January 08, 2008
"Pimply- Faced Youth" Slanders Ron Paul on Tucker Carlson Show
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at January 8, 2008 01:11 PM
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.
