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Bill Kristol

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He loves that we get a little crinkle over our noses when we look at him like he's nuts.
They so proudly wear this insignia.
Parroting squawkbox
Pundits
Icon pundit.svg
And a dirty dozen more
You could probably [have] a reasonably successful foreign policy by just seeing what Bill Kristol is advocating, and doing something else.[1]

William "Bill" Kristol (1952–) is an American neoconservative triumphalist, pundit, "analyst," and "strategist." In 1995, he founded the now-defunct journal of opinion The Weekly Standard. He also was its editor-in-chief until 2017.[2] His father is Irving Kristol, the man who also fathered the neoconservative movement.

Irv was actually a shrewd guy who said conservatives had "nothing left" to fight for once the Soviets collapsed. His son, on the other hand? "It's not going to happen. This is going to be a two-month war."[3] "A spectre is haunting the liberal elites... able to invigorate a McCain administration and to govern beyond it."[4] "No objective evidence [Palpatine] was 'evil.'"[5] And so on.[6]

Bill appeared with regularity, several times a year, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he displayed good humor in response to Stewart's rapier wit.

He was the only significant member of the Republican scribbling class to actively embrace John McCain in 2008, in contrast to others (e.g. David Brooks, David Frum, and even William F. Buckley's only son, for God's sake!) who appeared to retain possession of their faculties.

He is also a noted chickenhawk, even after the Iraq debacle.

Trump era[edit]

Since the 2016 election cycle, Kristol has been one of the most vocal "Never Trump Republicans", and called Donald Trump a "bigot". He proposed putting together a conservative third party to run against Trump, but the plan failed due to lack of support. Everyone who neocons ever appealed to was the sort of bigot that Kristol claimed to be against, and no one else was right-wing enough to support neocons.

In 2017, Kristol suggested that Trump-era conservatism was genuinely pushing him to the left:

The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?
—Kristol in a 2017 post[7]

In early 2019, Kristol and conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes founded The Bulwark, a centrism oriented anti-Trumpism opinion news website, which per Sykes had a core mission of "pushing back against some of the trolls and grifters on the right".[8] By 2025, The Bulwark had become one of the more popular U.S. political websites on Substack,[9] with a corresponding YouTube channel that as of February 4 2025 had nearly 950,000 subscribers.[10]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. Comment by daved, "More Foreign Policy Problems for Romney." Dispatches from the Culture Wars. 2012 July 2.
  2. "Who Killed the Weekly Standard" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New Yorker, 2019 January 3, archived on 2023 April 24
  3. Jonathan Schwarz, Bill Kristol’s Obscure Masterpiece. Tom Dispatch, 14 February 2008.
  4. William Kristol, Let Palin Be Palin. Archived from The Weekly Standard, 8 September 2008.
  5. No objective evidence Empire was "evil." A liberal regime w meritocracy, upward mobility. Neocon/reformicon in spirit. Bill Kristol, archived from Twitter, 10 December 2015.
  6. Hi Bill did you know Irving Kristol? Jamison Foser, archived from Twitter, 26 october 2014.
  7. John Bowden (November 21, 2017). "Bill Kristol: Trump and Moore 'are bringing out my inner liberal'". The Hill.
  8. "Former Weekly Standard staffers find new home at The Bulwark, a conservative site unafraid to take on Trump" by Oliver Darcy, CNN, 2019 January 4
  9. "Top U.S. Politics Substacks", Substack.com, archived on 2024 August 22
  10. The Bulwark, YouTube channel, archived on 2025 February 4