William Kristol, onetime leader of the American conservative movement and heir to the neoconservative patrimony through his father, Irving Kristol, and mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, made news last week by endorsing Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election. Breitbart, reporting on Kristol’s endorsement, described it like this:
Neoconservative “Never Trumper” Bill Kristol endorsed socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, saying he wishes he was less “against Israel and all that” but calling him “a very impressive politician.”
Several once-prominent figures in the conservative establishment, led by Kristol’s longtime friend Jonah Goldberg, expressed shock over his choice of Mamdani, especially given the candidate’s strong anti-Israeli views. Presumably, Kristol should be backing the sexual predator and former governor who got rid of New York state bail laws before killing off thousands of elderly people by throwing them together with COVID patients. Cuomo should be his guy instead of the radical Mamdani, who calls himself a “democratic socialist” and has expressed sympathy for Hamas.
Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that Bill Kristol was once a sound “conservative” but was seduced into leftist madness by the siren of media fame. He was supposedly once a giant of “our movement” who, step by step, went over to the dark side. But already in 2016, Breitbart labeled Kristol a “renegade Jew” for not standing with the pro-Israel Republicans and Donald Trump. Being a conservative and standing in opposition to an all-pervasive left was just too much of a challenge for this scion of an illustrious family that did so much to raise the right’s intellectual and moral horizons.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member