William Kristol had a storied career as a conservative and neoconservative. His father Irving Kristol (a friend of mine) was considered “the father of neoconservativism,” that is, disillusioned liberals. Bill Kristol was chief of staff to Vice-President Dan Quayle. He founded The Weekly Standard, a magazine of cutting-edge neoconservative commentary.
But he couldn’t tolerate Trump. When Trump was elected in 2020, Bill changed his party registration from Republican to Independent. In 2026, he registered as a Democrat. He is now an editor and writer at The Bulwark. What a transformation! As you will read in this article, his change of mind is more than skin-deep.
He wrote, in the same post that carried Jim Swift’s piece, the following about the indifference and arrogance of the elites:
America today has lots of hard-working immigrants, and plenty of native-born citizens who accept and respect them. But there are also plenty of Americans these days who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
I hasten to say there’s no fault in being born on third base. Indeed, all of us, whether rich or poor, who were born in today’s America might be said, in the grand historical scheme of things, to have been born on third base. A healthy American patriotism begins with acknowledgment of our good fortune, and with gratitude for what our forebears—most of whom were not born on third base—did to make our privileged lives today possible.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with also taking pride in what we and our contemporaries have accomplished. And if we sometimes overestimate our own achievements and underrate those of our predecessors—and therefore underrate our simple good fortune in being born here—well, that’s human nature, and it’s probably not worth getting all worked up about.
But what is worth getting worked up about is those who have no sympathy for others who didn’t happen to enjoy good fortune. What’s worth getting worked up about is those who have contempt for and who revel in cruelty toward the less fortunate.
There are lots of those people in America today. They include our president. They include many in his administration. They include many in the world of MAGA.
And they include Megyn Kelly, who was so proud of what she said on her show yesterday after the Supreme Court’s TPS decision that she then posted the clip on X:
Megyn sends a message to the Haitians who lost their TPS today:
“Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us . . . GO BACK TO FUCKING HAITI!”
Kelly thinks that “we” made America great with “our work ethic, culture, and values.” But most Americans of Kelly’s generation—and, to be clear, of mine—have had to do little in the way of heavy lifting to make America great. And is it clear that today’s culture and values are so exceptionally wonderful?
It was our forebears who made America great. Many of them were immigrants and refugees, whom earlier generations of nativists treated with hostility, bigotry, and cruelty.
The rhetoric of yesterday’s Court ruling is not itself bigoted or cruel. But the policies it permits are bigoted and cruel. They are the policies of people who found themselves, mostly by good fortune, standing on third base. Many of them aren’t particularly good hitters or fast runners. But they’ve decided to protect their status by making sure no one else—especially no one else of a different skin color or background—will have a chance to get up to bat.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Indeed, all of us, whether rich or poor, who were born in today’s America might be said, in the grand historical scheme of things, to have been born on third base.”
I applaud most of the sentiment here. Still, there are great numbers of people whose socioeconomic background could not have suggested third base. These conditions are not necessarily geographic, but can be. They are not necessarily economic, but that too is influential. A Lakota man robbed of his cultural identity by generations of boarding schools is not beginning life on third base. Nor is the son of a factory worker laid off when his father lost his job to outsourcing in 1995. I assume this is what he meant by the last paragraph.
There were lots of us suggesting that neoconservatives were leading us to cruelty years ago. Glad to find someone on the road to repentance.
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I listen to Bill Kristol and Tim Miller on Mondays on The Bulwark podcast. Both are reformed conservatives and have left the GOP. I have found most of what Mr. Kristol says refreshing, especially when he denounces his role in the past decades of GOP beliefs. However, he does recognize the old GOP is nothing like the new GOP. When people level criticism of former conservatives to their new found awakening into moderate liberalism, I think it is wrong. We need a big tent to defeat what is happening in America today and welcoming people in that used to be part of the problem, is the only way to move forward.
Megyn Kelly is appalling. She spews nastiness, hate and lies as much as Stephen Miller. They are two peas in a pod. And for as long as I live, I will never understand how people approve of either of them.
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Running Granny,
I’m with you.
We must welcome into the party people who recognize that the GOP has morphed into the Know-Nothing Party. Their leader is a charlatan who cares only about filling his bank account. $2.2 billion last year. What a disgrace!
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