When Lew Rockwell Attacks
Paleocon neanderthal Lew Rockwell didn’t like our post about his appearance with Alex Jones on a Fox News online show hosted by Andrew Napolitano, so he takes a creepy little slap at us: LewRockwell.com Blog: Little Green Footballs Is Upset.
The right-wing site with the flavor of a provincial Soviet newspaper in the 1930s (hey, another definition of neocon!), is turning greener at the Judge Napolitano show. (Thanks to Lance Adams)
Who is Lew Rockwell? For starters, he worked with Murray Rothbard to concoct a strategy of exploiting racial resentment, to create a coalition of populist paleoconservatives.
And there’s very good evidence that he is behind those sick racist newsletters published in the 1980s and 90s by Ron Paul: Who Wrote Ron Paul’s Newsletters?: Libertarian movement veterans, and a Paul campaign staffer, say it was ‘paleolibertarian’ strategist Lew Rockwell.
Ron Paul doesn’t seem to know much about his own newsletters. The libertarian-leaning presidential candidate says he was unaware, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of the bigoted rhetoric about African Americans and gays that was appearing under his name. He told CNN last week that he still has “no idea” who might have written inflammatory comments such as “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks”—statements he now repudiates. Yet in interviews with reason, a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists—including some still close to Paul—all named the same man as Paul’s chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.
Financial records from 1985 and 2001 show that Rockwell, Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. The company was dissolved in 2001. During the period when the most incendiary items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist “paleoconservatives,” producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic. To this day Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul—accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman’s recent writings and audio recordings.
Rockwell has denied responsibility for the newsletters’ contents to The New Republic’s Jamie Kirchick. Rockwell twice declined to discuss the matter with reason, maintaining this week that he had “nothing to say.” He has characterized discussion of the newsletters as “hysterical smears aimed at political enemies” of The New Republic. Paul himself called the controversy “old news” and “ancient history” when we reached him last week, and he has not responded to further request for comment.
But a source close to the Paul presidential campaign told reason that Rockwell authored much of the content of the Political Report and Survival Report. “If Rockwell had any honor he’d come out and I say, ‘I wrote this stuff,’” said the source, who asked not to be named because Paul remains friendly with Rockwell and is reluctant to assign responsibility for the letters. “He should have done it 10 years ago.”
UPDATE at 3/24/09 1:46:18 pm:
Here’s some more information on this lunatic: Gary North, Lew Rockwell, and the Politics of Stoning Heretics and Homosexuals to Death.
Frank says:
