James Bovard



Articles by James Bovard

Highway Robbery Continues to Be the Law of the Land

Seizure fever is toxifying law enforcement across the nation. For more than thirty years, federal, state, and local government agencies have plundered citizens on practically any harebrained accusation or pretext.
You could be at risk of being pilfered by officialdom anytime you sit behind a steering wheel. Between 2001 and 2014, lawmen seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from sixty thousand travelers on the nation’s highways—with no criminal charges in most cases, according to the Washington Post. Federal, state, and local law enforcement have institutionalized shakedowns on the nation’s highways to the point that “forfeiture corridors are the new speed traps,” as Mother Jones observed.
Police can almost always find an excuse to pull someone over. Gerald Arenberg, executive director of

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Highway Robbery Continues to Be the Law of the Land

Seizure fever is toxifying law enforcement across the nation. For more than thirty years, federal, state, and local government agencies have plundered citizens on practically any harebrained accusation or pretext.
You could be at risk of being pilfered by officialdom anytime you sit behind a steering wheel. Between 2001 and 2014, lawmen seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from sixty thousand travelers on the nation’s highways—with no criminal charges in most cases, according to the Washington Post. Federal, state, and local law enforcement have institutionalized shakedowns on the nation’s highways to the point that “forfeiture corridors are the new speed traps,” as Mother Jones observed.
Police can almost always find an excuse to pull someone over. Gerald Arenberg, executive director of

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Biden and Forgotten Federal Financial Tyranny

Under Obama and Biden, the banking sector has been weaponized against industries American leftists don’t like.  The Obama administration acted as if its regulatory targets did not deserve due process, and the program ravaged far and wide.
Original Article: Biden and Forgotten Federal Financial Tyranny

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Biden and Forgotten Federal Financial Tyranny

Americans were jolted last week to learn that the Joe Biden administration viewed purchasing a Bible as a potential terrorist warning sign. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, revealed that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network stretched its “suspicious behavior” definition to include purchasing a Bass Pro Shop hat, as well as items sold by Cabella’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods. If you’ve bought a gun or ammo since 2021, Team Biden bureaucrats may have automatically classified you as a “potential active shooter.” Or maybe your plane ticket purchases triggered the latest “lone actor/homegrown violent extremism” indicators.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of Washington precedents for this type of idiocy. The vast array of

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Truth Is the Biggest Threat to Democracy in DC

It seems U.S. government officials are entitled to blindfold and deceive the American people to avoid “intruding” on foreign leaders planning a military attack? This theory of democracy gets curiouser and curiouser.
Original Article: Truth Is the Biggest Threat to Democracy in DC

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Truth Is the Biggest Threat to Democracy in DC

Early this year, Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member, was arrested and charged with transmission of national defense information and other charges. Teixeira allegedly leaked classified documents on the Ukraine war and other foreign policy issues to a Discord gaming group. The document propagated from there and appeared in many news articles in the following months.
The Post article sympathetically portrays the struggles of U.S. government officials fighting to suppress the unapproved eruption of hard facts. In a passage sue to boost sales of Kleenex inside the Beltway, the Post quotes a U.S. government official who was permitted to remain anonymous: “We were blindsided and furious,” 
 The Post, which partnered with PBS for a television program on the

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The TSA Is Still Crazy after All These Years

In the past two decades, the TSA has proven it is ineffective in providing real security for airline passengers. However, its growing incompetence is matched only by its increasing intrusion into travelers’ lives.
Original Article: The TSA Is Still Crazy after All These Years

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The TSA Is Still Crazy after All These Years

The TSA has been promising to end its boneheaded ways for more than 20 years. Flying out of Dallas International Airport last week, I ruefully recognized that all TSA reform promises are malarkey.
As I neared the end of a TSA checkpoint line, I saw two women loitering behind a roped off section for CLEAR, a new biometric surveillance program that works with 35 airports and coordinates with TSA. CLEAR involves travelers standing in photo kiosks that compare their faces with a federal database of photos from passport applications, driver’s licenses, and other sources. The Washington Post warned that airport facial recognition systems are “America’s biggest step yet to normalize treating our faces as data that can be stored, tracked and, inevitably, stolen.”
Though the CLEAR program is

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My Forty-Year War on Reefer Madness

Forty years ago last week, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner published my first attack on the federal drug war. The previous year, the Reagan administration had unleashed its “Just Say No” program, vilifying anyone who smoked a joint, sniffed the wrong powder, or used nonapproved hallucinogens. I was mortified to see Ronald Reagan—who was elected on a promise to get “government off your backs”—double-cross his supporters with what morphed into the most intrusive scheme in American history.
Like kids everywhere in the 1970s, I laughed at the 1936 movie Reefer Madness in my high school health class. I’d occasionally smoked marijuana but hadn’t felt compelled to burn down any orphanages afterward. When Reagan went on the antidrug warpath, I was “laying for him,” as Mark Twain would say.
The

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Endangering Washington’s Divine Right to Deceive

Official Washington and its Court Media are up in arms that someone has told the truth via leaking government documents. They won’t rest until he is punished severely.

Original Article: "Endangering Washington’s Divine Right to Deceive"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

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Presidents Are Legally Immune for Their Most Dangerous Crimes

Donald Trump legally pays hush money and prosecutors try to fashion a crime from it. However, if a president lies and thousands of people die, it is called foreign policy.

Original Article: "Presidents Are Legally Immune for Their Most Dangerous Crimes"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

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Waco 30 Years Later: It Is Not an Atrocity if the Feds Do It

Thirty years ago, FBI tanks smashed into the ramshackle home of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, Texas. After the FBI collapsed much of the building atop the residents, a fire erupted and 76 corpses were dug out of the rubble. Unfortunately, the American political system and media have never honestly portrayed the federal abuses and political deceit that led to that carnage.
What lessons can today’s Americans draw from the FBI showdown on the Texas plains 30 years ago?
Purported Good Intentions Absolve Real Deadly Force
Janet Reno, the nation’s first female attorney general, approved the FBI’s assault on the Davidians. Previously, she had zealously prosecuted child abuse cases in Dade County, Florida, though many of her high-profile convictions were later overturned because of gross

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Endangering Washington’s Divine Right to Deceive

Do Americans have the right to know if the $100 billion in their tax dollars that the Biden administration is delivering to Ukraine is being wasted? No, according to the U.S. Congress – which recently voted against creating an Inspector General to investigate whether handouts to the most corrupt government in Europe were being stolen.
Do Americans have the right to know if their own government blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, the biggest act of environmental terrorism in history? The Washington Post reported that the message from the U.S. and western European governments is “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” So almost all reporters were “good boys” and moved along.
Do Americans have the right to know if Biden administration officials have perennially made false statements about the prowess

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Presidents Are Legally Immune for Their Most Dangerous Crimes

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has charged former president Donald Trump with thirty-four felonies tied to his payments to two women prior to the 2016 election. Some pundits are outraged that a former president is facing charges, and others are jubilant that Trump now has a mug shot. But this case will do nothing to curtail the most dangerous immunities that presidents possess.
Neither presidents nor any federal officials were entitled to break the law when this nation was founded. John Taylor, a US senator, wrote in 1820 that the Constitution “wisely rejected this indefinite word [sovereignty] as a traitor of civil rights, and endeavored to kill it dead.” But the following year, Chief Justice John Marshall concocted the doctrine of sovereign immunity out of whole cloth: “The

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Decorum Propels DC Deceit

The president’s SOTU speech has become an annual presentation of a new set of White House lies. But official Washington believes it is worse to publicly boo false statements than to make them.

Original Article: "Decorum Propels DC Deceit"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

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Raiding the World Bank: Exposing a Fondness for Dictators

I have always had a bad attitude toward official secrets regardless of who is keeping them. That prejudice and John Kenneth Galbraith are to blame for an unauthorized withdrawal I made from the World Bank. When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I paid $25 to attend a series of lectures by Galbraith on foreign aid and other topics.

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Biden’s Rescue Act Targets Americans’ Freedoms

Since the 1800s, surly Americans have derided politicians for spending tax dollars “like drunken sailors.” Until recently, that was considered a grave character fault. But Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act shows that inebriated spending is now the path to national salvation.

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In a Paranoid Nation, “Treason” Is Everywhere

FBI agents across the nation are tracking down and arresting Trump supporters who walked into the US Capitol during the January 6 protest that turned into a brawl. Scores of protestors have already been charged with unlawful entry—“knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority.”

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Pandemic Follies: Tyranny Won’t Keep Us Safe

Politicians have destroyed more than 13 million jobs this year in a deluge of edicts aimed to fight the covid-19 pandemic. More than two hundred thousand Americans still died from the coronavirus, but the anticovid government crackdowns probably did far more damage than the virus. The covid crisis has also shown how easy it is for politicians to fan fears to seize nearly absolute power.

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The Media Has Conveniently Forgotten George W. Bush’s Many Atrocities

Former president George W. Bush has returned to the spotlight to give moral guidance to America in these troubled times. In a statement released on Tuesday, Bush announced that he was “anguished” by the “brutal suffocation” of George Floyd and declared that “lasting peace in our communities requires truly equal justice. The rule of law ultimately depends on the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. And achieving justice for all is the duty of all.”

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