You had no idea because it’s literally not true. The ideology of neoconservatism has nothing to do with Trotskyism as a theoretical tradition. There are like maybe 5 prominent individuals who had some degree of connection to Trotskyists groups, or groups descended from Trotskyist groups, and some degree of connection to neoconservatism, and that’s the basis of the “trot-to-neocon pipeline.”

Half these people weren’t actually Trotskyists in any meaningful sense or, like James Burnham, were members of Trotskyist groups as young people or in college and wound up rejecting Marxism altogether as they moved right.

Funny enough, the surface-level shit take that Trotskyism gave rise to neoconservatism is itself obviously not a Marxist analysis. There’s no analysis of the material forces underpinning the rise of neoconservatism, there’s just the shallow idealism of “these people thought X and then later thought Y, and therefore Y is the consequence of thinking X.”