William Kristol, onetime leader of the American conservative movement and heir to the neoconservative patrimony through his father, Irving Kristol, and mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, made news last week by endorsing Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election. Breitbart, reporting on Kristol’s endorsement, described it like this:

Neoconservative “Never Trumper” Bill Kristol endorsed socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, saying he wishes he was less “against Israel and all that” but calling him “a very impressive politician.”

Several once-prominent figures in the conservative establishment, led by Kristol’s longtime friend Jonah Goldberg, expressed shock over his choice of Mamdani, especially given the candidate’s strong anti-Israeli views. Presumably, Kristol should be backing the sexual predator and former governor who got rid of New York state bail laws before killing off thousands of elderly people by throwing them together with COVID patients. Cuomo should be his guy instead of the radical Mamdani, who calls himself a “democratic socialist” and has expressed sympathy for Hamas.

Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that Bill Kristol was once a sound “conservative” but was seduced into leftist madness by the siren of media fame. He was supposedly once a giant of “our movement” who, step by step, went over to the dark side. But already in 2016, Breitbart labeled Kristol a “renegade Jew” for not standing with the pro-Israel Republicans and Donald Trump. Being a conservative and standing in opposition to an all-pervasive left was just too much of a challenge for this scion of an illustrious family that did so much to raise the right’s intellectual and moral horizons.

When it came to Trump, Kristol of course went the same NeverTrump road as Max Boot, David Brooks, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and David Frum—all onetime leading lights of the conservative movement, for whom the prospect of winning fame on the left was just too enticing to allow them to stay with their old buds. But now Kristol is taking that a step too far, apparently, as neoconservative author Diane Ravitch attacked Kristol in March for “betraying” her “ideals,” which meant deviating from a neoconservative foreign policy in his latest incarnation.  

I’ve written prodigiously on the American conservative movement and have had to wait until reaching old age to see my criticisms of this feckless group win a certain mass acceptability. So let me note that any classification of the political adventures of Kristol and his confreres as somehow “conservative” should be rejected out of hand.

The conservative establishment, which once embraced turncoats like Kristol, should not be allowed to escape its 40-year history of kowtowing to neoconservatives while waging war on everyone and everything that its neoconservative masters earmarked for removal. Kristol, Frum, and the others dragged the conservative movement to the left, stigmatized the non-cooperative as anti-Semites and white nationalists. When they couldn’t pull the movement as far to the left as they wanted—or when other prospects beckoned—they ditched their generally servile allies for new leftist friends and patrons.

Since the 1990s, Kristol has been urging Republican leaders to position themselves somewhere in the center on social and economic issues, while pursuing an immaculately neoconservative foreign policy. In 2012, he gave an interview to The Atlantic, in which he exhorted Republicans to “dump Ron Paul” and “let him take his foreign policy views with him.”

Long before Donald Trump rode the legendary escalator to political notoriety, Kristol was sticking the GOP and the conservative movement into a neoconservative Procrustean bed. When he failed to get everything he demanded from his sycophants, he went his own way. Of course, there was no political universe in which the conservative movement could have retained its credibility while at the same time fully accommodating Kristol. Kristol, therefore, turned his back on his erstwhile donors and continued his career in the mainstream media.

So let’s make one thing clear: It was these long-pampered neoconservatives who ditched the conservative establishment. The movement never ditched them. In fact, it treated them as royalty while they condescended to remain a part of it. When Kristol chose not to appear on Fox News anymore, a special place was reserved for his son-in-law, Matthew Continetti, as a stand-in for Bill. The movement took a very different approach to right-wing deviationists without neoconservative pedigrees. People like Pat Buchanan, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and John Derbyshire have been treated as heretics and expelled without qualms.

Pretending the conservative establishment is good, but its once-coddled neoconservative aristocracy became unworthy of its support, is quite laughable. It was the movement conservatives who were dumped. Kristol, Frum, French, Goldberg, and their allies were able to manipulate those who desired to be turned in their direction because they shared the same ambitions as their manipulators. They all craved professional and social acceptability and wanted to be able to “dialogue” with important folks on the establishment left.

But, as this neocon master class got tired of representing their sponsors, they took their talents elsewhere. Although the neocon defectors were outspoken and sometimes monomaniacal Zionists, they knew that once they threw in their fortunes with the left, they might be forced to compromise that commitment. And Kristol is now paying the full price of his professional decision, leaving people like Goldberg confused when he has no right to be surprised.

This brings me to another problem with the conservative establishment. Because it failed to marginalize or neutralize those to its right as successfully as it had hoped, it must now deal with an unruly “far right” opposition that it cannot make disappear and which seems to be rapidly expanding. The neocon power brokers who took over the right about 40 years ago have failed not only to keep Kristol, Boot, and its other advisors from defecting to the left. They’re now seeing those “fascists” and “anti-Semites” they tried to shove into the woodwork coming back in full force to make their control of the conservative movement more difficult.

Speaking as a surviving victim of Conservative Inc., I’m delighted my enemies are being defied from the right, even by those with whom I often disagree. What exactly did the Murdoch media, conservative establishment, or whatever else one may call this oppressive monopoly of permissible conservative opinion, think would happen once those on the right whom it worked to marginalize struck back? Forgive my obvious schadenfreude!

Yes, I know that Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and others on the non-authorized right often revel in saying outrageous things—but they’re like the dissenters in former Communist societies who came out during the “thaws.” Sometimes these podcasters are truculently offensive, but their occasional tastelessness pales in comparison to the Stalinist version of a conservative movement that the neocons and their lackeys have given us. Moreover, those still in charge of that operation maintain an iron grip on the conventional conservative media from which they keep out dissenting “extremists.”

Like the left, the conservative establishment (which, in a sense, is an extension of the left) provides us with truncated accounts of historical reality that are intended to put the storyteller in the most agreeable light. Supposedly, this establishment is now combating “right-wing extremism” as it labors on to prevent further defections to the left.  But let’s not be taken in! As always, Con Inc. is trying to accommodate its sponsors while looking for debating partners on the left (Fox News has hired them in truckloads.)

The conservative movement also doesn’t want to lose any more celebrities to its leftist competitors, particularly the anti-Zionist left, but it is also deadly afraid of giving the appearance of sounding “reactionary.” Thus, the movement swings away at Democrats as supposedly the party of John C. Calhoun and onetime Klansman Robert Byrd, while castigating Islamicists and Hamas for being anti-gay. For their public-relations ingenuity, you can’t beat these self-promoters.

Although we may never have the chance to test this hypothesis, let me state it once again, since I’ve been posing it for the last 20 years and perhaps even longer. In my considered view, no neocon dignitary ever loses his standing in the conservative establishment unless he decides to leave it for better opportunities on the left. If any of these figures suffers buyer’s remorse and decides to identify himself again with the conservative establishment, he’ll be welcomed back into the fold immediately.

Even those who retain essentially left-wing views, such as Bari Weiss and Caitlyn Jenner, may become conservative heroes or heroines if they support Israel unconditionally and describe themselves (counterfactually) as “conservatives.”  

In contrast to these supposedly acceptable allies, anyone perceived as standing to the right of the movement is viewed as its enemy. Although Nick Fuentes and I differ in our views about many things, we share one common experience that cuts across generations: We both have been ostracized by the movement that Bill Kristol has now finally decided to kick to the curb with his support of Mamdani. Thus, part of me can’t help but wish the best for the mouthy Zoomers who have become a thorn in the side of the neoconservative establishment, which richly deserves what it’s getting!