Academic

ILYA SOMIN: Timothy McVeigh Was No Libertarian: The Fallacy of Conflating Two Very Different Types ?

By Glenn Reynolds

ILYA SOMIN: Timothy McVeigh Was No Libertarian: The Fallacy of Conflating Two Very Different Types of ?Anti-Government? Movements. It’s not so much a fallacy as a malicious lie, but yeah.

From such statements, you might think that Timothy McVeigh and friends were libertarian foes of big government who hoped that their terrorist attacks would somehow lead to tighter constraints on government power.

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. 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 the book. . . .

By contrast, the Tea Party movement that many seek to conflate with McVeigh is primarily motivated by wholly different concerns. As a recent New York Times survey concluded, ?When talking about the Tea Party movement, the largest number of respondents [who were supporters of the movement] said that the movement?s goal should be reducing the size of government.?

Those dangerous libertarians — they want to take over the government, and then leave you alone! Read the whole thing.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on April 21, 2010 (boomark / email).