Author: Jacob G. Hornberger

More than 150 years after the Civil War, the nation is engulfed in controversy over statues of people who fought for the Confederacy. Many people want the statues taken down. The statues, they say, depict men who were slaveowners, slavery proponents, and traitors. Those who want the statues to stay in place are said to be racists. The feelings run so deep on both sides of the controversy that one would think that the Civil War ended just yesterday. As a libertarian, I question why government should erect statues in the first place, to anyone. That’s simply not a legitimate … Continue reading →

The post Lies and Hypocrisy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Frank Bruni, columnist for the New York Times, is outraged — outraged! — that people are comparing Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, to Ivanka Trump, the daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump. Both women are part of their respective governmental delegations to the Winter Olympics in South Korea. In his NYT column yesterday, Bruni expressed outrage that people would make such a comparison and, even worse, that they would actually compare North Korea and the United States. He believes that while North Korea is “rotten to the core,” America, under Trump, is only “in a rotten moment.” … Continue reading →

The post A New York Times Fairy Tale appeared first on LewRockwell.

Americans like to think of their country as different from those run by military regimes. They are only fooling themselves. Ever since the federal government was converted into a national-security state after World War II (without a constitutional amendment authorizing the conversion), it has been the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA that have run the government, just like in countries governed by military dictatorships. Oh sure, the façade is maintained — the façade that is ingrained in all of us in civics or government classes in high school and college: that the federal government is composed of three co-equal, … Continue reading →

The post Our Military Regime appeared first on LewRockwell.

More than 150 years after the Civil War, the nation is engulfed in controversy over statues of people who fought for the Confederacy. Many people want the statues taken down. The statues, they say, depict men who were slaveowners, slavery proponents, and traitors. Those who want the statues to stay in place are said to be racists. The feelings run so deep on both sides of the controversy that one would think that the Civil War ended just yesterday. As a libertarian, I question why government should erect statues in the first place, to anyone. That’s simply not a legitimate … Continue reading →

The post The Lies and Hypocrisy appeared first on LewRockwell.

The recent October 26 deadline for releasing 50-year-old JFK-assassination records of the CIA and other federal agencies provided an opportunity for people to promote their favorite JFK assassination theories. The Russians did it. Fidel Castro did it. The U.S. national-security establishment did it. The Mafia did it. A lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald did it. The reaction among some people was predictable: “Oh, there are so many JFK assassination theories that I guess we’ll never know what really happened.” Or “It’s all so overwhelming and I just don’t want to be pulled into the rabbit hole.” Actually, however, understanding … Continue reading →

The post JFK Conspiracy Theories appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whatever else might be said about the assassination of President Kennedy, one thing is for sure: The cover-up of this particular U.S. regime-change operation was one of the most ingenious and cunning plots ever designed. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, given that practically from its inception in 1947 the CIA was specializing in the arts of assassination, regime change, and cover-up. As far back as 1953, the CIA published an assassination manual that the CIA succeeded in keeping secret from the American people for more than 40 years. It came to light in 1997 as a result of a Freedom of … Continue reading →

The post The Cunning CIA appeared first on LewRockwell.

While the mainstream media was announcing for the past two weeks that President Trump was going to release the CIA’s long-secret records on the JFK assassination, I took a different position. On Monday of this week, I predicted that Trump would make a deal with the CIA that would enable the CIA to continue its cover-up of the JFK assassination. (See “I Predict Trump Will Continue the CIA’s JFK Assassination Cover-Up” and “No Smoking Guns in the JFK Records?”) On Thursday, the day of the deadline established by law for releasing the records, Trump granted the CIA’s request for continued … Continue reading →

The post The JFK Cover-Up Continues appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last Friday, President Trump made the following announcement: I have decided not to block release of the CIA’s remaining JFK-assassination related records except for those records that directly implicate the CIA in the assassination, which will continue to remain secret.” Okay, he didn’t really put it like that. But that’s the potential and likely import of his announcement, which actually read as follows: Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” (Italics added.) The operative words, of course, are: “Subject to the receipt of further information….” … Continue reading →

The post Will Trump Continue the CIA’s JFK Cover-Up? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The official story of the Kennedy assassination is that he was killed by a former U.S. Marine, lone-nut, communist assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald. The big problem, however, is that the official story has never comported with much of the circumstantial evidence in the case nor with common sense, reason, and logic. That’s why no one has ever been able to come up with a credible motive for Oswald to kill Kennedy. As I pointed out in Part 1, by the time he was assassinated Kennedy was ending the Cold War against the communist world and had announced his intention … Continue reading →

The post Figuring Out the JFK Murder-Coup appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Washington Post and Politico recently published two articles entitled “President Trump, Give Us the Full Story on the JFK Assassination” and “How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder” by historians Larry J. Sabato and Phillip Shenon. The thrust of the articles was to call on Trump to release all of the still-secret records relating to the JFK assassination belonging to the CIA and other federal agencies that the National Archives is required by law to release by October. In the Post article, the authors state that they have received reliable information that at least two federal agencies are … Continue reading →

The post Figuring Out the Kennedy Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.

The mainstream media is publishing the standard, predictable explanations for the latest shooting rampage, this one against Republicans playing baseball in a park in Alexandria, Virginia. The two most popular are the right of people to own guns and political rage. As with every other act of random killings here in the United States, the media misses the big one: The culture of ongoing violence that the national-security establishment has made a permanent part of America’s governmental structure. For 27 continuous years, the Pentagon and the CIA have been killing people in the Middle East and Afghanistan. That is a … Continue reading →

The post Violence Abroad appeared first on LewRockwell.

The fight between President-Elect Trump and the CIA over Russia’s alleged interference with the U.S. presidential election could have a major impact on what is set to happen in October 2017. That is the month when thousands of the CIA’s super-secret records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy are set to be finally released to the public, after more than a half-century of secrecy. When the Warren Commission published its report on the assassination in 1964, it ordered that many of the records relating to the assassination be kept secret for 75 years. Of course, that secrecy ruling never … Continue reading →

The post Will the CIA Regret Its Fight With Trump? appeared first on LewRockwell.

With the passing of former Cuban president Fidel Castro over the weekend, the decades-long U.S. war waged against him finally comes to an end, even if the decades-long embargo against the Cuban people continues. Castro was one of the most tyrannical dictators in the world. After taking power in 1959, he refused to permit democratic elections, suppressed dissent, censored the news, and controlled travel. And, of course, Castro was a communist or socialist. As president, he imposed a socialist economic system on the island, which entailed the nationalization of all private property. Most everyone became an employee of the state. … Continue reading →

The post The US War on Fidel Castro Is Over appeared first on LewRockwell.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA made multiple attempts to assassinate Cuba’s ruler, Fidel Castro. Let’s assume that the CIA had succeeded and that Castro had been shot dead on the streets of Havana. It’s not difficult to imagine what U.S. national-security state officials would be saying today: “If we hadn’t assassinated Castro, the United States would have fallen to the communists and, today, Fidel and his brother would be running the IRS, Social Security, Medicare, public schooling, and other socialist programs owned and operated by the U.S. government.” Soon after Castro took power on January 1, 1959, when … Continue reading →

Last night I was reading a book entitled The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs by David Unger. My eyes bulged out when I came across the following sentence: “In 1941 Attorney General Francis Biddle, following Roosevelt’s new guidelines, approved FBI wiretapping of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.” Why did that particular sentence grab my attention? Because I knew that the founder of The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Leonard E. Read, had served as head of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce before he founded FEE in 1946. I did a bit of research … Continue reading →