36 Critics of neoconservatism

Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad is a Palestinian American scholar and the president of the Minaret of Freedom Institute, a libertarian 501(c)(3) tax-exempt Muslim think-tank. He also is president of the Islamic-American Zakat Foundation, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt religious and charitable organization that primarily serves poor and needy Muslims in the United States.

Tariq Ali is a British Pakistani political activist, writer, journalist, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso, and contributes to The Guardian, CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books. He read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford.

Charles Obadiah "Chuck" Baldwin is an American right-wing politician, radio host, and founder-former pastor of Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida. As of January 2011 he was pastor of Liberty Fellowship in Kalispell, Montana. He was the presidential nominee of the Constitution Party for the 2008 U.S. presidential election and had previously been its nominee for U.S. vice president in 2004. He hosts a daily one-hour radio program, Chuck Baldwin Live, and writes a daily editorial column carried on its website, as well as on VDare. He is a former editor of NewsWithViews.com.

Burton S. Blumert was the president of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, California, co-founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, and the publisher of LewRockwell.com. In a career that spanned almost 50 years until his retirement in 2008, he bought and sold precious metals as the proprietor of Camino Coin Company.

Michael Jamal Brooks was an American talk show host, writer, political commentator, and comedian. While co-hosting The Majority Report with Sam Seder, he launched The Michael Brooks Show in August 2017 and provided commentary for media outlets, making regular appearances on shows such as The Young Turks. Brooks contributed to various publications, including HuffPost, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, openDemocracy, and Jacobin. Brooks' book Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right was published by Zero Books in April 2020.

Patrick Joseph Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was an assistant and special consultant to U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election.

Judith Pamela Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminist, queer, and literary theory. In 1993, they began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and is one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

Kevin Adam Curtis is a British documentary filmmaker. His favourite theme is "power and how it works in society", and his works explore areas of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history. Curtis has called himself "fundamentally a historian", and has described his work as journalism that happens to be expounded via film. His films have won four BAFTAs. He has worked for the BBC throughout his career.

Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Thomas James DiLorenzo is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland Sellinger School of Business. He identifies as an adherent of the Austrian School of economics. He is a research fellow at The Independent Institute, a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Board of Advisors member at CFACT, and an associate of the Abbeville Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech.

John James Duncan Jr. is an American politician who served as the U.S. Representative for Tennessee's 2nd congressional district from 1988 to 2019. A lawyer, former judge, and former long serving member of the Army National Guard, he is a member of the Republican Party.

Paul Augustus Findley was an American writer and politician. He served as United States Representative from Illinois, representing its 20th District. A Republican, he was first elected in 1960. A moderate Republican for most of his long political career, Findley was a supporter of civil rights and an early opponent of the U.S. war in Vietnam. He co-authored the War Powers Act in 1973, which is supposed to limit the ability of the president to go to war without Congressional authorization. Findley lost his seat in 1982 to current United States Senator Dick Durbin. He was a cofounder of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington, D.C. advocacy group and was a vocal critic of American policy towards Israel. He has also been praised for his support for the Palestinians and his anti-war activism.

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and writer. Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government. However, his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity (1995) modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics. Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement, from which he has since distanced himself.

Ben Garrison is an American far-right political cartoonist. His cartoons have been promoted among the alt-right for various depictions of alt-right ideology. He has produced controversial cartoons that have been characterized as sexist, racist, Islamophobic, anti-vaccine and antisemitic. They have also been criticized for attempting to deny climate change, and promoting conspiracy theories. His cartoons often lionize conservative figures and politicians such as President Donald Trump. Some alt-right activists have edited his comics to incorporate antisemitic content, including the antisemitic "Happy Merchant" caricature.

Paul Edward Gottfried is an American paleoconservative philosopher, historian, and columnist. He is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. He is currently president of the H. L. Mencken Club and editor-in-chief of Chronicles magazine.

Glenn Edward Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former attorney.

Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcast host. His work touches on a wide range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and Islam in particular, and is described as one of the "Four Horsemen of Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.

Thomas Carl Hartmann is an American radio personality, author, former psychotherapist, businessman, and progressive political commentator. Hartmann has been hosting a nationally syndicated radio show, The Thom Hartmann Program, since 2003 and hosted a nightly television show, The Big Picture, between 2010 and September 2017.

Jack William Hunter Jr. is an American radio host, political commentator and Politics Editor for Rare.us, a Washington, D.C.-based news website. He began his career in the late 1990s on alternative rock station WAVF 96.1 FM using the moniker "Southern Avenger", an anonymous pro wrestler/superhero-style character. In 2007, Hunter began appearing every Tuesday and Friday morning on WTMA News-Talk 1250 AM, and contributed to a weekly column to the Charleston City Paper. Hunter was also an aide to U.S. Senator Rand Paul, whom Hunter helped write the book The Tea Party Goes to Washington. He is perhaps best known for his decades-old, racially charged writings whose reemergence caused a major media controversy for his boss, Senator Paul.

Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, referred to mononymously as Kennedy, is an American political commentator, radio personality, author, and former MTV VJ. As of January 2015, she is the host of Kennedy on the Fox Business Network. Kennedy occasionally hosts Outnumbered on the Fox News, and is a frequent panelist on that network's show The Five. She was the host of MTV's now-defunct daily late-night alternative-rock program Alternative Nation throughout much of the 1990s.

Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, and many have been adapted into films, television series, miniseries, and comic books. King has published 61 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and five non-fiction books. He has also written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections.

Russell Amos Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, and literary critic, known for his influence on 20th-century American conservatism. His 1953 book The Conservative Mind gave shape to the postwar conservative movement in the U.S. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. Kirk was considered the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism. He was also an accomplished author of Gothic and ghost story fiction.

Joe Klein is an American political commentator and author. He is best known for his work as a columnist for Time magazine and his novel Primary Colors, an anonymously written roman à clef portraying Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. Klein is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. In April 2006 he published Politics Lost, a book on what he calls the "pollster–consultant industrial complex." He has also written articles and book reviews for The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Life, and Rolling Stone.

Karen U. Kwiatkowski, née Unger, is an American activist and commentator. She is a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer and a variety of roles for the National Security Agency. Since retiring, she has become a noted critic of the U.S. government's involvement in Iraq. Kwiatkowski is primarily known for her insider essays which denounce a corrupting political influence on the course of military intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2012, she challenged incumbent Bob Goodlatte, in the Republican primary for Virginia's 6th congressional district seat in the United States House of Representatives and garnered 34% of the Republican vote on a constitutional and limited government platform.

Robert Patrick Murphy is an American economist. Murphy is Research Assistant Professor with the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. He has been affiliated with Laffer Associates, the Pacific Research Institute, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), the Independent Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the Fraser Institute.

Randal Howard Paul is an American politician and physician serving as the junior United States Senator from Kentucky since 2011. He is a son of former twelve-term U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas who was a presidential candidate in 1988, 2008, and 2012.

Ronald Ernest Paul is an American author, physician, retired politician, and presidential candidate who served as the U.S. Representative for Texas's 22nd congressional district from 1976 to 1977 and again from 1979 to 1985, and for Texas's 14th congressional district from 1997 to 2013. On three occasions, he sought the presidency of the United States: as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988 and as a candidate in the Republican primaries of 2008 and 2012. A self-described constitutionalist, Paul is a critic of the federal government's fiscal policies, especially the existence of the Federal Reserve and the tax policy, as well as the military–industrial complex, the war on drugs, and the war on terror. He has also been a vocal critic of mass surveillance policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the NSA surveillance programs. He was the first chairman of the conservative PAC Citizens for a Sound Economy, a free-market group focused on limited government, and has been characterized as the "intellectual godfather" of the Tea Party movement, a fiscally conservative political movement that is largely against most matters of interventionism.

Nathan James Robinson is a British-American journalist, socialist, and Editor-in-Chief of Current Affairs magazine, which he founded in 2015.

Murray Newton Rothbard was an American heterodox economist of the Austrian School, economic historian and political theorist. Rothbard was the founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism, a staunch advocate of historical revisionism and a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, revisionist history, economics, and other subjects.

George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian between 2006 and 2008.

William Irwin Thompson was an American social philosopher, cultural critic, and poet. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He described his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He was the founder of the Lindisfarne Association.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, bestselling novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Stephen Martin Walt is an American professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He belongs to the realist school of international relations. He made important contributions to the theory of defensive neorealism and has authored the balance of threat theory. Books that he has authored or coauthored include Origins of Alliances, Revolution and War, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Since the end of his military career, Wilkerson has publicly criticized many aspects of the Iraq War, including his own preparation of Powell's presentation to the UN, as well as other aspects of American policy in the Middle East.

Thomas Ernest Woods Jr. is an American author, historian and libertarian who is currently a senior fellow at the Mises Institute. Woods is a New York Times Best-Selling author and has published twelve books. He has written extensively on subjects including the history of the United States, Catholicism, contemporary politics, and economics. Although not an economist himself, Woods is a proponent of the Austrian School of economics. He hosts a daily podcast, The Tom Woods Show, and he formerly co-hosted the now defunct Contra Krugman.