By James Kirchick
Monday, November 17, 2025
Last August, the American Conservative magazine
heralded a scoop on its website: Republican Congressman Riley Moore of West
Virginia had sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to award
Patrick J. Buchanan—author and television pundit, former aide to Presidents
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and himself a candidate for the presidency in
1992, 1996, and 2000—the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
That Moore chose the American Conservative to
announce his nomination of Buchanan for the nation’s highest civilian honor was
fitting. Along with the journalist Scott McConnell and the Greek aristocrat
Taki Theodoracopulos, Buchanan founded the magazine in 2002 as a populist and
paleoconservative rejoinder to the free trade, free market, and hawkish foreign
policy ideas then regnant in the Republican Party. “Not all conservatives do
agree that the United States should engage—for reasons that hardly touch
America’s own vital interests—in an open-ended war against much of the Arab and
Muslim world,” the trio declared in the magazine’s first editorial. The mission
of the American Conservative would be “to reignite the conversation that
conservatives ought to have engaged in since the end of the Cold War, but
didn’t.”
The following week, Moore co-authored an article for the
magazine with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts elaborating on why
Buchanan deserves the honor. Decrying “neoconservative gatekeepers” who
“dismissed him as a nativist, a protectionist, and an antisemitic
isolationist,” Moore and Roberts wrote that “looking back now, his speeches
read like prophecy.” They pointed to Buchanan’s address to the 1992 Republican
National Convention, which he delivered after waging a bruising yet ultimately
unsuccessful challenge to George H.W. Bush for the party’s presidential
nomination. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Buchanan
declared, an unnerving assertion that would do more to help Bill Clinton than
Bush. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as
was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” Moore and
Roberts also called attention to a clause in Buchanan’s speech accepting the
presidential nomination of the Reform Party eight years later in which he
implored, “There has to be one party willing to drive the money changers out of
the temples of our civilization.”
It was innuendo like this that had prompted William F.
Buckley Jr. to publish, nearly a decade earlier, a 40,000-word essay in National
Review ruefully concluding that Buchanan, his longtime friend and political
ally, was guilty of espousing anti-Semitism. But to Moore and Roberts, it
wasn’t Pitchfork Pat who was at fault in this exchange but rather the father of
the American conservative movement, who had pushed a “spurious accusation of
antisemitism” against a noble patriot whom “history has vindicated.”1
Moore’s proposal to give the Medal of Freedom to
Buchanan, which the Heritage Foundation touted in a short hagiographic video
titled “Pat Buchanan Was Right About Everything,” won the support of
MAGA-aligned think tanks such as the America First Policy Institute and the
Center for Renewing America (the latter founded by Russ Vought, the past and
present director of the Office of Management and Budget). The leader of
American Moment, an influential nonprofit for conservative youth, recently told
Politico that “Buchanan has been revered by the under-30 crowd basically
the entire time that I’ve been working in professional politics.” When Moore
pitched his idea at the National Conservatism Conference, an annual gathering
of the populist right, it was one of the weekend’s biggest applause lines.
The Buchanan boomlet arrived at a strange time. On June
22, two months before Moore made his pitch in the American Conservative,
President Trump carried out a very un-Buchanan-like action: the bombing of
Iranian nuclear facilities. Operation Midnight Hammer came toward the tail end
of 12 days of fighting between Israel and Iran during which Israel assassinated
30 Iranian generals and more than a dozen top nuclear scientists. While the
extent of the damage inflicted by Israel and the U.S. on Iran’s nuclear program
remains unknown, there is no doubt their effort stopped the regime’s quest for
a nuclear bomb for the foreseeable future. Trump took a victory lap, thanking
the Israeli military for “the wonderful job they’ve done” and boasting that the
U.S. and Israel “worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.”
Aside from a symbolic retaliatory strike against an American air base in Qatar
that was announced in advance and incurred no casualties, Iran’s reaction was
muted.
The successful mission came as a great disappointment to
the American Conservative. In the months leading up to Midnight Hammer,
the magazine published dozens of articles warning of dire consequences should
the U.S., acting not in its own interests but at the behest of Israel, attempt
to degrade or destroy Tehran’s illicit nuclear activities. This was an
uncomfortable position for the magazine to be in, since it had been championing
Trump ever since the 2016 Republican presidential primary when he denounced the
Iraq War and rejected the GOP’s traditionally hawkish foreign policy tradition.
Whereas mainstream Republicans bristled at Trump’s threats to leave NATO, his
friendly overtures to Vladimir Putin, his attacks on allies, and his
denigration of the role of values in American statecraft, such blimpish
rhetoric thrilled the magazine’s stable of foreign policy “realists.”
Trump’s decision to bomb Iran thus struck the
paleoconservatives as a colossal betrayal. Wary of offending the president or
his supporters in the MAGA movement they hope to influence, the magazine’s
staff and contributors struck an odd tone, simultaneously expressing support
for Trump’s leadership while also warning that he was on the brink of
instigating World War III. For moral guidance, they invoked the wisdom of their
co-founder. “On Iran, What Would Pat Buchanan Do?” the magazine asked in March.
The answer, sadly for them, was the complete opposite of what Trump did.
Considering that Trump had been saying for years that
Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon, his taking military action to forestall
such an outcome should not have come as a surprise. But despite his having
thoroughly rejected their counsel on the issue dearest to their hearts—a
foreign policy of “restraint” that sees America withdraw from the Middle East
and abandon its special relationship with Israel—the American Conservative
continues to support the president. Still reeling from the unmitigated success
of the attacks that they prophesied would drag America into another endless
Middle Eastern war and embittered over how the bond between Washington and
Jerusalem has strengthened as a result, it is a publication in collective
trauma. Its stubborn inability to accept reality is driving it further to the
fringes of American politics.
***
Acceptance of a nuclear-armed Iran is a fundamental tenet
of the American Conservative. As early as 2003, Buchanan was making “the
case for containment,” arguing that a strike on the country’s nuclear
facilities “would very likely unite the people and regime in furious resolve to
pay America back with acts of terror and with aid to the Iraqi intifada, the
Afghan resistance, and al-Qaeda.” In 2009, Notre Dame professor Michael Desch,
who sits on the board of the nonprofit organization (the American Ideas
Institute) that publishes the magazine, said the proverbial quiet part out
loud, speculating on the “possible benefits of Iran crossing the nuclear
threshold.” In 2015, Buchanan told Sean Hannity that Iranian threats to “wipe
Israel off the map” were mere “beer talk,” a casual rebuff of the Jewish
state’s existential concerns that would have come off as merely ignorant had he
not authored a book—Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War—whose
thesis is that America intervened on the wrong side in World War II.
Downplaying the revolutionary Islamist nature of the
Iranian regime and the threat it poses to the West has been a consistent theme
of the magazine. According to George D. O’Neill Jr., another magazine board
member and a fifth-generation Rockefeller heir who helped bankroll Buchanan’s
first presidential bid, “Many of the horror stories reported [about the Iranian
revolution] were probably exaggerated or not true.” (O’Neill is similarly
solicitous toward the late Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi, whom, he alleges,
was the victim of a “defamation campaign” orchestrated by “the neocons.”) In
February, an article in the magazine called on Trump to strike a “bold,
transformative deal with Iran,” as if it was a normal country that had not
tried to assassinate him at least twice. The possibility that Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei would be willing to strike such an entente with the United States, the
author concluded, was “very real.”
The second component of the magazine’s crusade against
the U.S. bombing of Iran was drastically inflating the negative consequences
such a strike might entail. In this, the magazine’s writers were guilty of
perpetrating the very same thing they accuse hawks of doing—exaggerating the
threat posed by an adversary. “Launching an attack on Iran would be a reckless
move that could trigger yet another major war in the Middle East,” CATO
Institute scholar Ted Galen Carpenter warned in March. “Doing so with the expectation
that the attack would produce a rapid, decisive victory for the United States
at little cost of blood and treasure would be the height of arrogant folly.”
In an April piece entitled “War with Iran Is a Path to
Destruction,” O’Neill led readers down the path by which Trump would inevitably
blunder into World War III. “The pitch is familiar, isn’t it?” he asked
rhetorically. “A swift blow—maybe a few airstrikes on Tehran’s nuclear sites or
a green light for Israel to do the dirty work—and the mullahs will crumble, the
region will stabilize, and we’ll be home by Easter.” Ridiculing the Pollyannish
“old lie” peddled by “the usual suspects” that such an operation would “be
quick, clean, and simple,” O’Neill warned,
“The Islamic Republic has spent years preparing for this very
fight—dispersing its assets, fortifying its defenses, and cultivating allies
from Hezbollah to the Houthis. A strike wouldn’t be a surgical snip; it’d be
kicking a hornet’s nest with no apparent interest in an exit strategy.” O’Neill
laid out the likely scenario:
Let’s play this out. Day one:
bombs fall, targets burn, and the cable news chyrons scream victory. Day two:
Iran retaliates—maybe with missiles on U.S. bases in Qatar or shipping in the
Strait of Hormuz, whence a fifth of the world’s oil flows. Day three: oil
prices spike, markets tank, and suddenly we’re not talking about a “limited
operation” anymore. Hezbollah rains rockets on Tel Aviv, the Houthis blockade
the Red Sea, and militia groups in Iraq and Syria start targeting American
troops again. Before you know it, we’re waist-deep in another quagmire, with
the same generals and pundits who botched the last three wars demanding more
troops, more money, and more time. Sound familiar? Lyndon Johnson followed that
advice, descended into infamy, and had to exit politics.
While O’Neill acknowledged, in passing, that “Iran is no
angel,” the real villains in his estimation were the “neoconservative Zionists”
whose loyalties lie with a country not their own. “History is littered with
failed leaders who thought war was simple,” he wrote. “It never is,
particularly when it is fomented by people who do not prioritize American
interests.”2
A third argumentative trick that the magazine employed
was to conflate a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities with an all-out invasion
aimed at toppling the regime. “While the [sic] Iran would lose a
shooting war, it could cause serious U.S. casualties and regional damage,” CATO
scholar Doug Bandow averred in May. He further claimed that “an extended
military campaign likely would be necessary to have a serious chance of halting
Iranian nuclear development” and that “a desperate Iran might strike at
facilities hosting U.S. forces throughout the Gulf and seek to block oil
traffic.” The chaos unleashed by a strike could spread to other countries, as
“angry populations might challenge royal regimes with negligible popular
legitimacy.” Bandow faulted—who else?—Israel for the tension in the Middle
East, as it was “informally allied with several of the Gulf kingdoms and other
Arab states, with Iran their primary target.” Rather than an alliance composed
of the United States, Israel, and the moderate Arab states, “the region would
benefit from an effective balance of power.”
It wasn’t just the devastating response from Iran that
U.S. policymakers needed to worry about, but also that of its proxies and
putative allies. “Because we are waging a dangerous proxy war with Russia that
has been responsible for killing many thousands of Russia’s young men, it would
be foolish not to expect Russia to lend its considerable expertise and massive
defense industrial base to help Iran deal casualties to U.S. forces in return,”
a magazine contributor claimed in December 2024. Last June, a senior adviser
for the isolationist Quincy Institute named Kelley Beaucar Vlahos wrote of
“military experts who believe that a war between Hezbollah and Israel, which
has been burning through its own arsenal in daily air assault and ground
attacks in Gaza for eight months, would look nothing like [the] 2006 [Lebanon
War],” in which the two sides essentially fought to a stalemate. “Today, the
group has an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles, which could overwhelm
Israel’s Iron Dome without assistance.” Three months later, the Mossad launched
one of the most daring and ingenious intelligence operations in the history of
modern espionage, “Operation Grim Beeper,” in which at least 5,000 detonable
pagers that it sold to Hezbollah exploded over the course of two days, killing
more than 40 people and wounding 3,500. Not long after that, the Israeli Air
Force assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who had been living in
hiding for decades. Today, the Iranian proxy is leaderless, and for the first
time in its miserable, more than 40-year existence, it might actually be forced
to disarm.
As an American military strike on Iran’s nuclear program
drew closer, the tone of the American Conservative grew increasingly
desperate. “Now is his time, and [Trump] doesn’t want Israel—which never wanted
a deal with Iran to begin with—to stand in his way,” Vlahos wrote on May 30, in
the vain hope that Trump would brush aside the noisome Israelis and strike a
deal with the Mullahs. When Israel launched its Operation Rising Lion on June
13, destroying Iranian air defenses and eliminating senior military commanders,
the magazine’s writers broke into a collective panic. “While the course we are
on staves off the already distant prospect of Iranian hegemony, it will egg on
Islamic terrorism and tempt hostile action on the sea lanes as Iran and its
proxies seek leverage against their enemies,” managing editor Jude Russo
fretted. Speaking on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast about the supposed
Zionist grip on Trump, American Conservative executive editor Curt Mills
stated that “if Trump doesn’t want his legacy to be doing the will of these
people and being forgotten in American history…he’s going to have to put his
foot down here.” Two days later, while praising Trump’s “instinct” to avoid
wars, senior writer Sumantra Maitra wrote that it was nonetheless “baffling why
he failed to seal a nuclear deal with Tehran, given that the Iranians agreed
not to produce nuclear weapons,” adding that “Tehran now has an enormous amount
of conventional weapons in stock for overwhelming Israel.”
On June 21, the day before Operation Midnight Hammer
commenced, a contributing editor of the magazine pleaded, “President Trump
should heed the warnings of good-faith opponents of escalation in the ongoing
crisis—including MAGA luminaries Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon—and not get
dragged into another Mideast Forever War. Failure to do so represents a roll of
the dice on the future of everything Trump and the America First movement have
achieved since 2015.” Trump, alas, did not take heed, and hours after the
bombing, a writer for the American Conservative expressed the fears of
his ideological confrères: “The United States is barreling toward full-scale
war with Iran.”
***
Regardless of how far Operation Midnight Hammer set back
the Iranian nuclear program, it’s safe to say that not a single negative
outcome the American Conservative predicted has come true. The Iranians
didn’t respond with missiles aimed at American military bases, but with angry
statements, bellicose murals depicting bombs raining down on Tel Aviv, and an
increase at Tehran’s airport in the number of posters of martyred generals.
There were no attempts to close down international shipping lanes. Russia
didn’t intervene. There weren’t even any mass rallies calling for death to
Israel and America, a regular feature of life under the Islamic Republic since
its instantiation more than four decades ago. Indeed, so subdued was the
Iranian response that even ardent supporters of the bombing expressed their
pleasant surprise.
In response to the double humiliation of failing to
persuade Trump not to bomb Iran and then, once he did, witnessing their
predictions of World War III fall flat, the American Conservative did
its best to cope. One would think that the absence of a kinetic Iranian
retaliation against American military assets, our allies, and commercial
shipping vessels would be cause for joy among self-proclaimed American
conservatives, but the crew at the American Conservative reacted to the
American-Israeli victory like sore losers. Senior editor Andrew Day sourly
fumed that Israel “instigated” the war and that “its campaign, though
impressive, failed to eliminate the Iranian threat, and probably made it worse
in the long run.” Other reactions verged on the silly. “After Iran, Will Egypt
Be Next?” a visiting scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
inanely asked, insinuating that Israel might attack the neighbor with whom it
has been at peace for almost five decades.
The magazine’s September/October cover story, “Can
Trump’s Iran Policy Be Saved?,” read like a flashback to the early years of the
George W. Bush administration, what with its dark imaginings of shadowy
neoconservatives manipulating America’s elected officials like puppets. “In
1917, only a few thousand Bolsheviks had seized control of the entire Russian
Empire,” authors Scott Horton and John Weeks wrote. “Less than a century later,
it only took approximately 100 neoconservatives to dominate the foreign policy
of the most powerful nation that has ever existed.” (To paleoconservatives,
anyone who doesn’t support closing all American military bases abroad, cutting
the defense budget in half, normalizing relations with North Korea, awarding
Vladimir Putin the entirety of Eastern Europe, and placing economic sanctions
on Israel is a “neoconservative.”) Rather than setting back the Iranian nuclear
program, the authors argued, Operations Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer
actually made all-out war more likely. “Now that [Trump] has accepted
Netanyahu’s standard that any Iranian domestic nuclear enrichment capability is
the equivalent of an active nuclear weapons program, forbidden and a target for
renewed U.S. air attacks, the president has trapped himself and the rest of us
into an ongoing cycle of escalation,” they wrote. “Failure to secure a
diplomatic solution to the current crisis will almost certainly result in a
full-fledged war and the destruction of Trump’s presidency.”
Justifying isolationism is easier when every overseas
conflict can be explained as the fault of America and its allies, which in turn
necessitates whitewashing one’s adversaries. It’s a task that the American
Conservative performs on a daily basis. “America’s Forever Enemies Want
Peace,” Day declared at the start of the United Nations General Assembly this
past September. After Israel wiped out most of the Houthi leadership in Yemen,
Harrison Berger, a former employee of the treason-inducing Glenn Greenwald,
rose to the defense of the Iranian-backed terrorist outfit. “Their central
grievance is the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide and famine currently being
perpetrated against the Palestinians in Gaza, with whom the Houthis identify—because,
as political scientist Norman Finkelstein explains, ‘what was done to Gaza was
done to them,’” he wrote. Berger concluded his stirring apologia for terrorism
and brigandry on the high seas with a testament to the Houthis’ independence
from the Mullah’s regime. “It is precisely their shared suffering—not foreign
directives—that explains why the Houthis have been more willing than any other
group in the region to take up arms for Gaza, and why Washington’s blank-check
support for Israel’s wars will not stop them.”
A corollary to rationalizing terrorism against the Jewish
state is resentment at how Jewish suffering is invoked to support its
self-defense. In a piece entitled “Washington Really Is Israeli-Occupied
Territory,” O’Neill returned to the 12-Day War’s supposed inciting incident,
the October 7, 2023, Hamas pogrom. The Israeli government, he suggested, had
foreknowledge of the massacre and allowed it to happen. “Some, including
concerned Jews in and out of Israel, have even questioned whether the Netanyahu
government was truly caught off guard,” he slyly wrote. But even if the act of
macabre savagery wasn’t a false flag, O’Neill argued in a subsequent article,
the Israeli response proved beyond all doubt that the country founded on the
ashes of the Holocaust is no better than the regime that perpetrated it. In an
open letter to his fellow Baby Boomers, O’Neill angrily scolded that their
grandchildren will never forgive them for enabling “the Gaza Holocaust.”
Berger took the fixation with Jewish duplicity a step
further. Decrying “The October 7 Industry,” he assailed “the loose network of
politicians, Zionist billionaires, lobby groups, and media outlets that have
transformed a single day’s violence into a permanent instrument for Israeli
power.” He went on to lament “Americans spoonfed the state narrative about
October 7,” endorsed a conspiracy theory that the IDF murdered its own citizens
to prevent them from being taken captive by Hamas, and scornfully referenced
the Hebrew word hasbara without translation (it roughly means
“explaining”), a sure sign that the writer is an anti-Semite. Portraying Jews
as lying about or conniving in their own suffering to attract sympathy in their
quest for money and power is a form of Holocaust denial, and Berger’s sickening
article is a form of it.
***
The more one reads the American Conservative and
listens to its contributors, the more one realizes how deeply ingrained the
idea of Jewish perfidy is in the magazine’s Weltanschauung. In 2004, American
Ideas Institute board member Michael Desch published an article headlined
“Abusing the Holocaust.” In it, he criticized the “overused analogy” that
likens present-day political dilemmas to the industrial-scale murder of 6
million Jews. Desch is certainly right that inappropriate invocations of the
Holocaust, like comparisons of contemporary political figures to Adolf Hitler,
are all too common. But Desch didn’t concern himself with the type of Holocaust
minimization that manifests itself in abortion protesters likening Planned
Parenthood clinics to Auschwitz or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling
illegal immigrant detention centers “concentration camps” while tearfully
pledging “never again.” No, what bothered Desch was the use of the “Holocaust
analogy” where it is most appropriate: situations concerning attempts to
exterminate Jews.
To Desch’s dismay, memory of the Holocaust, and in
particular the indifference that allowed it to happen, establishes an
“obligation that many contemporary policymakers and pundits feel to support the
state of Israel unreservedly and intervene indiscriminately in humanitarian
crises around the world.” In the eyes of the paleoconservative, the cursed vow
“never again” is to blame not only for America’s backing of Israel, but for a
“distorted U.S. foreign policy in other areas of the world.” Desch even found a
convoluted way to blame the Jews for the Serbian-perpetrated genocide of
Bosnian Muslims: “The international community’s never-again rhetoric led
Muslims to believe they would be protected in safe areas like Srebrenica.
Unfortunately this may have lulled about 7,000 Muslim men and boys into a false
sense of security and discouraged them from getting out of harm’s way before it
was too late.”
There is no greater rebuke to isolationism than
Auschwitz. Isolationists know this, which is why they spend so much time
relitigating World War II. It’s also why so many isolationists harbor antipathy
toward Jews, the Holocaust’s chief victims and the stewards of its memory. The
Jews are a living reminder of what happens when evil is not confronted, and
their survival is deeply offensive to those who prefer not to confront the evil
in our world. This accounts, in part, for the paroxysms of rage that Israel’s
defensive war to eliminate Hamas sent so much of the world into, inverting
victim and perpetrator with libelous claims that the Jewish state had
orchestrated a “famine” to commit “genocide” against the Palestinians.
At the same National Conservatism Conference where
Representative Riley Moore aired his proposal to present Pat Buchanan with the
Medal of Freedom, American Conservative executive editor Curt Mills
participated in a debate, “America and the Israel-Iran War.” Mills began his
opening remarks by referring to his opponent as his “co-belligerent” (a synonym
for “ally”), an error that would set the tone for the rest of his petulant
remarks. The chief obstacle to peace breaking out in the Middle East, he
argued, was not Islamist death cults like Hamas, the Islamic Republic of Iran,
or the pre-modern sectarian and tribal conflicts that afflict so many countries
throughout the region, but rather the Israel lobby. “My own journalism,
reporting, and posting on one former senior administration official’s social
media website have been defined by strident intra-right criticism of the
leadership of the Zionist project’s inappropriate and dangerous political
efforts in this country, particularly, and escalatingly [sic], and
desperately, and ceaselessly on the conservative side,” he said, in a typically
long-winded and pretentious sentence.3
Explaining why he had become a “hater” of the U.S.-Israel
relationship, Mills invoked his late “mentor and surrogate father,” Mark Perry,
a journalist who served as an adviser to Yasir Arafat. Unlike Perry, Mills was
not animated by a desire to “screw Israel,” but rather by his alarm at how the
alliance had become “a world-historical, perhaps the world-historical
case, of the tail wagging the dog.” The most powerful nation in the world by
several orders of magnitude, Mills explained, has been reduced to “Uncle
Sucker” by the Jewish state, which manipulates America’s democratically elected
leaders for its own selfish benefit. “As for Israel itself and its recent
conduct,” Mills concluded in a run-on sentence as grammatically maladroit as it
was morally grotesque, “which I as a U.S. nationalist feel I have a small vote
in, since I remain an unwilling shareholder in that country and its activities,
given U.S. military support and diplomatic largesse for Jerusalem, as my late
mentor said, referring to the experience of the Shoah: ‘They know better.’”
Paleoconservatives and their allies on the isolationist
left routinely slur those who disagree with them as “warmongers.” Once a staple
of Communist propaganda to describe opponents of the Soviet Union, today it is
liberally applied to anyone, liberal or conservative, who believes in American
global leadership, the importance of alliances, the promotion of human rights
and democracy, and the judicious use of military force to further American
interests. Far more dangerous than the dreaded warmongers are the fearmongers,
who obfuscate and outright deny the depravities of the West’s adversaries,
denigrate our allies, and grossly exaggerate the consequences of confronting
threats before they metastasize.
William F. Buckley Jr. dealt a serious blow to Pat
Buchanan’s reputation when he adjudged him guilty of anti-Semitism; it’s a
black mark that a Presidential Medal of Freedom is unlikely to cover up. For
all the talk about how Trump’s “America First” agenda owes so much to Buchanan,
the fulfillment of his vow to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon by
military means is a massive rebuke to the neo-Buchananites at the American
Conservative and other paleoconservative redoubts. As the president they
championed for his foreign policy of “restraint” asserts U.S. military
dominance in the Middle East, strengthens America’s relationship with Israel,
and effects even symbolic changes such as renaming the Department of Defense as
the Department of War, all they can do is shriek at their own impotence—and
point fingers at “the usual suspects” they deem responsible for their
relegation to the ideological gutter. Sickened by American military might, insouciant
at the prospect of an Iranian nuclear bomb, instinctively assuming the good
faith of the country’s sworn enemies, and obsessed with Jews, the American
Conservative is not worthy of its name.
1 In October,
Roberts revealed his true colors, releasing a video in defense of the podcaster
Tucker Carlson conducting a friendly interview with the Holocaust denier and
white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes during which Fuentes spoke of “the
historic animosity between the Jewish people and the Europeans,” “neocon Jewish
types behind the Iraq war,” and claimed that “the main challenge” to American
national harmony is “organized Jewry.” In his video, Roberts said,
“Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign
government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or
from their mouthpieces in Washington,” and declared that critics of Carlson
were part of a “venomous coalition” whose “attempt to cancel him will fail.”
2 Prioritizing American interests is
a subject O’Neill knows very well, having been named “U.S. Person 2” in the
2018 indictment of a Russian spy for whom he helped organize “friendship and
dialogue dinners” with American policymakers.
3 Mills’s concern about
nefarious foreign influence apparently doesn’t extend to the National Iranian
American Council, the Islamic Republic’s de facto lobby in Washington at whose
conference he has spoken.
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