Neoconservatism

Thoughts and Predictions on Israel’s war

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Trump should have remembered the French proverb: If you dine with the Devil, you’d better have a long spoon.

 Netanyahu and the Jews have played their cards adroitly and Trump has been left hanging out to dry.
At about 22:30 and 24:00 Mearsheimer comments on how the administration has been conned and what the costs will be.

The impact of the bombing of Iran and of the Israelis playing Trump for a fool is such that Trump’s presidency will never recover.
Trump’s base — cobbled together out of MAGA type Southerners and peace Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard and Kennedy — is going to be shattered.  The surprising defections of Gabbard and Kennedy enabled Trump to squeak by into office with 50.5% of the popular vote.  Trump could never afford to shatter that slender base.  His base will now dissolve.
Gabbard and Kennedy have been publicly humiliated.  The peace voters will drop out.  As the situation worsens and Trump is dragged along by the Israeli dog leash, I would not be at all surprised to see Tulsi Gabbard resign and make a public statement damning Trump.
The US may be drawn into a prolonged conflict.  The deficit will continue to soar as it did due to the money poured into the pockets of Liz and Daddy Dick Cheney and the rest of the military industrial complex when the neocons and their Baby Bush got us into the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Oil is going to soar in price…potentially to staggering prices. If oil prices rise dramatically, the economy is going to sour and as a result much of the public support for Trump will nosedive.
The neocons are going to be back in the driver’s seat. Trump is going to be at their mercy.  There’s no feasible way he can maneuver out of the situation.  The System Media will have an easy job exciting Americans into wanting to “get even” with Iran when American troops and oil investments in the Middle East are endangered.
Trump has no wiggle room.  He has been played for a fool by Netanyahu and the Jews.
Trump has boundless self-confidence in himself as “the master of the deal.”  He foolishly thought he could manipulate the Jews into going along with him on the immigration issue by making a deal with them — supporting the Gaza genocide and in exchange he thought the Jews would abandon their anti-WASP politics.
The Jews are far greater masters of the deal than Trump, but Trump’s pride made it impossible for him to see that and set his foolish course.
The Jews understand that crushing Amalek, the word they apply to White European Christians, is what is critical.  They can never abandon their policy of hostility toward us.  Without hostility, without cultivating and maintaining an adversarial attitude toward the host culture, the Jews would cease to exist.  Hostility is the sine qua non of their survival.
Netanyahu would never be so blind as to sign up for Trump’s deal.  Nor would “the community” at large buy into it.  Destroying Amalek through Third World immigration is their #1 priority. 
The latest poll shows that 71% of American Jews are opposed to Trump.  They are not going to change as a result of Trump’s championing Israel.  The Jews know that all significant politicians and both parties will always cater to them.  Trump’s “deal” was always DOA but Trump didn’t see this.
Netanyahu and the Zionists hate the demographic core of America.  They love immigration.  They are not going to change.  Trump should have thought of that but his level of self confidence did not allow for such considerations.
What will happen now?
Netanyahu and the community hold the trump cards.  They have trumped Trump.  Trump has no way out.  He’s caught.  They have caught him.  He has no options.
Trump will flop around like a fish out of water.  There’s no path open to him to save his Presidency.  There’s no way out for Trump. He cannot abandon Israel now.  He has to do what Israel tells him to do.  He will have to continue to cater to Israel even as the military “defense” budget rises staggeringly, oil doubles in price, inflation takes off, the economy reels and Trump’s public support dries up.
The Republicans will be crushed in the midterms.  Trump’s remaining time in the White House will be years of humiliation.  The neocons will be laughing their heads off and will be back in control even during the remaining Trump term.  In fact, the neocons are back in the driver’s seat already.
J. D. Vance will not be elected President in 2028.  His career is finished along with that of Trump.  He needs to start planning a new career.  Maybe he should become a real estate agent or a stock broker. After the peace voters return to the Democratic Party, after demographics ratchet America several more percentage points against the GOP, after working class voters get nothing while the plutocratic elite conspicuously enjoys Trump’s tax cuts, I would not be surprised to see the Republican Party lose the 2028 election by Goldwater/Johnson margins with the Democrats getting over 60% of the vote.
In 2028 the US will return to the post WWII status.  The Democrats will inherit the mantle of “racial progress”, wars to end war, etc.  The GOP will be a shadow opposition party that — as was the case for most of the post war period — will not oppose anything of consequence.
Anyway, these are my predictions.
As the English proverb says, “Truth is the daughter of time.”

Time will either confirm my assessment or disprove it.

Another Neoconservative Bites the Dust: The Life and Legacy of Michael Ledeen

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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.

From Red Diaper to Red State: The Political Odyssey of David Horowitz

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David Horowitz’s death on April 29, 2025 closes the chapter on a figure who embodied the neoconservative phenomenon: a Jewish intellectual who, like many of his generation, abandoned the Left when he perceived its ideals as incompatible with Jewish interests and American security.

Horowitz was born on January 10, 1939, in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, to Phil and Blanche Horowitz, both Jewish high school teachers and committed members of the Communist Party USA. His father taught English, and his mother taught stenography. Horowitz’s family background deeply shaped his early political outlook — his mother’s family had emigrated from Imperial Russia in the mid-19th century, while his father’s family fled Russia in 1905 during pogroms. In 1940, the family moved to the Long Island City section of Queens.

Growing up in a staunchly communist household, Horowitz was the quintessential “red diaper baby.” He attended Columbia University, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959, and later received a master’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

After completing his graduate studies, Horowitz moved to London in the mid-1960s to work for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. There, he became involved in anti-war activism, helping to form the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in 1966 alongside members of the Trotskyist International Marxist Group. During this period, he wrote The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, establishing himself as a voice in the New Left movement.

Horowitz returned to the United States in January 1968 and became co-editor of Ramparts magazine, an influential publication of the New Left based in California. During the early 1970s, he developed a close friendship with Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party. Horowitz assisted the Panthers with their community initiatives, including raising funds for a school for “disadvantaged” children in Oakland.

The turning point in Horowitz’s political journey came in December 1974, when Betty Van Patter, a bookkeeper whom Horowitz had recommended to work for the Black Panthers, was found murdered in San Francisco Bay. Her body had been severely beaten, and Horowitz became convinced that members of the Black Panther Party were responsible for her death.

This tragedy profoundly traumatized Horowitz. According to Hugh Pearson, author of Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America, Horowitz “totally went berserk with regard to the left-liberal community” following Van Patter’s murder. The incident shattered his belief in the moral righteousness of the radical left and catalyzed his political transformation.

Increasingly disillusioned with left-wing politics through the late 1970s and early 1980s, Horowitz underwent a gradual but decisive shift to the right. In 1985, he publicly announced that he had voted for Ronald Reagan in the previous year’s presidential election. Along with his writing partner Peter Collier, Horowitz published an essay in The Washington Post titled “Lefties for Reagan,” formally declaring their break with the left. They wrote that voting for Reagan was “way of finally saying goodbye to all that… to the self-aggrandizing romance with corrupt Third Worldism; to the casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism; to the hypocritical and self-dramatizing anti- Americanism which is the New Left’s bequest to mainstream politics.”

Following his political conversion, Horowitz dedicated himself to challenging what he saw as the dangerous influence of the left in American culture and politics. In 1988, he founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC) in Los Angeles, which aimed to “establish a conservative presence in Hollywood and show how popular culture had become a political battleground.” The organization was later renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) in 2006.

Horowitz chronicled his ideological journey in his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, which became one of his most significant works. This deeply personal account detailed his disillusionment with the left and his embrace of conservative principles. It was quoted by Kevin MacDonald in Chapter 3 of The Culture of Critique illustrating the point that leftist Jews remained committed, ethnocentric Jews despite their declared internationalism:

David Horowitz (1997, 42) describes the world of his parents who had joined a “shul” run by the CPUSA in which Jewish holidays were given a political interpretation. Psychologically these people might as well have been in eighteenth-century Poland:

What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that riveted the chosen to the faith.

One of Horowitz’s primary focuses as a conservative activist was challenging what he perceived as liberal bias in American universities. He published The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America in 2006, criticizing professors he believed were engaging in indoctrination rather than education. He also created the “Academic Bill of Rights,” aimed at eliminating political bias in university hiring and grading practices.

Horowitz organized numerous campaigns on college campuses, including “Islamofascism Awareness Week” in 2007, which sought to alert students about what he viewed as the threat posed by radical Islam. These events often generated controversy and resistance from students and faculty.

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Horowitz’s activism took on a new dimension. He became increasingly focused on what he called “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values.” Horowitz pushed the envelope by advocating for racial and ethnic profiling of “potential terrorists-and that does mean Islamic and Palestinian terrorists.” He likely would have loved The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther.

Horowitz, much like many of his peers in the largely Jewish neoconservative movement, was deeply affected by the 1967 Six-Day War and unsettled by the anti-Israeli rhetoric of Black nationalist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, steering him toward a strong pro-Israeli position. Though Horowitz publicly maintained that he was not a hardcore Zionist, his tendency to defend Israel at every opportunity suggests a deep alignment. In fact, he once argued, “If the Arabs disarm there will be peace, if the Jews disarm there will be a massacre,” contradicting his statement about being a lukewarm Zionist.

His stance on Israel became particularly pronounced after 9/11, as he increasingly claimed to view criticism of Israel as part of a broader anti-Western agenda. Horowitz became a fierce critic of Democrats who he claimed “empowered” Israel’s enemies, including “Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas.” In 2016, he published a controversial essay in Breitbart News accusing conservative Jewish writer William Kristol and other “Never Trumpers” of trying “to weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her.” Kevin MacDonald in VDARE (2016):

One of the more spectacular examples of an MSM frenzy over supposed anti-Semitism: the reaction to the attack by David Horowitz against his fellow Jew Bill Kristol, leader of a campaign to destroy Donald Trump [Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew, May 15, 2016] The headline, written by Horowitz, alluded to Kristol being Jewish.

As Jonathan S. Tobin [Email him] notes in Commentary,

[T]he real offense here is … his attempt to wrap him in the Star of David and to somehow brand his opponents as traitors to the pro-Israel cause. …

[H]is invocation of “America First” and the use of a term like “renegade Jew” in the headline (though not in the text of the article) seems to echo the smears of the pro-Trump alt right racists who have attacked conservative critics of the candidate with an avalanche of anti-Semitic invective.

[Breitbart’s ‘Renegade Jew’ Disgrace, May 16, 2016]

Horowitz’s offense was not simply criticizing Kristol’s campaign against Trump. Lots of people have done that without incurring the wrath of Commentary. And even saying that Kristol’s views are not good for Jews and Israel is commonplace:  Mondoweiss, J Street, and Mearsheimer and Walt in The Israel Lobby argue that neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby have a tragically mistaken view of Jewish and Israeli interests—also discussed in Charles Bloch’s and Steve Sailer’s VDARE posts.

The unforgivable offense: implying Kristol’s being a Jew had something to do with his opposition to Trump. After all, there would have been exactly zero upset if instead the headline was “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Republican.”

But putting ‘Jew’ in the headline was guaranteed to bring out immediate charges of anti-Semitism by the likes of Michelle Goldberg [Email her] in Slate :

To define someone as a ‘Renegade Jew’ in a column about scheming elites written for an audience full of white nationalists is to signal to the sewers. … A narrative is taking shape, an American Dolchstoßlegende that will blame a potential Trump loss on conniving Semites.

[Breitbart Calls Trump Foe “Renegade Jew.” This Is How Anti-Semitism Goes Mainstream, May 16, 2016]

Of course, we are supposed to engage in the fiction that the opinions of Bill Kristol et al. have nothing to do with being Jewish or what is good for Israel, but everything to do with their perception of what is good for America.

David Horowitz’s life trajectory from dedicated Marxist to conservative firebrand encapsulates much of the ideological turbulence of the latter half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. His dramatic political conversion, sparked by personal trauma and disillusionment, led him to become one of the most vocal critics of the movement he once championed.

However, Horowitz’s political career should not be viewed through an ideologically reductionist lens.  Mike Peinovich of The Right Stuff aptly observed that Horowitz was first and foremost a Jewish ethnic strategist with a history of changing his political positions to align with what he perceived as Jewish interests. And Jared Taylor pointed out Horowitz’s hypocrisy on identity politics:

Mr. Horowitz is simply wrong when he writes of “going back to the good old American ideal” of multi-racialism. I am certain that if all the prominent Americans I have quoted could rise from their graves, they would endorse the American Renaissance view of race and nation, and would be shocked at the idea of a multi-hued America in which we are to pretend race can be made not to matter. It is American Renaissance that is faithful to the original vision of America. Walt Whitman perhaps put it most succinctly when he wrote, “[I]s not America for the Whites? And is it not better so?” Yes, it is.

Mr. Horowitz deplores the idea that “we are all prisoners of identity politics,” implying that race and ethnicity are trivial matters we must work to overcome. But if that is so, why does the home page of FrontPageMag carry a perpetual appeal for contributions to “David’s Defense of Israel Campaign”? Why Israel rather than, say, Kurdistan or Tibet or Euskadi or Chechnya? Because Mr. Horowitz is Jewish. His commitment to Israel is an expression of precisely the kind of particularist identity he would deny to me and to other racially-conscious whites. He passionately supports a self-consciously Jewish state but calls it “surrendering to the multicultural miasma” when I work to return to a self-consciously white America. He supports an explicitly ethnic identity for Israel but says American must not be allowed to have one.

Not long before he was assassinated, Yitzhak Rabin told U.S. News and World Report that as Prime Minister of Israel he had worked to achieve many things, but what he cared about most was that Israel remain at least 90 percent Jewish. He recognized that the character of Israel would change in fundamental-and to him unacceptable-ways if the non-Jewish population increased beyond a small minority. Equally obviously, the character of the United States is changing as non-whites arrive in large numbers.

Throughout most of its history, white Americans took the Rabin view: that their country had a distinctly racial and ethnic core that was to be preserved at all costs. When Mr. Horowitz writes about the “good old American ideal,” that is what he should have in mind, not a historically inaccurate view that drapes a radical new course with trappings of false tradition.

Horowitz was a foundational figure in neoconservatism, but not as a defender of Western Civilization as some of his supporters like Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk have made him out to be. At the end of the day, Horowitz was an opportunist who shifted political stripes to serve Jewish and Israeli interests.
The way conservatives now praise him is unsettling, but it reveals a harsh truth: their movement owes its current form to him and his cadre of ex-Trotskyist Jews, who effectively turned American conservatism into a vehicle for Zionism. Horowitz’s lifework reveals that any nationalist movement lacking strong gatekeeping against Jewish influence is vulnerable to being co-opted and redirected to serve the interests of world Jewry much to the detriment of White interests.

We’re all obscurantists now: how the media class copes with democratic loss

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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.

Tulsi Gabbard on the Israel Lobby’s Role in Fabricating WMD Hoax

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I have been keeping fairly close track on the Senate confirmation hearings but never came across any mention of these exchanges. The New York Times, e.g., has nothing to say about them in its article “4 Takeaways from Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation Hearing.” Nor is there any mention of these exchanges in a second Times article on her career leading up to the hearings.

One would think that condemning the Iraq war as based on lies from neocons like Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Abram Shulsky’s Office of Special Plans(OSP) would be front page news. As Gabbard noted, it was “a complete falsification of intelligence. This was not a ‘mistake.’ It was a deliberate deception.”

When have you ever seen a U.S. politician make a statement challenging the very basis of U.S. foreign policy and its complete deference to the interests of Israel? Deference that resulted in 4,431 total American deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 31,994 wounded in action. And cost the U.S. approximately $1.1 trillion.

Slanting the news in favor of promoting and  protecting the Israel Lobby is nothing new for the Times. As I noted in my 2004 paper on neoconservatism as a Jewish movement (now a chapter in my forthcoming revision of The Culture of Critique)

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, The New York Times was deeply involved in spreading deception about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist organizations. Judith Miller’s front-page articles were based on information from Iraqi defectors well known to be untrustworthy because of their own interest in toppling Saddam.[1] Many of these sources, including Ahmed Chalabi, were also touted by the Office of Special Plans of the Department of Defense, which is associated with many of the most prominent Bush administration neocons (see below). Miller’s indiscretions might be chalked up to incompetence were it not for her close connections to prominent neocon organizations, in particular Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum (MEF), which avidly sought the war in Iraq. The MEF lists Miller as an author; she has published articles in MEF media, including the Middle East Quarterly and the MEF Wire. The MEF also threw a launch party for her book on Islamic fundamentalism, God Has Ninety-Nine Names. Miller, whose father is ethnically Jewish, has a strong Jewish consciousness: Her book One by One: Facing the Holocaust “tried to . . . show how each [European] country that I lived and worked in, was suppressing or distorting or politically manipulating the memory of the Holocaust.”[2]

The New York Times has apologized for “coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been” but did not single out Miller’s stories as worthy of special censure.[3] Indeed, the Times’ failure goes well beyond Miller, as noted in 2004 by Daniel Okrent, public editor of the Times:

Some of the Times’s coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines; and several fine articles by David Johnston, James Risen and others that provided perspective or challenged information in the faulty stories were played as quietly as a lullaby. Especially notable among these was Risen’s “C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports,” which was completed several days before the invasion and unaccountably held for a week. It didn’t appear until three days after the war’s start, and even then was interred on Page B10. (Okrent 2004)[4]

As is well known, Times is Jewish-owned and has often been accused of slanting its coverage on issues of importance to Jews.[5] It is perhaps another example of the legacy of Jacob Schiff, the Jewish activist-philanthropist who backed Adolph Ochs’s purchase of the New York Times in 1896 because he believed he “could be of great service to the Jews generally.”[6]

Shulsky and the OSP are illustrative of neocon ethnic networking and their close relationships to Israeli intelligence:

Shulsky was a student of Leo Strauss, a close friend of Paul Wolfowitz both at Cornell and the University of Chicago,[1] and yet another protégé of Richard Perle. He was an aide to neocon Senators Henry Jackson (along with Perle and Elliott Abrams) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and worked in the Department of Defense in the Reagan administration. During the George W. Bush administration, he was appointed head of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) under Feith and Wolfowitz. The OSP became more influential on Iraq policy than the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency,[2] but is widely viewed by retired intelligence operatives as having manipulated intelligence data on Iraq in order to influence policy.[3] Reports suggest that the OSP worked closely with Israeli intelligence to paint an exaggerated picture of Iraqi capabilities in unconventional weapons.[4] It is tempting to link the actions of the OSP under Shulsky with Strauss’s idea of a “noble lie” carried out by an elite to manipulate the masses, but one doesn’t really need Strauss to understand the importance of lying in order to manipulate public opinion on behalf of Israel.

The OSP included other neocons with no professional qualifications in intelligence but long records of service in neoconservative think tanks and pro-Israel activist organizations, especially WINEP. Examples include Michael Rubin, who is affiliated with AEI and is an adjunct scholar at WINEP, David Schenker, who has written books and articles on Middle East issues published by WINEP and the Middle East Quarterly (published by Daniel Pipes’ MEF, another pro-Israel activist organization), Elliott Abrams, David Wurmser, and Michael Ledeen. The OSP relied heavily on Iraqi defectors associated with Ahmed Chalabi, who, as indicated above, had a close personal relationship with Wolfowitz, Perle, and other neocons.[5]

(The numbered citations may be found in the linked article.)

So let’s hope that Gabbard is confirmed. A truly America First foreign policy is at stake. As Alexis notes:

Gabbard is not perfect. She has made political compromises. But she is the closest thing to an actual dissident the intelligence community has ever seen inside its ranks.

And that’s why the Senate hearings have turned into an all-out war to discredit her.

Because the real criminals—the ones who lied America into war—are still in power.

By Jonas Alexis, in  Veterans Today

As the U.S. Senate holds confirmation hearings for Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the gloves have come off in a brutal confrontation between Gabbard and the very intelligence establishment that lied America into war.

Gabbard’s nomination is shaking the corridors of power—not because of partisan infighting, but because she is directly challenging the deep-seated corruption at the heart of U.S. intelligence: the role of the Israel Lobby in fabricating intelligence, promoting endless war, and leading America into catastrophic interventions that have killed hundreds of thousands.

And no scandal is bigger—or more damning—than the Iraq War’s fake WMD story, a crime that led to the deaths of over 100,000 children.

Gabbard’s Senate Showdown: Calling Out the Iraq War Lies

During the hearing, Democratic war hawks aggressively questioned Gabbard’s foreign policy positions, particularly her outspoken opposition to regime change wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

Senators attacked her for “supporting Assad” and “supporting Gaddafi.”

Her response? A direct, brutal takedown of the U.S. intelligence community’s legacy of lies:

“I have no love for Assad or Gaddafi. I simply hate Al-Qaeda. The U.S. government has repeatedly allied itself with terrorists—people who killed Americans on 9/11 and who are responsible for the deaths of our soldiers. Our policy failures have put them in power, and I refuse to be part of that lie.”

Gabbard then shifted the conversation to the most infamous intelligence failure in U.S. history: the Iraq War’s fraudulent WMD claims.

“We launched the invasion of Iraq based on a complete falsification of intelligence. This was not a ‘mistake.’ It was a deliberate deception.”

And she’s right.

The Iraq War wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a failure of intelligence.

It was a premeditated crime, orchestrated by the Israel Lobby, with fabricated evidence designed to push the U.S. into an illegal war.

The Israel Lobby’s Hand in the Iraq War: A Manufactured Intelligence Hoax

For years, the Israel Lobby and its network of neoconservatives inside the U.S. intelligence apparatus worked to fabricate a case for war. The infamous ‘WMD’ hoax—the very lie that justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq—was crafted by Israeli-linked operatives and their American allies.

Scott Ritter: The Man Who Exposed the WMD Lies

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter was one of the few officials who publicly exposed the WMD hoax before the war even began.

“Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence was cooked, deliberately falsified to justify an illegal war. The real architects? The neoconservatives inside the Bush administration, backed by the Israel Lobby.” – Scott Ritter

The key players in the WMD deception included:

  • Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon officials with direct ties to Israel, who led intelligence manipulation efforts.
  • Ahmed Chalabi, a U.S.-backed Iraqi exile who fabricated false intel, working closely with Israeli sources.
  • The Office of Special Plans, a secretive intelligence unit inside the Pentagon that bypassed CIA oversight, feeding false WMD claims directly to policymakers.

This was not a mistake. This was a deliberate, coordinated disinformation campaign designed to drag America into a war that would serve Israeli geopolitical interests.

And it worked.

The result? Over 500,000 Iraqis killed. A destroyed nation. The birth of ISIS. And a generation of American soldiers betrayed and sent to die for a lie.

Yet, to this day, not a single one of these war criminals has faced justice.

Why Gabbard’s Nomination Terrifies the Establishment

Gabbard’s willingness to call out these intelligence failures—and the role of the Israel Lobby in crafting U.S. war policy—has put her in the crosshairs of Washington’s most powerful interest groups.

  • She refuses to push regime change wars.
  • She opposes military alliances with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.
  • She has repeatedly denounced the influence of foreign lobbies on U.S. policy.

Her stance on Edward Snowden is equally revealing. In the past, she has said that Snowden was being persecuted for exposing government crimes—a position that enrages the intelligence community.

Now, under Senate pressure, she’s toned down her support, but the underlying truth remains:

The U.S. intelligence apparatus is not about national security. It is about controlling the narrative, manufacturing consent for war, and covering up its own crimes.

The Real Fight: Gabbard vs. the War Machine

Gabbard’s nomination is more than a political appointment.

It’s a direct challenge to the entire foundation of U.S. intelligence—a system built on lies, foreign influence, and perpetual war.

The same forces that manufactured the Iraq War are the same forces that:

  • Destroyed Libya and turned it into a failed state
  • Armed terrorists in Syria to overthrow Assad
  • Back Ukraine while pushing America toward a war with Russia

And now, they fear a Director of National Intelligence who won’t play their game.

Gabbard is not perfect. She has made political compromises. But she is the closest thing to an actual dissident the intelligence community has ever seen inside its ranks.

And that’s why the Senate hearings have turned into an all-out war to discredit her.

Because the real criminals—the ones who lied America into war—are still in power.

 

Tucker interviews Thomas Massie

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Rep. Thomas Massie is in big trouble with the media after this tweet:

But it’s hard to know exactly what Massie meant by this, but presumably it is linked to the Republicans’ attempt to tie aid to Israel to securing the southern border. But of course, Jewish activists saw it differently, likely thinking that it resurrects the old charge of loyalty to Jewish interests trumping loyalty to American interests. The White House called it “virulent anti-Semitism, and Chuck Schumer tweeted (Xed?), “Rep. Massie, you’re a sitting Member of Congress. This is antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous, and exactly the type of thing I was talking about in my Senate address.” His Senate address included statements such as:

While the dead bodies of Jewish Israelis were still warm, while hundreds of Jewish Israelis were being carried as hostages back to Hamas tunnels under Gaza, Jewish Americans were alarmed to see some of our fellow citizens characterize a brutal terrorist attack as justified because of the actions of the Israeli government.

The problem is that the actions of the Israeli government are also brutal, on the West Bank and especially in Gaza. And it’s not at all clear what the Palestinians are supposed to do about it short of armed resistance.

Massie reposted Schumer’s criticism Tuesday and tweeted, “If only you cared half as much about our border as you do my tweets” implying I suppose, the Democrats’ open border policy bringing in millions of people with no attachments to America but are likely future Democrat voters is anything but patriotic.

All this occurred in the context of a House resolution that basically equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Massie was the sole Republican who did not vote in favor of it. Al Jazeera’s summary of the bill:

The symbolic resolution was framed as an effort to reject the “drastic rise of anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world”.

But it contained language saying that the House “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. It also condemned the slogan “From the River to the Sea”, which rights advocates understand to be an aspirational call for equality in historic Palestine.

Instead, the resolution described it as a “rallying cry for the eradication of the State of Israel and the Jewish people”. It also characterised demonstrators who gathered in Washington, DC, last month to demand a ceasefire as “rioters”. They “spewed hateful and vile language amplifying antisemitic themes”, the resolution alleges.

Husam Marajda, an organiser with the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), said the resolution is an effort to “cancel” Palestinian rights advocates by accusing them of bigotry and labelling their criticism of Israeli policies as hate speech.

“It’s super dangerous. It sets a really, really bad precedent. It’s aiming to criminalise our liberation struggle and our call for justice and peace and equality,” Marajda told Al Jazeera.

Mr. Marajda is quite right. Schumer’s tweet it typical of Jewish commentary on the war: no context—nothing about the blockade, the reality of Gaza as an open-air prison, apartheid on the West Bank, and the implacably hostile attitudes of the present Israeli government.

So Massie really stepped into what he must have known would be a deluge of hatred against him—and likely a brimming war chest for whomever runs against him in 2024.

So aid to Israel is being held up by Congress. But no problem. The neocons who run the Biden administration easily found a way to get around it:

The State Department is pushing through a government sale to Israel of 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition, bypassing a congressional review process that is generally required for arms sales to foreign nations, according to a State Department official and an online post by the Defense Department on Saturday.

The State Department notified congressional committees at 11 p.m. on Friday that it was moving ahead with the sale, valued at more than $106 million, even though Congress had not finished an informal review of a larger order from Israel for tank rounds.

The department invoked an emergency provision in the Arms Export Control Act, the State Department official and a congressional official told The New York Times. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities over the sales. The arms shipment has been put on an expedited track, and Congress has no power to stop it.

The Defense Department posted a notification of the sale before noon on Saturday. It said Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken had informed Congress on Friday that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.”

So Tucker’s December 5 interview with Massie is quite timely. From the Zero Hedge article (emphasis in original):

“But you gotta wonder like, why is the leadership of your party, the Republican party, in favor of this? Why the new speaker — seems like a nice guy but also like a child — why would his first act as speaker be to endorse this? I’m confused,” said Carlson.

To which Massie replied: “Well, I hope he doesn’t. But you know, Biden’s budget director, the head of the OMB sent a letter yesterday to Speaker Mike Johnson, imploring him to spend more money in Ukraine. And what they said is they want to revitalize our defense industrial base.”

“And they sent a list of states that would get money when we spend, you know, money on deadly munitions because they have to be manufactured in Alabama or Ohio or Texas,” Massie continued. “And so, you know, they’re saying the quiet part out loud that congressmen tend to vote for this stuff because a lot of this federal spending that goes to Ukraine is actually laundered back to the military-industrial complex. And in some ways, not very efficiently, but in some ways, it enriches people in their districts and the stockholders, some of whom are congressmen.” …

The two also discussed US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and her influence in Ukraine, with Carlson calling her “the single most consequential voice” in the Ukraine debate.

(Nuland’s husband, [neocon] Robert Kagan [tapped by Hilary Clinton as a top foreign policy advisor in 2016], notably penned a ‘Trump Dictator‘ piece in the Washington Post last week). [From 2016: Kagan has advocated for muscular American intervention in Syria; Clinton’s likely pick for Pentagon chief, Michelle Flournoy, has similarly agitated for redirecting U.S. airstrikes in Syria toward ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.]

Carlson notes that she was a “driving force behind the war in Iraq, which was of course a disaster and hurt the United States,” and now “she has far more influence on it than the entire United States Congress put together.” “How do we allow unelected lunatics like ‘Toria Nuland who clearly hates the United States, and always has, to have this power over our lives and our children’s future?”

[Neocons would be apoplectic at the idea that they hate the U.S.,  but Tucker’s claim seems a transparent attempt to paint them as having loyalty to their ethnostate, as implied by Massie’s tweet.] …

Carlson then asked if the people advocating for more war have ever apologized for “the killing of an entire” generation of Ukrainians who are fighting a “war they cannot win.”

“That’s all so grotesque, but it’s also straightforward. You know, people are getting rich, so let’s do it. Okay — that’s an argument. It’s an immoral argument but it is one. But that’s not the argument they’re making in public. They’re saying we have a moral obligation.”

“You’re a bad person, you just heard the national security advisor say it, you’re a bad person if you’re against this. But no one ever mentions that we have abetted the killing of an entire generation of Ukrainian men that will not be replaced. To fight a war that they cannot win.” -Tucker Carlson

Carlson also pointed out that the Biden administration “prevented a peace deal and we extended the war, and we killed all these people,” adding “And so all the ones running around with their little Ukraine flag pins, they’re implicated in that. Has anyone apologized?”

To which Massie replied, “No, to support this money you have to be economically illiterate and morally deficient.”

Other things that stood out to me:

  • Jake Sullivan: people who vote against Ukraine aid are Putin puppets in a war Tucker said was a “war they cannot win”;
  • Tucker on Victoria Nuland: “You can make the case she should be in prison”;
  • Massie: if border security is part of Ukraine aid bill, it will just give Biden (i.e., Mayorkas) more money to process more illegals;
  • White men not wanted in the armed forces, likely to be replaced by military-aged illegals with no allegiance to America;
  • requiring covid jabs in the military as a litmus test for allegiance to the liberal agenda;
  • proposed expense for additional Ukraine aid is equal to the entire U.S. spending on infrastructure;
  • interest on the debt more than the military budget; covid spending as obviously causing inflation.

The Extreme Center: How the Neocons Went Woke

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No lessens, no consequences

The Iraq war was spearheaded by a remarkably small group of people. It has become politically untenable to justify that overt disaster and some of the key architects of that war have, much belatedly, come to acknowledge as much. As late as 2013 Max Boot was still arguing there was No Need to Repent for the Iraq War. He had changed his tune by 2018, writing in his book The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, “I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” Boot claims, “It was a chastening lesson in the limits of American power,” yet in the same book complains that the modern conservative movement is “permeated with” racism, extremism and isolationism.

David Frum now describes the invasion as “a grave and costly error” and gives a thoroughly equivocal mea culpa. Robert Kagan says that the war “didn’t go exactly the way we wanted it to” and that “many aspects of the war” were “unfortunate.” Bill Kristol acknowledges that Iraq was “very difficult” and that “many things were done badly,” but concludes, “I’m inclined not to think it was [a mistake].” Since the inauguration of Trump, Kristol has changed his mind on trans rights, on gays, on abortion — but not on the catastrophe that led to over a hundred thousand civilian deaths. He told Jewish Insider: “Ironically, I’d say I’ve changed or rethought my views more on domestic policy issues… Foreign policy, I haven’t really changed my views. And I’ve been critical of Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

Despite the repeated disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere, these figures remain as combative as ever. In 2018 Kristol told Vox, “the fact that the public is, quote, “war-weary”… those instincts have be challenged.” He told the Al Franken podcast that the Iraq intervention “didn’t destabilize the entire Middle East, I wish it had destabilized some of those places more.”

The neocons have been consistently wrong about foreign policy, and not just wrong, but wrong in the loudest, most doctrinaire and most uncompromising way possible. You’d think they might face some career blowback…

What actually happened?

Liberal adulation

On his MSNBC show, Ari Melber referred to 2018 as the year when “many people began referring to ‘woke Bill Kristol’.” According to Melber, this was “A tribute to the idea that people do evolve and that Trumpism can create strange bedfellows.”

Joy Reid, perhaps the most noxious personality on MSNBC, was positively glowing with praise:

One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together.

It turned out that in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome, being vehemently against Trump was enough to garner liberal adulation. During Donald Trump’s four years in office we saw the wholesale rehabilitation of the most discredited propagandists of the war on terror. After Trump called the Iraq war a “big fat mistake” in the 2016 Republican presidential debate ,the neocons rebranded themselves as the ‘moderate’ voice against the danger of a Trump presidency. They went on to find lucrative positions in the liberal messaging apparatus. Frum became a senior editor for The Atlantic. Boot is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a CNN analyst, a columnist at The Washington Post, and a contributor to the New York Times op-ed pages. Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor at large for The Washington Post. Kristol is a frequent commentator on CNN and MSNBC.

In the liberal imagination, the Neocons shifted from being war criminals to sensible moderate centrists, and, after the 2020 election and January 6th, brave and principled defenders of democracy.

How did this happen?

Hawks for Hillary

In 2014 Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, predicted “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.” Attending a Foreign-Policy-Professionals-for-Hillary fundraiser, Robert Kagan was quoted as saying, “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump. I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.” Hillary won the endorsement of almost every high-profile Neoconservative you could name. Eliot Cohen, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century; John McCain speechwriter Mark Salter; think tank goon James Kirchick. Boot said he would “sooner vote for Josef Stalin than[he] would vote for Donald Trump.” The Wall Street Journal’s most hawkish columnist, neocon Bret Stephens, penned an op-ed titled Hillary: The Conservative Hope. But no one else went as far as Bill Kristol, who, when, after running a rival candidate in 2016 proved a fool’s errand, tweeted that he would “prefer the deep state to the Trump state.”

This wholesale coalition between Bush-era neocons and hawkish Democrats started before Trump and it continued after he left the White House. In 2008 The Weekly Standard celebrated Hillary Clinton as “the great right hope” of foreign policy, hailing her transformation from “First Feminist” to “Warrior Queen.” In 2013 John McCain described Hillary Clinton as a foreign policy “rock star.” In a 2014 profile of Robert Kagan in The New York Times, Kagan mentions that he served on Hillary’s “bipartisan group of foreign-policy heavy hitters at the State Department, where his wife worked as her spokeswoman.” He said of Clinton’s foreign policy, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that.”

This was more than a temporary marriage of convenience to stop Donald Trump. This is more than a pragmatic alliance. It’s an ideological convergence. The Neocons have cast off any pretence to conservatism while the Democrat Party has become uniformly pro-war. David Frum explained the realignment:

Trump pushed Never Trump Republicans into partnership with moderate Democrats — and prodded even formerly conservative minded people — to see power in ideas like Me Too and Black Lives Matter. … Old patterns are dissolving into something new.

The neocons had lost access to power in the GOP and needed to find a new constituency. Robert Kagan co-authored an article in 2019 attacking “America First” foreign policy with Antony Blinken, who is now Joe Biden’s Secretary of State. Kagan’s wife is Victoria Nuland. The two fell in love “talking about democracy and the role of America in the world.” Nuland is the ultimate example of the continuity (only interrupted briefly by Donald Trump) of personnel regardless of the administration. Nuland was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, a State Department spokesperson under Obama, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration. Her worldview is identical to that of her husband.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy,  the national security advocacy group responsible for the Hamilton 68 scam of Russian pro-Trump influence, is governed by a board that includes Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush; Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama; Bill Kristol; John Podesta; and, at one time, Jake Sullivan, now national-security adviser to President Biden. If there were ever a meaningful distinction between the liberal interventionists and the Neoconservatives, the two are now fully merged.

Invade the world, invite the world: Imperialism + Immigration

High-profile neoconservative figures have radically changed their positions on a whole range of issues to appeal to their new liberal followers but they’ve always been remarkably consistent on two policies: never ending war and unrestrained immigration. Preventing the migration of Muslims from such terror-prone countries as Afghanistan is beyond the pale, bombing those same people is seen as just fine.

Bill Kristol wants “new Americans” to replace a population he brands “lazy” and “spoilt” — “luckily you have these waves of people coming in.” Kristol has mourned the “insanity and cruelty” of ICE raids. “I’d take in a heartbeat a group of newly naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings of CPAC” he tweeted in 2018. Kristol made open borders a litmus test of respectability. Asked about his previous endorsement of the brain-dead Sarah Palin he said: “I regret that. … To be fair, if you look at what she said in 2008, apart from some of the silliness, she was not anti-immigration. She was not xenophobic. She was not isolationist. … So, in a funny way, if we could have co-opted some of the populism and given them a place in a McCain-nominated Republican Party, maybe that would have been a good outcome.”

He told Vox: “I will say, you know, the Weekly Standard was pretty unapologetically anti-Buchanan. … Pretty liberal on immigration.”

As documented by the repentant former neocon Scott McConnell in a 2003 article in the American Conservative, and more extensively in the book The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement, the neocons were instrumental in the cancellation of any Conservative that expressed reservations about immigration.

Boot expressed the ultimate synthesis of imperialism abroad and multicultural colonisation at home. Bemoaning the size of the America’s fighting force, he noted, “there is a pretty big pool of manpower that’s not being tapped: everyone on the planet who is not a U.S. citizen.” He floated the idea of simply paying Afghans to occupy their own country: “The most efficient way to expand the government’s corps of Pashto or Arabic speakers isn’t to send native-born Americans to language schools; it’s to recruit native speakers of those languages.”

Historically the imperial project enabled the successful militarily power to attain new territory for its people to settle. Under the new imperialist framework, America invades countries only to welcome the waves of refugees that war inevitably creates. So the return on the blood and treasure expended in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya is ever more Iraqi’s, Afghan’s and Libyan’s finding living space in the USA. According to the New York Times, in 2005, just a few years after 9/11, “more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than in any year in the previous two decades.”

Invade/invite are both formed by a similar panglossian view of diversity. For all the celebration of diversity, there’s a blindness to it, a belief that that deep down we’re all basically Americans, yearning for secular democracy and ‘freedom’ (in the form of unrestrained liberal hedonism and free markets). If diversity is a strength, there’s no reason to think that forcing democracy on a deeply sectarian country like Iraq might not work out. Here’s Kristol on Iraq: “I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni.”

In reality the Shia didn’t get along with the Sunni and horrific bloodshed between the two groups followed Saddam’s ouster.

In 2016 Robert Kagan wrote an article about Trump titled This is how Fascism comes to America:

His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

But he won’t bomb them. Therein lies the problem.

Anarchy at home, military occupation abroad

In 2020 over 130 senior Republican national security officials signed a statement that condemned Donald Trump because he “stokes fears that ‘angry mobs’ and ‘anarchists’ are destroying our country” and violated America’s “legacy as a nation of immigrants.” America’s foreign policy elite would like to wage non-stop war to “keep America safe,” yet when America’s urban centers themselves resemble war zones, the establishment either shrugs or cheers on the rioters (at least25 people died during the BLM riots, including a Trump supporter assassinated in the middle of the street in Portland).

Kori Schake, Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, writes: “Recent protests in Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere show that what happens in America matters for the advance of human rights and civil liberties elsewhere. … Our struggles are the world’s struggles, because the values that form our republic are universal values.” Schake was a foreign policy adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign and served as director for Defense Strategy on the National Security Council under George W. Bush. In an article titled “This Upheaval Is How America Gets Better,” Schake celebrated the violent riots of 2020: “We are now seeing America becoming better than it was. This churning, disputatious, and even sometimes violent dynamic is what social change in America looks like.” She praised the military for “modeling how to amplify black voices” while linking to a video of Dave Goldfein, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, talking about turning the force into a “safe space.”

“I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at ‘political correctness,’” wrote Max Boot, but 2017 was “the Year I Learned About My White Privilege.” “The Trump era has opened my eyes. … I have had my consciousness raised. Seriously.” He has referred to increasing support for BLM as “a reason for optimism.” This is the man who, a month after 9/11, penned an essay for the Weekly Standard titled “The Case for American Empire” where he called for America to “embrace its imperial role.”

David Frum, the man who coined the infamously ludicrous “axis of evil” phrase as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, is a senior editor for The Atlantic, a magazine that marries Black radicalism with rabid militarism. During the wildly destructive Black Lives Matter riots it published articles with titles like “Anger Can Build a Better World” and “How Rage Can Battle Racism.” I’ve previously written that “The hegemonic ideology of America is now a mutant symbiosis of the thought of Dick Cheney and Ibram X. Kendi.” On theatlantic.com articles by Kendi and David Frum (albeit not Cheney himself) are but a click apart (Joe Biden’s Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice at the State Department recently met with Kendi and had a discussion about “the ongoing, global impact of white supremacy & the importance of collective effort across sectors to build a world where racial & ethnic equity & social justice prevail”). The New York Times, the ultimate vector of elite consensus-forming, became a home for Max Boot and Bret Stephens to call for America to act as the world police while also publishing articles like Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police – but not, of course, the military.

Jennifer Rubin, another former neocon and a deeply unserious blogger who specialises in emotion-laden hyper-partisan bluster, has performed a remarkable political one-eighty, but continues to be one of the nation’s most rabid warmongers. Rubin went from being an anti-abortion zealot to worrying “if women cannot get abortions, will the military have trouble recruiting women?” In 2011 she criticised Newt Gingrich for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the Iraq war. She wrote a blog post that called out John McCain for opposing “enhanced interrogation techniques.” More recently, Rubin has become the Biden White House’s favorite pundit.

Responding to census data, Rubin tweeted, “a more diverse, more inclusive society. this is fabulous news. now we need to prevent minority White rule.” During the widespread riots and looting of 2020, Rubin tweeted “BLM is peaceful.” “White Christian nationalism”, by contrast, “will inevitably lead to violence, cruelty and lawlessness.” She blamed the violence of 2020 on “white agitators.” Combining both her neocon and woke credentials in a single sentence, upon the death of civil rights agitator John Lewis she claimed it “is easy to be despondent — as many were after the passing of John McCain.” Lewis’s courage, she tweeted, was “honored and echoed in the actions of BLM protesters.”

Speaking on MSNBC’s AM Joy of Trump supporters, Rubin said of the Republican Party (that she’d been a member of just a few years earlier):

What we should be doing is shunning these people. Shunning, shaming these people is a statement of moral indignation that these people are not fit for polite society.… We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again.

Rubin has shown herself more than willing to support the actual physical levelling of ideological enemies abroad, so perhaps this isn’t hyperbolic rhetoric so much as a literal policy prescription.

When the official GOP Twitter account accurately pointed out that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson supported critical race theory, Bill Kristol shot back “No more dog whistles. Just unabashed bigotry.”

Conclusion

In “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” David Frum managed to accuse those conservatives sceptical of the Iraq war of being both nativists and unpatriotic. The neocons managed to instrumentalize and exploit a redefined version of American nationalism that entangled American identity and nationalism itself with their own ideological proclivities. In that essay Frum accuses the great conservative intellectual Sam Francis of pursuing “a politics devoted to the protection of the interests of what he called the ‘Euro-American cultural core’ of the American nation,” and he condemns White advocates like Kevin MacDonald. That, in the minds of Neocons, is the very definition of unpatriotic.

Many conservatives still reflexively venerate the military. This increasingly resembles a case of battered-wife syndrome. Enoch Powell once told Margaret Thatcher that if Britain were to become communist, he would still fight for his country in war. I always regarded that as a moronic sentiment. One wonders how long Toby Keith-style nationalism can be instrumentalized for a political project that is fundamentally at odds with the interests of those actually doing the fighting and the dying. For all his faults, Trump was correct when he told Tucker Carlson that the biggest threat to the United States is no external enemy: “Who’s the biggest problem? Is it China? Could it be Russia? Could it be North Korea? No. The biggest problem is from within. It’s these sick, radical people from within.”

In a campaign video Trump reiterates, “The greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s ourselves.”

America won the Cold War against the Evil Empire only to one day resemble a gay, trans, racialized version of it — a woke Leviathan straddling the globe. Michael Ledeen, perhaps the most overtly deranged of all the Neoconservatives, wrote in his book War Against the Terror Masters:

We tear down the old order every day. … Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

Increasingly, that historic mission is the global spread of critical race theory and radical gender ideology. If ever it had any moral claim to police the world or export its way of life, that claim was burnt to the ground in 2020. It’s when the woke mob stops burning the American flag and starts waving it that the world really has a problem. When the moral certitude of social justice meets the impervious militarism of Neoconservatism, it will make for the most noxious and destructive brand of imperialism the world has ever seen.