Tom, thanks for directing us to USAToday’s smear of a fine patriot, Benedict Arnold. It’s about what I’d expect from a newspaper that absolutely worships the State.

Most of what we “know” about General Arnold turns out not to be true. He was actually a huge hero who defended liberty’s principles no matter who was abusing them: the British king and Ministry (equivalent to our modern bureaucratic regime) or people who called themselves Patriots but were, in fact, even more tyrannical than London’s government. I discovered the real story of Arnold and his “treason” while researching my second novel (due for publication this fall). I began writing the book determined to show Arnold for a traitor and a fool; within a few months, based on the facts, I had entirely changed my opinion.

Benedict Arnold defied American dictators, just as Heroic Ed has done. Those dictators naturally and vengefully vilified him at the time; textbooks and professors have repeated their slanders ever since as the truth (imagine the lies statist “historians” will one day write about Ed Snowden). I invite LRC’s readers to suspend judgment of a courageous anarcho-capitalist until my novel, M Genl B Arnold, debuts in another couple months.

(Arnold also makes a cameo appearance — and not a flattering one, since I didn’t yet understand his incredible devotion to freedom — in my first novel, Halestorm.)

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