There was one telling detail I forgot to mention in my newsletter last week about Senator Eric Schmitt’s speech at the NatC conference in Washington, D.C. In the transcript published on the Daily Signal site, mention of “the cultural war,” Pat Buchanan’s term originally, goes to a speech given by Schmitt in the Senate on the topic of campus antisemitism and Israel:

The battle for our future is not between democracy and autocracy, capitalism and socialism, or even “Right” and “Left,” in the old meaning of those terms. It is between the nation and the forces that would erase it.

For decades, many of those in power—not just here, but across the West—have been locked in a cultural war with their own nations. We see that in many of the countries of Europe today, where the immigration crisis threatens to transform the ancient fabric of those nations—and all who object are menaced by an increasingly totalitarian censorship state.

This is highly ironic: Pat Buchanan, to put it mildly, does not think that antisemitism is a problem of especial concern to American right-wingers. And he definitely did not believe protecting our relationship with Israel was part of an“America First” agenda. In case you think that Schmitt’s mention of the cultural war was just an incidental piece of rhetoric, on Friday, his office sent a letter to Trump requesting that Patrick J. Buchanan be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

How to explain this endorsement of one of America’s great modern antisemites, combined with the furrowed-brow concern over antisemitism? Perhaps it’s a product of the conflicted personal identity of his aide, Nate Hochman, who is both Jewish and a white nationalist. But this is not a matter of mere psychology. It points to the unwieldy coalitional dynamics on the right: a combination of the remnant of the most bloodthirsty and thuggish neocons and the heirs of the paleocon right. Not all are satisfied with the arrangement. Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, two of the most highly influential antisemitic voices on the Right, constantly militate against accommodation with pro-Israel neocons and administration friendliness to the Jewish state. And the NatC conference itself was riven over the issue of Israel.

But for some, extreme nationalism and support for Israel make obvious ideological sense. Call it “the Buchanan to Bibi pipeline.” After all, Yoram Hazony, the organizer of the conference, is an Israeli who wrote “a most painful, heartfelt farewell” to Meir Kahane after his assassination in 1990. Many on the New Right see Israel as performing the role the British Military governor of Palestine, Ronald Storrs, envisioned for it: a “loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.” Or, in the words of Theodor Herzl himself, “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”¹ Why pine for the lost days of empire and white global domination when you already have an actually-existing genocidal settler-colonial state to support? (And they can support it all with less guilt or shame than just being a Nazi because the Israelis themselves are a persecuted people.) Now, before you jump down my throat for calling Israel all that, keep in mind it’s because of, not despite, that character that this section of Western fascists “love” Israel. It may be “more complicated than that,” but they want Israel to be exactly what its critics on the Left say it is: a heavily armed outpost of global white supremacy. But they are a shrinking cohort: As in society in general, there is a considerable age gap in support for Israel in the conservative movement.

It used to be that one could roughly say that while paleocons were fascists at home, reimagining America as a white ethnostate, they were relatively more dovish abroad and skeptical of foreign entanglements, while the neocons were fascists abroad, favoring unabashed imperialism, foreign adventures, and unilateral wars, but broadly in support of center-right liberal democracy at home. The current fusionism of the right is the worst of all possible worlds: fascist at home, fascist abroad.