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Issues with the James Kirchick anti-Ron Paul article
lonewacko.com — Lists a few of the issues with the recent anti-Ron Paul article "Angry White Man" from the New Republic.
LonewackoDotCom- 25 diggs
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- Minarchian, on 01/08/2008, -2/+4On TNR
The New Republic was founded by Herbert Croly, a "Progressive" who believed that the Constitution should be abolished in favor of the will of governing elites. Here is what Virginia Postrel wrote about him several years ago:
Crolyism overturned the ideal of limited government in favor of a combination of elite power — commissions to regulate and plan — and mass democracy.... Frustrated with constitutional limits, Croly wrote, “It remains ... true ... that every popular government should in the end, and after a necessarily prolonged deliberation, possess the power of taking any action, which, in the opinion of a decisive majority of the people, is demanded by the public welfare.” This statement, while extreme, pretty much sums up today’s governing philosophy.
So, keep in mind that this is the philosophy behind TNR. It is a view that the political elite need to tell everyone else what to do, and use lethal force against people who resist.
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On the slander by Kirchick
An emailer informed me this morning that a young kid whom he called a "grossly uneducated, pimply-faced youth" slandered both Ron Paul and myself on the Tucker Carlson show last night. The pimply-faced youth (PFY) is one Jamie Kirchick, who writes for the left-wing, pro-war New Republic magazine. In the YouTube video of the conversation the PFY asserts over and over that Ron Paul is a "racist." When Carlson asks him if he ever heard Ron make a racist remark he says "No." But then, with a Gotcha! look on his face, the PFY announces: "BUT," he DID attend a conference on secession in 1995!! Aha! Gotcha!
This ignorant little kid posing as a "journalist" then informed everyone that the conference was sponsored by a "neo-Confederate" group and that Ron Paul speaks to "the neo-Confederate community," whatever that is, "in code language. (I knew that Ron was in touch with the Martian community, and with the residents of the planet Remulak, home of the supposedly "fictional" Coneheads of Saturday Night Live fame, but not the "Neo-Confederate Community" as well).
Well, I was at that secession conference and presented a paper there. It was sponsored by the Mises Institute, which has nothing to do with Confederates, neo or otherwise, as anyone who surveyed the Institute's programs on its web site (www.mises.org) would know. The PFY did not bother because he is only interested in slandering Ron Paul, not in being a serious journalist.
My paper was about the Northern secessionist tradition prior to the War between the States, including the Hartford, Ct. secession convention of 1814, and the secession movements of the mid-Atlantic states that existed prior to the war (see the book, The Secession Movement in the Middle States by William Wright). The famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a Northern secessionist whose credo was "No Covenant with Death," the "covenant" being the U.S. Constitition, and "death" being slavery. Other papers had to do with the Quebec secession movement, European secession movements, federalism in general, how the U.S. was created by a war of secession from the British empire, and even "How to Secede in Business" by substituting arbitration for litigation.
But don't take my word for it. The proceedings of the conference, which the PFY is obviously ignorant of, were published as a book: Secession, State and Liberty, edited by Dr. David Gordon, whose Ph.D. from UCLA is in the field of intellectual history. It includes essays by scholars and professors from Emory University, Florida State University, UNLV, University of Montreal, University of South Carolina, and even a lawyer from Buffalo, New York. It was published a few years after the Soviet empire imploded as the result of eleven separate acts of peaceful secession, which made it especially relevant to social scientists.
In fact, secession remains a lively topic of academic discourse, something that the PFY is obviously unfamiliar with. A few weeks ago a secession conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities was held in Chrleston, South Carolina, featuring some thirty historians and legal scholars. In little Jamie Kirchick's empty mind, the NEH must necessarily be a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment. (A friend in academe tells me that the participants in this conference spanned the ideological spectrum from left/liberal to Marxist).
Only an ignorant conspiracy theorist like Jamie Kirchick would assume that anyone who studies secession in a scholarly way is necessarily some kind of KKK-sympathizing kook. He knows that Ron Paul will not sue him for defamation because he is a public figure. I, however, am not a public figure.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018 ...
And a little more on this scum
Jamie Kirchick: "I don’t think Ron Paul is a homophobe; I'm just cynical"
http://gays-for-ron.blogspot.com/2008/01/jamie-kir ...
Reason talked with Paul about this:
Ron Paul: All it is--it's old stuff. It's all been rehashed. It's all political stuff.
reason: Why don't you release all the old letters?
Paul: I don't even have copies of them, because it's ancient history.
reason: Do you stand by what appears in the letters? Did you write these...?
Paul: No. I've discussed all of that in the past. It's just old news.
reason: Did the New Republic talk to you before they ran it?
Paul: No, I never talked to them.
reason: What do you think of Martin Luther King?
Paul: Martin Luther King is one of my heroes because he believed in nonviolence and that's a libertarian principle. Rosa Parks is the same way. Gandhi, I admire. Because they're willing to take on the government, they were willing to take on bad laws. So I believe in civil disobedience if you understand the consequences. Martin Luther King was a great person because he did that and he changed America for the better because of that.
reason: You didn't write the derogatory things about him in the letter?
Paul: No.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124281.html
"Internet information claiming that presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX) is a racist – and made derogatory comments about African Americans – has been making the rounds within the blogosphere. But sources close to the editorial group that published the newsletter (or newsletters) that supposedly carried the comments claim that Ron Paul never had anything to do with them, and wasn’t even aware of them.
These sources say that editorial operation in question was a fairly large one, and profitable for its time - focused in large part on measures that one could take to generate a lifestyle independent of government influence and intervention.
The publication, or publications, comprised a business venture to which Ron Paul lent his name. Headquarters were “60 miles away” from Ron Paul’s personal Texas offices. At the time that the publications were being disseminated, primarily in the 1980s, Ron Paul was involved in numerous activities including Libertarian politics. He eventually ran for U.S. president as a Libertarian."
http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=41 ... - glasnostic, on 01/10/2008, -0/+1even if you take RP at his word and believe that he had no hand it what that publication was printing, what does that say about the guy? I certainly wouldn't trust him as far as i could throw him if he didn't have the wherewithal to put a stop to such stuff being written in his name.
RP will continue to fail the way he always has.
and he think the state has the right to tell you what you can and can't do in your bedroom.. how the ***** is that libertarian?
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