Claremont, Iran, and the Fourth Age of American Neoconservatism

America's Conservative Movement Can't Seem to Quit Launching Doomed and Demented Wars of Choice. Why?

Michael Anton Speaks at CPAC Hungary (Photo Credit: By Elekes Andor - Own work, CC]

How does this keep happening?

This is the question currently racing through the minds of many in the wake of Donald Trump’s suicidal-seeming decision to launch an unprovoked war of choice against Iran. The question is even more apt and, seemingly, inexplicable considering the perception of Trump as having run on an expressly anti-interventionist platform and as having first risen to prominence as a vicious critic of the Iraq War. Indeed, one of the most memorable moments of Trump’s entire political career, arguably the one that ensured he won the 2016 presidential nomination, was his confrontation with and humiliation of Jeb Bush over his brother’s role in the Iraq War.

And yet here we are again, stuck in a war whose justifications are plainly demented, and whose manner of being waged is the very definition of evil. Is it actually a surprise, though? Not really. While Trump (and Trumpism) is famously amorphous and hard to pin down, with Trump’s statements being able to be interpreted as meaning everything and nothing simultaneously, there had long been signs that a war with Iran was coming. Trump’s irrational hostility toward Iran was evident as early as his 2016 campaign, if not far earlier. However, many of his anti-interventionist supporters, wanting to look past this and instead focus on Trump’s (in retrospect purely opportunistic) attacks on the old neocon/neolib establishment, refused to see the obvious and likely inevitable trajectory of this tendency. This remained the case even after his foolish and highly risky decision to assassinate Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, and for many of them this willful delusion continues to the present day, even as Trump has led the US into total strategic disaster before their very eyes.

One of the most bitter takeaways from the Trump experience for many will be the simple fact that, in many if not most instances, American liberals and progressives have been correct in their negative assessments of Trump even if it was usually for the wrong reasons. The fact that Trump is a world-historic narcissist, conman, and buffoon is not in dispute by anyone serious, and it turns out that Trump had, in fact, also been compromised by a foreign government for years (even if not the same one liberals believed so fervently he had been).

While it is true that the foreign government in question, that of Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, manipulated and pressured Trump into the doomed and desperate attack on Iran, the blame rests completely with President Trump himself and his administration, including Vice President JD Vance. Trump’s imbecility and grotesque personal corruption need no explanation and, as I previously said, are self-evident to anyone capable of thinking at all, except perhaps to his credulous remaining supporters who have now cloistered themselves firmly away from reality somewhere on the Fox News channel (which has essentially, in its last and final stage, become little more than a version of “Goodbye Lenin” for American boomers).

For his part, Vance, while using aligned surrogates to signal an ostensible opposition to war with Iran, behind closed doors, not only advocated repeatedly for the war but also advocated that the administration go “big” when doing so. A piece of advice Trump appears to have taken to heart. Vance is a dishonest fraud who owes his entire career to Peter Thiel, the transhumanist billionaire with whom Vance has been employed (or directly adjacent to) for almost his entire professional life post-law school, a man who poured millions and millions of dollars into his political campaigns (which likely would have failed otherwise) and also mounted a pressure campaign on then-candidate Trump to ensure Vance was chosen as his running mate in 2024. Thiel also happens to have a number of significant vested interests in the Israeli state through Palantir, which has a multitude of extremely lucrative contracts with the state of Israel, including for targeting and surveillance software used in the ongoing liquidation of the population of Gaza, as well as for America and Israel’s current terrorist bombing campaign throughout the wider Middle East, potentially including the bombing of the Iranian girls school, a hideous war crime that resulted in the murders of over 170 people, the vast majority of them small children.

Thiel, and his large and expansive political influence operation, have repeatedly worked to move the MAGA right toward an unquestioning support of Israel. As Thiel himself admitted, after being cornered about Palantir’s role in the butchery of the civilian population of Gaza, his “bias was to defer to Israel” on the matter.

Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, himself a fanatical Zionist, has repeatedly mocked those who have attempted to oppose his attempts to whitewash Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and terror bombing of Lebanon and Iran: “The primary source of death in Palestine is the fact that Hamas has realized that there are millions and millions of useful idiots,” Karp chortled when confronted by a protestor. The “millions and millions of useful idiots” in question, no doubt, include the tens of thousands of Gazan children that Karp and his company are directly responsible for directing the murder of.

Karp loves to talk about “western civilization” when attempting to defend his company’s activities. According to Karp, the defense of “the West” is something that requires a constant stream of AI-coordinated violence and surveillance (which Palantir conveniently provides, for a fee, of course). As Karp notes, the goal of his company’s “products” is to “power the West to its obvious, innate superiority” and also to bring “violence and death to our enemies.”

‘Neoconservatism’ in Context and Praxis

The term “neoconservatism” has now become so loaded that it has obscured its original meaning and origin. This corruption of usage has become so bad that it has almost lost its utility in contemporary usage. Regardless, the essence of neoconservatism still remains. Exactly for this reason, it is necessary to rescue and clarify the term.

The term neoconservative is typically used to refer to political figures like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld (all dead now, it so happens) or political activists like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the late Charles Krauthammer, as well as currently more active figures like David Frum, Brett Stephens, and Max Boot, all of whom attempted to justify their project on the basis of the alleged inherent superiority of American liberal democracy and the belief that spreading this doctrine (along with similar concepts such as “human rights,” etc.) would lead, at least in the long run, to some kind of universal happiness and self actualization. “Neoconservatism” in reality, however, constitutes a great deal more.

The history of neoconservatism in the United States is complex and not without its various contradictions and nuances. However, a good place to start in attempting to get a handle on what constitutes the actual “essence” of the movement is Justin Vaisse’s book Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement.

Vaisse divides the history of neoconservatism into three distinct eras, beginning with the first neocons who famously abandoned the left as a protest against the radicalism of the 1960s as well as the rise of the New Left, whom they felt threatened by, and ending with the Bush-era neocons whose project, draped in the language of human rights and democracy promotion, culminated in the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, which were parts of the broader “Global War on Terror.”

Of course, there was and remains a good deal of diversity in what neoconservatives believe and who they tend to be. For instance, in complete contradistinction to the current popular usage, not all neocons were advocates of democracy promotion. Irving Kristol, for example, widely viewed as the godfather of neoconservatism, was, unlike his infamous son, not interested in democracy promotion, especially for Arabs, who he believed (along with American blacks) did not possess the prerequisites to attain a basic level of liberal self-governance successfully.

Also, while the majority of neoconservatives were Jewish, not all were (in fact, most Jews aren’t conservatives at all, at least in the United States). The movement was, and still is, represented by members of other groups as well, especially Catholics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Richard John Neuhaus influenced by the tragically mistaken (in respect to the relation between the American nation-state and the Christian religion) views of John Courtney Murray.

Still other differences abound; however, there are two main characteristics to actual neoconservatism which can be confidently referred to as its “essence.” The first is a consistent dedication to some form of Zionism. As Vaisse observes, “Not all neoconservatives are Jews, although a majority of them are (just as Jews were overrepresented among ‘vital center’ liberals of the postwar period and among leftist radicals of the 1960s), but all, without exception, are strong defenders of Israel.” As he observed (an observation which remains true today) not all Zionists are technically neoconservatives, but all neoconservatives are Zionists.

The second characteristic is a general concern with restoring the moral fiber of the United States and/or counteracting the perceived decadence of American society. This characteristic is nigh universal amongst neoconservatives and is frequently pursued (though not always) under the guise of ensuring the US remains warlike and powerful enough to be able to continue to act in the interests of Israel.

Combine these two traits (which the vast majority of the American conservative tradition has done since the at least the 1960’s), and you have neoconservatism.

Claremont and the Fourth Age of Neoconservatism

Vaisse’s book was published 16 years ago, and thus his third and last age of neoconservatism ends in the wake of the Bush years. It is safe to say now that we are firmly in the middle of a “fourth age” of neoconservatism: one defined primarily by the work of the Claremont Institute and its various offshoots and appendages.

While the age of Trump was initially perceived as a rebuke to neoconservatism, in reality, it was merely a rebuke to a certain kind of neoconservatism: one defined primarily by the work of individuals like the younger Kristol, David Frum, and Robert Kagan to say nothing of the plethora of liberal interventionist figures like Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland.

Trump’s first term was quite shambolic, especially when it came to staffing the administration, and featured a rotating cast of different figures, frequently ones whose views were openly contradictory with one another. Thus, it was easy for almost any member of Trump’s bizarre coalition to see in it what they wanted to see, with the features of its various disconnected ink blots forming, through the sheer power of wishful thinking, whatever shape the observer in question desired.

However, this began to change near the end of Trump’s first term, as the few institutions that had backed Trump early began to organize themselves with eyes on creating a new conservative movement ostensibly in the image of Trump’s MAGA vision.

The Claremont Institute was perhaps the most prominent of these groups and arguably the one that has had some of the most actual influence, ideologically speaking, in the staffing and general temperament of the second Trump administration. It was, for one thing, organized; for another, it was more ideologically nimble than such bodies as the Heritage Foundation, which took nearly a decade longer to fully crumble to Trumpism. The institute was originally founded as a kind of cult of Harry Jaffa, the famous student of Leo Strauss who argued for the essentially divine status of the Declaration of Independence and of the role of Abraham Lincoln as a kind of messiah figure in the story of American civic religion. Beginning in the run-up to the 2016 election, however, all this began to change.

This occurred in many ways, of course, but the most high-profile one occurred with the publication of Michael Anton’s The Flight 93 Election under his then pen name of Publius Decius Mus, in which he argued that supporting then-candidate Trump was akin to the famous act of courage carried out by the passengers of Flight 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001, after the passengers attempted to storm the cockpit. The essay, which soon went viral after its publication, became a rallying cry for many, otherwise respectable, conservatives who had secretly supported Trump.

Like most at Claremont, Anton is an odd bird; a student of both Harry Jaffa and Machiavelli, he is also known for having a fastidious interest in menswear that borders on the obsessive-compulsive, having famously spent hundreds of hours writing critiques of men’s fashion choices at the Styleforum, an online hangout for menswear obsessives.

In other ways, though, Anton was quite ordinary for someone operating in the conservative world: he spent time on Wall Street after his stint in the first Bush administration, where he had worked as Condoleezza Rice’s press secretary and played a significant role in selling the Iraq War to the American public.

After his time in the private sector, among the very elites he would later go on to excoriate under his pen name, he went on to serve in the first Trump administration after he had become known as a public advocate for an allegedly more restrained American foreign policy. Of course, behind the scenes he became known as an ally and advocate for General HR McMaster, an outspoken Iran hawk who has passionately defended pretty much every single military action against Iran throughout his career while also continuing to argue that the country was “ripe” for regime change.

During his stint in the administration in the second Trump administration, Anton went on to actually lead the U.S.’s technical nuclear negotiations with Iran that occurred, infamously, in the run-up to the 12-day war. A number of those close to Anton’s interlocutors, including both members of the Iranian government and civilians, were, of course, assassinated by Israel in the surprise attack that signaled the opening act of the war. Both Israel and the Trump administration went to great pains to make it appear as if they were in fact negotiating in good faith at the time and did everything in their power to make it appear as though there were still more negotiations to come (at which Anton himself would have been present) before any military action would take place, a ruse that enabled Israel’s assassination plan to be much more effective than it otherwise could have been.

While it is, of course, officially unknown whether or not Anton knew or believed he was actively engaged in a series of bad faith negotiations designed to lure his professional diplomat interlocutors into a false sense of security that would ultimately lead to the murders of many via the missiles and bombs of Israeli assassins, it is hard to believe someone of Anton’s sophistication didn’t know what he was doing.

Anton supported both Trump’s decision to exit the Obama-era JCPOA as well as his decision to assassinate Qassem Soleimani; in addition, he also vocally defended the Trump administration’s stated strategy of “maximum pressure” against Iran. Though he has been characteristically mum on the events of “Epic Fury,” and even if he would claim to today be opposed or at least skeptical of the debacle currently unfolding in the Middle East, it is undeniable that his strategy of continual and permanent pressure and uncritical antagonism against Iran set the stage for Trump’s war.

During a Fox News appearance in the wake of the Soleimani assassination Anton attempted to downplay the dramatic nature of the event while simultaneously praising its decisiveness: “I don’t know that I necessarily agree that this was a dramatic escalation. You could interpret it as justified retaliation for all kinds of things that you’ve talked about earlier in the program that Iran has been doing without much of a response. So the main point I would want to make here is the Iranian regime since 1979 has a history of getting very aggressive, getting used to not facing pushback, not getting retaliation, and when they finally do get pushback, they tend to back down…”

While Anton was half right in a way, the Iranian government under the elder Khamenei was indeed risk avoidant in general and tended to shy away from direct confrontation with the US (a fatal miscalculation that led to the decay of any and all forms of Iranian deterrence in the face of constant US/Israeli attacks and provocations), Anton hubristically mistook Iranian reluctance for actual weakness and lack of capability. What is more, he refused to logically extend his thinking to include any kind of prudential limits on American aggression toward Iran. Limits, which would obviously be sorely needed considering the US government was being run by a man of Trump’s unstable disposition, to say nothing of the doomsday fanaticism of the Israeli government and various Christian Zionist senators like Lindsey Graham, to which Trump was beholden.

While Anton himself has been wise enough to not comment on “Epic Fury,” (likely recognizing it for the impending disaster that it was) his allies at the Claremont Institute, such as Ryan Williams, Matthew J. Peterson (among others) wasted no time in celebrating Iran’s impending defeat and Trump’s inevitable historic victory on the eve of the war, as well as the impending humiliation of all the naysayers and “panicans.” They were almost stepping on each other in their drunken rush to take credit for the genius plan.

Williams and Peterson, for their part, are creatures of Claremont and have had almost no meaningful work outside of it or its various satellites, though, to be fair, Peterson did spend some time working at Glen Beck’s The Blaze. Unfortunately, his contributions, while there, may have brought that publication to an even lower level of quality and professionalism. For reference, in the run up to the war (a war which he championed) Beck released an exclusive and ground breaking interview with…an AI version of George Washington, which explained to the audience the importance of launching a regime change war against Iran.

It should also be remembered, as an aside, that Peterson (and likely Williams as well, even though he was apparently too junior at the time to have a public position on the matter) also supported the Iraq War.

As we have already made clear, they are hardly alone at Claremont. Indeed, as Peterson himself noted, Codevilla’s original argument has become gospel at Claremont and, by extension, in the second Trump administration as well. That argument — posits not that the Iraq War was morally wrong on its own merits but rather that it failed because it was, in fact, “too moral” due to its attempt to “nation build.” Put another way, according to Claremont, America was simply too nice in Iraq (in spite of being responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis); if only it had simply destroyed more things and killed more people standing in the way of its “interests,” through a sublime act of the will, America would have achieved “victory” abroad and social harmony at home.

As Codevilla (who was a highly influential Senior Fellow at Claremont before his untimely death in 2021) noted, in a particularly lucid passage in a 2002 response to critics: “So if we cannot take responsibility for making the peoples of the Middle East into other than what they are, if we cannot make them like us, what can we do? We can earn their respect by killing our enemies. Though we cannot make good regimes, we can kill harmful ones.”

This is the “logic” behind “Epic Fury,” a logic that was designed and constructed at Claremont before being imported, wholesale, into the second Trump administration.

In addition, Claremont has had a long history of being, from its origin, completely obsessed with promoting the state of Israel.

Harry Jaffa, the man whose thought Claremont was founded to institutionalize, was once described, correctly it so happens, by Paul Gottfried as a “hyperbolic Zionist,” whose dedication to the Israeli state was so overwrought as to make it almost comical. As Gottfried noted, “It was a total remaking of the Right into a subgenus of the Left, combined with certain biographical peculiarities that may have been drawn from Jaffa’s New York Jewish background, for example, a hyperbolic Zionism, revulsion for the Germans and Russians….”

Indeed, Jaffa’s dedication to the Israeli state was so extreme as to lead him to literally make Israel a litmus test for members of his cult (i.e., everyone at Claremont), one that seems to be essentially still in effect even today. As Gottfried explained:

Those followers of Jaffa I have come across over the years have been mostly observant Roman Catholics; and when they oppose gay marriage and abortion, their stands may have more to do with their religious backgrounds than their Jaffaite credo. But taking these stands has certainly not hurt their membership in the club, providing they also embrace Jaffa’s American ideology and certain indispensable positions, like ‘being good on Israel.’

It must be noted that, in practice, the Jaffaite Israeli loyalty test doesn’t necessarily require explicit Zionist self-identification (though that’s certainly not discouraged). It simply requires being, as Gottfried described it, “good on Israel,” supporting Israeli interests, framing American civilization as “Judeo-Christian”¹ (a self-contradictory fiction that has been consistently used to justify hyperviolence against the weak), treating the US-Israel relationship as implicitly and unthinkingly foundational, and, most importantly, never publicly and/or meaningfully criticizing Israeli actions.

In recent years this has manifested itself in an attempt to reframe the US-Israel relationship, shifting away from the Bush-era focus on evangelical dispensationalism and towards a more seemingly pragmatic argument for US allegiance and subservience to Israel. As Anton himself attempted to promote in an interview with Jewish Insider:

“But so many foreign relationships can’t be reduced to dollars and cents,” Anton said in reference to the US-Israel relationship. “America has allies out of shared conviction and shared interests… Some of these alliances that you have are simply because of a natural affinity to democracies that share common values, and so on and so forth, and relationships built up over decades. And you don’t necessarily ask the question, ‘Hey, what am I getting out of this today?’ It’s not a calculation at every step of the way in foreign policy.”

It’s unclear exactly what interests Anton believes the US shares with Israel on any kind of moral level. It is a nation founded by literal terrorists who appeal to manifestly absurd and objectively false theological ideas in order to justify wanton murder, theft, torture, and rape and which is currently engaged in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing involving the targeted murder of tens of thousands of children. It is illegitimate in every possible way a regime can be illegitimate. In addition, it has continually acted against the interest of the United States through a longstanding campaign of espionage along with an unregulated campaign of direct intimidation and coercion against elected members of the US government. The latter easily represents the most blatant and shameless non-military interference into a country’s domestic politics in modern history, and one that has not only undermined US sovereignty but also acted in direct opposition to its actual interests.

It appears as though the cruelty and barbarism of the Israeli state is part of the appeal for Anton though, as he argued in Foreign Policy:

…one never sees nations sacrificing themselves for other nations, the way individuals sometimes do—by fighting for their country, for example. In this sense, Thomas Hobbes is instructive: All countries live in the state of nature vis-à-vis one another. Not only is there no superseding authority, no world government, above the nation-state to enforce transnational morality; there is also no higher law for nations than the law of nature and no higher object than self-preservation and perpetuation.

For all its bluntness and simplicity, America First is, at its root, just a restatement of this truth.

And it is here that we find the core of Anton’s tediously diabolical thinking, even if it is, at least here, somewhat unartfully concealed. At bottom, Anton, like essentially all of his colleagues and fellow travelers at Claremont (at least the conscious, reflective ones, of which I admit there may actually not be that many in absolute terms) and throughout the administration, is an explicit nihilist, who believes, ultimately, in nothing aside from the thrill of contemplating a weaker party being dominated and humiliated by a stronger one. He is De Maistre’s infant who “smothers a bird with its hand for the pleasure of seeing that there exists in the world a being weaker than itself.”

This is quite literally the core of the entire MAGA movement at this point: an addiction to the spectacle of being vicariously a part of an act of empty, narcissistic sadism. A sentiment expressed best, if not eloquently, by longtime Trump advisor Stephen Miller. In an interview with Jake Tapper, he said that:

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Which is all that remains for the pro-Trump conservatives who have chosen to support this perverse, grotesque freak show of a war and the inherently and irredeemably corrupt entity on whose behalf it is being fought.

There is, in fact, a higher law that indeed governs the activities of nations and requires them to pursue higher ends beyond “self-preservation” and “perpetuation.” They were long ago stated by the true sources (Socrates, especially in Gorgias; Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the entire history of the Christian church, etc. …) of that civilization they only pretend to defend. Of course one should not be surprised that Anton and his ilk reject this, as is in keeping with the teachings of Leo Strauss (their actual teacher).

The Strauss of Faith vs The Straussians of History

Let’s be perfectly clear, it is impossible to assess the current situation without referencing Strauss. Indeed, it is now quite clear that one of the many individuals who is owed a major apology in this regard is Shadia Drury (On Politics and Religion), whose main thesis on Strauss is that he believed liberal democracy was philosophically incapable of sustaining itself and required a secret ruling elite of philosopher-guardians who would manage the public through a variety of noble lies—manufactured civic religion, foreign enemies, and contrived wars—to prevent the mass of men from collapsing into the nihilism that is the inevitable result of the long term contradictions of liberal society.

For years Drury was relentlessly and dishonestly attacked by various attempted Straussian hatchet jobs; the vast majority of these attacks ultimately amounted to little more than facile attempts to argue that Drury had “misunderstood” the text or what Strauss “really meant,” etc. The problem with this, as those making the argument surely knew, was that Strauss literally promoted the theory of “esoteric writing” or, put more simply, the idea that essentially all the great thinkers in Western history were, at least on some level, lying to their audiences because, as philosophers, they recognized deeper truths that were too provocative and scandalous to be accepted by the masses; thus, the need to communicate with a select group of careful readers esoterically. The idea that the man who became famous for promoting this hermeneutic would himself express his true beliefs in a straightforward manner is laughable and ridiculous. However, this presents a problem for someone, like Drury, who is attempting to pin Strauss down, as his disciples can always just retreat into the obscurantism of claiming that’s “not what Strauss really meant” in an attempt to hide the implicit nihilism which is, at the very least, an entirely logical interpretation of Strauss’s teachings.

However, arguing over the “original” intent of Strauss (a futile endeavor under the best of circumstances) is no longer necessary. The results, as they say, are now in. For the second time in a little over 20 years, his acolytes have once again been integral promoters of yet another insane and doomed regime change war in the Middle East in yet another Republican administration, and for similar reasons, not the least of which being the idea that a little war may be a good corrective to the decadence of American society (even if this reason, of course, may be secondary to the service of Israel). As Anton himself noted regarding war during a podcast with Claremont’s American Mind, Machiavelli:

“…says there are these wonderful aspects about war. It widens the horizons; it elevates the nations. It’s good for you to some extent to have a little bit of war. And if you say that today, people freak out… This is kind of evident in Machiavelli, though, from a number of passages where too much peace can be a bad thing, where if you’re never under threat, if you never really have to fight for what you have, you never have to exercise certain martial, dare I say, manly virtues. Societies will become corrupt. He specifically uses the word ‘effeminate.’”

Anton, of course, couches this argument by making sure to put it in the mouths of philosophers of the past and not technically his own, but he is fooling no one (at least not anymore).

Especially now that it appears Anton not only may have been knowingly involved in a diplomatic ruse designed to set up a series of assassinations of Iranian officials (while knowingly giving the false impression that talks were still viable and ongoing) in the run-up to the 12-day war and also uncritically advocated for a brutal and stupid policy of “maximum pressure” (a policy that directly led to Trump’s War in Iran) but also likely knew in advance, even before the administration started, that a major war with Iran was coming.

As his colleague Ryan Williams unwisely let slip during a recent episode of Claremont’s “The Roundtable”:

Yeah. Um uh right uh it recalls to me I won’t give many details about it because the people involved were all doing it uh not in secret but just you know none of it was supposed to be public but we held a briefing ahead of um during the transition at our offices in Washington DC and uh Mike Anton was presenting as well as some others. Um, Mike was involved in the transition and was possibly going to take a position in national security or state department or whatever, which he ended up doing, going to the State Department. Um, but Mike wanted to tell especially the young MAGA folks or uh, you know, look, you all should go into this with open eyes about what you’re getting into. And he was not admonishing Trump by implication. He just wanted to convey to them, you must remember that some of you are much more restrictionists on foreign policy. Uh but remember Trump has always been an Iran hawk. He hates the Mullas. Uh they tried to kill him at least once. Uh you know he doesn’t like their weird regime. Uh they’re a standing threat in the region. He has said they can never have the bomb. Uh and he’s an ally and a friend of Israel and that has been his policy. That was his policy in the first administration and it will be in the second. Now, if you disagree with all that, that’s fine. You can still go in the administration, but you’re going to have to put a lid on all that and do your job. So, just, you know, remember that.

Thus, we can see once more the fruit of Strauss’s project (which is the final, undeniable verdict on all of his endeavors and that of his deluded acolytes). As the gospel tells us plainly, “By their fruits will you know them.” Regardless of the pretensions of any of Strauss’s students or interpreters, the brute fact remains that his acolytes (in many cases literally the same people) have now been responsible, in the span of a little more than 20 years, for providing the intellectual justification for two disastrous wars. In the words of Anton’s former boss: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…can’t get fooled again.”

Conclusion

If there is any final conclusion we can now draw as the Trump experiment (and by extension the American “conservative” experiment as well) draws to a bloody and disastrous conclusion, it is the following: first and foremost, the phenomenon known as “MAGA conservatism” has absolutely no future and should be abandoned and destroyed immediately. The sooner the better. Perhaps someday, something will appear to the right of the center in American politics into which it will be worthwhile to invest, however it is unlikely that will occur anytime soon. In the meantime, every effort must be expended in the coming months and years to hold to account every single individual responsible for this mind-numbingly stupid debacle, beginning ideally with Trump’s family, with all its corruption, and expanding outward from there. This will assuredly involve a slate of legal prosecutions, but this search for justice cannot and will not end (or even begin) merely in the courtroom. This process of “truth and reconciliation” should also involve all of the individuals that participated in it, including the ideologues at Claremont² and the other organizations that made the war possible. This process of restoring intellectual and moral probity should be approached in a methodical and determined manner and not as merely an attempted search for some kind of superficial and cheap catharsis.

In addition, it must be understood that, whatever kind of politics emerge on the American scene in the wake of this disaster, the only viable and moral form of politics will be one focused around a clear-eyed, unapologetic, and ecumenical anti-Zionism for the foreseeable future. Absolutely nothing meaningful can be accomplished in the United States until the disease of the Zionist lobby (which effectively acts as an unelected government within a government) is finally removed from the body politic for good.

1. Of course, I very much realize including this criticism is itself a significant provocation and one that, in addition to the tone of the rest of this essay, will undoubtedly have me labeled by a few as some kind of “antisemite.” However, I simply believe it to be a true statement of fact and thus do not care. In addition, while actual “anti-Semitism” does indeed exist and has been responsible for numerous evils in the past (and still today), the critical mass of accusations of it that are hurled today, at least in most popular media, are done purely to attempt to shield the state of Israel (and Zionism more broadly) and its various supporting actors from any and all types of criticism. In this sense the charge of “antisemitism” today serves, in the vast majority of cases, as little more than a thought-terminating cliché. Over the past two thousand years Jewish individuals have contributed a vast amount across all fields of endeavor to civilization as a whole (“Western” or otherwise) and continue to do so today. I take pains to emphasize the term “individuals” here, as one of the worst aspects of actual anti-Semitism is its attempt to treat all Jewish people as an undifferentiated mass who are all, without exception, predisposed (genetically or otherwise, depending on the species of crankery in question) to various ill deeds. In reality, Jewish people, like all people, are a group comprised of individuals all of whom vary greatly in their convictions, perspectives, and motivation and should be treated as such. They also should be respected and allowed to live their lives and practice their faiths in peace, again, like all people should. In this sense it should be emphasized, however, that they are not special. They do not have a special right to dominate, humiliate, displace, or murder others, nor do they have any kind of special (much less divine) right to rule over modern-day Palestine (as are the claims of modern Zionism).

2. An objection to the above that I anticipate will be hurled my way will be that I have misunderstood and mischaracterized both Claremont and Anton to the effect that there are secretly among them many who are opposed to the war, that perhaps Anton himself was secretly opposed to the war all along (with his foolish uber-hawk stance on Iran being a kind of necessary cover for him in the Trump administration; meanwhile, he was privately plotting to install a “based” foreign policy if and when he became Trump’s national security advisor). While I highly doubt this is actually the case, if I am indeed wrong in my assessment on this point, then it is all the more reason for Anton and any others to come forward publicly and condemn the war now (while it still matters and not in, say, five years when it would be both easy and meaningless to do so) in the same manner as Trump’s former Director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center Joe Kent, to his enormous credit, already has. Given the gravity of the situation, anything less is unacceptable and not worthy of respect or forgiveness and must be treated as full complicity. Again, I would love to be wrong about this, but I am almost certain I am not.