Max Boot

Max Boot (born September 12, 1969) is an American author, consultant, op-ed writer, lecturer, and military historian.

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• What the heck is a neocon anyway in 2003? A friend of mine suggests it means the kind of right-winger a liberal wouldn't be embarrassed to have over for cocktails. That's as good a definition as any, since the term has clearly come unmoored from its original meaning. ... In social policy, it stands for a broad sympathy with a traditionalist agenda and a rejection of extreme libertarianism. Neocons have led the charge to combat some of the wilder excesses of academia and the arts. But there is hardly an orthodoxy laid down by Neocon Central. I, for one, am not eager to ban either abortion or cloning, two hot-button issues on the religious right. On economic matters, neocons--like pretty much all other Republicans, except for Mr. Buchanan and his five followers--embrace a laissez-faire line, though they are not as troubled by the size of the welfare state as libertarians are.
  • "What the Heck Is a ‘Neocon’?". OpinionJournal.com (The Wall Street Journal). December 30, 2002. 

• Trump is a fascist. And that's not a term I use loosely or often. But he's earned it.
  • Tweet (November 22, 2015), as cited in "Why some conservatives say Trump talk is fascist", CNN (November 25, 2015)

• Trump is an ignorant demagogue who traffics in racist and misogynistic slurs and crazy conspiracy theories. He champions protectionism and isolationism — the policies that brought us the Great Depression and World War II. He wants to undertake a police-state roundup of undocumented immigrants and to bar Muslims from coming to this country. He encourages his followers to assault protesters and threatens to sue or smear critics. He would abandon Japan and South Korea and break up the most successful alliance in history — NATO. But he has kind words for tyrants such as Vladimir Putin. There has never been a major party nominee in U.S. history as unqualified for the presidency. The risk of Trump winning, however remote, represents the biggest national security threat that the United States faces today.
  • "The Republican Party is dead". w:Los Angeles Times. May 8, 2016. 

• As media scramble to figure out Trump's evolving position on immigration, remember he cares *only* about feeding his ego. Policy irrelevant.
  • Twitter (August 20, 2016)

• Carlson’s defenders point out that his conversations with Bubba the Love Sponge occurred years ago and not on Fox News. But he defended statutory rape — female teachers having sex with underage boys — as recently as a 2015 podcast. And on his Fox News show, Carlson regularly rages against immigration and diversity. In December, he said that immigration "makes our own country poorer and dirtier." White supremacists have become avid fans of Carlson; the white supremacist website Daily Stormer called him "literally our greatest ally."
• It is high time for both advertisers and network bosses, from Rupert Murdoch on down, to search their souls about their complicity in injecting this poison into the body politic. Carlson has a right to say whatever he wants — but he doesn't have a right to say it on the most-watched cable channel in the country. He needs to go. Now.
  • "Tucker Carlson needs to go. Now" The Washington Post (March 12, 2019)

How the ‘Stupid Party’ Created Trump. The New York Times (August 2, 2016).

• Many Democrats took all this at face value and congratulated themselves for being smarter than the benighted Republicans. Here’s the thing, though: The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on. At least until now.

• There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the "party of ideas," because it harvested so effectively the intellectual labor of conservative think tanks. ... In recent years, however, the Republicans' relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers.

• Catering to populist anger with extremist proposals that are certain to fail is not a viable strategy for political success.

Why the U.S. Ramped Up Its Information War With Russia. Council on Foreign Relations (February 10, 2022).

• Adversaries including the self-declared Islamic State and the Kremlin are free to spread lies and conspiracy theories, while the U.S. government generally feels compelled to hew to the truth in its public pronouncements (even as it often tries to conceal scandalous misconduct).

• Journalists are naturally skeptical of the U.S. intelligence, given the U.S. government's history making claims that did not pan out—most notoriously about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was used to justify the U.S. invasion in 2003. But there is indeed a long history of Russia using so-called false-flag operations to justify aggression.

• One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They're happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there's no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.
• Trump was running against more armed conflicts. ... Boot hated him. As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was "hard to imagine" the Russian government would react badly to the provocation.
  • Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018)

• Listed in one place, Boot's many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk.
  • Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018)

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Max Boot

• MaxBoot.net, home page