First, let me tell you the story of the typo on my Harvard application. (You’ll see why in a minute.)
One day I was reading Orwell’s 1984 and my eyes came to a full — and horrified — stop.
Is that how you spell coercion?
That can’t be right, I thought. No English words end in -cion! Plenty of Spanish words do, but not English words. This had to be wrong.
But it was right. And on my application I had spelled it coersion.
It was all over for me.
The next day I went in to see the head of my high school’s guidance department. I told him I’d misspelled a word on my Harvard application. Did this mean I was surely out of the running?
He paused. He then said — and I will never forget this — “You applied to other schools, right?”
Just the question I wanted to hear.
As it turns out, I was admitted anyway. But even the director of guidance had suspected I was probably doomed.
Here’s why that story comes to mind.
Over the weekend my almost-13-year-old, Regina, was asking me about my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (which she has been reading), and the various attacks on it. She wondered how I responded.
I told her that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, but that when you’re dealing with the kind of people who attacked that book, you’re dealing with people who exercise a tyranny over public opinion. For your own sake and for everyone else’s, you have to hit back hard.
Now at the time, it was downright frightening to be attacked by so many high-profile outlets. I’d love to be able to tell you that I was excited to be attacked on the New York Times editorial page because it meant I must have struck a nerve. But instead I wondered: is my career over? More on that in a minute.
Cathy Young of Reason magazine (don’t get me started) attacked the book in the Boston Globe. This was a signal that the forces of Libertarian Lite — pot and hookers yes, freedom of association and criticism of World War II no way — weren’t going to support me.
Max Boot, the neocon who defies caricature, attacked me in the Weekly Standard. The neocons disliked it for the same reason the Libertarian Lites did: it defended nullification and took a hardline antiwar position.
I look back on the ordeal now and I’m glad it turned out as it did. It got me plenty of attention, and it gave me repeated opportunities to smack down my opponents, hard.
Joe Lockard and David Greenberg, two professors who attacked me, got flattened. I’m not going to be modest about this. I mopped the floor with them.
Same with Adam Cohen of the New York Times.
I sold more books the week after Cohen’s attack in the Times than any week before or since. The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History wound up spending 12 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Don’t read this book, said the various outlets of thought control.
So people read it. Ha!
As I say, though, I was terrified at the time. I called my publisher and asked flat out: “Do you think my career is over?”
I don’t remember his exact words, but they were something on the order of, “You applied to other schools, right?”
And yet, just as with college, everything turned out all right in the end. I just kept on cranking out the books and the YouTube videos, and building a following — and you good folks found and supported me.
I just out-and-out refused to let them bury me. I spoke everywhere, I wrote articles for popular and scholarly journals, I worked alongside Ron Paul, I created Liberty Classroom, I made the 400 videos for the Ron Paul Curriculum, and I started the podcast, which I absolutely love doing.
As I began to have more successes, things eventually got to the point that even people who had abandoned me during those terrible months suddenly wanted to be my friend again. Even a guy who scrubbed his think-tank’s website of all traces of me acts to this day as if nothing ever happened, and has been friendly ever since.
My view: let bygones be bygones.
But I’ll never forget the people who stood by me, against the neocons and Libertarian Lite.
In particular: Lew Rockwell and everyone at the Mises Institute. Now those are true friends.
As for why this matters today: I’m sending out signed, personalized copies of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which is where all this got started. But just today.
Join my LibertyClassroom.com today (May 9, 2016) — where you’ll learn the history and economics they didn’t teach you — and then submit your mailing address on my Contact page and I’ll send that puppy right out to you.
Plus, coupons! Take $20 off one of our yearly memberships with coupon code SMASH, and $100 off a Master (lifetime) subscription with code MASTERY. (Coupon codes must be entered in all caps.)
Don’t let the civilization wreckers go unopposed. Arm yourself.
http://www.LibertyClassroom.com
That free book offer disappears at midnight, so before you turn into a pumpkin, click that link.