Hunter DeRensis | The Libertarian Institute

Veterans’ Group Responds to Liz Cheney: ‘Put Up or Shut Up’

by Hunter DeRensis | Feb 7, 2022 | Blog, Foreign Policy

Today Bring Our Troops Home, a national organization of Global War on Terror veterans, called on Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney to stop using the U.S. Constitution "as a media prop" and support congressional war powers as stated in Article I, Section 8. "It is time for Liz Cheney to either put up or shut up. In a weak attempt to defend herself after the Republican National Committee rebuked her, Cheney tried to claim she was standing on constitutional grounds. It is a lie," said Sgt. Dan McKnight, Chairman of Bring Our Troops Home. In reaction to the censure enacted Friday by the...

Jim Bovard on C-SPAN Today, 9:30 EST

by Hunter DeRensis | Jan 31, 2022 | Blog

Journalist and regular contributor to the Libertarian Institute James Bovard will appear on C-SPAN's Washington Journal this morning to talk about COVID-19 testing. You can watch his appearance, starting at 9:30pm EST, at this link.

Merchants of Death: Origin of the Military-Industrial Complex

by Hunter DeRensis | Nov 12, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

This article was originally featured at The American Conservative and is republished with permission of author. Is it unethical to profit off the mass death of your countrymen, and should something be done about it? In a society where wealth of any origin is increasingly looked at with suspicion and envy, weapons contractors have somehow avoided the spotlight. Even domestic gunmakers have withstood more public criticism than the producers of battleships, humvees, and fighter jets. When did a healthy skepticism of war profiteering turn into social acceptance of massive corporate structures...

Soldiers Are Losing Faith in Their Commanders

by Hunter DeRensis | Sep 2, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

During the founding of the United States, Pennsylvania earned the nickname “keystone” for its essential role—geographic, economic, and political—in winning American independence. Two and a half centuries later, Pennsylvania maintained its Keystone State status in the now concluded war in Afghanistan. In 2013, after the peak of the insurgency, state Adjutant Gen. Wesley Craig said that Pennsylvania endured "by far" the most National Guard deaths of any state. In the past two decades, according to tracker icasualties.org, the state has seen 93 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan in addition to...

‘Newspaper Generals’: The Shared Legacy of David Petraeus and Nelson Miles

by Hunter DeRensis | Aug 30, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

As the United States closes the door on its two-decade war in Afghanistan, the last person the American people need to hear from is the man who not only contributed to the war being prolonged a decade, but who wants it to continue for another (or more). And yet here is “King David” Petraeus, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, riffing in a casual interview with The New Yorker about how his counterinsurgency ideas were never given a large enough time frame to succeed, and hocking the same “lessons” he’s been repeating for years. Should the man who lengthened and exacerbated the...

Happy 140th Birthday, Smedley Butler

by Hunter DeRensis | Jul 30, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

For the first thirty years of the twentieth century, when there was trouble on the peripheries of the emerging U.S. empire in the form of rebellions, bandits, or resistence, Washington could always rely on one soldier to restore order. Invariably, days after his appearance, newspapers nationwide would carry the identical headline, “The Marines arrived and everything is quiet.” So how did it happen that, after three decades as a reliable hatchetman, this soldier turned and took aim at the same military, financial, and political leaders whom he had served? Smedley Darlington Butler was born...

All Vices Created Equal: Brandi Love and TPUSA

by Hunter DeRensis | Jul 19, 2021 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

For the past decade people have become comfortable in their Culture War trenches, which for the better part of the 2010s have pitted an evangelical, PC-imposing leftwing against a more laissez-faire rightwing. When it comes to the freedom to think and speak verboten ideas that dissent from the cultural monolith, the right has been much more friendly to liberty. There is, however, a portion of conservatives whose world outlook remains much more Tipper Gore than Dee Snider. And they made themselves loud and clear this past weekend responding to the controversy between Turning Point USA and...

American Historians Misjudge American Presidents

by Hunter DeRensis | Jul 7, 2021 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Politics

"They adored him as no man in a democracy deserves to be adored,” Walter Lippmann wrote, describing progressive worshippers of Theodore Roosevelt in 1916. American historians suffer from the same malady, a predisposition to hero-worshipping chief executives (T.R. included). What causes this persistent love affair? Is it a preference for studying big changes and swift actions, which occur most often under muscular presidents? Is it a sympathy for big government and the men who implemented the policies liberal historians themselves prefer? Whatever the cause of this fondness, the resulting...