The Antisemitism of Ron Paul's Far Right Anarcho-Capitalist Ideological Cult
Unpacking the bizarre views of one of the most odious congressmen of all time...
Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. Among the most important pieces from this first wave:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
Is Qatar the Most Terrible State in the Middle East? Or Is Iran Worse?
7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred
Why This Bible Thumper Is Going to Keep Using Plenty of Profanity
How Multi-Faith Mysticism & Maimonides Can Bring Peace to Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Everyone
This is the fourth installment in Volume II, intended as another 30 installments exploring the many manifestations of Jew Hatred and the issues surrounding it in America and globally. See the previous installments in this collection below.
Martin Luther King, Jr: An American Hero and Courageous Zionist Voice
Talking to These Students Gave Me Hope in this Dark, Dark World of War and Hate
Why I Don't Expect the Palestinians Will *Ever* Make Peace with Israel and Thus Gain Statehood
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
So I’ve begun working on “A is for Anarchism,” the first essay in my Joy of Political Sects guide to ideology, which I’ll be serializing in their first forms here at God of the Desert Substack for our premium subscribers. In this essay I’ll be polemicizing against two forms of anarchism - the far left anarcho-syndicalism of Noam Chomsky and the far right anarcho-capitalism of Ron Paul - while concluding articulating the philosophical form of anarchism that I myself do embrace.
I’ve got the introduction to the essay to a place that satisfies me but I need to start untangling my deeper thoughts and formulating my arguments and it seems like a pair of blog posts in this series is the way to do it. Then I’ll convert the themes in the posts more into essay form.
My apologies up front - there’s a whole lot here to sort of vomit up and then refine into my essay. So this is a long one that makes a whole lot of points and excerpts quite widely from previous writings of mine and others’. If anything doesn’t make sense then please ask me to explain further in the comments and I will.
I’ll start off with the post on Paul, because, honestly, I find him and his ideological acolytes much, much more annoying and I have too much experience arguing with them, including face-to-face when I attended CPAC more than a decade ago. At this point I can make the case against the “Paulestinians” practically standing on my head, it’s so easy and the evidence against them so abundant. The explanation for far left anarchists is similar but a little more complicated and I haven’t had to make it quite as consistently over the years since I’ve generally argued personally much more with anti-Israel types “on my own side” of the political right more than the overt enemies on the left. So-called “progressive” opponents of Israel often have less fortitude to articulate their opinions directly with someone on the other side. It’s just too easy to expose them as apologists for theocratic authoritarian dictatorships.
I don’t have to do it as much anymore, Paul is no longer as prominent and popular as he was 10 and 15 years ago. He’s no longer running regular presidential campaigns and he was unable to fully transfer his own significant cadre in his cult of personality to his son. Hardcore Paul fanatics were able to tell that the younger Paul was only barely one of them sooner than I did. And besides, Rand Paul has more than made clear that he just doesn’t have the political skills to rise higher politically than his current senate position. He can forget about trying for president again. He more than embarrassed himself the first time.
And now most of Ron Paul’s supporters have morphed into Trump supporters. But every now and then I do still need to explain to people just why Paul’s so objectionable. Like here on Twitter the other day. I don’t remember how I came to be following this guy:
I mean, he describes himself in his bio as “Hardcore Right-Winger. Ganz Rechts. Registered Independent. Catholic. Vladimir Putin Fan. #Trump2024 #ULTRAMAGA.” I knew what I was getting into when I followed him but he and I had some polite exchange about some issue or another where we agreed on something so I thought, “what the heck? why not?” And he politely followed me back. I’ve occasionally quote tweeted him with my disagreements and he usually hasn’t responded but he certainly did when I got into my usual anti-Paul spiel:
The “MAGA Warlord” asked me to explain:
So I did with four links which I’ll unpack more below:
The link is to this article is here which I’ll discuss first.
I did a quick summary of the case against Paul when I was an editor at PJ Media and Paul was a 2012 presidential candidate. From December 11, 2011, I wrote, “3 Impolite Facts About Ron Paul I Hope Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter Mention Next Time.” I wrote at the time:
Last night on Fox News Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter discussed the sorry state of the GOP primary. (Video here.)
I share Coulter’s analysis:
1. Governor Mitt Romney and Rep. Michele Bachmann are the most conservative candidates in the race.
2. Bachmann resembles Sarah Palin too much (just as Governor Rick Perry recalls George W. Bush) and neither have the political skills to win a national contest.
3. Thus we resign ourselves to Romney as the least-worst option who may actually beat Obama and may actually govern a center-right nation differently than how he led a center-left New England state. (And I affirm this as someone who signed an anti-Romney pledge back when Newt Gingrich sat at the bottom of the polls and the genuine Tea Party candidates had yet to implode.)
4. Gingrich and Rep. Ron Paul are the least conservative choices.
My only concern with Coulter and Hannity’s analysis is a more general problem that continues throughout the Conservative Movement: a lack of clarity when talking about Paul.
Last night Coulter and Hannity identified Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy as their primary disagreement. They — and most conservatives it seems — tend to have the attitude, “Well if only Paul would just get over these goofy foreign policy ideas then he’d be great!” But Paul’s “non-interventionism” is only a symptom of a far more serious intellectual and spiritual disease. I present these 3 impolite facts about Paul and three relevant books in support of them from some of his movement’s most vocal advocates. Don’t take my word for it — read their books for yourself.
1. Paul’s intellectual mentor Murray Rothbard was the founder of anarcho-capitalism and opposed the legitimacy of all nation-states, including ours.
[Then I included a photo of the late Justin Raimondo’s very sympathetic biography of Rothbard and linked to it.]
2. Paul openly proclaims himself a revival of the Old Right, the movement which opposed our entry in World War II. He and his followers proudly reject the New Right tradition established by William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and Barry Goldwater.
[I noted Paul’s endorsement of a book lionizing the views of the non-interventions Old Right which dominated the GOP before World War II and the Cold War]
“When I was deciding whether or not to run for President as a Republican, I re-read Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right and it gave me hope—that the anti-interventionist, pro-liberty Old Right, which had once dominated the party, could and would rise again. Here is living history: the story of an intellectual and political tradition that my campaign invokved and reawakened. This prescient book, written in 1993, could not be more relevant today.”
3. Paul is an antisemite.
This is not a complicated point (as some polite conservatives might think it is.) And it has nothing to do with Paul wanting to end foreign aid to Israel and all other nations. (I know plenty of passionate Zionists who think the same thing for different reasons.)
If you believe that the ideas of the Old Right have great value and that we should have followed a “non-interventionist” path during the rise of Nazism then you are an antisemite. You know good and well that the practical consequence of American inaction would have meant an even higher body count in the Holocaust. But dead Jews are apparently not something that concerns you much.
Just as today Paul doesn’t care if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arms the Islamic Republic of Iran for a nuclear-charged assault against Israel.
Yet when conservatives talk about Paul they just politely note that they disagree with Paul’s policy of standing by while the next Holocaust begins.
When will the Conservative Movement finally finish the job Buckley started and stop tolerating the racist, anarchist, useful idiots for Jihad in their midst? Ever?
Update: Ex-Conservative Andrew Sullivan endorsed Ron Paul for the GOP nomination today. Perhaps I’ll have a response later…
That’s right - Paul was so “non-interventionist” in his views he supported the “Old Right” movement which opposed entry into World War II. He was even more dogmatic in this principle that he would repeat it in the war on terror. During the 2012 campaign he admitted he didn’t oppose Iran getting a nuclear weapon in spite of the Islamic Regime’s stated objective of wiping Israel off the map.
I’ll state it simply: anyone who wants to do nothing to prevent the Islamic regime running Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, who just regards the Iranian theocracy as akin to any other nation, is an antisemite. They don’t care about the preservation of the Jewish people and are abetting Israel’s annihilation.
It’s my general view that most politicians are not particularly ideologues. They don’t seriously believe in any coherent political philosophy or seek to meaningfully advance public policies of a sincerely ideological nature. They embrace the policies which most align with their most consequential campaign donors. I think most politicians are simply out to advance and enrich themselves and feed their narcissism. They’re just going to go along to get along and rock the boat as little as possible in order to maintain their cushy position and state of perpetual public adoration.
Not all politicians are like this, though. Some are genuinely ideologically influenced by specific philosophers and teachers, and then they’re out to wield power in an attempt to reshape the world as their ideology dictates. Ronald Reagan was such a politician in my view. He was a charter subscriber of National Review and from what I can tell a genuine adherent of William F. Buckley, Jr./Frank S. Meyer style anti-communist, mainstream libertarian-conservatism of the “fusitionist” style, both in belief and political practice. Reagan managed to bridge together free market types, defense hawks, social/religious conservatives, and enough mainstream, normal, “Reagan Democrat” type people to gain the presidency in order to implement the policies necessary to win the Cold War. (Look forward to a greater explication of this ideology and its role in history in the third essay coming soon, “C is for Conservative Anti-Communism.” We’ll also talk about the “Old Right” in an essay further down the line: “O is for Old-Right Paleo-Conservative Antisemitic Conspiracism” in Chapter 6 where I’ll mostly focus on Pat Buchanan.)
Ron Paul falls into this genuine ideologue category as well. However his ideological mentors were much less practical and effective in their theory and practice as Buckley and Meyer. The two thinkers who most shaped Paul and later filtered down in a watered-down form to his son Rand (who we’ll get to shortly) are the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and his student and popularizer the economist/political theorist/historian/activist Murray Rothbard. Now, von Mises I don’t particularly bear ill will. While I’m not an adherent of his economic ideology, I gather there’s still some value in at least considering his work. (I might change my mind on this down the line should I take the time to dive into him more deeply.) I can understand how von Mises would so excite his student Rothbard that he would devote his life to popularizing von Mises’ ideas and overall philosophy, even naming his non-profit institute after him so. So if Mises is akin to Jesus then Rothbard was his St. Paul, and Congressman-turned-presidential-candidate Paul was the first pope and spreader of the faith - what Paul called “the gospel of Liberty” in his ideological church. Rothbard built the small libertarian intellectual activist movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and Paul took it to the masses, particularly the dumbest of the right-wing college students who formed little clubs - Students for Liberty - to promulgate and indoctrinate themselves with his teachings in the ‘00s and peaking in the early 2010s with Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign.
So why was Rothbard so uniquely terrible? The 2013 Article “Is it possible for a Jew to be anti-Semitic? The case of Murray Rothbard” at Zionism is Freedom hits the highlights:
Murray Rothbard, who has had immense influence on the growth of libertarian ideas, unfortunately also has played a large role in the acceptance of racist and anti-Semitic ideas among libertarian adherents. As you will see, it is quite possible for someone born to two Jewish parents to not only embrace anti-Semitic ideas, but also to promote those ideas vigorously -- as in the case of Rothbard.
When it came time to figure out where I stood on economics vis a vis libertarian philosophy, a newly converted Left-to-Right ideologue such as myself is confronted with three primary figures each belonging to a different school of libertarian thought: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, or Murray Rothard. Each represented a different school of libertarianism - namely the Chicago School, Objectivism, or Anarcho-Capitalism aka “Paleo-Libertarianism” which is just a broader-rebranding of the same thing emphasizing the ideology’s compatibility with Buchanan’s “paleo-conservatism.”
I tried to give each approach a fair shot over the years but it didn’t take me long to realize the Chicago School built around Milton Friedman’s approach and popularized by his student Thomas Sowell, was by far the most sensible. The other two just struck me as too extreme and self-oriented. (Rand even named one of her books The Virtue of Selfishness, just laying it right out there.) I liked the Chicago School instead because as one trained in political science I could relate to its empiricist approach. Friedman and Sowell advocated free market, limited government approaches based on intellectual, empirical analysis. They didn’t oppose most government programs out of some high-minded philosophical idea, but because when analyzed empirically the programs just usually did not work as intended at all. Sowell has told the story that his Marxism as a young man was not truly cured - even after taking a class by Friedman - until he spent a summer working for the federal government and seeing first hand how ineffective its programs were.
But I won’t be getting into economics too much in my essay collection. I hold to generally free market, limited government views influenced especially by Sowell and my own personal experiences living and working in the post-college “real world,” but at heart I’m very much a foreign policy activist and ideologue. So those themes will much more dominate this essay collection, with economics only a theme in 3 or 4 of these essays. The various economics ideologies I have not studied too deeply and while I have my opinions they are not firm enough yet to advocate too deeply. I find the study of the various economics-centric ideologies much more boring than ideologies which drive war, terrorism, and peace.
So while I find him a bit radical, extreme, and simplistic in his pro-market radicalism, Rothbard’s approaches to economics really are not the primary concern of my critique, rather it’s the foreign policy ideology and amoral philosophy he implanted into Paul which the congressman and self-promoting presidential candidate passed along to many right-wingers of my generation that pisses me off.
And what is at the heart of Rothbard’s “anarcho-capitalism”? What is so “anarcho” about his advocacy of free markets? It can be found in this infamous quote from him here, made in an address in 1992, reprinted in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report:
It was Rothbard’s naked position that the Constitution should be repealed, not defended, and the US should go back to the Articles of Confederation, the form of government the founders of our nation ultimately rejected as too weak to maintain a nation.
The fifth volume of Rothbard’s history of the American founding, Conceived in Liberty, published posthumously in 2019 by the von Mises Institute, makes this point abundantly clear. As reviewed in the Libertarian flagship magazine Reason:
The Constitution is traditionally seen as the culmination of the American Revolution. But in the fifth and final volume of Conceived in Liberty, the libertarian firebrand Murray Rothbard portrays it as a reactionary counterrevolution against the Revolution's radical principles, orchestrated by a powerful array of monied interests who hoped a more centralized government would reproduce many hierarchical and mercantilist features of the 18th century British state…
So Paul’s antisemitism is very easy to start off revealing. He embraced one of Rothbard’s most odious ideas which has poisoned the libertarian movement for decades. Returning to the article:
In the 1980s, anti-government sentiment was not so mainstream. Instead, it was contained to people on the far-right who supported militia movements, anti-political correctness, and had racist ideas. During this time, Rothbard argued that libertarians should engage in 'Redneck Outreach' to insert libertarian notions into these circles of far-right extremists.
Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, and Ron Paul focused the Ron Paul Political Report -- a newsletter Paul distributed to his supporters -- on very extreme ideas which trashed Jews, African Americans, and homosexuals. The newsletters continued until Paul was elected to Congress in 1995. Mr. Rockwell is the founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a major libertarian think-tank, and still serves as its president to this day.
Paul made millions of dollars in the 1980s selling a newsletter which trafficked in racism and antisemitic conspiracies.
Rothbard’s libertarianism was further driven by a racist understanding of economics:
It is our belief that Rothbard was proud to be a 'racialist' because, to him, it exposed the true source of inequality in a free market: genetics. The belief in biological racial inequality was, for Rothbard, part of his 'libertarian' project, because racial inequality is simply how markets reflect nature. For Rothbard, the arousal of the masses was best accomplished through appeals to racism. He believed that libertarians needed to remind the masses that privileged elites were looting and oppressing the middle and working class in the United States. This could effectively fire people up and generate support for him and his allies.
Rothbard would also shape the revival of the Old Right known as paleo-conservatism, which sought to revive the principles of non-intervention in foreign policy and domestic racism:
Early in his life, Rothbard was affiliated with the Old Right, which could have contributed to his pursuit and promotion of xenophobia and propaganda against non-white, non-Christians later on. Many of the Old Right's adherents, who were opponents of the New Deal and favored the U.S. staying out of World War II -- Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, for example -- were staunchly anti-Jewish. After very few successes politically, their ideas eventually shaped the philosophical movement called paleo-conservatism, thanks in large part to Rothbard himself and fellow anti-Semitic travelers like Joseph Sobran, Pat Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, and Sam Francis. The paleo-conservative movement's goals include opposition to multiculturalism, support for Christian orthodoxy, anti-federalism, and a "non-interventionist" (read: isolationist) foreign policy.
The article lists numerous examples of Rothbard’s antisemitism. First, his claim that Jews were behind the rise of the welfare state:
Rothbard's Jewish background did not deter his interest in raising "the Jewish question". He did so when questioning "top Jewish financiers" who "contributed to the welfare state's growth" in his article "Origins of the Welfare State in America". The entire article is fixation on how Jews were the catalysts behind the social welfare state in the United States.
Rothbard defended the Holocaust denial of Pat Buchanan:
When Pat Buchanan raised objections to facts regarding the Treblinka Concentration Camp's extermination of more than 780,000 Jews in the Holocaust, he was defended by none other than Rothbard. The suggestion by Buchanan that known facts in the Holocaust were fabricated by the Jewish victims is indeed anti-Semitic. Rothbard defended the indefensible.
Rothbard was also a defender of KKK-leader David Duke, one of America’s most prominent and influential antisemites:
Murray Rothbard also defended former KKK leader David Duke, a candidate for various political offices in Louisiana, saying, "It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke's current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleo-conservatives or paleo-libertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites: what's wrong with any of that?"
(Duke in turn would endorse Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential run.)
Rothbard has also been praised by Holocaust Deniers:
The Institute for Historic Review, an anti-Jewish organization that is the world's most notable Holocaust denial organization, features a story to memorialize the "brilliance" of Rothbard's "scholarship".
The article notes how Paul himself has also made his associations with Neo-Nazis and paleo-conservative antisemites:
3. Paul posed for a photo with KKK Grand Wizard Don Black after refusing to return $500 from Black in 2008.
4. In 2008, Paul endorsed anti-Semite Chuck Baldwin for President, who ran as a Constitution Party candidate. Baldwin has lashed out at the Jewish bankers -- he calls them "moneychangers" -- who control the media. He concludes, "They are destroying America."
The article’s conclusion is right on the money:
The evidence above shows that Murray Rothbard was indeed a self-loathing, Jew-bashing racist. What's more, the anti-Semitic philosophy he laid out is now being used by the worst enemies of the Jewish people to continue to advance their agenda two decades after his demise.
The libertarian "paleo" strategy has failed. They should abandon it entirely and admonish Rothbard, Rockwell, and Paul for their decades of promoting hate rhetoric as somehow "libertarian".
That article was from 2013. The next year I commissioned P. David Hornik to do a series on “The Ten Worst U.S. Purveyors of Antisemitism.” He picked Paul as #5, which seemed a fair ranking to me at the time.
Among the points which Hornik emphasized:
A few months ago Ron Paul touched off a media flap by agreeing to give the keynote address, on September 11, to a conference of the Fatima Center in Niagara Falls, Canada. The American Jewish Committee said it was “appalled” and “dismayed” and called on Paul to reconsider. Of course, he did not take the advice.
The Fatima Center is a Catholic fringe group whose leader, Father Nicholas Gruner, was suspended by the Vatican in 1996.
Hornik then described the antisemitism of the Fatima Center, which you can read much more about at the SPLC article I linked in my tweets above. Here’s what the SPLC has to say about the group:
In early September, the men are all scheduled to speak – along with a lengthy list of archconservative clergy, lawyers and academics – at a conference in Canada sponsored by the Fatima Center, part of the “radical traditionalist Catholic” movement, perhaps the single largest group of hard-core anti-Semites in North America.
Detail about the group’s antisemitism:
The following year, Gruner launched The Fatima Crusader, a quarterly that Gruner claims now has some 1 million readers. The publication has carried anti-Semitic articles such as the 1992 piece, "The Program of Christ Against the Plans of Satan," which denounced what it saw as Jewish "naturalism" and blamed Jews for putting "the Christian state in danger." The Crusader also has staunchly defended the work of Father Denis Fahey, a hard-core anti-Semite whom it called "brilliant." In an interview with Catholic scholar Michael Cuneo, Gruner accused a fellow radical traditionalist, E. Michael Jones, of being "secretly a Jew" who was "planted in the American Church to confuse Catholics and sow hatred against people like myself." The Fatima Center heavily promotes a conspiracy theory about the Vatican allegedly working to hide the so-called "Third Secret of Fatima" from the faithful. (Among other things, the theory accuses Pope John XXIII of making a blasphemous pact with Moscow that prevented the Vatican from denouncing communism and has resulted in Satanism flourishing "inside … the Vatican itself.") In 1995, Gruner was ordered to report to his bishop in Italy, but did not; as a result, the Vatican suspended Gruner from his priestly duties in 2001 (a lesser sanction than excommunication). Gruner owns a share of Catholic Family News, helped publish the schismatic book We Resist You to the Face, and is a regular speaker on the radical traditionalist circuit. In 2005, for instance, Gruner told an audience at the annual St. Joseph's Forum conference that Masons -- by which he meant the Jews -- "sacrificed their babies to the pagan gods." Gruner also rubs shoulders with hard-line Holocaust deniers, selling his wares at a 2006 conference of the anti-Semitic Barnes Review.
Another key journalist exposing Ron Paul’s antisemitism is Jamie Kirchick, who wrote about the Congressman's newsletters’ Israel obsession:
[Paul’s] newsletters display an obsession with Israel; no other country is mentioned more often in the editions I saw, or with more vitriol. A 1987 issue of Paul’s Investment Letter called Israel “an aggressive, national socialist state,” and a 1990 newsletter discussed the “tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise.” Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newsletter said, “Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.
Hornik also noted who chose to support Paul financially:
Paul also told Ed Crane of the Cato Institute that “his best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for The Spotlight, the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust denier Willis Carto until it folded in 2001.”
That’s the same Willis Carto featured earlier in this series, whom the Anti-Defamation League calls “one of the most influential American anti-Semitic propagandists of the past 50 years.”
Hornik concluded by Paul’s propagandizing against Israel on Iranian TV, comparing the Jewish state to the Nazis, an act which the IHRA definition of antisemitism cites as antisemitic:
Isolationists like Paul generally favor military action only if America itself is attacked. One imagines that, if Mexico were to launch thousands of rockets at Texas, Paul would support doing something about it.
That was the situation in Israel in 2008, during which a total of 3700 largely Iranian-supplied rockets and mortars fired from Gaza fell on southern Israel—a very tiny area compared to Texas. It took Ehud Olmert’s left-leaning government until December to finally take action and launch Operation Cast Lead.
Even then it was too much for Paul, who took to Iranian TV to call Gaza a “concentration camp” where people were “making homemade bombs” and mocked the idea that Gaza—by then a haven for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terror groups—was the aggressor.
And how has Paul’s antisemitism manifested in recent years since Hornik’s, Kirchick’s, and Zionism is Freedom’s reporting? In 2018 he tweeted this antisemitic image referencing the common far right antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews are behind a “cultural Marxist” subversion of America:
What is the antisemitic “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory?
Jewish Currents explained it here and noted how it inspired antisemitic terrorism:
THIS PAST WEEKEND, a man opened fire in the Chabad of Poway synagogue outside San Diego, killing one woman and injuring three other people. The shooter’s online manifesto includes a range of antisemitic conspiracy theories. He wrote that Jews control the media and the banks, and that he hated Jews for their “role in cultural Marxism.”
“Cultural Marxism” is a trope that is rapidly spreading from the far right to the conservative mainstream. The term first gained notoriety when white nationalist Anders Breivik cited it as a reason for killing 77 people in two lone wolf terror attacks in Norway in 2011. Poway shows once again how dangerous the idea is. It creates a rationale for violence against leftists, against Jewish people, and against anyone associated with either.
“Cultural Marxism” has been floating around as a term for some time, and hasn’t always carried its current connotations. For example, it’s been used to describe left cultural analysis by figures like Marxist British historian E.P. Thompson. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the term first began to gain traction in right-wing venues when paleoconservative writer William Lind used it during a 2002 speech at a Holocaust denial conference.
Lind used “cultural Marxism” to characterize the ideology of the Frankfurt School—a group of predominantly Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Lind argued that the Frankfurt School had developed anti-racism, feminism, and sexual liberation in order to undermine traditional American values. “Cultural Marxism,” for Lind, was a foreign Jewish plot meant to weaken the white Christian patriarchy that had made America strong.
So Paul was advocating for the same types of antisemitic conspiracy theories which others at the antisemitic conferences he had been attending were advocating. At the same holocaust-denying journalists which praised him for advocating. Is it any surprise then that he sympathizes with antisemitic regimes and smears the Jewish state?
Paul’s unwillingness to support states defending themselves originates in his mentor’s ideology that states are inherently illegitimate and shouldn’t even exist. This in turn somehow mutates into sympathizing with states like Iran seeking to destroy other states. Paul appeared on Iranian TV to smear Israel as an apartheid, Nazi state. In a presidential debate he made clear that he did not oppose Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. Where does this come from? A fanatic devotion to “non-interventionism,” a philosophy which refuses to validate America’s allying with and supporting other states which share out values of freedom.
And what about Rand Paul, the congressman’s son who is now a Senator from Kentucky? Where does he fall on all this stuff? I had to tackle this question back in 2010 when editing NewsReal Blog, as we had to figure out if Rand Paul was an anarcho-capitalist with amoral foreign policy ideas like his pop, or if he was a “mainstream” Tea Party conservative as he tried to present himself. At the time Rand Paul was sort of trying to split the difference. He knew that he needed his father’s cult-like, fanatical base of support to get off the ground, but he also knew he had to talk more moderate to draw enough support to win his senate seat. So where did he really stand?
I came to the conclusion that Rand was very much a believer in his father’s and Rothbard’s teachings, he was just smart enough not to be too loud about it. After all, he had very nice things to say about Rothbard and had been a supporter of his father’s previous campaigns, so he was complicit in the ideology’s promotion. But how has devotion to his father’s ideas manifested in Rand’s actions as a senator? Here’s a particularly noteworthy and rather morally disgusting example, Jewish Insider reported in January 2022, “Rand Paul takes heat from pro-Israel groups for stalling Iron Dome funding”:
A coalition of pro-Israel organizations sent a letter to Senate leadership on Tuesday taking aim at Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) for blocking supplemental funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system and arguing that folding the funding into a larger package would “undermine Israel’s security.”
The funding passed the House by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in September of last year, but Paul has repeatedly blocked passage in the Senate, insisting that funding be reallocated from Afghanistan aid to pay for the $1 billion Iron Dome supplement.
…
“[The funding] has bipartisan support in the Senate, although passage has been stymied,” the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Jewish Insider, reads. “One person’s objection should not undermine the overwhelming bipartisan will of the Senate nor stand in the way of ensuring Israel has the tools necessary to keep people safe.”
When rockets were raining down on Israeli civilians, Rand Paul chose to block the bipartisan efforts to restock the Iron Dome defense system keeping them alive, supposedly on “fiscal conservative” grounds, demanding that funding going to Afghanistan be redirected if Israel was to be supported.
But the Pauls are not the only anarchists who arrive at this strange alliance with Islamist totalitarians. In a future entry in this series - maybe the next, maybe not, we’ll see where my mood takes me - I’ll explain how anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky ended up in a similar spot, shaking hands and kissing the head of Hezbollah: