Tom Woods On FTL Talking About Jesse Benton and John Tate

Tom Woods: My Memories Of Jesse Benton

SOURCE

Ron Paul campaign chairman Jesse Benton is going to head up the campaign of Mitch McConnell. Gee, now why did those incorrigible naysayers have so many unkind words for him?

People who said Benton was positioning himself all along for bigger things in the GOP were scoffed at. Why, Jesse has a secret plan to get Ron Paul the nomination at the last minute!

Well, now we know the real secret plan.

Ask yourself this: how much money would you have to be paid to work for an enemy of the things you’re supposed to stand for? Maybe now people will understand why Jesse would fly into a tirade after some of Ron’s most heroic moments, when the rest of us were cheering.

I could go through a lengthy catalogue of problems with Benton. The grassroots folks already know a lot of them, so there’s probably no need. What’s done is done.

Not that the world revolves around me, but just a word about how I was treated. Early on in the campaign I posted a note that under the circumstances I thought was astonishingly restrained. I said that if the fundraising success of 2008 was to be surpassed, the grassroots would have to be persuaded that professionals would be brought on this time, that debate coaching would take place as it does in all other campaigns, etc. Nothing could have been more obvious than that. And this was obviously the note of a friend, not an enemy.

Now here’s how a professional would have handled a situation like this, in which a longtime supporter is unhappy but obviously still on the team in the broad sense. “X, we understand your sentiments, which are shared by practically everyone, and we’ll be ensuring that these changes are made. Your input is always welcome,” etc.

Jesse, on the other hand, denounced me in a series of emails, and made perfectly clear that I was to be cut off from everything — the campaign, Campaign for Liberty, etc. He referred to my “boorish behavior” (you know me — always the boor), and told me from now on to leave him and his family alone. Nice touch, that last part, implying that I was likely to stalk his wife.

Naively, I assumed another top person, whom I will not name, would be as appalled at Jesse’s behavior toward a longtime supporter as I was. So I (gleefully) forwarded the correspondence to him, only to be told that Jesse’s conduct was not unprofessional at all [!]. But I would not technically be banned from C4L, I was told.

So I just went ahead and made a whole bunch of videos, viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, and wrote a whole bunch of articles (here’s my favorite), on my own during the campaign in defense of Ron against his critics. I was not earning a five-figure monthly salary for this.

I then went ahead and signed on with Revolution PAC. (I resigned from it in March of this year, because I had said from the beginning that I would be on board only through Super Tuesday. Also, it was a very busy time in my life, and I felt I couldn’t contribute enough.) The excuse for my absolute exclusion from everything, put forth by the official yes-men, is that my involvement in the PAC erected a legal obstacle to any involvement in the campaign.

This particular lie has the sequence of events reversed. I joined the PAC only after I had been blacklisted. But I kept my mouth shut during the campaign every time I saw people say, “Woods isn’t allowed to work with the campaign because of the PAC.” I never corrected anyone. I kept the real story a secret for Ron’s sake. No one on earth can fail to understand why I might want to tell it now, to set the record straight.

And no, I wasn’t looking to be hired so I could get that five-figure monthly salary. I was prepared to work for free.

Another potential excuse would be that as a radical libertarian, I wouldn’t know how to pitch Ron to a GOP audience. This is as wrong as wrong can be, and I have the converts to prove it. As a former mainstream GOPer myself, I know exactly how to frame the argument to win them over.

For months and months, the top two people spun everything I did in the most negative light possible, in order to poison my reputation with people I respect. They don’t know I know this. But I’m happy to say I have friends everywhere, and they are loyal.

Again, I kept my mouth shut. And again, no one on earth can seriously expect me to continue doing so.

Of the various lies Jesse told about me, the least damaging was the claim that I had called him a — well, it’s a word I would never say. The actual story was this: in 2010 I was having drinks with Iowa Ron Paul GOP people, and Jesse was there. I mentioned the name of an old college friend of mine I thought Jesse might know, and Jesse shouted out, with an important Christian Right Ron Paul guy right there, “X [my college friend] is a —-sucker!” Classy. I reminded Jesse of this incident when he complained of my allegedly boorish behavior. At that moment, the story began to spread that I had called Jesse a you-know-what.

This particular lie I made no special effort to refute. I joked with people that if the grassroots heard that I had called Jesse that name, I’d be a hero.

So Benton is gone, but is Bentonism alive and well? Bentonism is the playing down of Ron Paul’s most popular and important ideas, the impatience with and purging of people who champion those ideas, and an obsessive eye to GOP respectability. Is that what the “liberty movement” is? Then count me out.

Finally, please note that I stand to gain nothing by clearing the air like this. Nothing but grief and more burned bridges. But sometimes you have to do what you have to do, regardless of the consequences for yourself. It’s quite possible that this person will make his way back into our circles at some point, and I want to urge people not even to consider donating to anything with his name on it.

Incidentally, if Rand Paul intends to run in 2016, the single most effective way he could convey to the public that he is not really serious, and that people should withhold their donations, would be to hire Jesse Benton.

Mises, Rothbard, Woods and Keiser

I started seeing grumblings last week about some blow up between Max "Bernanke is a Protestant" Keiser, and Tom Woods.  The whole thing was apparently over Max not bowing down to Mises and Rothbard which got the number one cheerleader Tom Woods quite riled up.  I do not know the ins and outs of what was said, and for the basis of this post it is somewhat irrelevant. 

After this article appeared on ZH I decided to briefly write my thoughts as well because I had wanted to get this out there for some time.

I always found it funny that the two people Lew Rockwell and Tom Woods revere the most in the space of Austrian Economics is Murray Rothbard and L v Mises (both jews of course).  I have been interested in this for some time, because arguably the Mises Institute run by Lew Rockwell is the biggest Austrian economics think tank on the planet.

I like Lew and Tom, I have listened to every one of Lew's podcasts (many of which are stellar) and routinely post videos from both of them here on the blog.  So I am not an enemy of either of these men, yet I do find it curious that they are such cheerleaders for Mises  and Rothbard, to be honest it's alittle scary.  I understand that Lew and Tom both knew Rothbard and that Lew knew Mises so it could just be that they happen to be in charge of keeping up their legacy, but to me it goes deeper than that.  By focusing on these two economists many other great economists take a back seat.  As I see it the L v Mises Institute exists to insure that Mises and Rothbard are remembered as the two heavy hitters and thus make two jews the patriarchs of the entirety of Austrian Economics thought.

To the new reader, or to the reader who doesn't understand the realm of jewish influence this observation may seem boring, but the study of jews controlling both sides of a debate or movement I find very fascinating.   Today you have economists such as Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan and Paul Kruggman who are also jews yet follow Keynesian principles, whereas the flip side (apparently) is Mises and Rothbard.  So you have the most prominent proponents on either side and they are all jewish?

"So what", you may be saying, "they are all jewish, well not all jews have to agree on every subject" while this is true there is no more a cohesive group of people on planet earth than the jews and that is a fact, sure they will sell their own grandmother for a nickel (no honor among thieves) but when it comes down to promoting their own be it hollywood, the music industry or any other field they do it every single day.

I really have no direct conclusion with this post, just the fact that I find it quite odd that Lew and Tom spend a disproportionate amount of time building up the legacy of Rothbard and Mises where without Lew and Tom most people today wouldn't even know their names.  If their contribution to economics was so great they wouldn't need cheerleaders constantly reminding people of their importance, and the fact that they do it with such regularity and fervor just sends up a red flag with me. 

Ultimately I find it suspicious and unfortunate that nearly every major player in economics period now is jewish, and the people today who could be great on the Austrian side seem content to just give all the credit to jews of the past.

Tom Woods: An Appeal to Ron Paul, on Mitt Romney

The Ron Paulian Task: Build Up the Remnant

The Free Market: Fallacies and Facts | Thomas E. Woods, Jr

Tom Woods Speech at Ron Paul NH Boots on the Ground Party

"I Support Cain" Means "The Country Is Fine Just As It Is"

FULL ARTICLE WITH LINKS

A Suffolk University poll of Florida Republicans finds 25% in support of Mitt Romney and 24% supporting Herman Cain. In other words, these voters believe the country is about 4 percent off track but basically all right. For all their talk about how bad Obama is, apparently things aren’t that bad if they want to replace him with a safe establishment man like Romney or Cain (former head of the Kansas City Federal Reserve).

Under Romney it’s obvious nothing will change. Anyone can see that. Under Cain it’s only slightly less obvious. His big proposal is a revenue-neutral tax shifting. He has no plans to cut anything (and please, spare me the he’ll-cut-the-rate-of-growth-of-spending stuff). He supported Romney in 2008. He supported TARP — he had no idea it would be used to “pick winners and losers”! — which means on the key economic issue of our time, which Reagan budget director David Stockman calls “the single greatest economic-policy abomination since the 1930s, or perhaps ever,” Cain chose the Establishment over the people. He lectured “free-market purists” for opposing it.

You can imagine how much “change” we can expect from a guy like that — the whole establishment lines up on one side (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the cable news commentators, John McCain, Barack Obama) and the American people on the other, and Cain goes with the establishment. But he’ll be a big maverick next time that happens, right? Sure.

Not to mention he thought there was nothing wrong with the economy on September 1, 2008. How can he fix something he couldn’t perceive — and actually ridiculed other people for pointing out? How is this in any way defensible? He is such a lightweight on the economy that he calls his economic adviser onto the stage to answer even simple questions.

His foreign policy is indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s. Both subscribe to the entirely conventional bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, which has yielded Americans one budget-busting boondoggle after another. (Turns out the people in Washington the Tea Party rails against do not suddenly become infallible and super-effective when they turn to foreign policy — though why this should be surprising or unexpected I have never been able to understand.)

So Florida voters are telling us this: we don’t want a truth-teller who in 2001 explained precisely what was happening to the economy. We don’t want any deviation from the trillion-dollar bipartisan foreign policy (even though we don’t support any other bipartisan program). We want someone totally clueless who will more or less keep things the way they are and not lay out any serious plan for cutting spending or the deficit. Well, that’s just super.

The Problem With Herman Cain