On November 8, the American people carried through a mighty and glorious revolution against Big Government and its embodiment in King William (Jefferson Blyth IV "Clinton"). But what we got for our pains is Big Government headed by yet another King William (Kristol). A left-liberal (Socialist) in the guise of a New Democrat (Social Democrat) was replaced by a neoconservative (Social Democrat) in the guise of a conservative.

Officially, of course, our new Maximum Leader is Newt Gingrich, whose seat on the throne was hardly warm before he had maneuvered to grab more House power than any Speaker since the notorious Joe Cannon. Newt is a neoconservative (Social Democrat, wacko techno-futurist division), in the guise of a fiery revolutionary quasi-libertarian. In actuality, however, we are now being ruled by a duumvirate, by two kings, a two-headed monster: King Newt and King Kristol. Newt is the nominal chief, the outside front man who deals with the media and the public; William is the shadowy inside man, the "theoretician" who sets the public policy agenda and cracks the whip over the "intellectuals," policy wonks, and strategists of the Republican Party.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each role, and who plays what is a function of many factors, including personal temperament. Gingrich, as the politician who gets elected, clearly loves the open exercise of power. Kristol, as the "intellectual" in this division of labor, is better suited for the inside handing down of the policy line to pundits, think-tankers, and the battery of neocon syndicated columnists.

One advantage to the intellectual slot is that the front man-politician gets the glory but also takes all the heat. Gingrich has already been subject to a lot of media "scrutiny" (the current euphemism for hostile profiles and articles) mainly by hard leftists outside the "mainstream" left center-right center neocon-social democrat spectrum. But Bill Kristol has gotten no scrutiny whatsoever, and to my knowledge has never been subjected to this process. King William has become a king beyond criticism for one reason: because the general public has no idea of Kristol's enormous new power in tandem with Gingrich.

The neoconservatives, after having been dominant under Reagan, grew to detest George Bush toward the end of the Bush Administration. And so the tightly organized neocon ranks, extraordinarily well-funded and represented way out of proportion to their numbers in the ranks of journalists and syndicated columnists (a common quip is that there are 33 neocons in this country of whom 32 are syndicated columnists), openly or quietly threw their weight behind Bill Clinton, leading the Backstabbing Faction of the Republican Party. In fact, it was mainly the neocons, headed by their "left" faction who are nominal Democrats, such as columnist Ben Wattenberg and the media-hyped Democratic Leadership Council, who persuaded the American public that Bill Clinton was really not a bad Old Liberal but a centrist New Democrat.

After he assumed power, however, King Willie, the Slick One, betrayed his neocon supporters. In two ways: first, his policies, driven by his Gorgon spouse, were much Harder Left than the neocons had been led to believe. (Yes, everyone, even neocons, makes mistakes.) But secondly, and more important, Clinton appointed almost none of the neocons to high office. Instead, the multi-cultural, multi-gendered Hard Left got the appointments. And patronage, of course, is the key to politics and to power.

Nothing is more dangerous than a neocon scorned. And so, the neocons joined the rest of the American public in revolt against the hated Clintons. While the lower ranks of the neocons had to make do with menial jobs waiting for Their Turn, the neocon rulers of course did not exactly suffer economic deprivation during the dry two years of the reign of King Willie. While Bill Bennett made a small fortune in no-show jobs at a number of heavily neocon funded institutions, Bill Kristol segued neatly from his Bush-era job as chief of staff ("control") of Vice-President Quayle, to head of the new, munificently-funded "Project for the Republican Future." Kristol is chairman of the tiny board of directors of the Project, which also includes National Review publisher Thomas Rhodes, and, most significantly, Michael S. Joyce, head of the extremely wealthy Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee. Joyce is a long-time protégé of Kristol's father, Irving, the "Godfather" of the neoconservative movement. Irving had led the long march of the neoconservatives from Trotskyite to Democratic liberal to Reaganite, and is still the chief theoretician of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

In recent years, however, the aging Irving has passed the mantle of power to his apostolic and dynastic successor, William. No sooner had William set up shop at the Project in Washington, than he began to issue ukases and edicts to his mailing list of God knows how many tens (hundreds?) of thousands, which includes every Republican, conservative, or libertarian leader or institution of any prominence. Strange to relate, his orders to the Republican/Official Con/Official Libertarian troops always seem to be obeyed. When the Clinton health plan took shape, King William issued a decree to the Republicans to close ranks and – sorta – oppose it. Sure enough, they did. Fortunately, the Clintonians stuck stubbornly to their Hillary-Ira Magaziner Hard Left health plan, so that Congress wound up passing nothing, nothing being a whale of a lot better than Kristol's soft-core alternative. Before the election, moreover, William Kristol managed to "persuade" Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett to cut their own potential presidential throats by coming out strongly against Proposition 187, thereby going against, not only the overwhelming mass of the public, but also against Governor Pete Wilson and the bulk of the California Republican Party.

The groveling adulation of Bill Kristol by virtually every conservative leader in the country has to be seen or read to be believed. Conservative bigshots vie with each other in heaping the kind of extravagant praise upon William that Ayn Rand devotees used to heap upon their Leader. Thus, Bill Kristol is routinely referred to by virtually everyone as "the most brilliant conservative intellectual in the country," the only permissible range of dispute being those who gently demure and claim that Bill is merely second in brilliance to his beloved poppa. Liberal pundits go along with this assessment, in their case with grudging but not worshipful admiration. To paraphrase Tom Fleming's pungent comment on the allegedly increasing brilliance of The Bell Curve's heralded "Cognitive Elite": If the Kristols, William & Irving, are the "most brilliant intellectuals" in the conservative movement, that movement is in deep doo-doo indeed.

When the American people voted on November 8, they were not consciously voting to elevate William Kristol to Supreme Power. Indeed, the vast majority of the American public, fortunately for their peace of mind, have never heard of William Kristol. But such are the wonders of the Guided Democracy that the neocons have arranged for us, that is what has happened.

No sooner had the election been won, than Bill Kristol leaped to assume the reins of command. The first order of business of the Betrayers of the Revolution was to rush Gatt-WTO through the lame-duck Democrat Congress. It should occasion no surprise that one of Kristol's first decrees after the election was to order the Republicans to "Pass Gatt-Quickly!" Of course, the Republicans, including the "libertarian revolutionary" Gingrich, hastened to obey.

Of some interest is the quality of the intellectual reasoning that Kristol used in his "Memorandum to Republican Leaders" of November 21 to persuade them to obey. The Republicans, said Kristol, have won, they should be strong and confident, they should stick to principle and not compromise or dicker with Clinton – and therefore they should hasten to pass Clinton's Gatt proposal right away, without delay or qualifications! If you can make sense out of that line of reasoning, you're a better man (or woman) than I. But sense, intellectuality, persuasive reasoning, have nothing to do with the case. Argumentation is here only a figleaf for the naked exercise of power, in this case the power of King William K. and the neocon movement which he heads and controls.

After succeeding in suppressing Bob Dole's abortive attempt to delay Gatt in order to gain more concessions from Clinton, King K. turned his attention to shaping up the conservative intellectual front. On December 16, he headed a panel of Official Con/Left Libertarian think-tankers on "What to Kill First: Agencies to Dismantle, Programs to Eliminate, and Regulations to Stop." Despite previous bold talk by Kristol and the others about "principle" and rolling back the welfare state, left Libertarian think-tankers, under King William's watchful guidance, decided to suddenly "mature," to "grow in stature," to "accept the responsibilities of power," as the liberal media always like to dub sellouts to statism. Except for Wall Street's favorite, capital gains tax cut, no calls came for cuts in taxes, only their "limitation," in effect, the stopping or slowing down of tax increases. No appeals rose up for abolishing any agency or program. The merger of neoconservatism and left-libertarianism, of Official Conservatives and Libertarians is now virtually complete.

King K. followed up this panel with a foreign policy panel a few days later. The "spectrum" on foreign policy was narrowed to one tiny band of "bipartisan" neocon interventionists and warmongers, including former Defense Department biggie Paul Wolfowitz, and former State Department heavies Robert Kagan and Robert Zoellick, topped off by the sinister syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. How's that for a broad range of "Republican" opinion?

And yet, in all of the commentary on the election by the conservatives and libertarians, only one person has broken into print with sharp criticisms of King Kristol. As might be expected, that person is our very own paleo point man, my colleague Lew Rockwell. Writing in the Washington Times ("Striking the Pose on Welfare Reform," Dec. 4) Lew revealed William Kristol's repeated post-election denunciations of any attempt to carry out a revolution or genuine rollback of the Welfare State. Lew points to Kristol's execrable advice to the neocon-controlled (Kemp-Bennett) "Empower America" conference: "Don't take a kamikaze approach," ordered King K. For that would "wipe out everything at once that took 60 years to build up." Awww! Perish the thought! Would K.K. take the same view toward the painstaking 72-year "buildup" of the Soviet Union? Bill Kristol elaborated by telling the New York Times that Republicans "should shed the minority mindset" of "let's do everything we can all at once." Instead, he explained, the important thing is not to worry about principle or rollback but to elect a Republican president in 1996 (i.e., do nothing). In short, don't do what we told the American people we were going to do. Instead, wait comrades! Wait for a Republican president! And then it will be wait for his re-election! Wait for the Second Millennium! Wait for the light at the end of the tunnel! Pie in the sky by and by!

During the first two years of the Clinton administration, our prime political task was to expose, expose, and attack, attack the collectivist schemes of the Clintonian Democracy, and to help build a right-wing populist revolution against Clintonian rule. Now that the people have made that revolution and it has already been betrayed, our task is to expose, expose, and attack, attack the leading betrayers, the Gingriches and the Kristols as well as their support system of the neocon/Official Con/Official libertarian punditocracy. The grassroots right-wing have marvelous libertarian and anti-statist instincts, but they are unsophisticated about people and political leaders, especially those who clothe their treason in the fair garb of rightist and libertarian-sounding rhetoric. Our task is to strip the glowing rhetoric from our misleaders, and reveal the ugly reality underneath. Our task, in short, is to show, once again, that despite the systemic deceit practiced by our Official movement apologists and word-spinners, our Emperors, be they Willie or William or Newt, are wearing no clothes.