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Justin Raimondo

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'Justin Raimondo (born Dennis Raimondo<ref>The Character Assassins, by Raimondo [1]</ref> on 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.

Contents

[edit] Background

During the 1960s, Raimondo took a brief interest in the ideology 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. (The caucus was revived in 2004 as the Rothbard Caucus.) 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.

Raised a Roman Catholic, Raimondo now is "not a believer." <ref>Pope John Paul II: Man of the Year, by Raimondo [2]</ref>

[edit] Recent activities

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%. [3]

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 [4]. 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 [5].

[edit] Major ideas and recurring themes

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 occasions—including a piece in which he calls anti-Semites "deranged" [6]—writing that he has "respect and great affection for the Jewish people."[7]

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.[8] Raimondo also believes the United States was lied into World War II by FDR and that the US provoked a war with Japan deliberately through economic sanctions.[9] 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."[10] 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 elements of Israeli intelligence operating in the U.S. had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.[11]

[edit] Writing style

Raimondo's writing style is best characterized as caustic and detail-oriented, and is sometimes angry or sarcastic. His typical Behind the Headlines column covers foreign policy, and he is 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.

[edit] Positions & honors

[edit] Bibliography

In 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 1-57392-809-7.
  • The Terror Enigma: 9/11 And the Israeli Connection, iUniverse, November 2003, ISBN 0-595-29682-3.

[edit] References

<references/>

[edit] External links (and selected columns)

[edit] Selected columns

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[edit] External links

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