On Tuesday this week, freshman Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) made an appearance at the National Conservatism Conference to deliver the keynote address. His remarks predictably targeted progressive lawmakers and the principles of liberalism in the United States — specifically, he focused his ire on the traditional enclaves of the country’s “elite,” the largest cities that tend to skew more Democratic and forward-thinking.

Except Hawley didn’t use the term “city-dweller,” or “urban” or even “coastal elites” to describe the subject of his enmity. He used, repeatedly and often, the word “cosmopolitan.”

On its face, the word is inoffensive and unremarkable. But in the wrong context — indeed, in the context in which Hawley used it on Tuesday — the word has deeply anti-Semitic subtext.

In his prepared remarks, Hawley at various points decried the “cosmopolitan consensus,” the “cosmopolitan elite,” the “cosmopolitan class,” and the “cosmopolitan economy,” and more broadly took exception to the “cosmopolitan agenda” that is supposedly at the root of the country’s yawning political divide.

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