Category: Between the Lines

It’s like something out of The Lord of the Rings: a vast empire ruled by a king known as “B’arack”—an Orcish name if ever there was one—sends out its mechanical murderers to wreak destruction far and wide.  They strike from the air, whistling over homes huddled against the hills, dropping down on children as they...

When it comes to race, life in America resembles nothing so much as a reenactment of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.”  That story, you’ll recall, depicted a town that seemed normal—except that, once every year, there would be a lottery, and if you picked the one black stone among so many white ones, the...

Washington is reeling from revelations that the NSA is turning the country into a virtual Panopticon.  Americans are now learning that all our phone calls are turned over to the feds, who also have their tentacles in the servers of the major internet providers.  The whistle-blower, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a remarkably articulate former CIA employee...

I first saw it lying right under the fence, stretched out a good eight to ten feet long.  A rope?  Did I put that there? In the next moment I realized what it was. When I moved out to Sonoma County’s “wine country,” I knew there’d be wildlife—you know, birds, and maybe a few raccoons,...

There are ghosts in this house.  Yes, more than one, I think.  Of course, I don’t believe in ghosts—except that I can hear them. Every house emits noises, especially late at night.  Or, perhaps, it speaks during the daylight hours, only to be drowned out by the drone of traffic, lawn mowers, barking dogs, and...

The death of Hugo Raphael Chávez Frías provoked cries of “Hallelujah!” from pundits on the right.  Michael Moynihan, writing in the Daily Beast (the internet incarnation of Newsweek), jeered “Good riddance!” while he danced on the Venezuelan strongman’s grave.  All the usual suspects—the War Street Journal, the “conservatives” over at National Review, and the Israel...

The nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense has sparked a firestorm of opposition from Israel’s fifth column in the United States.  It is a useful example of just how the Jewish state’s parasitic relationship with America works. Israel cannot stand alone: She is a European colony in the midst of an Arab sea...

When 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered 26 people, most of them children, after killing his own mother at home, the nation went into one of its periodic orgies of recrimination—mostly directed at the National Rifle Association, which had to shut down its Facebook and Twitter accounts thanks to the...

Talk of secession is in the air.  A number of internet petitions from several states, asking to be allowed to leave the Union, have garnered tens of thousands of signatures.  Unsurprisingly, Texas leads the list, and Ron Paul has endorsed the idea.  According to him, “secession is a deeply American principle.”  True enough, which is...

For once, we actually had a candidate, but as Ron Paul retires and his son does his best to sully the family brand name, the future of the movement he inspired is in doubt.  No one was surprised that Jesse Benton, head honcho of the Paul presidential campaign—known for his propensity to sell out at...

St. Patrick’s Church is now a modern structure consisting of two red-brick tetrahedrons sprung up, like some poisonous mushroom, over the transformed landscape.  The original building, Old St. Patrick’s, is down the street from the usurper, crouching in the shadows, dreaming of the days when a Roman Catholic church could never have been mistaken for...

A fine summer day it was, and as I walked down my quiet country road I smugly congratulated myself for being unafraid of any bills that might lie waiting in the darkness of the rusty old mailbox.  I made a mental note to get a new one, perhaps an elaborate one.  Now, where would I...

“Hey, why don’t you get out there and mow the lawn?” How many times had I heard that refrain?  Through all the days of my youth, it seemed.  My father would always laugh when he said it, knowing full well I would be doing no such thing.  Not that he would have trusted me with...

Ray Bradbury’s passing, at the age of 91, evokes sadness and nostalgia for the lost world of my youth.  I discovered him early on, before he became quite as famous as he is today, in the science-fiction magazines that were my earliest “serious” reading material.  His stories featured real people, not the walking, talking clichés...

There’s no doubt the President’s endorsement of gay “marriage” was stage-managed: The timing was the key.  He did it hours after the news that North Carolinians had voted to put a ban on the practice in their state constitution.  Pressure from his supporters—and some of his biggest donors, I have no doubt—contributed to the decision. ...

I’ve avoided writing about racial politics for the same reason I’ve avoided stepping on land mines, but the news is filled with nothing but racial conflict these days: Trayvon Martin, the firing of John Derbyshire from National Review, the purging of Pat Buchanan from MSNBC, the daily accusations from the liberal media that conservative opponents...

Charles Koch was standing in line, waiting for his greaseburger.  The scene: a little greasy spoon at the foot of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, where we low-level Kochtopus employees grabbed a quick hamburger for lunch.  The place was smoky, unappetizing, and cheap.  So what was one of the richest men in country doing there? He...

The contractor is gone, the painter has departed, and the electrician has shed light where before there was only darkness.  The house glints fresh green as the afternoon sun finally pierces the clouds on this unusually warm winter day: 65 degrees in full sun.  Asphodel are arising from their winter graves, ghostly white and waving...

At this point it is clear that Rep. Ron Paul is not going to be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party.  Yet it seems likely that he will outlast all his rivals but for Romney, and that he will have a substantial bloc of delegates at the convention.  Paul has the money, and the...

What is a populist? This much used (and abused) term has gone through several American incarnations.  First, it was the name of a 19th-century political party whose program was as vague as its success was short-lived: The party combined an untenable admixture of Southern agrarianism and social-democratic panaceas leavened with a healthy hatred of Eastern...

I’ve bought three houses in as many years, and sold two of them.  Having been excluded from participating in the housing bubble by extreme poverty, I suppose I’ve been making up for lost time.  In 2008, when my mom died, I inherited what was—by my modest standards—a considerable sum, and there was no doubt about...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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,...