When I first saw the memo from the FBI’s counterterrorism center in Newark, declaring that I’m “a threat to National Security,” not to mention an “agent of a foreign power,” I was incredulous. These can’t be real FBI documents, I thought to myself. Someone is pulling my leg. Sadly, no. As I discovered upon further...
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Ron Paul, Now and Then
People don’t usually get more radical as they get older; it’s almost always the reverse. And the successful politicians were never radical to begin with. The one exception to this rule is Ron Paul. Ron has been around a long time. The 75-year-old 11-term U.S. representative from Texas ran for president on the Libertarian Party...
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Bohemians in the Redwoods
Every year at midsummer, the secret rulers of the world meet in solemn conclave down the street from me. In the down-at-the-heels resort town of Monte Rio, on the banks of the Russian River in California’s wine country, is the Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre “encampment” that houses the members of the Bohemian Club, founded in...
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The Enchanted Orchard
I moved to the northern reaches of California’s Sonoma County, known as the Russian River, in 2008 and eventually settled in a house, built in 1930, in the midst of an ancient orchard. Peaches, pears, plums, persimmons, walnuts, grapes, apples, figs—an incredible cornucopia, which gave without prompting, drew me to this enchanted orchard in a...
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Ideology and Everyday Life
I’m a libertarian, as perhaps some of my readers know. My late mentor, Murray Rothbard, practically founded the movement in his living room, and I’ve been an activist since my teenage years—a long time ago. I wear my libertarianism like a comfortable old shirt. Yet ideology and everyday life don’t always mesh. In my youth,...
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Our Antiwar Opportunity
The politics of U.S. foreign policy are governed by the tides of partisan warfare, the ebb and flow of the constant struggle between “left” and “right.” Which means that, every decade or so, the political spectrum switches polarities: Witness the transformation of the “isolationist” Old Right of the 1940’s into the warmongering conservative movement of...
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Obama’s Fatal Mistake
Never underestimate the stupidity of our rulers. When Judge Andrew Napolitano of Freedom Watch asked me if I thought President Obama would intervene in Libya, I said, “No, he’s too smart for that.” I attribute my misreading of events to my reading of the President’s general demeanor. Obama projects the aura of a disinterested scientist,...
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The Man Behind the Protests
By now we’ve all heard a number of analyses of the events in Egypt and the outbreak of revolutionary fervor that is toppling regimes throughout the Arab world: It’s a replay of the revolution that overthrew the shah of Iran and installed the Ayatollah Khomeini (say the neocons); it’s all a sinister plot to install...
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Another Brown Scare
In the run-up to World War II, when FDR was locked in a political struggle with his conservative Republican opponents, Roosevelt’s “brain trust” came up with a scheme to win the war of ideas and get rid of the President’s bothersome critics. Today, we call it the “Brown Scare.” It was a campaign of vilification...
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Annus Horribilis
The year 2010 was a depressing one in the foreign-policy world; the decline and fall of a world empire, no matter how well-deserved its fate, should be seen only as a tragedy. The sheer scale of its fatal gigantism portends a Stentorian scream as it falls into the abyss—and we heard the first painful groans...
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Are You Smarter Than a Terrorist?
The idea that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can stop terrorist attacks by means of its now-infamous “porno scanner,” or by forcing Americans to undergo intrusive body pat-downs as if they were inmates in a correctional facility, is utter nonsense, and everybody knows it—including our government officials. The scanners cannot detect explosives that are secured...
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Justice Entrapment
When I was very young, I often explored my grandfather’s library, inhaling the musty secrets of tomes not opened for many years. It was on one such visit that I first came upon John Roy Carlson’s Under Cover. Published in 1943, Carlson’s best-selling book—enticingly subtitled My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America—purported to...
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Happy Warriors
Readers of The War Lovers, a fascinating account of the dawn of America’s imperial age by Newsweek reporter Evan Thomas, are bound to feel a twinge of déjà vu as they put down the book. Focusing on three men—Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Randolph Hearst—Thomas shows how they collaborated to usher in America’s...
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Going Rove
The idea that the “far right” is on the cultural warpath is, like most liberal canards, the exact opposite of the truth. See, for example, the sort of treatment handed out to the victor in Delaware’s GOP senatorial primary. The conservative Catholic Christine O’Donnell, a 46-year-old Sarah Palin knockoff, was immediately held up for ridicule...
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I Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello
Barack Obama, you’ll recall, campaigned as the antiwar candidate, at least insofar as Iraq was concerned. Iraq was a “war of choice,” according to him, one that should not have been fought, and he defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries precisely because of her support for Bush’s war. Not that there was anything principled about...
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Adios, Rio Nido
I moved to Rio Nido, a tiny hamlet in the middle of a redwood forest, in the winter of 2008, just a day after the Big Crash. I had found my sanctuary in a world of trouble. What I didn’t count on was a new form of trouble. Rio Nido is a resort community, founded...
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Dialoguing With Douthat
Surely, the defining characteristic of the paleoconservative temperament is disgust—with the current state of the country, the culture, and (most of all) the “official” conservative movement. On this last point, there can be no compromise: Eight long years of Bushism, with a foreign policy energized by neoconservative democratism, has bankrupted the country financially and bankrupted...
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To Teach or To Sneer
Authentic conservatives and their libertarian allies have long been a small minority in a larger movement that, for the most part, rejected their radical critique of the managerial state. The “paleos” were singled out for attack by the neoconservatives, that exotic sect of ex-leftists prophetically described by Russell Kirk ...
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To Teach or To Sneer
Authentic conservatives and their libertarian allies have long been a small minority in a larger movement that, for the most part, rejected their radical critique of the managerial state. The “paleos” were singled out for attack by the neoconservatives, that exotic sect of ex-leftists prophetically described by Russell Kirk as “this little Sacred Band—which had...
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Attack of the Hyphenates
The immigration debate is often framed in terms of ethnicity, and the arbiters of permissible expression are appalled that anyone would approach the issue in terms of cultural identity and a reasonable desire for homogeneity. Permit me, however, to raise a quite different objection to the unchecked flood of immigrants who have been deluging our...
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Middle Eastern Hijackers
Have the Israelis gone crazy? We have recently witnessed a number of incidents in which Israeli hostility to the West has been made manifest. Yet the Western world has been the biggest—indeed, the only—supporter of the Zionist project outside the Jewish Diaspora. First, consider the ambush of Joe Biden in Israel, where he went to...
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Rothbard Was Right!
As the Tea Partiers swarm town-hall meetings, and talk of nullification, the Tenth Amendment, and even secession is in the air, I can’t help thinking, Rothbard was right! That’s Murray Newton Rothbard (1926-95), the libertarian economist and theorist whose uncompromising intelligence instructed an entire generation of the freedom movement’s leading lights. Rothbard’s career spanned the...
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Going Green for Goldman
What’s behind the cult of “global warming”? We’ve been hearing about it for years on television, in magazines, from politicians, and from certain corporate entities: Mankind is destroying the earth, and the only solution is to “go green.” Unless we radically change our behavior, the oceans will rise, catastrophe will ...
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Mr. Brown Goes to Washington
As I write, the pundits are all atwitter over the stunning upset pulled off by Scott Brown, the “independent” Republican who made mincemeat out of former state attorney general Martha Coakley in the race to fill the Massachusetts “Kennedy seat” in the U.S. Senate. Democrats are lashing out at each other over their loss, with...
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Going Green for Goldman
What’s behind the cult of “global warming”? We’ve been hearing about it for years on television, in magazines, from politicians, and from certain corporate entities: Mankind is destroying the earth, and the only solution is to “go green.” Unless we radically change our behavior, the oceans will rise, catastrophe will ensue, and that will be...
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At the Crossroads
At the Crossroads by Justin Raimondo “No one is free save Jove.” —Aeschylus Up until now, Ayn Rand hasn’t had a biographer worthy of the name: only the memoirs of embittered ex-followers, or hagiographies written by devotees. Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made remedies that lack. It’s the first serious attempt...
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Muslim Problem
It isn’t all that easy being a paleoconservative/libertarian as well as the editorial director of Antiwar.com. I would estimate that more than half of my readers and financial supporters are from the left side of the political spectrum, although there is a substantial libertarian contingent. The ideological overlap—a mutual opposition to our interventionist foreign policy,...
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Thirty Pieces of Silver
The news of the arrest of Stewart David Nozette, a top government scientist, on charges of spying for Israel had barely hit when none other than Steve Rosen, former top AIPAC official and accused Israeli spy, piped up in Nozette’s defense. Some character witness! Rosen was recorded culling state secrets from Larry Franklin, formerly the...
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Galt’s Glitch
Is Atlas shrugging in Brazil? This just in: A massive power failure blacked out Brazil's two largest cities and other parts of Latin America's biggest nation for more than two hours late Tuesday, leaving millions of people in the dark after a huge hydroelectric dam suddenly went offline. ...
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The Sibel Edmonds Story
Sibel Edmonds is a former translator for the FBI—and she’s a tease. And I don’t just mean the seductive allure of her dark good looks. For years, she’s been hinting at the vastness of the story she’s been sitting on, letting it out in dribs and drabs, like Chinese water torture. But now, at last,...
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The Sibel Edmonds Story
Sibel Edmonds is a former translator for the FBI—and she’s a tease. And I don’t just mean the seductive allure of her dark good looks. For years, she’s been hinting at the vastness of the story she’s been sitting ...
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Exporting Political Correctness
During the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House frequently trotted out Laura Bush to laud our soldiers’ heroic efforts to “liberate” women. These were not wars of aggression or conquest. They were wars for “education,” the former schoolteacher averred: “The United States government is wholeheartedly committed to the full...
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Kristol, Missiles, and a Big Boat
Lord knows I’ve had my run-ins with Andrew Sullivan, who seems to think that a devotion to gay rights and Obama constitutes a form of “conservatism,” and yet I’ve got to give the guy credit for writing this ...
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EXCLUSIVE: Guns and Roses
When one William Kostric walked into a protest outside a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at which the President of the United States was present, carrying a loaded gun—“Of course it was loaded,” he told Chris Matthews later, “what kind of fool would carry around an unloaded gun?”—he ...
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Banking on Fraud
The insight at the core of the conservative disposition—that the future is invariably worse than the past—enjoys daily confirmation as the economic crisis deepens. It seems that in many respects we have entered a new world, which, given the circumstances of its birth, is sure to be rather grim. We got a good glimpse at...
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Change We Can Laugh At
With the election of Barack Obama, opponents of U.S. intervention abroad were supposed to throw their hats in the air and cheer: The millennium had arrived! The war in Iraq would end rather shortly, and the Bad Old Days of the Bush-Cheney-neocon Axis of Evil were coming to an end. So why are we embarking...
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Israeli Spies, Exposed: Only the Beginning
It was a sizzling June afternoon in 2003 when the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst, Lawrence Franklin, walked in off the hot pavement into the cool recesses of the Tivoli restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, and offered to commit espionage against the United States—and the FBI recorded every word. It wasn’t just serendipity that caught this traitor...
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Cheney Logorrhea
Pat Buchanan is one of our favorite people and is certainly a source of inspiration for many of our readers. However, in a recent column entitled “Obama Avoids the Crocodile,” he defends Barack Obama’s decision not to release the horrendous Abu Ghraib photos (some of which show rapes of prisoners by American and Iraqi soldiers)...
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Look Who’s Talking
“This conversation doesn’t exist.” Those were the last words spoken by U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) as she concluded her 2005 chat with “a suspected Israeli agent,” as Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly put it, during the course of which she agreed to sell her country down the river in exchange for 30 pieces of...
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The Martyrdom of Chas Freeman
It was a cold, blustery day in Washington, D.C., when the spies met their mark. The place: Union Station. The mark: one Lawrence Franklin, then a 56-year-old Iran specialist who worked as a top official at the Pentagon. Franklin was convinced that Israel was being shortchanged by the United States, and that Iran posed a...
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The Return of the Neocons
The disastrous denouement of the Iraq war, and the revelation that we were lied into invading a country that represented no credible threat to us, had supposedly discredited the authors of that reckless adventure—the neoconservatives centered in and around the American Enterprise Institute. AEI served as the headquarters of the neocon network in Washington, a...
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Obama as Lincoln: Mask and Mirror
Ron English, the self-styled “Robin Hood of Madison Avenue” who specializes in “liberating” commercial billboards and defacing them (albeit artistically) with his anticapitalist messages, has painted a portrait of Obama as Lincoln: The President’s thick lips, crinkled brow, and eyes sparkling with a preternatural intelligence are seamlessly merged with the ...
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Obama as Lincoln
Ron English, the self-styled “Robin Hood of Madison Avenue” who specializes in “liberating” commercial billboards and defacing them (albeit artistically) with his anticapitalist messages, has painted a portrait of Obama as Lincoln: The President’s thick lips, crinkled brow, and eyes sparkling with a preternatural intelligence are seamlessly merged with the high forehead, biblical beard, and...
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McCain’s Revenge
Did John McCain throw the election? Is it just me, or was there a certain elegaic tone to the Republican presidential campaign, a McCain’s Last Hurrah narrative that precluded victory around the time the stock market took a dive? It was then that McCain signed a joint statement with his Democratic rival, urging lawmakers “to...
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The Bush Years: A Reversal
We have just survived eight years of the worst American presidency in modern times. For conservatives, the reign of Bush II was far worse than anything we had to endure previously, but at least in the case of outright statists like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we knew what we were getting into. In the case of...
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Petraeus and the Senate Chickens
The central character in the little morality play spun out by the Bush administration in making the case for “staying the course” in Iraq is Gen. David Petraeus, commander of our forces in Iraq and the savior of the neocons’ war. His much-vaunted report was to elucidate the conditions for “victory” once and for all,...
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Ron Paul Rising
When the Old Gray Lady finally deigned to take notice of Ron Paul’s presidential bid, it was in the form of a long piece in the New York Times Magazine by Christopher Caldwell, a piece that confirmed the definite feeling of déjà vu I get when I note the energy, the enthusiasm, and the surprising...
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Wrong From the Beginning
As the editorial director of Antiwar.com, I have been in a good position to chart the failed predictions and laughable prognostications of the War Party—and, while it may be in somewhat bad taste to say, “I told you so,” as the latest news indicates that we have surpassed 3,000 American dead (not to mention 34,000...
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Regime Change
Whenever Washington targets some poor, misbegotten country for “regime change,” references to that unfortunate nation’s media by Western journalists are usually preceded by the modifier state-owned or state-controlled. The inference is clear: These guys are shills, not real journalists. Yet the West has its own state-owned and controlled media: The Brits have the BBC, and...
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Financial Shenanigans?
The “scandal” surrounding House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) has all the earmarks of a Washington feeding frenzy—which means, in short, that most ordinary Americans couldn’t care less. Financial shenanigans in the Imperial City? I’m shocked, I tell you—shocked! Yet there is a lesson here, albeit not the one the Democrats and other “good government”...