Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute

The NSA Is Spying on Tucker Carlson (and Everyone Else)

by Jim Bovard | Jul 2, 2021 | Featured Articles

Fox News host Tucker Carlson was mocked on social media this week for stating that he had been told that the National Security Agency was reading his private emails and spying on him. The usual suspects called Carlson paranoid, because there are so many checks and balances to assure the feds would never illegally target a vexatious Biden critic. However, on Tuesday, a dissent by Travis LeBlanc, a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, revealed that one of the NSA’s most intrusive surveillance engines, XKeyscore, may be violating federal law and Americans’ rights and...

How the Biden White House Seeks to Reinvent ‘Domestic Terrorism’

by Jim Bovard | Jun 28, 2021 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

The Biden administration revealed on Tuesday that guys who can’t get laid may be terrorist threats due to “involuntary celibate–violent extremism.” That revelation is part of a new crackdown that identifies legions of potential “domestic terrorists” that the feds can castigate and investigate. But there is no reason to expect Biden administration anti-terrorism and anti-extremism efforts to be less of a farce and menace than similar post-9/11 campaigns. Since the French Revolution, politicians have defined terrorism to stigmatize their opponents, a precedent followed by the Biden...

How the American War on Drugs Demolished Guatemala

by Jim Bovard | Jun 9, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Vice President Kamala Harris visited Guatemala earlier this week to bestow millions of dollars in new foreign aid on that government. The Biden administration is pretending that giving more US tax dollars to Central American governments will miraculously reduce the surge of illegal immigrants that Biden’s appointees are welcoming in Arizona, Texas, and elsewhere. The purpose of Harris’s trip and the new handouts is not to solve that problem but simply to make the Biden administration appear to give a damn about the issue. In her official statements during the visit, Harris included no...

How the Corporate Press Pushes War

by Jim Bovard | Jun 9, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Fifty years ago, the New York Times began publishing excerpts from a massive secret report called the “History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy.” Those excerpts, which quickly became known as the “Pentagon Papers,” provided shocking revelations of perennial government deceit and spurred an epic clash over the First Amendment. Unfortunately, many of the media outlets that will celebrate the Pentagon Papers anniversary have long since become lap dogs of perfidious politicians dragging America into new foreign conflicts. The report that became the Pentagon Papers was a secret...

Memorial Day: Remember Political Lies that Caused Soldiers to Die

by Jim Bovard | Jun 1, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

This article was originally published at the Institute last year on Memorial Day and is reprinted below. On Memorial Day, the media do their usual sacralizing of war. Instead, it should be a day for the ritualized scourging of politicians. During the last 70 years, their lies have resulted in the unnecessary deaths of almost 100,000 American soldiers and millions of foreigners. And yet, people still get teary-eyed when politicians take the stage to talk about their devotion to the troops. On Memorial Day 2011, for instance, the Washington Post included numerous touching photographs of...

George Bush’s Damnable Afghan War Lies

by Jim Bovard | May 25, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Former President George W. Bush is bewailing President Joe Biden’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Bush told Fox News last week, “I’m also deeply concerned about the sacrifices of our soldiers, and our intelligence community, will be forgotten,” after the war ends. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the American media has already forgotten how Bush’s lies turned U.S. intervention in Afghanistan into a quagmire that pointlessly killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers. After Al Qaeda hijacked four airplanes on September 11, 2001, wreaking death and destruction in...

Correcting the Lapdog Media

by Jim Bovard | May 13, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Former CNN White House correspondent Michelle Kosinski declared on Twitter last week that American journalists would “never expect…Your own govt to lie to you, repeatedly” and “Your own govt to hide information the public has a right to know.” Kosinski denounced “Trump’s unAmerican regime” and declared, “No one should accept this.” Kosinski’s comments epitomize the “Trump-washing” of American history that explains much of the media’s rage, hypocrisy, and follies in the last five years. Kosinski’s mindset also helps explain why Americans' trust in the media has collapsed. Kosinski spent years...

Congress’ Obsession With Unreadable Laws

by Jim Bovard | May 10, 2021 | Featured Articles, Politics

“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap,” Napoleon is reputed to have said more than two centuries ago. Boundless ignorance is also not a handicap, as Congress demonstrated last December by approving a 5593-page bill without reading it. Plenty of activists and editorial pages howled over the sloppy procedures propelling $2.3 trillion in new federal spending. James Madison warned in the Federalist Papers in 1788 that “it will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they...