QUESTION: Do you mind if I ask something personal? It’s clear the neoconservatives aren’t fond of you, and I imagine the feeling is mutual. Since I know you’ve met quite a few of them face-to-face, was there a particular moment or encounter that personally struck a nerve with you?
EJ
ANSWER: That is an interesting question. Aside from being misled that I initially believed they were economic conservatives, I came to see their disregard for human life and history. I lost high school friends in Vietnam. Others in Iraq. My family has fought in every American war. My cousin still has the musket from the Armstrong who fought in the American Revolution. There’s a profound difference between defending your homeland and being sent to war on false pretenses to satisfy some deranged political theory of world domination.
The Vietnam veterans I’ve known are among the most anguished. They carry the weight of knowing, even today, that they were sent to fight for a lie. Neoconservatism, at its core, tends to elevate ideological and strategic goals above the human toll of warfare. That’s certainly a point of fierce political disagreement, but if you look at the ideology, its history, and how it’s played out, it becomes clearer why so many see it that way—and why that perspective feels deeply personal to those of us who’ve lost people along the way. From Project Northwoods willing to kill American civilians just to blame it on Cuba to justify a war to assassinatinge JFK because he sought peace with the USSR.
This ideology’s roots goes back to the debunked political theory of Trotskyite ideology of the early 20th Century. This is a reference to the fact that many early neoconservatives were former LEFTISTS who became disillusioned with liberalism and the counterculture of the 1960s . Irving Kristol was a disillusioned liberal who became a foundational figure of neoconservatism. While he held a deep concern for the survival of Israel and wrote about it in those terms, there has always been a debate if he and other were covertly just wanted war to protect Israel in the direct sense.
Irving Kristol remained sympathetic to the goals of the New Deal and the Great Society, but he grew skeptical of government planning and what he saw as the vague idealism of left-wing ideologues. He rejected the conservative anti-New Deal stance of Barry Goldwater in 1964, but also distrusted the radical dissent of the counterculture. While he is credited with this dogmatic view, I knew his son and even helped him start his magazine the Weekly Standard taking the back page to kick off his venture.
I came to understand that I was wrong. Bill was not about economic conservatism. This was all about geopolitical war and indeed to support Israel. I had discussions about how taking down Saddam Husein in Iraq and then others was necessary to bring peace to the Middle East. This dogmatic view concerned me. Bill Kristol was so anti-Trump because he was against war that he killed his own magazine with his Neocon views. Bill Kristol, the prominent neoconservative commentator and founder of The Weekly Standard, did endorse Kamala Harris for president in the 2024 election along with Dick Cheney. This proved their movement was never about economics.
The Neocon ideology is characterized by a strong endorsement of military instruments to promote what is viewed as the U.S. national interest, a concept scholars describe as a mix of “assertive nationalism” and “militarism.” The belief is that American military might should be used to spread democracy and freedom, even by force and without international cooperation if necessary. I disagreed since I believed that the very usurpation of power to effectively create a coup of American foreign policy was taking place before my eyes during Bush Jr’s administration.
This was all justified by a powerful sense of American exceptionalism and a moralistic view of the world, dividing it into allies and adversaries I came to see was a reaction to Khrushchev’s (1953-1964) “we will bury you” boast of November 18th, 1956 spoken at the Polish Embassy. That boast was standard Communist view that recessions and depression was a flaw of Capitalism and this Marxism would eliminate that.
The Neocon stated goal became more radical after Irving to justify using U.S. power to create a world of democracies, which, in their view, are inherently more peaceful. Being a student of political systems, we ourselves did not live under a democracy. I saw a usurpation of power through UNELECTED means to achieve a fake goal of morality that allowed them to look at themselves in the mirror as righteous rather than usurpers seeking to create peace by killing all your enemies.
What I write about is not conspiracy theory. For whatever reason, I seem to have ended up in the middle of so many things, which is why they are so determined to try to prevent people from listening to me.