Imperial-Movement.html">The New York Times</a> notes, &#8220;could cut against criticism that the Trump administration has played down the threat of white nationalist violence for political reasons.&#8221; The group also happens to be pro-Russia.
The State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, Ambassador Nathan Sales, underscored in a statement to the Times Monday that by naming a white nationalist group a &#8220;specially designated global terrorist organization,&#8221; the Trump administration is doing something &#8220;unprecedented.&#8221;
&#8220;These designations are unprecedented,&#8221; said Sales, as reported by the Times Monday. “This is the first time the United States has ever designated white supremacists as terrorists, and this illustrates how seriously this administration takes the white supremacist terrorist threat. We are doing things no previous administration has done to counter this threat.”
&#8220;The State Department’s designation for the organization, the Russian Imperial Movement, sets up the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to block any American property or assets belonging to the group,&#8221; the Times explains. &#8220;It will also bar Americans from financial dealings with the organization and make it easier to ban its members from traveling to the United States.&#8221; Three of the group&#8217;s leaders — Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev, Denis Valliullovich Gariev and Nikolay Nikolayevich Trushchalov — are being labeled individually as terrorists, officials told the Times, a designation that includes additional sanctions.
Officials told the Times that the group is not believed to be sponsored by the Russian government, but that its actions have been &#8220;tolerated&#8221; by President Vladimir V. Putin and it has &#8220;helped advance the Russian government’s external goals by recruiting Russian fighters to aid pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine.&#8221; The organization has also supported neo-Nazi organizations in Scandinavia, which follows a larger Russian government strategy of &#8220;sow[ing] chaos in Western democracies,&#8221; the paper adds.
While Trump&#8217;s critics have frequently portrayed the president as &#8220;racist&#8221; and &#8220;empowering&#8221; white supremacists in his rhetoric, his administration has now taken multiple decisive and historic steps to counter the threat of white supremacism. As the Times notes, the White House added white supremacist groups to the federal government’s <a class="css-1g7m0tk" title="" href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/NSCT.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">National Strategy for Counterterrorism</a> in 2018.
In the document, the administration cites nationalist and separatists movements, including specifically neo-Nazis&#8217;, as potential global threats. Below is an excerpt from a passage describing the global threat posed by such groups:
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<blockquote>There is also a broad range of revolutionary, nation- alist, and separatist movements overseas whose use of violence and intent to destabilize societies often puts American lives at risk. For example, the Nordic Resistance Movement is a prominent transnational, self-described nationalist-socialist organization with anti-Western views that has conducted violent attacks against Muslims, left-wing groups, and others. The group has demonstrated against United States Government actions it perceives are supportive of Israel and has the potential to extend its targeting to United States interests. Similarly, the neo-Nazi National Action Group, a terrorist organization that was banned by the United Kingdom in 2016 for its promotion of violence against politicians and minorities, operates mainly in the United Kingdom but has engaged with like-minded groups in the United States, Estonia, France, Germany, Latvia, and Poland—expanding the potential influence of its violent ideology. Likewise, Babbar Khalsa International seeks, through violent means, to establish its own independent state in India and is responsible for significant terrorist attacks in India and elsewhere that have claimed the lives of innocent civilians. Such groups may avoid or deprioritize targeting United States interests for now to avoid detracting from their core goals but frequently conduct assassinations and bombings against major economic, politi- cal, and social targets, heightening the risk to United States personnel and interests overseas.</blockquote>
The document also describes domestic terrorists motivated forms of violent extremism not connected to radical Islam, &#8220;such as racially motivated extremism&#8221;:
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<blockquote>Lastly, the United States has long faced a persistent security threat from domestic terrorists who are not motivated by a radical Islamist ideology but are instead motivated by other forms of violent extremism, such as racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism.</blockquote>
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Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/first-european-country-announces-multi-step-plan-to-ease-coronavirus-lockdown">First European Country Announces Multi-Step Plan To Ease Coronavirus Lockdown</a>
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Donald Trump

Trump Administration First In History To Label A White Supremacist Group Terrorists

Racism

Terrorism

Trump Administration

White Supremacy

The ushering in of the Trump presidency has caused many conservatives to pause and soberly reflect upon both the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">future of American conservatism</a> and <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/our-constitutional-order-prioritizes-justice-not-procedure/">what it even means</a> to be a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-national-conservatism-conference-josh-hammer">conservative</a>, in the first instance. The intramural conservative dialogue reached a crescendo earlier this year when New York Post Op-Ed Editor Sohrab Ahmari declared his opposition to pluralistic/values-neutral &#8220;<a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/against-david-french-ism">David French-ism</a>&#8221; and his preference, instead, to &#8220;fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.&#8221;
The recent hullabaloo on the Right over pornography regulation/banning, a dialogue that owes its elevation in no small part to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-first-things-porn-is-not-a-blessing-of-liberty">those of us</a> <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/knowles-the-porn-debate-isnt-really-about-porn">here</a> at <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-every-child-exposed-to-internet-pornography-is-an-abuse-victim-there-should-be-laws-protecting-them">The Daily Wire</a>, is a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-every-child-exposed-to-internet-pornography-is-an-abuse-victim-there-should-be-laws-protecting-them">proxy fight</a> that represents an apotheosis of the <a href="https://constudies.nd.edu/news-and-events/events/2019/09/13/trumpism-what-is-conservatism-in-the-age-of-trump/">ongoing</a> Ahmari/French dialectic. And that intellectual divide, which is multifaceted but might be simplified as pitting the centrality of classical liberal procedural norms (French) versus the centrality of a morally assertive vision of justice and the common good (Ahmari), is of course itself a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/david-french-sohrab-ahmari-and-the-battle-for-the-future-of-conservatism">proxy fight</a> for the future of conservatism.
On Friday, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro weighed in with an incisive <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/shapiro-the-problem-with-common-good-conservatism">essay</a>, &#8220;The Problem With &#8216;Common Good&#8217; Conservatism,&#8221; that bifurcates between &#8220;common good&#8221; conservatives and &#8220;rights-based&#8221; conservatives. Working within the framework of this dichotomy, Ben made a powerful argument in favor of the latter.
I&#8217;d like to offer a reply.
America&#8217;s negative rights-based framework of government takes its most recognizable form in the Declaration of Independence, wherein Thomas Jefferson famously <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript">asserted</a> (emphasis added) that &#8220;We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. &#8212; That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.&#8221; To be sure, the Declaration deserves much in the way of <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2809272">admiration</a> — for Abraham Lincoln, the greatest statesman in the history of the republic, <a href="https://online.hillsdale.edu/document.doc?id=279">it served</a> as the &#8220;apple of gold&#8221; for  which the Constitution merely served as the surrounding &#8220;picture of silver.&#8221; The Great Emancipator rhetorically invoked and substantively <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-salon-attacks-declaration-independence-josh-hammer">relied upon the Declaration</a> throughout his political career — culminating in his helping shepherd the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiii">13th Amendment</a> through Congress and his seeing through the Union to victory in the Civil War itself.
At the same time, Jefferson, who was undoubtedly influenced by Lockean theory and other Enlightenment ideals, held many deeply heterodox views that were in no small degree of tension with his contemporaries. The insatiable revolutionary who <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/105.html">thought</a> that &#8220;the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants&#8221; held an intensive disdain for Burkean-style epistemological humility and incrementalism. Jefferson disagreed with those, such as <a href="https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Adams%2C+John">John Adams</a>, who believed that America&#8217;s inheritance of the unique English common law system — a rich tradition of common law thinkers including William Blackstone, John Selden, and John Fortescue — was Americans&#8217; more tangible safeguard of their rights. Indeed, one need only take a cursory glance at the <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp">English Bill of Rights of 1689</a> to recognize just how strongly that charter came to influence our own Bill of Rights.
Alas, ever the Francophile and gallivanting off at the time in pre-revolutionary Paris, the author of the Declaration was actually not even present at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. And suffice it to say that the men who actually crafted the Constitution held slightly different viewpoints as to the reasons why governments are instituted among free men.
In perhaps the most famous Federalist Paper of them all, <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp">The Federalist No. 51</a>, Jefferson&#8217;s fellow Virginian James Madison quite bluntly stated (emphasis added): &#8220;Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society.&#8221; Similarly, in <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed57.asp">The Federalist No. 57</a>, Madison announced the Constitution&#8217;s ultimate intention with unmistakable clarity — and, in so doing, he directly used the phrase that has elicited so much recent consternation (emphasis added): &#8220;The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.&#8221; Similarly still, the <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/preamble">Constitution’s Preamble</a> enumerates the substantive purposes of &#8220;establish[ing] Justice&#8221; and &#8220;promot[ing] the general Welfare&#8221; before it asserts the goal of &#8220;secur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty.”
In other words, as I <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/our-constitutional-order-prioritizes-justice-not-procedure/">wrote</a> in September for the Claremont Institute&#8217;s American Mind online journal: &#8220;[T]he Founders did not put the procedural norms of English common law first. On the contrary, they built our regime directly on the foundation of the substantive political virtues: Justice, human flourishing, and the pursuit of the common good.&#8221;
The upshot is that America&#8217;s Founders did not view the governmental pursuit of justice, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/">Aristotelian human flourishing</a>, and the common good as in any way whatsoever being in conflict with the Declaration and Constitution&#8217;s over-arching procedural framework of securing negative rights. The two concepts are directly related to one another. As scholars Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George <a href="https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-baby-and-the-bathwater">wrote</a> in the most recent issue of National Affairs, there are &#8220;what Aristotelians call eudaimonistic (or human flourishing) grounds for the limitation of certain governmental powers — and, not unrelatedly, the protection of certain civil liberties. The judgment is that these limitations tend, overall and in the long run, to best protect integral human well-being.&#8221;
It is the pursuit of justice, not the promotion and excessive expansion of liberty above all else, that most animated the Constitution&#8217;s Framers. For the Framers, expansions of liberty beyond a bare-bones natural law threshold could generally <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/why-the-new-right-rises/the-american-founding-was-not-libertarian-liberalism/">only be justified</a> if they were conducive to the pursuit of justice and the common good. These men were familiar with Aristotle’s <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.3.three.html">wisdom</a> that &#8220;a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only&#8221; — and with Burke&#8217;s <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=2Tu3bScwKKAC&amp;pg=PA200&amp;lpg=PA200&amp;dq=men+are+qualified+for+civil+liberty,+in+exact+proportion+to+their+disposition+to+put+moral+chains+upon+their+own+appetites;+in+proportion+as+their+love+of+justice+is+above+their+rapacity.&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=xwTUBDS16s&amp;sig=ACfU3U3yIo4SPFCI5bOZVZ5ZPot2cxYPgA&amp;hl=en&amp;ppis=_c&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwitucuVhLvmAhXVLc0KHat9BoIQ6AEwBHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=men%20are%20qualified%20for%20civil%20liberty%2C%20in%20exact%20proportion%20to%20their%20disposition%20to%20put%20moral%20chains%20upon%20their%20own%20appetites%3B%20in%20proportion%20as%20their%20love%20of%20justice%20is%20above%20their%20rapacity.&amp;f=false">admonition</a> (emphasis added) that &#8220;men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity.&#8221;
Similarly, the Framers loathed licentiousness and were extraordinarily careful not to recklessly conflate liberty, properly understood, with licentiousness. They were invariably terrified of the possibility of liberty sliding toward licentiousness. George Washington himself <a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/circular-to-the-states/">warned</a> in 1783 that &#8220;arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to licentiousness.&#8221; And almost eerily foreshadowing today&#8217;s staunch libertarians who oppose even the most anodyne attempts to <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/11/how-to-regulate-pornography">regulate pornography</a>, Founding Father Oliver Ellsworth <a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-landholder-iii-connecticut-courant/">warned</a>: &#8220;It is not strange that the licentious should tell us a government of energy is inconsistent with liberty, for being inconsistent with their wishes and their vices, they would have us think it contrary to human happiness.&#8221;
But a more muscular and morally assertive form of government <a href="https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-baby-and-the-bathwater">can be consistent</a> with liberty, justice, and human flourishing alike. At the time of the American Founding, blasphemy and obscenity were generally jail-able offenses. And contra classical liberal/civil libertarian historical revisionism and the nostrums espoused in the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-conservative-network-claims-leftists-josh-hammer">erroneously decided</a> 1964 Supreme Court case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the <a href="https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/natural-rights-and-the-first-amendment">First Amendment is perfectly consonant</a> with the robust common law of defamation.
Jeffersonian idiosyncrasies aside, the Founding Fathers were therefore not overly inspired by Lockean classical liberalism and high-minded Enlightenment theorizing. They were Anglo-Saxon Christians who inherited a unique cultural and common law tradition from their English forebears and sought to incrementally improve, in distinctly <a href="https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/04/edmund-burke-and-the-american-revolution-the-whole-story.html">Burkean fashion</a>, upon the political work of those forebears. In so doing, they were not per se averse to prudential statesmen wielding the levers of governmental power to nudge the citizenry toward the pursuit of justice and the common good — especially, of course, within the <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed45.asp">police power ambits</a> of the various states.
In short, my reading of history is that America&#8217;s Founding Fathers would have been baffled by the notion that the pursuit of justice or the common good is a governmental priority in any substantial state of tension with a governmental priority of securing negative rights. Our political leaders were expected to pursue &#8220;the common good of the society,&#8221; as Madison framed it in <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed57.asp">The Federalist No. 57</a>, while also being sure to protect and secure the preexisting negative rights of a free citizenry.
Knee-jerk promotion and expansion of liberty run amok toward libertinism, which, much to the chagrin of Objectivists and strict libertarians, has never been the sole and exclusive political priority of any serious political thinker, was utterly rejected by the Founders as a preeminent goal whose pursuit and attainment justified the establishment of governments among men. Instead, it was justice and human flourishing that most animated them — and the pursuit of justice and human flourishing quite naturally fit within the Declaration and Constitution&#8217;s over-arching framework of negative liberty. In the specific context of the pornography debate, there is, of course, no natural or First Amendment <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/10/10998/">constitutional &#8220;right&#8221;</a> to smut.
The Founding Fathers were thus both &#8220;common good&#8221; conservatives and &#8220;rights-based&#8221; conservatives. Which is what we should want our political leaders today to be, as well.

School Of Athens By Raphael

HAMMER: Government Exists To Establish Justice, Not Promote Liberty

Conservatism

Constitution

Federal Government

Libertarianism

With the news of President Trump <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/menken-secular-jews-claim-they-dont-exist-to-spite-the-president">signing</a> an executive order affirming the fact that Judaism can, in fact, be seen as a nationality (as opposed to a religion), left-wing groups and pundits — both Jewish and non-Jewish — have declared that this action is anti-Semitic. These groups seem to despise the notion of a Jewish nation.
In his 2018 book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Judaism-Zionism-Israel-Yotav-Eliach/dp/091415334X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=yotav+eliach&amp;qid=1576080910&amp;sr=8-1">“Judaism, Zionism, and the Land of Israel”</a>, Rabbi Yotav Eliach begins the history of the Jewish people in Israel with the definition of a nation and how Judaism fits into that definition. That premise is pivotal when discussing the conflicts of the Middle East, as it cuts against the left-wing and Arabist arguments that the Jews are a colonial interloper in Palestinian-Arab land. Zionism is, itself, Jewish nationalism. Those who classify themselves as “anti-Zionist” are anti-Jewish nationalism at their core, so this executive order embodies everything against which they have fought.
Rabbi Eliach writes that “Judaism operates on three levels”: Religious, social, and nationalistic. The religious level includes “lifecycle rituals, prayers, holidays, religious garb, and the Sabbath.” The social level includes personal modesty, behavior, and diet, unrelated to a specific religious ritual. The nationalistic level “is the basis for a constitution for running a Jewish State.” This includes criminal law, property law, liability law, business law, family law, rules regarding social welfare, governance, and military law. Studying the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) alone will show you that Judaism is more than a religion.
So what is the definition of “nation?” Rabbi Eliach quotes Professor Bela Kiraly of Brooklyn College, who taught “the definition of a nation is a group with a common language (preferably distinct); a common culture (preferably distinct), and a common land of origin — a location on Earth where a particular group developed its language and culture, and where this culture and language were dominant.” Judaism easily fits these three qualifications.
The common language of the Jews is Hebrew, which has been used for over 3,000 years. Hebrew letters, the same alphabet that is used today, can be found on the Dead Sea scrolls, which date back 2,100 years. The Jewish people managed to maintain this language after they lost their independence and were spread into the global Diaspora. This is why prayer books throughout history have all been written in the same Hebrew.
The Jewish people also have a common, and unique, culture. As stated, there is a Jewish constitution, which has laws that separated the Jewish people from other cultures at the time of the writing of the Torah. There is also a unique Jewish calendar (still used to this day), specific clothing that Jews — specifically Jewish men — must wear, schools that Jewish children attend, food that Jews are allowed to eat, a different day of rest, and a specific place Jews pray toward: Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Land of Israel, is the direction every observant Jew faces when he prays three times a day. In Europe and America, Jews face east. In Asia, they face west. There are libraries that are filled with the historic connection that Jews have with the Land of Israel. The specific borders are described in the Torah. It was conquered by the prophet Joshua, the successor to Moses. It existed without a centralized monarchy for 300 years until Saul was made King. Saul was succeeded by David, who expanded the territory and shored up the defenses of the land. His son, Solomon, built the First Temple. There was Jewish sovereignty for 687 years until the Babylonians conquered the land. That is almost three times longer than the United States of America has been a nation. And that’s just the beginning.
The Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Persian Empire, who gave the Jewish people autonomy of the land — albeit without their own monarch. The Second Temple was built and the Jews still had their own court system, calendar, and language. The Persians were conquered by the Greeks, who eventually attempted to force the Jewish people to adopt Greek language, religion and culture. The Jews revolted, and won their independence in the year 165 B.C.E. (before the common era).
These events barely scratch the surface of the history of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, which has maintained a continuous Jewish population through today. “The Jewish relationship with [The Land of Israel] is not theoretical”, writes Rabbi Eliach, “it is a historical relationship that goes back over 3,000 years. That is one of the reasons archaeology is so important in modern Israel. The more one digs, the more one finds a Jewish past.”
So when Slate <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/trump-executive-order-judaism-religion-anti-semitism-palestine-bds-boycott-movement.html">headlines</a> “President Donald Trump to Sign Executive Order Redefining Judaism as Ethnicity or Nationality,” The Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/10/trump-executive-order-antisemitism-israel">says</a> “Executive order could redefine Judaism as a race or nationality, which critics argue is itself antisemitic,” or Newsweek <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/antisemitism-trump-jews-nationality-white-house-tropes-1476620">writes</a> “President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order defining Judaism as a nationality rather than just a religion,” they are being historically ignorant. President Trump cannot redefine Judaism as a nation, because Judaism is already, by definition, a nation.
The Jewish nation, despite being the subject of more hardships than any other nation in the history of the world, has managed to survive precisely because it is a nation more so than it is a religion. Only a nation, with a common language, culture and land, could outlast every other nation that has sought to conquer and destroy the Jewish people. President Trump is merely recognizing that fact — and protecting Jews on American campuses while doing so.
 
Moshe Hill is a political analyst, columnist, and student of Rabbi Eliach at Rambam Mesivta. You can like Moshe Hill on Facebook at <a href="https://facebook.com/aHillwithaView">facebook.com/aHillwithaView</a> and follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/themohill">@theMoHil</a>.

Star of David

HILL: The Jewish Nation

Anti-Semitism

Israel

Judaism

Yesterday, during Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro&#8217;s must-watch <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/sunday-special-ep-79-yoram-hazony">&#8220;Sunday Special&#8221; podcast conversation</a> with prominent Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony, the author of &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Nationalism-Yoram-Hazony/dp/1541645375">The Virtue of Nationalism</a>&#8221; made a biblically grounded argument that &#8220;good borders make good neighbors.&#8221;
It is perhaps difficult to think of a less politically correct thing to say to a bipartisan American ruling class still hooked on the post-Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 nostrums of porous borders and a classical liberalism-inspired freer flow of cross-border labor, but Hazony — a personal friend, in the interest of full disclosure — is nonetheless absolutely correct. And it ought not to be too difficult to understand why.
The fundamental premise of Hazony&#8217;s <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?459062-1/isi-conservative-book-year-award">award-winning</a> 2018 tome is to lay out two competing visions for the governance of global affairs, and to argue in favor of one vision over the other. Those two visions are imperialism, which favors a globally oriented governance of monolithic rule via transnational institutions, and nationalism, which favors a nation-state-centric governance of disparate rule via sovereign nation-states.
There are a myriad of reasons for preferring the latter to the former, and the deepest and most existentially  meaningful reasons are those that grasp at human nature itself. It is fundamentally inimical to human nature for people to outsource their sovereignty and self-determination to the whims and caprices of those external actors with whom those people do not share undergirding mutually interdependent bonds of loyalty. Those bonds of loyalty can only be nourished and sustained when the relevant polity shares some semblances of a common culture: Language, customs, traits, religious tradition, legal tradition, and so forth. Put even more simply, those bonds of loyalty can only be nourished and sustained when the relevant polity is a true nation, properly understood.
Yet nationalism is superior to imperialism/transnationalism for another reason that is less philosophically lofty but no less indispensable. In terms of most effectively ensuring relative global tranquility and diminishing the frequency of bloody conflicts, encouraging and emphasizing epistemologically modest national sovereignty is far preferable to encouraging and emphasizing epistemologically hubristic imperialism. Most of the great conflicts over the past millennium have involved one civilization frowning upon a foreign civilization and seeking to impose upon that foreign civilization its own political version of the good life.
A modern example is the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-never-forget-911-we-need-rethink-how-we-josh-hammer">bipartisan hubris</a> of the neoconservative moralistic &#8220;Right&#8221; and Samantha Power-esque &#8220;responsibility to protect&#8221; moralistic Left that leads to nonsensical overseas attempts to impose our American values and way of life upon those nations whose values and way of life are entirely anathematic to our own. As a purely tactical and procedural means of discouraging bloody conflict, it makes sense to establish a baseline default rule of respecting the internal dealings of foreign nations. Pursuing a domestic legislative agenda oriented around the <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/our-constitutional-order-prioritizes-justice-not-procedure/">common good</a> and Declaration of Independence-rooted <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">natural rights theory</a> is just and proper; what is improper is pursuing the exportation and ultimately forcible imposition of a foreign agenda of our American vision of the common good and Declaration of Independence-rooted natural rights theory.
As a basic matter of observing developments around the world over at least the past half-century or so — and going back even further to at least the ancient construction of the Great Wall of China — it is intuitive and obvious that strongly enforced borders are generally largely successful in deterring and thwarting would-be foreign aggression and revanchism. In 2017, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute <a href="https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/defense/the-places-where-walls-work/">laid out</a> just a handful of successful border walls/fences/security barriers in recent historical memory:
<ul>
<li>Israel&#8217;s post-Second Intifada construction of a security barrier around much of Judea and Samaria had the effect of quickly reducing terrorism in Israel by upwards of 90%.</li>
<li>The Polisario Front, a Cold War-era communist group committed to independence for Western Sahara, was largely contained after Morocco&#8217;s intensive fortification of its external barrier with Algeria.</li>
<li>The longstanding hot spot that is the Kashmir territorial dispute between India and Pakistan was relatively quelled by India&#8217;s nearby construction of a defensive border fence.</li>
</ul>
Indeed, there are countless other examples.
To resist the urge to forcibly export and impose one&#8217;s idiosyncratic domestic agenda unto others is to help decrease conflict and make the world a safer place. Good borders do indeed make good neighbors.

Israeli-Palestinian security barrier

HAMMER: Yes, Good Borders Make Good Neighbors

Bible

Border Wall

Illegal Immigration

Political Correctness

The Ben Shapiro Show

Yoram Hazony

Earlier this week, erstwhile culinary icon of Southern-inspired cultural conservatism Chick-fil-A <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-chick-fil-a-just-caved-to-the-rage-mob-theyre-about-to-learn-the-hard-way-that-surrendering-never-pays-off">kowtowed</a> to the <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/brand-warfare-is-a-fight-to-the-death/">hectoring bullies</a> of radical LGBT activism and announced that it would henceforth refrain from donating to such deeply polarizing and horrifyingly conservative Christian organizations as &#8230; the <a href="https://theresurgent.com/2019/11/19/chick-fil-a-is-made-to-care-caves-to-progressives-abandons-salvation-army/">Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes</a>. Apparently, a mere organizational affiliation with Christianity in the year 2019 suffices to incite &#8220;homophobic&#8221; or &#8220;transphobic&#8221; smears from the secularist outrage mob.
Far be it from me to tell a private company that it has made a poor business decision, but the reality is that Chick-fil-A has all but assuredly made a poor business decision. As many in the commentariat class have pointed out, Chick-fil-A&#8217;s business model has only increasingly flourished as the Left&#8217;s attacks against it have contemporaneously amplified. The predictable result of Chick-fil-A&#8217;s corporate cowardice will only be the alienation of the company&#8217;s core supporters and the failure to appease its <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/backlash-chick-fil-a-faces-heat-for-caving-to-leftists-cutting-ties-with-christian-orgs">insatiable foes</a> on the Left.
As Spencer Klavan aptly put it at <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/brand-warfare-is-a-fight-to-the-death/">The American Mind</a>, &#8220;The attack on Chick-fil-A makes plain that radical leftists are not in this for a compromise, or an equitable live-and-let-live solution. &#8230; Destruction, not détente, is the goal.&#8221; Indeed. And against this backdrop of leftist/secularist cultural hegemony, overly defensive calls for pluralism and procedural &#8220;tolerance&#8221; are woefully <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-social-conservatives-must-defend-the-intrinsic-good-of-religion">inadequate</a> <a href="https://americanmind.org/discourse/our-constitutional-order-prioritizes-justice-not-procedure/">responses</a> for those of us on the political Right.
The latest Chick-fil-A imbroglio is, of course, a downstream symptom of an upstream cause: The utterly toxic <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-stop-politicization-what-should-not-be-josh-hammer">politicization of all facets</a> of our day-to-day lives. As Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/shapiro-how-to-disunite-america">argued</a> in his syndicated column this week, this is a deeply pernicious trend. The fraying of the American social fabric, already a years- or decades-long phenomenon, continues to worsen unabated. A nation where warring political tribes not only consume different media, but eat different chicken sandwiches and wear differing clothing lines, is a country destined for bitter strife, at best — or internecine violence, at worst.
Americans of good faith all ought to agree that we should not want to live in a country where such an anodyne institution as a chicken sandwich chain elicits this level of hostility, and engenders this level of politicized passion, due to its Christian-inspired donative proclivities.
The question for conservatives, amidst this debilitating backdrop of politicized bifurcation, a widening economic and cultural chasm <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/josh-hawleys-striking-critique-of-american-life/">between the classes</a>, and metastasizing crises of hyper-individualistic atomism and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/opinion/loneliness-political-polarization.html">despondency</a>, is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">how best to proceed</a> as a political movement. The republic often seems to be falling apart at the seams, and it is incumbent upon all of us in the political and commentariat classes to think very hard about what it is we can do to plot a salutary path forward. Above all else, that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">path forward</a> must focus on how best to heal our polity&#8217;s fractious wounds and concomitantly re-inculcate a sense of proud Americanism.
It ought to be obvious that &#8220;live-and-let-live&#8221;-style classical liberalism — a political movement centered around the conservation of certain Enlightenment-era procedural norms, and not around the conservation of substantive moral or cultural norms — is both <a href="https://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/uploads/reports/Graphs-Charts/1101/figure2_drutman_e4aabc39aab12644609701bbacdff252.png">politically wanting</a> and woefully inadequate to confront the crises of our times. Rather, a resurgent, forward-looking conservatism simply must better account for a human nature that, contra Ayn Rand, is inherently inimical to radical individualism. Human nature yearns for communitarianism — for inclusion in what Edmund Burke famously called the &#8220;<a href="https://www.bartleby.com/24/3/4.html">little platoon[s]</a>&#8221; of society. Yet the sclerotic and morally bankrupt reality of contemporary American political life presents us, as New York Post Op-Ed Editor Sohrab Ahmari <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/11/joker-and-our-crisis-of-solidarity">put it this week</a> at First Things, with a &#8220;bipartisan abolition of solidarity.&#8221;
Conservatives simply must become more willing to rethink outmoded Reagan-era orthodoxies and to discard the anachronistic bromides of what some now dub &#8220;<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/2009/07/23/conservative-inc/">Conservatism, Inc.</a>&#8221; As Ahmari framed it, the human nature reality for both leftists and libertarians/procedure-centric classical liberals is that &#8220;the longing for solidarity can never be permanently repressed.&#8221;
It is past time to make this pursuit of solidarity a core underlying basis of our conservative political agenda. To be sure, filling out the substantive details of this solidaristic, assimilationist, nationally cohesive conservative agenda — what many of us might call <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-national-conservatism-conference-josh-hammer">&#8220;national conservatism&#8221;</a> — remains a work in progress. Here is how I <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-national-conservatism-conference-josh-hammer">briefly outlined</a> parts of the agenda, back in July:
<blockquote>
National conservatism means a politics concretely focused on the mutually interdependent bonds of human loyalty upon which a society ultimately depends — as opposed to the atomization espoused by hyper-individualistic doctrinaire libertarianism. National conservatism means a politics focused on national solidarity and reinforcing the shared customs, traits, norms, and mores that establish America not merely as an idea but also as a tangible people — as opposed to the <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/defend-america-defeat-multiculturalism/" data-reader-unique-id="185">existential scourge of divisive multiculturalism</a>. National conservatism means viewing America as a nation-state with an economy — as opposed to viewing America as but one border-less abstraction within a globalized economy. National conservatism means the articulation and advancement of all domestic and foreign policy alike through the lens of national self-interest — as opposed to policy advancement based on transnational considerations or the needs of foreigners. National conservatism means a hardened immigration system that <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/was-amy-wax-speech-racist-immigration/" data-reader-unique-id="186">prioritizes cultural assimilation above all else</a> — as opposed to a laxer immigration system that prioritizes the cheap labor needs of the Fortune 500. National conservatism means a foreign affairs approach premised on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/45699/hammer-america-needs-re-think-its-global-alliances-josh-hammer" data-reader-unique-id="187">narrow alliances with like-minded, self-sufficient nations</a> who share America’s core national security concerns — as opposed to a foreign affairs approach premised on a tendentiously moralistic, sovereignty-undermining transnational agenda. National conservatism means a world order of sovereign nation-states — as opposed to the soft tyranny of the unelectable transnational bureaucrats in Turtle Bay and Brussels. National conservatism means a domestic affairs approach that, while undoubtedly market-oriented, resists the vestigial temptation to shirk the levers of political power as a means to advance the conservative cause in the realms of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49361/hammer-josh-hawleys-bill-taking-big-tech-josh-hammer" data-reader-unique-id="188">Big Tech</a>, higher education, and other private spheres that increasingly pose just as dire a threat to our way of life as does over-zealous Big Government itself. National conservatism means a conservatism that works for the American heartland and for all rungs of the economic ladder — as opposed to a purist anti-regulation agenda that merely speaks for the economic interests of the bi-coastal elite.
</blockquote>
There are many <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1197611846217416710">erudite conservative critics</a> of this prospective political model. I share some of their concerns. And it is true that policy wonks must dedicate substantial time to fleshing out more of the intricate details. But I also do not see a viable alternative path forward. America will regain its sense of national solidarity — its sense of patriotism and of communitarian belongingness in the greatest nation-state in the history of the world — or it will eventually wither and die. I, for one, am hoping for the former.

Chick-fil-A

HAMMER: On Chick-Fil-A, Political Tribalism, And The Need For National Solidarity

Christianity

Homosexuality

LGBTQ

Religion

Salvation Army

Among his many exhortations to conservatives is Russell Kirk’s insistence that they be guided by the principle of prudence. Prudence, properly understood, requires the ability to be self-critical — to avoid an unmoving fealty to outmoded dogmas, to re-examine assumptions, and, most of all, to have the courage and foresight to correct course if and when things have gone wayward.
Leading lights on the Right gathered last week under the banner of “national conservatism” to apply some prudent self-examination to the now well-trodden path of the traditional conservative consensus. It was a necessary effort, and one that may prove to be transformational.
The “consensus,” as it was once described, is hardly without its cracks. At the <a href="https://nationalconservatism.org/">National Conservatism Conference</a> last week, the orthodoxy that has defined the Right for the last 40 years — philosophical allegiance to the three-legged stool of markets, moral values, and military might — was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49750/hammer-national-conservatism-conference-josh-hammer">visibly and profoundly challenged</a>.
That it was challenged so enthusiastically and with such intellectual rigor suggests that there is, in fact, an ascendant movement afoot.
It arises out of an acknowledgment that there is a rootlessness in America today that conservatism, as it has been traditionally defined, has left unaddressed. &#8220;Fusionism,&#8221; the prevailing political consensus between traditional social conservatives and economic libertarians, has made America rich, but it has also left us morally bereft.
All of this provided the context for a deeply resonant <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPAUQKY9Jyw">closing speech</a> by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). The new Republican senator from Missouri has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43923/hammer-judicial-crisis-networks-open-attack-sen-josh-hammer">made quite a name for himself</a> by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47899/hammer-senator-josh-hawley-most-important-freshman-josh-hammer">vigorously vetting</a> lifetime judicial nominees and unapologetically <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49361/hammer-josh-hawleys-bill-taking-big-tech-josh-hammer">taking Silicon Valley giants to task</a>.
But Hawley&#8217;s philosophical roots have not had much public exposure in Washington, D.C. Hearing them was worth the wait.
The senator did not hesitate to make his mark as the clear embodiment of this self-critical, self-aware, shifting consensus on the Right.
“For too long now,” Hawley opened, “this country has been badly led &#8230; by a political consensus forged by a political class that has lost touch with what binds us together as Americans.”
In a statement that left little room for doubt about where Hawley stands on the need to cling to old shibboleths, he declared the great divide was “not between Trump supporters and Trump opponents, or between suburban voters and rural ones, or between Red America and Blue America,” but between “the political agenda of the leadership elite and the great broad middle of our society.”
In a searing indictment of the current political arrangement, the senator did not mince words:
<blockquote>Because in this bargain, foreign competitors get to make the goods, and we just buy them. And then they buy up American companies with the profits. And yes, in this bargain there are lots of jobs — jobs on Wall Street, or in Hollywood, or in Silicon Valley.
Because the truth is, the cosmopolitan economy has made the cosmopolitan class an aristocracy. At the same time, it has encouraged multinational corporations to move jobs and assets overseas to chase the cheapest wages and pay the lowest taxes.
And it has rewarded these same corporations for then turning around and investing their profits not in American workers, not in American development, but in financial instruments that benefit the cosmopolitan elite.</blockquote>
The elite have benefited at the expense of middle America — which is left with flat wages, lost jobs, and declining opportunity. “Is it any surprise,” Hawley pondered, “that in the last half century, as our leaders have pursued a program that the American middle does not espouse, does not support, and does not benefit from, that public confidence in American government has collapsed?”
It should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to how President Trump was elected. Salena Zito and Brad Todd wrote an <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Great-Revolt-Populist-Coalition-Reshaping/dp/1524763683">entire book</a> about it, based largely on interviews with voters from both parties who pulled the lever for Trump. Both parties had let them down, they said. Not only that, but these voters felt disrespected, unheard, and belittled.
Trump was a disrupter, with allegiance to no one, and an allergy to being pushed around by orthodoxies on any side — the orthodoxies which Hawley identifies on the Left as “champion[ing] multiculturalism that degrades our common identity,” and on the Right as “celebrat[ing] hyper-globalization and promis[ing] that the market will make everything right in the end, eventually &#8230; perhaps.”
So what is to be done?
The new consensus that Hawley sets forth includes support for policies ranging from more investment in middle America, upending “the economic concentration that stifles small producers and family enterprises,” removing mountainous college debt as a barrier to entry to the modern workforce, an immigration system that “rewards and nourishes American labor,” and trade policies that prioritize American workers over cheap foreign goods and “arbitrage schemes by the great corporations.”
In just a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49681/watch-josh-hawley-defends-americas-heartland-molly-prince">20-minute speech</a>, Sen. Hawley set himself at the head of a vanguard that presents a new way for conservatives to think about old problems.
It was also personally meaningful. I grew up in a small, rural town in upstate New York plagued by low wages and low expectations — offset only by high rates of heroin addiction. By the time I graduated high school, I had lost classmates to suicide, overdose, and murder. In the seventeen years since then, I have heard many on the Right appeal to me on the basis of our shared, and deeply held, principles.
But I can mark Hawley’s speech as the first time in my life that I’ve heard a Republican so forcefully and intentionally address the very real problems of the impoverished, rural communities that truly do not care about the corporate tax breaks or the Mueller investigation.
It is time for conservatives to acknowledge that while our principles remain steadfast, their application — and the political consensus that guides them — is in need of self-critical review.
Josh Hawley may be the senator best positioned to do this. His fearlessness in subjecting the old assumptions to rigorous evaluation is breathing new life into our increasingly rusty and irrelevant Congress. And his embodiment of the commitment to the foundations of conservatism with a profound understanding for grievances that animate the populists makes him one of the most intellectually interesting and relevant policymakers to watch.
Like he did so many things, Russell Kirk anticipated this. His adage to all of us would seem appropriate to where Josh Hawley has the potential to take conservatism: “Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.”
Rachel Bovard is policy director at <a href="http://www.conservativepartnership.org/">Conservative Partnership Institute</a>.

BOVARD: Josh Hawley Is Quickly Becoming One Of The Most Important Conservatives In America

Josh Hawley

Republican Party

The &#8220;<a href="https://nationalconservatism.org">National Conservatism Conference</a>,&#8221; which I attended last week after having <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48154/hammer-national-conservatism-conference-2019s-most-josh-hammer">previously billed it</a> as &#8220;2019&#8217;s most important intellectual gathering,&#8221; came to a close last Tuesday. Organized by the <a href="https://burke.foundation/">Edmund Burke Foundation</a>, a new group <a href="https://burke.foundation/people/">led</a> by Yoram Hazony and David Brog, the Conference featured an <a href="https://nationalconservatism.org/conference-schedule/">ambitious agenda</a> that sought to build off Hazony&#8217;s <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?459062-1/isi-conservative-book-year-award">award-winning</a> 2018 <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Nationalism-Yoram-Hazony/dp/1541645375">tome</a> on nationalism and promulgate a forward-looking intellectual paradigm and substantive agenda for a rejuvenated, nationalist-inspired Right. The choice of the great British statesman Burke as the eponymous symbol of the Conference&#8217;s organizing Foundation was intentional: The <a href="https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/07/19/burke-and-the-nation/">conservatism advanced here</a> was of a distinctly traditionalist hue that put much of the post-1950s right-of-center American political consensus squarely in its crosshair.
The Conference received no shortage of media attention — representing the <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/national-conservatisms-time-has-come/">full</a> <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/07/55245/">gamut</a> of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/trump-nationalism-tucker-carlson.html">political</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/7/17/20696543/national-conservatism-conference-2019-trump">viewpoint</a>. And pushback from all the traditional targets of Hazony&#8217;s philosophical ire — be they leftists, libertarians, neoliberals, or neoconservatives — was certainly expected.
But by any measure, the Conference was markedly successful. And it is important to understand why.
The modern American conservative &#8220;three-legged stool&#8221; consensus of fiscal, social, and national security conservatism, forged out of the depths of Cold War necessity and expounded upon at the time by the likes of Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr., frayed during the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary. While it was always debatable whether Frank Meyer&#8217;s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusionism">&#8220;Fusionist&#8221;</a> paradigm of laissez-faire economics and traditionalist social mores was promulgated due more to intellectually compelling or to merely electorally convenient purposes, the undebatable reality is that the most authentically Fusionist candidate in 2016 — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) — was ultimately defeated by the far more populist Donald J. Trump.
The extent to which Trump&#8217;s primary victory over Cruz represented a watershed substantive moment for American conservatism, as compared with the extent to which it merely represented a triumph of brute force of personality and a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html">surfeit of free media</a>, remains an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42234/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">ongoing source of debate</a>. But a much-ballyhooed <a href="https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/political-divisions-in-2016-and-beyond">election postmortem</a> put forth in 2017 by <a href="https://www.voterstudygroup.org/participants/lee-drutman">Lee Drutman</a> and the <a href="https://www.voterstudygroup.org/about">Voter Study Group</a> provides some clues.
Drutman&#8217;s study attempted to analyze the specific substantive and attitudinal issues that divide voters for the two parties, and he charted out all data accumulated from the Voter Study Group&#8217;s underlying Views of the Electorate Research Survey into a convenient <a href="https://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/uploads/reports/Graphs-Charts/1101/figure2_drutman_e4aabc39aab12644609701bbacdff252.png">scatterplot</a>. The respondents&#8217; data agglomerated in the scatterplot can be separated into four quadrants, in a basic two-axis analysis:
<blockquote>We can break the electorate into four types, based on their position in the four quadrants of <a href="http://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/uploads/reports/Graphs-Charts/1101/figure2_drutman_e4aabc39aab12644609701bbacdff252.png">Figure 2</a>:
Liberal (44.6 percent): Lower left, liberal on both economic and identity issues 
Populist (28.9 percent): Upper left, liberal on economic issues, conservative on identity issues 
Conservative (22.7 percent): Upper right, conservative on both economic and identity issues 
Libertarian (3.8 percent): Lower right, conservative on economics, liberal on identity issues</blockquote>
Drutman&#8217;s study thus attempts to demonstrate that a whopping 73.5% of voters hold &#8220;liberal&#8221; views on economic issues, whereas only 26.5% are &#8220;conservative&#8221; on those same issues. In Drutman&#8217;s model, Hillary Clinton won overwhelmingly among &#8220;liberal&#8221; voters, Donald Trump won decisively among both &#8220;populist&#8221; and &#8220;conservative&#8221; voters, and the tiny minority of &#8220;libertarian&#8221; voters were almost perfectly split among Trump, Clinton, and &#8220;other.&#8221;
Drutman&#8217;s study ought to be an earth-shattering wake-up call for institutional movement conservatism — what some of the more populist/<a href="https://freebeacon.com/columns/making-sense-of-the-new-american-right/">paleoconservative</a> elements of the broader coalition have long derided as &#8220;<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/2009/07/23/conservative-inc/">Conservatism, Inc.</a>&#8221; It ought to finally put to rest the notion, advanced in the not-so-distant past in the form of the Republican National Committee&#8217;s post-2012 election &#8220;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/what-you-need-to-read-in-the-rnc-election-autopsy-report/274112/">autopsy</a>,&#8221; that moderating on social/cultural issues provides the best political/electoral path forward for the GOP — which is, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, America&#8217;s sole viable political organ representing something approximating conservatism.
Rather, it is libertarianism and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47839/hammer-limited-defense-sohrab-ahmaris-assault-josh-hammer">classical liberalism</a> — an innate hostility to government interventionism in any and all areas of life — that lack a core base of popular political support and electoral relevance. Though celebrated in many college dorm rooms and advocated by venerable right-of-center institutions such as The Wall Street Journal&#8217;s editorial page, it is increasingly clear that a morally ecumenical &#8220;live and let live&#8221; mentality that takes the form of a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47964/hammer-conservatives-must-make-their-arguments-josh-hammer">reflexively hands-off, value-neutral politics is unsuited</a> to America&#8217;s present social crisis of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Alienated-America-Places-Thrive-Collapse/dp/0062797107">despondency</a>, fractured communities, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49616/hammer-why-no-one-discussing-drug-trafficking-josh-hammer">drug overdose epidemics</a>, and decreasing church attendance.
Enter the National Conservatism Conference. In his opening remarks, Hazony — who has spent decades subscribing to the late Irving Kristol&#8217;s quip that &#8220;the three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth&#8221; — declared national conservatism&#8217;s &#8220;independence&#8221; from libertarianism, classical liberalism, neoliberalism, globalism, and neoconservatism. Yet Conference co-organizer Brog, in clarifying that the new national conservatism movement operates within the broader confines of the <a href="https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/07/19/burke-and-the-nation/">broader Anglo-American liberal tradition</a>, solemnly renounced <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Why-Liberalism-Failed-Politics-Culture/dp/0300223447">illiberalism</a> in his opening remarks.
So what exactly is this ascendant &#8220;national conservatism&#8221;? Numerous conference speakers and attendees with whom I spoke seemed to be grappling with this very question. One prominent conference speaker confided to me that &#8220;the policy piece of this&#8221; broader puzzle &#8220;will take a lot of time to flesh out.&#8221; And regarding Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the wunderkind conservative/populist senator who was the only elected official to speak at the Conference and who I have <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47899/hammer-senator-josh-hawley-most-important-freshman-josh-hammer">previously lauded</a> as the most important freshman conservative since Ted Cruz, National Review Editor Rich Lowry <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/07/22/the-left-smears-a-senator-for-calling-out-elite-ideology/">writes</a> that &#8220;filling out a plausible policy agenda to give expression to Hawley’s [anti-elitist] worldview is very much a work in progress.&#8221;
But as far as beginning to shift the intellectual paradigm as to what a forward-looking conservative agenda looks like, the Conference was an immensely important opening salvo. The Conference, held at the tony Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., featured a palpable sense of optimism resonating all throughout. Conservatives of a Burkean stripe tend to be natural pessimists, but the Conference seemed to buzz with cheeriness — both about the future of the conservative movement and, ultimately, about the American republic. The sense of attendees, many of whom were staunch supporters of President Trump, the thunderous nationalism that was 2016&#8217;s Brexit vote, and nationalist foreign leaders such as Viktor Orbán, was that the conservatism advanced at this Conference was the vanguard of a conservatism that can ultimately win.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">If I had one takeaway from the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NationalConservatismConference?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NationalConservatismConference</a>, it would be this: The vibe is very optimistic. Optimistic, that is, about the future of both conservatism and the future of the republic.
In short, the conservatism articulated here is a conservatism that can win.
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1150893420770148352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
National conservatism means a politics concretely focused on the mutually interdependent bonds of human loyalty upon which a society ultimately depends — as opposed to the atomization espoused by hyper-individualistic doctrinaire libertarianism. National conservatism means a politics focused on national solidarity and reinforcing the shared customs, traits, norms, and mores that establish America not merely as an idea but also as a tangible people — as opposed to the <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/defend-america-defeat-multiculturalism/">existential scourge of divisive multiculturalism</a>. National conservatism means viewing America as a nation-state with an economy — as opposed to viewing America as but one border-less abstraction within a globalized economy. National conservatism means the articulation and advancement of all domestic and foreign policy alike through the lens of national self-interest — as opposed to policy advancement based on transnational considerations or the needs of foreigners. National conservatism means a hardened immigration system that <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/was-amy-wax-speech-racist-immigration/">prioritizes cultural assimilation above all else</a> — as opposed to a laxer immigration system that prioritizes the cheap labor needs of the Fortune 500. National conservatism means a foreign affairs approach premised on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/45699/hammer-america-needs-re-think-its-global-alliances-josh-hammer">narrow alliances with like-minded, self-sufficient nations</a> who share America&#8217;s core national security concerns — as opposed to a foreign affairs approach premised on a tendentiously moralistic, sovereignty-undermining transnational agenda. National conservatism means a world order of sovereign nation-states — as opposed to the soft tyranny of the unelectable transnational bureaucrats in Turtle Bay and Brussels. National conservatism means a domestic affairs approach that, while undoubtedly market-oriented, resists the vestigial temptation to shirk the levers of political power as a means to advance the conservative cause in the realms of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49361/hammer-josh-hawleys-bill-taking-big-tech-josh-hammer">Big Tech</a>, higher education, and other private spheres that increasingly pose just as dire a threat to our way of life as does over-zealous Big Government itself. National conservatism means a conservatism that works for the American heartland and for all rungs of the economic ladder — as opposed to a purist anti-regulation agenda that merely speaks for the economic interests of the bi-coastal elite.
Sen. Hawley of Missouri, the only elected official to speak at the Conference, is perhaps positioned as the political figure most closely attuned to this political moment. Hawley is likely too infatuated with trust-busting President Theodore Roosevelt and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47141/hammer-blown-opportunity-justice-kavanaugh-quickly-josh-hammer">antitrust law</a> for my own taste, but he is a brilliant young statesman whose biography, <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/june-web-only/age-of-pelagius-joshua-hawley.html">substantive beliefs</a>, and approach to our national politics alike all position him perfectly to lead ascendant national conservatism on the home front. His <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49681/watch-josh-hawley-defends-americas-heartland-molly-prince">rousing Conference speech</a>, which was the final of four keynote presentations, is well worth watching in full:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DkIapXCfPGE" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
Hawley&#8217;s domestic platform, if coupled with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43151/hammer-ted-cruzs-non-interventionist-hawk-foreign-josh-hammer">Cruz&#8217;s signature &#8220;non-interventionist hawk&#8221; foreign policy approach</a>, would be one embodiment of the future of the conservative movement in America. As I <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42234/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">wrote</a> in January:
<blockquote>If conservatives can channel their &#8220;virtuous&#8221; fealty to nationalism and promote policies that galvanize a moral spark for a disaggregated citizenry that begin to heal the wounds of our bitterly fractious politics, that is one possible distillation of the future of the conservative movement. So long as we do so without <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1083555344989573120">throwing the free enterprise baby out with the surrounding bathwater</a>.</blockquote>
Organizers, speakers, and attendees alike left the Conference with no shortage of questions. Indeed, there are many, many unanswered questions as to the precise form that this upstart national conservative movement will take as applied to any number of issues. But conservatism is unquestionably healthier now than it was before the Conference began — we are moving the ball in the right direction. A paradigm shift has begun.

HAMMER: The ‘National Conservatism Conference’ Represented The Future Of Conservatism. Here’s Why.

Democracy

In the aftermath of the election of nationalist/populist Donald Trump as President of the United States, the American conservative movement and Republican Party alike have been forced to confront the realities of a fundamentally transformed intellectual and political landscape. As such, we conservatives have been internally grappling with many profound questions.
What is the continuing intellectual vitality of the founding ethos of the modern, Cold War-era conservative movement &#8212; the <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/03/frank-meyer-fusionisms-impact-today/">&#8220;Fusionism&#8221;</a> between laissez-faire neoliberalism and traditional moral conservatism, as best personified by William F. Buckley, Jr. and National Review? What is the continuing political and pragmatic vitality of Reaganism&#8217;s &#8220;three-legged stool&#8221; of laissez-faire, social conservatism, and anti-Communist (subsequently rebirthed as anti-Islamist) hawkishness? To what extent should conservatives &#8212; and, indeed, partisan Republicans &#8212; consider &#8220;Fusionism&#8221;/Reaganism to be a <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/03/against-the-dead-consensus">&#8220;dead consensus&#8221;</a> that is intellectually and politically worth discarding as an atavistic remnant of a bygone era? To what extent should conservatives and Republicans rededicate themselves to the experience- and wisdom-centric insights of Edmund Burke and cease fealty to the rationalist, Lockean natural rights principles that undergirded Jefferson&#8217;s Declaration of Independence? Is the free market best viewed as an intrinsically moral good for which conservatives ought to brook minimal deviation, or as a purely instrumental means that may (or may not) assist the achievement of philosophically loftier ends &#8212; justice, greatness, and Aristotelian <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/">human flourishing</a>? Is <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/david-french-response-sohrab-ahmari/">classical liberalism capable</a> of forming a philosophical backbone for a durable political coalition, or is <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/against-david-french-ism">something else needed</a> to congeal solidarity and wield fortified social capital against an emboldened and hegemonic cultural Left?
These are but some of the probing queries that the election of Trump &#8212; to say nothing of similar movements all across the globe, such as Britain&#8217;s 2016 &#8220;Brexit&#8221; vote and the elections of nationalist figures as far as <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/aug/13/no-submission-to-islam/">Hungary</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/36117/7-things-you-need-know-about-trump-brazil-who-kassy-dillon">Brazil</a> &#8212; has necessitated. In January, Tucker Carlson issued a clarion on-air <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSuQ-AyiicA">populist call to action</a> heard &#8217;round the world &#8212; Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/tucker-carlson-populism-america-needs-virtue-before-prosperity/">responded in generally critical fashion</a>, and I <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/42234/hammer-path-forward-conservative-movement-josh-hammer">offered a compromise of sorts</a> wherein conservatives &#8220;channel their <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Nationalism-Yoram-Hazony-ebook/dp/B078WRX331">&#8216;virtuous&#8217;</a> fealty to nationalism and promote policies that galvanize a moral spark for a disaggregated citizenry that begin to heal the wounds of our bitterly fractious politics&#8221; so long &#8220;as we do so without throwing the free enterprise baby out with the surrounding bathwater.&#8221; These tensions within the broader right-of-center political and intellectual tent have only been accentuated by the recent intramural skirmish between conservative intellectuals <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/against-david-french-ism">Sohrab Ahmari</a> and <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/david-french-response-sohrab-ahmari/">David French</a> &#8212; an extended dialogue that has been somewhat disjointedly focused on an amalgamation of nationalism versus classical liberalism, Trumpism versus Reaganism, political <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/17662/stop-alinskyization-american-right-josh-hammer">means/ends justifications</a>, substance versus procedure, and brashness versus civility. Here at The Daily Wire, I offered <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47839/hammer-limited-defense-sohrab-ahmaris-assault-josh-hammer">multiple</a> nuanced <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47964/hammer-conservatives-must-make-their-arguments-josh-hammer">defenses</a> of the thrust of Ahmari&#8217;s more nationalistic and overtly moralistic prescription for the present intellectual moment on the Right.
Now, an exciting intellectual confab that promises to explore these themes in greater detail will be held next month in Washington, D.C. The <a href="https://nationalconservatism.org">&#8220;National Conservatism Conference,&#8221;</a> organized by the <a href="https://burke.foundation">Edmund Burke Foundation</a> and its <a href="https://burke.foundation/people/">leaders</a> Yoram Hazony and David Brog, will be held from July 14-16 in the nation&#8217;s capital. Keynote speakers include U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, Tucker Carlson, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. The Conference <a href="https://nationalconservatism.org/about/">describes</a> its role, in relevant part, as follows:
<blockquote>
The return of nationalism has created a much-discussed &#8220;crisis of conservatism&#8221; that may be unprecedented since modern Anglo-American conservatism was formulated by Russell Kirk, William Buckley, and their colleagues in the 1950s. At the heart of this crisis is a question: Is the new American and British nationalism a hostile usurper that has arrived on the scene to displace political conservatism? Or is nationalism an essential, if neglected, part of the Anglo-American conservative tradition at its best?
The conference on &#8220;National Conservatism&#8221; will bring together public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.
We see this public conference as the kick off for a protracted effort to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race. Our aim is to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.
</blockquote>
I am very excited for this gathering, and will be covering the Conference for The Daily Wire. It is my hope that committed activists and those who have given thought to the nature of the intellectual and political moment on the Right will consider <a href="https://nationalconservatism.org/registration/">registering</a> to attend.
In anticipation of the Conference, I have collected exclusive statements from numerous Conference organizers and speakers. Each statement reflects solely the views of the individual who has provided the statement. Here are the statements:
<ul>
<li>Yoram Hazony, Edmund Burke Foundation Chairman and Herzl Institute President: &#8220;The intellectual map on the political right consists of three main groupings: The dominant view for the last generation has been classical liberal or libertarian; on the far right, there is the rising power of white identitarian politics. In between these two groups, I believe we can see a clear coming together of a third camp &#8212; which we&#8217;re calling national conservatism. National conservatives are distinct from libertarians in that we recognize the centrality of the idea of the nation, both in the history of conservative thought and in the real political world. The purpose of national politics is to defend the independence, cultural inheritance, and interests of a particular nation. We believe in the unique historical identity of each nation, but we reject the idea that a nation can be reduced to the color of one&#8217;s skin. The nation is real people, sharing a unique cultural inheritance and bonds of mutual loyalty. We believe that at this moment, national conservatism can offer a realistic alternative and a way forward for the political right that these other alternatives cannot offer.&#8221;</li>
<li>David Brog, Edmund Burke Foundation President and Maccabee Task Force Executive Director: &#8220;The election of Donald Trump created an overdue opportunity to challenge the status quo that&#8217;s long dominated movement conservatism. We hope to seize this moment to reclaim and reassert the nationalist principles that have always been central to the conservative worldview. At a time when forces on the woke left and extreme right seek to divide us, we propose uniting Americans with an energized vision of our shared nationality. And at a time when too many glorify being left alone, we welcome shared sacrifice for the sake of giving every American a right to rise. This is a conservatism that can inspire. And this is a conservatism that can win.&#8221;</li>
<li>Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): &#8220;American conservatism is at an inflection point. After years litigating the battles we inherited from the 1980s &#8212; and losing them all too often &#8212; we have an opportunity to offer the country a new vision of America&#8217;s tomorrow. This conference is one of the most promising signs yet of our movement&#8217;s capacity for renewal, and I look forward to offering my own small contribution to that discussion.&#8221;</li>
<li>Rich Lowry, National Review Editor: &#8220;Nationalism is one of the most important trends of our time, and an indispensable aspect of American conservatism. Thinking through why that is so, and what concrete form American nationalism should take, deserves to be very high on the Trump-era Right&#8217;s to-do list.&#8221;</li>
<li>Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum President: &#8220;The conference organizers have dug deeper into the history of conservatism &#8212; back to the fifteenth century &#8212; than anyone else, thereby producing a more profound understanding of this intellectual current. I look forward to conference speakers applying those insights to today&#8217;s issues. That is what I hope to do in my overview of Europe.&#8221;</li>
<li>David Azerrad, Director, B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics and AWC Family Foundation Fellow, The Heritage Foundation: &#8220;The election of Trump shattered the reigning consensus on the Right. As a result, we conservatives have had to reconsider how we talk and think about the conservative project. [Yoram] Hazony has gathered an impressive array of conservatives to think through the big challenges of our time: The rise of China, identity politics, transnationalism and the atomization of Western society.&#8221;</li>
<li>Michael Doran, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow: &#8220;In the past, political movements tended to follow on after intellectual movements. In today&#8217;s world, nationalism has flowed directly out of the body politic without any preceding intellectual current. The conference seeks to begin filling the void.&#8221;</li>
<li>Rebeccah Heinrichs, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow: &#8220;What is the purpose of government? What is the unique purpose of the American government and how ought we as Americans orient our policies toward other nations? And what are the biggest external and internal threats facing America? Conservatives are grappling with these questions in a new and energetic way that is necessary and good. There is little consensus at this point and things are fluid. But that should be encouraging! Groupthink is the last thing we need. This conference will help us think through some of these questions so we can learn from one another and hopefully do good for conservatives and Americans, generally. It&#8217;s a start.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
I hope to see many of you next month in our nation&#8217;s capital to discuss these ideas that are so profoundly important for the future of our American republic, our Western civilization, and our common humanity alike.

HAMMER: The ‘National Conservatism Conference’ Is 2019’s Most Important Intellectual Gathering

Liberalism

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