Neocons and Neolibs: A Conspiracy of Silence

Below is my new American Free Press article, now un-paywalled and available to everyone; above is my discussion of issues raised in the article with John Friend of AFP, originally recorded for his podcast The Realist Report.

It is an oft-remarked truism that the United States is increasingly riven by acrimonious disputes between left and right. Democrats and Republicans are reciprocally uncivil in the halls of Congress, while in the streets, groups like Antifa and the Proud Boys regularly have at each other. More and more observers speak seriously of secession and/or civil war.

But at the higher levels of policy-making and information management, there is a remarkable convergence between ostensibly opposing sides. Neoliberals, those intellectual heirs of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and neoconservatives, the cult followers of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, purport to represent diametrically opposing ideologies. Yet they regularly work together—one might even say conspire—to advance the interests of the power elite that runs the Western bankster empire. Fostering the illusion of meaningful difference between the establishment left and establishment right is a key feature of their modus operandi.

The near-total overlap between the neoliberals and neoconservatives is most visible in their shared silence around the most outrageous state crimes against democracy (SCADs).* Two recent examples are Trump Administration neocons triggering the COVID pandemic via a biological attack on China and Iran,** and the Biden Administration’s demolition of the Nordstream pipeline.***

No establishment thinkers, whether of the left or the right, will even entertain the most plausible, best supported hypotheses about who was responsible for these two horrifically destructive events. In both cases, the question “who had the means, motive, and opportunity” has an obvious answer: the US government, or elements thereof. But neither neocons nor neolibs dare mention the elephant in the room.

In the case of COVID, any knowledgable student of geostrategy could have told you back in 2010 that the US would probably launch a covert, deniable biological attack on China within the next decade or so, in order to try to shrink the gap between Chinese and American economic growth. The ideal anti-economy bioweapon would be highly contagious but with a relatively low (1% or less) mortality rate. Its main purpose would be to force lockdowns and other economy-shrinking measures, and launch the process of decoupling the US and Chinese economies.

When precisely that scenario came to pass three years ago, the neocons (including the COVID bio-attack suspects) immediately launched a false-flag “blame China” campaign. Meanwhile the neoliberals, those eternal useful idiots, blathered about nonsensical bats-to-pangolins-to-humans fantasies. Censors forbade discussion on social media. Neither side even hinted at the most obvious explanation.

Likewise, when the Biden Administration committed the worst-ever act of eco-terrorism by blowing up Nordstream, everyone with eyes saw it coming a mile away. Biden himself even bragged about it in advance. Like the COVID attack on China, the Nordstream attack on Russia and Germany was entirely predictable and stemmed from an obvious US geo-strategic imperative.

But just as Democrat opponents of Donald Trump failed to hold the Trump Administration accountable for its COVID attack on China and Iran and subsequent pandemic, Republican opponents of Biden have refused to go after the terrorist president for his attack on Nordstream. A conspiracy of silence reigns, just as it did after 9/11 and before that the JFK assassination.

The neocon-neolib conspiracy-coverup entente is odd, given that neolibs profess to fervently believe in transparency and constitutional democracy and human rights, while neocons believe there is only one human right: The right of the strong to rule over the weak by any means necessary, starting with big lies and unchecked violence. How could two such antagonistic groups ever cooperate?

The answer, as mentioned earlier, is that the neolibs are the neocons’ useful idiots. The neocons believe conspiracies are necessary. The neolibs believe conspiracies don’t exist. So the neocons consciously design, carry out, and cover up the most criminal and destructive covert operations, while the neolibs incessantly bleat that such things never happen and that anyone who notices them is a “conspiracy theorist.”

Scratch a smart neolib, and you’ll discover a neocon lurking beneath. Joe Biden, for all his liberal rhetoric, is a gangster at heart. Like the neocons, Biden takes for granted that the powerful, himself included, lack scruples and moral limits. Outrageous crimes, whether for personal gain (like his “Big Guy” exploits with Hunter) or geopolitical advantage (like his destruction of Nordstream) are simply par for the course. Men like Biden, and before him LBJ, don’t need to be Straussian philosophers to come by their gangster ethics.

So why don’t the two gangster parties try to defeat each other decisively by exposing each others’ crimes? For the same reason a city’s leading crime families don’t wage all-out war on each other: It’s bad for business.

*On SCADS, see Lance deHaven-Smith’s Conspiracy Theory in America.

*See Ron Unz’s Our COVID-19 Catastrophe.

***See Seymour Hersh’s “How America Took Out the Nordstream Pipeline.”

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com