Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute

Don’t Trust ‘Waco Whitewasher’ John Danforth’s Election Advice

by Jim Bovard | Oct 25, 2020 | Featured Articles

Trump’s attack on the debate commission is an attack on the election itself,” blares the headline from today’s Washington Post op-ed page. That article was written by former senator John Danforth, who has been a member of the Commission on Presidential Debates since 1994. Danforth, an ordained Episcopal priest whose piety earned him the derisive nickname, “Saint Jack,” is one of Washington’s favorite useful idiots of Leviathan. It is no surprise that he would be a permanent fixture on a commission that appears determined to perpetuate the swamp. Danforth wails in the Post that accusing the...

Gretchen Whitmer Is Both a Victim and Perpetrator of Terror

by Jim Bovard | Oct 11, 2020 | Featured Articles

#StopTrumpsTerror is one of the hottest trending topics on Twitter, with more than 90,000 tweets. Yesterday, the FBI announced the arrest of six people yesterday in a plot (perhaps government-hatched) to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for treason for destroying the state’s economy with the lockdowns she imposed. Seven other individuals were arrested and charged with violating Michigan’s anti-terrorism law. Trump had no connection to the plot, and at least one of the alleged plotters denounced Trump as a “tyrant” and “the enemy.” But Trump’s condemnations of...

A 19 Year Retrospective on the War on Terror

by Jim Bovard | Sep 12, 2020 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Nineteen years after the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror is still the biggest sham of this century. President George W. Bush promised to “rid the world of evil” and instead unleashed war and carnage. American troops are now fighting in 14 nations as part of an endless crusade against “extremists.” President Obama provided massive military aid and other support to Al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups in Libya and Syria—and the Trump administration continued the Syrian idiocy and has repeatedly veered close to war with Iran. Trump talks of “ending endless wars” but he has failed to deliver on one...

Trump’s Last Chance at Reelection: End the Wars!

by Jim Bovard | Aug 15, 2020 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Four years ago, Donald Trump electrified campaign audiences by denouncing “Trigger Happy Hillary” Clinton. Trump bragged in 2016 that his advisers knew “how to avoid the endless wars we are caught in now” but he has yet to deliver on what many voters believed was his most important campaign promise. Can he revive his faltering reelection bid by boldly withdrawing American troops from much of the world? Perhaps Trump did not recognize how steeply the deck is stacked in Washington. For more than a hundred years, starting with Woodrow Wilson, presidents have lied America into foreign wars. In...

Why I Write

by Jim Bovard | Aug 12, 2020 | Featured Articles

I was born in Iowa, raised in the mountains of Virginia, and attended Virginia Tech sporadically from 1974 to 1976 before dropping out to try my luck writing. At some point in the late 1970s, individual liberty became my highest political value and I resolved to do what I could to defend it. I had seen the federal government sabotage the currency, ravage southeast Asia with an unjust war, and tumble into disgrace with the Watergate scandal. The pratfalls of the Carter administration, following the depravity of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, spurred a sense of impending political and...

2020 Has Killed the State’s Claim to Legitimacy

by Jim Bovard | Jul 29, 2020 | Featured Articles

The American political system may be on the eve of its worst legitimacy crisis since the Civil War. Early warning signals indicate that many states could suffer catastrophic failures in counting votes in November. The election will occur amidst the vast economic devastation inflicted by a political class that responded to COVID by seizing almost unlimited power. And Deep State federal agencies have already proven that they will trample the law to sabotage election results. America could soon see a hundred-times worse replay of the Florida presidential balloting 20 years ago in the Bush-Gore...

America’s Hobbesian Tyranny

by Jim Bovard | Jul 25, 2020 | Featured Articles

Almost 400 years ago, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote a book scoffing at tyrannophobia—the “fear of being strongly governed.” This was a peculiar term that Hobbes invented in Leviathan, since civilized nations had feared tyrants for almost 2000 years at that point. But over the past 150 years, Hobbes’ totalitarianism has been defined out of existence by apologists who believe that government needs vast, if not unlimited power. Hobbes’ revival is symptomatic of the collapse of intellectuals’ respect in individual freedom. Writing in 1651, Hobbes labeled the State as Leviathan, “our...

A Halo for the Civil War is Hogwash

by Jim Bovard | Jul 16, 2020 | Featured Articles

“If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?” said Rhett Butler, the savvy anti-hero in Gone with the Wind. Politicians, activist historians, and social justice warriors have awarded the American Civil War an ex post facto halo. But viewing the Civil War as another “Good War” encourages people to naively view military destruction as a tool for national uplift. The latest canonization of the Civil War is based on a series of myths that endanger peace and freedom in our time. The first myth regarding the Civil War was that the United States...