A Neocon Monster: The Ruinous Lies & Crimes of Bill Kristol, Now a Major Foreign Policy Thought-Leader in the Democratic Party | SYSTEM UPDATE #102
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, a neocon monster, the singular evil and deceit of Bill Kristol.
One of the most extraordinary, alarming, and baffling developments to witness in American politics is the complete rehabilitation of neoconservatives.
Most Americans who know this term first learned of it in 2002 during the run-up to the American and British invasion of Iraq.
The neocons were the most vocal and vehement advocates, not just of the invasion of Iraq, but more importantly of the warmongering framework undergirding that attack.
Namely, that the world is better off when the United States rules it, and especially the Middle East, through application of superior military force.
In essence, ordering all countries to do the bidding of the United States, Always under the threat that failure to obey will result in attack, invasion, bombings, regime change, coups, and much more.
This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new.
The neocons didn't invent it.
The U.S.
fought wars, imposed tyrannies, and engineered coups all over the world on every continent during the Cold War and after.
But what distinguished neocons from standard warmongers and militarists were two qualities.
First, they had no other politics, they have no other politics, beyond their quest for endless war.
Many neocons, in fact, began as liberals or even leftists, and were willing to morph into anything they needed to be on any other issue as long as doing so served the only issue they really care about, namely placing the U.S.
in a state of endless war, almost always fought by other people's families and children rather than their own.
Starting with the war in Iraq, a war they were craving and loudly demanding long before the 9-11 attacks.
That attack became the pretext for the war in Iraq.
They have supported every new and proposed American war since then.
Neocons is really just a polite euphemism for bloodthirsty sociopathic warmongers.
Second, neocons, by definition, barely even pretend to care about the truth.
Whether they know it or not, the smarter ones do, the dumber ones don't, they are often followers of the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss and his belief in the, quote, noble lie, falsehoods propagated by those who are superior in the society in order to deceive and mislead the peasants into acting contrary to their own belief system.
For their own good, as elites define that concept for them.
It was no accident that the war in Iraq, along with every US war that followed it, was begun and then sustained with propaganda so intense and deceitful that calling them lies is a woeful understatement.
They believe in lies, neocons do, and they appear to derive arousal from them, almost as much as they believe in and find purpose and excitement in wars.
Neocons were said to have reached the peak of their power during the Bush-Cheney administration, when the trauma of the 9-11 attack and the fear and anger it inspired finally gave them the fuel to usher in their demented agenda of endless, permanent war.
The utter failure of the Iraq War and the realization that it was based on lies told to the public through the corporate media, often led by neocons themselves, supposedly resulted in neocons finally being expelled from power and influence in Washington.
They were discredited, we were told, finally unmasked as the deceitful sociopaths that they are.
That should have been true, but it most definitely was not.
The neocons went a bit underground after the Bush administration, but they never really went away.
And in 2013 and 2014, they began to detect a shifting political reality.
Anti-war sentiment was growing in the Republican Party, as it was before 9-11, as evidenced by Ron Paul's campaigns or George Bush's 2000 presidential campaign plank that the U.S.
needed to have a more humble foreign policy, and at the same time, Democrats were becoming increasingly enchanted with the promises, power, and profit that war provides.
In 2013 and 2014, neocons became especially enamored of Hillary Clinton.
And though the narrative we're fed now claims that neocons only migrated back to the Democratic Party as a reaction to Trump, as though neocons are such honorable patriots and devotees of democracy that they simply could not abide Trump's anti-democratic impulses, the reality, as is easily demonstrated and as we will show you, is the neocons began maneuvering to reattach themselves to the Democratic Party long before Trump emerged.
And they were especially excited by the prospect of a presidency led by Hillary Clinton, whose criticisms of Barack Obama was that, despite his bombing eight different Muslim-majority countries during the eight years of his presidency, Obama was insufficiently aggressive, bellicose, and militaristic.
The neocon's migration back to the Democratic Party is now complete.
Virtually every major neocon from the Bush-Cheney era don't even bother to brand themselves any longer as never-Trump conservatives.
They're just Democrats, like any other, and are ardent admirers of Joe Biden.
And why wouldn't they be?
Their perception that the Democratic Party is the best vehicle for advancing their war-hungry pathology is correct.
But the fact that they opportunistically morphed into loud opponents of Donald Trump and became Democrats, along with the passage of time that means more and more people don't remember who they are or what they really did, means that neocons have reached a level of influence that is arguably greater than what they wielded back in 2002.
And that is what makes it so urgent to document who they all are and why they are singularly menacing and demented.
The most uniquely influential and illustrative neocon is almost certainly Bill Kristol.
For years, he edited a magazine, The Weekly Standard, founded in 1995, that was funded by Rupert Murdoch, and that was designed to push the United States to align with neoconservative ideology more and more by exerting influence within the Republican Party.
Crystal now performs exactly the same role, contaminating our body politics with neoconservative sickness, but now operates within the Democratic Party and is now funded not by Rupert Murdoch, but by the liberal billionaire Pierre Omidyar.
One could very effectively and persuasively make the case that Bill Kristol is the single most toxic, destructive, and malign influence on American politics over the course of the last three decades.
And that is exactly the case that we will make tonight.
Both as a reminder of what neoconservatives really are and have always been, and to highlight how significant their influence continues to be now more than ever in American politics, the Democratic Party, and prevailing sentiments about war, militarism, and chronic deceit from and prevailing sentiments about war, militarism, and chronic deceit from America's leading institutions of power.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One might legitimately ask why it is that we're devoting an entire program to a single individual, Bill Kristol, who has never held elected office in the United States and who who has never held elected office in the United States and who has never been in any official positions of power, who essentially has spent his life as a pundit, an operative, and test.
He has worked very, very closely with numerous politicians who did rise to high levels of political influence, including former Vice President Dan Quayle during the first Bush administration.
But in general, Bill Kristol is an operative, he's a propagandist, he's an activist, and he's an influencer.
And the reason why he merits so much attention, the attention that we're about to lavish on him, the light we're about to shine on him, is because, credit where it's due, he has been uniquely effective, uniquely consequential in his attempt to mold and shape America and its foreign policy to align with neoconservative ideology.
And particularly because so many people Have not lived through the events of the early years that brought the Iraq War into play, or who have forgotten what neoconservatives are because they are now largely identified with the cause of sabotaging Donald Trump and endlessly denouncing him.
There is a huge amount of amnesia, especially among the liberals in the United States who have come to regard neocons as icons and thought leaders.
That it is really urgent to delve deep and document exactly what their driving worldview is.
Not back in 2002, but always, including through today, because I do believe it's the case that neocons exert more influence than ever before, including in their heyday of 2002, and thus there is little
There are very few groups, if there are any, meriting the kind of critical scrutiny that we're about to devote, not just to neocons, but to their unquestioned leader, Bill Kristol, who is now identified as an anti-Trump activist, but who has become overtly a Democratic Party adherent and supporter.
He's funded by one of the world's richest men in Pierre Omidyar who funds numerous Bill Kristol organizations including the media outlet that he now edits and runs, The Bulwark, which is read by many people.
Most importantly of all, the ability of Bill Kristol and his neocon comrades to maintain influence within liberal establishment institutions and within the dominant Democratic Party means that foreign policy increasingly has become a mirror image of what Bill Kristol and neoconservatives always wanted it to be.
And that's the reason why it's so important to spend time documenting both their history and their current Ideology.
So let's start with a 1998 article that was published in the New York Times.
It was co-authored by Bill Kristol and by Robert Kagan.
And if that last name, Kagan, sounds familiar to you, it should.
Robert Kagan is the husband of Victoria Nuland, who at the time in 1998 was a Clinton administration official.
She then went on to become Dick Cheney's chief foreign policy advisor for the Iraq war.
She then Rose even further within the next administration, the Obama administration, where she essentially began running Ukraine, first for Hillary Clinton's State Department and then for John Kerry's.
The only time we got her out of government was during the four years of the Trump administration.
And now she's back in the Biden administration.
Running Ukraine and the war in Ukraine from a neoconservative perspective for the Biden administration.
So it was Bill Kristol and her husband, Robert Kagan, whose brother, Frederick Kagan, is also a leading neocon.
And his wife, Frederick Kagan's wife, Kimberly Kagan, was the theorist behind the so-called surge that was designed to keep Americans hooked on and continuing to support the war in Iraq in 2006 and 2007.
It's really like a neoconservative dynasty, like the Kennedy family of neoconservatism.
So here you have Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1998.
At the time, Bill Clinton started bombing Iraq, and the claim from a lot of conservatives was he's only doing this to distract from the scandal that eventually resulted in his impeachment through the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
And yet Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan were not condemning Bill Kristol for bombing Iraq.
They in fact were arguing that it was nowhere near enough in terms of the military force that we had to bring to bear.
Now remember, the Iraq War ended up happening Five years after this article was published, five and a half years in part because of 9-11 providing the pretext, but neoconservatives were demanding this long before.
Here's what the New York Times article read.
The headline there, you see it?
Bombing Iraq isn't enough?
And it then reads, Saddam Hussein must go.
Saddam Hussein must go.
The imperative may seem too simple for some experts and too daunting for the Clinton administration, but if the United States is committed, as the President said in his State of the Union message, to ensuring that the Iraqi leader never again uses weapons of mass destruction, the only way to achieve that goal is to remove Mr. Hussein and his regime from power.
Any policy short of that will fail.
Does the United States really have to bear this burden?
Yes.
Unless we act, Saddam Hussein will prevail, the Middle East will be destabilized, other aggressors around the world will follow his example, and American soldiers will have to pay a far heavier price when the international peace sustained by American leadership begins to collapse.
If Mr. Clinton is serious about protecting us and our allies from Iraqi biological and chemical weapons, he will order ground forces to the Gulf.
Four heavy divisions and two airborne divisions are available for deployment.
The President should act and Congress should support him in the only policy that can succeed.
So long before 9-11, in 1998, they were demanding a massive, gigantic deployment of U.S.
military force into the Middle East to invade Iraq and to change the government.
By itself, that is as extreme and deranged a policy as anyone could possibly advocate.
And the arguments they made for it, that Iraq had WMDs and that it was Saddam Hussein who was destabilizing the region and would continue to do so unless you removed him, by itself should have forever removed them From any kind of access to institutions of influence.
After all, we know of course that that entire article was premised on a lie.
And nothing destabilized the Middle East.
Nothing.
More than the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein.
Even Tony Blair admits.
Despite continuing to be an advocate of that war, and who presided as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom when the UK joined the US in invading, that it was exactly that war and the removal of Saddam Hussein that gave rise to ISIS.
So how can someone be an advocate of clearly the worst, most destructive, and most immoral foreign policy of the last 25 years, the war in Iraq, have spent years advocating it based on lies, based on arguments that turned out to be the opposite of truth, And not have any career harm at all.
In fact, continuing to thrive.
Thriving more than ever.
Access to every single establishment platform.
Because it doesn't matter how much you lie.
It doesn't matter how sociopathic the policies are you advocate.
As long as you're doing so, on behalf of the US security state, your career will thrive.
And nobody demonstrates that more than Bill Kristol.
Now, the neoconservative entity they created was called the Project for a New American Century.
It was really an organization designed to encapsulate and implement the neoconservative worldview.
Here they are in a letter from that organization to President Clinton regarding Iraq on January 26, 1998, where they basically wrote to President Clinton demanding that he invade Iraq.
Quote, we are writing you because we are concerned that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.
In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting that threat.
We urge you to seize that opportunity and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S.
and our friends and allies around the world.
That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power.
We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
They weren't offering there, by the way, to enlist and go and fight in that war, needless to say.
They wanted to send other people's families to go fight and die for this necessary endeavor.
Whatever support they were offering would have been from the safe distance in their homes in Northern Virginia.
They go on, quote, the only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.
In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing.
In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.
That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.
We urge you to articulate this aim and to turn your administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power.
This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political, and military efforts.
Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, dangers they had no indication or no willingness or interest in getting near, but they did acknowledge they were aware of these dangers, quote, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. quote, we believe the dangers of failing to do so We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing U.S. resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf.
In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the U.N. situation.
Security Council, we urge you to act decisively.
If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S.
or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country.
If we accept the course of weakness and drift, we put our own interests and our future at risk.
So these really were the leading theorists and advocates of what became the most shameful, the most destructive, and the most immoral war of the last 40 or 50 years.
How is it that it did not destroy their careers reading this?
Quite the contrary.
Bill Kristol has become an icon of Democratic Party politics and American liberal politics.
He is a star in social media.
Almost entirely driven by the admiration of liberals.
He only became that when he took a leading role in denouncing Donald Trump, and then immediately saw how he could integrate himself into the Democratic Party, insinuate himself into its politics, and import this ideology back into the party that is now dominant in the United States.
When the run-up to the Iraq War happened after 9-11 took place, these same neocons saw their opportunity.
They saw that they could get the United States to invade not just Iraq but a series of countries and began beating the drums as hard as possible.
And I want to make the point here, there are obviously a lot of people who are now very popular in liberal politics who played a major role In bringing about the Iraq War, first among them, Joe Biden, probably the senator most responsible for getting the United States Senate to pass the authorization to use military force.
He was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, along with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, became an outspoken defender of the need to remove Saddam Hussein.
People like David Frum, the beloved Atlantic writer who's constantly on CNN and MSNBC, Cheered by liberals for everything he does as an ardent defender of American democracy through his denunciation of Trump.
Wrote the speeches that came out of George Bush's mouth that misled the country into that war.
But Bill Kristol was the leading theorist constantly pounding this drum for years and here he is in Beginning of 2002, so just a couple of months after September 11th, immediately trying to exploit the emotions that honest Americans felt to direct them to a war that he had long wanted for whatever his motives were.
And the article was entitled, What to Do About Iraq, and I'm showing you this not because it's Some singular or aberrational example because it's completely illustrative of the lies and deceit propaganda they were constantly feeding into the American discourse.
Quote, the amazing thing about the current, quote, debate over Iraq is that no one disputes the nature of the threat.
Everyone agrees that as Al Gore's former National Security Advisor Leon Forth puts it, quote, Saddam Hussein is dangerous and likely to become more so.
That he is, quote, a permanent menace to the region and to the vital interests of the United States.
No one questions, furthermore, the basic facts about Saddam Hussein's weapons program.
Do you see they're saying, nobody disputes the fact that Saddam Hussein has a nuclear weapons program.
Nobody disputes.
That he has biological and chemical weapons?
All of these are lies!
Of course, not only did they have no such program, but there were many people disputing it.
And then here he says, nor is there any doubt that after September 11, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction posed a kind of danger to us that we hadn't fully grasped before.
Do you see the way they're just exploiting the emotions of Americans after 9-11, pretending that 9-11 is the proof that we have to get rid of Saddam Hussein, constantly planting these seeds that 70% of Americans ended up believing that Saddam was responsible for the planting of the 9-11 attack?
When in reality, this is something that they wanted well before 9-11, as we just showed you.
In the 1990s, much of the complacency about Saddam, both in Washington and in Europe, rested on the assumption that he could be deterred.
Saddam was not a madman, the theory went, and would not commit suicide by actually using the weapons he was so desperately trying to obtain.
Some of us, it's true, had our doubts about this logic.
The issue seemed to us not so much whether we could deter Saddam, but whether he could deter us.
If Saddam had had nuclear weapons in 1991, would we have gone to war to drive him from Kuwait?
But after September 11th, and by the way, there you see an important premise that has long been permeating American foreign policy, that when a country has nuclear weapons, it is madness in the extreme to risk a war with that country.
A precept that has completely disappeared as neocons like Bill Kristol continue to demand that the United States escalate more and more the proxy war in Ukraine.
Now, here he is again exploiting the trauma that Americans felt from September 11th.
"After September 11th, we have been all but forced to consider another scenario.
What if Saddam provides some of his anthrax or his VX or a nuclear device to a terrorist group like Al-Qaeda?
Saddam could help a terrorist inflict a horrific attack on the United States or its allies while hoping to shroud his role in the secrecy of cutouts and middlemen.
How in the world do we deter that?
To this day, we don't know who provided the anthrax for the post-September 11th attacks.
You may recall that we did a show A month ago where we walked through the critical nature that the anthrax attacks played in bringing about the war in Iraq because of liars and propagandists like Bill Kristol linking continuously the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein and more nefariously constantly trying to link Saddam Hussein to The planning of the 9-11 attacks.
We constantly hear about the evils of disinformation, and yet right before your eyes you're seeing that there is no more pernicious disinformation agent than Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and his neocons, and they have more blood on their hands over it than anybody else.
Here he goes on about the anthrax attacks.
We may never know for sure, although we hear only about the risk of such actions, the benefits could be very substantial.
A devastating knockout blow against Saddam Hussein, followed by an American-sponsored effort to rebuild Iraq and put it on a path toward democratic governance, would have a seismic impact on the Arab world, for the better.
The Arab world may take a long time coming to terms with the West, but that process will be hastened by the defeat of the leading anti-Western Arab tyrant.
None of that happened, of course.
It is past time for the United States to step up and accept the real responsibilities and requirements of global leadership.
We've already tried the alternative during the 1990s.
Those who argued for limiting American involvement overseas, for avoiding the use of ground troops, for using force in a limited way and only as a last resort.
For steering clear of nation building, for exit strategies and burden sharing, those who prided themselves on their prudence and realism won the day.
A few missile strikes here and there, a few sting operations, but when confronted with the choice of using serious force against Al Qaeda, or really helping the Iraqi opposition moving to drive Saddam Hussein from power, President Clinton and his top advisors flinched.
They always depict a reluctance to go to war as a sign of cowardice.
And conversely, an eagerness to send other people's kids to go to war as a sign of courage.
If Bill Clinton, if Bill Kristol were suiting up to go fight these wars that he was constantly advocating, maybe he would be justified in depicting himself as courageous.
But there's nothing courageous about writing articles in the Weekly Standard, trying to manipulate the American public and play on their emotions to start wars that other people go and fight for your own hidden agenda.
But this is the standard that remains today.
That if you are unwilling to send America to another war, if you're against it, it means you're a coward, you're not willing to fight for freedom.
You're Neville Chamberlain to the Churchillian warriors like Bill Kristol, who constantly demand that America fights one war after the next.
He goes on.
Most Republicans put little sustained pressure on the Clinton administration to act otherwise.
The necessary actions were all deemed too risky.
The administration, supported by most of the foreign policy establishment, took the, quote, prudent course.
Only now do we know that it was an imprudent course.
The failure of the United States to take risks.
And to take responsibility in the 1990s paved the way to September 11th.
Again, implying that our refusal or our failure to remove Saddam Hussein in the 1990s somehow is what caused September 11th.
Now, again, I'm emphasizing this not as a relic of history, although that would be important, to remember who it is who has the blood on their hands from all these wars, but because this exact mindset
That the United States has to be the world leader and the way we're the world leader is by constantly going to wars in every part of the world to put governments in power that we want and to remove governments that we dislike continues to be the dominant ideology in Washington that drives American foreign policy from Syria to Libya to Afghanistan and now in Ukraine and the same exact people
Who were spreading these lies back then in this demented mindset are the same people now doing so.
The only thing that changed is back then they were doing it on behalf of the Republican Party and now they do it on behalf of the Democratic Party.
In the days following the invasion of Iraq, Bill Kristol went on to C-SPAN.
This was on March 28, 2003.
And I just want to give you a little bit of taste of what it is that he said.
They are personally handpicked by Saddam.
The Fedayeen Saddam.
There are a few thousand of them.
They are murderers.
It's like saying that the German people are very upset because the SS are bravely fighting behind American lines.
March 1945.
Whatever else you can say about this war.
Let me just make one point.
George Bush is not fighting this like Vietnam.
Whatever the... We don't need to re-fight the whole history of Vietnam.
Saddam may be.
That's the danger.
Saddam may be.
But it's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
This is going to be a two-month war, not a... It's going to be two months, not six months.
Hey, Brian.
How's it going?
Good, sir.
What would you like to say?
Well, I think it should be...
So, first of all, the person whom he was debating there was Daniel Ellsberg, who died on Friday.
The heroic Pentagon Papers whistleblower who was trying to warn the country that we were entering another Vietnam, a war based on lies, that the United States government knew it couldn't win and yet was falsely assuring the public that it would.
And there you had Bill Kristol talking over him, shutting him up, and saying, this is going to be a two-week war, a two-month war.
He constantly assured the public that this war was going to be over within a matter of months at the most.
And of course, we ended up spending a decade or more in Iraq and never achieved any of these purposes.
So again, somebody who is just, you can look at them, who just goes on television constantly, Who gets published in the New York Times, urging a word that is widely regarded as the most morally abject and destructive.
Who makes claims that were factually false at the time and promises that turned out all of them to be unfulfilled.
Is somebody that in a healthy society would be ignored and have their reputation destroyed forever.
It isn't just that he made some predictions and they were wrong.
It's that he deliberately lied in a way that ended the lives of a million people in Iraq.
Thousands and thousands of American soldiers who fought a war based on false pretenses.
And it tore that country apart.
It gave rise to ISIS.
It destabilized the entire region.
Bill Kristol did this over and over and yet he continues to be a very popular and influential operative within the Democratic Party and beloved within the established media.
He has access to the New York Times.
He got hired by the New York Times years later as a columnist for that paper.
He goes on MSNBC and CNN all the time where he's treated like some sort of wise elder.
That is how sick establishment politics is that he is the avatar Despite this avalanche of decades worth of extremism and deceit and very bloodthirsty policies that he has never stopped advocating.
I began writing about politics in late 2005, so two and a half years after the Iraq War began.
And when I did, I started a blog, a free blog, on Google's free blogging software called Blogspot.
The name of my blog was Unclaimed Territory.
And occasionally when I had readers who were very smart and who had something to say, they would actually write posts for me.
I really believed in independent journalism and citizen journalism and still do.
And one of the people who wrote for me back then was someone I never met, whose name I didn't know, but whose work was always unfallibly well-researched and smart.
And he used the acronym or the pseudonym Anonymous Liberal.
He wanted to be anonymous because of his work.
And in early 2007, on January 2nd, he wrote an article called Bill Kristol, Pundit Superstar.
And I show you this in part to show you how long I've been at this with Bill Kristol, but also because his only point back then was to show you things Bill Kristol had said in the most mainstream venues, how grotesquely wrong they were, and yet how he continued to be treated like some important establishment voice.
So I just want to show you a couple of those.
On April 4th, 2003, A week and a half or so after, shock and awe, the attack on Baghdad by the United States began, Bill Kristol wrote, quote, there's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America that the Shia in Iraq can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime.
There's almost no evidence of that at all.
Iraq's always been very secular.
By 2007, a civil war was raging where the Sunni insurgency and the Shia in the south of Iraq who were close to Iran were fighting viciously and hating each other because of centuries old religious conflict between them.
On April 28th, So a month or so after the war, he wrote, quote, The first two battles of this new era are now over.
around the world, we committed ourselves to reshaping the Middle East so the region would no longer be a hotbed of terrorism, extremism, anti-Americanism and weapons of mass destruction.
The first two battles of this new era are now over.
The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably.
But these are only two battles.
We are only at the end of the beginning in the war on terror and terrorist states.
And it was very clear, and there was a lot of reporting, that the real goal of neocons, the neocons with official positions in the Bush administration, like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, led by Dick Cheney, and these propagandists like Bill Kristol and David Frum, Was that they didn't just have one or two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, they wanted to invade and control and install new governments and they had a long list.
Beginning with Iran, followed by Syria, and a multitude of other countries that they intended to invade, and that's what Bill Kristol is saying there.
We already won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thankfully, we won them decisively and honorably, but this is just the start.
We're at the end of the beginning.
We have a lot more countries to invade.
This is not just wrong, this is psychopathic.
Now, back in
In 2011, the neocons, despite more or less being a little bit underground, started to reemerge because Hillary Clinton and her band of liberal interventionists, people like Samantha Power and Susan Rice, had begun agitating for President Obama to involve the United States in new conflicts, one of which was Libya.
Hillary Clinton was an adamant and vehement advocate for the U.S.
mission to, along with NATO, go to Libya and remove Muammar Gadhafi, who had ruled that country for decades, who had never attacked the United States, who had, in fact, been a partner and an ally of the United States.
But he began saying that he wanted to start using Libyan oil and the resources and the profits from it to fund social programs in Libya rather than letting Western oil companies control the oil.
And the British and the French in particular were highly dependent on Libyan oil and the type of crude that it produced.
And they were trying to get the United States on board to engineer regime change in Libya, and Hillary Clinton succeeded in getting President Obama to do so.
And the most vehement, vocal advocates of that war as well, of course, were neocons, including Bill Kristol and Elliot Abrams and Robert Kagan, the same people over and over.
And at the time, when President Obama finally agreed to have the United States get involved in this war, he stood up and gave a speech where he again lied Every American war begins with a lie, saying that the purpose of this war is not regime change.
And he would never let it become regime change.
We were told the only purpose of this war was to create a no-fly zone over places like Benghazi in order to protect Libyans from attacks by Muammar Gaddafi.
And of course, very quickly, the war immediately worked into a regime change war.
Here is Bill Kristol, as reported by Politico, recognizing the influence he continued to wield in 2011.
There you see the headline, Kristol, Abrams, Kagan, all neocons.
Their letter presses the House GOP to pack the Libya mission because it was the Republicans who were highly resistant to this war.
And they did not want to give Obama the authorization to use military force that the Democrats and Republicans gave to George Bush eight years earlier for Iraq.
Here is the letter Bill Kristol wrote with those other two neocons called a open letter to House Republicans.
Quote, "We thank you for your leadership as Congress exercises its constitutional responsibilities on the issue of America's military actions in Libya.
We are gravely concerned, however, by news reports that Congress may consider reducing or cutting funding for U.S.
In the NATO-led military operations against the oppressive regime of Libyan dictator Muay al-Qadhafi, such a decision would be an abdication of our responsibilities as an ally and the leader of the Western alliance.
It would result in the perpetuation and power of a ruthless dictator who has ordered terrorist attacks on the United States in the past, has pursued nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and who can be expected to return to these activities should he survive.
Quote, Quote, The problem is not that he has done too much, however.
But that he has done too little to achieve the goal of removing Gaddafi from power.
The United States should be leading in this effort, not trailing behind our allies.
We should be doing more to help the Libyan opposition, which deserves our support.
We should not be allowing ourselves to be held hostage to UN security resolutions and air-resolute allies.
What would be even worse, however, would be for the United States to become one of those air-resolute allies.
The United States must see this effort in Libya through to its conclusion.
Success is profoundly in our interest and in keeping with our principles as a nation.
The success of NATO's operations will influence how other Middle Eastern regimes respond to the demands of their people for more political rights and freedoms.
For the United States and NATO to be defeated by Muammar al-Qadhafi would be to suggest that American leadership and resolution were now gravely in doubt, a conclusion that would undermine American influence and embolden our nation's enemies.
It's the same script over and over, almost verbatim, from what they were saying about the need to go and invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein.
The same claptrap about the duties and responsibilities and burdens of American leadership, weapons of mass destruction, terrorist attacks.
Claiming that somehow this tiny little country in Northern Africa was a threat to the United States and accusing anybody who was resistant of being too afraid, too cowardly, too timid, unlike these brave warriors, to do what needs to be done.
Now, the war in Libya turned out to be a very important moment in American political history, recent political history, because what actually happened there was, it was the Democratic Party that was by far the most emphatic supporters of this regime chain operation in Libya.
Democrats in the Congress overwhelmingly supported their Democratic Party president in supporting it.
And what happened was, House Republicans were very resistant to voting for this war.
And in fact, when the vote came up, and it was that vote that Bill Kristol was trying to influence through that open letter to the House Republican Caucus, Republicans used their majority in Congress to reject the authorization.
They refused to authorize President Obama to go to war in Libya.
And yet, he ignored it.
Obama did.
He ignored the House vote.
Even though under our Constitution, wars are supposed to depend upon and be fought only in the event of Congressional approval, not only didn't the House approve of this war, they rejected it upon voting and Obama ignored that and went to war anyway and removed Qaddafi.
The war was already underway and he continued it.
Now House Republicans didn't do much about that fact.
They didn't defund the war.
They didn't try and impeach him.
So one can question how serious they really were.
But nonetheless, it was Republicans who were against this war and Democrats led by Hillary Clinton who were most in favor.
And that was when neocons started readjusting their mindset and their framework.
And started to see, and it was just a little bit of time later when Ron Paul ran for president in 2012 in the GOP primary and did far better than anyone anticipated with very little money, going into Iowa and South Carolina and telling Americans that neocons were destroying their economic future by using their resources and their children to fight wars that were not in the interest of the United States.
And neocons started to see the writing on the wall that the far more The bellicose and aggressive and militaristic party was starting to become the Democratic Party and not the Republican Party.
There were plenty of Republican senators who supported that regime change effort in Libya, but there was a very significant and growing sentiment in the Republican Party against these kind of regime change wars and against liberal interventionism in general.
And it was then that these neocons started believing correctly That Hillary Clinton would likely be a better vehicle for their neocon agenda than what the Republican Party was becoming.
Two years later, in 2013, there was another war on offer, this time in Syria.
And Bill Kristol, this time with Leon Wieseltier, the neoconservative Democrat who had long written for the New Republic until a MeToo scandal removed him.
Back in Politico with a headline, Bill Kristol, Leon Wieseltier urge Syria action.
Quote, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, and more than 60 other journalists, political operatives, and foreign policy experts have signed an open letter calling on President Obama to bomb the Syrian military unit responsible for the recent chemical weapons attack.
Quote, at a minimum, The United States, along with willing allies and partners, should use standoff weapons and air power to target the Syrian dictatorship's military units that were involved in the recent large-scale use of chemical weapons, the group states.
It should also provide vetted, moderate elements of Syria's armed opposition with the military support required to identify and strike regime units armed with chemical weapons.
The co-signers also urged the United States and other willing nations to consider direct military strikes against the pillars of the Assad regime and to accelerate efforts to vet, train, and arm moderate elements of Syria's armed opposition, with the goal of empowering them to prevail against both the Assad regime and the growing presence of al-Qaeda-affiliated and other extremist rebel factions in the country.
First of all, this is another example of another war, another country, where Bill Kristol wants to change the government up using military force.
Just one after the next, after the next, and the failure of the war in Iraq, the fact that it was based on lies, didn't diminish his influence at all.
Media outlets are reporting on Bill Kristol's pro-war letters as though they're some significant force in US politics because they are.
He was funded by Rupert Murdoch and he wielded great influence.
He, as I said, got hired by the New York Times as an op-ed columnist long after the Iraq War invasion was over.
He got put onto ABC News panels regularly on their Sunday show as an ABC News contributor.
His influence in Washington continued to grow, and every time there was a new war presented, he took his spot, saying the same things over and over, just like he's saying now about the war in Ukraine.
You can put it verbatim, that we're fighting for democracy, that we have to stand up for our allies.
It's constantly the same script used over and over just for any different war.
In 2010, Bill Kristol created a new foreign policy group along with Liz Cheney.
This was before Liz Cheney ended up being elected as a congresswoman from Wyoming.
She was an outspoken advocate for the Bush-Cheney foreign policy.
She in particular was someone who saw the world exactly the way Bill Kristol saw it.
As somebody who believed that America should continuously fight wars as a way of securing the interest of companies like Halliburton, which her father was a major stockholder of, or other arms dealers.
And I think it's very notable that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol had this group called Keep America Safe, designed to pressure the Obama administration to be even more militaristic and more warmongering than they were.
Again, Obama was no pacifist.
He removed Gaddafi.
He did allow the CIA to wage vicious regime change wars in Syria.
Unlike what he said, that we were empowering Al-Qaeda, we were actually on the same side as Al-Qaeda in the war in Syria.
And the reality is that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol made perfect partners because they were both among the greatest warmongers That the United States has in mainstream politics, and it's not a coincidence that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol became two of the leading opponents of Donald Trump.
Why?
Does anybody ask in the Democratic Party, why are Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol, two of the most demented warmongers, why did they in particular find Donald Trump so threatening and so offensive?
And why do these deranged warmongers Now viewed the Democratic Party with so much affection.
This group, Keep America Safe, aside from just hectoring and badgering Washington to constantly fight new wars, also was designed to smear any opponents of the war on terror as Al Qaeda allies, just like now both Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol are devoted to smearing opponents of US foreign policy as Kremlin agents.
That was back then the preferred choice of character assassination for any dissidents of American war policies and what they did was there were seven lawyers inside the Justice Department or nine lawyers inside the Justice Department who to their great credit had, under the Bush administration, sued the Bush administration by claiming that several war on terror policies violated the Constitution.
That's what you need lawyers to do.
That's what you want lawyers to do when extremist policies are implemented.
Putting people in prison with no due process, including American citizens, as was done in the case of Jose Padilla, an American-born citizen who was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in 2002, was accused of being a dirty bomber, and then was disappeared was accused of being a dirty bomber, and then was disappeared into a military brig for two and a half years in South Carolina with not only no charges, but no access to lawyers or to the outside Okay.
And there were lawyers, seven of them, who ended up working for the Obama Justice Department, who, under the Bush administration, had sued the Bush administration, claiming that their policies violated the Constitution.
The guarantee of habeas corpus, of due process, the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches.
And Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney created a group, Keep America Safe, that suggested that those lawyers inside the Obama Justice Department were disloyal to the United States, were on the side of Al Qaeda because they sued the Bush administration on constitutional grounds.
They produced this nauseating McCarthyite ad where they branded them the Al Qaeda 7.
And let's take a look at this ad that that duo produced.
So who did President Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder hire?
Nine lawyers who represented or advocated for terrorist detainees.
Who are these government officials?
Eric Holder will only name two.
Why the secrecy behind the other seven?
Whose values do they share?
Tell Eric Kohler, Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al Qaeda 7.
That's one of the most repellent political ads you will see.
Right up there with Rick Wilson's attack on the multiple amputee Saxby Chambliss or rather Max Cleland who ran against Saxby Chambliss for the Georgia Senate race in 2002 and Rick Wilson ran ads morphing the face of Max Cleland into Osama Bin Laden, suggesting that because he opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which Max Cleland did, that meant he was an al-Qaeda sympathizer.
That is Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol.
They do it now with attacking people who are opposed to the war in Ukraine or any other Policy position they have including during Russiagate of accusing them of being Kremlin agents.
Back then they were doing it by suggesting that any lawyers who sued the Bush administration must be sympathizers of Al Qaeda.
And yet these two have now become probably the single two most beloved former Republicans among American liberals other than those who work in government.
Mother Jones called Liz Cheney in 2021 one of the heroes of 2021.
They haven't changed at all their tactics.
They've only changed the party on whose behalf they implement them.
Now, perhaps the most odious aspect of neocons is just how disingenuous and manipulative they are about essentially everything.
As I indicated earlier, it's not as though they're the only faction in Washington that believes in a warmongering, militaristic agenda.
The issue, though, one of the things that distinguishes them from other factions is they actually believe in nothing else besides that.
Every other claim view is nothing more than an obviously strategic means of insinuating themselves and ingratiating themselves into institutions of power to ensure that their real issue, the only agenda they actually care about, which is endless war, continues to reign supreme.
And everything else they say Is completely artificial.
They don't care about anything else.
They're willing to say anything they have to say about any other issue to ensure they remain in power.
So just to take one example, back in 2002 and 2003 when they were trying to manipulate the Republican Party and attach themselves to that party, the strategy chosen by Karl Rove in order to keep Republicans in power was to run multiple referenda and constitutional amendments in various states to oppose same-sex marriage in order to bring out the evangelical vote who vote Republican and giving them something that they would need.
It was a very disingenuous but cynical and ultimately pragmatic and effective tactic by Karl Rove to focus on gay marriage in order to get the evangelicals out.
The Bush administration, Dick Cheney, didn't care about that at all.
In fact, Dick Cheney was the first national politician of any stature to advocate for same-sex marriage, which he did in the 2000 vice presidential debate with Joe Lieberman, in part because his daughter is gay, so they didn't actually care about that, but they were willing to pretend they were deeply opposed to gay marriage, and Bill Kristol went right along with that.
For years, the Weekly Standard editorialized aggressively against the issue of marriage equality and the rights of gay men and lesbian.
Here, for example, is a 2009 article, so well into the debate about gay marriage, and there you see a headline, The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage, that was published.
It wasn't written by Bill Kristol, but it was published by Bill Kristol when he was the editor of the Weekly Standard.
It's now at the Washington Examiner just because that's where the Weekly Standards backlog is now that they've closed.
But it's really a very repugnant way of arguing against gay marriage.
It delves into the arguments in some of the most offensive and just the ugliest ways possible.
But Phil Crystal was willing to do that because at the time the power base was the Republican Party.
And to be accepted among Republicans, he had to pretend he was against gay marriage and the rights of homosexuals.
And in fact, he did that all of the time.
So here, for example, is a political article from 2012, the headline of which is Bill Kristol's arguments on homosexuality.
And what had happened was the Weekly Standard had sent out a vehemently anti-gay email using extremely aggressive language that was regarded as homophobic.
And again, the issue is not here whether Bill Kristol is pro-gay or anti-gay.
It's the willingness of him to take whatever position he has to in order to advance the only agenda he cares about, which is endless war.
So here is the controversy.
Quote, following Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol's decision to not condemn an anti-gay email sent out by the magazine's marketing team, former ThinkProgress blogger Matt Corley went digging through the Nexus archive and turned up interviews from the 90s in which Kristol argued that homosexuality was a choice and that it was, quote, perfectly reasonable to discriminate against it.
Quote, in many cases, it's a choice.
Crystal told Larry King in a 1993 interview, there are many, many human beings throughout history, millions and millions and millions who have been both homosexual at times in their lives and then heterosexual or vice versa or bisexual.
How can it be a biological imperative that people can change?
Crystal also defended discrimination during a debate with Tom Stotter, the coordinator of an organization working to get gays into the military.
Quote, some discrimination is perfectly reasonable, he said.
The discrimination between trying to teach our kids what most of human history has thought was a desirable lifestyle that will contribute to their happiness and trying not to deter them, not to prohibit and not to punish, but trying to steer them in a direction that will contribute to their happiness.
In 1988, Crystal told Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts on ABC News, quote, I don't think this is political.
These people exist, Sam.
You may not want them to exist.
There are people who say, I was, quote, gay once.
I didn't like it.
I stopped counseling, and now I am happily heterosexual.
So endorsing conversion therapy, defending discrimination against gay people, Every single anti-gay argument, from the most mainstream to the most aggressive and alienating, Bill Kristol was espousing because he wanted a power base in the Republican Party.
Here is a 1998 article in the New York Times by Andrew Sullivan, who at the time was a well-known conservative, but also an openly gay man who supported the cause of gay equality, and the title of the article was Going Down Screaming.
Sullivan was critiquing the conservative movement for becoming increasingly obsessed with the personal lives of American adults and wanting to use state power to interfere in their personal lives when conservatism was supposed to be the movement of limited government.
That was through the Moral Majority, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell.
That was the conservative movement when I came of age that I rejected because I didn't think the role of the state Was to interfere in the private lives of American citizens and adults and control their choices.
I still don't think that's the case.
And here's what Andrew Sullivan said about that transformation of the conservative movement, quote, No conservative thinker has done more to advance this new moralism than Bill Kristol, best known for his urbane appearances on This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, and about as close as Washington has to a dean of intellectual conservatism.
Now, I should just point out here, by the way, that Bill Kristol His father was Irving Kristol, one of the pioneers of neoconservatism.
In fact, he became a conservative in the 1960s during the War of Vietnam, but he had been a Marxist before that.
And his mother is also a famous neoconservative, just like John Podoritz, his contemporary neocon, had his father, Norm Podoritz, who was one of the founders of the neoconservative movement, just like the Kagan family with Victoria Nuland.
They're very dynastic and incestuous and intermarried, neoconservatives are, and oftentimes with the beneficiaries of nepotism, as Bill Kristol was, like Jonah Goldberg, His mom was Lucianne Goldberg.
Their careers get based on and started by their moms and dads.
But according to Andrew Sullivan, Bill Kristol is the closest that Washington has to a dean of intellectual conservatism.
And no journal has done more to propagate, defend, and advance this version of conservatism, meaning the moralizing kind, than the magazine Kristol Edits, The Weekly Standard, founded in 1995 by Rupert Murdoch.
Most of this year, Crystal and The Standard have gleefully egged on Republicans in their moral crusade.
As early as May, at a time when it seemed the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal might dissipate, Crystal urged Republican congressional candidates to forget other issues in the fall and campaign solely on the issue of the president's morals.
Quote, if Republicans do that, he argued, they will win big in November.
And their victory will be more than a rejection of Clinton, it will be a rejection of Clintonism.
A rejection of defining the presidency and our public morality down.
But perhaps no edition of the Standard captured the current state of American conservatism better than the one that came out immediately after the Star Report was made public.
Its cover portrayed Star as Mark McGuire with the headline, Star's Home Run.
Inside, page after page of anti-Clinton coverage anchored by an essay by Crystal advocating a full house vote for impeachment of the president within a month was followed by a long, surreal article by a reporter attending a four-day world pornography conference.
Six pages of explicit sex interspersed with coy condescension followed.
The cover teased with the headline, quote, Among the Pornographers.
One of the many graphic scenes in the article occurs in a ladies' room, quote, unprompted Dr. Susan Block removes a rubber phallus from her purse and hikes up her assistant, LaVon's dress, bearing her derriere.
Block paddles it and kisses it while LaVon coons.
The article was so lurid that the Standard's editors preface it with a note, quote, Because of the subject matter, some material in this article is sexually explicit and may offend some readers.
The weird porno-puritanism of the Star Report does not exist, it seems, in a vacuum.
It comes out of a degenerated conservative political and literary culture.
Now, just probably doesn't even need to be said, given how everything Bill Kristol says turns out to be untrue, but the Republicans followed his advice.
They did impeach Clinton over that sex scandal.
And the Republicans lost that midterm election because polls continuously showed that Americans really did not care about the Lewinsky scandal because, in general, Americans have a live-and-let-live attitude when it comes to the lives of adult American citizens, and they just never really cared, contrary to his advice.
But it was Bill Kristol, as Andrew Sullivan said, Who took the conservative movement and tried to weaponize it as a moralizing movement to use state power to interfere in the lives of American adult citizens.
That was Bill Kristol.
Sermonizing against gay marriage and the evils of homosexuality.
Because that was what was demanded of him at the time to stay powerful in the Republican Party.
So that he could then influence it to become far more warmongering.
Now, however, Bill Kristol is a Democrat.
His only power base is within the Democratic Party.
And now he has completely reversed course.
On abortions, for example, here is a tweet from April of this year.
He's now a very ardent pro-choice activist.
Quote, access to safe and legal abortions has now threatened states that have chosen to keep abortion legal.
This is due to Judge Cosmerock, who is a judge due to Donald Trump.
Whomever Trump picks as his vice president in 2024, shouldn't Democrats run in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, etc. against Trump Cosmerock?
So now he's advising the Democrats to be aggressively pro-choice, just like 20 years ago he was advising the Republicans to be aggressively anti-gay.
Here is a tweet in March of this year, or March of last year rather, in which he is responding, he's citing a Washington Post.
Op-ed column that is by a lesbian mom who objects to Florida's, quote, "don't say gay" bill, which of course is the bill that the media gave to this law that had nothing to do with not saying gay.
It was just about what curriculum would be taught to second graders and first graders.
And Bill Crystal was deeply offended now.
He's now a gay rights activist by this law.
And he quotes that article, quote, but that, of course, is the pernicious intent of bills such as these to stigmatize and shame gay and transgender people under the guise of protecting children from inappropriate conversations about sex.
This is the person who was perfectly willing to wheel out the most repulsive anti-gay tropes and to talk about the importance of discriminating against gay men and turning the Republican Party into a moralizing, crusading party against LGBT rights.
And now suddenly it's woke Bill Kristol because they don't care.
He doesn't care about any of these issues.
These are things he uses to manipulate people to stay in power.
Now, Bill Kristol has become a conservative for a while.
Bill Kristol has become a Democrat for a while.
The idea was, what we heard was from Bill Kristol and these lying neocons was, look, I'm the same conservative I always was.
I'm just as conservative.
I'm still a Republican.
I'm just so morally offended by Donald Trump and his crude attacks on democratic values and his disregard for the humanity of others.
I'm talking about the bloodthirsty warmonger who killed a million people in Iraq.
He wanted to go around cooing the entire world, pretending suddenly to care about the virtues of democracy and Trump's attack on it by claiming, I'm still a Republican, I'm still a conservative, I'm defending Trump in the name of conservative values.
But the reality was Bill Kristol and his neocon comrades We're planning to join the Democratic Party before Trump emerged, as I said earlier, because they saw in Hillary Clinton a much more promising leader that would usher in neoconservative warmongering, while the Republican Party saw an anti-war sentiment growing.
Here from the New York Times in 2014, so before Trump ever announced his candidacy, let alone emerged as a credible candidate, is an op-ed by Jacob Heilbrom, who's essentially one of the nation's most knowledgeable scholars of neoconservatism and neoconservatives.
He wrote a book and has long traced their thinking and their strategizing and their tactical choices.
And here you see a Picture, with the headline of that article, the next act of neocons.
This is 2014.
And pictured there, on the left, is Hillary Clinton, and on the right is Robert Kagan, who, again, is Victoria Nuland's husband, and the author of the co-author with Bill Kristol of all those articles we showed you at the start, demanding regime change in Iraq and many other countries well before 9-11.
And the idea was neocons saw in Hillary Clinton the perfect leader they've wanted.
She was the one attacking Obama for not taking out Assad, for not arming Ukraine, for not confronting multiple other countries who cheered the war in Libya that they supported as well.
And here's what he observed and predicted about neocons and Democrats in 2014 before Trump.
Quote, after nearly a decade in the political wilderness, the neoconservative movement is back, using the turmoil in Iraq and Ukraine to claim that it is President Obama, not the movement's interventionist foreign policy that dominated early George W. Bush era Washington that bears responsibility for not the movement's interventionist foreign policy that dominated early George W. Bush era Washington that bears
Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, 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.
Other neocons have followed Mr. Kagan's careful centrism and respect for Mrs. Clinton.
Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in the New Republic this year that, quote, it is clear that in administration councils she was a principled voice for a strong stand on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya.
And the thing is, these neocons have a point.
Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq War, supported sending arms to Syrian rebels, likened Russia's President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, wholeheartedly backs Israel, and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.
Of course, the Neocon's latest change in tack is not just about intellectual affinity.
Their longtime home, the Republican Party, where presidents and candidates from Reagan to Senator John McCain of Arizona supported large militaries and aggressive foreign policies may well nominate for president Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has been beating an ever louder drum against American intervention abroad.
In response, Mark Salter, a former chief of staff to Senator McCain and a neocon fellow traveler, said that in the event of a poll nomination, quote, Republican voters seriously concerned with national security would have no responsible recourse but to support Mrs. Clinton for the presidency.
Still, Democratic liberal hawks, let alone the left, would have to swallow hard to accept any neoconservative conversion.
Mrs. Clinton herself is already under fire for her foreign policy views.
The journalist Glenn Greenwald, among others, has condemned her as, quote, like a neocon practically.
And humanitarian interventionists like Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations, who opposed the Second Iraq War, recoil at the militaristic unilateralism of the neocons and their inveterate hostility to international institutions like the World Court.
But others in Mrs. Clinton's orbit, like Michael McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a neocon haven at Stanford, I'm much more in line with thinkers like Mr. Kagan and Mr. Boot, especially when it comes to issues like promoting democracy and opposing Iran.
That was an incredibly prescient article describing exactly what the neocon tactic not only was then, but has become, which is understanding that the most intense and reliable pro-war sentiment resides not in the Republican Party any longer, but the Democratic Party.
And it was Hillary Clinton in particular, but also they're very happy with Joe Biden, who has been a longtime supporter of exactly the wars and more posture that they have been advocating for decades.
All the things about Hillary Clinton that article said was also true of Joe Biden.
He was a supporter of the war in Iraq and obviously is a very aggressive supporter of the proxy war in Ukraine, now their most important priority.
Now the one thing that I have to say that he did get a little bit wrong in that article was he predicted that liberal Democrats and the left would not accept neoconservatives migrating to their party.
That has turned out to be completely untrue.
There are a few exceptions, but by and large, prominent liberal pundits have welcomed people like Bill Kristol and David Frum.
And Jeffrey Goldberg.
And every one of those Bush-era neoconservatives into the camp.
In fact, they regard them as their allies and their leaders.
The most popular host on MSNBC now, with Rachel Maddigan, is the former Bush-Cheney spokesperson, both for the White House and the 2004 re-election campaign, Nicole Wallace.
And Bill Kristol, when he appears on MSNBC, is treated Not only as a wise statesman, but as some sort of beloved uncle.
Here is Ari Melber, who is the 6PM host and has been for many years now, who was so excited to have Bill Kristol on his show in 2018.
Watch how he treated him.
This is our last show of the year, as I've mentioned, and it's been a year when America was often divided, though here on The Beat, we do try to bring people together.
And many of you have told me one of your favorite pairings involves times when we've united conservative Bill Kristol, a prominent member of George Bush Sr.' 's squad, with progressive Fat Joe, the most famous member of the terror squad.
I remember the first time they came on together during our first year.
Fat Joe was calling in by phone to the control room.
We were talking about Eminem's criticism of Trump's immigration plan with Talib Kweli and Crystal said he was honored to even be mentioned in that conversation.
I want to say shout out to Fat Joe and to Chuck as well because you know they've been activists in this hip hop thing for a long time.
You're not shouting out Bill Crystal?
I've seen Bill Crystal on TV but I don't know a man like that yet.
Hey Bill, we don't know you like that.
I'm speechless.
What can I say?
I'm honored to be even mentioned.
I'm honored to be even mentioned.
And maybe we didn't know Bill like that, but this was the year that many people began referring to woke Bill Kristol, a tribute to the idea that people do evolve and Trumpism, like a lot of challenges, can create strange bedfellows.
And we learned this isn't just for political junkies.
Fat Joe told me his fans now approach him to ask about Bill Kristol.
And they clearly clicked when we had them back on the show together.
And Joe taught Woke Bill about what it means to be lit.
Aw man, I'm happy to be back with Bill.
I feel like we made history the first time.
It was huge.
It was a moment, you know?
We say that you was lit.
We call it lit.
L-I-T.
I appreciate that.
I'm just lit when I'm, very occasionally, when I'm on with someone like you.
I got my brother here, the dynamic duo.
Twitter loves us, man.
They love us.
Pat us the show through the rest of the year, whether we're not on together.
I'm just his echo, you know?
Like, his second man, you know?
You're his hype man.
That's me.
When you introduced us, he said, why are you the great fag?
Just a Trump show.
You know, either you're with him or you're not down.
I agree, actually.
I mean, look, it is, I mean, a very divided country.
Speaking truth to power.
You bring this face on the air, ratings goes up!
That is really one of the most repulsive things I've ever seen.
It is nauseating.
This is a murderer, a person who is demented, who is the single most shameless liar in American politics over the last 30 years who has enormous amounts of blood on his hand.
And because he dislikes Donald Trump, they're giggling as though he's some sort of pop star, which is exactly how Democrats and Liberals treat not just Bill Kristol, but all of the Bush-era neocons.
As long as they're against Donald Trump, even if they're against him because he opposes their neocon warmongering, or wants better relations with Russia, Or, in general, sees neocons for the evil that they are.
As long as they're against Trump, they become good people.
The Democratic Party and neocons are like this.
They are in bed together and they're happy about it.
And it extends far beyond a mere dislike of Donald Trump, as you just saw in that disgusting, repugnant video.
Over the years, Bill Kristol has not just become a Democrat, he has become deeply, deeply embedded in influential alliances with the Democratic Party and with its foreign policy leaders.
In 2017, when I was at The Intercept, a media outlet I had founded and that was funded Almost entirely by Pierre Omidyar, the liberal billionaire who now funds Bill Kristol, because back in 2013 when we started The Intercept, Pierre Omidyar was largely interested in press freedom and transparency and viewed the Snowden story very positively.
But then when Trump emerged, he became a fanatical Russiagator.
He became convinced that the Kremlin was hiding under every bed, that Donald Trump was the singular evil.
And he started to believe that the salvation for the world were former Republicans who were going to stand up in the name of conservatism and oppose Donald Trump on these trans-partisan grounds of common values.
Just because you're a billionaire does not make you smart.
You have to be a complete idiot to think that neocons who have been going around the world destroying governments and countries genuinely cared about democracy and that's why they hated Trump as opposed to because of the fact that Trump was an unreliable president for their agenda.
But that's what Pierre Omidyar believed, and so he started funding all these groups.
And one of the groups that he funded is one I wrote about in 2017 called the Alliance for Security and Democracy.
and And here is the title with the new DC policy group.
Democrats continue to rehabilitate and unify with Bush era neocons.
This union is far more than a marriage of convenience to stop Trump.
It reflects broad based agreement on US hawkishness toward Russia and beyond.
So I was writing about this group.
And this is what I said, quote, one of the most under-discussed yet consequential changes in the American political landscape is the reunion between the Democratic Party and the country's most extremely discredited neocons.
While the rise of Donald Trump, whom neocons loathe, has accelerated this realignment, it began long before the ascension of Trump and is driven by far more common beliefs than mere contempt for the current president.
A newly formed and by all appearances well-funded national security advocacy group devoted to more hawkish U.S. policies toward Russia and other adversaries provides the most vivid evidence yet of this alliance.
Calling itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the group describes itself as, quote, a bipartisan transatlantic initiative that will develop comprehensive strategies to defend against, deter, and raise the cost on Russian and other state actors' efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions and will also, and raise the cost on Russian and other state actors' efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions and will also, quote, work to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing
When it comes to this new group, the Alliance of Democrats with the most extreme neocon elements is visible beyond the group's staff leadership.
Its Board of Advisors, for example, is composed of both leading Democratic foreign policy experts along with the nation's most extremist neocons.
Thus, alongside Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor to Joe Biden and the Clinton campaign, you have Mike Morrell, Obama's Acting CIA Director, Mike McFaul, Obama's Ambassador to Russia, and they sit aside in this group alongside leading neocons such as Michael Chertoff, George Bush's Homeland Security Secretary, Mike Rogers, the far-right, supremely hawkish former congressman who now hosts a radio show, and Bill Kristol himself.
So you had the members deeply embedded in the U.S.
security state, the Democratic warmongers who now control the Democratic Party, and their neocon allies in a group designed to make the United States far more hawkish and aggressive toward Russia and beyond.
Now, as you probably recall, one of the major frauds exposed by the Twitter files was a thing called the hashed Hamilton 68 dashboard.
They're purported to track Russian disinformation through a secret list of 600 accounts and claim to follow that they accused of being propagandists for the Kremlin, even though they refused to ever disclose this list.
And the Twitter files revealed that on this list were a bunch of mainstream journalists who just happened to oppose US foreign policy.
And it was this group, the Alliance for Security and Democracy, that was behind this fraud.
Here's their tweet from August of 2017.
Where they announced our Hamilton 68 dashboard to track Russian disinformation on Twitter is launching today.
And you see this creepy imagery with the Twitter birds, a dashboard tracking Russian propaganda on Twitter.
Now, Bill Kristol has given up the fraud that he's a conservative who is angered by Donald Trump.
He's now admitting he's just a Democrat.
Here's a tweet from October of 2020.
From him, just filled out my early absentee ballot in Virginia for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Mark Warner, and Jennifer Wexton.
No regrets at all about this.
And then he cites his other tweet from February, not presumably forever, not perhaps for a day after November 2020, not in every issue or in every way until then, but for the time being, one has to say, we are all Democrats now.
Needless to say, it went well beyond 2020 because Bill Kristol understands that his warmongering neocon agenda can only be served by empowering himself within the Democratic Party and empowering that party.
And here he is in March of this year tweeting, at the end of the day, Biden has been pro-democracy, pro-Ukraine, and pro-securing our financial system.
The Republican Party is none of those things.
So Bill Kristol is telling you I haven't changed any of my views.
I'm the same neocon scumbag and sociopathic monster I was back in 1998 and 1995 and 2002 when I was funded by Rupert Murdoch and seeking one war after the next.
It's just that right now I see that it's the Democratic Party that serves the agenda and the Republican Party that does not.
How is it possible that anyone who's a member of the Democratic Party doesn't get alarmed by that and doesn't question it?
Why is it?
That all the neocon extremists, who back in 2002 were being called the new Hitler and the new Nazis by American liberals, now view the Democratic Party as the most hospitable to their agenda.
An agenda that they have never changed.
It's because they're right.
As Jacob Hopper said in 2014, they correctly perceive that people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are far more receptive to and subservient of their neocon agenda than the Republican Party is.
Now one of the most common tactics of neocons that they've always used is to accuse anyone who opposes their wars of being a traitor.
Bill Kristol is still doing that, but now on behalf of the Democratic Party, here in December of last year, quote, the anti-Ukraine right is an anti-American right.
His site, The Bulwark, that PYR funds, is now all about telling people that Ukraine is on the verge of winning.
There you see the headline, beyond the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the West cannot go backward and must go forward.
The same rhetoric over and over for decades about every war, we need to be bold, we need to be strong, we need to stand up for our responsibilities and go fight this war.
It's now the same script he reads from, but he's reading from it for a liberal audience on behalf of the Democratic Party, because that's who the Democratic Party is.
The scummiest, most amoral, most violent, sociopathic, war-seeking people.
That is the Democratic Party.
Now, in case you think that Bill Kristol has changed any of his views, except on issues he doesn't care about.
Like LGBT issues and the like where we showed you he's just willing to say one thing on the most extreme side and switch to the absolute most extreme in the next one minute he's willing to say homosexuality is a disease the next minute he's willing to say it's vital that seven-year-olds have access to trans-affirming surgeries and then just back and forth whatever neocons need to say to attach themselves to whatever body they're trying to control they will say.
Listen to Bill Kristol in his own words.
Here's a debate he did with the anti-war libertarian Scott Horton for Reza Magazine in October of 2021 after Scott Horton stood up and condemned the neocon agenda in multiple ways.
Bill Kristol says what he always says, which is that the real problem It's not that monsters like him have pushed America into too many wars, but not enough wars.
Part of the world, and we've obviously made many mistakes there.
I think one of the mistakes we made was not pushing democracy hard enough when we had real leverage.
I'm not a defender of the Saudi regime.
I was kind of mocked in 2002 when I said that I thought a consistent policy for freedom in that part of the world.
The only mistakes Bill Kristol ever acknowledges that he made is that we didn't go far enough.
We didn't have enough wars.
We didn't push the wars far enough.
He's saying there, we made some mistakes.
The only mistakes Bill Kristol ever acknowledges that he made is that we didn't go far enough.
We didn't have enough wars.
We didn't push the wars far enough.
And here he is even saying, I'm not a supporter of the Saudi regime.
In fact, I would like to do regime change there too.
I'd like to change the government there as well.
I continue to think, and I'm solely critical of both the Trump and Biden administration for being too soft on MBS, for example, for arranging for the killing of an American resident, Jamal Khashoggi.
So I've been – same with Sisi, same with Pakistan.
I would be – if anything, I think in the Middle East, which is so difficult, though, and which we look at and then get, understandably, shrink from the consequences of really a kind of even liberal imperial world, and so we tend to pull back and we tend to For understandable reasons, prioritize short-term security, peace, anti-terror, which is awfully important.
You know, it's not nothing that we haven't had in 9, 11, and 20 years.
And we probably don't do enough to promote liberty and democracy.
So that's his lesson 20 years after the war in Iraq after seeing the collapse of stability in that region and the complete failure that every single thing he said what happened didn't happen is that we don't do enough wars.
We don't pursue enough wars to spread democracy around the world.
It's the same neocon script.
It has not changed a comma.
Except that he now knows that the Democratic Party is the place to do that.
Here's one more clip.
This is again from 2021 just to show you that Bill Kristol is not a Democrat because Bill Kristol has changed.
Bill Kristol is a Democrat because the Republican Party and Democratic Parties have changed.
Middle East type wars, I'm uncertain about that future.
I agree with him on the other hand in maintaining the alliances in Europe and Asia.
But I would make this point.
Talk to actual liberals.
Small-L liberals, people who believe in liberty around the world.
Talk to actual Democrats around the world.
How many of them want the U.S.
to withdraw?
Even the ones who think the U.S.
has been unwise in their countries, and I've discussed this with many such people, often in the Middle East, in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia, don't think the answer is, well, if you just left, things would really get better.
Quite the contrary.
It's that we're not doing the right thing, we're not doing things carefully enough, we're not being intelligence enough in the way in which we promote liberty, those are all fair points.
And we're all, but the idea that somehow any people, real people around the world, whether it's, and I thought it was unfortunate that Mr. Horton repeated in effect pro Putin talking points about Ukraine.
I sympathize with the Ukrainian people who were invaded by Putin's Russia and the idea that- - That he can stand up and say that, that he's offended by invasions.
He sympathizes with people whose countries are invaded when he has done nothing his entire life except urge invasions of other countries.
And he distinguishes himself from Vladimir Putin somehow.
By saying he sympathizes with the Ukrainian people.
Note, everybody who opposes this war is always a pro-Putin propagandist.
He's very soft-spoken.
He kind of conducts himself in this very reasonable manner.
And it masks the fact that there's blood dripping from his teeth.
And there's blood all over his hands.
And what he's saying, again there, is that if you go around the world, what you hear is people like the United States to be involved in their countries.
Of course!
Why wouldn't you?
If you want a certain government toppled, of course you want the most powerful government to come into your country and topple that government, as long as they do what you want.
But the idea that people around the world are grateful for American coups and intervention and wars is something that nobody believes.
And it takes a real sociopathic liar to be able to stand up and say that.
All polls show that the anti-Americanism all over the world is due to the perception that Americans interfere in their country.
We went over a speech from Fiona Hill, a hardcore Russia hawk.
Who essentially warned everyone in American and Western elite circles that the entire world is now engaged in a confederation against us because of their disgust and contempt long harbored over the perception that we destroy their countries for our own interests.
These are all just lies that pour out of his mouth and yet as he does it, his popularity within the Democratic Party and his influence in it increases Because they have succeeded in turning the Democratic Party and its followers into a believer of the neocon worldview.
Let me just show you one last video just because the perception that somehow it's not the Democratic Party but Bill Kristol has changed is so preposterous.
Here he is in Iraq.
January 2022, again, saying that the only problem with the Democratic Party is we don't do enough wars.
And the only problem with the United States is we're not aggressive and interfering enough.
Afghanistan, people can differ a lot about the wisdom of what we did there over these two decades, but it hasn't ended terribly well.
And I say this with genuine sadness, knowing many people who fought there and who were involved in the policy and All the administrations that have had to deal with those difficult areas of the world and the pullout from Afghanistan was pretty pretty catastrophic I think for us credibility and of course afraid for the Afghan people
And even Assad in Syria, ten years ago, he was supposed to be gone, and eight years ago, nine years ago, I guess, President Obama said use of chemical weapons, a red line.
We haven't enforced that red line.
Venezuela, a dictator's in charge there, who allegedly was going to be gone in the last several years, and there was bipartisan support for that.
So we haven't been able to do what we hoped to do, that what we said we were going to do, He wears that little smirk the whole time and he speaks in that soft monotone, but what he's saying is actually deranged.
He's saying that he has a long list of countries he's disappointed we haven't gone to war with in order to change the government of, and that until we do, until we start basically Going to one war after the next, even more than we do, American leadership will be unfulfilled.
This person is a deeply disturbed individual.
He is somebody who craves the death and destruction of others for his own amusement.
And he engages in constant deceit and lying and propagandizing and always has in order to achieve that.
This is one of the most repugnant people On the planet, in one of the most destructive.
And if this is somebody who is not a bridge too far for Democrats and Liberals, it means they have absolutely no standards.
And the reason it's worth focusing on him and deconstructing his ideology is not because he's some relic of the past.
It's because he's very much at the peak of his influence in the present.
And the reason is that the Democratic Party has completely reconstituted itself To become neoconservative to the core.
It's not just Bill Kristol.
It's almost every single neocon from the Bush-Cheney era who now identifies the Democratic Party as their best vehicle.
Not because they're dumb, but because the liberals and Democrats who don't realize this are dumb.
They're smart.
They understand exactly how Washington is played.
They recognize the Democratic Party for what it is, and what the Democratic Party is is a mirror of how rotted and sociopathic and deceitful and thirsty for blood these neocons are and always have been.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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