Re: [I-S] Ron Paul's newsletters and the failures of mainstream journ-0-lism

I am the author

http://bighomocon.blogspot.com/2011/12/jamie-kirchik-and-ron-pauls-newsletters.html

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 4:08 PM, MJ <michaelj@america.net> wrote:

Do you have a LINK? The Author's name?

Thanks!

At 03:59 PM 12/30/2011, you wrote:

Ron Paul's newsletters and the failures of mainstream journ-0-lism

James Kirchik, or Jamie as his friends and associates know him, is a young journalist, Yale educated, Jewish and gay, a fan of the late Christopher Hitchens and a friend of many DC libertarians and conservatives, from tv and radio personality Mary Katherine Hamm to the editors of reason magazine.


For full disclosure I should say that I know Jamie, have gone out drinking with Jamie and his boyfriend in the past month, have attended one of his birthday parties, have chatted with him at reason magazine happy hours and CPAC events, and in my day time job as a real estate agent, sold him a property a couple of years ago.    Indeed at CPAC 2011 I introduced Jamie to a friend of mine who is Ron Paul's press person in his Congressional office, since I socialize with both of them occasionally, and got to watch them be awkward with each other before Jamie had to depart to his next event.  He's smart, I think probably far more decent than many Beltway journalists and political junkies, and good company.  If I was twenty years younger I would probably think he is attractive.  He also has lovely parents, both of whom I have met (and who are probably around my age).


Jamie made his name back when he was on the staff at the New Republic (in whose offices I used to meet him to work on real estate contracts) by exposing that some newsletters written 20 years ago by associates of Ron Paul that ran under Ron Paul's byline, contained noxious, bigoted, content (Paul associates Lew Rockwell, the late Murray Rothbard, and their entourage are usually fingered as culprits).  There were among the many years of this newsletter a few passages critical of gays, blacks, Israel and AIPAC.  I am choosing my words carefully here because in the current brouhaha some, including Jamie, are saying the newsletters are anti-Semitic, and I do not think merely criticizing Israel or the AIPAC lobby amounts to anti-Semitism; and neither did (Jewish) libertarian writer Jacob Sullum (whose wife is a rabbi --  and I am almost embarrassed to add that -- next I will be disclosing that some of my best dates have been with Jews, and indeed in a few cases with Washington establishment gay Jewish neoconservatives) when he reviewed the material for reason magazine during the last election cycle.  And whether Ron Paul or his policies are or are not "good for the Jews," they certainly have been good for one Jew, since they have gained Jamie most of the publicity his writing (which is by the way, usually very good, and is usually on deeper topics) has received.







Two questions I have never seen asked nor answered are:  1) where did 20-something Jamie learn of these newsletters, since they were written when he was a pre-teen (Kirchik was born in 1983), and most libertarians and Ron Paulistas were ignorant of them until after his original TNR story?  AND  2) who financed his excursion to the one or two libraries in Kansas or Nebraska where he could find a still extant paper copy back in 2007-2008?  Perhaps The New Republic financed it, as TNR has a long-standing fear of libertarianism, with regular articles attacking fictional libertarian straw men (which are then routinely exposed over at reason).  The answers are likely perfectly innocent (though rumor is Jamie was connected to the Giuliani campaign in 2008 and is supporting the Gingrich campaign in 2012) and yet it would still be very interesting to know (feel free to reply here).  Jamie's repetition and follow up of his 2008 articles in the Times and the Weekly Standard is timed both for the Iowa caucuses, which the political class fears Paul may win -- and also, more innocently, for the week when most readers would be interested and it would result in the most website traffic.

Jamie a day or two ago wrote an article called "Ron Paul's World" in the New York Times ( here), rehashing the newsletter story and responses by liberalish writers like Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic who support Ron Paul.  Jamie strings together all of Ron Paul's past and present associations that an urban liberal would find suspect.  And they definitely exist.  I attended, and even sponsored, Ron Paul's Liberty Political Action Conference this fall in Reno, Nevada, which included libertarian and liberaltarian elements, tea partiers, independents, Republicans, Democrats, and some far right third party types (who were local to Idaho, Wyoming, Montana etc and did not have far to come).  Though the speakers and VIPs at LPAC were all respectable Senators and academics and celebrities, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Mike Lee, Prof. Walter Block, actor Vince Vaughn, some of the booths were manned by ultra-conservative Christian groups.   Strangely, these theocrats were very friendly to me, offering me pamphlets and trying to chat me up so much that I was tempted to slap on a pink triangle to test their ardor or their gaydar.  Jamie concludes from Paul's "failure" to tell off all of these donors and supporters that Ron Paul is a conspiracy theorist.  I conclude that Paul, an open and congenial man (I have met him) has been frozen out of public debate by the ruling political class for so many years that he will indeed go on a conspiracy kook's radio show if invited as long as the kook supports his ideas about ending the Fed or the American empire.  That may now be seen to be practically unwise and a strategic error in hindsight.  But it may be the only venue he had years ago when the ruling political class was censoring him the way they are still censoring former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.

Jamie and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (who he is affiliated with, according to the Times piece) are upset in part that Paul is not an automatic supporter of anything they believe is necessary for Israel's survival.  There is nothing wrong with that.  My own views are a rather recherche form of libertarian Zionism that makes no one happy, neither many libertarians nor many neoconservatives and other Zionists.  (And I am perfectly content with my specialness.)  Nothing that is, as long as one understands his actual ideas and does not misreport his ideas or policies.


Jamie also does not understand much about Paul's economic policies. I google chatted Jamie yesterday about how his gold standard riff was a repetition of Dick Morris's inane misunderstandings/lies about Paul after this article was posted and he replied that he -- horrors -- did not get his ideas from Dick Morris. When I explained that Paul, following economists like Nobel laureate FA Hayek (The Denationalization of Money) and Lawrence White (Competition in Currency), believed in a free market of privately issued, competing currencies, backed by whatever consumers liked and thought would save value and protect savings against inflation, and NOT a 19th century government currency with a government gold standard, Jamie replied that he had never heard of such a thing and that that was even crazier.  (And I must apologize to Jamie in that, though he knows I blog and reads my blog, I did not tell him I was going to write this, though at the time I didn't know I was going to write this.)

How can you decide who is and is not a kook and what is and is not a conspiracy if one has a Dick Morris level grasp of someone's ideas about economic theory, history and policy?  For Ron Paul and other students of the Austrian school of economics, the fact that half of every economic transaction (money) is government owned, and that interest rates are centrally planned by the State and its appointed banking cartel, is the fundamental cause of economic disruption and unemployment, and hence poverty and much racial inequity.  You can't judge how Paul's policies would affect racial minorities or economic opportunity or prosperity if you are in the shallow water thinking that his critique of corporate statism is along standard Republican lines dealing with marginal tax rates or welfare reform or affirmative action.

If you are going to write articles on Ron Paul for 5 years, you should have heard of a basic, well-known (among Paul supporters) idea put forward by one of Ron Paul's major intellectual sources, a Nobel Prize winning economist.  And it is not a "crazy" idea because the ruling class is invested in the current system where a government currency is used to finance government debt and bail out banks (and fund the American military empire) by stealing average people's purchasing power through inflation or because they fail to even discuss it in undergraduate classes at Yale.

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