My latest column is up at LewRockwell.com. This one is about experiences I myself have had that I’m seeing replicated in the media’s treatment of Ron Paul: there’s no effort made to refute what we say; our positions are simply enumerated and denounced. There is no acknowledgment of our arguments or attempt to show where we are wrong. A sample:
My first exposure to how the MSM uses this tactic against dissidents came in early 2005, when the New York Times denounced my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History – which had already spent two months on that paper’s bestseller list by that point – on its editorial page. That denunciation was written by a former employee of a well-known thought-control organization that monitors American life for deviant opinions. (A deviant opinion is one that – need I say it? – diverges from the Joe-Biden-to-Mitt-Romney spectrum of allowable thought.)
The Times warned Americans that my book contained all sorts of subversive arguments – but without actually explaining my positions, disclosing any of the evidence I had offered for them or – and this is the point – bothering to show why I was wrong. It was enough to state what I had said – usually in a way intended to make it sound ridiculous – and leave it at that, as if it were self-refuting. That was the treatment I deserved for being ungrateful for all the gifts the political class had bestowed on Americans.
For example, I pointed out in the book that European recovery after World War II owed little or nothing to the sacred Marshall Plan. In response, the Times merely restated the conventional view: the Marshall Plan “lifted up devastated European nations after World War II,” the very premise I had challenged, and which the Times did nothing to rehabilitate apart from merely repeating it.
Where was I wrong? Which arguments were mistaken? My mistake, evidently, was questioning the received version of U.S. history. A deviant like me was not entitled to having the nature of his errors explained to him. It was enough to list my offenses and banish me.