I have spent decades trying to turn political dirt into philosophic gold. I have yet to discover the alchemist’s trick, but I still have fun with the dirt.
I was born in Iowa and raised in the mountains of Virginia. Wheeling and dealing with old coins as a teenager vaccinated me against trusting politicians long before I grew my first scruffy beard. Shortly after my fifteenth birthday, the U.S. government drove the final wooden stake into the nation’s currency when President Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. government would cease redeeming any dollars for gold. The dollar thus became a fiat currency—something which possessed value solely because politicians said so.
Reading Coin News and other numismatic publications, I soaked up the rage at how the U.S. government was intentionally torpedoing the value of the dollar. When I got laid off from a construction job after graduating high school, I saw it as a sign from God (or at least from the market) to buy gold. I liquidated my coin collection and poured the money into gold. Nixon’s resignation redeemed my gamble.
I didn’t get rich but made enough to help pay for sporadically attending Virginia Tech, with some money left over to cover living expenses during my first seasons of literary strikeouts after I decided to become a writer. The Watergate scandal and the bipartisan crimes of the Vietnam War helped me recognize that politicians as a class were scoundrels.
After living in Boston and southern Illinois, I moved to Washington DC in 1980 to try my luck as an investigative journalist. I sought to write articles that would awaken Americans to the growing threats to our rights and liberties. I thought that exposing damning facts would wake up enough Americans to stop government from destroying everyone’s freedom. At that point, politicians and their media allies usually portrayed government as a hovercraft sailing along, kindly assisting people on the road of life. The state that I had met on my life’s pathways was often oppressive, incompetent, and venal. I saw no profit in delusions about the benevolence of officialdom. Instead, I realized that idealism on liberty demands brutal realism on political power.
In ancient Greece, the famous cynic philosopher Diogenes purportedly scoffed at a rival who had “practiced philosophy for such a long time and never yet disturbed anyone.” I had the same view on investigative journalism. But in Washington DC, most of what passes for “journalism” is simply shilling for Leviathan. It is impossible to overstate the servility of reporters proud to serve as “stenographers with amnesia.”
In contrast, I was a philistine who gave no credence to an agency’s mission statement. After I wrote a piece in 1983 lambasting a new program by the Ronald Reagan administration to lavish subsidies on businesses purportedly to train workers, an assistant secretary of Labor denounced my “callously cynical concept of the American free enterprise system” and wailed, “Bovard was determined to disparage all government efforts without giving President Reagan’s reforms a chance.” Actually, I was happy to “disparage all government efforts” doomed to repeat past failures. I learned how to smell a policy rat.
I recognized that atrocities that went unchallenged set precedents to haunt Americans in perpetuity. After I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece detailing how an FBI sniper gunned down Vicki Weaver—a mother holding a baby at a cabin door in the mountains of northern Idaho—I was denounced by FBI chief Louis Freeh for “misleading or patently false conclusions” and “inflammatory and unfounded allegations.” My articles helped demolish the Ruby Ridge cover-up, concluding with the feds paying a multimillion dollar settlement for wrongful killings. But the FBI’s long record of outrages did not deter conservatives from exalting the agency after 9/11 or deter liberals from conferring sainthood upon the Bureau for its efforts to undermine Trump.
My disdain for prevailing pieties spurred plenty of denunciations. After my 1995 book dedicated to “Victims of the State” (Shakedown: How the Government Screws You from A to Z), Entertainment Weekly scoffed that I was “paranoid.” So I should have written “lucky beneficiaries” instead? In 1999, a Los Angeles Times book review castigated me as an “unvarnished example of the contemptuous attitude toward the American political system.” After I wrote an op-ed mocking the “night pay” bonuses for non-working Customs Service agents, the American Federation of Government Employees denounced me for “senselessly vilifying government workers” and planting “seeds in the minds of sick people such as Timothy McVeigh, resulting in tragedies such as the Oklahoma City bombing.” Hell, I have never even been to Oklahoma.
By the late 1990s, being an investigative journalist was akin to plinking at a rigged carnival shooting gallery. Each time you scored a bullseye, three more targets quickly popped up. I wrote plenty of pieces debunking both Bill Clinton’s “New Liberalism” and the pledge by Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution to rein in rampaging agencies. Despite growing distrust of Washington, the vast majority of floundering federal programs seemed impervious to criticism. Government had become so large and powerful that its abuses became little more than background noise.
The 9/11 attacks toppled media courage as well as the World Trade Center towers. Three months after the attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed, “Those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty…only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and…give ammunition to America’s enemies.” I wasn’t giving ammo to anybody—I was simply documenting how the George W. Bush administration was turning freedom into a phantom. But the Bush administration sought to intimidate anyone who was pro-freedom to their mouth shut about the most brazen power grabs perhaps since World War I.
I didn’t muzzle myself after 9/11. The harder my articles hit, the less newshole I got. My pieces on Bush‘s torture regime were as popular with editors as if I had advocated cannibalism. A 2006 book review in The Washington Times, where I had been a contributor for more than twenty years, derided me as a “bomb thrower” who was guilty of “character assassination” of President Bush. Was it my fault that George never found those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
The Barack Obama era brought a fresh deluge of outrages and scandals, supplemented by bizarre power grabs, including a new prerogative for presidential assassinations of Americans suspected of terrorist connections. After I repeatedly lambasted Attorney General Eric Holder in USA Today, the Justice Department press chief Brian Fallon pressured the paper to cease printing my “consistently nasty words about Mr. Holder.” Fallon bitterly complained that I had “authored pieces criticizing [Holder] on civil liberties, relations with law enforcement, and civil asset forfeiture.” Was it my fault if the attorney general was a menace to the Bill of Rights? USA Today was unfazed and continued printing my exposes of federal law enforcement.
The first Trump administration almost made bombast great again. Donald Trump yanked in the reins on a few federal agencies but otherwise the growth of Leviathan seemed to be on automatic pilot. In a series of pieces for USA Today and elsewhere, I exposed how the FBI surveillance crime spree crippled both the Constitution and the Trump administration. When Trump sought to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, he was outfoxed by Democrats and the Deep State. Trump failed to perpetuate the Obama administration’s leash on reckless biological research abroad, paving the way for the U.S. government to bankroll the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The COVID virus exited from that lab, resulting in seven million deaths worldwide and Trump’s temporary elevation of Tony Fauci as COVID savior. By the time that Trump saw through the lockdown ruse and a deluge of new voting rules, he was too far behind to win the 2020 election.
“Government is good” was practically the official storyline after Joe Biden took his oath of office in January 2021. Actually, “no boondoggle left behind” was his administration’s tacit motto. Democrats and their media allies pretended that Biden’s election victory miraculously fixed all the federal flaws that have damned programs and policies for most of the prior century. I wrote about how Biden unleashed federal surveillance and why libertarians should expect to be hammered harder than practically any other target. In USA Today, New York Post, and the Libertarian Institute webpage, I bashed Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate. From the Disinformation Governance Board to the White House crackdown on COVID humor on Facebook, I heartily thrashed censors wherever I could find good newshole. Many of my key attacks on Biden, Trump, and earlier presidents can be found in Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, published by the Libertarian Institute.
From getting kicked out of the Supreme Court for laughing at Leviathan, to heisting damning documents at World Bank headquarters, to racing around East Bloc regimes one step ahead of the secret police, I’ve had more fun than I deserved. I appreciate the editors I’ve found who are still willing to publish pieces exposing official crimes and political absurdities. And maybe one of these years, the tide will turn in favor of individual liberty.
