As a teenager, I was a news junkie. (That never changed.) I listened regularly to KFWB News radio in Los Angeles. One of their anchormen, Jeff Riggenbach, had a distinctive baritone voice. When I was 19, I was doing a bit of selling marijuana. A friend came to tell me of someone who wanted to buy a pound. I told him to bring his friend by. When the friend arrived and started talking, I said “You’re Jeff Riggenbach!” “I’m aware of that,” he replied.
Over the years I met Jeff over and over at events and homes of friends. In 1978 we were working in the same offices, Jeff at Libertarian Review and me at Students for a Libertarian Society. We became fast friends.
Jeff Riggenbach is a journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator. A member of the Organization of American Historians and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, he has written for such newspapers as the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle; such magazines as Reason, Inquiry, and Liberty; and such websites as LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, and RationalReview.com. His books include In Praise of Decadence (1998), Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (2009), and Persuaded by Reason: Joan Kennedy Taylor & the Rebirth of American Individualism (2014). Drawing on vocal skills he honed in classical and all-news radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston, Riggenbach has also narrated the audiobook versions of numerous libertarian works, many of them available on Mises.org.
Jeff was a brilliant and creative man. He died at 74 after a long illness. He made the world better and his passage is a great loss. I will miss him very much.
By a vote of 284-129, the House of Representatives soundly defeated an amendment to establish a plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. A slight plurality of Democrats supported the measure, with most of the leadership opposing. All Republicans except two voted in to oppose. Libertarian Justin Amash supported the measure. The amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was offered by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
President Trump declared in late May that he wanted to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan before the November election. Since that time, Democratic leaders have shifted to an even more hawkish position, pulling out all the stops to prevent such a move. Much of the foreign policy of the Democratic leadership has been driven by opposition to Trump’s positions, rather than by what is best for the country or what the American people desire.
American troops have been fighting in Afghanistan for 19 years, with no progress in reducing violence.
This article was originally featured at Antiwar.com and is republished with permission.
My good friend Jon Basil Utley died on Friday. Jon had been fighting lymphoma for a few years. I believe he was 87. He was one of the sweetest men I ever met. For the last several years, he served as Publisher of The American Conservative magazine and website. Last year, he wrote a brief history of trying to organize conservative opposition to US interventionism.
I met Jon in 1991 when he was organizing the Committee to Avert a Mideast Holocaust, against the first Gulf War. He was very supportive of my efforts in starting Antiwar.com in 1995, and became our first major donor in 1999, and continued to support us generously over the years. He was so genuinely appauled by US wars and committed the latter part of his life to fighting them. He wrote occasionally for Antiwar.com, his articles are available here. Jon was given a lifetime achievement award by The American Conservative last year.
Jon was the son of famous conservative writer Freda Utley and Russian communist economist Arcadi Berdichevsky, a close associate of Joseph Stalin. Jon was born in Russia in the early 1930s. In 1936, Stalin’s police arrested Arcadi. Unable to aid him, Freda left soon after for England with young Jon, using British names and passports. There, she mobilized important leftist friends like George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Laski to try to find Arcadi and even sent a letter directly to Stalin. She received two postcards from Arcadi reporting his five years’ sentence to an Arctic Circle concentration camp for alleged association with Trotskyists. In 1956, she learned he had died on March 30, 1938. She later became a fervent anti-Communist and became an important figure in the US conservative movement.
Jon grew up around prominent conservatives, and became an important part of the movement. When he became disgusted with America’s wars, he used his position within the movement to try to turn them against the wars. Although frustrated with his attempts, he continued to attend meetings and speak out for peace for many years. Jon would often call me and tell me about these endeavors. I usually saw Jon in person about once a year when he would visit California.
In 2004 Jon travelled to Russia and learned that his father was executed by firing squad for leading a hunger strike at the Vorkuta prison labor camp. He was “rehabilitated” posthumously in 1961 under post-Stalin rehabilitation laws. Jon told me that he was able to see files in Russia that included photos of his father and the actual execution order signed by Stalin himself.
I am having a hard time writing this. I spoke with him a few weeks ago and realized how ill and frail he was getting. I had been trying to reach him every day for the last two weeks and feared the worst. I will so miss talking with him. I will post additional tributes to him in the coming days.
Here is Jon’s biography from The American Conservative website:
Jon Basil Utley is publisher of The American Conservative. Utley is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service with language studies in Germany and France. He first worked for American International Group insurance in Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia. Later he became a foreign correspondent in South America for Knight Ridder newspapers and for 17 years, starting during the Reagan Administration, was a commentator about third world issues on the Voice of America. He managed an oil drilling partnership in Pennsylvania and later worked in real estate development. He has written for the Harvard Business Review, Washington Post, and other papers. He was formerly founding editor of The Bogota Bulletin, associate editor of The Times of the Americas, and a contributing editor to The Conservative Digest. He was born in Moscow.His father, a Russian trade official, was sent to the gulag and executed at the Brick Quarry in Vorkuta for being one of three leaders of a hunger strike. His mother, Freda Utley, became a prominent anticommunist author and activist.
Justin Raimondo, former editorial director and co-founder of Antiwar.com, is dead at 67. He died at his home in Sebastopol, California, with his husband, Yoshinori Abe, by his side. He had been diagnosed with 4th stage lung cancer in October 2017.
Justin co-founded Antiwar.com with Eric Garris in 1995. Under their leadership, Antiwar.com became a leading force against U.S. wars and foreign intervention, providing daily and often hourly updates and comprehensive news, analysis, and opinion on war and peace. Inspired by Justin’s spirit, vision, and energy, Antiwar.com will go on.
Justin at 4 years old
Justin (born Dennis Raimondo, November 18, 1951) grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York and, as a teenager, became a libertarian. He was a fierce advocate of peace who hated war, and an early advocate of gay liberation. He wrote frequently for many different publications and authored several books. He was also politically active in both the Libertarian and Republican parties.
The Young Rebel
When Justin was six, he was, in his own words, “a wild child.” This will surprise no one who knows him. In “Cold War Comfort,” which he wrote for Chronicles Magazine, he tells how he dashed out of his first-grade class with his teacher chasing him. Because this was a daily occurrence, he writes, he was sent to a prominent New York psychiatrist named Dr. Robert Soblen. Just this decade, Justin got his hands on Soblen’s notes on his case and learned that Soblen had concluded that Justin was schizophrenic. Soblen’s reason? Justin was Catholic, claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary, and believed in miracles. Soblen recommended locking up young Justin in a state mental institution. The one Soblen had in mind was Rockland State Hospital, which, according to Justin, was the backdrop for the movie The Snake Pit.
Soblen was not just a psychiatrist. He was also a top Soviet spy and friend of Stalin who was tasked with infiltrating the American Trotskyist movement. He was ultimately convicted of espionage and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1961. Ultimately, in 1962, Soblen committed suicide after jumping bail, fleeing to Israel, and seeking asylum in the UK.
Justin at 10 years old
When Justin was 14 years old, he wrote an article on Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s philosophy, for a local New York newspaper. Rand’s lawyer, Henry Holzer, responded by sending him a “cease and desist” letter. Not long after, Justin went to a lecture at the Nathaniel Branden Institute and stood in line to get a book signed. He was identified, pulled out of line, and escorted to a private room. Soon Nathaniel Branden came in and gave Justin a resounding lecture. Shortly after this, Ayn Rand herself entered the room with her entourage. According to Justin, she seemed surprised that he was so young. When Justin told her that the editors of his piece had edited it and changed some of his meaning. Rand warmed up and said, “So you want to be a writer.”
As an Objectivist and budding libertarian, Justin participated in the student strike at his progressive high school, Cherrylawn, in 1968. Although exuberantly popular with students and quite a real-life experiment in anarcho-libertarianism, the school ultimately reverted to its more traditional mode of, among other things, decision making. No more collective morning meetings of students to decide what they would or would not study that day, and whose classes they would attend!
Shortly after graduating from high school, Justin made the leap to San Francisco. Here Justin found a place he made his own and remained for nearly 40 years.
The Activist
Justin was very active politically from an early age. In the mid to late 1970s, he worked to get the Libertarian Party to accept gay rights and was a participant in the gay liberation movement in San Francisco. Justin was one of the activists who spoke out strongly against the Dan White verdict. White was found guilty of manslaughter and given a 7-year prison sentence for killing San Francisco mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, two prominent gay rights advocates. Justin thought that White should have been found guilty of first-degree murder. His powerful booklet about the case, In Praise of Outlaws, was published by the Students for a Libertarian Society.
Justin CO-founded the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus (LPRC) in late 1978. Economist Murray Rothbard joined a few months later. Around the same time, Justin became one of the first employees of the newly formed Students for a Libertarian Society. Shortly after Democratic US Senator Sam Nunn and other members of Congress moved to reinstate the military draft and draft registration, Justin helped organize a number of anti-draft rallies that were held around the country on May 1, 1979. The LPRC disbanded in 1983.
Charles Koch in a heated discussion with Justin, circa 1979
Known for gay rights activism and radicalizing the Libertarian Party, Justin nevertheless did not for the most part identify with the left. He found more intellectual inspiration in the Old Right, people like John T. Flynn, Albert J. Nock, Frank Chodorov, Isabel Paterson, and other mid-20th century figures who defended the vision of a constitutional republic and protested the progressive leviathan’s despotic powers at home and abroad. Justin was especially influenced by novelist Garet Garrett, who saw Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency as a revolutionary development that gutted American freedom while leaving the superficial form of the Constitution intact, and who was perhaps “even harsher” in opposing Truman’s Cold War imperialism. Justin regarded the irreconcilable conflict between interventionists and traditionalists as the defining struggle over the heart and soul of American conservatism.
Justin long hoped that electoral politics could restore anti-imperialism on the right. In 1987, Justin and his friends Eric Garris, Colin Hunter, and Alexia Gilmore started the Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee within the Republican Party. It was a predecessor to the Libertarian Republican faction within the Republican Party that was led by then-Congressman Ron Paul.
Not content just to write and organize, in 1996, Justin ran as a Republican against powerful Bay Area Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. In his campaign, he emphasized his opposition to her vote in favor of the Clinton Administration’s military intervention in Bosnia.
Because of his strong antiwar views, Justin also supported Pat Buchanan three times in his run for President of the United States: 1992, 1996, and 2000. In 2000, Justin gave the nominating speech for Pat Buchanan at the Reform Party convention in Long Beach. It can be seen here from 1:19:00 to 1:32:02.
A Writer to the End
Ayn Rand correctly intuited Justin’s path. Although at times a dedicated activist, he primarily fought the power through writing. Justin wrote regularly for the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, and the American Conservative. He also wrote for Reason, Mises Review, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Libertarian Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Spectator, Real Clear Politics, and Mother Jones. For several years, he also had a monthly column for Chronicles Magazine.
Of course, his most prolific writing was for Antiwar.com. He, along with managing editor Eric Garris, helped set up Antiwar.com in 1995 and he was writing a column 7 days a week by 1999, when Antiwar.com became a major force on the World Wide Web, going viral when it led nationwide opposition to the NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. Justin was the guiding light of Antiwar.com and over those 20 years wrote about 3,000 articles.
Largely due to Justin’s columns, Antiwar.com continued to grow in focus and influence after September 11, 2001, and established itself as a leader of opposition to the new wars of the 21st Century. Justin led the charge in stressing the need for libertarians, peace activists, and all Americans to resist the war machine, starting with the Afghanistan intervention. His writing on Antiwar.com got him on cable news during the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq: he appeared multiple times on Fox News Channel, CNN, and MSNBC. His outspoken views made him a target of various pro-war intellectuals, notably Bill Kristol, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens. As the nation went to war and throughout the years of conflict, Justin did not tire in his opposition. No writer more relentlessly and meticulously documented the crimes of the war party.
Pursuing the American Dream
Justin fondly quoted poet Robinson Jeffers, who described America as a “perishing republic.” But Justin never gave up on the country he loved, and in his later years he found his own piece of the American dream. In 2007 Justin moved from San Francisco up north to Sonoma County, where he embraced life as a curmudgeonly semi-gentleman-farmer. He took immense pleasure in cutting his lawn, chatting with the neighbors, and surveying the horse pastures beyond the wooden fences across the road, all the while assiduously following political and cultural events, largely via the internet.
Justin and his husband Yoshi
Although early on he was skeptical of gay marriage, Justin defended the right of gays to marry, and married his longtime companion, Yoshinori Abe, in 2017.
When Justin was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in October 2017, he was told he had at most 6 months to live. But he was an early user of Keytruda, which likely increased his lifespan by over one year.
One of the last pleasures Justin had as part of his Antiwar.com activities was seeing, on June 12, three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in 18-15416 Dennis Raimondo v. FBI, roundly rebuke the pathetic Department of Justice lawyer who claimed that the court should have no say in how the FBI held on to evidence when it was clear that no crime was committed.
On Thursday, June 27, Justin finally succumbed to his cancer. He is survived by his two sisters, Dale and Diane, and his husband Yoshi.
Justin was one of a kind. He will be missed, both here at Antiwar.com and by the wider world.
I am sorry to announce that David Bergland has died at the age of 83. He had been battling prostate cancer.
Bergland was the 1984 presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party. He was also the 1976 candidate for Vice-President.
I met David in 1973 and worked closely with him during my time in the Libertarian Party. He was a principled promoter of freedom and peace and was a leader in the anti-interventionist wing of the Libertarian Party during the 1970s and 1980s. He was the author of Libertarianism in One Lesson.
Rep. Walter Jones, one of the most consistently antiwar members of Congress, has died at age 75 after an extended illness.
The Republican lawmaker had battled a series of ailments in recent years and was granted a leave of absence from Congress late last year after missing a number of House votes.
Jones was originally a strong supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact, Jones became well known for leading the effort to have french fries renamed “freedom fries” in House cafeteria menus as a protest against French opposition to the invasion.
By 2005, Jones had reversed his position on the Iraq War. Jones called on President George W. Bush to apologize for misinforming Congress to win authorization for the war. Jones said, “If I had known then what I know today, I wouldn’t have voted for that resolution.”
Jones went on to become one of the most antiwar members of Congress, fighting for ending US involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
Jones also became a regular donor to Antiwar.com and contributed to the Antiwar.com blog. Jones often made surprise phone calls to me and to news editor Jason Ditz to praise our work and to thank us for helping him to “see the light” on issues of national security.
We at Antiwar.com mourn his passing and extend our condolences to his family and friends.
I have just received the very sad news that our good friend and freedom-fighter Will Grigg, has passed away. He was 54.
Will was a long-time activist and writer against war and state power. He had recently co-founded The Libertarian Institute with Scott Horton and Sheldon Richman.
Will is survived by his wife Korrin and six children.
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