Category: Between the Lines

To say I was a difficult child is something of an understatement: I was a wild child.  In retrospect, I can only feel sorry for my poor parents, who had no idea what to do with me.  I was simply unmanageable.  Unwilling to sit still in class, or to obey the simplest instructions, I did...

You never know what Lady Fortuna has in store for you next. Having quit college—after all, I knew what I wanted to do, and didn’t need lessons from some hippie in how to do it—I was shuttling between New York City and my parents’ house in the suburbs.  I was 19, aimless, and living at...

I am writing this very close to March 20, the 15th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, and I’m wondering: Have we learned anything from that experience? One has only to look at the headlines to understand that no, we haven’t learned anything from the experience of being lied into war by a...

Whatever happened to the libertarian movement? Since the age of 14 I have been a self-conscious libertarian.  That’s when I started reading libertarian tracts (Rand, Mises, Hayek).  I say reading, but at least in the case of Mises, reading was not the same as understanding at such an early age.  I was no child prodigy. ...

Kathy Griffin, “comedienne,” posts a photo of herself holding up the bloodied head of President Trump, gore dripping down his face. A Central Park production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar features an assassinated Caesar as Trump: The audience roars its approval as Brutus & Co. plunge their knives into him.  Meanwhile, the background music broadcast by...

The media frenzy that greeted the victory of Donald Trump is now reaching a pinnacle of manic hysteria.  Every single day, it seems, there is some new toxic, trumped-up accusation: He’s a Russian agent!  He’s obstructing justice!  He’s wants to repeal the First Amendment!  Members of the media, who are indeed playing to Trump’s characterization...

My local newspaper is now unreadable, and I’m damn mad about it. In order to understand the earthshaking significance of this turn of events and its emotional impact on me, you have to understand the role my paper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, plays in my life. It is the centerpiece of a long-standing ritual, one...

As I write, the attempted CIA coup against the Trump administration is ongoing.  Yes, you read that right: We’re getting awfully close to Seven Days in May territory.  Through a series of leaks to the “mainstream” media, the Langley spooks have launched a propaganda campaign that outdoes any of their overseas operations by a long...

For the first time since the Reagan years a Republican took Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Michigan.  After years of waiting for the rise of the MARs (Middle-American Radicals), I hear the ghost of Sam Francis chortling with unrestrained mirth. Trump took on the Clinton machine, the Republican Party, the media, the oligarchs, the neocons, and...

You are likely reading this after the election, and already one of the following three scenarios is unfolding. One: In a Brexit-like upset, Donald J. Trump mobilizes a coalition of Flyover Country “deplorables,” traditional nonvoters, and those who either lied to or refused to answer pollsters, and is elected President of these United States. The...

As the nation prepares to go to the polls to elect the 45th president of these United States, two flashpoints may determine the outcome. The first is Islamic terrorism.  It was almost funny to listen to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio inform us that a bomb set off in the Chelsea district wasn’t...

The national media campaign against Donald Trump is unprecedented.  All pretense to “objectivity” has been thrown out the window in an effort to keep the populist wing of the GOP out of the White House.  Nary a day goes by that the Washington Post or the New York Times doesn’t run a hit piece targeting...

Democracy isn’t freedom—and in today’s Turkey some people realize that, as amazing as that may seem.  Not ordinary folks, but the mid-level officers of the Turkish army, who have been watching with a jaundiced eye the steady Islamization of their country by an elected leader. The recent history of the Turks is rife with intrigues,...

Attorney General Loretta Lynch attempted to censor the three 911 calls Omar Mateen made as he was slaughtering his 49 victims at an Orlando nightclub.  All references to Islam and the Islamic State—to which he pledged allegiance as he was slaughtering his victims—were initially scrubbed.  “What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this...

It was the first meeting of The John Randolph Club, held somewhere in the wilds of Texas.  I was there at the urging of Murray Rothbard, who was enthusiastic about this gathering of libertarians and paleoconservatives in the wake of the Cold War’s end.  With the commies out of the Kremlin, said Murray, the Old...

The stunning success of the Trump campaign has upended what has passed for conservatism lo these many years and opened up new vistas for the American Right. Many if not most readers are familiar with the story of how the neoconservatives emigrated from the far left and colonized the conservative movement, hijacking what had been...

As Donald Trump moves closer to the magic number of 1,237 delegates, the panic of the political class is a wonderful sight to behold. GOP donors meet in secret conclave, plotting various scenarios designed to steal the nomination.  A “brokered” convention, a “contested” convention, a last-minute rules change, and a “conservative” third party run by...

Politics is all about hatred.  Never mind who you’re voting for: It’s who you’re voting against that really counts.  And that’s why any disagreement I may have with Donald Trump’s actual policies is completely irrelevant.  Because what really matters is that all the people I really hate—the media, the leadership of both parties, the entire...

Donald Trump has upended the GOP presidential primary process and turned it into the most entertaining reality show yet.  If The Donald’s road to the White House is blocked—either by the Republican elites or by his own tendency to go too far—and he returns to TV land, he’ll have a hard time topping this one....

California is showing the way forward for the aspiring authoritarians in our midst—and the drought is providing them with the perfect opportunity.  The front page of my local rag, the Press-Democrat, ran a story by Washington Post writer Bob Kuznia, “State’s wealthy guzzling water,” which sported this lede: “Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents...

We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire.  If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night; the precise moment does not matter.  There was no painted sign to say: “You are now entering Imperium.”  Yet it was a very old road and...

The waitress at my favorite Japanese restaurant, a spotlessly clean little joint in a Sonoma County hamlet not far from my home, had no idea what she was getting into as she took the order.  Two unremarkable looking customers had walked in the door: one an older, rather prissy-looking man with wire-rim glasses, and the...

I want to apologize to my readers, although I can only hope for forgiveness.  I certainly don’t deserve it. OK, Justin—I can hear you now—what have you done this time? The sin of which I am guilty is optimism of the most fatuous sort—or, rather, projecting an inauthentic optimism onto a most unworthy object.  The...

I’ve been a libertarian activist since the age of 16 or so—long before the term libertarian became known and widely used by the general public.  Indeed, when I announced my conversion to parents, friends, and associates I distinctly recall a number of them saying something to the effect of “Gee, I didn’t know the librarians...

It’s a Charlie Hebdo world—a place where “free speech” means the freedom to depict the Pope in drag with the caption “Ready for anything in order to win some clients?”  Where “liberty” means crude drawings, of the sort one might see on a men’s room wall, showing the Holy Trinity in a series of sexual...

You knew Jeb Bush was going to run for president; after all, assuming the worst is really the essence of conservatism.  And, sure enough, he’s “actively exploring the possibility”—a half-measure that prefigures the weakness and tepidity of another Bush presidency. Conservatives tempted to glom onto an alleged winner might want to contemplate the wisdom of...

My grandfather, Nicola Raimondo, came from a little town called Torre di Ruggiero, at the tip of the Italian boot.  It was a poor place then, and it looks to be even poorer today, from what I can tell, with half the place for sale and the other half in ruins.  He was 15 years...

You knew it would come to this.  So did I.  And yet one is still surprised by the sheer boldness of it all.  From my local paper: California public schools do an inadequate job of teaching students about gay and lesbian history, despite a 2011 law that requires schools to teach such lessons, according to...

I have lost the battle with my garden, the only war I care about these days.  The Drought (yes, I mean to capitalize it, to personify it as if it were an angry god) has scorched the yard, and there is no such thing as victory in the face of such an enemy—only the hope...

They are coming: on trains, on buses, on foot, all the way from Central America, where they meet up with smugglers who take them across our nonexistent border.  This has been happening for decades, but there’s one big difference in the recent wave of illegal immigration: These are children, many under ten years of age—50,000...

I have a recurring nightmare in which the war criminals who lied us into Iraq reappear to mock the hundreds of thousands they murdered in cold blood, repeating the same lies, the same rationalizations, the same mindless slogans that lured us into that hellhole to begin with.  Bill Kristol, the Kagan clan, the Israel Firsters,...

Think of what we’re trying to do: upend the biggest, deadliest, most intractable apparatus of power this world has ever seen.  The sheer scope of the Leviathan State is so daunting that any patriot who seeks to take it on is immediately faced with the enormity of his task—and that is sure to overwhelm even...

Washington desperately needed a new enemy, so the timing of Putin’s bloodless “invasion” of Crimea was just right.  Al Qaeda’s value as a fear generator has been seriously compromised ever since the death of Osama bin Laden, and now that it looks like the U.S. government has taken the Syrian affiliate of the group under...

One minute we were just waiting for the bombs to drop on Syria.  The next we were listening to the President tell us why it was a good idea—but never mind! What in the heck happened? The American people rose up, that’s what happened.  They called their representatives in Congress and told them, in no...