Don’t call them concentration camps

This week Washington hosted the first ever National Conservatism conference. “We see nationalism as integral to the rise of conservatism,” Yoram Hazony said. The Israeli philosopher is chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organized the event.

Yikes as fuck, obviously.

There, Peter Thiel spoke about the need for the FBI and CIA to question Google about their dealings with China in a “not so gentle manner.”

Heritage Foundation fellow David Azerrad said that when Trump called Mexicans rapists and suggested a blanket ban on Muslim immigrants during the 2016 campaign wasn’t racist but “preaching civic nationalism” and “defending all Americans.”

They hosted speakers like Amy Wax, a law professor who previously falsely claimed that black students rarely graduate high in their class. Now she’s saying non-whites litter more than whites.

At the conference, Wax made the case that it makes sense to favor white immigrants over non-whites because the latter litter more. Don’t worry, that’s not a racist thing to say though. Because the littering is cultural, not biological. It’s too bad about all the censorship of academics. /sarcasm

At Vox, Zach Beauchamp described the talk by J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, as “one of the sharpest critiques of libertarianism I’ve ever seen from a conservative.” The talk was definitely interesting. Vance makes the argument that libertarians haven’t used their political power to fight against corporatism or for struggling Americans. If libertarians had ever had any political power I’d agree with him. We certainly have been more focused on cutting social safety net spending than abolishing corporate welfare and fighting for police accountability and reform.

And then Fox News’ Tucker Carlson gave a talk called “Big Business Hates Your Family”? where he apparently criticized House Republicans for not helping American families hurt by creative destruction and called Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, “more important than everything written by social conservatives over the past 10 years.”

It’s great to see conservatives and progressives both supporting the idea that America should prioritize a functional social safety net. The racism and xenophobia, however, are not so chill. Nationalism is on the march, in a big way, in this country, and it bites my ass that the response from Democrats to rising nationalism is tepid support.

Nancy Pelosi has a Democratic majority House and rubber-stamped a GOP Senate bill to fund concentration camps. The only thing she’s said about the camps, that I’m aware of anyway, is don’t call them concentration camps.