Recently a great deal of publicity has been given to a burgeoning split in the right wing, a split between the dominant Buckley-National Review conservatives and the new libertarians.

Twenty years ago I was an extreme right-wing Republican, a young and lone “Neanderthal” (as the liberals used to call us) who believed, as one friend pungently put it, that “Senator Taft had sold out to the socialists.” Today, I am most likely to be called an extreme leftist, since I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, denounce US imperialism, advocate Black Power and have just joined the new Peace and Freedom Party. And yet my basic political views have not changed by a single iota in these two decades!

abortion, 148

African-Americans, 37–38, 43–46, 102, 160

and conscription, 122

and conservatives, 159

and Rothbard, 151

as colonized people, 41–42, 46

Agnew, Spiro, 127–28

Algeria, 119

Americans for Democratic Action, 61, 62, 159

American Telephone and Telegraph, 50

Anarchism, 125–26, 160

An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Rothbard), 11

antiwar movement, 83–84, 100, 109–10, 129–30

and liberalism, 159

Arendt, Hannah, 159

Bay of Pigs, 86

Biafra, 48

The fantastic, incredible, shattering events of April Fool Week came with such bewildering speed that it’s almost impossible to sort them out and analyze them at this early date. We pundits and columnists were taken by surprise almost every day, and many of us formed brilliant theories one day, only to see them shattered by the onrushing and changing facts of the day following.

Okay. I deplore and condemn the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. But no more and no less than I deplore and condemn any murder of any man. The attention and the brouhaha being paid to the King murder is more than a little ridiculous and more than a little revolting.

President Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race is the last of a series of withdrawals that caught the mass media totally and completely be surprise: Governor [George] Romney’s sudden pullout while campaigning in New Hampshire, and Governor [Nelson] Rockefeller’s decision to withdraw from the race after all his friends and associates were assured that he would enter. In every case, the withdrawer proclaimed the reason to be his desire to “unify” the party and/or the country.

Lyndon Johnson’s April Fool peace offensive was, as Senator [William J.] Fulbright had the enormous courage to point out, a phony. Hanoi had repeatedly said that it would not negotiate until the United States unconditionally and permanently halted the bombing of North Vietnam. Johnson’s bombing announcement fooled many people into believing that this is what Johnson had decided to do; instead Johnson continued to bomb North Vietnam up to 200 miles north of the border and, in fact, he bombed this large zone much more intensely after the “bombing halt” than he had done before.

The great debate that raged during the post-King-funeral riots, and will continue to rage in the wave of ghetto rioting this summer, is: Should looters be shot?

Many defenders of property rights are backing the position of Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley that looters would be shot by the police, and are criticizing such officials as New York’s Mayor John Lindsay, who maintains that his police will not shoot children for looting stores. The issue is being posed: the lives of the looters vs. the property rights of the merchants.

Anyone who has anything to do with the nation’s campuses knows that the atmosphere has changed drastically over the last couple of years; even over the last few months. The signs are everywhere.

The presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy has tapped a great deal of enthusiasm among considerable segments of American life. Particularly is this true of the nation’s campuses, for students and faculty alike. His lone courage in launching the race against overwhelming odds and against the displeasure of the President, combined with his opposition to the Vietnam war and his scholarly tone and style, have won the hearts of almost the entire American college community, as well as other middle-class Americans.