In an unmistakably jubilant tone, the media reported a declaration of support for Kamala Harris from 100 prominent Republicans. The announcement made it clear that these onetime respected Republicans and past officials in pre-Trump Republican administrations were taking this apparently earth-shaking action because they distrust Donald Trump—both his character and especially his America First foreign policy.

The signatories were distressed that Trump had singlehandedly polarized American politics. They were, however, confident that a Harris-Walz administration would bring our now-polarized country back together. The defecting Republicans were also confident that the newly elected President Harris would call on them for a cabinet post, to provide “diversity of views” in American political life, something that Trump and his followers had supposedly stifled with their divisive policies and silencing of opposition. 

The concluding paragraph of the declaration, which tells us that while Trump “cannot be trusted to defend the Constitution,” Kamala Harris has “demonstrated” that she will do precisely this. Where to begin our refutation of this gibberish? Perhaps we should start by noting Kamala’s work as “border czar,” which resulted in letting in about 12 million illegals, over half a million of whom have proven criminal records. 

Perhaps her supposedly responsible defense of the Constitution consists of promising to give these future Democratic voters living accommodations, airline flights to their desired American destinations, and even sex-change operations, all at American taxpayers’ expense. Perhaps Kamala showed that responsible constitutional behavior her Republican admirers praise when she expressed support for the rioters during the Summer of Love, or when she famously compared ICE to the Ku Klux Klan.

One would have to be a caveman or lunatic to believe that the American left and its figurehead presidential candidate would restore open debate, supposedly by following the practices of the administration now in power. Our Democratic leaders are already putting their enemies in jail, from Trump’s lawyers, to pro-life demonstrators, to Jan. 6 protestors; and they have used the IRS and FBI to go after “terrorist” parents who object to the sexualization of their children in kindergarten classes. Democrats have also inflicted “diversity, equity, and inclusion” on our workplaces—that is, antiwhite, antimale hiring practices, which are now the norm within all institutions controlled by Democratic public administration. Meanwhile, “woke” corporate contributors to the Democratic Party have carried out this war on white males for personal advancement. 

Lifelong Democrat John Kerry let the totalitarian cat out of the bag when he explained that when his guys win in November, they will have to address a raging “fever of disinformation.” Apparently there are just too many unruly opinion-givers out there who, like Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables,” say things that offend the ruling party. For Kerry and other Democrats, the First Amendment furnishes a “major block to stopping disinformation.”  

The Republican luminaries running to kiss up to the Dems include lots of careerists, like Kenneth Adelman and Eliot A. Cohen, who feel snubbed by Trump, personal enemies of the former president like Dick and Liz Cheney, and social butterflies like Christopher Buckley. But we may doubt that any of the declaration’s signatories is thick enough to believe that woke Democrats will promote political and intellectual diversity. We may also wonder at their obvious lies about Kamala’s “engaging in orderly foreign policy decision-making.” Do these defecting Republicans really believe that “she has consistently championed the rule of law, democracy and our constitutional principles”? 

What is hard not to notice here is the continuation of a trend that began decades ago and which Chronicles has never failed to note. Among the newly won supporters for Kamala are recognizable neoconservative celebrities. And these addicts of public attention have not been notably loyal to those from whom they demand favors. In fact, most neoconservatives have had a foot in both the Republican and Democratic Parties, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re again moving with the wind.

Decades ago, the conservative movement sold its soul to those neoconservatives. National Review, Fox News, and other respectable organs of this movement ran to embrace people whom they considered important and who suddenly deigned to call themselves the c-word. The gatekeepers even obligingly expelled those of us who raised objections to the growing influence of their arduously gained VIPs.

In 2003, the prominent neoconservative David Frum ridiculed the Old Right in National Review (“Unpatriotic Conservatives,” March 25, 2003) for failing to support George W. Bush’s Iraqi war of choice. The magazine’s editor, William F. Buckley, Jr. (Christopher’s father), and his factotum, current editor-in-chief Rich Lowry, approved the commissioning of this vicious attack, although it was later discovered that Buckley was personally opposed to the Iraq war but was hiding his real views. Despite the favor Frum received from the conservative establishment, he had “second thoughts” (to steal a phrase neocons used in the 1980s, when they first rebranded themselves as leftists-become-conservative). He deserted his adulators to become a leading journalist of the left-wing magazine The Atlantic a few years later. 

Let me count a few of the neoconservative darlings of the past who dissed their conservative benefactors and went over to what we at Chronicles would consider to be the dark side: Bill Kristol, David Brooks, David Frum, Max Boot, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and George Will. The list could go on and on. Those former National Review celebrities are now working for the anti-Trump (and at least by implication, pro-Kamala) website The Dispatch or the even more abjectly pro-Democratic Bulwark. These defections are far from accidental. They reflect the direction that the authorized conservative movement, led by National Review, was taking for decades, indeed from the 1980s onward. Those who didn’t fit in with this new direction lost their positions and sometimes social respectability. 

It is, moreover, ridiculous to treat these multiplying defections as the eccentric actions of a few losers who just didn’t get everything they wanted. These deserters were pampered and lionized by their sponsors, who pulled out all stops, including suppressing their critics, to keep these people with them. The problem was the mainstream left could offer more scrumptious goodies, like better professional contacts and a larger social world; and so, the coddled darlings changed sides. These defectors didn’t have to make that move to remain journalistically successful. They could have gone on waffling and occasionally beating up on the populist right, like National Review does today, without openly scorning their onetime donors. 

But now that some of these defectors have openly changed sides, let me say that I’m delighted. They’ve exposed, for all of us to see, the rotten judgment of their erstwhile patrons. And it’s hard for me to feel the slightest sympathy for those who have been used and then disposed of like a soiled Kleenex. They fully deserve what they’re getting. 

While the conservative movement was “reaching out” to make converts from the left, it developed a two-tier system in how it approached its neoconservative favorites and how it dealt with those on the right who dared to criticize them from a lower perch. Although there were some figures whom Buckley thought counted more than others, well into the 1980s the conservative tent was large enough to accommodate a wide range of views and personalities. That changed quite noticeably afterward.

The disparate treatment of National Review’s current editor, Rich Lowry, and its former senior writer John Derbyshire, who were both accused of impolitic racial remarks, may exceed in its application of the double standard anything that Republican journalists and newscasters complain about in calling out the mainstream media. While Derbyshire, who is a distinguished mathematician and a verbally adroit commentator, lost a job at National Review for expressing highly defensible views about whom his son should not stop to help on the highway, a vastly happier fate awaited the far less talented but more richly paid Lowry, who committed what would seem a less-pardonable act. Lowry suffered no harmful effects after accidently uttering the N-word to describe Haitian migrants on the Sept. 16, 2024 episode of The Megyn Kelly Show podcast.

In fact, Lowry’s publication, which is awash in donor money, is now raising more green stuff by sending out fundraising letters playing up the supposedly “unjust accusation” to which its editor has been subjected. By now it should be apparent that the mostly undeserving Conservative Inc. elite can do just about anything—short of criticizing Israel or writing realistically about Martin Luther King, Jr.—without losing its exalted status. The rest of the movement is just there to celebrate them.

On Oct. 7, the New York Post published an editorial comment by archetypal neocon John Podhoretz. By the last paragraph, his stream-of-consciousness rant about the anti-Semitism he sees everywhere in the history of Western civilization descends into what must be described as utter anti-Gentile lunacy. He wrote:

The Jew-hatred that is the toxic and disgusting byproduct of the events of the past year isn’t anything new. It’s something very old. It can be seen in that Muslim “hadith” I just quoted, and in the views of anti-Jewish thinkers throughout history, both religious and irreligious—St. Paul, Martin Luther, Voltaire, Karl Marx, Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler.

I won’t even bother to ask the enraged author to produce anti-Semitic statements by the Jewish St. Paul, who fought with other Jews over theological issues but who by no imaginable standards was anti-Semitic. Although Luther and Voltaire made unkind remarks about Jews, putting them in the category of Hitler borders on madness. 

Needless to say, I won’t hold my breath until an authorized conservative gatekeeper chides Podhoretz for his faux pas. After all, he is a first-tier member of their persuasion.