From my latest column at Responsible Statecraft, “Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol and their friends may wag their fingers today at Trump and his supporters’ red meat rhetoric, but the anti-Islamic speech and conspiracy theories that plagued the Republican base throughout the aughts were never denounced by the neoconservative establishment at the time.

Such behavior was more often encouraged or at least ignored because it helped the war cause. Don’t forget Dick Cheney, before he was denouncing Trump’s Muslim ban when it was politically convenient, was telling fellow Republicans that Obama was supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. His daughter Liz, before she was denouncing MAGA conspiratorialists, was on ‘Larry King’ defending the so called ‘Birthers’ who didn’t believe Obama was born in this country:

‘I think the Democrats have got more crazies than the Republicans do,’ Cheney said at the time. ‘But setting that aside, one of the reasons you see people so concerned about this, I think this issue is, people are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas …’

Kristol carried himself as being above the anti-Muslim fray, but rarely criticized the rampant, xenophobic Bush-era hate in the way that he goes after Trump today on a regular basis. Joseph Leone at Harvard’s Progressive Policy Review noted of Kristol in February, ‘The war, and the jingoistic propaganda Kristol peddled to support it, have also contributed to the rise in Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence within the United States and globally. Although Kristol now opposes Donald Trump, the former president’s Muslim ban and frequent incitement of violence against Muslims are the product of the war drums Kristol played for years.”

Read the entire column.

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