Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute

30 Years Later, Waco is Still Damning

by Jim Bovard | Apr 18, 2023 | Featured Articles

Thirty years ago, FBI tanks smashed into the ramshackle home of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, Texas. After the FBI collapsed much of the building atop the residents, a fire erupted and 76 corpses were dug out of the rubble. Unfortunately, the American political system and media have never honestly portrayed the federal abuses and political deceit that led to that carnage. What lessons can today’s Americans draw from the FBI showdown on the Texas plains 30 years ago? Purported Good Intentions Absolve Real Deadly Force Janet Reno, the nation’s first female attorney general, approved the...

Biden’s Sham Summit Won’t Save World Democracy

by Jim Bovard | Apr 3, 2023 | Featured Articles

President Joe Biden triumphantly saved world democracy last week (at least according to the White House scorecard). Biden co-hosted another Summit for Democracy, a repeat performance after the December 2021 test run. Biden sounded like a Quaalude Savior as he recycled his “inflection point of history” cliché. But the summit proved again that politicians are perils to freedom regardless of their prattle. Biden promised that “we are seeing real indications that we are turning the tide” in favor of democracy around the globe. Practically no one who's not on Biden’s payroll agrees. The...

Was the Iraq War the Biggest Con of the 21st Century?

by Jim Bovard | Mar 23, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The Iraq War was spawned by a deadly combination of political depravity and media complicity. Unfortunately, on the twentieth anniversary of the war, both elements of that conspiracy are being whitewashed. Instead, politicians and their pundit accomplices are prattling as if the Iraq war was a well-intentioned mistake, not a crime against humanity. In the days after 9/11, when pollsters asked Americans who they thought had carried out the 9/11 attacks, only 3 percent of respondents suggested Iraq or Saddam Hussein as culprits. But President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney...

Pro-Censorship Democrats Whitewash the Federal Government’s Iron Fist

by Jim Bovard | Mar 13, 2023 | Featured Articles, Politics

The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a hearing last Thursday on the Twitter Files. Elon Musk purchased Twitter last October and was aghast to learn how the feds had previously domineered his new company. “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene,” he tweeted on December 10. Musk chose a handful of journalists to go through Twitter’s records and expose how the feds domineered the company. Prior to Thursday’s hearing, the Twitter Files revealed that the U.S. State Department had directly pressured Twitter to cancel almost 300,000 accounts...

30th Anniversary of the FBI’s Biggest ‘Bomb’

by Jim Bovard | Mar 1, 2023 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

Thirty years ago this past Sunday, the largest terrorist attack in American history up to that point occurred when a 1200-pound bomb exploded beneath the World Trade Center in New York City. It was sheer luck that the explosion did not topple the entire skyscraper and kill thousands of people. Politicians solemnly marked the anniversary but dignitaries made no mention of the FBI’s role in that disaster. On November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated at a New York hotel. Kahane advocated banishing all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, and his political party was banned...

TSA Still Molesting at Warp Speed

by Jim Bovard | Feb 23, 2023 | Featured Articles

I traveled to Hartford, Connecticut last week for a conference. It was the first time since the start of the pandemic that I had the pleasure of being pawed by TSA agents. Alas, since 2020, neither I nor the Transportation Security Administration have become corrigible. Flying out of Washington National Airport on Thursday, I saw a special entry for the CLEAR program that enables people who pay $189 a year to skip TSA lines. I lambasted this program here back in December. Travelers stand in photo kiosks that compare their face with a federal database of photos from passport applications,...

The Forgotten Terrorist Pretext of the Vietnam War

by Jim Bovard | Feb 16, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Since 9/11, terrorism has become the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to pieces, invoking terrorism provides all the cover needed for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check to fight terrorism should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago. Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Anti-terrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War II. As the French...

Don’t Get Duped By the ‘State of the Union’

by Jim Bovard | Feb 13, 2023 | Featured Articles, Politics

Watching President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech was like being cornered by a drunken lout who endlessly yanks on your shirt sleeve and babbles about all the favors he’s going to do for you. Biden told so many howlers that he eventually got heckled like a bumbling comic at open mic night. He flavored his bunkum by sporadically screaming at his audience like an old man telling kids to get off his lawn. But Biden’s fixes for America will be ruinous if they are enacted. Ahead of the speech, Capitol Hill was again surrounded by an 8-foot-high black metal fence. This was the third year in...