The Neocon Con
TL;DR
The America First agenda stands for individual liberty, family sovereignty, and religious freedom in conformity with Biblical values. It is built on sovereign, culturally homogeneous nations minding their own business, with God managing the big picture. Unity comes from common obedience to God.
Globalism stands on government as God, with unity achieved by force of law and a single world government.
America First is the man who tends his own house and does not butt into his neighbor’s. Unless attacked, America First prefers to spend its resources on domestic needs rather than foreign wars. Globalists in America want America weakened and subject to an emerging global government.
Neocons pretend to be conservative by appealing to ideas like “defending democracy around the world.” But they are closet globalists. American intervention abroad drains the political and financial capital needed for domestic priorities like immigration enforcement, religious freedom, and parental rights. That is the neocon plan.
What does "neocon" mean?
The term "neoconservative" was coined by Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist, in a 1973 article in Dissent magazine. He used it as a critical label for former leftist intellectuals who had drifted rightward. The name stuck.
But the real story is who these people were and what they were actually doing. The neocon project was never a genuine conversion to traditional conservatism. It was a hostile takeover of the Republican Party by a faction of former leftists who retained the same messianic, global interventionist impulses they had as Marxists. They just swapped the ideology.
The Trotsky-to-neocon pipeline is not a conspiracy theory. It is a well-documented intellectual history. Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, was a Trotskyist in his youth. Max Shachtman, another Trotskyist, mentored many of them. The common thread was a belief in using state power to forcibly reshape the world according to universalist principles. When they gave up on class struggle, they channeled that same energy into "democracy promotion" and American global hegemony.
Now, if you are a lifelong conservative who came up through the ranks believing in limited government, national sovereignty, and ordered liberty, you might wonder how a bunch of ex-leftists ended up running your party. And it's fair to ask: How did they explain this to themselves and everyone else?
Enter the famous line. Irving Kristol, the man described as the "godfather of neoconservatism," once said he was "a liberal who was mugged by reality."
That line is a brilliant piece of branding. It performs several functions at once.
It makes them look like reluctant converts. Men of principle who were forced by hard evidence to abandon youthful idealism. It deflects from the fact they were never really conservatives. They weren't defending tradition, custom, or national sovereignty. They were importing leftist methods into a new vessel. And it shuts down further inquiry. "I was mugged" implies a traumatic, personal epiphany, not a calculated political realignment.
I call it what it is. The whole thing was a con job to take over the Republican Party. These people needed an excuse for why they stopped being leftists, and that excuse became the founding myth of a movement that captured a major American political party. The joke writes itself: a man who was literally never a conservative says he was "mugged by reality," and suddenly he's the intellectual leader of American conservatism.
And the punchline? They were against street crime but very much for state-sponsored violence on a mass scale when it served their geopolitical agenda. The Iraq War, the Libyan intervention, endless regime change wars. They were "mugged," all right. They just grabbed a bigger gun.
More to come on this post.