Timothy McVeigh fled the scene of the Oklahoma City bombing driving a battered old yellow Mercury Marquis that was missing a license plate. He was spotted fleeing the scene, with a passenger sitting next to him in the Marquis, by witness Gary Lewis. FBI agent John Hersley testified about the witness during an April 27, 1995, preliminary hearing, excerpted belowU.S. vs. Timothy McVeigh, № M-95–98-H (Western District of Oklahoma.) Preliminary Hearing, 27 Apr. 1995. Testimony of Jon Hersley, pp 86-87. See also Gary Lewis 302 reports: (1) FBI 302, interview w/ Gary Lewis by SA Leslie...
Gary Johnson
A History of Libertarian Party Presidential Messaging, 1972-1996
Friends of liberty inside and outside the Libertarian Party are waiting patiently—some passively—for three more weeks until the conclusion of the November presidential election. Not to find out whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will come in first, but how many votes their own candidate will receive on the margin. Jo Jorgensen, a businesswoman, university lecturer, and longtime party activist received the presidential nomination in May, with the (virtual) convention selecting activist and podcaster Spike Cohen as her running mate. Not long afterwards, the Jorgensen/Cohen ticket became the...
6/22/20 Vincent Bevins on the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
Scott interviews journalist Vincent Bevins about his latest book, The Jakarta Method, in which he lays out some of the history of the U.S. government’s support for violent right-wing coups all over the world. During the Cold War, America backed brutal extremists in Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Iraq, and elsewhere, who were responsible all told for the deaths of millions of civilians—all in the name of defeating the threat of communism and socialism. Unlike the well-known and well-publicized crimes of left-wing dictators like Pol Pot in Cambodia, almost nobody in the United States today knows...
5/29/20 Coleen Rowley on the Dangerous Failings of the FBI
Scott talks to Coleen Rowley about the failures in America’s intelligence agencies that contributed to the 9/11 attacks, and that continue to plague us today. She reminds us that three FBI agents in three different states tried to pass very specific warnings to their higher-ups about the possibility of an attack like the one on September 11th, but were ignored in all three cases. After 9/11, of course, our politicians assented to an unprecedented expansion of surveillance powers, most likely assuming that they would never be the victims of the abuse of these powers. In reality, they...
The Historical Inevitability of Libertarianism
Marxism infamously puts forward a theory of history in which its utopian vision for human society is upheld as an eschatological certainty. According to Marx, irresistible political and economic forces will compel mankind towards a future of full equality and unimaginable abundance. Despite the wishful thinking behind this vision (which also included an anticipation of unspeakable revolutionary violence preceding utopia), it hasn’t come to pass. I would argue that Marx’s ideas are magical thought innovations on nascent Classical Liberal ideas that sadly didn’t survive the rise of...
The Antiwar Comic: It’s All Part of my Libertarian Fantasy
Hey, if you're gonna dream, dream big. For more comics visit the Webcomic Factory.
Federal Education Budget: Teapot, Meet Tempest
The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 requires the president of the United States to submit a budget proposal to Congress for each fiscal year. Congress isn’t required to honor that proposal. In fact its budget resolutions and actual appropriations seldom reflect presidents’ requests very closely. But there are always fireworks over the request anyway. President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for FY2018 calls for a 13% ($9 billion) cut to the US Department of Education versus 2017’s discretionary funding. That may sound like a big big hit to your kids’ schools, and the usual suspects...
Libertarians Have Gone Missing on Campuses
On visits to college campuses, I find overwhelming evidence of leftism but virtually no evidence of libertarianism. Libertarianism is akin to a lost civilization on campuses, worthy of study by students of archeology and anthropology. Perhaps if one were to dig deep enough in an ideological dig, some shards of libertarian thinking could be found on campuses and placed in a museum of quaint ideas. Students of yesteryear used to have a political epiphany from reading Atlas Shrugged. Now the book is hard to find in college bookstores. And there is almost a zero chance of finding Ayn...
Libertarianism as Extreme Middle-of-the-Roadism
While the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate Gary Johnson unsuccessfully tried to sell voters a lukewarm version of libertarianism as the good policies from both Democrats and Republicans but none of the bad (“neither too hot nor too cold”), there’s an argument to be made for libertarianism as the “golden middle.” But it is not a middle position between those two evils, but between two destructive extremes in social cooperation: the power of one and the power of none. The power of one refers to the highly hierarchical and vertically organized (read: coercively coordinated) society...
Reoccurring Populism and History Ignored
The attempt to forge a life that has no reverence for history is an unsustainable… Now, what does having been told that have anything to do to anything? I hear far too often the American-right go after secular progressives for one reason or another, but the same goes for the American-left going after Christian conservatives. The problem with both is that they wish to dominate the other but neither can justify a reason for doing so other than the common “because they’re just completely wrong.” Nearly a year ago I published an article discussing a very simple question, what comes after...