I was never one of them. I have no connections with them. I disavowed them a long time ago, even when this site was being publicly touted by them as one of the 100 Most Popular Conservative sites on the Internet. I was number 52 back then, ahead of The American Spectator, Human Events, and American Conservative. And in 2015, I exposed the false posturings of “conservativism” as a coherent political philosophy or substantive ideology in my book with John Red Eagle, Cuckservative. This is relevant because The Tree of Woe recently considered the way in which the direction of the disavowals is now changing:
Disavowal has a long tradition on the Right. For 75 years, right-wing moderates have disavowed right-wing extremists to make sure they’re not associated with them or their beliefs. It began in 1950, when Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith disavowed Republican Senator Joe McCarthy in her “Declaration of Conscience,” leading the way for the Senate to disavow Senator McCarthy entirely in 1954.
Disavowal became formal policy in 1955, when William F. Buckley begin purging the “far right.” A prolific disavower, Buckley famously repudiated Robert Welch in 1962, Revilo Oliver in 1966, Pat Buchanan in 1991, and finally Sam Francis in 1995. Buckley’s successor, Rich Lowry, disavowed Ann Coulter in 2001, and John Derbyshire in 2012.
Disavowal reached its peak in February 2016, when the entire conservative establishment came together to disavow Donald Trump in an essay series on National Review that included posts by Glenn Beck (The Blaze), David Boaz (Cato), L. Brent Bozel III (Media Research Center), Mona Charen (National Review), Ben Domenech (The Federalist), Erick Erickson (The Resurgent), Steven F. Hayward (Reagan Professor at Pepperdine), Mark Helprin (author), Yuval Levin (National Affairs), Dana Loesch (The Blaze), William Kristol (Weekly Standard), Andrew McCarthy (National Review), David McIntosh (Club for Growth), Michael Medved (talk radio host), Edwin Meese (former Reagan admin), Russell Moore (Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of Southern Baptist Convention), Michael B. Mukasey (US Attorney General), Katie Pavlich (Townhall), John Podhoretz (Commentary), R. R. Reno (First Things), Thomas Sowell (Hoover), Cal Thomas (USA Today), R. Emmett Tyrrell (American Spectator), and Kevin D. Williamson (National Review).
In 2025, a countervailing tendency has emerged in which right-wingers now disavow the disavowers, indeed they disavow disavowal itself.
The big change, of course, is the way that the American Left and Right have both rejected Israel, its brutal war on the Palestinians in Gaza, and its increased aggression against what seems like half the countries in and around the Middle East. Despite the initial sympathy after the October 7th attacks, the subsequent awareness that the attacks were permitted, and perhaps even encouraged in the interest of justifying ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, have eliminated those sympathies.
And, of course, the war on the Constitutional rights of Americans in the name of “anti-semitism” has unsurprisingly proved extraordinarily unpopular among pretty much everyone who hasn’t sold their souls and other body parts to AIPAC. Everyone who “fights antisemitism” is now correctly seen as being anti-American and no amount of rapid-fire rhetorical redefinitions of every single word involved is going to change that obvious dialectical truth.
But since Conservative Inc. is wholly owned by AIPAC, I think we’re going to see more and more big name conservatives rejecting the label, rejecting the posture, rejecting the premises, and rejecting the corruption, because no amount of media support and pay-for-puppeting is going to suffice to maintain their viability with an increasingly skeptical public. Calling people Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens “the Woke Right” as conservatives attempt to enforce an ever-growing set of anti-American laws, literal speech codes, deplatformings, and delegitimizations has rendered the neocolonization of the entire conservative movement obvious and politically unviable.
The appeal of conservative ideology and anti-anti-semitism is no stronger than the liberal appeal of ideology and anti-anti-racism in today’s multiracial, multireligious political world. In the post-ideological age, identity is the only game in town. And “conservative” is not an identity.
The Christian Nationalist Right doesn’t need conservatives because we have the truth on our side. Or, more precisely, because we are on the side of the Truth and they observably are not.
Cue all the moaning about “they’re trying to divide us!” To which I say: “look around you, Boomer.” They already did. There is no us.