Yoram Hazony [00:00:00]:

If you guys campaign against Trump, if you insist on civil war in the MAGA movement, you're going to destroy the nationalist movement from inside and civil war and you'll end up bringing the leftists into power. You're never, ever going to get a government this good again. Never. Grow up. I just think, I think again, you need a little bit of wisdom to be able to see who's really threatening you. Foreign.

Will Spencer [00:00:38]:

Hello and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast. This is a weekly interview show where I sit down and talk with authors, thought leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world. New episodes release every Friday. My guest this week is Dr. Yoram Hazoni. Yoram Hazoni is an award winning philosopher, political theorist and Bible scholar. His books, the Virtue of Nationalism and Conservatism A Rediscovery paved the way for nationalist revival in dozens of countries and set the stage for the rebirth of conservative political thought worldwide. His previous books include the Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, God and Politics in Esther and the Jewish the Struggle for Israel's Soul. He serves as chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a Washington, D.C. public affairs institute that has hosted the National Conservatism conferences in America, Britain and Europe since 2019. He is president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem. Dr. Hazoni, welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.

Yoram Hazony [00:01:32]:

Hello Will. Thanks for having me. Good to see you.

Will Spencer [00:01:35]:

Thank you, sir. I'm very grateful to have you on. I have your book here, the Virtue of Nationalism. Pardon me, My daughter got to the COVID of this, but this was a formidable book, sir. I wrestled with this book because as I started reading it, I deemed that it was worthy of wrestling with. And so I've been looking forward to asking you some questions and sort of getting into the thesis behind the book and sort of revealing, sort of my takeaways from it. So thank you so much for this, this work.

Yoram Hazony [00:02:02]:

Sure, my pleasure. Thank you for reading it.

Will Spencer [00:02:05]:

Absolutely. So just real quick, before we start the conversation, a little background on me. I've had the blessing to travel to more than 30 countries around the world. I've been to India and China for long stretches of time. I've been to Israel as well. I've been to South America and Asia. So the thesis about strong nationalistic countries versus anarchic countries versus imperialistic countries is something that I have direct firsthand experience with. So that will color some of my comments today.

Yoram Hazony [00:02:33]:

Great.

Will Spencer [00:02:35]:

So just to start, what was the genesis of the Virtue of Nationalism? When did you first start thinking about some of the ideas that took form in this book, huh?

Yoram Hazony [00:02:45]:

Good question. There's the, the backstory for the book is that during, during the 1990s, I was born in Israel, raised in New Jersey. I went to university in the United States in New Jersey, both Princeton and Rutgers. And then my wife and I moved to Israel and we've lived here since and raised our family here. So when we arrived, when we got back to Israel, it was the, the early 90s, right after the Oslo Accords. I mean, this, this was kind of like, during this wave of kind of, you know, you, utopian politics, they were erasing, you know, erasing the borders in Europe and thinking that, you know, peace with China, that everything was going to work out because, because liberalism was going to conquer all differences between human beings. So at that time, there was also the Oslo Accords where, where the, the, the Israelis brought the, the plo, the longstanding Palestinian terrorist organization, signed an agreement, brought them into Israeli territory. Israel's about, you know, like 50 miles wide. And, and there was this euphoria, there was this sort of emotional release and uplifting as the elites, the intellectual and leadership of the country kind of rejoiced in. There's not going to be any more war. There's not going to be any more hatred. There's like, everything's going to be solved. And what's interesting is that instead of just being a, you know, like a peace agreement between two warring parties, like, you know, you sign a deal and then both sides live their own lives normally. What, what happened in Israel was that the, that these elites took the signing of this agreement as a signal for uprooting what they called post Zionism, they, they were going to eliminate, you know, every Jewish aspect from the public life of the country. So they wanted to change the national anthem, they wanted to change the national flag and put a crescent on the flag and just all these total attempt to overcome the past. Israel was born in sin and everyone was just going to admit it. We wouldn't have to. So it wasn't just a, you know, like a military agreement or even a political one. It was taken as a cultural signal for uprooting everything Jewish, both in the religious sense and in the national sense, for public life and abandoning it. And that, that got me and, and my friends thinking about, thinking about nationalism and anti nationalism. So for the first 15 years that I was writing on this, I wrote a book called the Jewish State, which you just mentioned, which came out in 2000, which is about this, which is about the, the attempt by the, the universities and the Judiciary and the media to, to make everything inherited, illegitimate and evil. And so while I and my friends, like, we had this center and we did research and, and, and we read a lot while we were studying Israeli nationalism, Jewish nationalism, we. We also started building back the store, building out the story of English nationalism and American nationalism and, you know, what are the roots of these things and what do they have to do with it? So I, I, personally, I was, you know, just mostly focused on. On Israel and Judaism, Israeli and Jewish issues for most of my career. I was writing a book about God in Hebrew scripture in 2016, early 2016, when I got a call from a professor friend of mine, a conservative Jew, an older scholar and mentor, and he got in touch with me at the beginning of 2016, and he said, yoram, all that stuff that you, you guys were putting together on nationalism, it's time for you to drop whatever you're doing and write the book that explains this to, to other people, not just, you know, to Israelis and Jews. And that's how the book was born. It was. That was the year of Brexit, that was the year of Trump. And, and I looked around and, and I saw that he, that he was right. I mean, I, I didn't figure this out, but he did that, that America and Britain were both simultaneously heading towards, like, complete craziness and hostility towards national independence and their national traditions and the religious parts and the biblical foundation of their national traditions. And I had seen all of this in Israel in the 1990s, the same, the same exact thing. And I figured, he's right. I need to explain nationalism now, not just to Israelis and Jews, but to Christians and Americans and Brits and others. So that's where the book came from.

Will Spencer [00:08:33]:

I'm so interested. Can you take us into a moment where those pieces kind of clicked, where you're dealing with a question related specifically to Israeli nationalism, and then the pieces click into place like, oh, wow, I'm actually looking at a much bigger problem because that was my experience reading the book. As I was reading the book, it's like, okay, this makes sense. Why an Israeli national would be writing a book, you know, with such strong biblical foundations about what a nation is. It makes sense. But then it's as if you had discovered a gift that you wanted to give to the rest of the world. Can you, can you take us into the moment or the moments when that maybe kind of clicked into place?

Yoram Hazony [00:09:11]:

Well, the connections, like I say, the connections between biblical, Biblical, mostly Old Testament nationalism. I'm not an expert in New Testament. So I'll leave you to decide whether the New Testament is nationalist, but the Old Testament is the source for one nation under God, the concept that a nation will be free and under God. We don't have any other source. There's no Greek source for it. There's no Roman source for it. It's part of the Jewish inheritance of Christianity. And that's something that. It didn't click for me in 2016 because we'd been working on it for decades. I have this colleague, Ofir Haivre, who's an Israeli scholar, who is an expert in the common law, the political, the political tradition of the common lawyers. And, and pre. Pre. Burkean conservatism. And, and so he, you know, I, Somewhere around the year 1999, he walked into my office having come back from a research trip in England, and he's like, in these old, old archives and he, he created a photocopy of this 800 page, like these gigantic, gigantic pages from, from. From the, the mid 17th century, the mid 60s, 1640s, when this fellow, John Seldon, wrote a. Who, who was the greatest of the common lawyers of his generation, wrote this massive book about, about the, the natural law and national laws based on the teachings of the Jews. Today, nobody knows his name. At the time, he was the most prominent jurist in England. And his goal was to show that national independence of England should be based on the common law inheritance the same way that Jewish tradition is based on the rabbinic inheritance. That's a parallel that he draws explicitly. And he's arguing that England is like the Jews. It has this inherited legal tradition which points it to God's truth and which is independent of these universal efforts, you know, to take Roman law and impose it on England and try to turn it into like a universal law for everybody. So, so these kinds of connections are, are things I'd been learning from, you know, my friends and colleagues and I, I knew quite a bit about it at the time. What shocked me in 2016, which was completely unexpected, was that that all these people that I, I had known from the conservative movement in the United States over decades, including all sorts of friends, and, you know, they started saying, they started telling me, listen, trust us, we're from New York. We know Donald Trump. He's insane, he's a fascist, he has no principles, he stands for nothing. He's bringing the 1930s to America. They reacting, I mean, just crazy, crazy stuff. And what, what really happened was, was that I, I didn't know how to take it because they Sounded like they were acting crazy. And I didn't necessarily believe what they were saying, but I didn't know what to think about it until I watched the Republican convention and I saw Donald Trump give his acceptance speech. And I remember I was sitting with, sitting with friends, and I said, what on earth? Donald Trump is just like a traditional nationalist. Everything he's saying is traditional nationalism. This is the old American nationalism that, you know, when I was in College in the 1980s, and that's just what a lot of people sounded like. The belief that America's independence, not some global governance, that America needs to care, to make sure that, that its people have factories to work at and that American defense industries are not dependent on foreigners and that the borders need to be patrolled. And, you know, like, all of these are, were sort of like completely familiar things. That's just a nationalist politician. Why is everybody talking like he's, you know, like he's bringing fascism to America? So that's, that's really the moment that it snapped for me is, is that I just suddenly realized that, that basically all, everything that was happening was people who are like liberal globalizers. I didn't, I didn't realize how much my friends had bought into this stuff. And, and it was really just them saying, no, you know, utopia is going to come through through taking down all the borders and having global governance. I mean, these people called themselves conservatives, but I mean, there's nothing conservative. That's like a Jacobin universal, you know, revolutionary utopian set of thoughts. And these were my friends saying this, and I couldn't believe it. And Trump just seemed, like, completely normal. Yeah, it just seemed normal to me. So that's it. That's. So the book was. And, and, and then the, the UK part is, you know, lots of people were saying, no, Trump is insane. You know, he's mentally, he's this, he's that. But then when, when I, when I traveled to, to, to England and I found out that, that in Britain people were reacting the same way to Brexit, that Americans were reacting to Trump. So that just nailed it for me. Then, then I just new. This isn't about Trump. They only think it's about Trump. It's not about Trump because the same thing is, is happening with, with, with Brexit. This is the same, the same story that, that, that we saw in Israel in the 1990s. It's a, a revolt against having an independent country with its own faith, with its own traditions, with it, with its own ways of doing things. And and no, we're. We're going to give that up and we're going to destroy it. We're going to drown ourselves. And in globalism, same exact phenomenon.

Will Spencer [00:15:57]:

It's almost like an affront against their personal religion that they don't know that.

Yoram Hazony [00:16:00]:

They hold it is. Well, that's generally true about liberalism, is that when I say liberalism, I'm using the term kind of the way we use it in political theory. So it's not just people on the left who are liberals. There are liberals on the left, there are liberals on the right. And what I mean by liberals is people who think that the only thing you need to know about politics is that, you know, that people are born perfectly free and perfectly equal and that the job of government is to defend their freedom and their equality. If you think, if you think that that's politics and you don't think that government has, you know, some kind of important role to play in terms of propagating and preserving and strengthening the nation, the family, religion, fear of God. If you don't think any of those things, family, nation, religion, God, scripture, if you don't think that those things are crucial to politics, then you're a liberal. So there are all these liberals, Republicans and Democrats, and, and they, many of them are Christians or Jews. They have their religion privatized. And they don't understand that by privatizing their Christianity and their Judaism and creating this supposedly neutral empty box, which was their country like, once it was a Christian country, once it was a Christian nation, but now it's going to be a liberal nation, meaning it's neutral, doesn't believe in anything officially. And they don't understand. That's the same thing as, you know, as setting, like lighting a fuse to the destruction of your country. So they have a religion. They don't know that they have a religion. They think they're Christians or Jews, but what they've done is they've replaced the normal historical Christian or Jewish concern with public life, with national life. They've replaced that with empty. Empty like a, like a vacuum. That's, that's, that's their, their ideal is that the country should be neutral. It should be a vacuum. And into that vacuum, you know, so they have the religion of vacuum. And, and then after two generations, it turns into neo Marxism or all these other crazy things or the Stone Choir stuff that you were writing about. That's also something that's growing because the public space has been a religion of vacuum for so long. And people don't know what to do with themselves.

Will Spencer [00:18:53]:

You mentioned that there's so many different directions I want to go with the things that you said going back to Trump and Brexit, but you mentioned it's lighting a fuse to the destruction of your country. I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit, because I think it's central to the thesis of your book.

Yoram Hazony [00:19:07]:

Yeah, right. I wrote another book called after that, a few years in 2022, which is called Conservatism a Rediscovery and Conservatism A Rediscovery. It's where I answer all the questions that people asked me about the nationalism book. So. So it's a bigger book and it goes deeper. One of the topics is this question is how does lighting the fuse work? And so my. What, what I proposed in that book is, is that the heart of the problem is, look, toleration, tolerating people who are different from you is. Is a virtue in political systems, right? It's. I don't. I don't. It can't be absolute. There's no such a thing as, you know, tolerating everything and everyone. That's impossible. But, you know, being decent to your neighbors who don't agree with you is, to begin with, it's a virtue. And what liberals do is they take this basically good thing and they turn it into an idol and they turn it into an absolute. They say, okay, because tolerating a certain amount of tolerating others so that you can get along and live together, because that's good, we're just going to say, no, we're not going to call it toleration anymore. We're going to call it, you know, absolute. The absolute right of every person to think and do whatever on earth he or she feels like doing and to demand that others think it's okay that they're doing it and not protect themselves, no matter what it is.

Will Spencer [00:20:45]:

Right.

Yoram Hazony [00:20:46]:

So. So that's kind of the heart of the, of the liberal thinking is if we could just turn this into an absolute. And what happens is that, you know, the first generation, let's say after the Second World War, people came back from the war. And I think America and Europe and lots of other countries were really traumatized by this and they wanted to fix things so, like, things would never be bad again. Right. I mean, that was kind of the moving spirit of the 1950s and 60s and 70s was that. And so what they did was they wanted not just government to be neutral, they wanted the schools to be neutral. So they expelled God in Scripture from the schools. They wanted neutrality between, you know, races, which, you know, if you just like if all they were trying to do was to, to end persecution of, of blacks in some parts of the United States, then that probably, probably would have worked out okay. But, but then they said, no, no, it's not just blacks and whites. Men and women have to be perfectly equal, and atheists and believers have to be perfectly equal. And, and, and you have to treat everybody equally. So it doesn't matter if you go to the army or if you're a draft dodger, you're equal. It doesn't matter if you get divorced or if you don't or you stay married, you're equal. It doesn't matter if you have children or you don't have everybody. Every, so this everybody equal, it turns into every thought, every idea has to be treated equally to all other thoughts and all other ideas. And, and, and when you raise children like that, it turns out that you, you know, in the first generation, everybody has fun like, you know, trashing the inherited guardrails, transgressing and, you know, proving that, that, you know, you can do whatever it was your parents and grandparents would have hated for you. So that's the first generation. But what happens with the second generation and the third when, when they're raised with whatever you want to do, my son, my daughter, whatever makes you feel good, whatever you believe in, that's good for me. Zero guardrails, right? Zero inherited direction whatsoever. And everybody's expected to be like this little Nietzsche who like trans values all values from within himself or herself. But nobody can do that, right? You know, maybe even Nietzsche couldn't do. But let's say there's two people who can do it and then all the rest of us can't do it. So then you end up with what we've got, which is kids who have no role models. And you're right. In the essay of yours that I read that there's definitely a father famine, but the father famine, I mean, it's probably the most important part, but it's part of just a general hero famine that when it was normal to say, listen, kids, look at the way that grandma and grandpa are. They're married 60 years later and they're still doing it. Not because it was easy, but because it was right and important and godly. And look at how they're still doing it. And everybody around them says, wow, that's, that's great. People should be like that. That's one world and there's a different world where you say, no, you know, getting divorced is just as good as staying. I mean, you know, whatever's good for you, that, that whatever's good for you at the, by the second generation, by the third generation, for sure, it's just a bunch of depressed people. People. Human beings, they thrive in hierarchy and in truths and directions and guardrails and ways of looking at things that are handed down. Of course, you know, you get to a certain age, maybe you'll rebel and move over to a different hierarchy, but human beings are always within some kind of handed down way of looking at the world. That's if they're healthy and if you don't hand anything down, they, they just decay, they get, they get depressed, they don't know where to go, they can't generate it from within themselves. And, and, and, and then they start, you know, doing drugs and other poisons in order to, to silence the, the, you know, the, the hole in them, in the, in their soul that's screaming, where do I go? Where to go? I don't know where to go. And anything can get into that. So that's Jordan Peterson's young men who can't clean their room. But it's also Abigail Schreier's young women who in groups, dozens of them, decide that they're men. When you take away the traditions, you take away not just the ability to find truth, but even the ability to just be mentally semi normal. You take that away too, and, and that's the fuse and, and all kinds of explosions. It could, it, you know, it can be a civil war, it can be a foreign invasion. It could, it could be anything. But, but you can't be you, you cannot be healthy. You had a Christian nation, you, you wanted it to be a neutral nation. And making a neutral nation, which means that you're claiming that everything is just as good as everything else. That's the beginning of the end. Can it be turned around? I hope so. I know a lot of really good people who are trying to turn it around. But to turn it around, you need to understand where we are. That's where we are. Yes.

Will Spencer [00:26:31]:

I see behind you on the shelf, Carl Truman's rise and triumph of the modern self, which is of course the quintessential example where he set out to understand how was it that the statement, I was born a man, but inside I'm a woman. How does that statement have any logical sense and sort of to unpack the cultural streams of how we got there? But I want to go down that road. But I Mean, that'll take us on a whole different adventure. So we talked about how to light the fuse and it seems to me that there was a reaction to the idea of nationalism that came after World War II. That was what all the evils of history were kind of pinned on. And so let's talk about that for a minute because that seems to be the immediate go to fascist Hitler, you know, Holocaust.

Yoram Hazony [00:27:15]:

It's.

Will Spencer [00:27:16]:

If you try to advocate for the well being of your own nation.

Yoram Hazony [00:27:19]:

Yep. I, I actually think, I actually think that quite a bit of this was going on already after World War I.

Will Spencer [00:27:26]:

Okay.

Yoram Hazony [00:27:27]:

I mean, remember that, that Woodrow Wilson after World War I there was the League of Nations and the Kellogg brand treaty already in the 1920s they were, they had this theory that they were going to ban war. There was going to be no more war on Earth ever. And you know, so this kind of like we're so sick of inherited commitments that like, we just need to flatten. That was already in place in the 1920s and 30s. But you're right that, you know, from, from our perspective, looking back on it, World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, it's, it's like this, you know, this, this generation of trauma that, that had people willing to consider how can we not do this again? And right after World War II, there were many, many liberal and Marxist intellectuals. Those are not the same thing, but both liberals and Marxists who jumped on the opportunity since Hitler did call himself a nationalist. Now, I don't think Hitler was a nationalist because for me, a nationalist. The traditional meaning of the word before Hitler was a world of independent nations. There was the idea that many different nations should be able to chart their own course, you know, find God in their own way, according to their own lights. That, that was the, like the old nationalism. And Hitler hated that. I mean, you know, like I, I don't, don't, don't tell anybody, you know, I, I'm not going to tell anybody to read Mein Kampf because then people will say Yoram said to read Mein Kampf and you know, forget that. But if you did read Mein Kampf, you'd see that Hitler has, is no nationalist at all that he uses when he uses the word nationalism. He hates independent nations. He, he believes in only one thing. That, that the, that the German race should be the, the, the Lord of lords of the earth and, and mistress of the globe. That's what he believes in. He believes in annihilating all of the freedom of other, other peoples to, to, to, to be what they want. He is a biological imperialist, as Anthony Smith, the great scholar of nationalism once called it. He's a biological imperialist, not a nationalist. But after World War II, all these liberals and Marxist scholars started hammering on the fact that Hitler used the word nationalist. He appropriated it from its actual use. And they said, yes, it's national independence. That's what's evil. That's what led to this, is that Germany was independent. And so what's the answer? The answer is no one's going to be independent anymore. And there's a liberal version of this, and there was a commie version of this, but both versions, what they had in common was we're going to eliminate all the borders and we're going to bring eternal peace to the world by eliminating the. The. What they called, you know, the selfishness, the egoism of having a nation that looks out for itself and its own people. And, you know, they. From that perspective, you know, both. Both the liberals and the Marx. I mean, the Marxists were straight out, you know, obviously anti Christian, anti Judaism, anti religion. But the. The liberals were more complicated because a lot of these liberals were hap. They believed in, like, being personally religious. Like the architects of the European Union, the original architects from the 1940s and 50s. They're all these Catholics people. They're believing Catholics. And their idea was, my Catholicism should be private and we'll just eliminate public religion and public nationhood and nationality. And they thought that there's going to be no more wars. Cause nationalism and religion is what caused all the wars.

Will Spencer [00:31:43]:

I appreciated that you took it back to World War I, because I think that's in many ways that's a forgotten war in our cultural memory today that set the stage for so many things that ended up happening in World War II. And you also touched on what I saw as the critical distinction in the book. I listened to your conversation with Ezra Klein, and he, of course, zeroed immediately in on what Tribes, families and nations. Something like that. Tribes and clans. Yeah. I didn't think that that was. Obviously, that's important, but I thought, and it made sense to me why he would pick that. But I thought the distinction between anarchic, nationalist and empirical states. Yeah, Imperial, imperial. That's it. Not imperial, imperial. I thought that was the far more crucial distinction that you made. And that was like staring up at a giant wall of. Of correct. Like. Yeah, I can't really argue with that. So maybe unpack that for the listeners.

Yoram Hazony [00:32:36]:

Sure. Well, the, The. The original sort of. I don't know if you can use the term state of nature. The, before mass agriculture, before the invention of, you know, of mass irrigation, human beings lived in a society that the term anarchy is reasonable, but it doesn't. Sometimes people think anarchy means like all these individuals who have no political structure. That's not actual anarchy. The anarchy that I'm talking about is the order of tribes and clans, which is, if you remember in scripture, when Abraham leaves these gigantic river valleys, the Euphrates, the Nile, that's where all the power is. It comes from irrigating vast areas of land, unprecedented wealth in terms of agriculture, grains, which is wealth that you can store. And then that leads to standing government, armies, bureaucracy, you know, all these people who are like full time paid to, to like run government. All of that is, it's very new in human history. You know, it's, it, it's like five, 6,000 years old. It's not like, it's not older than that. And, and so the, this, the original, like what are human beings kind of like naturally, if you leave them alone, what they are is, is that they form like, like families or group of families which are like clans or bands. And when they're attacked, these, these, these clans, they, they get together and then they, and they, they make an alliance. And if the alliance is longer term, then they become nations. And so this, this kind of like you can see when, you know, when, when Canaan is invaded and, and Abraham, you know, he's got a few hundred men and he gets together with his neighbors and they've each got a few hundred men. That's the order of tribes and clans. Every family has a foreign policy. Nobody has the right to take anything from you. You decide, like you and your God. It's between you and your God, you know, and your neighbors. But there's no universal anything in terms of politics. And so that's the order of tribes and clans. And what destroys it is the imperial state, which I just described is the wealth of cities like those in Mesopotamia or in Egypt, that creates the imperial state. And the theory of the imperial state is always the same. There's some God that comes to the king, unless the God, the king is a God, but some God comes to the king and says to the king of Assyria, let's say your job is to go out and conquer the four corners of the earth and bring peace and prosperity to mankind. I mean, it has a positive vision. It's not just, you know, kill for killing sake, although there's plenty of that. But the heart of it is why should people fight? Why should the order of tribes and clans continue? There's no reason everybody should just bow the knee to me, whoever me is, and I'll bring peace and prosperity to the world. No more disease because no more war, and everybody will be happy. And that imperial state, that's what gives birth to our scripture, to the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish and Christian inheritance, which begins with the prophets looking at these imperial states and saying, that's evil. That's evil. True, they want to bring peace and prosperity, but it's evil to gather up an army, go to somebody else's country, and kill everybody who's in the way and take their women and take their land and say, that's in the name of peace and prosperity. That's the heart of the idolatry that the, that the prophets are rebelling against. And in the Hebrew Bible, we have a proposal for an alternative. And the alternative is an independent nation. I mean, think about this. That God, creator of heaven and earth, he speaks to Moses and he gives him borders. I mean, he keeps giving borders. He gives borders all the time. But. But in Deuteronomy, we have it like Moses saying explicitly, you're not allowed to cross these borders. You're not allowed to take an inch from your neighbors and then suddenly realize that these borders, they're to keep you in these borders are so that you can pay attention to your people and their needs and their path to God instead of going out and conquering the whole world. And this proposal that we get from Moses, where the king is from your people, he's not a foreigner. The prophets, they're from your people. That doesn't mean that the other nations don't have prophecy. It just means you need to have prophets from your own people. And the law is your own people, and the priests are from your own people, and it's your law, and you've got borders and you're not allowed to conquer the neighbors. And that is the proposal that comes after the empires prove that they can destroy everything, every society of clans and tribes, they'll wipe it out. And the proposal is, wait a second. If you organize a bunch of tribes with a common language, a common religion, like a brotherhood of tribes, then you might be able to stand up against this.

Will Spencer [00:38:37]:

That's one of the things that I was so surprised, pleasantly so, by the book, was how deeply scriptural it was. As I'm looking into the rationale for nationalism as the coming together of tribes, it's like, yeah, that sounds about right. Particularly in the picture of allied tribes. And clans forming a nation to push back on imperial ambitions, which we see throughout scripture. And one of the key concepts that. One of the words that you use throughout the book, which I think is also foreign to our world today, is this notion of loyalty, mutual loyalty. I wonder if in this, in this age of, you know, we are born free and totally equal and all of our obligations are by consent only. One of the side effects of that is we have no loyalty to anything because if we can just merely withdraw our consent for our obligations, then I owe you no loyalty. And we see that across, across culture in so many different ways, across many societies. But bonds of mutual loyalty as bringing clans together to form a nation. Can you talk about that notion and how it shows up in the thought of how nations are formed?

Yoram Hazony [00:39:48]:

Sure, but I think you've actually already said the heart of it, that the liberal. Let's take John Locke at the beginning of the second Treatise of Government. He tells you all human beings are born perfectly free and perfectly equal. And then he explains what that means is that they only undertake moral or political obligation by way of consent. In other words, there's no way to be born into having obligations morally or politically in order to God or to anything. So it's already right there that the, the moment that you say your obligations, none of them are inherited, none of them are situational, none of them have to do with, you know, the reality that you're in and any kind of objective, you know, moral order or what God want. No, no, no, no. The only obligations are through consent. And exactly as you said. And by the way, this is, this is an argument that, you know, it's not, this was already an argument that was, was being used against, against the, the pre. Liberals in, in the 1600s. That same argument that if it's all by consent, then there's no obligation. You've just, you've dissolved all obligation. There's it. Where's their obligation? Anytime, anytime that if it's consent. So okay, so you consent to get married, but later you don't consent anymore. So, so there's a, so you don't have to stay married. You consented to have a child, but then you meet the child, the child grows up and you say, oh, that's not the child I wanted. Oh, whoa, you know, like I missed some other child. So then you don't consent anymore. So he's not your child. Like, I mean, it doesn't work like that. You can't, you can't be born into a nation and say, you know, well, you know, I'm only going to go to war to protect my people. I'm only going to do that, you know, when I, when I like the government. It doesn't work like that. You, you, if you want to leave your country and you want to, you know, go, you know, move to, to China, you know, good luck. But even, but when you get to China, you're still going to owe loyalty to China. Like you can't, I mean human beings cannot escape moral obligations. They're, they're inherent in the nature of our relationships with, with individuals and societies and with God. And that's the absolute root of the liberal sickness, is thinking that it's up to you whether you have any obligations or not.

Will Spencer [00:42:28]:

And that I think is the most corrosive idea. So how do these mutual obligations take shape between clans forming a nation? Why should a clan establish loyalty bonds? And the key modifier I thought was mutual loyalty. It's not a one way loyalty. And the word that comes to mind for that is covenantal. Why should, why should, why should clans form bonds of mutual loyalty for each other towards the establishment of a nation?

Yoram Hazony [00:42:56]:

Well, you know, there's if, if you're not willing to get into like empirical human nature, meaning the way human beings are really like, instead of like the way philosophers think they are. You know, so philosophers, they can like, you can sit there and you can say, you know, oh, I'm not married and you know, and I, I don't have any children and I, I don't owe my parents anything. And you know, I'm free, I'm perfectly free. And you know, like you can think that kind of thing and you can think all human beings are basically like this, but it isn't empirically true. Meaning, like if experience teaches you that it's not true at all. What actually happens is that you meet somebody and it can be a man meeting a man or a man meeting a woman or a student learning with a teacher. You meet somebody and at the beginning you're strangers and then experience puts you to various tests and you start to feel like, listen, I can rely on this person, this person is my friend. And after a while of, you know, you've been friends with somebody and then you test it and you say, listen, I'm having trouble with something, can you help me? And they come through. So what happens in real life is that these, these bonds are established through experience where you invest time in other people, you discover that they, that they're going to be there with you, that they're Going to fight your battles with you, that they feel your pain with you, and you feel the same thing for them. So, you know, obviously some. Sometimes you love somebody and they don't love you back. But the foundation of human societies is the mutual friendship, the mutual love or mutual loyalty that is built up over time. Human beings, we're programmed to not start over every day. We don't start over every day. We have a friend and we want to keep our friend, and we want our friend to keep us. And if our friend doesn't stand by us in some difficulty, then it hurts. It hurts because, like, we feel like a piece of us is being torn away. Okay, so, so when, when, when you switch this from kind of like analyzing it to thinking, so, so what should you do? So what should you do? So just. So, for example, there's. There's this, this rabbinic principle called a hazaka, which means if, if, If I pick up somebody to go, you know, I. I see him hitchhiking and I take him, you know, I go out of my way and I take him to, to his, his, his Homer's place of work once, then that, that's fine. That doesn't mean I have to do it the next time necessarily. I mean, it's good charity to do it. But you don't have to do it. If I do it twice, it's the same thing. By the time you get to the third time, like the third day in a row that you see him standing there, that. The principle is that you gotta understand that you're in his heart, you're creating something which it could be very positive, but you begin to owe him. Like, you can't just. After you've done it a dozen times, you can't just say, oh, I don't feel like it today. And like, ditch him because he's now planning on the way he gets home is by going with you. So that's just a very basic thing about human beings, is that it hurts us when we're betrayed, when it turns out that someone is not willing to uphold the thing that to us, seems to be the basis of our relationship. And so surprise, it's not just individuals. I mean, it's obviously true husbands and wives and parents and children, but it also develops between. Between groups. And, you know, this is, you know, I don't know if it's the Lord of the Rings or what's a Braveheart? I mean, some of our, you know, our best adventure movies moralize exactly on this point. Is, are, are the old alliances Going to hold. Well, what is that? What does that mean they held 200 years ago? Why do they have to hold today? But there's something very, very human about saying, I'll stand with you.

Will Spencer [00:47:50]:

One of the things I also enjoyed about the book was the way that you parse things, showed the holes in the liberal approach, like liberal internationalism is ultimately imperial and, and slanders nationalism as doing all the things that imperialism did, like Hitler and the National Socialists were ultimately imperialists, not nationalists. And so that they were sort of, they were, they were given the title of nationalist to slander all of nationalism, which we live in today, but also the notion that, that liberals want this imperial state, this nation, this globalized state that holds together. But what holds it together, if not loyalty? Well, then that ends up being force, which is the very thing that I thought that liberals were opposed to.

Yoram Hazony [00:48:35]:

Yep, exactly. So, I mean, it's really, it's peculiar how hard this is for people to understand, but it's a very, very old idea that. I mean, you find it in Aristotle, you find it in the common law tradition. The, the. It, it's in Scripture. The idea that if people are, if people are virtuous, I mean, this is, this is basically the story of the Book of Judges is if people are willing to stand by their brothers and to, to go to war to protect everybody and they, you know, then you don't need a government to force you to do it. If people just spontaneously, they're willing to obey the laws, pay their taxes, go to war when necessary, and they're willing to do all of this without being forced because they're loyal out of loyalty, loyalty to their people, loyalty to their God, loyalty to their family. If they're willing to do that, then that's the best way. Everybody knows that that's the best way that you don't have to force people. But people are usually not capable of that. And, and, and government is the, the result of it. So, so what happens if, what, what, what happens if we decide that, that the entire world is going to obey certain rules, but we don't base the obedience to the rules on loyalty. We. Everybody has individual consent. They can do whatever they want. There's no loyalty between anybody and anybody else. So in the end it's going to be forced, just like you said. And, and, and so you take a, you know, a great liberal thinker like Friedrich Hayek, and you get to the end of the road to serfdom. The book is Freedom, Freedom, Freedom. And you get to the end of It. And he's, he's talking about world government. Like, wait a second, you know what, How'd you get there? You, you were saying that, that everybody should be free. And, and he's. Yeah, but we need to, you know, we need to make sure everybody's protected and free. And so who's going to protect us and make sure we're free? Well, it's world government. And you know, like, like, you, you can't, you can't, you can't do that. You can't give the, the world imperial state enough power to, to fix things for every single individual on Earth without having created something that is instantly a tyranny. It just doesn't. Like, there's no such thing. It makes no sense.

Will Spencer [00:51:18]:

You also talked about Immanuel Kant, and that I thought was another fascinating distinction. Just how scriptural you're rooting the idea of nation set up against the anarchic state versus the imperial state. But I didn't realize that the imperial state drew so much of its, I guess you might say modern post Enlightenment enthusiasm from Kant's writing. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Yoram Hazony [00:51:42]:

Yeah, well, Kant wrote a couple of pretty, pretty famous essays. One is called Perpetual Peace, and it's about how you eliminate. How you eliminate war from, from, from mankind. And another one is called. This is like a slim, like a, A thin volume which is called Kant's Political Writings, and they're all in there. And there's one called History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective, where he argues that the only moral route for history to go forward is if you begin by eliminating the borders in Europe. And then he says it doesn't have to be all the nations in the world simultaneously because we in Europe were more advanced. And the other nations, they're like children and they're primitive, so it'll take them some time. But he says the only moral way, direction for his history to go is first the Europeans will decide that they're not going to fight each other anymore and that they'll be under law and there'll be like one government and one court system that will judge among everybody in Europe. And then he says, gradually it'll, like, we'll just add other. As the other nations of the world, they reach maturity and they come to realize that were correct and that this is the only way. Then they'll join and then in the end you'll have this, this world Federation and, And it's. Yeah, it's completely bonkers. It's, it, it's, it's just like, you know, it's like John Lennon. It's, it's this kind of like, imagine there's no nations and there's no religion and there's nothing to fight about, but, you know, that's fine as long as you're not human. You know, like human beings, like, we fight about things. That's part of being human. And we, we need to. We need to find. Find a way to, to improve. Improve ourselves and make the best in that context. And, and this is just like, it's just like blue skies. Like, like the, the only moral thing is for us to stop fighting. And the only way for us to stop fighting is for us to have a world government. And it's all right there. That. That's the European Union. And if they could, then they would do it to the whole planet. They're, they're only doing it in Europe now because they, you know, they're sitting around like Kant, thinking, oh, you know, the, the non Europeans, they're like so primitive and, and so they're not ready, but they think everybody should just join the European Union. They really believe that.

Will Spencer [00:54:12]:

It seems to me that there's also some sort of subtle Darwinian ideas that are. That are looped in there that, oh, humans will naturally evolve. Maybe Kant wouldn't use that word. They will evolve to a point where they can just drop all these borders. Certainly I know that many, many liberals today do think that way. They have a Darwinian view of human progress. Would you say that your biblical view is what roots the nationalism in the terms of God, says, this is the way things are? Like, evolution's not a thing. This is the way things are.

Yoram Hazony [00:54:44]:

Well, you might be right. I haven't thought about like that before. See, the thing about Kant and most of these Enlightenment thinkers is, is that they really think every. That there's like this universal reason that reason with like a capital R is this thing that every single human being can access. And I mean, it's really. It's not very compatible with the biblical view that people are just, you know, kind of bad and in some kind of very profound way. And the Enlightenment tries to defeat that, you know, that, that badness of human beings. It tries to defeat it with reason. It tries to say, look, all of us can have access to reason. Reason dictates moral and political truths in. In sort of like an absolute way that's unmistakable and infallible. That's the assumption in Kant and in many of his, you know, many liberals think something like this, that, okay, you're Angry, but stop being angry. You know, you're thinking about, you know, what they did to your parents. But stop, stop thinking. Just use reason. And then there's like this universal reason where you disconnect from all particular commitments. You disconnect from family and from nation and from history. You disconnect from everything. And, and then you're like in this perfect reasoning place and then once you do that then, then you have the answer and everybody's going to come to the same answers. So, so it, I would think more that there's kind of like a, there is an opposition between the, the Darwinian, you know, like, like Hitler sees himself as Darwinian. Like it's not, it's not like hidden, it's like there's a struggle for, among the races and the fittest race is going to defeat and enslave all the other race. So that's like a Darwinian imperialism. Kant is kind of like the opposite. I mean it comes in the end, it comes to something pretty similar but in principle it's the opposite. He's saying, he's saying no, it's not Darwinian. There's no power struggle at all. It's not about power. There's only one truth and reason will dictate it like as though it's God to all of us just by thinking. And scripture doesn't, you know, doesn't accept either of those. I mean it definitely does not accept that the strongest should rule. That's a, that's at the heart of pagan politics is that whoever's powerful, it's his job to oppress and destroy anybody in his way. So that's paganism, one kind. But in scripture we also get a serious skepticism about human reason. It's not that reason isn't good, wisdom is good in scripture, but you know, but the idea that if you just let people think they'll come to the right answers, I mean there's this sort of like repeated refrain in the book of Judges, you know that in those days there was no king in Israel, every person did whatever was right in his own eyes. And that's not considered good because the liberal enlightenment assumption that if everybody does what's right in their own eyes then they'll A come to the truth about what's right and B, everybody will agree about what's right. It's non existent. Those assumptions are anti scriptural in a very, very deep way. So I think that both Kantian liberal imperialism and the power hungry racial imperialism, both of those are two good examples of things that are Incompatible with Scripture.

Will Spencer [00:59:14]:

Yeah, Too much faith and human reason. Too much faith in human power set up against the way God has told us things are. So let me ask you a couple questions about America with all of this in mind.

Yoram Hazony [00:59:31]:

Okay. Yeah, go ahead.

Will Spencer [00:59:33]:

So from being overseas, most people around the world have a difficult relationship with America because there are many things that they love about us as a nation, but they also resent our imperialism. And I think both of those are true. I've experienced both of those as American overseas. How can America now begin to reconstitute itself in a more nationalistic sense? I know this is a gigantic question, but get comfortable with pulling back from the imperialist posture that it's had for, we'll say 40 or so years, probably more, because that seems almost a challenge to the American identity in a way.

Yoram Hazony [01:00:11]:

Yeah. I think that even though the United States had for sure elements of empire during the Cold War, was fighting an openly imperialist enemy that was trying to conquer the world. And, and so there were elements of Americanism that, you know, you could, you could accuse them of being imperial. But you know, I was in College in the 1980s at the end of the Cold War when Reagan, Reagan was president. I write about this also in my book on conservatism. And Reagan was a nationalist. Reagan, Reagan didn't fight wars of conquest. I mean, people don't remember this, but all this stuff about like, you know, we're going to go conquer Iraq and Afghanistan and, and like, that wasn't Reagan. Right. The only thing Reagan ever, ever conquered was, was, you know, this, this island in the Caribbean called Grenada. That it was like a one week war. That was it. That was the only war that, that Reagan ever fought. He was a nationalist. He, he, he believed that America should back its allies, but he didn't believe that America should be the sole protector of its allies. You know, like, which is basically where, where the, the, the, the, the neoliberals, the neoconservative, that's basically where they ended up was. Now we're just going to protect Europe and Japan and the Middle east and South Asia and we're going to protect them forever until, you know, until we bring utopia that wasn't Reagan. And so the, the, the America I grew up in still thought that it was a nation. You know, like, I understand people can argue about, but it really, really seemed to everybody like it was like it was a nation. People still knew, you know, what was the religion of this country. Not everybody, but most people did. They knew what was the national religion they knew that the country was founded on scripture. They knew that America was on the side of freedom of nations, of independence of nations. They didn't, they didn't think that America's job was, was, you know, was to conquer other nations and make them be like America. So I, it's not that long ago that America was a nation and in a clear way. And the restoration is, is something that's always possible. You know, that's also something that we learn from scripture, is that, that you know, you can be going downhill and you can be like Sodom and God will just say, you know, done with this, no more patience, it's over. But there's also the book of Jonah and Assyria we've talked about, you know, was the evil empire of that day. But the book of Jonah teaches that repentance is still possible minutes before the destruction at, you know, it's still possible for the king and all the people to repent and to change course and repent. It's not just like an internal thing in your heart. Repent, Repent means you're going to change direction, you're going to act differently. And so you know, we don't rule out that possibility. And in practice I think, you know, you know, as a Zionist means somebody who thinks like it's a good idea to have a Jewish state. So there's kind of like a, a little political theory hidden in that like why should, you know, why should Jews all, you know, why should most Jews or all Jews go and live in one place? And there's this idea that, that, that the way that the way that truth comes into the world, the way that goodness comes into the world is you start with a small society, you start with Abraham and he'll build a family and that family, it'll grow. And over time it can become something that's different from what it was. Abraham comes from Ur Kastim, from the Babylonians, from the big city. He comes from, from a place of evil and he found something that's new. And God wants Abraham because he can teach justice to his children and their children. That's what we're told. And the same thing is true in our reality that the most important thing is more important than anything else is that your family, you want to, you want to raise a godly family, you want to raise a children that walks and got children walk in God's ways. Well they need to be in a community that is like minded. I don't mean that everybody has to agree on everything, but there's no way to raise children to resist, you know, a corrupt world without a community that is, you know, it's like, it's. It's like your Noah's ark. It's like it's your. You're raising your children, protecting them from, from, from, from the world until they get strong enough. And, and America has this, you know, old federalist system that it doesn't use for very much these days. But, but it could, you know, it. It could, in theory, go back to having certain states have a certain character that would be better than the character of other states. And I think that has to be the way to go. I'm not saying there's nothing you can do from Washington. There are things you can do from Washington. But ultimately it comes down to if there's no place where you can raise godly children and have a good shot of them carrying it on to the next generation, then it's pretty hopeless. So that's the thing I tell people to do, is make sure that you marry somebody who believes in what you believe and then get yourselves to a church or a synagogue. There needs to be a community. And if you don't know how to do it, then find some community that has the tradition that hasn't lost it yet, and you learn from them.

Will Spencer [01:06:57]:

I think one of the hopeful signs in the world today is a lot of young men, and I do have a question about that quickly. But a lot of young men grew up in this sort of liberal imperialism. There are no obligations, but beyond what you consent to, they're discovering that, actually, no, I do quite want the yoke of mutual obligations placed upon my shoulders because that's how I orient myself as a man. I think Doug Wilson says young men are like semi trucks, but if you don't put anything in the back, in the back trailer that kind of fishtails, it only goes straight if you put a weight in the back. And I think that's a great metaphor. One question I did have, though, is you say in the book that the way that a nation constitutes itself, and I may get the terms wrong, so please correct me if I do. As a strong central supporting tradition, I want to say I don't want to use the word ethnicity, but that's the word that's coming to mind. That may not be the word that you use, but there's a strong central family tradition, which in America I believe is Anglo Protestant. I think that that's true and you agree, but one of the things that we're seeing in the United States today is as this Anglo Protestant tradition is attempting to reassert its sense of centrality, that a lot of young men are taking that as an excuse for hatred, that they're doing exactly the wrong thing with it. And so you touched on it when your conversation with Al Mohler in the library. A little bit. We talked about it, came up in my essay in its own way. So how do we begin addressing this? How do we begin to reestablish a strong central tradition, let's say, that defines the character of a nation without it going into fascism, without it going into hatred, without it going into ethnic supremacy?

Yoram Hazony [01:08:42]:

Well, I'm not, you know, I'm not really sure that the traditions, that the average tradition is more likely to go to, you know, tribal or ethnic surprise. The word ethnic is a. Yeah, it's not the term. No, it's just kind of a mess because ethnos is just, it's just the Greek word for nation. So it's the same word when you, you know, when you read the Bible and it says nation, which in Hebrew is goy. Like in Hebrew, the Jewish nation is a goy, and the other nations are also goyim. That same word in Greek is ethnos. Okay. And what it means, it's a collection of tribes, but there is no racial content to it. The, the tribes, they're built on families, but the families can adopt, like Ruth, the Moabite. Your, your people is my people. Your God is my God. There, there are cases of non Jews joining the Jewish people as individuals and also as tribes all through scripture. And, and, and that's normal for the old concept of nation. Before, before modern racial theory was invented, before genetics, the way people looked at it was it's an inheritance. It's based on family lineages. But people marry and people join, people volunteer to join. And what holds it together? There's a common religion, a common language, a common God, and the loyalty of people who are trying to do something together. So that's a nation. And ethnicity really does mean something like that. Okay. Of course there's a, there is a Greek inheritance, but you know, everybody knows that, like, if you decide you want to move to Greece and spend your life there and marry a Greek woman and have Greek children, then like, you know, you could do that. Anyway, I've sort of gone, gone off on this tangent, but no, it's fine. I, I, I do want to defend nationality and ethnicity without shoving it hard into this, this pseudoscientific category of, of, of race. Nationality is not about race. It's about who's loyal to whom. Now you can say, you know, you can say it's hard for people who are not Anglo Protestants to be loyal to, you know, to a nation that's dominant with. Dominated by Anglo Protestants. And here's an interesting argument. I actually think that it's much easier for people who are not Anglo Protestant, you know, whether they be Jewish or Catholic or from some other country. It's much easier for them to be loyal to a country that has a strong center where they know what it is. Even if. Even if, you know, they don't feel like, well, that's exactly me. But they don't need to feel like it's exactly me. They only need to feel like, you know, those guys are. They're basically good. I don't agree with them about everything, but they're protecting me. My life is good here, and I'm going to be loyal to them because they're being loyal to me, and so I'll help them. That's something that happens. That happens, can happen very naturally in a society where there's a strong dominant tribe or culture or nationality that is. Everybody knows that they're the people who run the place. They're the people in charge, and we're going to connect with them. We'll ask for things, and they'll ask for things, and we'll find a way to be loyal to them if they're loyal to us. That's natural. Here's what's not natural. What's not natural is to say, no, there is no center. Nobody's in charge. Nothing's better than anything else. Nothing is in charge more than anything else. There's no inheritance that holds us together. Nothing. Pure multiculturalism. Everybody does whatever he wants. All the tribes do whatever they want. And that's the book of judges. There is no possible way of holding that together in such a way that it doesn't descend into civil war and weakness from, From. From the outside. So the. The goal for Americans, as for, you know, in every other place, the. The goal needs to be to restore the. The strength and the centrality of. Of ancestral traditions where it's possible to do that. I mean, like, you know, I, I understand this is a big challenge. There are places in America where it's still possible to do that. So those are the places to start.

Will Spencer [01:13:50]:

How does. Then how does for my people, resist becoming against other people? Because that, I think, is what we're seeing is that there. There are a lot of young men who are saying, I want to be for My people and establish a strong sense of national identity based on Anglo Protestantism. And that becomes I'm for my people. That instinct seems very quickly these days. It could be an optical illusion created by the online dialogue or it could be some longer phenomenon. But that instinct seems to go very quickly. I'm for my people and I'm against you sharing this land with me. Please go ahead.

Yoram Hazony [01:14:29]:

That question, it goes straight back to what you were explaining about the lack of fathers. Which is, the lack of fathers is just the most important, but it's just a part of a bigger picture, which is lack of useful good father substitutes. I mean, like traditional society, your father might have been killed in a war or died in disease or it's some accident, but you've still got your uncle. You know, you've still got the local minister or the local governor. I mean, you've got people who, they can be the subs. You don't always have to have your biological father. It's better, but it's not absolutely the only thing that could work. The problem here is that in addition to not having fathers, they also don't have, they also don't have father figures. And so, so look, young men, Young men are not, they're not, they're. Look, young men by nature, they're not inherently the wisest and the smartest of human beings. That's not the, you know, seriously, like if we want to be real realistic about human beings, people become, become wise when they get old. They've been through a lot. They gain status in the community. They become, you know, like the church elders or, or, or, or the advisors to the king. It takes a lot of experience and a lot of, you know, hard knocks in life and seeing a lot of things to get to the point where you have a balanced judgment. And, and, and, and, and it's, you can see the difference between a rival and an enemy. Between a rival, meaning somebody who's competing with you because he's not like you, but you could make friends with him. You could cooperate with them under certain circumstances if you did it right. So that's a rival. An enemy is somebody who's trying to kill you and so you feel like killing him. Young men, many of them, not all of them, but many young men, they're, you know, they're high spirited. They like to, you know, to see enemies and imagine killing them. You know, like, I'm not saying this is good, but it's natural. And if you have a society that's organized in a reasonable way, then the Young men, they go to the military, they fight. They learn love and loyalty for their country. They learn justice from, hopefully, from their commanding officers and their political leaders and their religious leaders and from Scripture. And so as they grow up, they become a little bit less fiery and combative and more capable of distinguishing true enemies that are really trying to destroy you. I mean, those things really exist in the world from. From rivals or competitors, people who are, you know, actually, they could be your friends if, you know, if you be a little bit less obnoxious, you might end up being really, actually good friends with them. And how do we get here? Look, it's all the same question. Like in a. In a place where people do not have wiser figures that are inspiring them or just a place of sort of moral chaos and fear and not knowing where your future is, it's just really easy to get these gangs, these gangs of youths, and they're usually led by. Not always, but usually these gangs of youths, they're led by other youths. The thing is, it's like it's all about rejecting all the elders. It's all about rejecting the past. So even. Even if they're saying, yeah, you know, we're not pagans, we're Protestants, you know, but. But, you know, there's something really pagan going on. Because if they're saying, no, all the elders in my church, you know, they're just all sell. They're selling out to the Jews, and they're selling out to the left, and Donald Trump is selling out. Everybody's selling out. And the only ones who really, really know who, you know, who the enemy is, it's this other guy who's like 35 years old, and he's the guy who's leading me. I mean, I'm sorry, if you're 25, then somebody who's 35 cannot be your father. He can't be your father, and he can't be your father substitute. He does not have the wisdom that's needed in order to navigate these really difficult questions. Like, it. It's hard to know the difference between an enemy and a rival and a competitor and a potential ally. All of these things, they're subtle. It's not subtle. I mean, it's not always subtle. Right. Gaza's 50 miles away from my home in Jerusalem. Okay, so it's not subtle. If they invade my country and slaughter people and rape them, then I know that they're my enemy. But that's not what's going on here. We're talking about having to fight to Restore. To restore a Christian nation in a country that's lost it. So in your imagination, you think, you sit around saying, oh yeah, we'll make Catholicism illegal, we'll make Judaism illegal, and we're just going to give orders and it's all going to be fine. Okay, good for you. That's nice for you that you have that vision, but good luck politically. And they'll say, no, no, it's not polit going to have a dictator. We're going to have a Franco, we're going to have a. This, we're going to have. Come on. Look, realistically, you guys, are. You, you're not going to get anywhere or you're just, you're just not, you're not, you're not going to get anywhere. You can't, you, you can't even convince the people in, in your own church. You can't even convince Protestants to be like you. What, you're going to take over the United States by force? Farmers. This is all nonsense. The reality is that you actually need to save your country. And to actually save your country, you're going to need allies. And those allies, they're just not all going to be like you. So some of them you like more and some of them you like less. And that's hard, but that's life is that you need allies. You need to build bridges to people who, they agree with you enough so that they'll help you, they'll be your friends. And in the crucial battles ahead to, you know, the most important things, the most important. Get, get, get, get God in scripture back into the classroom. You know, get, get, get rid of pornography on every telephone. Right? Just, just, just find a way of eliminate that. That's important. Find a way for people to start serving in the military again. Find a way to build communities where, where, where marriages can stay together and children, children can, can, can, can be be raised with the fear of God. These are really, really crucial things. What's not crucial? What's not crucial is sitting around and dreaming about how you're going to shut down the synagogues. Now, look, maybe you don't agree with me. Maybe you think the most important thing is that there should be no synagogues in America. I think the problem with it is, is, is like, before you get to like, is it good for Christianity is the right thing, is the wrong. Before you get to that, it, you're. It, you're, you're dreaming a hopeless situation. What you're saying is, what I really want to do is I want to cause Every person who could have sympathy for me and help me and force them all into a camp where they're not going to help me. So what. What do you need to do that for? That doesn't make any sense.

Will Spencer [01:22:42]:

You mentioned that, the animus for the Jews, and we were discussing that a little bit beforehand before we started recording. So you've been talking about things that I think a lot of young Anglo Protestant men would be very sympathetic, very sympathetic to. And so I guess as we've talked about the rise, as we talked earlier about the rise of antisemitism, do you think that your book can help put some of that away? Because here's a Jewish man, an Israeli Zionist Jewish man, saying, no, you can have your nation. When I think a lot of these young men are used to hearing otherwise.

Yoram Hazony [01:23:18]:

Yeah, there's a lot of complicated issues here. I mean, one of them is just a fact, is that there are a lot of liberals in America. And I hope everybody's listening. You've already figured out that I'm not a liberal. And no, I just, I've never been a liberal. I was not for five minutes in my life. There was never a moment I was a liberal. Like, I never, ever, ever had sympathy for that. I, you know, I grew up in a home where the analogy that, you know, the way that in, you know, in Israel, we want Israel to be a Jewish country and we want our kids to, you know, our kids to study Bible in schools and, and to serve in the army and to get into. And to get a Bible from the military and to think that they're joining the hosts of the Jewish people going all the way back to Abraham. And so I grew up with that as a Jewish vision. And my father always thought that Christians should have something similar. I mean, he always thought that Christians believe in the Bible, they can be godly, just like Jews can be godly. I mean, I apologize. This is a very Jewish perspective that you can. Jews think you can actually find salvation through different religions. So from my father's perspective, me growing up Jewish in America, he always thought that the good guys were the Christians who were trying to bring morality and Bible and love of nation back to their country. And we would sit there when I was a kid and, and like, like, watch, watch the news. And there was, it was local New York, so there was always like this leftist Jew arguing with this rightist Jew. That's, that's what they had on the New York station. And, and whenever the leftist Jew would come on, my father would just go, oh, he knows nothing. He doesn't understand anything. What this country needs is moral fiber. You know, like, and then the, the, the rightest Jew would come on and we start talking about like, like, you know, the Christians are the good guys and my father, you know, that's what they need. That's what. So like, I, I grew up with that. I know that. I, I know that most Jews in America are liberals, but the problem with, I know not everybody's going to agree with this, but, but this is my view, and I think it's right, is that the problem with Jewish liberals is the same problem that you have with Jewish Catholics, which is the same problem you have Jewish Protestants. And the problem with them all is that they're liberals. And if they would stop being liberals, then, then they would stop being so annoying. So, yeah, so look, I just, I published, along with Josh Hammer, who's another Orthodox Jew, and Timon Klein, who you might know, he's, he's the editor of American Reformer and Tyman. And Josh and I spent a couple of years, actually three years just now writing a book about ending separation. Not a book, I'm sorry, a law reviewer. It's very long, but it's not a book. It's, it's like, it's a long, long law review article and it's on ending separation of church and state in America. And look, I understand liberals are not going to like this. Liberal Jews will attack it, but so will liberal Catholics and liberal Protestants and liberal atheists. They're all going to attack it. But there are plenty of Jews who understand that. I mean, for this you have to go to Orthodox Jews, you have to go to nationalist Jews. But there are plenty, plenty of Jews on the right. If you bother to find them and actually meet them and talk to them, who will say the same thing that I'm saying, which is Christianity and Judaism have no future in America if it's a neo Marxist country. Zero. Not possible, not possible. It has to be turned around. So the only reasonable thing, if Orthodox Jews want to stay in America, I mean, maybe they want to move to Israel, but lots of Orthodox Jews want to live in America. If they're going to stay in America, then the Orthodox Jews are going to have to side with the Christians in bringing God and scripture back. They're going to have to support it. If they don't support it, then America is going to be a place where no Jews can live and no Christians can live. That's it. That's the reality.

Will Spencer [01:27:36]:

And would you say that's Kind of your message to liberal Jews to get comfortable with the idea that, you know, a scripturally rooted Christian American nation, that where they honor in the Protestant tradition, the Reformed Protestant tradition honors the Old Testament. That is, that is actually a good place for them to be.

Yoram Hazony [01:27:54]:

That. Look, that's where I would like them to get. But here's the truth. The truth is that Orthodox Jews have many children and maintain the traditions. They learn scripture, they constantly learn scripture. They teach their children Torah, they talk about Torah with their children. And most of their children grow up to be Orthodox Jews who care about Torah and care about God. And those are people who can respect Christians who do the same kind of thing. If they see that Christians are leading that kind of life, most Orthodox Jews can respect them, and if it's reciprocated, see them as brothers. Also, liberal Jews are not having children. Right? There's some liberal Jews having children, but the intermarriage rate for liberal Jews is. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but it's somewhere around 50%. They marry out, and then they only have one child or 1.2 children or whatever it is. So the future for Jews in America and in Israel and in every place where Jews live, the future for Jews is not liberal Judaism. The future for Jews is Orthodox Judaism and Jewish nationalism. And, you know, so I have liberal Jewish friends. I've. They know my views, the ones that still talk to me. They get to hear it all the time. And, you know, and these days, there's plenty of Jews who are rethinking things in the United States. And, you know, the, the, the, the, the left, which, you know, a lot of Jews used to think that the Democratic Party in the left, that that was a place for Jews. There's not many Jews left who think that anymore.

Will Spencer [01:29:44]:

No.

Yoram Hazony [01:29:44]:

And, and so, you know, now the big question is whether the Republican Party and the right can be a place for Jews to go. I certainly think. I mean, there's, you know, 35% of Jews in America. It's not a lot, but it's. Most of the Orthodox and the nationalist Jews, they voted for Trump. And those are people who, I think that. I think they definitely could be really good allies for serious Christians. And as far as the other Jews, they're still thinking, and some of them are talking to me, some of them are listening. I'll keep telling them the same thing I'm telling you, which is America was founded as a Christian nation. America was legally, by law, recognized by the Supreme Court as a Christian nation. A Christian people. Up until the 1930s, the whole separation of church and state thing was an invention. Post World War II, 1947, in Everson vs. Board of Education, that's the first time that the U.S. supreme Court decided that the American government should not support religion and struck it down and made it illegal. That was the first time. That's not long ago. So Jews need to help Christians if they want to save America rather than coming to Israel. If they want to come to Israel, I'll welcome them. If they want to stay in America, they got to help the Christians turn the country around and make it a place where decent people can raise decent children.

Will Spencer [01:31:14]:

Yeah, because now they're looking at the pro Palestine movement, which has taken on definitely a violent tenor, is sort of sweeping through the left. So where, where are Jews, where are liberal Jews to go when they find themselves no longer welcome in the party they called home?

Yoram Hazony [01:31:29]:

Right. So. Well, they already know they're not welcome. Most of them. And most of the people I talk to, they, you know, there's a tiny sliver who are, you know, totally crazy and still with the Democrats. But the big mainstream of American liberal Jews, they know things have gotten really bad. Let me ask you a question, though, since you brought up these horrific. I mean, they call themselves pro Palestine, but they're not really pro Palestine. I mean, what they're really about is it's an alliance of neo Marxists with the Muslim Brotherhood whose goal is to overthrow. And they make no bones about the fact that they're anti white. But even if, you know, for people who are uncomfortable with that discourse, they're anti white, they're anti Christian, they're anti Jewish. For them, decolonizing Palestine, killing all the Jews in the land of Israel. For them. You know, that's just, that's the ideal. That's the model. They would do the same to the Christians, they would do the same to the whites. What I can't under. Here's what I really, I really can't understand about the, the, the rising, thickening anti Judaism on, on the political right. Okay, fine. You don't, you, you don't like Jews because they're not the same religion. And you're not happy with the fact that Jews are 2% of the population. They have a lot more than 2% influence, and that makes you unhappy. Fine, okay, I don't like that. I think you're wrong. But fine, I get it. Like, I can understand it. I cannot understand how come all these anti Jewish guys are talking praise about Islam. There's something desperately screwed up going on. If you can't tell that, that, if you can't tell that the Muslim Brotherhood is here to take over your country, to overthrow it, and to, to make sure everybody ends up Muslim and there's no Christians and Jews left. If you, if you don't understand that that's, that's the goal, and you're sitting there like, imagining like that the Jews are trying to do something terrible to you when, when, when you, you've actually got Islam to deal with. So God help you. I can't, like, I, I can't understand, I can't understand that. If you want to say, okay, I don't like Jews and I don't like Muslims, fine. Okay, so you're just fine. I get it. You're, you're, you're, you need, you need to grow up a little bit. But. Okay, you don't like Jews and you don't like Muslims. But, but that's not what they're saying. This entire anti Jewish movement on the right is. It's constantly talking up Islam. So what's going on? Are these guys getting paid? Like, how could they possibly be doing this? I mean, this is like, look, the nationalists in Europe, like we have, you know, in the national Conservative movement, there's an American branch, there's a British branch, we have national nationalists on the right, thank God, in many other countries. The nationalists in Europe are all, they're all pro Jewish and pro Israel, almost every last one of them. Why? Because they actually have, they have an actual attempt to take over their countries by the mass Muslim immigration that's pounding down their doors in America. You guys, you have the luxury of pretending, you know, pretending that the Jews are your enemies because there aren't enough Muslims yet. Whoa, you guys are going in the wrong direction. Wait till you find out, you know, who your real enemies are here.

Will Spencer [01:35:22]:

So you wanted me to explain why so many on the right have.

Yoram Hazony [01:35:27]:

I can't understand it.

Will Spencer [01:35:28]:

So it gets back to enlighten me, help me out. Yes. So it gets back to a belief of what the Jews are really about. They have read or heard about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a forgery that sort of discuss this Jewish plot to subvert white Christian men via the family. So they look at Jews as being anti family, anti marriage, anti children, and so anti traditionalism. That's, that's their belief about what all Jews are about. So it's, it's locating evil in the Jews as a people. And so as they look out across the spectrum of who could be our true. Our traditionalist allies. You have white Christian men, and they look to Muslims as still attempting to maintain a traditionalist view, and they have rejected Jews. So it's sort of like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So Muslims are the enemies of the Jews, so they must be my friend. And that's the reason.

Yoram Hazony [01:36:24]:

I don't know. It's just. It, It's. It. It's just difficult. You know, I. I do. I watch some of these podcasts, so it's not. It's not that I. You know, I've never heard this before. I've seen it. I know what you're talking about. I know that's what they're saying, but I can't imagine what kind of planet they're living on. I mean, there was this professor named. A famous professor, Harvard professor, named Huntington, wrote this book, the Clash of Civilizations. And, you know, he has this famous, famous chapter called Islam's Bloody Borders. And he says, look across the globe and see, like, where is there endless bloodshed that can't be put down? Where? And he says, well, it's where. Where the Christians bump up against the Muslims, right? The Muslims are being. Christianity is being annihilated throughout the entire Middle east right now. It's where the Muslims bump up against the Jews. That's the Israel part. It's where the Muslims bump up against the Chinese in the western provinces. It's where the Muslims bump up against the Hindus. Everywhere. Everywhere you look, Islam is. Look, I'll give you this for a young man who wants to do nothing but fight and see enemies all around him and dream of conquering the whole world, fine. I understand the Muslim brotherhood is your thing, baby, but you're a Christian. So what? So what are you going to do? You're going to ally with the. The Muslim aim of conquering the whole planet? You and the Muslims are going to go forward together and. Come on, there's no reality here. Where has that happened? Where there's just no such thing. It's complete fantasy.

Will Spencer [01:38:35]:

Well, they look at Jews as the most urgent and pressing evil on earth. So we'll work together with the Muslims to wipe out all the Jews, and then we'll fight the Muslims, but because God is on our side, will win. And this allegiance with the Muslims is even more ironic considering the love for these radical right guys for the Crusades. So it's like, wait, just five minutes ago, you're talking about how great the Crusades were, and they didn't go far. Enough. And now you're talking about allying with the Muslims. Like, you gotta pick one of these. But they really do view Jews as the source of all evil on earth. And Jews, as a result, have to be eradicated by any means necessary if that means distasteful alliances and they're willing to do it and they'll work it out afterwards. And that, that really is the worldview.

Yoram Hazony [01:39:20]:

Well, look, I, I know it's unpopular on the right these days for, to, to say, you know, come visit Israel and see for yourself. Because, because, you know, you're not allowed to say, have you been there? Like, so, so, so I'm not going to say that. But, but seriously, like, if you, if you, if you walk around as a Christian in Israel, it's, it's a, it's just not true that anybody's going to spit on you. They're not going to spit on you like people are. These Christian podcasters are always saying this. They've never been to Israel. They have absolutely no idea. But it's not true. Jews don't hate Christians. You know, there's. The Jews have the same tribal, you know, the same tribalist young people who are being obnoxious that everybody else does. So I'm not going to tell you. No Jew is ever going to say something obnoxious. But no, Jews don't hate Christians. If you walk around in Israel, you're going to be absolutely safe in Israel. Try to go to any place that's controlled militarily by, by the Muslims and find out how safe are you? Like, where are you going to be afraid? You're going to be afraid walking around in Jerusalem in the Jewish neighborhoods. You think, you think some, some Jew is going to come out and like, like try to hurt you? No, try. Cross. Cross to the other side. Go, go over to where, where the Muslims are and see how you feel walking around at night. This is, it's just, this is, I mean, you're real. This is like a childish fantasy of somebody who has no experience of anything. Anything. Jews do not attack Christians anywhere. Right? And if somebody tells you, oh, you know, like, I, I saw on social media that there were some young Jewish guys who broke tables in a Christian restaurant, okay, so maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about, do they want to kill you? Do they want to destroy you? Do they want to take your women and never give them back again? Do they want an end to your civilization? When have you ever Met Jews who talk like this. There aren't any Jews who talk like that. So, okay, again, yeah, yes, liberal Jews say the same stupid things that liberal Protestants do. Okay? But Orthodox Jews, nationalist Jews, they are natural allies for Christians. And like I said, if you can't, you're too young to be able to distinguish somebody who disagrees with you but could be your friend from somebody who actually wants to destroy you. Well, you got problems.

Will Spencer [01:41:56]:

You got big problems, kid, and that's really great. I'm glad that you mentioned that. Because if you really want to be worried about being a Christian somewhere, try going to China. They will disappear you. You will vanish. I had a guest on my podcast, Sam Rotman. He was a Juilliard trained pianist, raised Orthodox Jewish, became a Christian. He was brought in, he was brought in by a group to perform in China and never really got to perform. He was basically on the run the entire time because the Chinese police were trying to arrest him. He told me this in a private conversation. And so I was saying earlier I was wrestling with your book because I felt it was worthy of the effort. And very slowly, as I worked through it, not because I disagreed with it, because I wanted to wrestle with it. And as I worked through the book, I was slowly overcome. But the place where I think you pinned me was at the very end in response to critics and the final pages where you call out the true threat that America should really be worried about, which is China and not Russia. And also how an American nation that's worrying about what's going on in Gaza is probably not the best use of America's time right now, given what's going on. And you make that point very strongly that conservatives truly need to be worried about China. And we ask where all this anti Semitism is coming from. I think ultimately it's influenced by Chinese money as a play to weaken the right. We can talk about that perhaps separately, but maybe talk about the threat that China represents not just to America, but also to the west, also to nationalism, and just expound on that a little bit because I don't think we hear enough about it in the United States.

Yoram Hazony [01:43:33]:

Yeah, I don't. It's, it's a little bit, it's a little bit mysterious to me. And it, it may be that you know that as you're, you're saying that, that there's a tremendous amount of money, money and tech know how going into manipulating what it is that, that, that Americans and Westerners, what it is that we see. But you know, the, there's Only one country that's really threatening the United States and that's China. There's only one country that's really strong enough to have a hope of, of destroying America. It's China. And you know, even if, you know, you don't think that, that it's bizarre that, that the Chinese are interested in, in making sure that the United States can't, you know, that they make all the medicines in the United, for the United States and they're buying all the farmland and that like, even if you, you don't see any, nothing to see there. No, no hostility that you can see just the fact that the Chinese are so strong and they're so good at what they're doing compared to everybody else. That's something that, you know, I think like normal people responsible for the future of their country, they should be thinking about a lot other things. They should be thinking about definitely the, the penetration of, of Muslim Brotherhood into the United States because that's clearly a goal of the Chinese. The neo Marxism in the universities, that's clearly a goal of the Chinese. If their goal is just to weaken America, then bring in lots of immigrants from Muslim countries and turning the universities into factories of atheist revolution who by, by the way, happen to, to, you know, also be, you know, really interested in, in, in the white people being the evildoers and, and, and, and the, the colored people, which is to say the, the Chinese are the, are the. I mean the whole neo Marxist story is like it, it's, it's like as though it were designed by the Chinese. I'm not saying it was, but I mean it was probably designed, you know, by, by the Soviets, but you know, back then. But so these three problems, the Chinese, the radical Islam and the, and the neo Marxist revolutionaries, those, those three things together, they, they are the, the, the, the act. The United States remaining a cohesive country 50 years from now. So I think America should be focused on that. I don't think the United States is responsible for the security of the rest of the world. I don't think that the United States at this late stage of the game needs to be responsible for the primary responsibility for the security of Europe or the Middle east or South Asia. I think America's goal needs to be, and I think Trump and Vance and Rubio, I mean I really, and Hank said I think they're good on this. I think they understand America's goal needs to be to get other friends and allies to foot the bill, to stop freeloading, to send their sons and daughters to the military to take responsibility, primary responsibility for security in their regions and let the United States focus on China. I think that's, I, to me, it just seems like, you know, completely obvious. If I were the American president, that's what I would want, you know, so I definitely, definitely understand Americans who don't want to get involved in another Middle Eastern war. There's no, I mean, this is in my book, I mean, I, I, I just, I don't think there's, there's any, any defense defensible theory for why the United States was, was conquering Middle Eastern countries and trying to install liberal democracies in those countries. I mean, it's crazy. It's all craziness as far as I'm concerned. But, but President Trump wants to send B2s for 37 hours to bomb the nuclear weapons program. Because Trump doesn't want to lease the bombers to Israel. He'd rather that the Americans fly them. So now that's gonna, you think that's like the end of your loyalty to the, to, to the Trump administration? Like the best nationalist government, the most pro nationalist, pro Christian government that there's, like, ever been in our lifetimes, and you're gonna turn your back on them because you think that, seriously, you think that Trump, Trump and Vance and Rubio and all these, all these guys, like, they're all just like marionettes being manipulated. Like a few Jews call them up from Israel and they're, they're such limp nothings that they forget that they're America first and they're Jewish first. Like, what on earth, like what planet are you living on? These are the best guys that we've ever seen. This is the best administration we have ever seen. And you can dream all you want, but if you guys campaign against Trump, if you insist on civil war in the MAGA movement, you're going to destroy the nationalist movement from inside and civil war and you'll end up bringing the leftists into power. You're never, ever going to get a government this good again. Never grow up. I just, I just, I just think they need, like, I think again, like, you need a little bit of wisdom to be able to see who's really threatening you.

Will Spencer [01:49:50]:

And this is part of the anti Semitic Jewish mania. Like, it's not a rat, it's not a rational worldview, and it is a totalizing worldview. It does take a, take men and some women over and they do see Jews as the source of all evil and Israel as, as the big bad behind everything. And it really does get its claws inside men's minds and hearts and ultimately souls. And it's very difficult to extract men from that worldview. And you say, quite rightly, that a lot of them, like, I'm no longer loyal to Trump over the bombing of Iran, the surgical strike of Iran. And it's bizarre to see, because here you are advocating for a strong national United States, you know, that isn't necessarily getting involved in wars, you know, that isn't leasing bombers to Israel. You're advocating for this, and you're saying, quite rightly, like, you guys got to grow up and understand what loyalty is. Bonds of mutual affection are to begin constituting your nation again and not just bolting at the first sign of something that you don't like that challenges your corrupted worldview, let's say.

Yoram Hazony [01:50:58]:

I think that's a really good point, is that I understand this is. This is always. This is. It's always hard for young people. You know, they don't understand how hard politics is. They don't. You know, if. Unless. Unless you've been close to it, to political power and actually seen the way it's done. It's all built on coalitions, even the most feared dictators, they still need a coalition to rule. They still need people on their side. And you can't escape it. I mean, this is basic to being human, is you can't have everybody be your enemies at the same time. And you have to have allies. And Trump is so good at coalition building. And look, I'm, like I said, I'm a nationalist, I'm a conservative. There's a lot of liberals in the Trump coalition. Trump brought in. He brought in people like Elon Musk and RFK Jr. There's a lot of liberals he brought into the coalition. And I'm not a liberal. And I can understand people saying, okay, Elon Musk is not my cup of tea. RFK Jr is not my cup of tea. Even some members of the Republican Party, people in the Congress. Why is Trump backing them for elections? And there's a very simple answer, but maybe you just don't want to hear it, which is that in real life, you cannot. You can't win elections and you can't win wars without an alliance, without. Without a coalition of people who are going to back you and be loyal to you even when it gets really, really hard. And same with governing. You can't go into government and just. You can't just issue, you know, like one man saying, I want this, I want that, and happens. It doesn't work. Like that. You need to have hundreds and thousands of people, and they need to come from different groups, and they need to all be bringing their force behind you to make it possible for you to win the election, govern, and then win the next election. And that's just hard to do. It's not. It is. I understand. Young people are always impatient. You know, the things the guy had said in the speech are, you know, it's six months have gone by and, and, and he's not implementing it yet. Well, look, if you're, if you're, if you can't, if you can't trust Donald Trump and, and the really good people that, you know, many, many really good people that he's got in his administration, if, if you can't, you know, give him some credit and let, let him do his work for a few years without, you know, turning on him and hating him. So, I, I, I. There's nobody who's going to satisfy you. There's never going to be. It's, it's just there, there, there is nobody better. I'm not saying that Donald Trump is perfect. He's not perfect. But, you know, I've gotten old. I've seen, you know, I've seen many, many elections at this point in America and in other countries, and, and Trump is, is, he's the best. You know, like Bannon keeps saying, like he's a historical figure. Yeah, it's, it's really true. You just don't get people this, this bold and this brave and this willing to fight on so many different fronts and this good at coalition building to make it actually happen, to make it possible. You never get to see this. It's, you know, it, it's so rare and so precious and sitting around, sitting around and, like, hating on him, you know, like he's like some bad guy. You, you don't get it. You don't get what it's about. It's incredibly rare you get somebody who is, who is this good and doing this many things right. You should be doing everything you can to help him.

Will Spencer [01:55:15]:

What are some of the things that you see Trump as Trump as getting? Right, because I know there are a lot of young men that are, you know, sort of being torn between two different perspectives. You know, there's maybe what they see and feel, and then there's all their bros that have turned hard against Trump and they don't know quite how to sort it out. Maybe a more sober, wise perspective may help them see clearly what's actually going.

Yoram Hazony [01:55:34]:

On, you know, because I Remember the Reagan years and, and Reagan was the second, you know, the other great political figure that I got to see during my life. And please don't like, jump on, jump down my throat because I said something good about Reagan. You weren't there. You don't know what was actually happening. You don't know. Just, just set it aside. I'm sorry I annoyed you by saying that, that Reagan was a great man. But between Reagan and Trump, Trump is the one who's much more ambitious. I mean, Reagan came into office, he basically, he had three principles, three things. He only had three things that he. One, he wanted to defeat the Soviet Union. Two, he wanted to, to, to unleash the American economy, to break the unions and deregulate and allow America to begin being strong again. And the third thing he wanted was he wanted to eliminate the debt. The third thing he failed. The first and the second things he succeeded at. Other things he believed in, like d. De atheizing, de atheisting the American schools. That's something Reagan believed in. But it, it wasn't one of his three, three top priorities, and he didn't, he didn't succeed in it. Trump doesn't have just three top. I mean, we can name his top three priorities. We can. It's, it's, it's immigration, it's re. Industrialization, so the country is strong and has jobs, and it's ending the perpetual imperial presence of America as the prime military power every place in the world. Those are Trump's top three things. So first of all, just on those top three things, I think he's doing really great. I mean, just that immigration ice is like the size of an army now. It's just a few months in. Give him time. Look, he's doing more than anybody has ever done before, and maybe he's just going to pull it off. Like, there's a lot of good signs. The business about the United States doesn't have to have responsibility primarily for. I mean, gosh, he's got it, he's got the Europeans talking about like, 5% of their budgets is GDP. So you can say, all right, they're, they're, they're BSing. It's not going to happen. They're not. Okay, maybe, maybe you're right. But when has there been an American president who said that's it. Listen, who's in charge of defending Ukraine? If you guys want to defend Ukraine, that's up to you. It's your job, it's your region, it's your security. You pay for it, you Put the soldiers down. Now. Nobody's ever said that before, anything like that. I mean, it's like a miracle to see that he's saying it. His whole administration is on message. They're all saying the same thing. Instead of fighting with one another, that's incredible. And they're trying to do it. Maybe they'll pull it off. And the re Industrialization thing, it's the same thing. He's simultaneously fighting with every country in the world in order to try to force a situation where they will actually pay for access to American markets. They'll invest trillions of dollars in the American economy building factories in the United States. He's trying. Maybe he'll pull it off. Look, I don't know if he's going to succeed, but I do know that. That he's out there, frontline everything he said he'd do. So I named three things. So let's go for bonus number four. The draining the swamp. Okay, fine. So you're unhappy about Epstein. But can you please. Let's say you're right. Do you understand that he is fighting trench warfare, agency by agency, appointment by appointment, bureaucracy by bureaucracy, to try to turn these things around. He really is firing people. He really is bringing in people. You're saying, okay, not fast enough, not good enough. And what about Epstein? But come on, there's never been anything like this before. Tulsi Gabbard just announced this week that she's cutting 50% of the positions in her agency. When have you ever seen this in the United States? Never. Never in our lifetimes have we seen 50% reductions. And Rubio's doing it in State. Never. Okay, so that's number four. Right? Let's. Let's do number five. Who in American history has taken on the universities? Who's done it? The core. The core of the training, the creation of this neo Marxist, pro Chinese, pro Muslim Brotherhood. The. The core of it is. Is these universities. And, and nobody's ever. Nobody's ever had the courage to take them on. And he's taking them on. You know, I could just keep going, but listen, he's. He's. He's shown. He's shown that. That he's one. One tough, serious guy on at least five major issues that the entire future of America depends on. Right? And this is. We haven't gotten to energy yet. Like there's. There's more, but enough. If you can't understand that, that. That this man, that he. He is doing what it is humanly possible to do, to turn around the United States, which is in terrible, terrible place after, after generations of, of, of abuse and mismanagement and liberalism, after generations. And he's willing, he's, he's willing to fight on, on all these fronts. Ah, you should be cheering him. You should just be cheering him. You know, if you don't cheer him now, 20 years from now, God forbid, you know, I hope this doesn't happen, but I hope you, you don't end up in some place where 20 years ago, you're going to say there was this, this Jewish guy, Khazoni, and he was defending Trump and, and, and saying that he was amazing. And I didn't believe it because I just thought it could be much better. And he was a sellout. Come on.

Will Spencer [02:02:10]:

Do you see hope for Trump potentially, Vance or Rubio, bringing America back to a more nationalistic stance from where it is currently?

Yoram Hazony [02:02:19]:

I see hope, but, you know, hope is hard. Yeah, no, I didn't mean hope is hard. I mean hope. I'm okay on hope. I, I see wonderful things that, that are potentially that are, that are happening or beginning to happen. I know that the actual outcome that, you know, that I'm hoping for, that I'd like to see is not going to happen just in the next four years, you know, so I'd like to see J.D. as president. I'd like to see Rubio as president after that. There's unlimited potential, but the hole is really deep. The disaster is really, really, really, really deep. And it's really difficult to do this. And people should be, you know, should be praying and praying, praying for the administration and doing absolutely everything they, they can to help. So, yes, Hope, always remember that even, even the Assyrians repented, and God spared them. And there was nobody in the ancient world was more evil than the Assyrians, and they repented. God spared them. So, God, God, God bless America. And I hope to see a restoration God.

Will Spencer [02:03:48]:

You've been so generous with your time. And amidst prepping for the conference next week, I wonder if we just want to close quick about the coalition building and the National Conservatism Conference that's coming up next week.

Yoram Hazony [02:04:00]:

Right? So that's September 2nd through 4th, NATCON 5 in Washington, D.C. if you're a student, there's assistance and scholarships for students and for people who are like, you know, first responders and so on, there's special rates. Please do come. This is where the coalition is being built, and you get to hear people you agree with and don't agree with, but everybody there is working together in order to try to make national conservatism, nationalist conservatism, a reality in America and in the rest of the democratic world. So see you there.

Will Spencer [02:04:45]:

Thank you so much, sir. Where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do?

Yoram Hazony [02:04:49]:

Oh, well, first of all, natcon.org for the conference, and you can from the conference site, you can get to the website that we have recommendations of books that you can read. There's an aggregator that comes up with the best nationalist and conservative essays every week they're posted. You can sign up for a mailing. And if you're interested in me, then why Hazoni Y H A Z O N Y on Twitter is my handle. And take a look at my books if you're into that kind of thing.

Will Spencer [02:05:32]:

Well, I recommend the Virtue of Nationalism right here. You can see it's pretty well bookmarked and marked up as I worked my way through it. And I was very, I was very grateful for this because it helped me understand a lot of things that I had seen and dimly understood. And so you had mentioned earlier about potentially coming back on. I have lots of questions for you about what you said about Israel, about why the hatred for Israel related to its stubborn nationalistic stance. I wonder if you'd be willing to come back on at some point and have that conversation.

Yoram Hazony [02:06:02]:

God willing.

Will Spencer [02:06:04]:

Wonderful, sir.

Yoram Hazony [02:06:04]:

Well, thank you so much, and I hope we'll have the opportunity to do that. And thank you for having me. Thank you for hosting me and for that marvelous essay which opened up our conversation.

Will Spencer [02:06:18]:

Praise God. Thank you so much, sir. I'm very grateful to connect as well.

Yoram Hazony [02:06:21]:

God bless it.