by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:

Justin Raimondo died last week. It was a long-time coming.

Co-Founder of Antiwar.com, Justin was one of the most important men in America you’ve probably never heard of.

In the dark days after 9/11 he was the Antiwar movement in America. I remember how quickly everything turned against libertarians politically after that.

And yet, there was Raimondo, plugging away exposing the truth, naming names and showing no fear.

Inspiration doesn’t cover it.

For close to 20 years, three times a week, wielding the biggest rhetorical stick he could find, he let the Empire have it right where it deserved it most.

Right between the eyes.

I haven’t talked about him much here on the blog or even recently on my livestreams and it was an omission.

I may have been avoiding this, to be honest. Why else would it take me a week to even address the subject?

I was forced to the other day, thankfully, by Garland Nixon when I was on Fault Lines. I stumbled through it. The interview starts at 130 minutes in.

So, I’ll try to do a slightly better job here.

We’ve all known for a long time that Justin had lung cancer. Frankly, who wants to face knowing that someone whose voice was precious to you, to your development, and without whom you wouldn’t be where you are today would be leaving?

The first time he replied to me on Twitter I was star-struck.

Raimondo was required reading for well more than a decade. He introduced me to a version of the world I didn’t know existed. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I would soak up what I could of what he knew and integrate it into my evolving worldview.

He wrote about the one subject that libertarians can always claim the moral high ground on: war is never the answer. War is the health of the state.

As Scott Horton says in his short statement here, it’s cool that Antiwar.com was owned by libertarians, not leftists. Not that it should matter. But looking at the current state of politics in the U.S. it certainly does right now.

Because we are the only people who are consistently, at all times, against war, philosophically. It’s something we have to teach people over and over and over again. And now Raimondo isn’t here to shoulder the load.

Okay, Justin, challenge accepted.

It is the obligation, nee the duty, of all libertarians to focus on that above all other issues. Sure lower taxes are nice and all but where do you think the push for those taxes comes from?

War.

When we withhold our taxes where do you think the funding for the Empire and all its wars comes from? The Fed and central banks around the world.

Why do you think, really, Nixon closed the gold window?

Being anti-war is not a consequence of the non-aggression principle, it is the non-aggression principle writ large.

You can’t fix what’s wrong with America until you fix the foreign policy. And you can’t fix the foreign policy until we come clean about where it comes from.

And Raimondo talked about this incessantly until he couldn’t anymore.

Read More @ TomLuongo.me