Author: James Bovard

The Trump administration is pushing radical changes in the food stamp program as part of the farm bill. Reform efforts may be derailed by activists who vastly exaggerate hunger and portray food handouts as the epitome of social justice. But federal food handouts have already done far too much damage to Americans’ health. Food stamps are now feeding 42 million people. Twitter activists created a #HandsOffSNAP hashtag to seek to block any efforts at reform. But, while politicians portray food stamps as a nutrition program (Congress changed the name to Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, in 2008), they are actually … Continue reading →

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It’s hard not to like a savvy ex-federal lawyer who blows the whistle on the feds. David Hardy has been doing that for decades – often with explosive results. Hardy, along with the late Mike McNulty, helped blow open the coverup of the federal assaults at Waco. Hardy’s dogged Freedom of Information Act requests turned up the biggest smoking gun on the ATF:  a memo revealing that, nine days before the raid, two undercover ATF agents (recognized as such by Koresh) knocked on the door of the Davidian residence and invited Koresh to go shooting. Koresh, two other Davidians, and the two agents had a fine … Continue reading →

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Since Donald Trump’s election, it has become fashionable for his opponents to use a #Resist hashtag on their social media postings. Public demonstrations have become more fashionable than at any time since the Vietnam War. Federal agencies are actively working to thwart the Trump administration; the Obama holdover chief of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau even refused to vacate her office for a Trump appointee. Government employees are avidly leaking documents to the Washington Post and other papers in a way probably never seen before in American history. Despite such efforts, Trump remains president. Barring death, resignation, impeachment, or Twenty-Fifth Amendment removal, … Continue reading →

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Starvation might be stalking among college students, according to shocking headlines in Newsweek and elsewhere, and The Washington Post warns of “The hidden crisis on college campuses.” In reality, last week’s report from Temple University and Wisconsin HOPE Lab is typical of the baloney that spawns policy hysteria nowadays. Temple University/HOPE researchers assert that 36% of four-year college students and 42% of community college students are “food insecure” — a vaporous term beloved by pro-welfare advocates. This analysis is modeled on the Department of Agriculture’s annual Food Security survey. USDA is emphatic that its survey does not measure hunger, but that neonsize warning sign was ignored by this study (titled “Still Hungry and Homeless in College”). … Continue reading →

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 Noor Salman, the widow of the gunman who killed 49 people at a gay Orlando nightclub has been acquitted on charges of lying to the FBI and helping her husband in the 2016 attack. (March 30) AP The FBI suffered another debacle on Friday when an Orlando jury returned a not guilty verdict for the widow of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded 53 in his attack on Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in June 2016. The biggest terrorism case of the year collapsed largely thanks to FBI misconduct and deceit. Noor Salman was charged with material support of a foreign terrorist organization and lying to the FBI … Continue reading →

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President Trump has said and done many things to appall the friends of freedom. From Trump’s pro-torture comments to his praise of police brutality to his cruise-missile barrage against Syria to his threat to annihilate North Korea, there are ample signs that he scorns a freedom-and-peace posture. Unfortunately, many of Trump’s opponents are even more statist than the president. Marking the anniversary of Donald Trump’s election, the Washington Post Magazine presented “38 ideas for repairing our badly broken civic life.” Post Magazine editor Richard Just explained that “all of us … should be able to agree that some future-pondering about the state of our … Continue reading →

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President Trump declared last week that the law enforcement should “take the guns first, go through due process second.” But the history of federal firearms enforcement shows that due process is often a mirage when federal bureaucrats drop their hammer. Before enacting sweeping new gun prohibitions, we should remember the collateral damage and constitutional absurdities from previous federal crackdowns. Gun control advocates have called for prohibiting possession of AR-15 rifles — a ban that could create five million new felons overnight, since most owners would not meekly surrender their firearms at the nearest federal office. Others advocate outlawing all semi-automatic firearms — an edict first … Continue reading →

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Much of the media nowadays is portraying itself as heroes of the #Resist Trump movement. To exploit that meme, Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg rushed out “The Post,” a movie depicting an epic press battle with the Nixon administration. But regardless of whether Spielberg’s latest wins the Academy Award for best picture on Sunday night, Americans should never forget the media’s long history of pandering to presidents and the Pentagon. “The Post” is built around the Pentagon Papers, a secret study begun in 1967 analyzing where the Vietnam war had gone awry. The 7000-page tome showed that presidents and military leaders had been profoundly deceiving … Continue reading →

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The New York Times is running a series of “Red Century” articles extolling some of the virtues of communism on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Last August, the Times showcased a Yale University lecturer rhapsodizing about the Soviets’ environmental record in a piece headlined, “Lenin’s Eco-Warriors.” The piece hailed Lenin as “a longtime enthusiast for hiking and camping” who “agreed that protecting nature had ‘urgent value.’” The article extolled the nature preserves that the Soviet regime created early in its reign. The Soviets long enjoyed good PR in the West for environmental policy. This had nothing to do with the actual facts … Continue reading →

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Trump said Obama’s ‘horrendous leadership’ on Syria could start World War III. He’s made things even worse. Last year on the campaign trail, crowds roared when Donald Trump denounced his opponent as “trigger-happy” Hillary. But President Trump is rapidly incarnating the vice he condemned. Nowhere is this more evident than in Syria, where Trump’s recklessness risks dragging America into a major war. U.S. policy toward Syria has been a tangle of absurdities since 2012. President Obama promised 16 times that he would never put U.S. “boots on the ground” in the four-sided Syrian civil war. He quietly abandoned that pledge and, starting in 2014, launched … Continue reading →

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“Our democracy is only as good as people trust the results,” former President George W. Bush declared in a presumably well-paid speech last week in the United Arab Emirates, a notorious Arab dictatorship. Bush is being exalted as if he is the second coming of George Washington thanks to his implied slams against the Trump administration. But Bush’s actions during his eight-year reign did far more to ravage democracy at home and abroad than most people realize. Thanks to gushing media coverage, Bush is enjoying one of the greatest comebacks in modern American history. In the summer of 2008, only 22 percent of Americans approved of Bush … Continue reading →

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One of the Obama administration’s most aggressive social justice engineering schemes was busted earlier this month in federal court in Texas. In 2012, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission effectively made it a federal crime for businesses to refuse to hire felons and ex-convicts. Federal Judge Sam Cummings ruled on Feb. 1, 2018 that the EEOC violated federal law in concocting this new federal offense, providing the Trump administration a divine opportunity to rein in run-amok bureaucrats. The EEOC’s 2012 “Enforcement Guidance on the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions” was 20,000 convoluted words intended to browbeat businesses to cease checking the records of job applicants. EEOC commissioner Constance … Continue reading →

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This month is the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party’s seizure of power in Petrograd, Russia. British Guardian columnist Paul Mason recent declared that the Soviet revolution provided “a beacon to the rest of humanity, no matter how short lived.” The New York Times has exalted the Soviet takeover in a series of articles on the “Red Century” – even asserting that “women had better sex under communism” (based largely on a single dubious orgasm count comparison of East and West German women.) Professor Hunt Tooley’s November 1 Mises article on “The Bolshevik Great Experiment: 100 Years Later” vividly captured the stunning death … Continue reading →

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President Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey on May 9 spurred much of the media and many Democrats to rally around America’s most powerful domestic federal agency. But the FBI has a long record of both deceit and incompetence. Five years ago, Americans learned that the FBI was teaching its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” This has practically been the Bureau’s motif since its creation in 1908. The bureau was small potatoes until Woodrow Wilson dragged the United States into World War I. In … Continue reading →

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This year is the 100th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s pulling America into World War I. Many people celebrate this centenary of America’s emergence as a world power. But at a time when the Trump administration is bombing or rattling sabers at half a dozen nations and many Democrats are clamoring to bloody Russia, it is worth reviewing how World War I turned out so much worse than the experts and politicians promised. Wilson was narrowly reelected in 1916 on the basis of a campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war.” But Wilson had massively violated neutrality by providing armaments … Continue reading →

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