{"id":137227,"date":"2019-07-02T04:45:53","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T08:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/?p=137227"},"modified":"2020-07-17T10:48:10","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T14:48:10","slug":"in-memoriam-justin-raimondo-1951-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/in-memoriam-justin-raimondo-1951-2019-137227","title":{"rendered":"In Memoriam: Justin Raimondo, 1951-2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Edward Welsch – Chronicles Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

Justin Raimondo Image Courtesy of Eric Garris<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2016, Raimondo was also the first to coin the term \u201cTrump Derangement Syndrome,\u201d in a column in the Los Angeles Times.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Justin Raimondo, long-time Chronicles columnist, vociferous anti-war activist and a leading member of the paleolibertarian political movement, died Thursday at age 67 after a long battle with lung cancer.<\/p>\n

An influential champion of anti-interventionist foreign policy within the Libertarian and Republican political parties, Raimondo lobbed broadsides at warmongers left, right, and center from his post as founder and editorial director of Antiwar.com. He was a close friend and collaborator of both the patriarch of conservative-libertarian thought, Murray Rothbard, and of Patrick Buchanan, the doyen of Paleoconservatism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From Justin Raimondo’s <\/span>Twitter<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In 2016, Justin was the first to tell the American people that what was going on was a coup designed to create Russia-gate and kick Trump out of office.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stop the CIA Coup<\/strong><\/span>
\nThe Deep State versus Donald Trump<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/span>
\nby Justin Raimondo – December 12, 2016<\/span>
\nRead on Antiwar.com…<\/a><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\u201cI have known Justin Raimondo since we stood together to oppose the rush to war against Iraq in 1991,\u201d Buchanan said in an email. \u201cIn the three decades since, no man in America worked harder or did more to resist the interventionist impulses of the American establishment and the wars they produced than Justin and his Antiwar website.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Raimondo was a compelling and seemingly contradictory figure. He was a gay rights activist and unbeliever who at the same time cherished his Catholic roots and sympathized with cultural conservatives. He was an anti-war stalwart who once found common cause with those on the left and yet became a staunch supporter and defender of President Trump. He was a key member of the paleolibertarian movement that grew around the John Randolph Club in the 1990\u2019s, which found common cause in conservative cultural values and opposition to government intervention.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere is the left today? The Left is talking about cultural issues, Cultural Marxism, this whole racial and sexual identity politics, and that was really the death of the anti-war movement,\u201d Raimondo said in a 2014 interview<\/a> with Mises Institute President Jeff Deist. \u201cAll the movement is on the right now. That\u2019s where the growth of anti-interventionism is really taking place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raimondo grew up in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and was influenced by teachers at the nearby Jesuit seminary. This education exposed him to the ideas of Western philosophy and St. Thomas Aquinas, which he wasn\u2019t getting in the public school. He was a rebellious student often in trouble with his teachers and parents, who sent him to see New York psychiatrist Robert Soblen.<\/p>\n

As Raimondo detailed in his 2017 Chronicles column \u201cCold War Comfort,\u201d<\/a> Soblen was actually a prominent Soviet spy, who ruled that Raimondo\u2019s bad behavior was the result of his youthful religious belief, and recommended that he be institutionalized\u2014a fate he narrowly escaped.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a difficult kid, I could have been a juvenile delinquent easily,\u201d Raimondo said in the 2014 interview. \u201cBut then I read Ayn Rand, and I became a libertarian.\u201d<\/p>\n

His affinity for Rand and precociousness as a writer amusingly led him at age 14 to receive a cease-and-desist letter from Rand\u2019s lawyer, Henry Holzer, as detailed in Antiwar.com\u2019s tribute to Raimondo<\/a>. The problem was forgotten when Raimondo met Rand in person and explained that his editors had mangled his meaning.<\/p>\n

Raimondo was a libertarian when there were only about a thousand people in the entire country who identified as such. After high school he moved to San Francisco and got involved in local politics, including the gay rights movement as well as libertarian causes. The center of the libertarian movement at that time was the \u201cKochtopus\u201d empire of various publications and think tanks started by Charles and David Koch, including the Cato Institute based in San Francisco. In 1978, he joined the Koch-run Libertarian Review magazine as an editorial assistant, which was his formal entry into the libertarian world.<\/p>\n

Soon after joining the Koch empire, Raimondo and Antiwar.com co-founder Eric Garris started the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, which pushed for an anti-interventionist platform. This drew the attention of Murray Rothbard, who was fed up with the compromises made by the more centrist Libertarian Party faction that the Kochs supported. \u201cWe were getting paid by Charles and at the same time opposing him in the LP,\u201d Garris said in an interview.<\/p>\n

The differences eventually widened into a schism that by 1983 had sent both Raimondo and Rothbard out of the Libertarian Party and the Kochs\u2019 orbit. Raimondo and Garris joined the Republican Party and worked to organize a libertarian faction within it, planting the seeds that would eventually help support Ron Paul\u2019s candidacy in the 2008 Republican primary.<\/p>\n

He also supported Pat Buchanan\u2019s presidential campaigns in 1992, 1996, and 2000, serving in 1996 as his campaign chairman in San Francisco. This stretch was one of the most productive periods of his life, during which he founded Antiwar.com and wrote two books, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (1993), and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (2000). He also participated at that time in the paleolibertarian movement that grew around the John Randolph Club, the Rockford Institute, and Chronicles magazine.<\/p>\n

Raimondo was a fantastic writer whose columns and book Reclaiming the American Right I\u2019ve found to be influential in converting both establishment conservatives and libertarians to a paleoconservative viewpoint, with one of my colleagues describing it as a creating a \u201cparadigm shift\u201d in his thinking. It was one of the first books to explain who the neoconservatives were, and how they had hijacked traditional conservatism. In 2016, Raimondo was also the first to coin the term \u201cTrump Derangement Syndrome,\u201d in a column in the Los Angeles Times. In addition to Chronicles and Antiwar.com, he also wrote regularly for the Huffington Post, American Conservative, Reason, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Spectator.<\/p>\n

When asked to comment about Raimondo\u2019s influence for this article, Patrick Buchanan said, \u201cHe was steeped in history, a splendid writer, a loyal friend with a fine sense of humor, and a brave man who endured his sufferings with great dignity. May God bless and keep him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Justin leaves behind his husband Yoshi and two sisters, Dale and Diane, and will be missed greatly by Chronicles readers and staff.<\/p>\n

Read more at: Chronicles Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

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By Edward Welsch – Chronicles Magazine Justin Raimondo Image Courtesy of Eric Garris In 2016, Raimondo was also the first to coin the term \u201cTrump Derangement Syndrome,\u201d in a column in the Los Angeles Times. Justin Raimondo, long-time Chronicles columnist, vociferous anti-war activist and a leading member of the paleolibertarian … <\/p>\n

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