Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute

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...

‘Missionary Journalists’ Are Lying About the American Revolution

by Jim Bovard | Feb 7, 2023 | Featured Articles

The 1619 Project is back in the news with the release of the six-part Hulu series built around its claim that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.” The 1619 Project, championed by Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times, has been canonized by progressives and is now being taught in more than 4,500 American classrooms. Vice President Kamala Harris jumped on the bandwagon last June when she told school children “black people in America” suffered “400 years of slavery.” Harris did not specify when she expunged the Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation...

Davos’ Damndest Delusion: FBI As Good Guys?

by Jim Bovard | Jan 24, 2023 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

You can judge an audience by how much bullshit they accept from the podium. By that standard, the World Economic Forum attendees in Davos, Switzerland last week were either depraved or craven. Why else would FBI chief Christopher Wray not get hooted down for portraying his agency as “good guys?” Why was the FBI boss even making an appearance at a conference chockful of political weasels, billionaires, and depraved activists like former Vice President Al Gore? Actually, Wray was part of a panel on national security that included luminaries such as Ukrainian Vice-Prime Minister Yulia...

Biden’s Toxic January 6th Demonology

by Jim Bovard | Jan 12, 2023 | Featured Articles, Politics

Last Friday, President Biden held a White House ceremony commemorating the second anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot. Biden showered a dozen Presidential Service Medals dozen people connected to the 2020 election or the January 6 events. Biden talked of the anniversary as a "day of remembrance"—perhaps echoing the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Many Americans would be happy to never hear about January 6 again. No such luck. Vice President Kamala Harris equated January 6 with 9/11 and threw in Pearl Harbor to score a trifecta. Biden endlessly invoked January 6 in his speeches...

The IRS Straps on Their Jackboots to Enforce Biden’s Tax Laws

by Jim Bovard | Jan 9, 2023 | Featured Articles

The Internal Revenue Service is perhaps the ultimate sacred cow in Washington. It is the “goose that lays the golden eggs” for the city’s power and prestige, delivering trillions of dollars to politicians to work miracles (or at least get reelected). When criticism erupted over the 87,000 new revenooers to be hired thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Washington’s Defenders of Correct Thinking rushed to the ramparts. The Media Goes To Bat for the IRS Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, in an article headlined “Another Republican Lie is Born,” caterwauled that Republicans’ anti-IRS...

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