Long before “wokeness” became a culture war buzzword, a cohort of Jewish thinkers who had come of age as socialists, Trotskyists, and New Deal liberals began warning about identity politics, racial grievance, and threats to Israel. As the radicalism of the 1960s engulfed American politics, these figures became what we might now call the original anti-woke activists.

Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, embodied this transformation. Early on, he moved comfortably in liberal circles and even flirted with sympathy for the New Left. By the late 1960s, however, he underwent what he later described as a political “conversion experience,” emerging by 1970 as an unapologetic neoconservative. His critique of the radical Left was withering. He accused it of following “the route of personal grievance” instead of “the route of ideas” and of describing middle-class American values “in terms that are drenched in an arrogant contempt for the lives of millions and millions of people.”

Podhoretz’s shift was not purely ideological. It exposed deeper racial anxieties and a fraught relationship with America’s upheavals over race. Long before his full turn to neoconservatism, he wrote one of the most explosive essays of the decade, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” which appeared in Commentary in 1963 and stunned readers with its brutal candor.

In that piece, Podhoretz admitted to “the hatred I still feel for Negroes,” yet proposed interracial marriage as the ultimate solution to racism. “I cannot see how [the dream of erasing color consciousness] will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear,” he wrote. “And that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.” He pushed further, insisting that “the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned,” and that only the physical erasure of racial difference through intermarriage could resolve the “Negro problem.”

This episode foreshadowed his later disillusionment with the Left. As the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power and campus radicals who were increasingly hostile to Israel, Podhoretz came to view the New Left not as an ally but as an existential rival. Reflecting on that era in the Claremont Review of Books, he observed that “the enemy of the New Left was not the Right. The Right didn’t exist for the New Left. It wasn’t on the radar. It was so self-evidently bad. They didn’t have to waste any energy on it. No, the enemy was the liberal community.”

If Podhoretz supplied the tone and the cultural venom, Irving Kristol supplied the architecture. Often described by the New York Times as the godfather of neoconservatism, Kristol began, as he later recalled in a PBS interview, as a Trotskyist at City College of New York in the late 1930s, part of a famous milieu bound together less by devotion to socialism than by hatred for Stalin and the Soviet betrayal of the socialist ideal.

After World War II, he evolved into a Cold War liberal, co-founding the London-based journal Encounter in 1953 to promote an Atlanticist, anti-Communist vision; its rise and later scandal have been chronicled in obituaries such as The Guardian’s appraisal. By the mid-1960s, Kristol remained a Democrat but was increasingly skeptical of the Great Society and the utopian social engineering it promised. With Daniel Bell, he launched The Public Interest in 1965 as a journal for reform-minded liberals wary of technocratic hubris and unintended consequences.

The New Left’s surge, with its anti-Americanism, moral relativism, and emerging hostility to Israel, pushed Kristol further right. He saw in the counterculture a sign of cultural and civilizational decay. By the 1972 McGovern campaign, he had concluded that, as one left-wing critic later put it in Jacobin, the Democratic Party had been captured by its radical fringe. Kristol openly aligned with the conservative movement, praising Nixon’s law-and-order pragmatism.

Kristol’s thinking was also shaped by the German-Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss, whose work on classical political philosophy and modern nihilism was popularized in venues like Cato’s overview of Straussian influence. For Kristol, politics became the art of the possible, grounded in moral tradition rather than abstract egalitarian ideals. His journey—from Trotskyist to liberal to conservative—came to be summed up in the famous line explored at VoegelinView: “a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”

If Podhoretz and Kristol provided the intellectual spine, Sidney Hook represented the embattled academic conscience. Once a Marxist and Communist sympathizer in the 1930s, Hook became by the 1960s one of the New Left’s fiercest critics. As Jewish historian Edward Shapiro recalled in a piece for the National Association of Scholars, Hook was horrified when “groups of violent anti-Vietnam War radicals and racist demagogues, urged on by sympathetic faculty, occupied campus buildings, trashed faculty offices, and intimidated spineless administrators.” For anyone watching the campus pro-Palestine protests of 2023-2024, the echoes are unmistakable. The barricades, moral fervor, and denunciations echo the 1960s, when Jewish political actors first discovered how easily their own revolutions could turn against them.

Midge Decter, often described as the “godmother of neoconservatism,” followed a path akin to Podhoretz and Kristol. She began as a liberal Democrat deeply embedded in New York’s Jewish intellectual scene, but recoiled in the 1960s from what she later denounced, in a Jerusalem Post interview, as the Left’s “heedless and mindless politics and intellectual and artistic nihilism.”

The New Left’s radicalism, sexual liberation, and what she saw as a national “seizure of self-hatred” convinced her, as summarized in a National Humanities Medal citation, that America was spiraling into moral decay. By the 1970s she had become a leading critic of feminism, the counterculture, and gay liberation. In one widely cited formulation, reported in an Associated Press obituary, Decter argued that feminism aimed to keep adult women “as unformed, as able to act without genuine consequence, as the little girl she imagines she once was and longs to continue to be.”

Taken together, these figures were reacting to the same combustible mix: the rise of the New Left and Black Power, the spread of the counterculture, and the eventual fallout from the Arab-Israeli wars, which helped nudge segments of Black America toward sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Their response was to abandon the Left and remake American conservatism in their Judaic image.

The consequences of the Jewish neoconservative ideological conquest still shape American politics today. From it emerged an “invade the world, invite the world” order in which American power is spent advancing Jewish interests abroad while immigration policy at home enriches plutocrats and erodes the country’s European demographic core.

Michael Ledeen, the man who urged America to “to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall” every decade,  met an end that many of his critics would call overdue. On May 17, 2025, Ledeen died at the age of 83. marking the passing of one of the last influential Jewish neoconservatives of his generation.

Ledeen obtained a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied under the Jewish German-born historian George Mosse. He took a particular interest in Italian fascism and wrote a doctoral dissertation that eventually became “Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936,” published in 1972, which explored Benito Mussolini’s efforts to create a Fascist international in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

His academic career began at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was an assistant professor of history from 1967–1973, before becoming a visiting professor at the University of Rome from 1973–1977. Ledeen authored over 35 books throughout his career, including works on fascism, European history, and Middle Eastern politics.

His influence was most felt in the realm of national security though. Throughout his career, Ledeen held multiple advisory roles within the U.S. government, including as a consultant to the National Security Council, a special advisor to the Secretary of State, a consultant to the Department of Defense, and a consultant to the under-secretary of political affairs. Ledeen was an active member of numerous think tanks and regime-change advocacy organizations such as the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon, Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Additionally, he has been published in numerous philosemitic conservative outlets such as the National Review, Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly Standard. His influence extended beyond formal roles. According to the Washington Post, he was the only “full-time” international affairs analyst frequently consulted by Karl Rove, the chief strategist of then-President George W. Bush.

Ledeen’s career was not free of controversy, however. In 1980, Ledeen co-authored articles with Belgian-American journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave in The New Republic alleging Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy Carter, accepted payments from Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi and met with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He made those same assertions before a Senate subcommittee as the 1980 presidential election quickly approached. These claims, published weeks before the presidential election, reignited the “Billygate” scandal.

A 1985 Wall Street Journal investigation later confirmed that the stories were part of a disinformation campaign executed by Italy’s military intelligence agency (SISMI) to hurt Carter’s presidential re-election campaign. Italian intelligence officer Francesco Pazienza testified that Ledeen received $120,000 for his role and operated under the codename “Z-3.” Pazienza, who was convicted for extortion in connection to the operation, described Ledeen as a key figure behind the dissemination of false narratives.

Additionally, Ledeen was heavily involved in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration. As a consultant to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, Ledeen facilitated back-channel communications between U.S. officials, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. In this case, the Reagan administration was clandestinely negotiating hostage releases in Lebanon via arms sales to Iran, a scheme that bypassed Congressional oversight and later became a major scandal. Ledeen defended Ghorbanifar despite widespread skepticism about his reliability, subsequently detailing his perspective in the book “Perilous Statecraft.” While he never faced criminal charges, Ledeen’s role in Iran-Contra showcased his willingness to operate in the shadows, ethics be damned.

Like many Jews in the neoconservative movement, Ledeen has a long career of advocating for regime change in the Middle East.

Ledeen was one of the most vocal Jewish neoconservatives lobbying for the removal of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Along with other neoconservative luminaries such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, Ledeen signed “An Open Letter to the President” in 1998, urging Bill Clinton to topple Iraq’s Baathist regime.

Similar to other Jewish officials in the national security establishment, Ledeen was an unapologetic champion of using hard military power. Jewish neoconservative journalist Jonah Goldberg coined the “Leeden Doctrine” after reflecting on a speech he attended in the 1990s at the American Enterprise Institute. In that speech, Ledeen was alleged to have said:

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.

In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Ledeen was one of the most energetic proponents of using military force against the country. Ledeen wrote a piece at the National Review critical of former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who advised against invading Iraq. Instead of exercising restraint, Ledeen called for turning the entire Middle East “into a cauldron”, as he explained in more detail:

Scowcroft has managed to get one thing half right, even though he misdescribes it. He fears that if we attack Iraq “I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror.”

One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists.

Ledeen’s hawkish stance on Iran was also a lifelong constant. He labeled the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini a “theocratic fascist”, and as Jewish political commentator Peter Beinart observed about Ledeen’s Middle Eastern political analysis, every problem in the region “traces back to Tehran.” Despite opposing a direct invasion of Iran in his later years, Ledeen championed aggressive support for Iranian dissidents and preemptive strikes against nuclear facilities if diplomacy failed to get Iran to kowtow to the United States.

Michael Ledeen’s death marks the end of a career that Jewish journalist Eli Lake described as one of “America’s most courageous historians and journalists.” His friend David Goldman, a Jewish international relations commentator associated with the Claremont Institute, wrote that Ledeen’s “personal contribution to America’s victory in the Cold War is far greater than the public record shows.”

Ledeen’s legacy is undeniably one and steadfast advocacy for Jewish interests within the American conservative movement. For those who saw his influence as a barrier to a more authentically gentile Right, his passing, like David Horowitz’s, may indeed be viewed as an opportunity for change as more of the Jewish founders of neoconservatism and their progeny exit the plane of the living.

For this author, Ledeen will certainly not be missed.

In the UK, legions of Labour supporters are realising that their party is hardly different in government to the previous Conservative administration. Guardian writers and below-the-line comments initially blamed the penny-pinching policies of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves on the ‘black hole’ left by the Tories (and Brexit, of course). But as the swingeing cuts continue, and Labour takes from the poor to give to the rich, discontent is rising.

Welcome, Labour followers, to the reality that Conservative voters have experienced since 2010. The dichotomy of Left and Right, which originated in the French national assembly of the late 18th century (nobility sitting on the right and revolutionaries on the left) seems irrelevant to the party in power. The only difference is in presentation: Labour pretends to serve one side while the Conservatives pretend to support the other. Did Cameron, May or Johnson stem the tides of immigration, Green and Woke? No – but they made the right noises to fool the electorate. The establishment wants us to keep the faith in a political pantomime.

The old divide is becoming unsustainable, despite mainstream media efforts. In the latest Atlantic monthly magazine, Anne Applebaum tries to explain what ‘far right’ means in context of Donald Trump’s return of to the White House. How could former Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr. serve a man that the likes of the Atlantic and Washington Post had deemed fascist?

Applebaum is starting to get it, but her prejudices prevent her from really understanding why the Left / Right paradigm is becoming meaningless. She focuses entirely on supposedly problematic ‘populism’, failing to consider how conventional political parties have abandoned the ordinary people to become like the nobility of revolutionary France.

Confusing for Applebaum is the phenomenon of politicians of the Right pursuing causes associated with the Left. She cannot believe that the likes of Trump and Viktor Orban really care about the common people; instead, she sees demagogues exploiting economic and cultural woes in a rapidly changing world. They are conmen, pretending to help the poor while building an oligarchy: –

This rising international elite is creating a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of a law in a world where emotion defeats reason — only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

She has a new word for the Right: ‘obscurantism’. The movement led by Trump and other figures manifests in a nebulous spiritualism, nativist narratives, and covid and climate change denial. The trajectory Applebaum describes is from Enlightenment values to darkness, through cultivation of fear. Ironically, she believes that humanity should be very afraid of viruses and a purported climate emergency, while most Trump voters simply want more freedom and less government, especially government that massively subsidises the left. It’s the establishment that has cultivated fear, from nuclear Armageddon to ‘global boiling’.

I first read Applebaum’s neocon missives two decades ago when I subscribed to the new magazine Standpoint, which I naively regarded as an antidote to subversive identity politics. Like neocons generally, Applebaum was obsessively concerned about Russia, which under Vladimir Putin was a counterweight to the Western-driven new world order emerging after the fall of communism.

Today, such rhetoric is normalised. But Applebaum knows that so-called populists in the West do not see Russia as our enemy or believe that Putin wants to invade Europe. Instead they see NATO and the EU as the warmongers, while the biggest threat to civilians in Western countries is not Putin but their own governments (as JD Vance remarked in his address to a security conference in Munich).

The Right, Applebaum asserts, has abandoned conservatism and caution for a wrecking ball. Democratic institutions are at risk. Again displaying lack of insight, she began her article with a scathing account of the Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu, who was arrested and barred from standing after his first-round election win was annulled. The reason given was supposed Russian influence on TikTok, but it was foreign interference by the EU and globalists that cancelled the election and its likely winner.  Some democracy there, Anne!  Meanwhile Orban has ‘impoverished his country’, she claims, ignoring the EU clamouring for punishment because of the Hungarian government’s legitimate policies.

Applebaum has a litany of slurs for anyone patriotic or traditionalist: law-breakers, thieves, misogynists. And, of course — conspiracy theorists. The latter should be worn as a badge of honour nowadays, because undoubtedly there is a global conspiracy to undermine sovereignty and install an oppressive technocracy. Wild conjecture may abound, but that does not invalidate the obvious truth, as blatantly stated by the World Economic Forum.

She gets something right, by stating that ‘techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology controls us in ways we can’t understand’. But who is controlling this technology? And why is the internet, initially liberating, now used for surveillance and censorship? Populists are not the powerful clinging to the status quo.

Applebaum scoffs at a mystical belief in the ‘deep state’ as a dark force taking humanity in a dystopian direction. Anyone remotely paying attention to politics in the West realises the deep state is a horrifying reality.

The problem with pro-establishment concepts of public opinion and politics is that the disfavoured side is labelled not with its own identification but by smears. ‘Far-right’ is not how most conservative patriots would describe themselves. But this term is used so excessively that libertarians and even socialists have been caught in the net, if they commit heresy against the climate cult or doubt the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

The Right / Left construct is a divide-and-rule strategy that we must overcome if we are to build a unified resistance to the globalist agenda. Applebaum, for all her verbosity, is a useful idiot for the predatory elite. Or more likely, she realises that as an entirely kosher, card-carrying member of the predatory elite, she is quite aware of where her ethnic, social, and economic interests lie: Definitely not with populism.