At CPAC 2026 in Grapevine, Texas, last Thursday, conservative Jewish commentator Josh Hammer walked to the main stage with eight minutes and a list of names. What followed was one of the most unsparing indictments of prominent right-wing figures heard at a major conservative conference in years, delivered not from the fringes but from center stage, to a crowd that responded with sustained applause.
Hammer, Newsweek senior editor-at-large, syndicated columnist, host of The Josh Hammer Show, and author of Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West, opened with a clear distinction: the Trump White House is performing. It is “podcastistan”, referring to the conservative influencer class, that is rotting from within.
What Hammer emphasized at CPAC was that voices on your own side who actively work to weaken your nation and legitimize your enemies stop being dissent and become sabotage.
“Things in the administration, in short, are going pretty well,” Hammer told the crowd. “It is only when we look outside the administration to the conservative influencer class, those who dwell in podcastistan, as some now call it, when we see things going perhaps slightly less well.”
He named names without hesitation. Tucker Carlson, he said, “wrestled the demon and seems to have lost the fight with the demon,” citing Carlson’s decision to host a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece named Jang on his show. On the podcast, Jang proposed a new world order in which the United States would join China, Russia, and Iran as “equal partners.” Hammer’s assessment: “If you think that sounds patently insane, that’s because it is. If you think that sounds indistinguishable from the musings of Noam Chomsky, that’s because it is.” He noted that Carlson then affirmed Jang’s “Beijing-approved dystopia as the wisest possible advice and the only path that preserves civilization.” Carlson, Hammer added, has also praised Russia, Maduro’s Venezuela, and Sharia law. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a single anti-American system or regime that Carlson has not in fact praised.”
Hammer then turned to Megyn Kelly, whose first episode following the launch of Operation Epic Fury against Iran featured Marjorie Taylor Greene. Rather than marking the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and what Hammer called “the remarkable asskicking that Trump had just begun delivering to a regime that’s attacked and killed Americans ever since 1979,” Kelly and Greene lamented. Kelly said on air: “This feels very much to me like it is clearly Israel’s war.”
Hammer rejected that framing with force. He documented Trump’s decades-long record on Iran, calling for military force against the regime in 1980, stating in 1988 he would “go in and take” Karg Island near the Strait of Hormuz. “Short of tariffs,” Hammer said, “there is literally no single issue on which Donald Trump has been more consistent over the decades than the issue of Iran.” The insinuation that Trump was maneuvered into action by Israel or by prominent American Jews, Hammer said, “is simply put horseshit.”
At the core of the speech was the MAGA framework itself. “The slogan that catapulted Donald Trump to the presidency and continues to define his political career is Make America Great Again,” Hammer said. “In it are three distinct claims. First, America was once great. Second, America became less than great. And third, it will one day be made great again.” The “brain rot right,” he argued, rejects all three. “Much like the neo-Marxist left, the retard right doesn’t think America was ever great, and they certainly don’t think that America is capable of being made great once again. They are therefore explicitly anti-MAGA. In fact, they are actually just anti-American.”
The goal of these figures, Hammer argued, is not eccentric or misguided; it is deliberate. “The goal is to destroy the MAGA coalition and the current iteration of the American right. These subversives have no interest in a strong America that kills arch terrorists who want us dead and confronts a Chinese Communist Party that wants us subjugated. They have no interest in a conservative movement that is downstream of the West’s biblical inheritance.” Instead, he said, “like Putin’s Svengali Alexander Dugin, they want a coalition movement that makes America great by making Russia and China great. Like the Muslim Brotherhood, they want the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition made great again by making Islam or Sharia law great again.” His verdict: “It’s stupid. It’s evil. It’s flaming stinking garbage. It is the direct advancement of our enemies’ interests on the world stage
A JL Partners survey cited by Hammer found that Republicans trust Trump over Carlson and Kelly by a margin of 83% to 6%. That number, Hammer said, is not a close call.
He closed with a direct charge to the audience: “Your job, CPAC, is simple. It is to resoundingly say to the retard right: no. The future of this conference depends on it. The future of this movement indeed depends on it. And ultimately, the future of this country depends on it. So don’t mess it up.”
