The War Party has suffered significant defections since the proclamation of our great “victory” in Iraq last year, and that’s a good thing; but why would anyone take any of these people seriously? Take Tucker Carlson, the neocon punk with the P.J. O’Rourke haircut on CNN’s Crossfire, a vehement supporter of the war in Iraq...
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The Dan Rather Diversion
The “mainstream” media, we often hear, isn’t covering the real stories—it shies away from controversy and supinely bends under pressure from government officials, corporate sponsors, and warmongering demagogues. All of this may be true, but what we don’t hear is what happens when the media does do a little investigative reporting, especially when the resulting...
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Reality TV News
From pro-war to antiwar, from uncritical acceptance of government pronouncements to principled skepticism, the American media’s perspective on the war has veered drunkenly from one extreme to another. They not only trumpeted the lies put forth by the War Party but gave them credulous and even solemn attention, then turned on a dime and descried...
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Attack of the Trotsky-cons!
Murray N. Rothbard must have seen the post-September 11 era in a dream to be able to sum it up as well as he did in his 1992 inaugural address to the John Randolph Club: Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism...
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The Communitarian Warlord
Remember communitarianism? It was one of those embarrassing fads of the 1990’s, like Furbies, Beanie Babies, and the “Third Way,” a socio-moral movement that was meant to signify all things warm and cuddly. As articulated in his 1993 book, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda (1993), and in two sequels, communitarian...
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Dominating Headlines
The recall election in California has dominated the headlines of late, thanks, in part, to Governor Hiram Johnson, the lion of the Western Progressives. The irony is that today’s alleged “progressives”—in thrall to the special interests (i.e., the public-employee unions)—are horrified by what their ancestors have wrought. The Union Pacific Railroad was a great octopus...
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The Terror Enigma
“Remember 9/11!” is the rallying cry of the War Party; what we are remembering, however, is a half-truth. It is time to draw the curtain on the largely ignored prehistory of September 11. Although Bush-administration officials deny that they had even a hint of what was to come, government agencies were literally awash with warnings...
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Attack of the Jacobins
Trent Lott—to the guillotine! The cry has gone up, the mob is implacable, and the once-powerful and seemingly unassailable Senate majority leader has gotten the message loud and clear: Confess your sins, bare your neck, and prepare to lose your head! And for what? What sin did this former muckamuck of the GOP commit that...
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War Birds: A Taxonomy
As war clouds loom over the political landscape and the propaganda wafts thickly from the major news media, we have to ask: Where does all of this come from? Who is behind the rush to war? Pat Buchanan has utilized a useful phrase to describe the origins of this bloodlust: the War Party. This term...
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Larry Ellison’s Golden Age
Larry Ellison has an idea. The relentlessly self-promoting CEO of Oracle Corp., a Silicon Valley software company famous for its ability to grab government contracts, envisions post-September 11 America as a country where everyone walks around with a “smart card.” Days after the terrorist attacks, the opportunistic Ellison was all over the media claiming that...
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Wheeler’s Progress
On October 15, 1905, Burton K. Wheeler stepped off a train at the Northern Pacific depot in Butte, Montana, thinking that he had seen more of the West than Lewis and Clark but wondering if his luck had run out. After looking up every lawyer in town (Wheeler had graduated from the University of Michigan...
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Civil Rights or Property Rights?
The interplay of race and economics in America has produced a new variant of political economy that we might call “multicultural capitalism,” a system in which property is, for the most part, privately owned, but its ownership is conditional on the race, sex, and—in some cases—the sexual orientation of the owner. In the pursuit of...
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Cui Bono? Conspiracy Theories: A Rothbardian Perspective
During the debate over our unnaturally extended presidential election, David Corn, associate editor of the Nation, appeared on CNN’s Crossfire and took up the cudgel in defense of Gore and his fellow coup-plotters. The smarmy Corn parried his opponent’s contention that Al Gore and the Democrats were trying to steal the election with a gleeful...
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A National Convention
The Reform Party’s national convention convened in Long Beach, California, in early August. I arrived, filled with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation: I fully expected Patrick J. Buchanan to overcome the last obstacle to launching what promises to be an historic campaign; on the other hand, I knew the anti-Buchananistas weren’t going to make...
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An Empire If You Can Bear It
“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.” —William McKinley In his classic study of “isolationism,” Not to the Swift, Justus Doenecke takes note of a phenomenon called “Asia Firstism”—the view of conservative politicians and publicists of the postwar era who opposed meddling in Europe but saw Asia as the equivalent of...
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Beyond Left and Right
November 9, 1989, marked the end of the old politics and the old alignments; on that day, as the Berlin Wall fell, so did the political categories and alliances of half a century. The end of the Cold War meant a lot more than the end of communism as a viable ideology. It meant more...
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A Spy in the House of NATO
The recent news that there was a spy at NATO who revealed top-secret plans—including detailed descriptions of targets—during the Kosovo war has thrown the Pentagon and the Western powers into confusion and dismay. According to the London Guardian (March 10), a classified U.S. military intelligence report reveals that the Serbs may have been reading the...
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Tale of a “Seditionist”
Lawrence Dennis was an outsider in a movement of outsiders, a unique and largely solitary figure whose career as a writer—and notorious “seditionist”—embodies the tragedy and bravery of the Old Right, the pre-World War II “America first” generation of conservative intellectuals and activists. In many important ways, Dennis is the prototype of modern “paleo conservatives.”...
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No Peace for Iraq
From Operation Desert Storm, unleashed against Iraq by President George Bush, up to the present moment, the attack on Iraq has been relentless. As I write, a report of a U.S. sortie over Iraqi skies and a clash with Iraqi anti-aircraft guns is hitting the wires—yet another skirmish in the continuous low-level warfare that has...
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Buchanan at Bay
—”Imperialism is absolutely necessary to a people which desires spiritual as well as economic expansion. —Benito Mussolini America has survived, the Last and Only Superpower, while so many others have fallen by the wayside, their bones littering the road from empire: Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, and—closest to ourselves—a once-great Britain,...
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The Other Lindbergh
While the most famous member of the Lindbergh clan is undoubtedly the aviator and World War II-era isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the qualities for which he won renown—his courage, his Scandinavian severity, his willingness to stand against the tide of popular opinion, his dislike of cities and the elites they spawned, and (most of...
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Matthew Shepard and the Thought Police
Long before the advent of “political correctness” as we have come to know (and hate) it, there was an active and ongoing campaign to outlaw “hate crimes.” This movement had its first big success in 1944, when 36 isolationists of varied backgrounds were indicted for sedition. In charging the defendants—who had nothing in common but...
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Hojotoho! Hojotoho!
What is it about Ayn Rand that so fascinates her enemies as well as her admirers? Her two major novels, Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943), are enduring pillars of popular culture. Her paeans to egoism make Nietzsche look like a piker, and, quite unlike that sickly aesthete, she had a life as dramatic...
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The Flight of the Lone Eagle
“There is a hawk that is picking the birds out of our sky. She killed the pigeons of peace and security. She has taken honesty and confidence from nations and men. She is hunting the lonely heron of liberty.” —Robinson Jeffers, “Shiva” The competition to be the first to traverse the Atlantic...
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The Culture War Rages On
The culture war rages on at Barnard College, where two sharp-eyed harpies, Sandra Chefitz and Shannon T. Herbert, have humbled the last vestiges of traditionalism within its ivy-covered halls. Upon discovering that a Barnard brochure boasted that graduates of women’s colleges were more likely to marry and bear children than were alumni of coed institutions,...
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The British Were Coming!
“Oh, that deceit should steal such subtle shapes And with a virtuous vizard hide foul guile.” —William Shakespeare In the midst of his battle to save our old Republic and keep the United States out of World War II, John T. Flynn wondered about the true identity of his enemies. As...
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The Lion of Idaho
The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing and potentially rather promising. The depressing...
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Buchananism: Two Opinions
Free Trade, Free Slaves The United States owes its origin to the trade wars of early modern Europe but its success to the Industrial Revolution, which filled America with productive, largely self-sufficient people. The history of the United States is testimony that economic growth has not occurred uniformly around the world. Some nations and empires...
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Wagging the Dog
In the popular film Wag the Dog, an American President caught molesting a young girl seeks to divert attention away from the sex scandal; a mock “invasion” of Albania is staged, Hollywood-style, complete with faked film footage and bogus carnage, L’affaire Lewinsky debuted the same week, and federal officials—threatening military action against Iraq as news...
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The Pleasurable Science
“No nation ever made its bread either by its great arts, or its great wisdoms. By its minor arts or manufactures, by its practical knowledges, yes; but its noble scholarship, its noble philosophy, and its noble art are always to be bought as a treasure, not sold for a livelihood.” —John...
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A Labor of Hate
The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.” —Theodore Roosevelt Hailed by the New York Times for showing that Colonel Robert McCormick, the legendary publisher of the Chicago Tribune, was “anti- just about...
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The Black War on Asians
While the media is focused on the alleged threat of a few rural white supremacists holed up somewhere in Idaho, black racism in the inner cities is on the rise. “Viet family flees bomb threat at project,” blared the headline in the San Francisco Examiner on June 16. Although political correctness forbids even its victims...
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George Soros, Megalomaniac
“It is a sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything,” confessed George Soros to a British newspaper, “but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” Recalling youthful fantasies of omnipotence in his 1987 book The Alchemy of Finance, the multibillionaire...
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The Road to Cascadia
They call it Cascadia—a land of plunging waterfalls and snowcapped mountains, a mythical kingdom of towering trees and raging rivers. Here in Seattle, capital of this Arcadia, the sleekly modernistic Space Needle rises up against the backdrop of Mount Rainier, which dominates the horizon—a distinctly Cascadian juxtaposition of mountain and cityscape, forest and skyscraper, greenery...
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David Horowitz and the Ex-Communist Confessional
The literature of recanting radicals has been with us since 1917: from the recollections of Russian Mensheviks, who rued the day they joined with Lenin, to Irving Kristol’s “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” in which the neoconservative godfather fondly reminisces about his youthful dalliance with dissident communism. With each successive atrocity and betrayal—Kronstadt, the Moscow Trials,...
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Rothbard Against the Dismalists
“Wisdom is neither inheritance nor legacy.” —Thomas Fuller In his keynote speech to a meeting of the John Randolph Club, Murray N. Rothbard exhorted his colleagues to take up the task he sees as central to the success of their movement: nothing less than the repeal of the 20th century. The publication of a new...
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A Brazen Plan
Shortly after midnight on May 24, the ship Pai Sheng slipped into San Francisco Bay. With at least 200 people jammed below deck, the ship docked at Fort Point, at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. The 19th-century fort, built to guard the city against invaders and once a Coast Guard station. has long...
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Who Is Henry Galt? Ayn Rand and Plagiarism
Can it be that a fraud has been perpetrated on the readers and admirers of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand—a literary and intellectual swindle that veers perilously close to plagiarism? That such a charge could be leveled at the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is irony bordering on farce. For the spirit that animated the...