Raimondo's Big Lies

For decades, Justin Raimondo has been a rabid partisan for a shifting cause. On one level, his apparent commitment seems admirable. But the moment one tries to analyze to what he is committed, one finds sand and shale. There’s no bedrock.

The closest he comes to a consistency was a personal loyalty to Murray Rothbard, but even that shook and faltered for several years. Again, most of us who call ourselves Rothbardians have had differences with Murray; I called him the “Darth Vader of the Movement” back in 1977. By 1988 he was trying to recruit me to back Ron Paul in a new Old Right alliance. But what exactly was it that drove Justin apart from Rothbard in 1982? Was it some deep principle (such as anti-voting) that forced him to see Anakin turn into Darth? No, it was a petty power play, and Raimondo supported the candidate of the Council on Foreign Relations against Rothbard, hardly a moment of principled martyrdom.

Raimondo resuscitated the label “radical caucus” from the Dustbin of Libertarian History to which I had consigned it in 1974, and, ignoring its prior history, used it for purposes nearly 180 degrees the opposite to which it had been used during 1973 and 1974. But that is Old Movement History.

What occasions this Editorial is that Raimondo has stepped across the Last Line, beyond even his hysterical attempts to emulate Leninist rhetoric in the Libertarian Vanguard newspaper he edited in the early 1980s. He consigned the Entire Libertarian Movement to the Memory Hole of anti-Revisionist History, privileging the Libertarian Party, a tiny and infected appendix of This Movement of Ours, as being “essentially” the whole movement!

And he did this so insidiously as to draw a gasp of admiration from the Spectre of Joseph Goebbels by slipping it in an article ostensibly attacking the Libertarian Party! Actually the article in question, posted on antiwar.com over which allegedly he exercises some control, is an attack on a particular tactic of the LP’s current director. Raimondo even goes out of his way to praise the Renegade Browne, who has not only betrayed every anti-political position with which he used to hector the rest of us as not living up to, but who has now swindled the Libertarian Party sheep-level members and got them bleating for more frequent and deeper shearing.

Raimondo is worried that Irv Rubin (leader of the Jewish Defense League, succeeding Meir Kahane) has been welcomed by Director Crickenberger into the LP. Kahane was the leader of the Israeli Fascist Party, Kach. Raimondo worries, who next? David Duke?

Well, I am no happier than Justin that Ron Crickenberger thinks he was granted the Sacred Mantle of defining who is a Libertarian and who is not. Ron decided that since Camille Paglia called herself a “Libertarian Democrat” but spurned the advances of overeager partyarchs to have her join the LP, she was NOT a Libertarian. (See May 2000 LP News, page 10.) Actually, to 90% of This Movement of Ours, that strengthened her credentials.

But what is Raimondo’s real agenda here? Protecting the Libertarian Movement? Hardly; none of us care whether the LP recruits Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; its last shreds of credibility collapsed with the Hornberger campaign bubble. Protecting the LP? Ah. In the guise of attacking the LP, he really is protecting it from the Rubins and Crickenbergers . . . and above all, from the Libertarian Movement. Let me quote from the middle of his broadside:

You see, I had been an active libertarian from a very early age; as a member of the libertarian faction of Young Americans for Freedom in the sixties, which later made up the founding cadre of the LP, I was there at the beginning. The first issue of Reason arrived in my mailbox, way back when that glossy anodyne was a self-stapled 16-page photo-offset magazine that wowed its mostly teenaged audience. So I was a prime candidate for recruitment: it was just that I couldn’t find them! My parents, who were all-too-familiar with my political enthusiasms, sent me clippings about the founding of the Libertarian Party, in 1972, but it wasnt until the MacBride campaign, in 1976, that I actually met a real live member of the Libertarian Party — and the next few years were a frenzy of political activity.

Back then, the libertarian movement was essentially the Libertarian Party, and all the movement greats played some sort of role in its internal politics — first and foremost being Murray N. Rothbard, the libertarian social theorist and economist, who for years was the Grand Old Man of the LP, and guided it through its early successes. I stayed in the party until 1983, playing a very active role, in association with Rothbard, and ran as a candidate for office several times in the San Francisco Bay Area, garnering at one point as much as 8 percent of the vote in a race for State Assembly. In 1983, however, catastrophe struck. . . .

The Libertarian Movement was not only NOT the LP in 1972-74, but it was less than 1%. Every major figure from Robert LeFevre to Leonard Read, from Ayn Rand to Andrew J. Galambos, was opposed to its emergence. Even Rothbard until the Fran Youngstein mayoral campaign of 1973, denounced the LP has hopelessly premature.

Rothbard was never the Grand Old Man of the LP, though he was the Infant Terrible of the Libertarian Movement. He became Mr. Libertarian even in the general press around 1972 — again, prior to the general emergence of the LP in 1974. Sorry, Justin, but I was there and in Murray’s living room while you were having your teenage dreams.

Let’s see if his “history” of the period he actually experienced was any better.

An Abbreviated History

That was the year more than half the party walked out of the national convention in a debilitating split from which the LP never really recovered. Although the party’s 1980 standard-bearer, Ed Clark, got more votes, the really high point of the LP, in an organizational sense, was the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, in 1988. Paul had previously been a Republican congressman, gerrymandered out of his district by party bosses, and thankfully he has regained his seat — but in the interim he agreed to take on the onerous task of running for the highest office in the land on a hopeless third party ticket. He garnered some 470,000 votes, and more importantly built up the heretofore sagging reputation of the LP as up-and-coming — America’s third largest party, we used to boast.

More Big Lies. The major split of the LP occurred in 1974 when the original radical caucus led the Reform wing of Eric Scott Royce out of the LP, after their attempt to save the LP for the Movement failed at the Dallas Convention, and Boss Ed Crane purged any remaining rc or Reform sympathizers. Eight state newsletter editors lost their jobs for so much as mentioning my name. Now that was a split!

The 1983 upheaval was caused by Rothbard splitting with the Kochtopus against their candidate for president, CFR member Earl Ravenal. The result was a purge of the Top by the Bottom (and some former Tops). Was revolutionary Raimondo allied with the upward surge of the lower party castes against billionaires forcing ruling-class agents on them? Uh, no; that was the basis for Raimondo’s split with Rothbard. Raimondo embraced privilege, pomp and power and turned on his “hero” who had regained his soul.

What he got in return was ill-treatment by his internal party critics, a left opposition that did not so much object to Paul’s politics as they did to his cultural stance: he didn’t pander to gays and concentrate 90 percent of his energy on the drug issue, he wouldn’t mouth liberal platitudes about abortion, and — far worse, in the critics’ eyes — both he and his charming wife Carol were themselves exemplars of traditional American culture and bourgeois values: their lifestyle did not involve smoking dope and dancing ’til dawn. In short, they were (and are) precisely the kind of people that make up the overwhelming majority of Americans, the Great American Middle that is yearning to be set free of their bondage to the federal government — and naturally the LP rejected them.

And then Raimondo turned around four years later and re-embraced Rothbard and Murray’s paleoconservative rhetoric as to why Ron Paul didn’t get the support he should have from the LP membership. Why did Justin swing back? Could it have been because the Kochtopus had pulled up stakes and denounced the LP itself? (Ed Crane, selected to appear after my presentation against the LP at the Libertarian International in Oslo in 1985, refused to defend the LP and declared that “Konkin was right.”) And they had no time or money for Raimondo and his second-hander Pseudoradical Caucus.

The point that should have been made in Raimondo’s article, and that other Libertarians such as Brad Linaweaver have already made, is this: the Party leadership’s ready willingness to embrace odious statists who have a voting bloc to deliver and to denounce and alienate public figures who might draw thousands or millions to libertarianism but who are not familiar enough with This Movement of Ours to understand how lowly the regard that the LP is held in, is a problem for decent Libertarians of good will. But then Raimondo has nothing to say to such worthy people. —SEK3



	The Big Lies of Justin Raimondo For decades, Justin Raimondo has been a rabid partisan for a shifting cause. On one level, his apparent commitment seems admirable. But the moment one tries to analyze to what he is committed, one finds sand and shale. There’s no bedrock. The closest he comes to a consistency was a personal loyalty to Murray Rothbard, but even that shook and faltered for several years. Again, most of us who call ourselves Rothbardians have had differences with Murray; I called him the “Darth Vader of the Movement” back in 1977. By 1988 he was trying to recruit me to back Ron Paul in a new Old Right alliance. But what exactly was it that drove Justin apart from Rothbard in 1982? Was it some deep principle (such as anti-voting) that forced him to see Anakin turn into Darth? No, it was a petty power play, and Raimondo supported the candidate of the Council on Foreign Relations against Rothbard, hardly a moment of principled martyrdom. Raimondo resuscitated the label “radical caucus” from the Dustbin of Libertarian History to which I had consigned it in 1974, and, ignoring its prior history, used it for purposes nearly 180 degrees the opposite to which it had been used during 1973 and 1974. But that is Old Movement History. What occasions this Editorial is that Raimondo has stepped across the Last Line, beyond even his hysterical attempts to emulate Leninist rhetoric in the Libertarian Vanguard newspaper he edited in the early 1980s. He consigned the Entire Libertarian Movement to the Memory Hole of anti-Revisionist History, privileging the Libertarian Party, a tiny and infected appendix of This Movement of Ours, as being “essentially” the whole movement! And he did this so insidiously as to draw a gasp of admiration from the Spectre of Joseph Goebbels by slipping it in an article ostensibly attacking the Libertarian Party! Actually the article in question, posted on antiwar.com over which allegedly he exercises some control, is an attack on a particular tactic of the LP’s current director. Raimondo even goes out of his way to praise the Renegade Browne, who has not only betrayed every anti-political position with which he used to hector the rest of us as not living up to, but who has now swindled the Libertarian Party sheep-level members and got them bleating for more frequent and deeper shearing. Raimondo is worried that Irv Rubin (leader of the Jewish Defense League, succeeding Meir Kahane) has been welcomed by Director Crickenberger into the LP. Kahane was the leader of the Israeli Fascist Party, Kach. Raimondo worries, who next? David Duke? Well, I am no happier than Justin that Ron Crickenberger thinks he was granted the Sacred Mantle of defining who is a Libertarian and who is not. Ron decided that since Camille Paglia called herself a “Libertarian Democrat” but spurned the advances of overeager partyarchs to have her join the LP, she was NOT a Libertarian. (See May 2000 LP News, page 10.) Actually, to 90% of This Movement of Ours, that strengthened her credentials. But what is Raimondo’s real agenda here? Protecting the Libertarian Movement? Hardly; none of us care whether the LP recruits Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; its last shreds of credibility collapsed with the Hornberger campaign bubble. Protecting the LP? Ah. In the guise of attacking the LP, he really is protecting it from the Rubins and Crickenbergers . . . and above all, from the Libertarian Movement. Let me quote from the middle of his broadside: You see, I had been an active libertarian from a very early age; as a member of the libertarian faction of Young Americans for Freedom in the sixties, which later made up the founding cadre of the LP, I was there at the beginning. The first issue of Reason arrived in my mailbox, way back when that glossy anodyne was a self-stapled 16-page photo-offset magazine that wowed its mostly teenaged audience. So I was a prime candidate for recruitment: it was just that I couldn’t find them! My parents, who were all-too-familiar with my political enthusiasms, sent me clippings about the founding of the Libertarian Party, in 1972, but it wasnt until the MacBride campaign, in 1976, that I actually met a real live member of the Libertarian Party — and the next few years were a frenzy of political activity. Back then, the libertarian movement was essentially the Libertarian Party, and all the movement greats played some sort of role in its internal politics — first and foremost being Murray N. Rothbard, the libertarian social theorist and economist, who for years was the Grand Old Man of the LP, and guided it through its early successes. I stayed in the party until 1983, playing a very active role, in association with Rothbard, and ran as a candidate for office several times in the San Francisco Bay Area, garnering at one point as much as 8 percent of the vote in a race for State Assembly. In 1983, however, catastrophe struck. . . . The Libertarian Movement was not only NOT the LP in 1972-74, but it was less than 1%. Every major figure from Robert LeFevre to Leonard Read, from Ayn Rand to Andrew J. Galambos, was opposed to its emergence. Even Rothbard until the Fran Youngstein mayoral campaign of 1973, denounced the LP has hopelessly premature. Rothbard was never the Grand Old Man of the LP, though he was the Infant Terrible of the Libertarian Movement. He became Mr. Libertarian even in the general press around 1972 — again, prior to the general emergence of the LP in 1974. Sorry, Justin, but I was there and in Murray’s living room while you were having your teenage dreams. Let’s see if his “history” of the period he actually experienced was any better. An Abbreviated History That was the year more than half the party walked out of the national convention in a debilitating split from which the LP never really recovered. Although the party’s 1980 standard-bearer, Ed Clark, got more votes, the really high point of the LP, in an organizational sense, was the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, in 1988. Paul had previously been a Republican congressman, gerrymandered out of his district by party bosses, and thankfully he has regained his seat — but in the interim he agreed to take on the onerous task of running for the highest office in the land on a hopeless third party ticket. He garnered some 470,000 votes, and more importantly built up the heretofore sagging reputation of the LP as up-and-coming — America’s third largest party, we used to boast. More Big Lies. The major split of the LP occurred in 1974 when the original radical caucus led the Reform wing of Eric Scott Royce out of the LP, after their attempt to save the LP for the Movement failed at the Dallas Convention, and Boss Ed Crane purged any remaining rc or Reform sympathizers. Eight state newsletter editors lost their jobs for so much as mentioning my name. Now that was a split! The 1983 upheaval was caused by Rothbard splitting with the Kochtopus against their candidate for president, CFR member Earl Ravenal. The result was a purge of the Top by the Bottom (and some former Tops). Was revolutionary Raimondo allied with the upward surge of the lower party castes against billionaires forcing ruling-class agents on them? Uh, no; that was the basis for Raimondo’s split with Rothbard. Raimondo embraced privilege, pomp and power and turned on his “hero” who had regained his soul. What he got in return was ill-treatment by his internal party critics, a left opposition that did not so much object to Paul’s politics as they did to his cultural stance: he didn’t pander to gays and concentrate 90 percent of his energy on the drug issue, he wouldn’t mouth liberal platitudes about abortion, and — far worse, in the critics’ eyes — both he and his charming wife Carol were themselves exemplars of traditional American culture and bourgeois values: their lifestyle did not involve smoking dope and dancing ’til dawn. In short, they were (and are) precisely the kind of people that make up the overwhelming majority of Americans, the Great American Middle that is yearning to be set free of their bondage to the federal government — and naturally the LP rejected them. And then Raimondo turned around four years later and re-embraced Rothbard and Murray’s paleoconservative rhetoric as to why Ron Paul didn’t get the support he should have from the LP membership. Why did Justin swing back? Could it have been because the Kochtopus had pulled up stakes and denounced the LP itself? (Ed Crane, selected to appear after my presentation against the LP at the Libertarian International in Oslo in 1985, refused to defend the LP and declared that “Konkin was right.”) And they had no time or money for Raimondo and his second-hander Pseudoradical Caucus. The point that should have been made in Raimondo’s article, and that other Libertarians such as Brad Linaweaver have already made, is this: the Party leadership’s ready willingness to embrace odious statists who have a voting bloc to deliver and to denounce and alienate public figures who might draw thousands or millions to libertarianism but who are not familiar enough with This Movement of Ours to understand how lowly the regard that the LP is held in, is a problem for decent Libertarians of good will. But then Raimondo has nothing to say to such worthy people. —SEK3