I would shake my head and think: they're not ready, but maybe someday they will be.

And for some people that day did eventually come. It dawned on these folks that the same establishment that lied to them about Covid and health and "Russia collusion" and BLM (I remind you that Mitt Romney held all of these positions just as much as Hillary Clinton did; that's what I mean by establishment) and scores of other things might also have been lying about the heroic stories it tells about itself.

When you have that realization, you have at last made it over to the other side.

It's not a popular or comfortable place to be, to be sure: every perfunctory Memorial Day social-media graphic about honoring our fallen heroes fills you with rage about the lies that got these men killed in the first place — lies that make "safe and effective" sound like the very gold standard of truth.

And neoconservatives become downright intolerable to you.

Just yesterday, Mark Levin wrote: "I will not back any isolationist/America-trashing candidate in the GOP presidential primaries."

Of course Levin, himself a neocon, would use the agitprop word "isolationist."

"Isolationist," translated into non-propaganda English, means a person who has noticed that the grandiose promises of the world's nation-builders never seem to come true, that having 700 military bases around the world obviously doesn't make us "safer," and that after you blow a trillion here and a trillion there you're starting to talk about real money.

And what could Levin mean by "America-trashing"? As Dave Smith says, we're not insulting the lakes. We're criticizing our government. Neocons want to conflate criticism of the regime with criticism of "America," but it shouldn't be difficult to understand that these are two distinct things.

On the neocon issue, Donald Trump himself recently said in Riyadh (emphasis mine below):

This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists…giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs.

No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits, like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad, so many other cities.

Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves…developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies….

In the end, the so-called "nation-builders" wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.