Scott breaks the bad news about Antiwar.com co-founder Justin Raimondo‘s death from lung cancer, his legendary career in the libertarian movement, the importance of his 3,000 articles he wrote for Antiwar.com and the future of the site.
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Alright you guys, well as often, I'm the bearer of bad news here.
Justin Raimondo, editor-at-large of Antiwar.com, has died today at 67.
He was the author of Reclaiming the American Right, The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement and Enemy of the State, The Life of Murray N. Rothbard, both of which are excellent by the way.
He was 67, died of lung cancer, survived by his husband, Yoshi, who they've been together for, I don't know, 25 years or something like that.
Of course, Justin's a legend in the libertarian movement.
Him and Eric Garris go back to the 1970s as partners in all kinds of shenanigans, including the Radical Caucus of the Libertarian Party and all the Libertarian Party civil wars of the 1980s, splits between the Rothbardians and the Catoites and all the different things.
And of course, co-founder of Antiwar.com with Eric in 1995.
The way Eric tells the story, it took him forever to get Justin to pay attention to the internet.
He was a pamphleteer alright, but by 1999 when Bill Clinton started bombing Kosovo, he really got on board and started writing regularly.
And that was when I first heard of Antiwar.com.
And I remember my friend Sean showing it to me, hey look, Antiwar.com, oh, are they socialists?
No, they're libertarians, check it out, check out all this stuff.
And that was just huge to me at the time, that the URL, antiwar, belonged to the libertarians.
And you know, at the time, I don't know if you guys are familiar with that older profile pic of Justin where he's got the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, a little portent there, but he's looking over his shoulder and he's got this scowl on his face.
And it was really cool, you know, back then reading Antiwar.com at that time, there was no Twitter, you didn't have kind of direct access to the guy, you just get to see these three articles every week.
And that's when I really started reading again, it was right after September 11th, and you know, all the way through the, you know, lead up to the war and all that.
And I remember thinking, how does this guy know all this stuff?
And he lives in San Francisco, but he knows everything about what's behind the headlines for real in Washington DC and did so much to shape my understanding of what was going on there.
And you know, people throw around the word neocon all the time now, you know, overly broad way to mean just any hawk or something like that, but it's actually a very narrow definition, a biographical designation for less than a hundred men probably in the world.
And Justin was really at the forefront, you know, somebody like Jim Loeb, some of these other experts, you know, they knew all along who Richard Perle was and that kind of thing, but out in popular society, it was just not really ever discussed.
No one really knew.
There's the Republicans, the oil men, this kind of thing.
And Justin said, oh no, look, these guys are Likud.
That's essentially the deal with them.
And right he was about that.
And that's to oversimplify it.
Go and read Trotsky, Strauss, and the neocons.
Go and read who lied us into war and some of these old Armando classics.
I mean, really, you want to know about that history, read everything the guy wrote from September 11th on and see what you can see.
It'll be a lot, I promise.
He was so good on that and a huge influence on me and my understanding of what was going on right there at the turn of the century with foreign policy there.
And of course, you know, I ended up working for antiwar.com starting in, I guess, 2004.
And then, so starting then, that was my main job was putting the links in Justin's articles.
So all those years you guys were reading all those Armando articles, I was the one putting all those links in there.
And so you wonder how come I know so much?
That's a big part of it.
Obviously the interview show helps, but that was a big part of it, was sitting down for three hours of research, three days a week, and, you know, really diving into this stuff and correcting him when he needed to be.
But most of the time, just proving he was right, because he already was.
It was a pretty easy job when it came to it.
And I have to say, he really was the most important writer in America, certainly in the 2000s and into the Obama years, but especially in the George W. Bush years, there was just nobody that was more vital to the antiwar movement and just to sanity and a real understanding of what was going on, what was happening and why it was happening.
With the launch of the Middle Eastern wars, he was really in a class by himself there for a very long time.
And, you know, it's true that he was a crotchety old bastard and he and I didn't always get along all that well as, you know, close friends or anything like that.
But that's all right.
It's kind of beside the point, you know, other than I guess he clashed with a lot of people, but a lot of people always overlooked that too, because they could see the value in there that if he wasn't such a crotchety old bastard, he probably wouldn't be so good on the stuff that he's so good on.
And so there's that, you know, but, you know, overall, I think you look at that article archive at antiwar.com, 3000 something articles there, going back to 1999, the war diary, it was called at the start of the Kosovo war there.
And, you know, calling Bill Kristol, the little Lenin of the conservative movement in like 1999 with this kind of thing, it's great stuff going all the way back.
And by the way, antiwar.com will continue, despite popular opinion, Justin was never the guy that put that page together for you every day.
That's Eric Garris and Jason Ditz who get the credit for that, who do such hard work for you.
You have no idea how hard Eric Garris works to make antiwar.com go, but so that's who's responsible for those headlines up there every day.
That's Eric and Jason.
And of course, I'm in charge of the viewpoints, I'm the editor of the, you know, opinion section and all of that.
Margaret Griffiths and Thomas Knapp help, and Angela Keaton, of course, raises the money to keep the whole thing going.
So our crew's not going anywhere.
So we have lost our head writer, but we'll continue on there.
I think you'd probably look for me to write more articles for antiwar.com.
I'm the editorial director.
I guess I need to step up and start writing a regular column there and join Danny, who's our only other regular columnist at this point, Danny Sherston.
But anyway, keep checking antiwar.com for the bad news.
We'll still be there.
Check the top of the page for Justin's obit if you want to pass that around.
Give it a retweet, this kind of thing.
And so sorry for the bad news, but thanks everybody.
I won't be seeing you around still.
