Justin Raimondo
Justin Raimondo (born
November 18,
1951) is a
libertarian/
paleoconservative author and the editorial director of the website
Antiwar.com. He has been involved in a variety of political efforts from his base in the
San Francisco Bay Area.
During the
1960s, Raimondo took a brief interest in the philosophy of
Ayn Rand before joining
Young Americans for Freedom. In the
1970s, he became active in the
Libertarian Party. With
Eric Garris, he organized a "Radical Caucus", which brought Raimondo and Garris to the attention of the influential libertarian theorist
Murray Rothbard. In
1983, after a schism in the party, Raimondo left the Libertarian Party and attempted to organize a libertarian faction in the
Republican Party known as the
Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee. After
1989, Raimondo again began working with Rothbard in the
anti-war John Randolph Club.
In the
1996 U.S. congressional elections Raimondo ran as a Republican candidate in California's 8th district against
Nancy Pelosi. While championing conservative and libertarian causes in general the main emphasis of his campaign was his opposition to the deployment of U.S. troops in the Balkans and, in particular, Pelosi's vote to that effect. Raimondo received 13% of the vote while Pelosi got 85%. [
1]
During the
1992,
1996, and
2000 presidential elections, Raimondo supported the campaigns of
Pat Buchanan, both as a Republican and in the
Reform Party. Being an openly
gay man, his support of the
social conservative Buchanan attracted considerable attention [
2]. In
1995, during the
Clinton administration's military
interventions into the
Bosnian war, Raimondo and Garris launched Antiwar.com to provide a platform for their opposition. The site has continued to publish regular columns. Raimondo has been a vocal critic of the
invasion of Iraq and the ongoing
occupation. In
2004, he supported
Ralph Nader for President, and explained his reason for this in an article published in
The American Conservative [
3].
Several themes and concepts recur quite regularly in Raimondo's writing, mostly derived from his
libertarian and
paleoconservative ideological roots. He is uncompromising in his beliefs that initiatory war is wrong, immoral, and counterproductive, that a small group of
neoconservatives in both major
American political parties has been responsible for "lying us into war" repeatedly, and that the ideals of the
Old Right conservative movement have been consistently sold out since around the time of the
Vietnam war, when
neoconservatives united with
religious conservatives to pursue an expansive
foreign policy, often in support of the country of
Israel. Raimondo often condemns the government of Israel, though he has explicitly condemned
antisemitism on many occasionsâ€"including a piece in which he calls anti-Semites "deranged" [
4]â€"writing that he has "respect and great affection for the Jewish people."[
5]
Long before
John J. Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt argued that Israel exerts a dominant force in the formulation of American foreign policy (see
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy), Raimondo was essentially saying the same thing.[
6] Raimondo also believes the United States was lied into
WWII by
FDR and that the US provoked a war with Japan deliberately through economic sanctions.[
7] Raimondo's views have been compared by Christopher Hitchens to those of
Charles Lindbergh, whom Raimondo describes as an "American hero sprung from the heartland".[
8] However, it seems clear that Raimondo does not endorse Lindbergh's infamous Des Moines speech in which the famous aviator descried Jewish influence on the media (see Raimondo's book,
Reclaiming the American Right, pages 106, 137, 227). Raimondo has also written repeatedly about the
Israeli Art Student conspiracy and he has written that some members of the Israeli government had advance knowledge of the
9/11 attacks.[
9]
Raimondo's writing style is best characterized as
caustic and detail-oriented. His typical column is usually very angry in tone about one aspect of foreign policy or another, and he's not above enjoying the downfall of his adversaries or attacking other
internet pundits, with some of his favorite targets being
Christopher Hitchens,
William Kristol,
Jonah Goldberg,
David Frum, and
Andrew Sullivan. More often than not though his targets of attack are government figures and programs. He was also one of the first internet pundits to make maximum use of the
linkability of the
web, filling each article with extensive
hyperlinks to source material, punditry, his own articles, and statistics he believes support his claims.
* Editorial director,
antiwar.com* Contributing editor,
The American Conservative magazine
* Former adjunct scholar,
Ludwig von Mises InstituteIn addition to his thrice-weekly column for antiwar.com and regular contributions to
The American Conservative magazine (he has also written for the
paleoconservative magazine
Chronicles), Mr. Raimondo is the author of several books.
*
Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993)
*
Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (AFPAC, 1996)
*
An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard, Prometheus Books, July 2000, ISBN 1573928097.
*
The Terror Enigma: 9/11 And the Israeli Connection, iUniverse, November 2003, ISBN 0595296823.
Selected columns
*
"Who Are The War Criminals? Naming Names"*
"Our Bizarro World Foreign Policy"*
"Why We Fight"*
"The Imperial Delusion"*
"Israel and the 9/11 Connection"External links
*
"Intrepid Antiwarriors of the Libertarian Right Stake Their Rightful Claim to Power" by Lessley Anderson, SF Weekly*
Antiwar.com*
Justin Raimondo Election History*
Unpatriotic Conservatives: A war against America.*
Neoconservatism Versus Libertarianism: They're polar opposites 
