I’ve recently changed my ID on twitter from ’swgalibertarian’ to ‘veritasthorn’, and several people have asked me why.
It is essentially a continuation of a change I made several months ago on Peach Pundit of going away from having the word ‘libertarian’ in my ID, just to make it absolutely clear that even though I am a Libertarian, my opinions are not necessarily those of the Party. On some issues, I am honestly a bit more extreme than many in the Party are comfortable with, and on some issues I am a bit more conservative than many in the Party are comfortable with.
So to cut those concerns off at the head, I changed my twitter ID.
As to the specific change to this particular new identity, here is the backstory there:
My path to Libertarianism began several years ago, as I began to struggle with legalism in the Southern Baptist Church. One of the books I read in that era was Shaunti Feldhahn’s Veritas Conflict, a This Present Darkness-like novel centering around ideological diversity at Harvard. This book played a key role in pushing me towards Libertarianism, as it began to free me from the chains of “christian” legalism. (The next fiction book from Mrs. Feldhahn, Lights of 10th Street, would push me even further down that path.)
So that’s where the ‘veritas’ part originated, with paying homage to that early influence.
As to Thorn, it also comes from a work of fiction. In this case, it was Dale Brown’s President Thomas Nathaniel Thorn, who first came to power at the beginning of Warrior Class. Thorn was a self-styled Jeffersonian Republican who skipped his own Inauguration ceremonies because they weren’t explicitly in the Constitution. He was also my introduction to non-interventionism, and while Brown himself thinks that philosophy is pretty much slap crazy, I found I very much agreed with Thorn, for the most part. (Thorn was a full-blown isolationist, I am simply a non-interventionist, and there IS a significant difference. Isolationists don’t want ANYTHING to do with other countries, non-interventionists simply don’t want OUR men and women dieing in THEIR wars. We’re perfectly cool with international trade, and many of us more ardently support free trade than many of our pro-interventionism brothers and sisters.)
In other words, from Veritas Conflict I first truly learned about ideological freedom, and from President Thorn I first learned of non-interventionism – two ideas that would merge and lead me to finally separate from the Republican Party and join the Libertarian Party and work for genuine Liberty.
Hence, ‘veritasthorn’.