Jeffrey Lord Doesn't Know Founders or Ron Paul

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NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Much like the British Empire thought itself impervious to any threat to its power so do the modern “Red Coat Elites” of the Status quo. As such, Jeffrey Lord of the American Spectator, felt safe in utterly making up history to support his slanderous attack on Ron Paul, relying upon the notion that readers would take him at his word and remain ignorant to the actual historical record. His absurd attempt to place men like Washington and Jefferson into the Straussian Neo-Conservative wing succinctly illustrates just how much of a threat Ron Paul has become to the entrenched power base whose stranglehold over American government has brought us to the precipice of bankruptcy and collapse.

Will history repeat itself and see the “grassroots rEVOLutionaries” shift the power back to the people? One thing is for sure; the Status Quo is scared and will do all it feels possible to halt the rising popularity of Ron Paul and the calls for a return to Constitutional governance.

Point-by-point, Doctors Tom Woods and Kevin Gutzman deconstruct Jeffrey Lord’s hit-piece on Ron Paul, a must watch for anyone truly interested in the truth and facts of the matter surrounding Dr. Paul and the Founding Generation.

[Timecoded Transcript & Video Forthcoming]

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Previously, on The Mike Church Show:

[00:00:17] Mike: I consider the war against Gaddafi, admittedly a monster, to be ill-conceived, poorly articulated, unnecessarily drawn out, and predicated on the whims of the U.N. and the Arab League, rather than authorization from the U.S. Congress. Youre right. Theres no celebrating any of this. Obama still never received congressional authorization for this.

[00:00:37] Mike: Empowering the federal judiciary and giving the Congress a veto over acts of the Supreme Court is not necessary. They already have it. All they have to do is read the damn Constitution. Now, giving the states veto authority over the Supreme Court, long overdue and needs to happen. But thats not Governor Perrys standard.

[00:00:59] Mike: I feel like Ken [Mergolski ph] of WGR News: Now, where did Obama get the where did NATO get the [strength ph]? Oh, I dont know, they got it from the stash. Well, whose stash? Well, the United States stash. But we dont want to talk about it. Wait, were not worried about that. Thats why we elected Obama, because he gave it to them.

[00:01:17] Mike: Peace, liberty, prosperity. They come in that order. Were never going to be at peace as long as we have all the DeceptiCons out there rattling sabers and the Libtards that will support their President who will rattle sabers and will continue up the spending and the ginning up of war so the military industrial complex and the empire can hold its ground.

Ready for some more?

[00:01:53] Mike: Okay, folks. Welcome to todays very extraordinary, very special Post Show Show. Were live at LiveStream.com. We are live at MikeChurch.com. Were live all over the place.

[00:02:10] The reason for todays special Post Show Show here on a Wednesday and its still sponsored by the 24/7 Backstage Pass and Founding Father Films, where you find The Road to Independence: The Movie and The Spirit of 76: The Movie is this. The piece posted in yesterdays American Spectator.org online blog and magazine and the response today, which I just printed out reach over here and grab this. And the title of the original post was Ive got one more page coming here Ron Paul and the Neoliberal Reeducation Campaign. This is posted by a guy by the name of Jeffrey Lord. He worked in the Reagan White House. What prompted this the world may never know. We do know this: It is littered and filled with inaccuracies, with historical inaccuracies here.

[00:03:08] And not only has Lord been afforded an opportunity here to respond to this and to correct some of the historical inaccuracies that he put out, but hes doubled down on them. Hes taken all the chips, and he put them all in. So he is now all in again on stating that Jefferson was an interventionist, just like Bush; that Washington was an interventionist, just like Clinton; that Monroe was an interventionist; that Adams was an interventionist; and they went all around the world spreading the American Empire. Folks, this is just historical myth-making here.

[00:03:52] And so the purpose of having the two guests on, Tom Woods and Kevin Gutzman, is twofold: Number one is to shoot down these inaccuracies here, and number two is to provide a bit of a window into why. Why is this happening? Remember, this contagion began about three weeks ago during the Iowa campaign, or after the Iowa debate, I think it was. It started with a guy named Hawkins who was writing at Townhall, and it was, Oh, Ron Pauls not a conservative because of this; and, oh, Ron Pauls not a conservative because of that. And they just hurl these things and expect them tostick.

[00:04:37] Now, the fact that this gets published at the American Spectator magazine, where some pretty decent writers write, including W. James Antle III, who I think is one of the better writers out there, and who I dont think is a DeceptiCon, ought to tell you just how high the level of opposition is here. Someone inside that GOP establishment is scared, and/or is worried. Scared, worried, doesnt matter. They read the same polls that you and I read.

[00:05:10] And so the response to this, to Jeffrey Lords piece here, Ron Paul and the Neoliberal Reeducation Campaign, is why were doing the Post Show Show here today, so we can record it; and that there could be Tom representing himself, Kevin representing himself. But they are both serving on the board of the Ron Paul Super PAC, so full disclosure there, so youll know Revolution PAC, as its known. And we had a conversation about this earlier. Were going to recreate this again here and get into the nitty-gritty details of what Lord got wrong and just how this is almost juvenile, but well save that for theconversation.

[00:05:56] So let me get our guests on here. And lets make sure we have everybody here. Hail, hail, the gangs all here. Tom, Kevin, are youthere?

[00:06:05] Tom Woods: Yes.

[00:06:06] Kevin Gutzman: Yes.

[00:06:07] Mike: Fantastic. Okay. Lets check our levels. Everybody sounds good. All right. So Jeffrey Lord, American Spectator.org, piece comes out yesterday: Ron Paul and the Neoliberal Reeducation Campaign. And the setup for it is, does Ron Paul have a lot of interesting ideas he puts forward as a presidential candidate? Yes, blah blah blah blah, and then the accusation. So Ron Paul is no conservative, and heres why.

[00:06:36] And one of the things that was used by Lord here, indiscriminately in my view, not once but twice because he used it in the original piece, and then he used it in the reply to Jack Hunter here, is the Founders. And hes claiming here that the Founders were interventionist on this. So Kevin, I think you have what it is that Lord said, and you have a pretty complete take on this. Well start withyou.

[00:07:04] Kevin: Well, first of all, Lord says that George Washington was an interventionist. And his evidence for that is that during the American Revolution, Washington as commander in chief planned invasions of Canada which were launched on two occasions. And according to Lord, this in itself makes Washington into aninterventionist.

[00:07:28] Now, of course whats to be noted here is that the word interventionist refers to people who want, after the fashion of Bill Kristol and David Brookss infamous call for National Greatness Conservatism, to be finding wars to fight just because national greatness requires finding wars to fight. Notice when I say to fight, I dont mean actually joining the army and going and fighting them. Bill Kristol could of course n
ever defend to that. But it requires finding some military campaign for ones country to be engaging in. And on the other hand, Washington in the Revolution was not doing that. Washington was leading a defensive war. The British had attacked the United States, and the United States were trying to win theirindependence.

[00:08:18] Of course, the other thing that Lord says about this in order to try to confuse his readers is, well, during the Revolution the attack on America had not come from Canada, it had come from Britain. This is wrong on two grounds. Number one, Britain and Canada were not to be distinguished during the Revolution because Canada was still part of the British Empire. So to say, well, the United States werent attacked by Canada, they were attacked by Britain, would be like saying, well, you know, during World War II the United States werent bombed by Okinawa, they were just bombed by Japan. I mean, what does that even mean? So this is an absurdity.

[00:08:57] Now, in todays surrebuttal, Lord has added to this argument by invoking the names of various other prominent American revolutionaries. For example, he says that Thomas Jefferson was an interventionist, too. And how do we know that Thomas Jefferson was an interventionist? Well, because as President, Thomas Jefferson launched an American naval flotilla against the Barbary Pirates. And this makes Thomas Jefferson an interventionist.

[00:09:27] Okay, well, whats to be noticed about this is that the Barbary states of North Africa had been, since the Revolution, by the time Jefferson became President for over 30 years, these North African Islamic states had been attacking American shipping, seizing the American ships, selling their cargos, and enslaving the sailors. Right? Now, what Jefferson decided to do was to send the Navy to defend American shipping, defend American ships and sailors. Thats not interventionism. Thats a defensive effort analogous to, oh, I dont know, Ron Pauls call for reprisal against the Taliban after 9/11.

[00:10:07] So contrary to the implication of Mr. Lords piece, original one yesterday and the surrebuttal today, Ron Paul actually voted for reprisals against Afghanistan and the al Qaeda movement after 9/11, exactly in the spirit of the Founding Fathers. When people use the word interventionism, theyre not talking about using the military defensively. Thats not what interventionism is, and thats not what Bill Kristols National Greatness Conservatism idea of getting other Americans children to go fight wars that he dreamed up, thats not what that was about. So the two are completely incommensurate. And one is led to the conclusion that, either Lord has just no idea what hes talking about, which of course is, as one reads through these pieces, a possibility that increasingly impresses itself on the mind, the other possibility is that Lord is just being dishonest. That is, he must realize that this was not interventionism.

[00:11:14] He also invokes the example of James Madison, who of course as President asked Congress to declare war on Great Britain. And he says this, and the fact that Madison thereafter launched an invasion of Canada, this was interventionism. No, it was not, because the reason why James Madison asked Congress to declare war on Britain was that the British had been seizing American ships, conscripting American sailors into their Navy, harassing the United States militarily. And Madison finally decided the only way to get them to stop attacking us is to fight back. That is not interventionism.

[00:11:56] And Madison, like Jefferson, like Washington, was a thoroughgoing disbeliever in what the Neocons, apparently including Mr. Lord, stand for, which is constant war-making, keeping the economy constantly on a war footing, always having some foreign country to attack, borrowing money, printing money, undermining the domestic economy in the service of, quote/unquote, national greatness. Really, the more one contemplates Lords propaganda here, the more infuriating itbecomes.

[00:12:30] Mike: Now, Tom, Tom Woods is on the line here with us, too, here on the Post Show Show. Tom, you may find I find a corollary running through this. It wasnt two months ago, maybe three months ago, that you and I were embroiled in a controversy with talk show host Mark Levin over this very issue here with the Barbary Pirates, and over Levins insistence that Obama could bomb the snot out of anyone he wanted to because Jefferson had gone after the Barbary Pirates. You wrote a piece called, if I remember the title of it, The Phony Case for the War Powers Act. Isnt what Lord is doing here just taking Levins histrionics and applying them to the Founders, just as Levin tried to do, and then trying to link that back to Ron Paul?

[00:13:17] Tom: Well, sure. Except in both cases, as Kevin had started to indicate, they have no historical basis for these arguments. And in consultation with Kevin I launched a challenge Levins way. And I said, if you really you and your positions are really so much in line with American tradition and the Constitution, it shouldnt be any difficulty for you at all to pin down one federalist, if you can find any supporter of the Constitution during the entire ratification process who took your position, that the President could launch non-defensive wars without consulting Congress. Lets hear it. And of course I never got an answer to that.

[00:14:02] In terms of the Barbary Pirates, its interesting to note that they were, in fact, the actions that Jefferson took were in fact authorized by congressional statute, as were the actions of John Adams during the quasi war with France. Typically, the evidence for what the Neocons want to find simply does not exist. So what theyll do is theyll then change the subject and say, oh, well, you know, you write for a website that included a guy who once criticized Reagan. I mean, like thats how you know youve clearly won the argument. My response when I saw this Lord piece was just to think, there are so many errors in it, like I could spend a lifetime replying to this guy. Its going to sap all my energy.

[00:14:46] But what I think annoyed me the most is hes going to tell us, the American Spectator is going to tell us who the conservatives are and, you know, people we are supposed to support and like. And the key one, of course, with all these National Greatness Conservatives, so-called, is Alexander Hamilton, Jeffersons great rival. But, I mean, I dont see that its particularly conservative to support a guy who wanted a President serving for life and senators serving for life and federal vetoes of state laws. And beyond that, I mean, Hamilton was a centralizer. He favored a strong executive. He wanted a national bank. He favored broad construction of the Constitution. Why is that the conservative tradition?

[00:15:31] Russell Kirk, the great post-war conservative thinker in America who wrote the classic book The Conservative Mind, and I think Im allowed to cite him as an authority against Jeffrey Lord, whoever he is, it was Kirk who said Hamilton does not qualify as a conservative because Hamilton was introducing innovation into the American system with his broad construction and all these other policies that I mentioned; that, to the contrary, as Clyde Wilson later argued, Jefferson has the better claim to this because Jeffersons suspicion of the executive and his more strict construction of the Constitution is much more in line with American tradition.

[00:16:10] I mean, remember, during and after the War for Independence, the states, which had lived under, as colonies, very strong executives in the form of governors with veto powers that could not be overridden, replaced those systems with much weaker executives. There were governors that couldnt veto anything at all, and the legislatures were the ones with the greater power. This was the American tradition. Hamilton was harking back to a British tradition. The American tradition is the Jeffersonian one. So that Lord would cite this and then lecture us about w
ho the conservatives are, particularly when people like Lord hang around with and sup in happy concord with people like Joe Lieberman, who by no definition is a conservative, he doesnt seem to rebuke himself for that. But its wrong for us to hang around with free market economists like Murray Rothbard. I mean, this is a crazy universe that he lives in.

[00:17:10] Kevin: Let me add something to that.

[00:17:11] Mike: Sure.

[00:17:12] Kevin: You know, its very common among Neocons and kind of half-educated conservatives just to point to the offhand utterances of whichever Founding Father happens to support the argument they want to make at the moment. But we need to notice that, among the Founding Fathers, there were people whose views we dont like. That is, there were people like Alexander Hamilton and John Adams who thought that it was a good idea to have a federal law that says its a crime to criticize the President.

[00:17:42] Mike: Right.

[00:17:42] Kevin: And they literally threw people in prison. The leading Jeffersonian newspaper editor, a congressman from Vermont, these people wanted to imprison, they actually did imprison leading critics of the Adams administration, I mean, just people who disagreed with John Adamss foreign policy. Thats why John Adams was a one-term President. People decided we hate this. And in fact, after John Adamss Hamiltonian experiment, the Federalist Party came to an end. They were voted out after one term of John Adams and never came back. And heres Jeffrey Lord saying, well, Alexander Hamilton agreed with me.

[00:18:18] Yeah, you know what, you could point to Alexander Hamilton in support of censorship of anybody who criticizes the President or Congress. You could point to him in support of a king, like the Polish monarchy of the 18th Century. You could point to him in behalf of any kind of arbitrary government you want. What kind of an argument is this? And then again, my conclusion has to be, well, Lord just doesnt have any idea what hes talking about. And so, as I said, hes kind of pulled Rogets off the shelf, and hes looking through it for quotations; and, hey, heres something nice by Alexander Hamilton. But the fellow had political views that nobody in America currently accepts. So pointing to him in support of arbitrary authority in the executive and so on, what is this supposed to prove, exactly? Or, in other words, what is it that a conservative is supposed to beconserving?

[00:19:12] Mike: Well, thats a good question here. And Im on the Post Show Show here, Mike Churchs Post Show Show, with Kevin Gutzman and Tom Woods. Both have several books out there that are worthy of reading: Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution and Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, plus Rollback, Nullification, and Im just doing this for the edification, for the American Spectator viewers that are going to check this video outhere.

[00:19:36] Let me point something else out here. Theres also a strain running through the setup here in Lords original piece yesterday, Ron Paul and the Neoliberal Reeducation Campaign, that says something to the effect of, well, Ron Paul is never going to be welcomed into the party of Reagan and Lincoln. He throws Lincoln in there. He fleshes this out today after Jack Hunter, our mutual friend, writes a rebuttal to Lords piece, where he fleshes this out a little bit more to try and dive in a little deeper here. Okay, all of you Ron Paul kooks, too, youre all a bunch of Lincoln deniers. Youre all a bunch of deniers of the majesty and the wonder that was the great centralizer, the great consolidator, the great ender of the great tradition of states rights, Abraham Lincoln. As if, again, now, just totally a revisionist view of history, as if, again, there is no one that is allowed to question the sanctity and the sacrosanct history of Lincoln.

[00:20:42] But as all three of us here together, I think all three of us know I havent ever actually talked to Tom about it. Ive talked to Kevin about it. As we three know, the mythology of Lincoln that Levin and all the other, quote, conservatives, and now Mr. Lord, so love to cite, is just riddled with inaccuracies here. And Id like to get your take on that, too, because this isnt just this is expanding now. So the whole universe that we have lived in for the last, well, Tom and I, I guess thats 2003. Kevin may have occupied that universe by himself with Russell Kirk and others way back in the day. But for Tom and I for the last eight years here the whole universe is under attack here.

[00:21:26] No. This is this is what Jeffrey Lord is saying. This is the way it was. There were these interventionists, the Founding Fathers. There were these guys, they founded this nation because they had one great purpose. Its stated in the Declaration. They all went about their business of making the great purpose part of the great nation and the great empire. The Southern states resisted. We got rid of them. Oh, thank the Lord for Abraham Lincoln. Then we had these wonderful men come along like Roosevelt and Wilson, and they pushed the ball further down the field. And then the whole thing was made so that it was irrevocable by Roosevelt. This is their canon. This to them is what it means to be a conservative. And its evidenced in Lords response to Jack Hunter.

[00:22:12] Kevin: Well, I dont think theres anything in Ron Pauls public statements that indicates that hes criticized Lincoln on the ground of foreign policy. And in fact I dont think theres anything in Lincolns record to show that he favored an interventionist foreign policy. Im not aware of any instance in which Lincoln called for any overseas military adventures of any kind. So this seems, again, to be a kind of arbitrary invocation of one of the great deities, and were all supposed to bow, just as I was saying before, well, you know, Alexander Hamilton, who knows anything about him, but he said something I agree with once, or at least if you take it out of context it seems to support my current argument, so Ill mention AlexanderHamilton.

[00:22:56] I think this doesnt have anything to do with Ron Paul or the general argument from the Neocons that Ron Pauls foreign policy views are somehow inconsistent with the general line of American conservatism. So, you know, whats the point of his even bringing this up? I think, again, we have in Jeffrey Lords original argument, or his original piece, I should say, we have a long section from him about 1941. And somehow were supposed to deduce from this that Ron Paul would have, I guess, would have opposed World War IIs American involvement? Well, you know, the United States didnt get involved in World War II on a whim and on an impulse ofinterventionism.

[00:23:41] Mike: Right.

[00:23:42] Kevin: What happened was Japan bombed Hawaii. So the United States responded by declaring war on Japan.

[00:23:48] Mike: Yeah, I kind of remember that.

[00:23:50] Kevin: Yeah, and then Japans allies declared war on the U.S. And so the United States responded by declaring war on them. How does that support a Bill Kristol kind of gratuitous war-making enterprise? It really has nothing at all to do with what does this have to do with Abraham Lincoln, exactly? It seems to me entirely irrelevant. And so, again, he seems to have come to the conclusion, okay, there are various things in the American past that Americans generally like. Ill say that Ron Paul opposes them. Well find a quotation from Lincoln from Hamilton. Ill make some false statements about Washington and Jefferson. Well say something about World War II. And well just, you know, make it a kind of pastiche of fabulous sentiments in the past and, you know, stir the mystic chords of memory. And then people will decide, well, Ron Paul really is a kook.

[00:24:40] But the bottom line is theres nothing that he says thats actually well founded. I mean, for example, saying Ron Paul ran for President as a Libertarian in 1988, and
one of the people he opposed for the nomination was Russell Means; Russell Means once called Ronald Reagan names, therefore Ron Paul hates Ronald Reagan; and so Ron Pauls not a conservative? What kind of reasoning is that?

[00:25:04] Mike: Thats the reasoning of a desperate man. Tom?

[00:25:06] Tom: Oh, yeah, let me jump in here, too. Its interesting to note the Stalinization of the official conservative movement because, in the old days, you can you dont have to take my word for it. You can flip through old issues of National Review. You used to be able to debate issues of substance in National Review. There used to be differences of opinion allowed, where you wouldnt be called a kook because you had a difference of opinion with other people, particularly on the Lincoln question. There were actually vigorous debates over the significance of Lincoln that went beyond the third-grade schoolboy, he freed the slaves stuff. I mean, this actually went into, well, okay, I mean, but look at all the constitutional theory that was behind what he did, and the long-term significance of it, and were there other ways to accomplish this. All these sorts of issues were openly discussed before the complete Neocon takeover. Now, in terms of and youre right, of course, most people, obviously they like Lincoln, havent thought about it one way or the other. I mean, were all against slavery, so it just seems like an open-and-shut case…

[00:26:06] Mike: Sure.

[00:26:07] Tom: …until you read more about it. And of course they are taking for granted that nobody will. But beyond that, in terms of the 1941 thing and beyond, first Lord suggests that all anti-interventionists, such as they have been in American history, have all been liberals, or left liberals. But in leading up to, I mean, I dont think General Robert Wood was, or Hamilton Fish, or Hoover, or others I could cite. And in fact, if we look through American history, we look at what the left was supporting, they were supporting war. In 1898 you see left liberals saying we have to smash Spain completely. Spain is a backward country. We have to wipe it off the face of the earth. It was the great historian William Leuchtenburg, who was not a conservative himself, who admitted that the burden of the anti-imperialist banner was carried by the conservatives. It was the conservatives who said that intervention abroad and imperialism run counter to American tradition.

[00:27:09] Mike: Yes.

[00:27:10] Tom: In World War I it was overwhelmingly, the left overwhelmingly supported intervention into World War I. So really I think we could make a very strong case that Lord is the one who is in the left liberal tradition, not us.

[00:27:25] Mike: Okay, so the final question is on this, because I think we have pretty much deconstructed what it is that Jeffrey Lord uses as his accusation. If this were a trial, Id say the judge would either declare it a mistrial because, Mr. Lord, you have no case, get out of my courtroom, and might even censure him with a contempt of court citation; but, if we actually got to the closing argument, and we had to say, okay, well, whats the motive here, why did he do this Ill go first.

[00:27:58] Its apparent to me that and I might read more of this than you guys do because its my job to read their magazines and report about them on the air. But it occurs to me that there is a definitive, palatable, and traceable record of talking heads and writing writers and writing pens that are part of the canon of modern-day conservative thought, whether its television, radio, or print, that have made it a point that, whenever given the opportunity and in Jeffrey Lords case I guess the opportunity is, wow, Ron Pauls doing way too well in the polls, let me nip this guy when given the opportunity, that they take shots at the congressman. But Lord even goes farther here. Lord takes shots at the congressmans supporters, and at the rabid Paulistas out there. Dont try and tell them this because theyll just even get more angry. Well, maybe you get angry because you know that truth is on your side. Why should one walk away from an argument when one is being fed falsehoods, knowing that hes not the one feeding the falsehoods?

[00:29:10] So it seems to me that the effort to get rid of Ron Paul and his supporters, number one, is shortsighted because where are those supporters going to go after Mitt Romney, I guess, is consecrated and receives the blessing from on high that hes the Republican nominee, and thats not set in stone. But where are these supporters going to go? I thought the Republican Party was supposed to be the big tent party. So now theres no room at the party for anyone to raise their hand and say, uh, maybe we shouldnt be bombing Libya. Maybe we ought to get out of Afghanistan while we still can. Maybe we should pull our troops out of Iraq, Okinawa, Italy and what have you here. Seems to me that the left that infiltrated the right years ago and set up camp there is feeling a little uneasy about their death grip on what used to be known as the conservative movement.

[00:30:02] So thats where I see this coming from, that theyre protecting what they believe to be their God-given entitled right they are elites, after all which is to order us about, draft our sons and daughters or conscript them, send them, as Kevin said, to go fight wars in other countries without sending their own and what have you here, that thats really whats at stake here. The status quo for the first time since Barry Goldwater is actually being questioned and debated. So Ill let you two respond to that, and well wrap this up. Kevin, you can go first.

[00:30:34] Kevin: Well, my own feeling is that theyre trying to recast basically all of American history to support their own arguments. You know, its a common game in the United States that people want to say every capital G Great, capital M Man who ever lived in America supports what Im doing. And I think one element that were overlooking here, or were kind of sliding past, is Lord also distorts Ronald Reagans record. Ronald Reagan was not an interventionist in the way these people are, either. That is, I can well remember in the 80s we had several insurgencies in Central America and Africa and Asia that the United States opposed because they were being fomented by the Soviet Union in El Salvador and Nicaragua and Namibia and of course Afghanistan.

[00:31:19] And Reagan, according to Steven Haywards recent book and Hayward was, like Lord, an advisor to Reagan Reagan told Hayward at one point, These sons of bitches want me to send the army everywhere, but I am not going to have 25,000 men in Nicaragua. Its not going to happen. So Reagan had decided, even though I would argue the Soviet Union was an existential threat to the United States, Reagan had decided he was not going to do it. And yet, if you read what these people, Kristol and Lord and these other guys, are telling you, well, Reagan would have been out trying to give schools to girls in Afghanistan, if only hed thought of it. And its just not true. So essentially whats going on is a kind of recasting of everything we thought we knew about American history to make it support the Mark Levin/Bill Kristol/Rush Limbaugh highly educated radio announcer axis.

[00:32:19] Mike: Sounds plausible to me. And you see that written, see it spoken, see it said often. Its repeated. Its repeated an awful lot. Tom, your take on that?

[00:32:32] Tom: Sure. Let me just take 30 seconds on one quick point that needs to be answered from Lord first, before concluding.

[00:32:39] Mike: Sure.

[00:32:40] Tom: And that is the anti-Semitic thing that he raises. And he points his main evidence is that Ron Paul likes a guy named John T. Flynn. Now, what Lord is counting on is that the people who read the American Spectator wont know anything about the history of conservatism, and maybe hes right. I dont know. But what they probably, I guess they dont know, theyre t
rying to claim that Ron Paul likes John T. Flynn. John T. Flynn was some kind of anti-Semite. Therefore, you know, you draw your own conclusion.

[00:33:06] Well, I, you know, Ive read a lot of John T. Flynn, and I have never heard this accusation before because, to the contrary, it was John T. Flynn who criticized Charles Lindberghs famous speech in September 1941 in Des Moines listing the Jews as one of the groups pushing for war. It was Flynn who criticized him for this. Flynn criticized Father Coughlin, who was quite vituperative against the Jews. Flynn was known as being an author. He had originally been a columnist for the New Republic. And then he moved sort of to the right, and he wrote some books, particularly his New York Times best seller in 1948, The Roosevelt Myth. Every conservative read that book. Lots of Americans read that book. People loved that book.

[00:33:51] So Lord is basically saying all of America is just corrupt. I mean, its not just Ron Paul, apparently. But he doesnt tell anybody that, about who Flynn actually was. And as I say, I see absolutely zero evidence that Flynn was an anti-Semite, absolutely zero. But I guess he figures no one will have heard of Flynn because we at the American Spectator have done such a lousy job educating people about who conservatives are, they wont even know who the guy is.

[00:34:14] But in terms of, you know, your question about what does this all mean and where is it coming from, I think last time around they figured they could get away with not engaging Ron Paul on the merits and talking about his ideas. They could just dismiss him as a crank because, by definition in Jeffrey Lords world, if you dont fall between Joe Biden and Mitt Romney, youre by definition crazy. Bydefinition.

[00:34:34] Mike: Right.

[00:34:35] Tom: So why do I even need to address your arguments? But now that, you know, we see the most recent poll in Iowa has Ron Paul at 16 percent, which would just have been unthinkable four years ago, now they feel like maybe they do have to make some arguments. But if this is the quality of the arguments we can expect, I mean, talk about having a battle of wits with an unarmed man. I mean, its going to be great to spend the next few months with Kevin just, you know, just bashing these things down, one at a time, like whack-a-mole.

[00:35:06] Mike: And the added benefit of this is that the average American out there that may be watching all this because Americans do tend to tune into presidential campaigns a little more than they do their local mayors and what have you, which is a tragedy. But being that as it may, maybe theyll hear some of this stuff about how Ron Paul is not the kook, that its the people that are, as is usually the case, those that are accusing someone of being a kook are the actualkooks.

[00:35:38] The final question here, and the final wrap-up for this is, folks, and Ill leave Kevin and Tom to finish this up as they want. But you can expect a lot more of this. If this is just we havent even gotten to where there is an actual vote thats going to matter yet. Were, what, five months away from the January 29th, I think it is, Iowa Caucus, the first one that actually matters. You cast a ballot, its set in stone, whoever wins gets the delegates, whoever wins the most amount of votes there gets the delegates. Thats the way a caucus works. Iowa will actually matter in January.

[00:36:15] If this is what theyre doing in August, as Tom just said, five months from the first actual casting of ballots, can you imagine what happens if that 16 percentage point number that you just mentioned, Tom, gets up to 21? Can you imagine what happens if the Gallup poll throw Obama out, just put the Republican candidates in there in the precious top tier, which is Romney, Bachmann, and Perry now. What if the top tier in December of 2011 is Romney, Paul, and Bachmann, with Paul a strong second, five points behind Romney in a national poll? What is the GOP to do, fellas? Are they going to kick the Paulistas out and say we dont care about your 25 percent, and tempt the congressman and tempt his campaign to go, if we take 25 percent of the Republicans, half the independents, and 15 percent of the Democrats, Rons President?

[00:37:11] Kevin: Well, you know, weve had in the last couple of days poll results, national poll results showing that Ron Paul is within the margin of error in a head-to-head race with President Obama. So its not that they think that Ron Paul couldnt be elected. And then you have to ask yourselves, okay, well, then, what is it exactly that they dont like about Ron Paul? Ron Pauls congressional, I mean presidential campaign is based on two premises, that is, that the foreign policy of the United States is counterproductive and highly costly; and, secondly, that the domestic policy of the United States is spendthrift, leading us to bankruptcy, and that we ought to get rid of this fiat currency we currently have, that is, the Federal Reserve, whose only purpose, only purpose, is inflation.

[00:37:55] Well, which plank of this do the Neocons not like? And the answer is, they dislike both of them. They like the fiat currency because they like limitless spending. And they like the constant war-making; and, you know, you have to draw your own conclusions about what interest they have in that. But, sure, Ron Paul is a danger to the status quo. And on both of those questions I just mentioned, Ron Paul disagrees, not only with the Neocons, but with the Democrats. You can see the Neocons and the Democrats as being essentially two wings of one party. Its the big government here and a big government overseas party. And Ron Paul is a threat to that.

[00:38:33] Mike: Yeah, I concur on that. Thats absolutely correct. Thats what I believe is at play here. Tom?

[00:38:39] Tom: Well, Ill say that, if they start launching more Jeffrey Lord-style attacks in the hope that this will stave off the thing they fear most, which is a Ron Paul victory, it could backfire on them in the same way that the Newsweek cover story of Michele Bachmann backfired on Newsweek, where they put they found one unflattering picture of her, and they put that on the cover and attacked her. Well, of course all her supporters are now going to rally to her and say, ah, the media, we should have known they were going to come after the best of the candidates. So that only confirms me in my position of supporting her. Thats whats going to happen. In fact, thats why Lew Rockwell wondered, did Ed Rollins pay Newsweek to run this article and this unflattering picture? I mean, he couldnt have asked for better publicity to rally her troops. This is just rally the Ron Paul troops. And these people are extremely hard working, and I wouldnt want to rally them against me, Ill just put it that way. So I think that type of strategy is not so promising for the establishment.

[00:39:46] Mike: If youre keeping track of all this at home, folks, or youre watching this on video, just keep this in mind, and Ill leave you with this final thought here. The Constitution of the United States and the little r republican form of government that it supposedly gave us, and it did back in the day, is what is really at stake here. And for the first time in my adult lifetime, Im like Michele Obama, Im actually proud of my country because theyre debating this. Were actually having a conversation with this out in the open. Imagine this, sunlight shining in on actual history, not the mythological version weve been sold. And I think that its very healthy and that it cant help but produce better results that we have going in today.

[00:40:28] Now, Kevin, I said it was the final thing, but one thing that Im recalling here, before we say goodbye, you once told me that, look, Mike, some of us would just be happy if they would just take a Hippocratic oath. Dont do any more harm. Just stop. No more. No further. Just agree you wont do any more harm, and we might be able to live with that for a little while. Then well
work on it from after that. And it seems to me that, with these debates that we have going on here today, inside what is supposed to be the party of less government, which as all three of us know is a crock, but that there is a wing now of the less government party that is actually less government. Thats refreshing, isnt it?

[00:41:11] Kevin: Well, you know, we are the Goldwater-ite remnants. That is, there is this strain of American thought that has tended to be a minor part of one or the other party. And currently, since Goldwater, its the Republican Party that has this small group in it of people who insist that, you know, less government, or what the Founding Fathers used to call liberty, is a good idea. It ought to be tried. And so, you know, hope, as youve said to me, hope springs eternal. And that is true. Hope perhaps is going to be forlorn, but it beats the alternative.

[00:41:50] And, you know, I think that the people who are in power have every kind of incentive whether its a career incentive, whether its a social incentive, whether its an economic incentive to oppose the idea of smaller state domestically and less bombing overseas they have every incentive to try to defeat Ron Paul because he does threaten their interests. But what the average voter, average American needs to recognize is that these policies that the establishment in both parties agree on are actually contrary to their interests. You know, its not in my childrens interest to be paying for more wars.

[00:42:34] Now the Neocons are talking about Iran as their next target. Well, gee, thats a great idea. I mean, obviously Irans a threat to us. They havent attacked anybody in, oh, I dont know, 2,500 years. So clearly theyre an existential threat to the United States. We have to have another boogeyman because we need to keep the military spending up and line the pockets of people who are in these various positions. So I do think that we can expect to see vociferous, even if often unenlightened, defenses of the status quo from people like Lord, whose celebrity comes from having accidentally once been some kind of factotum for a famous politician. And that means we have to answer them.

[00:43:20] Mike: Yeah. Tom, any final thoughts?

[00:43:23] Tom: Well, my final thought is just thanks to Mike Church for giving us an opportunity to so that we didnt instead of having to spend eight hours writing a reply to this, being able to engage in the much more productive and more enjoyable and more easily distributed kind of verbal reply that weve been able to make because I think this is great. I love having a chance to talk with Kevin. But its nice to see that there is at least one voice out there that isnt going to tell you that every issue that matters under the sun is contained within a debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, you know, that there just might be issues of importance that are excluded in a debate like that. And thank goodness, you know, somewhere out there people can hear this.

[00:44:09]

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Point-by-Point Doctors Tom Woods and Kevin Gutzman Deconstruct Jeffrey Lord’s Slander of History and Ron Paul

Mike: All right. Gentlemen, hang on just a second because I have a couple of things I want to tell you about how were going to get this to you. So dont hang up. Folks, that will do it for us here today on the Post Show Show, a very special edition of the Post Show Show. I want to thank Kevin Gutzman want to thank Dr.Woods and Dr. Gutzman, to be proper with this. And thank you for tuning in. You can get the MP3 version of this, the audio version, the transcript, and the video. Wherever you may have found this link here, it should be available there. But it is out there. And we will continue this fight and continue this conversation as this campaign goes along. You can always find me at MikeChurch.com. I thank you for watching, and well see you next time.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

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