As Lew Rockwell and Ryan McMaken have recently observed, the media and politicians are increasingly trying to associate anyone who is “anti-government” with Timothy McVeigh, in a desperate attempt to discredit the Tea Party movement.
Obviously, McVeigh’s murderous actions demonstrate that he was no libertarian.
But was he even “anti-government,” as the media would have us believe?
In this blog post, libertarian law professor Ilya Somin shows that he was not. In fact, he was a Neo-Nazi.
[UPDATE: A number of people have written me to suggest that Somin has it wrong. Details here.]
You should read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:
In reality, McVeigh was a neo-Nazi and his attack was inspired by the Turner Diaries, a 1978 tract that advocated the use of terrorism to overthrow the US and establish a government explicitly based on Nazi Germany. If you suffer through the experience of actually reading The Turner Diaries, as I did, you will find that author William Pierce did not support anything remotely resembling limited government; indeed, he explicitly repudiated limited government conservatism in one part of the book.
[Keep reading…]
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