Blagnet.net

Kooks and conspiracy theorists

Among libertarians online, mainly in their blags, there has been some discussion, pretty heated, disappointed, and resentful, about the revelations that Ron Paul’s newsletter of the 1980’s and early 1990’s contained very strongly racist, anti-Semitic, bigoted, and conspiracy-theorist/paranoid essays. Very few of them ever had a byline, so no attribution has been given to them. It is almost certain that he didn’t write any of the hateful content, and wrote very little else in them besides.

This has led to many smears by so-called libertarians and Statists alike that all of Ron Paul’s supporters, the Lew Rockwell crowd and many other writers, are also hateful, racist bigots, who want to return to the Confederacy and organize themselves into militias and other nonsense. The fact that Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard were closely associated with Dr. Paul and even his newsletter back then does not say anything about all those other LRC and Mises Institute contributors. Just because a writer supports or is supported by people who used to or even still do subscribe to nutty conspiracy theories or racist bigotry does not make them kooks or bigots. (To be sure, there are a lot of the latter out there, and they describe themselves as “libertarian,” though Lew, Murray, Walter Block, Kelly, and I might disagree with that categorization.)

Mainly what I wanted to say was: this reminds me of the reason I ceased visiting the other, semi-major libertarian commentary site, StrikeTheRoot.com. It must have been my junior or senior year of college that they had a little survey on their site, asking a question that was something along the lines of, “Do you believe Israel/Israelis/the Jews had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks?” or “Do you believe the Israelis/Jews knew about 9/11 beforehand and avoided the WTC that day?” I clicked “No” because even if such a despicable and improbable thing were true, there was no evidence for it whatsoever. Still isn’t. After I voted, I saw the results, and something like two-thirds or three-fourths of respondents had said Yes! What kind of sick, twisted weirdos frequented this site? I declared to myself then and there that, regardless of the positions of the owners and writers at that site, I didn’t want to associate myself with such anti-Semitic nutjobs. So I haven’t visited it again, a single time. That was the whole point of this post. Just to point out that semi-mainstream “libertarians” can be pretty hateful and even deranged, and neither I, nor Kelly, nor most of the LRC/Mises crowd and its supporters want anything to do with them.