Paul endorses loony Far Right conspiracy group.

This blog was, to make an understatement, less than enthusiastic that Ron Paul was selling himself as a libertarian given his unlibertarian views on certain issues. And I was less than thrilled with his associations to the lunatic Right. I mean the truly lunatic Right of secret conspiracies, banking plots and world-government cabals that are best understood while on LSD.

I also mentioned that Paul was more than friendly with the crazed John Birch Society. The Birchers like to sell themselves as sane by emphasizing their areas of agreement with libertarians. Some people think this a big deal. But socialists have areas of agreement with Libertarians. Hillary has areas of agreement. Even King George has areas. Libertarians have become such cheap political whores that any agreement seems sufficient to buy their praise.

The Birchers started out as your typical Right-wing group obsessed with the “Communist conspiracy”. But JBS founder Robert Welch had other wacko theories in mind. He believed that in 1776 a satanic (sometimes “Satanic”) plot was organized to set up world government. The group that supposedly did this was the Illuminati.

In reality there was an Illuminati. It’s goals were far more modest that the deluded fantasies of Welch and it’s other critics. The Illuminati was founded in Bavaria during a very conservative era. It was not a good time to oppose the State or the Church and most classical liberals would oppose both. The Illuminati was the good guys. They would trying to expand intellectual and political freedom against a regime that was run by the landed aristocracy and the church.

Thomas Jefferson basically praised the goals of the Illuminati and said it operated as secret society because it was forced to do so by the regime it opposed. The conservative forces, of course, were against the classical liberal revolution and the Illuminati in Germany was basically destroyed by the state. But it lived on in the fevered imagination of crazed conservatives ever since. Jefferson’s kind words for an organization that was promoting the same liberal goals as the American Revolution was cited as proof that he was the head of this “Satanist” plot in America.

Various writers for the next couple of hundred years imagined the Illuminati being involved in anything they didn’t like. For some the “international bankers” were the plot and the Illuminati controlled them. Some said it was the Jews and that the Illuminati was the cabal at the very top. Catholic conspiracy mongers like to see the Illuminati running the Masons and Protestantism. Fundamentalist nutters saw the Illuminati controlling the Catholic Church. Over the years there is nary a wacko plot that has been invented that wasn’t then put under the alleged control of this defunct organization.

Robert Welch, the founder of the Birch Society, took this stuff about as far as you good. For him all the various conspiracies existed but were controlled by the “Insiders” by whom he meant the Illuminati. Many of the top Birchers were convinced the Insiders were really all Jews and that Jews were the plotters behind all the world’s troubles. Welch preferred to keep that sort of thing under the table. But prominent Birchers frequently went off into the anti-Semitic land of neo-Nazism. Many a JBS chapter ended their official meetings with unofficial discussions where anti-Semitic tracts came out of hiding and were discussed but never “officially” lest the JBS be tarnished.

The Birchers were against the Civil Rights movement for equality of black Americans. Today they are leading the charge against Hispanics and homosexuals. They are still pushing their wacko conspiracy theories and it is from them that Paul got his bizarre material on NAFTA and the alleged “North American Union”. The Birch Society is for the war on drugs, for censorship and wants abortion banned. They are not advocates of separation of church and state across the board.

If a libertarian is broadly defined and socially liberal and economically conservative they are NOT libertarians. They hold Ron Paul’s views which were conservative and, at best, merely wanted the social control run on the state level. They don’t oppose state control they just want a different level of government doing the controlling. A libertarian opposes the control full stop. Simple lesson but a lot of alleged libertarians don’t get it.

Now Ron Paul has basically come out of the closet and publicly endorsed the John Birch Society. Paul called them “a great patriotic organization” and wished “them continued success and endorse their untiring efforts.” Their efforts are supposedly for “less government” but their definition of less government and a libertarian definition are very different. A libertarian says you can have less government by abolishing the war on drugs. The Birchers and Paul say you get it by having the states run the war on drugs instead.

A libertarian says that church and state (any level of government) must be separated. The Birch and Paul view is that church and state may be combined at the level of the 50 states just not at the federal level.

Ron Paul’s endorsement of one of the nuttiest of the far Right groups is an indication of how far from libertarianism he has drifted. What worries me isn’t that he drifted in this Far Right direction as much as some libertarians drifting along with him. The libertarian movement is drifting far from its original principles and turning in a rump of the Far Right with their bigoted campaigns and their intolerance for individual freedom.

Note: This was written a few days ago but we were on the road and hotel WiFi stopped working on us as we were preparing to put this on line and we didn't get it working again. My apologies for the delay.

Secret bankers plot takes over REASON magazine. Right!

The paranoid nut cases at the John Birch Society are outing our friends at REASON magazine as fascists! Truly. No more bizarre than the loony conspiracists theories they usually tout with such fervor, however. In fact, they are being rather mild in berating writers from REASON as only fascists. Usually they invent some plot involving bankers and the Council on Foreign Relations.

When their adrenaline is pumping they start in about the Illuminati and mysterious “Insiders”.

The Birchers, and others on the extreme Right, have been pushing a NAFTA superhighway theory that is about as bizarre as the old JBS canard that Dwight Eisenhower was a agent of the Communists and reported to his brother for instructions from Moscow. It really is difficult to emphasize how deranged the Birchers can be. And they don't even have to work hard at it. It seems to be a natural talent.

Jim Capo, at the Birch Society, is upset because the Los Angeles Times has published an article debunking their conspiracy du jour -- this Superhighway/NAFTA plot that has miscellaneous xenophobes in a dither.

Capo says that article he finds so offensive “was awarded to a pair of fascists from Reason magazine, an outfit that used to be in favor of freedom.” Which is unlike the John Birch Society that loved government control over lots of things. Debunking this paranoid theory apparently makes the authors, Shikha Dalmia and Leonard Gilroy, not just fascists but “corporatist shills” as well as “phony libertarians." Aparently the new revisionist view of libertarians, that is so popular on the far right, includes beliefs in secret plots, building walls on the borders and slamming immigration.

I was once told that if you throw a stone at a pack of wild dogs the one that yelps is the one you hit. They don’t get much wilder than the Birchers --- they are crazy and funny people. (I remember one JBS member who tried to convince me that homosexuality was caused by a vitamin deficiency.) And Capo certainly is yelping loudly. Capo makes the point that “real libertarians” like Republican Ron Paul believe in the conspiracy theories they promote. He may well do so. But he is hardly a a typical libertarian.

Regardless of the vices or virtues of Ron Paul, conspiracy theories didn’t used to be typical fare for libertarians. That is, this sort of irrationality is not one peculiar to libertarians. We may have our own craziness but hundred year secret plots to rule the world by building highways isn’t one of them. The Bircher are most welcome to that insanity—we have enough of our own.

Of course, the paranoid mind always must explain anyone who challenges them. So when someone challenges the existence of witches that challenge is proof positive that the denier is clearly a witch. So apparently REASON magazine is now a part of the secret plot to take over the world and install one-world government for the Illuminati.

Capo explains: “what the LA Times and Reason magazine are really trying to do is sell us a toll ticket on the Conspiratorial highway of their sponsors.” See, “their sponsors”. Now, we know. Reason is sponsored by the conspiracy. And clever folks that these conspirators are, they set up REASON 40 years ago so it could hire two people who would write an article that would deny the secret plot to create a North American Union with a NAFTA Superhighway.

Pretty soon we’ll discover REASON editors hired Freemasons and dance naked at the Bohemian Grove —so watch for videos on YouTube proving it. I’m just waiting to find out that editor Nick Gillespie is a member of the Skull and Bones. I have it on good authority that he possesses both a skull and bones himself. He’s never been seen in public without them.

Every time I run into the Birchers I swear I can hear the music of the Twilight Zone playing in the background.

Replace one bad idea with another.

I have commented on the lunatic theory of the “North America Union” conspiracy. And I was pleased to see AlterNet taking on this paranoid delusion. As with much you find at AlterNet it is some good and some bad. And I thought I’d mention what they had to say and respond.

First, they poo-poo the idea of an international plot of “globalists” to set a transnational government. And they are right when they say it is “an offspring of the John Birch Society right, with its attendant xenophobia and paranoia.” The conspiracy theory of the Birchers is bizarre.

First, the founder Robert Welch, went on about the Communists “conspiracy”. Now he was fairly solid ground except in thinking that there was a monolithic agreement among Marxists. There never was. The Soviets did present a problem and were a monolithic government which did do some horrific things. But the Left was not in lock step with the Soviets.

Welch got even more bizarre when he wrote that President Eisenhower was a communist agent controlled by his brother. Welch did have many loose screws.

Then in the mid 60s the Birchers latched on to the ideas of Dan Smoot that the Council on Foreign Relations was involved in a plot to merge the United States with the Soviet Union and to establish a one world government. He laid out his theories in his book The Invisible Government which was published by the Birchers. Smoot presented himself as an FBI expert. He did serve as a field agent in the FBI but the Bureau was rather unhappy with the quality of his work and he left under a cloud. He was reprimanded on several occasions. Smoot also claimed he was an “administrative assistant” to J. Edgar Hoover but the FBI says this was entirely false.

The Birchers, however, moved on. Now they started looking at the “banking conspiracies” espoused by various groups, especially by anti-Semites who argued the bankers were “Jews”. At this point Welch started concocting a grand conspiracy theory tying all this strands of conspiracism together. Welch was reading the wacko conspiracy books about Freemasons and such and came across the idea that an obscure order, the Illuminati, was involved. Eventually they became the main culprits controlling, from behind the scenes, all the other conspiracies.

Normally one would say: “And the rest is history.” But very little of what the Birchers claims holds up well when scrutinized. One ends up on an endless loop of conspiracy claims using the books of other conspiracy nuts to back up the book being read. Along the way there is a conspiracy for everyone. If you hate Catholics you can find books documenting the Vatican’s involvement with the plot. Hate Jews and there are hundreds of books you can turn to for “proof”. If you hate Protestants you can find Catholic conspiracists arguing that the Protestants are part of the conspiracy. Some argue the Mormons are and others argue the Mormons are good guys.

So out of this jumble of bad history and delusional thinking has emerged the “conspiracy” to merge the US with Canada and Mexico. That’s today. Tomorrow the world.

AlterNet, however, goes off the deep end as well. They pull in their left-wing obsessions. They argue that people are attracted to such wacko ideas as “an entirely logical reaction to the process of corporate-driven global integration that feeds in Americans’ very real and wholly valid economic anxieties.” This would be a good time to throw up.

The movement for free trade is often opposed by corporations who don’t want the competition locally. Everyone wants to be able to sell abroad and to have a protected market at home. So many corporations are leaders pushing for protectionist measures to limit their own competition.

But the really asinine comment is that the fears of the public are “real and wholly valid economic anxieties.” That is just garbage. It is mostly based on fallacies and economic illiteracy. It is not true and the economists of the world are pretty much in agreement on the benefits of free trade.

To back up the claim that these economic fallacies are legitimate the author of this piece resorts to counting heads informing us that 46 percent of the public thinks free trade deals are bad for America. And they believe they lowered wages -- in spite of rising wages to the contrary. Yet the same site laughs hysterically went Right-wing nuts pull out public opinion polls against evolution.

So the author realizes that the conspiracy theory is fringe material but is convinced that his own fringe economic theory (at least among professional economists) is absolutely valid. And he finds the fault to be the very thing he himself hates: free trade. How convenient. He speaks in way that implies he was one of “those” “who have spent years in trying to raise awareness of what’s really going on in the movement to blanket the earth in “free trade” deals...” In fact the author sounds like a nutter when he says: “Make no mistake, I’ve shed blood opposing corporate trade deals like NAFTA and the Free Trade Areas of the Americas, and there are very real and very significant problems with the push toward harmonization.....”

By the way harmonization is not the same thing as free trade and it is not good. It is a means by which bad policies are imposed on nations that have decent policies to limit competition. For instance the old EU countries are lumbering dinosaurs unfit to survive the modern world. They face stiff competition from the rising stars in Eastern Europe. So the old countries, instead of reforming their failed policies, are trying to impose the same burdens on the emerging markets in order to stifle their growth and make them less attractive.

The major difference between the AlterNet author and the lunatics he sets out to debunk is that he wants them to concentrate on his favorite hate group: corporations. He hates free trade, corporations and I would guess he isn’t found of free markets in general. And he wants the lunatic fringe on the Right to adopt his targets. I’m glad to see him debunk some of the lunatic conspiracy theories that he does. I’m disappointed to see him replace those Right-wing wacko theories with Left-wing wacko theories of his own.