Category: Between the Lines

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Cold War Comfort

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...

Not Like the Other
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Not Like the Other

We often hear opponents of U.S. action abroad denounced as “anti-American.”  On the other hand, these alleged anti-Americans present themselves as anti-interventionists—opponents of the policy and not the country. So how to tell the difference?  One sign of anti-Americanism is the surrounding rhetoric used by the opponents of intervention in question: Are they screaming about...

NeverTrump, No Reserve
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NeverTrump, No Reserve

The enormity of what we’re up against is something I acknowledge in the abstract, but blank out of my consciousness 99 percent of the time.  It’s only when I come across an article like Alexander Rubinstein’s and Max Blumenthal’s recent exposé of the Omidyar Network that I’m jolted into awareness.  As the article published by...

Schizophrenic Citizens
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Schizophrenic Citizens

The very idea of dual citizenship is downright absurd.  It’s a contradiction that cannot be resolved.  The concept of citizenship is based on the expectation of loyalty to the country, and this, in turn, means that citizens owe their exclusive allegiance to the community in which they live.  So how is it possible to have...

Catch, Release, Repeat
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Catch, Release, Repeat

The photo went viral: a little girl crying after she’d been separated from her mother at the U.S.-Mexican border.  Time photoshopped it so that the little girl was crying while the Evil Donald Trump looked down at her, looming over her like some giant troll as she sobbed for her mother.  It was tweeted and...

Neocons in the Dark
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Neocons in the Dark

As I write this the news of Tom Wolfe’s death is breaking.  The stylish author of The Right Stuff, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the progenitor of the “New Journalism,” Wolfe was one of the last of the serious celebrity authors.  He contributed at least a few memorable phrases to the American lexicon, one...

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California Dreaming

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...

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The Liars and the Credulous

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...

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Lost Near the Beltway

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. ...

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If It Leads, It Bleeds

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...

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The Coming Backlash

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...

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Paper War

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...

Where Honor Is Due
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Where Honor Is Due

I got a call from a Washington-based journalist the other day who wanted to know if Pat Buchanan had any influence on the platform of our current President. What a question!  The guy sounded fairly young—at least, younger than me—so he doesn’t remember.  Yes, but aren’t there books, articles, easily accessible on the internet?  Has...

Considering Bannon
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Considering Bannon

They liken him to Rasputin and Svengali: He’s the éminence grise of the Trump administration, the hard-line ideologue who represents and multiplies all the darkest impulses of that man in the Oval Office. But who is Steve Bannon, really? The New York Times, in a remarkably dishonest—even for them—piece implied that the President’s chief strategist...

Inaugurating a Movement
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Inaugurating a Movement

It was a clarion call to his supporters and a hard slap in the face to his adversaries—the latter being gathered just a few feet behind him as he delivered his Inaugural Address.  Donald J. Trump never minces words, and on January 20 he showed that he isn’t about to start, now that he’s President...

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Booby-Trapping Trump

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...

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Ada Missed the Boat

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...

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Any Way You Put It

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...

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Unignorable Flashpoints

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...

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Realignment

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...

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Turkey Purge

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,...

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Abridging Omar

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...

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Immigration and Ideology

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...

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The Right Reborn

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...

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Prioritizing Threats

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...

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Who Hates Trump?

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...

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Wrecking Ball

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....

We’ve Only Just Begun
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We’ve Only Just Begun

The Left is not generous in victory.  The ink on the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was barely dry before a vicious assault on organized religion in this country was launched, a multipronged offensive with the clear intention of marginalizing Christians and banishing them from the public square. The first shot was fired...

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The Third Great Awakening

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...

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A Bubbling Crude

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...

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Disturbing the Peace

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...

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The Neocons Called the Tune

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...

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Confessions of a Libertarian Activist

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...

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Jihad on the Western Front

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...

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LBJeb

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...

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Living With Foreigners

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...

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The Golden State’s Lavender Jacobins

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...

My Conversation With Alex Jones
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My Conversation With Alex Jones

I always had the general impression that radio shock-jock Alex Jones was a huckster—basically an entertainer, as opposed to a serious person.  I’d never bothered to listen to his broadcasts, and all I knew about him was secondhand.  My recent encounter with Jones gave me the chance to find out the truth for myself. The...

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The War of Wars

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...

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Foreigners No More

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...

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Neocon Nightmare

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,...

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Is There Hope?

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...

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Stalking the Bear

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...

The World Upside Down
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The World Upside Down

The hysterics are deafening: The “invasion” of Crimea has the pundits in an uproar, with the Krauthammers and Kristols and Kagans calling for a new cold war (verging on hot), and the “progressives” chiming in with calls for sanctions and making Vladimir Putin “pay a price,” as the President put it.  Even some “libertarians” are...

Why Has the Land Turned on Me?
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Why Has the Land Turned on Me?

I have showered more love on this old 1940’s farmhouse than on any person living.  Certainly, I’ve spent more money on it than I care to count.  But more than the house itself—an undistinguished structure made interesting only by my renovation—it’s the land I fell in love with. The way my foot sinks into the...

The Russians Are Coming!
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The Russians Are Coming!

When the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union imploded shortly afterward, the world breathed a sigh of relief—except in the faculty lounges of our more exclusive universities, the last bastion of Marxism in the developed world.  But these hothouse exotics weren’t the only losers.  Their opposite numbers, the professional anticommunists, had far more to...

Taking Action
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Taking Action

“I don’t just renovate,” says Nicole Curtis, the 36-year-old star of Rehab Addict.  “I restore old houses to their former glory.” She’s a willowy blonde with the body of a pinup model and the determination of a drill sergeant—and she can wield a nail gun as well as any man, if not better.  That may...

No Peeking
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No Peeking

I promised mysel I’d stay out of local politics once I moved up here to Sonoma County, California, but this story is too good to pass up. It was 3 a.m., and the beautiful lady heard a rustling at her window.  Maybe it was the wind.  Had she left the window open?  She lay motionless...

It’s Always World War II
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It’s Always World War II

They call it the “Good War,” I suppose, in order to differentiate it from all the really bad wars we’ve been fighting—and losing—lately: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the future conflicts our political class has up its collective sleeve.  I call it the Worst War, because it fathered all the ones to come.  It was...

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An Unexpected Sea Change

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...