Although often couched in complex political theory, conservative media’s internal war boils down to one idea: Some think it’s possible to work with liberals while others believe liberals are out to destroy conservatives and must be fought at every turn. 

This divide explains the difference between a magazine like National Review, which sometimes but not always opposes President Trump’s populist policies, and pro-Trump outlets like American Greatness and the Federalist.

“National Review thinks we can make peace with the liberals in debates over principles and policies,” a conservative author, James Piereson, says. “But we can’t go too far lest they call us radicals. The other side thinks we are in a wartime situation: the left wants to destroy us. That is a large difference.”

The president of the William E. Simon Foundation, Mr. Piereson says that to understand the rift in conservative media, it helps to turn to a scene from “The Godfather.” In the film, after a rival faction tries to assassinate the head of the family one of its lawyers wants to make a peace deal. 

As Mr. Piereson recalls, “The two brothers reply that you can’t make peace with people who are trying to kill you.”

He adds that there is “genuine bad blood” between the conservative journalists in New York and Washington, not that he’s taking sides.

Mr. Piereson observes that National Review “cares very much what the liberals think of them,” while the Federalist’s editor-in-chief, Mollie Hemingway, and American Greatness and others in that group “don’t care what they think because the left wants to eliminate opposition and take over. They also think the liberals have been pushed out of the conversation by the left, progressives, and ‘woke’ advocates to the point that liberals no longer exist — to the extent they do, they have come over to our side.”  

One source who has more than a decade of experience both in conservative media and on Capitol Hill thinks that Mr. Pierson’s “Godfather” analogy is perfect — that disagreement stings harder when it’s coming from inside a political family. 

“The difference boils down to this,” the source, who asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting friends and colleagues, says. “National Review thinks its job is to police the right. We think that our job is to defeat the left.” 

The fact that such policing comes from fellow conservatives is particularly infuriating: “The left has Hollywood, the media and the tech industry. Imagine trying to take on all of that and then be criticized by people who are supposed to be on your own side,” the source says.

An example offered by both Mr. Piereson and the source is the case of the Covington Catholic kids. In 2019 high school student Nicholas Sandmann was recorded on video wearing one of President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign hats while smiling at a drum-thumping activist, Nathan Phillips, at the Lincoln Memorial. 

Many media outlets, including National Review, painted Mr. Sandmann as an aggressor, when the truth was far different. National Review issued an apology.

A National Review senior writer, David Harsanyi, says he thinks the criticism of the Never-Trump conservatives is overblown. “What position did NR take on the Covington Catholic thing?” he asks. “A single editor wrote a reactive blog post when it happened; and when we realized the information was wrong it was deleted. That incident is a good example of how a lot of the anti-NR stuff is ginned up.” 

Mr. Harsanyi agrees that today’s liberals are more extreme than those from the days of John Kennedy and Patrick Moynihan. “I certainly don’t believe the American left is the same now as it was forty years ago, or even ten years ago. Most aren’t liberal by any definition of the idea.” 

Mr. Harsanyi says that NR “has writers with an array of opinions” and adds that he speaks for himself, not National Review. 

National Review’s editor, Ramesh Ponnuru, did not respond to requests for comment.

One current clash between the two sides is over the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol.  

A National Review senior writer, Dan McLaughlin, tweeted out his support for the long prison sentence given to one of the January 6 rioters who invaded the building. This drew a response from Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist, who tweeted, “National Review out here supporting the Pelosi/Democrat approach – disparate treatment for the left’s of legion rioters who destroyed American cities in the summer of violence vs the J6 rioters.” 

On Twitter, a NR writer, Isaac Schorr, fired back: “Mollie is lying because that’s what she does to make money.”

Mr. Schorr, the Federalist, and Ms. Hemingway declined to comment for this article.

The bad blood on the right can be traced back at least to the battle between writers Sohrab Ahmari and David French. 

In 2019 Mr. Ahmari, an editor at the New York Post and the author of “The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos,” wrote a piece for First Things, “Against David Frenchism.” It argued that writers like Mr. French, then at National Review and now at the Dispatch — a publication founded by two journalists who wrote for National Review and have been critical of Mr. Trump, and who left Fox News as contributors last year, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes — were too conciliatory with the left. 

A New Yorker writer observed at a 2019 debate that Messrs. Amari and French “plainly seemed to dislike each other.” Mr. French told the reporter, “There are those who look at our culture, genuinely fear the left, and believe that the church is in some sort of left-induced death spiral. It’s hard to describe the sense of fear and panic you’ll hear in some quarters of the religious conservatism.”

He added, “I think the far more proper view is that many cultural trends are cyclical, that there have been considerable conservative victories in our cultural conflicts, that tens of millions of people still attend strong, healthy churches, and we should never, ever lack confidence in the power to persuade.”