Last December, the Weekly Standard, in an article by Matt Labash on a mass wedding conducted by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon at RFK Stadium on November 9, offered a feast of vilification and innuendo. Though the Washington Post and the New Republic both lampooned the same event, Labash’s polemic had a more vicious edge. He ridiculed “the stumpy Korean who sports tacky boutonnieres the size of babies’ heads and whose matchmaking involves playing Fifty-two Pick-up with your 8 by 10.” Labash reprises and exaggerates the complaints of some defecting Moonies that

the movement engages in deceptive recruiting methods, keeps recruits from contacting their demonized parents and makes members sleep 11 to a van while traveling the country selling cheap trinkets and flowers, with no health benefits or salaries in order to enrich Moon and offset the costs of gatherings such as this one.

While a related piece by Margaret Talbot in the New Republic (December 22, 1997) depicts Moon as a religious eccentric “in need of some positive attention,” Labash expresses alarm at his megalomania, and particularly at his “authoritarian accents that would do North Korea’s Kim Ilsung proud.” He tears into “conservatives” who “jumped on board in the 1980s when Moon proved himself a staunch anti-Communist, funding the Contras and lavishing junkets abroad.” Labash also names some names—e.g.. Jack Kemp, Gerald Ford, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and former Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, all of whom are accused of soiling themselves with Moonie money.

More significant than the names Labash throws out are the ones he conspicuously fails to mention. A complete account of Unification Church funding in the 80’s and early 90’s would have to include the swarm of neoconservative recipients who took tens of millions of dollars they now consider tainted. When I went to work for the Washington Times Corporation in the mid-80’s, a neoconservative colleague, Cynthia Grenier, helpfully explained that I would never rise in the organization nor publish in the Washington Times unless “I learned to get along with Norman and Midge.” I had apparently offended this couple by writing something that made me sound “more gentile than Jewish.” The lady who advised me was entirely right. Many in high places in the corporation—e.g., Liz Kristol, John Podhoretz, and Todd Lindberg—were the offspring or hangers-on of the two families that now dominate the Weekly Standard.

The neocon affiliations of the Washington Times Corporation have dearly cost the Reverend Moon. They pushed his American publishing empire into a fateful alliance with the global democratic boosters and treacherous beneficiaries who are now straining themselves to make him look bad. As early as 1986, the American Spectator, whose staff and contributors had enjoyed Moon’s bounty, unleashed a savage attack on “antidemocratic” tendencies in the Unification Church. Other more recent attacks in the City Journal and the Weekly Standard indicate the utter contempt felt by neocons for “the stumpy Korean” who has looked after them. One might contrast this to the brief, implausible alliance in the late 80’s between the Unificationists and the National Front in France. Though the common interest here, anti-communism, was not sufficient to compensate for sharp ideological differences, Frontist candidates who took financial aid from the Reverend Moon treated him with unfailing gratitude. Le Pen himself took pains to express this sentiment, much as members of the American Old Right such as M.E. Bradford and Russell Kirk were politely grateful for the honoraria they received for essays published in The World and I. But such alliances with genuine conservatives could not have worked, as I suggest in The Conservative Movement, given the Reverend Moon’s announced plan to transform human society.

The difference in attitude is simple. Conservatives make an effort to be loyal to their friends and benefactors, even when they disagree with them sharply over a political or religious issue. Leftists, on the other hand, do not believe in loyalty—either to their friends or to their country. The neocon alliance with the Unification Church was fated by the presence of two overlapping agendas. Because of the nationalisms that both disguise in internationalist rhetoric and because both are wedded to gargantuan government, Unificationists and neoconservatives were, to some extent, natural allies. Unfortunately for the Unificationists, their preferred allies have turned out to be less than grateful. So far from maintaining a decent reticence about their benefactor’s shortcomings, neocons and their allies cheerfully make common cause with the Church’s sworn enemies, including the most famous renegade Unificationist in the United States, Michael Warder. On the basis of Warder’s volunteered testimony, the Reverend Moon was sent to jail on still questionable charges of tax fraud.

Recent neocon displays of rudeness at the expense of their Asian benefactor may be related to his declining value. With a new foreign patron, Rupert Murdoch, in tow and with rumors that the Reverend Moon may be dragged down with the Korean currency, the neocons have less reason to make nice to the Unification Church. Besides, many of the neocons’ fellow Jews dislike the Unificationists intensely. While I did not find a large Jewish presence among Church members, the organized Jewish community thinks differently, and Moon has been repeatedly attacked for pulling in confused Jewish kids. Moreover, the featured speaker at the mass wedding in RFK Stadium was Louis Farrakhan, whose anti-Semitic obsessions come up inevitably during interviews. Given other Moonie setbacks, this may have struck the neoconservative leadership as the opportune time to discipline an embarrassing patron.

My own reading of the about-face is more complicated. Contrary to a widespread fiction, rank-and-file Unificationists are neither stupid nor passive. Though their theology offends Christians and their agenda should disturb any Eurocentric traditionalist, most Unificationists I have met are civil, morally engaged, and intellectually more curious than professors of my acquaintance. When I worked for the Washington Times Corporation, my Unificationist colleagues worked harder and appeared less programmed than did the minicons, who were given more money but had no interest in ideas, only in “our positions.” The neoconservative diatribes against the Unification Church resemble the kind of backbiting heard when second-generation neocons congregated in the cafeteria of the Washington Times to make fun of the more earnest but less privileged Moonies who did not have the good sense to be born with influential parents.

Two closing observations may be appropriate. First, as a chronicler of neocon chutzpah, it seems to me unlikely that the shots in question were random. Neocon broadsides launched in expensive national publications are always acts of deliberation. They do not take place, as their victims have learned, because some pimple-faced kid is having a good time. Moreover, views that would upset the Kristol-Podhoretz rete, such as praise of the Israeli Labor Party or kind words about Germans, would not get into the same publications, except as a feeble attempt at balance assigned to a guest contributor.

Furthermore, whatever recent developments have fueled the neocon assaults on a longtime patron, the assaults themselves are an act of bullying. Neocons have a history’ of serving notice to those who help them but are not fully part of their community. Thus 11 years ago Commentary, in an essay by James Neuchterlein, brought up the charge of right-wing extremism against William F. Buckley and his progenitors. Though Buckley was commended for moving toward patriotic moderation “since the fifties,” there was a time, Neuchterlein pointed out ominously, when his views might have been seen to skirt a dangerous extreme. Such bullying is reminiscent of how Soviet communists dealt with Western fellow travelers in need of reproof A permanent aspect of neocon politics, this ideological bully ragging is a method of commanding unconditional loyalty from allies who are perceived as being on the outside but having nowhere to go. Rupert Murdoch, take note.