In late 1970, during his freshman year at Florida State University, Linaweaver joined the local college chapter of the national conservative organization Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Both conservative and libertarian ideologies were represented within the local YAF chapter, prompting Linaweaver to begin writing and debating about the various political philosophies competing for followers on college campuses at that time. This eventually led to his first sale to a national publication, a short article The Wish, which made the case for capitalism over socialism. The article appeared in The New Guard, the magazine published by YAF. Subsequent articles in that publication drew the attention of public intellectual, conservative author, and YAF founder William F. Buckley. Linaweaver and Buckley subsequently struck up a friendship and correspondence, which lasted decades until Buckley's death in 2008. Through that relationship, Linaweaver eventually published essays in Buckley's magazine National Review. Unknown to him at the time, Linaweaver's writing also caught the attention of Ronald Reagan. In 1976, Reagan devoted one of his radio show broadcasts to a discussion of The Wish, praising Linaweaver in the process. Reagan summed up his commentary on Linaweaver with the line, "How right he is!" The radio broadcast is included in the Reagan CD set In His Own Voice and in the book Stories in His Own Hand: The Everyday Wisdom of Ronald Reagan. Linaweaver didn't learn about the endorsement from Reagan until decades later. He mused that if he had known about it earlier, it might have changed the trajectory of his career path. "I never would have had my career in Hollywood. I might have been a boring political hack in Washington, trying to capitalize on the Reagan endorsement to be a political speechwriter. I'd be a worse libertarian than I am today." Instead, Linaweaver soon took up writing science fiction, and stories for movies, inserting his libertarian ideology into the works whenever feasible. In a 2007 interview, he noted that "I've been getting libertarian messages into everything for a quarter of a century". But, he observed, not every genre lent itself to his form of political promotionalism. "My involvement with movies has been mostly low-budget, exploitation stuff where ideology is not that relevant. When you're writing science fiction for a New York publisher, you actually achieve something when you slip in a libertarian idea. But with independent, exploitation, low-budget Hollywood, there's already an anti-authoritarian attitude. That culture is by nature fairly libertarian. There's less need to be a propagandist."
