Updated April 7, 2022
I recently reviewed with folks on my email list some of the craziness that has been coming from a small group of left-libertarians on social media I have dubbed the Loser Brigade, and I’m going to do so more systematically here.
I do not recognize myself in their attacks on me, and neither does my sizable listenership. In fact, one of Woods’s Laws is: the more outrageous the claims about Tom Woods, the less the critic has actually listened to or read me.
Now let me be blunt: the people I am responding to do not matter in any way. Nobody has ever heard of any of them, and if you combine their lifetime contributions to the libertarian movement it wouldn’t match what I crank out in a month.
This is not primarily a left/right thing, by the way. It isn’t the scholarly left-libertarians — who are in fact my friends and who have appeared on the Tom Woods Show! — who have a problem with me. (I did an entire week of episodes with my friend Gary Chartier, the most brilliant and academically accomplished of the left-libertarians.) It is people of no distinction or accomplishment who pretend to be outraged by me.
Let me give you some advice. People like the folks I am about to describe to you are, without fail, miserable in their personal lives. They want to spread their misery to you. When you just laugh at them, or you ridicule them, they become more and more deranged. You are not doing what they want.
I insist that you bear this in mind in your own life, because I think it will help you. Anyone who acts the way these people do is never happy. Not ever, not once. They are envious, they are bitter at their own lack of accomplishment, and they hate to see someone enjoying his life — as I most certainly do.
The very last thing they are is crusaders for justice. They are anything in the world but that.
They have even cited Max Boot, and his unfavorable review of one of my books, against me.
This goes to show how unserious they are about war. They would never cite an article by Woods, who favors no foreign aggression of any kind but who they believe to be insensitive, but they have no problem at all citing Max Boot, who has blood all over his hands.
(Not to mention, as you might guess Boot’s review was idiotic, taking me to task for not supporting Woodrow Wilson’s decision to intervene in World War I — libertarians are citing this against me?)
I take solace in this: they accomplish nothing.
When I was writing Meltdown, the New York Times bestseller that exonerated capitalism for the financial crisis, they were doing nothing. (Prove me wrong!)
When I created 400 homeschool videos on Western civilization, so homeschoolers would understand the Western legacy of liberty, they were doing nothing — because if all of them put together could have delivered one of these lectures, I’d be shocked.
When I wrote We Who Dared to Say No to War, with the late Murray Polner, a man of the hard left, and we got a coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly and Ralph Nader bought 1200 copies, they were flapping their gums about outreach to the left, which unlike me they never actually do, since the left doesn’t know who they are and holds them in contempt anyway.
When I was invited to deliver lectures in Iowa by the state Republican Party and I gently but firmly told the attendees that they needed to knock off the warmongering, the Loser Brigade was doing nothing because they would never have been invited in the first place.
I’ve just released a documentary on the last financial crisis, and the NYC premiere featured a panel of luminaries from the financial world.
Meanwhile, the Loser Brigade tweets.
My regular listeners, reading their bizarre claims, are genuinely astonished: what on Earth could justify this level of hatred, and the obvious attempt to make Woods out to be something he clearly is not?
Before I proceed, let me give a little background on myself and my work in the libertarian movement. I do not relish this, believe me, but what is being done to me is so vile that I wish to defend myself as comprehensively as possible.
I received the 2019 Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award from the Austrian Economics Center and the Hayek Institute in Vienna — no mean feat for a lad of 47, I would think.
I spoke at Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic in 2008, and opened for him to crowds of thousands in many major cities. I wrote the mission statement and the statement of principles for Ron’s Campaign for Liberty, an organization he asked me to lead. (I declined because I had a young family at the time and was not keen on moving.)
I have written a dozen books, which have been translated into as many languages and published by prestigious houses like Columbia University Press, Basic Books, and Random House. These include two New York Times bestsellers.
I created my own dashboard university, LibertyClassroom.com, where other faculty and I teach courses in history, economics, and related fields, from a libertarian perspective. No, I can’t change the existing universities but I can create something of my own for the libertarian world, and that’s what I did.
I created 400 videos on history for Ron Paul’s homeschool curriculum, a project to which I devoted two years of my life — and even then I had to move at breakneck speed.
I have released over 2100 episodes of the Tom Woods Show, and my guest list is a who’s who of the libertarian movement. Gene Epstein, formerly of Barron’s, and his son Jim, of the Reason Foundation, say mine is the most ecumenical libertarian podcast in existence. (If the claim is that I’m a terrible right-winger, go look up the word ecumenical.)
With Bob Murphy I released 225 episodes of Contra Krugman, which taught economics by uncovering the errors in Paul Krugman’s New York Times columns.
I won the $50,000 first prize in the Templeton Enterprise Awards for my book The Church and the Market.
I’m co-editor of Exploring American History: From Colonial Times to 1877, an 11-volume encyclopedia.
My School of Life program teaches libertarians how to survive in a hostile world: how to build businesses, invest money, create networks of like-minded people, educate their kids, become more skilled at writing and public speaking, be better negotiators, and on and on. Apart from criticizing me and other successful libertarians, have my critics ever accomplished even a sliver of this?
My work has been endorsed (enthusiastically) by Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, the Reagan Administration’s David Stockman (a frequent guest on my show), Barry Goldwater Jr., and Judge Andrew Napolitano (who is the godfather of my daughter Sarah), and has been favorably reviewed in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Publishers Weekly, and numerous other academic and popular periodicals.
Now: is it metaphysically impossible that a person matching this description could be a “white supremacist,” or whatever they’re calling me? No. I suppose it’s not metaphysically impossible. But is it highly, highly unlikely? The question would appear to answer itself.
I’m now going to run through the list of Loser Brigade complaints. This is as thorough as I can make it. Some of the complaints will seem so ridiculous that you won’t believe I’m bothering to answer them, but I want to be comprehensive.
Some of these are drawn from a bill of particulars drafted by a young man (we’ll call him YM) who Tweets a lot, and who describes himself as a libertarian, but who pretty much just repeats establishment opinion (e.g., Tulsi Gabbard is probably a Russian asset, etc.). When I use quotation marks in a particular complaint it is drawn from the YM’s list of no-no’s.
Here goes:
Complaint: “At least once hosted neo-nazi Christopher Cantwell (‘the crying nazi’) on his podcast, saying to him ‘You have been saying a lot of the things that I wish I could say, but for diplomatic reasons and for the fact that I’m too busy to open up more civil wars…You’re doing very important work.'”
This accusation is particularly evil.
When I had Chris Cantwell on my show in 2014 (precisely once; I don’t know why the words “at least once” would be used), he was still a regular host on Free Talk Live, for heaven’s sake. Unless we’re now going to ramp the hysteria level up to 11 and accuse the Free State Project of white supremacy, this would appear to be a relevant consideration.
Ian Freeman, who runs Free Talk Live, is the last person on earth even a hysteric would call a “fascist” or a “Nazi,” which is why no one has bothered trying. And Ian says of Chris, “Until the last year or two of his life, he’d been a libertarian activist with no known racist streak.”
Cantwell appears to have shifted toward white nationalism around 2017.
If you are expecting me to divine the direction someone would take years after his appearance with me, or for me to know a guest better than his own daily co-host does, I think you are being a trifle unfair to the host of a five-day-per-week podcast.
Now let’s get to that quotation from me. This will show you how little honor my critics have, honor evidently being another outdated right-wing institution.
The obvious intention of the quotation attributed to me is to make it sound as if I was speaking in 2014 to the Cantwell of 2017 and saying, “Thank goodness you’re saying all the anti-Semitic things I wish I could say, Chris!”
That’s obviously why the dates are never included. It is a deliberate attempt to insinuate sinister motives on my part.
It leaves you in shock that people of such bad will could exist.
Never explained is: why would I have said such a thing in public? Saying I wish I could utter anti-Semitic statements so I’m glad you’re doing it for me is only about three percent better than actually uttering them myself, so what would have been the point of publicly saying something like this? Their story makes no sense.
What I obviously meant — and which is immediately clear from listening to the episode — was that I was glad Chris had written a series of articles in 2014 against some not particularly bright critics whom I myself had no particular desire to fight with, but whose arguments needed to be answered. He could call people out in ways I couldn’t, since had I done so I would have inadvertently launched various institutional civil wars.
Now make no mistake: the Loser Brigade obviously knows this. They are simply trying to destroy me. (That’s too dramatic, probably: opposition from these folks is like pebbles thrown at the Washington Monument, so if you’re concerned for me, don’t be.) They likewise know I would never behave in this ends-justify-the-means way toward them in return, because I am a decent person with principles.
Complaint: I am said to believe that it should be illegal for women to work outside the home. One member of the Loser Brigade told this to people at the 2018 Libertarian Party convention. I have of course never even thought, much less advocated, such a thing. This is completely made up. Once again, these are not normal people. They do not behave the way you and I do.
Complaint: “Refused 5 times to answer who he’d support for president between Bill Weld and David Duke”
Oooh! Woods must be hiding his secret desire to vote for David Duke! Why, this must surely be the most charitable explanation!
The reality:
A punk with zero manners kept demanding I answer his questions, and since I don’t let people bark orders at me I told him to take a hike. This was the nature of my alleged “refusal.”
Complaint: “Ran a podcast with the description ‘The Discrimination Myth: Frank Karsten returns to discuss myths of discrimination that virtually everyone believes, which tend to empower the state'”
I love this one. The YM objects to an episode description. This guy is delicate! He has no idea what was discussed and can’t quote a single sentence from it. He can’t imagine how people’s misperceptions about discrimination might — might, I say — feed into state power.
The left’s entire narrative about discrimination is simply assumed to be correct.
But since we cannot know a priori if it is correct, I’d like to examine it. And instead of refuting me on particular points (he doesn’t know any, because — like the rest of the Loser Brigade — never in his life has he listened to my show), the young man points and shrieks because I’ve raised the issue at all.
Not exactly the freethinking sort, this fellow.
No aspect of that podcast episode is even debatable, I might add. And unlike the Loser Brigade I have nothing to hide, so I’ll actually link you to it so you can listen for yourself.
Complaint: “Taught (teaches?) lessons for Ron Paul’s insane, theocratic Christian homeschool indoctrination program”
The percentage of the Ron Paul Curriculum that could be described as “theocratic” is precisely zero, which is why (as usual) we are given no specifics. Which classes and which lectures promote theocracy, exactly? Ask this question and you can be guaranteed you will receive no answer.
Oh, I’m sure you will get a song and dance about this or that. But keep asking, “Where in the curriculum will I find anything ‘theocratic’? Specifics, please.” Our critic will get flustered and try to redirect you. Be merciless. He has no idea what he’s talking about.
Ron Paul himself made clear from the beginning that his curriculum, while sympathetic to Christianity, would not be a Christian curriculum per se. This is why no marketing materials portray it as a Christian curriculum. (The Christian homeschooling market is huge, so if ours were indeed a Christian curriculum we would be out of our minds not to emphasize this.) He wanted it to be something any family at all could use. If Dr. Paul is lying about this, can we at least see the offending lessons that show him to be a liar?
The curriculum includes the usual subjects, as well as courses on public speaking, starting a home business, personal finance for teens, and other helpful topics that are not typically found in such curricula.
Here is the list of lessons I created for the curriculum, spread over three courses. The “theocratic” aspect would appear to be carefully hidden.
Let’s start with my Government course:
- Introduction
- Natural Rights Theories: High Middle Ages to Late Scholastics
- Natural Rights Theories: John Locke and Self-Ownership
- Natural Rights Theories: Argumentation Ethics
- Week 1 Review
- Locke and Spooner on Consent
- The Tale of the Slave
- Human Rights and Property Rights
- Negative Rights and Positive Rights
- Week 2 Review
- Critics of Liberalism: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the General Will
- Critics of Liberalism: John Rawls and Egalitarianism
- Critics of Liberalism: Thomas Nagel and Ronald Dworkin
- Critics of Liberalism: G.A. Cohen
- Week 3 Review
- Public Goods
- The Standard of Living
- Poverty
- Monopoly
- Week 4 Review
- Science
- Inequality
- Aid to Developing Countries
- Discrimination
- Week 5 Review
- The Socialist Calculation Problem
- Working Conditions
- Child Labor
- Labor and Unions
- Week 6 Review
- Health Care
- Antitrust
- Farm Programs
- War and the Economy
- Week 7 Review
- Business Cycles
- Industrial Policy
- Government, the Market, and the Environment
- Prohibition
- Week 8 Review
- Taxation
- Government Spending
- The Welfare State: Theoretical Issues
- The Welfare State: Practical Issues
- Week 9 Review
- Price Controls
- Government and Money, Part I
- Government and Money, Part II
- Midterm Review
- Week 10 Review
- The Theory of the Modern State
- American Federalism and the Compact Theory
- Can Political Bodies Be Too Large?
- Decentralization
- Week 11 Review
- Constitutionalism: Purpose
- The American Case: Self-Government and the Tenth Amendment
- The American Case: Progressives and the “Living, Breathing Document”
- The American States and the Federal Government
- Week 12 Review
- Monarchy
- Social Democracy
- Fascism I
- Fascism II
- Week 13 Review
- Marx I
- Marx II
- Communism I
- Communism II
- Week 14 Review
- Miscellaneous Intervention: Postwar Africa
- Public Choice I
- Public Choice II
- Miscellaneous Examples of Government Activity and Incentives
- Week 15 Review
- The Industrial Revolution
- The New Deal I
- The New Deal II
- The Housing Bust of 2008
- Week 16 Review
- Are Voters Informed?
- Is Political Representation Meaningful?
- The Myth of the Rule of Law
- The Incentives of Democracy
- Week 17 Review
- The Sweeping Critique: Robert LeFevre
- The Sweeping Critique: Murray N. Rothbard
- Case Study: The Old West
- Economic Freedom of the World
- Week 18 Review
Here’s Western Civilization to 1492:
- Introduction and Overview
- Hebrew History I
- Hebrew History II
- Hebrew History III
- Week 1 Review
- Hebrew Religion and the Hebrew Contribution
- Minoan Crete
- Mycenaean Greece
- Homer, The Iliad
- Week 2 Review
- Homer and Hesiod
- Classical Greece: Overview
- Pre-Socratics, I
- Pre-Socratics, II
- Week 3 Review
- Socrates
- Plato: Introduction and Overview
- Plato’s Worldview
- Plato and The Republic
- Week 4 Review
- Aristotle: The Philosopher
- Aristotle’s Ethics
- Aristotle’s Politics
- Classical Greece: The Polis, Sparta
- Week 5 Review
- Classical Greece: The Polis, Athens
- The Persian Wars
- The Peloponnesian War
- Herodotus and Thucydides
- Week 6 Review
- Greek Drama, I
- Greek Drama, II
- Classical Greece: Art
- Greek Religion
- Week 7 Review
- Greece and Western Liberty
- Alexander the Great
- The Hellenistic World
- Hellenistic Philosophy
- Week 8 Review
- Rome: Beginnings and Foundations
- Struggle of the Orders
- Expansion of Rome
- Toward the Empire, I
- Week 9 Review
- Toward the Empire, II
- Toward the Empire, III
- The Augustan Settlement
- Latin Literature: The Golden Age
- Week 10 Review
- The Silver Age of Latin Literature
- Rome After Augustus
- Second-Century Rome
- Roman Art
- Week 11 Review
- Christianity: The Background
- The Birth of Christianity, Part I
- The Birth of Christianity, Part II
- Early Christian Sources I: The New Testament
- Week 12 Review
- The Spread of Christianity
- From the Underground Church to the Edict of Milan
- Early Christian Texts II: Didache, Shepherd of Hermas, Apostolic Fathers, Apologists
- The Development of Christianity I
- Week 13 Review
- The Development of Christianity II
- Monasticism, Part I
- Monasticism, Part II
- The Church and Classical Culture I
- Week 14 Review
- The Church and Classical Culture II
- Rome: Third-Century Crisis
- Diocletian and Constantine
- Rome and the Barbarians, Part I
- Week 15 Review
- Rome and the Barbarians, Part II
- Rome: Significance
- St. Augustine I
- St. Augustine II
- Week 16 Review
- The Church and the Barbarians
- Merovingians and Carolingians
- The Papal-Frankish Alliance
- Charlemagne
- Week 17 Review
- The Carolingian Renaissance
- Christianity in England and Ireland
- Christianity in Germany
- Midterm Review
- Week 18 Review
- Islam
- Byzantium I
- Byzantium II
- After Charlemagne
- Week 19 Review
- Ninth- and Tenth-Century Invasions
- Feudalism and Manorialism
- Medieval Art
- England: William the Conqueror
- Week 20 Review
- The Gregorian Reform, Part I
- The Gregorian Reform, Part II
- The Church-State Struggle and Western Liberty
- Christendom
- Week 21 Review
- The Great Schism
- France: Capetians to Louis IX
- The Medieval Church: Sacraments and Liturgy
- The Medieval Church: Popular Piety
- Week 22 Review
- Crusades: Background
- The First Crusade
- Later Crusades
- The End of the Crusades
- Week 23 Review
- The Albigensian Crusade
- The Mendicant Orders
- England: Magna Carta
- France: Philip the Fair
- Week 24 Review
- The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century
- The Rise of Universities
- Scholastic Philosophy
- Thomas Aquinas: Biography and Overview
- Week 25 Review
- Thomas Aquinas and the Quinque Viae
- Thomas Aquinas and the Divine Attributes
- Just War Theory
- Later Scholasticism
- Week 26 Review
- The Cathedrals
- The Rise of Towns
- Economy in the High Middle Ages
- The Medieval Contribution to Western Prosperity
- Week 27 Review
- The Holy Roman Empire I
- The Holy Roman Empire II
- Medieval Literature
- Dante and the Divine Comedy
- Week 28 Review
- Philip IV vs. Boniface VIII
- Marsilius of Padua and the Attack on Papal Power
- The Avignon Papacy
- Fourteenth-Century Crisis
- Week 29 Review
- England in the Fourteenth Century
- France in the Fourteenth Century
- The Hundred Years’ War
- The Great Western Schism
- Week 30 Review
- The Fall of Byzantium
- The Renaissance: Ideas
- Petrarch and the Renaissance
- Renaissance Humanism I
- Week 31 Review
- Renaissance Humanism II
- Machiavelli
- Renaissance Art I
- Renaissance Art II
- Week 32 Review
- Renaissance Art III
- Renaissance Art IV
- The Northern Renaissance
- The Renaissance Popes
- Week 33 Review
- Renaissance Italy: The Key Political Units, Part I
- Renaissance Italy: The Key Political Units, Part II
- Fifteenth-Century France
- Fifteenth-Century England
- Week 34 Review
- The Holy Roman Empire to the Fifteenth Century
- The Church on the Eve of Reform
- Centralization in Spain
- The Age of Discovery, Part I
- Week 35 Review
- The Age of Discovery, Part II
- The Age of Discovery, Part III
- Concluding Remarks
- Preview of Western Civilization II
- Week 36 Review
Here’s Western Civilization from 1493:
- Introduction
- Review of Western Civilization to 1492
- The Church on the Eve of the Reformation
- The German Reformation, Part I
- Week 1 Review
- The German Reformation, Part II
- The German Reformation, Part III
- Other Protestant Figures
- John Calvin
- Week 2 Review
- The English Reformation, Part I
- The English Reformation, Part II
- The Catholic Reformation, Part I
- The Catholic Reformation, Part II
- Week 3 Review
- Sixteenth-Century Portraits: Charles V
- Sixteenth-Century Portraits: Philip II
- The French Wars of Religion
- Sixteenth-Century Portraits: Elizabeth I
- Week 4 Review
- The “Eutopians”
- The Thirty Years’ War
- The English Civil War
- The Levellers
- Week 5 Review
- Oliver Cromwell
- The Glorious Revolution
- John Locke, Part I
- John Locke, Part II
- Week 6 Review
- France Before Louis XIV
- Difficulties and Revolt in Spain
- Constitutionalism
- Absolutism
- Week 7 Review
- Mercantilism
- Louis XIV, Part I
- Louis XIV, Part II
- The War of the Spanish Succession
- Week 8 Review
- The Hohenzollerns
- The Habsburgs
- Russia: Peter the Great
- A Survey of Art
- Week 9 Review
- The Scientific Revolution, Part I
- The Scientific Revolution, Part II
- The Scientific Revolution, Part III
- The Enlightenment, Part I
- Week 10 Review
- The Enlightenment, Part II
- Adam Smith
- Europe in the 18th Century, Part I
- Europe in the 18th Century, Part II
- Week 11 Review
- Enlightened Absolutism
- The American Revolution, Part I
- The American Revolution, Part II
- The American Revolution, Part III
- Week 12 Review
- The French Revolution, Part I
- The French Revolution, Part II
- The Reign of Terror
- Napoleon, Part I
- Week 13 Review
- Napoleon, Part II
- The American and French Revolutions Compared
- Edmund Burke and the French Revolution
- Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Women
- Week 14 Review
- The Industrial Revolution, Part I
- The Industrial Revolution, Part II
- Slavery and Its Abolition, Part I
- Slavery and Its Abolition, Part II
- Week 15 Review
- What Was the Source of Western Prosperity?
- The Congress of Vienna
- The Conservative Reaction, 1815-1830
- The Growth of State Education
- Week 16 Review
- Education Without the State: The Case of England
- Liberalism, Part I
- Liberalism, Part II
- Liberalism, Part III
- Week 17 Review
- Liberalism, Part IV
- Socialism
- Neoclassicism
- Romanticism
- Week 18 Review
- Midterm Review
- The Revolutions of 1830
- The Revolutions of 1848
- Marxism, Part I
- Week 19 Review
- Marxism, Part II
- Marxism, Part III
- Marxism, Part IV
- Naturalism
- Week 20 Review
- The Crimean War
- The Unification of Italy
- The Unification of Germany
- The Second Industrial Revolution
- Week 21 Review
- Southeastern Europe: New States Emerge
- France and England in the Late 19th Century
- Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia
- Imperialism
- Week 22 Review
- Did The West Grow Rich Through Imperialism?
- Modernism, Part I
- Modernism, Part II
- The Coming of World War I
- Week 23 Review
- World War I, Part I
- World War I, Part II
- World War I, Part III
- The Paris Peace Conference
- Week 24 Review
- The Russian Revolution and Its Aftermath, Part I
- The Russian Revolution and Its Aftermath, Part II
- The Russian Revolution and Its Aftermath, Part III
- The Russian Revolution and Its Aftermath, Part IV
- Week 25 Review
- The Broken World of the Interwar Period
- Communists, Fascists, and Others
- Nazis!
- The 1930s and the Coming of the War in Europe
- Week 26 Review
- The Beginning of World War II
- Axis Invasions in Southern and Western Europe
- The United States as a Neutral
- Global War: Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor
- Week 27 Review
- Total War Mobilization: Propaganda, Production, Transportation
- Military Matters
- The Final Solution and Other Mass Murders
- Bombing and Mass Destruction
- Week 28 Review
- 1944: The Beginning of the End: Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and More
- Coordinating the Allied Effort: Allied Planning
- January 1945: Barbarism on All Sides
- The End of the War
- Week 29 Review
- The Axis in Ruins
- The Nuremburg Trials
- Origins of the Cold War
- Two Power Blocks and Orwell’s 1984
- Week 30 Review
- The Economic Miracle
- Decolonization
- European Union and Cold War
- The Cold War from the ’50s to the ’70s
- Week 31 Review
- Art and Architecture in the Twentieth Century
- The World of the Sixties
- The Middle East and Western Civilization to the Seventies
- The Soviet Union from Brezhnev to Gorbachev
- Week 32 Review
- The Collapse of the Soviet Empire
- Migration, Economics, Nationalism, Ethnic Cleansing
- The West and the Rise of Asia
- Lessons: Liberty, Technology, Society, and the State
- Week 33 Review
Imagine looking at that list and — instead of being at least mildly impressed — thinking: “tHeOcRaTiC iNdOcTrInAtIoN!” Then you’ll have a sense of the kind of person who invented the Black Legend about Tom Woods.
The YM describes the Ron Paul Curriculum as “insane,” but by this point I suspect the reader is getting an idea of who the insane one is.
Complaint: “Regularly hosts notorious white supremacist Stefan Molyneux on his podcast”
I’ve never heard Molyneux advocate laws that would assign a legally superior position to one race over another, but he is certainly a controversial figure and not for everyone. I’ve interviewed plenty of those. I’ve interviewed numerous left-libertarians on my program, too. For that matter I’ve interviewed a left-wing sociology professor who favors abolishing the sex offender registry.
In other words, you never know what you’re going to get on the Tom Woods Show. I interview people. Some of these people are quite controversial. If that means you need a fainting couch, I may not be the podcast host for you.
Complaint: “Constantly pals around with Lew Rockwell, an uncontroversially, fabulously racist paleoconservative who also likely authored the notorious Ron Paul newsletters”
The YM, I wish to point out, happens to be a big Ronald Reagan fan (so not exactly a radical libertarian). When it emerged recently that Reagan had made a racist joke about Africans to Richard Nixon, the poor kid bent over backwards to make excuses for Reagan. So take his alleged concerns about racism with the level of seriousness that he himself evidently does.
Meanwhile, Lew (who did not write the newsletters, incidentally), has made available to the whole world an enormous amount of libertarian and Austrian School literature: books, articles, speeches, courses, seminars, and the like, featuring Carl Menger, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, Israel Kirzner, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Gustave de Molinari, Henry Hazlitt, and hundreds more. Lew has also made available, also for free, the entire print runs of academic libertarian journals, and since the 1990s has hosted the Austrian Economics Research Conference, where hundreds of academics from all over the world present technical papers in Austrian economics.
At a time when Official Libertarianism pretended not to know who Will Grigg — our greatest champion against police abuse — even was, it was Lew who gave him a platform.
Unlike our critics, Lew is radically antiwar and anti-state. He is one of the great benefactors of our movement, and I am delighted to count him as a friend. I see zero evidence of “racism” on his part. (Is “fabulously racist” something like racist, but with sequins?) Every one of his key issues — antiwar, anti-Fed, anti-drug war — would disproportionately benefit minority communities; I can’t imagine how a libertarian could consider that debatable.
Complaint: “Wrote a book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, filled with insane, ultra-conservative historical revisionism”
There is of course nothing “insane” inside The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, unless you think the basic narrative you learned in seventh grade is essentially correct. (If it is, I can’t imagine why anyone would become a libertarian.)
My critic supports certain American wars, whereas I as a radical libertarian criticize them all. My critic favors Hamiltonian nationalism, whereas I favor the compact among states as Jefferson envisioned it. To him this is “insane.” Alrighty.
Complaint: I wrote an article critical of the abolitionists.
They actually get one right for a change. I did write such an article — 26 years ago, during my pre-libertarian years. At that time, like many utilitarians and traditionalists, I did not believe in the existence of natural rights. But (it should be unnecessary to point out) the article did not criticize the abolitionists for opposing slavery (since like all normal people I obviously opposed slavery); it instead discussed matters of social philosophy and theology.
I might add that having long since emerged from my paleoconservative phase — and by the way, I happen to like the paleocons, who oppose war and the empire, which is more than I can say for some libertarians and much of the Left — I’ve long since abandoned my skepticism of natural rights, as anyone who reads or listens to me has known for years. In fact, I gave a public lecture on natural rights theories for Campaign for Liberty 10 years ago (and I in turn made that talk into an episode of my podcast), and I teach them in my government course for the Ron Paul Curriculum. For that matter I no longer advocate protectionism or criticize capitalism.
Complaint: The “League of the South.” I’ve been pretty open about the meeting Jeffrey Tucker invited me to in 1994, and I’ve told the whole story here.
Complaint: I have said that “if control over immigration were devolved to the most local level possible,” people would tend to “sort themselves according to very different demographic patterns.”
Guilty as charged. But is this debatable? In a world of states and public property, the migration and residential patterns of individuals would obviously be different from what they would be in a purely private-property society. How could they not be? And since the purely private-property society is our goal (or at least it is for me, a radical libertarian), the closest approximation to the outcome that would obtain in that case would come in the short run from decentralizing decision-making about immigration down to the lowest possible level.
Perhaps you disagree with me on that, but if there’s supposed to be something actually sinister about it, I must be too dense to see what it is.
And now for the next-to-last bit of insanity: Woods is against “race mixing.”
I heard that and thought: these people have well and truly lost their minds. Where in heaven’s name could they be getting this?
Never in my life have I said or written a word about that subject, or ever so much as hinted that interracial relationships were the business of anyone other than the individuals involved. (Unlike the Loser Brigade, which literally mocks the Nonaggression Principle, I actually believe in it.)
As my friends well know, I myself spent two years in an interracial relationship. And I assure you, we did not call the authorities on ourselves!
Evidently I used the phrase “ethnic cohesion” in an article 27 years ago, and that is what they are basing this claim on.
Since you’re a normal person, you assume I must be joking.
I’m not.
The reference was to the policy in the Soviet Union of moving ethnic Russians into the Baltic states for the purpose of rendering them more readily amenable to state domination.
From this they charitably conclude that I must favor state suppression of interracial relationships.
I’m not kidding.
Yes, people like this exist.
Woods Derangement Syndrome, we may as well call it. It really deserves a name of its own.
It might be worth recalling that Stalin undertook the Holodomor in order to destroy Ukrainian nationalism, the better to make subjects out of the Ukrainian people. It was almost as if Ukrainian culture had served as some kind of resistance mechanism against Soviet domination.
Whoops, there I go: I said the word culture. We all know that can only mean fascism!
Imagine being so coarse and unlearned.
Their crazy anti-Woods jihad relies on preposterously uncharitable interpretations of isolated sentences. Normal people look and say, “You got that from that sentence?”
These are not normal people.
Gene Epstein, formerly of Barron’s and now director of the Soho Forum, the premier libertarian debate series in the country, speculated on the Tom Woods Show not long ago as to why people like this attack me.
I’ll give you a hint: no aspect of his theory involved, “After an honest review of your work, they concluded you are a bad person.”
Complaint: Woods’s wife was too young.
If you are living a sad, degenerate life, you have to believe that other people, who certainly appear to have healthier lives, are in reality just as bad as you, if not worse, so those pangs of conscience aren’t quite so severe.
The people behind this complaint tried to alienate Joshua Smith’s daughter from him, and told nonstop lies about him and his family, when Josh was running for Libertarian Party chair. Compared to that, inventing a story about me is nothing.
As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”
They are asking people to believe that despite the magnifying glass that’s been on my life for the past 25 years, a major scandal managed to go unnoticed for two decades, and then just happened to emerge on the eve of the Libertarian National Convention, at the hands of people who were pulling out all the stops to oppose the caucus I belong to, and at the precise moment when my caucus was about to take over the party.
To call that implausible would be a bit of an understatement.
The whole fake story is stupid, ridiculous, and evil, and people who wanted so badly to believe it were relying on some comments from a psycho (I must be the only person on Earth with a psycho in the family) who also claimed earlier this year that I had “abandoned” my family (!).
I had known Heather’s family because her mother worked for my magazine at the time, so I met and spoke to Heather (who was born in 1983) in 1999, well before we started dating. Contrary to the story, I did not court her until late 2001, when she moved to New York. We were married in August 2002, when she was 19. I shouldn’t have married her, though, because according to a member of the Brigade, “societal expectations” now frown on marrying young.
“Societal expectations” evidently envision people pissing away their 20s sleeping around and calling it “liberation.” In the traditional Catholic world, we’re rather more serious about our lives and about getting on with being adults. A glance at the marriage announcements at any trad chapel in the United States will bear this out — a huge percentage of parishioners are married between 18 and 21.
Of course the one subculture the Brigade has zero sympathy for or knowledge about is traditional Catholicism, since it consists of normal people doing normal things, and no genitals being removed. The same people trying to manufacture a scandal in my life describe drag queen story hour as simply the innocent reading of books to children. I am not joking about that. Not normal, these people.
The idea of a proper courtship, furthermore, which Heather and I had in New York, in which she lived in one place and I lived somewhere else, instead of the two of us living together, is considered old-fashioned and unsophisticated.
Our relationship was entirely honorable. Being traditional Catholics, Heather and I were chaste until the wedding night, and went on to be married for 13 years and have five beautiful daughters. Not quite the story of exploitation and horror the crazies were hoping for, which is why most of them had to give up on the story. It made no sense. People were quite understandably responding with, “Are you referring to the woman he had five daughters with?”
Her mom in fact refuted the story, so if we had been dealing with people arguing in good faith, that should have been the end of it from the get-go. But these are ends-justify-the-means amoralists, so (as we’ve seen above) the truth makes zero difference. Whatever advances the revolution.
(Not to mention: this being rural Oklahoma, the fact that I’m still alive more or less proves that nothing untoward happened.)
And that’s it. There is nothing here. Contrary to these lunatics’ disgusting insinuations, none of this corresponds to any of the slanderous names I’ve been called. It’s all bullshit from nobodies, as usual. We did nothing wrong and we make no apologies.
I’m told that the chief of the Brigade is basing this complaint on speculating as to what our telephone conversations all those years ago consisted of, and of course coming up with the least charitable (and most wildly uncharacteristic) possible answer. You know what we talked about? Church history, economics, and music. Nerd topics.
His henchmen have since defiled a video of my daughters — not the kind of thing people who are innocently pursuing justice normally do. But it’s something people filled with hate would do, and I have never seen people more filled with hate and resentment than this bunch.
Heather is retired from all Internet drama these days, and indeed she was always better than I was at taking my own advice: our lives speak for themselves, and we do not respond to bad-faith actors. She couldn’t be more right.
Even after the very unfortunate divorce we remained close: Heather surprised me by flying from Kansas to New York to attend my famous debate with Michael Malice on Alexander Hamilton, and in 2017 she directed my 1000th podcast episode event in Orlando. That is an exceptionally long time to remain in the hypnotic trance I am alleged to have placed her under.
Some people have expressed concern to us that our daughters are being exposed to something extremely nasty because of these people’s stupid attacks. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Our daughters are aware of this weird smear campaign, and they understand that it’s the price we pay for our otherwise pleasant and comfortable lives. It’s helped them learn about what frustration and envy can do to certain kinds of people.
Another thing I have taught them is this: even though these nobodies have done this to me, it would be wrong for us to do the same to them. The nobodies know I would never make up a story to harm them. (They have nothing I could take from them even if I were so inclined.) It’s the same reason I’m antiwar: there are some things, I teach my children, that you simply cannot do to your enemy, period.
And speaking of my daughters, this video will give you a sense of them. Confident, well spoken, bright, and with poise, they appear to have been raised in a pretty good household. (You will also spot Heather in the video, who does not appear to be desperate, exploited, or under a hypnotic trance.)
The best and most honorable way to put me in my place is much more straightforward than all this. Just produce better content than I do.
Write better books. Release 2100+ of your own podcast episodes. Create a better adult enrichment product than my Liberty Classroom. Release a better homeschool curriculum.
But notice what that involves.
Work. And brains.
In other words, forget it.
They’ve had ten years to produce a homeschool curriculum to rival the one I created with Ron Paul. Ten years!
So where is it? Where is their alternative?
There isn’t one, and there never will be. We are not dealing with creators here. We are dealing with the opposite.
I create, and they attack.
So, why all the attacks lately?
Here’s why.
The heroic Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party is making enormous strides heading into the national convention in Reno. Ron Paul calls it “the libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party.” (Did I mention that we’re dealing with the 37 libertarians who don’t like Ron Paul?)
A whole lot of us are tired of the abuse that’s been directed at us, the tendentious interpretations of everything we say and do, and, at the top, the poor communication of libertarian ideas.
You may say, “Woods, I don’t care about the Libertarian Party.”
I get it.
But:
It has “libertarian” in its name, which means it is from the LP that most people will learn about our ideas.
So we all need to make sure that if the LP exists, it’s at least representing us in a way that isn’t embarrassing and grotesque.
Well, the Loser Brigade, which criticizes ol’ Woods for being a “right-wing libertarian,” is quite happy to continue nominating ex-GOP politicians, while Woods the right-wing fuddy-duddy actually wants to nominate a radical libertarian.
Ain’t that something?
The other thing about these folks:
They snipe at Ron Paul and me, but they accomplish nothing.
They have no K-12 homeschool curriculum. They have no LibertyClassroom.com. They don’t have a dozen books, and certainly no bestsellers. Their works haven’t been translated into over a dozen languages. They do not lecture all over the world. They do not write books for prestigious publishing houses.
They Tweet.
Meanwhile, the Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party grows and grows.
And the nerds who long for Bill Weld — if you ever wondered if anyone actually loved Bill Weld, by the way, these are them — don’t know what to do about it.
Folks, you can be with the goody-two-shoes nerds, or you can be with Dave Smith, Scott Horton, and me.
Help us make things happen.
I’m pretty sure these folks thought they could slander us forever, and there would be no consequences.
No such luck, Chuck.
We’re coming.
Like and support what I do?
Then join me inside the Tom Woods Show Elite:
http://www.SupportingListeners.com
P.S. See also my post “How to Deal With Haters.”