Neoconservatism

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.

Jeffrey Sachs and Philip Giraldi: The Ukraine War Is Yet Another Neocon War

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Jeffrey Sachs in Tikkun (a liberal-left Jewish publication):

The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.

…

The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world. It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence. Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the “battle for Ukraine,” the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a neocon think-tank led by Kimberley Allen Kagan (and backed by a who’s who of defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Raytheon), continues to promise a Ukrainian victory. Regarding Russia’s advances, the ISW offered a typical comment: “[R]egardless of which side holds the city [of Sievierodonetsk], the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will probably have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back.”

Notice that Sachs, writing in a Jewish publication, avoids any mention of advancing Israeli interests as the main motive of the neocons. However, Jewish motives and Israeli interests are always front and center for Jewish neocons, but to establish that, one needs to delve into biographical details (e.g., associational patterns, history of pro-Israel activism, family connections). (This 2014 article shows that Victoria Nuland, a central figure in both the 2014 coup and the current war, is enmeshed in a family dedicated to pro-Israel activism.)

These sorts of details are essentially missing on the Ukraine war in both the Sachs article as well as in Philip Giraldi’s article in The Unz Review (“How Jewish Is the War against Russia?”). However, as indicated below, Giraldi notes such details in his treatment of the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

Giraldi:

Currently, the top three State Department officials (Tony Blinken, Wendy Sherman and Victoria Nuland) are all Zionist Jews. The head of the Department of Homeland Security, which is hot on the trail of domestic “terrorist” dissidents, is also Jewish as is the Attorney General and the president’s chief of staff. They and their boss Joe Biden do not seem concerned that their client Ukraine is no democracy. The nation’s current government came into power after the 2014 coup engineered by President Barack Obama’s State Department at an estimated cost of $5 billion. The regime change carried out under Barack Obama was driven by State Department Russophobe Victoria Nuland with a little help from international globalist George Soros. It removed the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych who was, unfortunately for him, a friend of Russia.

Ukraine is reputedly both the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe, witness the Hunter Biden saga. The current President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish and claims to have holocaust victims in his family tree, is a former comedian who won election in 2019. He replaced another Jewish president Petro Poroshenko, after being heavily funded and promoted by yet another fellow Jew and Ukraine’s richest oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is also an Israeli citizen and now lives in Israel.

It all sounds like deja vu all over again, particularly as many of the perpetrators are still around, like Nuland, priming the pump to go to war yet again for no reason. And they are joined by journalists like Bret Stephens at the New York Times, Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper at CNN, and also Max Boot at the Washington Post, all of whom are Jewish and can be counted on to write regular pieces both damning and demonizing Russia and its head of state Vladimir Putin, which means it is not only about the Middle East anymore. It is also about weakening and even bringing about regime change in nuclear armed Russia while also drawing some lines in the sand for likewise nuclear armed China. And I might add that playing power games with Russia is a hell of a lot more dangerous that kicking Iraq around.

To put it bluntly, many US government and media Jews hate Russia and even though they benefited substantially as a group by virtue of their preeminent role in the looting of the former Soviet Union under Boris Yeltsin and continue to be among the most prominent Russian oligarchs. Many of the oligarch billionaires, like Boris Berezovsky, self-exiled when Vladimir Putin obtained power and began to crack down on their tax avoidance and other illegal activity. Many moved to Western Europe where some bought up football teams while others went south and obtained Israeli citizenship. Their current grievances somewhat reflect their tribe’s demand for perpetual victimhood and the deference plus forgiveness of all sins that it conveys, with the self-promoted tales of persecution going back to the days of the Tsars, full of allegations about pogroms and Cossacks arriving in the night, stories that rival many of the holocaust fabrications in terms of their lack of credibility.

…

It has long been recognized by many that a particular antipathy directed against Russia permeates the so-called neoconservative world view. The neocons are hugely overrepresented at the top levels of government and, as noted above, a number of them are running the State Department while also holding high level positions elsewhere in the Biden Administration as well as in the foreign policy think tanks, including Richard Haass at the influential Council on Foreign Relations. Likewise, the intensely Russophobic US and Western media, foundations and social networking sites are disproportionately Jewish in their ownership and staffing.

And beyond that, Ukraine is to a certain extent a very Jewish-identified place. The Jewish media in the US and elsewhere has been showering Zelensky with praise, referring to him as a genuine “Jewish hero,” a modern Maccabee resisting oppression, a David versus Goliath. T-shirts bearing his image are being sold that read “Resisting tyrants since Pharaoh” while the largely Orthodox Jewish community in New York City has already been raising millions of dollars for Ukrainian aid.

…

As US-Russian negotiations leading up the current fighting were clearly designed to fail by the Biden Administration, one therefore has to wonder if this war against Russia is largely a product of a long enduring ethno-religious hatred coupled with a belief in the necessity for a strong American military applied as needed to dominate the world and thereby protect Israel. The neocons are most visible, but equally toxic are the Jews who would prefer to describe themselves as neoliberals or liberal interventionists, that is liberals who promote a strong, assertive American leadership role to support the basically phony catchwords “democracy” and “freedom.” Both neocons and neoliberals inevitably support the same policies so they have both ends of the political spectrum covered, particularly concerning the Middle East and against Russia. They currently dominate the foreign policy thinking of both major political parties as well as exercising control over media and entertainment industry coverage of the issues that concern them, largely leaving the American public with only their viewpoint to consider.

Alas, Giraldi presents the issue of Jewish motivation as a question: “One has to wonder….” Nevertheless, he is quite clear on Jewish motivations for the war in Iraq, with some of the same information presented in my “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement.”

There was considerable collusion between the Israeli government and the Jews in the Pentagon, White House, National Security Council and State Department in the wake of 9/11. Under President George W. Bush, Israeli Embassy staff uniquely had free access to the Pentagon office of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, not being required to sign in or submit any security measures. It was a powerful indication of the special status that Israel enjoyed with top Jews in the Bush Administration. It should also be recalled that Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans was the source of the false WMD information used by the Administration to justify invading Iraq, while that information was also funneled directly to Vice President Dick Cheney without any submission to possibly critical analysts by his chief of Staff “Scooter” Libby. Wolfowitz, Feith and Libby were of course Jewish as were many on their staffs and Feith’s relationship with Israel was so close that he actually partnered in a law firm that had a branch in Jerusalem. Feith also served on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which is dedicated to nurturing the relationship between the US and Israel.

These issues are always complicated, since many American Jews (reportedly the majority in the  lead-up to the war in Iraq) have opposed these wars, and it’s depressingly easy to find non-Jews, particularly mainstream conservatives, who are also strong supporters of these wars. As always, one has to look at where the power and influence lie, and once again, it lies with strongly identified Jews in the Biden administration, the foreign policy establishment (both neoconservatives and liberal interventionists), and the media, as it was during the George W. Bush administration. Activist Jews promoting war can count on the mainstream media to never mention their Jewish identity or history of promoting Israel.

Non-Jews have many motives for supporting these ventures, from misguided patriotism to great career opportunities in politics, the media, and even the academic world. The reality is that a great many non-Jews gravitate to the power, money, and career opportunities available for those who do not rock the boat on Jewish influence, and they do so for self-interested reasons. Getting ahead in the mainstream requires an understanding that opposing the centers of the Jewish power results in marginalization at best or instant career death at worst. The rise of a Jewish elite in the U.S. has had far-ranging consequences, including policies on immigration, civil rights, the secularization of American culture, and the pathologization of White identity and collective White interests.

Jewish influence is indeed the 800-lb gorilla in the room. The lack of honest discussion of Jewish power and influence — or any discussion at all — among mainstream figures in the media, academia, and politics speaks volumes.

Neocons, Ukraine, Russia, and the Western Struggle for Global Hegemony

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Part of this was originally posted in 2014 but remains relevant, with some updates/elaborations, as noted. 

Philip Giraldi has a nice column on the continuing power of the neocons, particularly in the Ukraine situation (“Diplomacy is a Four-Letter Word“).

The vitriol unloaded on Russia since the rise of Vladimir Putin and most recently to ridicule almost every aspect of the Olympic Games is astonishing. …

The sustained pressure on the Ukraine over the past several months has likewise been remarkable and, under other circumstances, it would all be difficult to explain but for the fact that it and Russia are essentially two halves of one policy that is being orchestrated by the same group of neoconservatives, some of whom have now, fortuitously enough, attached themselves to the party in power in the White House, which is the Democrats. It was easy enough to do as many neocons are basically liberal Democrats if one excludes their aggressive foreign policy views.

Right. The neocons are too often associated only with the Republicans, but historically the neocons have had a strong position in the Democratic Party and have pulled the Republicans to the left on vital issues such as immigration. Indeed, a very important strand came out of the far left Trotskyist followers of Max Shachtman, a Jewish labor leader who, by the time of his death, had made major inroads in the Democratic Party and whose legacy is still with us today.

The Trotskyist movement had a Jewish milieu as Shachtman attracted young Jewish disciples—the familiar rabbi/disciple model of Jewish intellectual movements. … He became the quintessential rabbinical guru—the leader of a close, psychologically intense group. …

By the late 1950s he moved into the mainstream of U.S. social democracy” with a strategy of pushing big business and white Southerners out of the Democratic Party (the converse of Nixon’s “Southern strategy” for the Republican Party). In the 1960s “he suggested more openly than ever before that U.S. power could be used to promote democracy in the third world”—a view that aligns him with later neoconservatives.  …

In 1972, shortly before his death, Shachtman, “as an open anti-communist and supporter of both the Vietnam War and Zionism,” backed Senator Henry Jackson in the Democratic presidential primary. Jackson was a strong supporter of Israel (see below), and by this time support for Israel had “become a litmus test for Shachtmanites.” (see “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,” p. 17).  Read more

Neocons flock to Biden: It’s All About Jewish Values

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Probably the least surprising news you will hear in this election season, from Philip Weiss, “Neoconservatives are flocking to Biden (and let’s forget about the Iran deal.”

Neoconservatives are flocking to the Biden campaign. The DC braintrust that believes in using US military power to aid Israel in the Middle East has jumped parties before– to Clinton in ’92, and back to Bush in 2000– and now they’re hopping aisles to support Biden, with Bill Kristol leading the way.

Last night on an official Biden campaign webinar led by “Jewish Americans for Biden”, and moderated by Ann Lewis of Democratic Majority for Israel, two prominent neocon Republicans endorsed Biden, primarily because of Trump’s character posing a danger to democracy. But both neocons emphasized that Biden would be more willing to use force in the Middle East and reassured Jewish viewers that Biden will seek to depoliticize Israel support, won’t necessarily return to the Iran deal and will surround himself with advisers who support Israel and believe in American military intervention. …

Eliot Cohen, a Bush aide and academic, echoed the fear that Israel is being politicized. “A lot of Jews made a big mistake by taking something I was in favor of, moving the embassy to Jerusalem and obsessing about that,” he said. But there was huge political risk in that: if the United States is internally divided, at war with itself, and “Israel has become a partisan issue, which it should never ever be…. That’s not in Israel’s longterm security interest.”

Biden will reverse that trend by appointing strong supporters of Israel, Cohen said.

“Joe Biden has a long record as a friend of Israel. I think we’re both quite familiar with the kinds of people who will go into a Biden administration and I think we feel very comfortable that they will have a deep and abiding concern for Israel which is not going to go away.”

Edelman also said that Trump has created many “dangers” in the region by not being aggressive:

“By withdrawing or threatening to withdraw US forces, by repeatedly not replying or dealing with Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf or against Saudi oil infrastructure, he’s created a sort of vacuum that is being filled in Libya by Russia and by Turkey…”

Biden will work with allies and be ready to use U.S. military in the region– or as Edelman said, “to play.”

“The region is a mess,” Edelman said. “And yet the president continually says he wants the U.S. to withdraw from the region. The reality is that the withdrawal of US power form the region has helped create this morass of threats.”

He cited three war zones in which the U.S. or proxies’ bombing is essential to U.S. security, Libya, Yemen and Syria.

In Syria, “The Trump administration pulled out and said, we don’t want to play here,” Edelman said.

“Other forces are going to fill the vacuum created by the absence of US leadership and they won’t be benign forces,” Edelman said. Iran, Russia, or Turkey will come in and create a “vortex of instability that can potentially come back to haunt us” — with terrorist attacks or the disruption of energy markets.

Cohen and Edelman opposed Obama’s Iran deal, and both predicted that Biden will be hawkish on Iran.

In other words, Trump has failed the Israel Lobby because he has tried to pull our US forces from the Middle East and, although he has laid down sanctions against Iran, he has not gone to war. Of course, these are the people who promoted the ongoing disaster of the Iraq war. They are probably right that Russia and Turkey would benefit from US pulling out completely (Libya??), but where are legitimate US interests in all this? Trump ran on ending Middle East wars and getting out of the region–the original reason the neocons jumped ship (in addition to fears of a nascent Orange Hitler). Despite being president he has been unable to do so. He has been strongly opposed by the foreign policy establishment and the Pentagon — a testament to the extent to which the US security establishment is Israel-occupied territory.

Lurking in the background of the attitudes of Cohen and Edelman is the idea that Biden would tame the forces on the left that have been so critical of Israel in recent years. With Biden they get it all: Strongly pro-Israel even to the point of initiating a war with Iran, taming the anti-Israel voices on the left (Kamala Harris with her Jewish husband s not among them), and perhaps a Senate led by Israel operative Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile the Republican Party would default to the Chamber of Commerce and the remaining neocons, and the hope of a nationally competitive GOP, much less a truly populist GOP, would die. Bill Kristol loves the prospect of a long-term Democrat domination.

And of course, all of these bellicose proposals are cloaked in a veneer of “Jewish values” — not so ironic if one assumes, as is certainly the case, that promoting war for specifically Jewish interests is indeed a Jewish value.

Cohen … spoke about Jewish values. He and his family belong to an orthodox synagogue and have raised four children with a religious education. “I’ve tried to live my life by Jewish values. One thing that’s very important for Jewish Republicans. Obviously the issue of Israel is important, it’s the only Jewish state, it’s important to look after it and for it to thrive, but what is our approach to politics?” Jews don’t believe that you Render unto God the things that are God and render unto Caesar the thing that are Caesar’s and therefore not take issue with a politician’s character “so long as they do what we want them to do.” He said, “That’s not the Jewish way.” In the Book of Samuel, the king engages “in despicable behavior,” and the prophet storms into his bedroom. “We believe that character matters.” And this election is about character.

Okay, Trump is not a saint. But given that Biden is up to his eyeballs in scandal doesn’t bother Cohen at all — despite overwhelming documentation. So we are not supposed to care that the Biden family raked in millions by using Biden’s influence to alter US foreign policy or that China could easily blackmail him into doing their bidding on trade and military issues. So in the end, it’s really about what Cohen, Edelman, Kristol, et al. think is good for Israel (Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot jumped the GOP ship even before Trump was elected). Again, count me unsurprised.

And of course, the other thing is that neocons have always been on the left within the Republican Party. One might say they have attempted to not only make Israel a bi-partisan issue (their first priority) but also promoting the liberal/left social agenda, such as replacement-level non-White immigration, as a bipartisan issue — both values strongly promoted by the mainstream Jewish community. They jumped ship mainly because Trump was promising to undo the liberal/left social agenda as well as disengage from foreign wars and US occupation of the Middle East. During the 2016 campaign, some of the strongest denunciations of Trump came from neocons (“Jewish Fear and Loathing of Donald Trump: Neocon Angst about a Fascist America”).

If you haven’t seen it, Carlson’s interview with Bobulinski is damning, and the documents he refers to have been thoroughly authenticated.